Research Brief: The Latest Research in the Field

• • racism

Your Monday research brief is here.

 

Research in the Dictionary

  • Connor, Michan Andres. “Metropolitan Secession and the Space of Color-Blind Racism in Atlanta.” Journal of Urban Affairs (2014). (locked)
    • “The Reverend Joseph Lowery and the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus sponsored a 2011 voting rights suit, Lowery v. Deal, that demanded the disincorporation of several majority-white cities in Georgia’s Fulton and DeKalb Counties and preemption against attempts by affluent and majority-white north Fulton to secede from the rest of the county. Secession would have severe consequences for racial equity in the metropolitan area. Lowery’s 2011 dismissal by the District Court reflects ascendant color-blind racial ideology that defends white privilege in metropolitan space by attributing it to culturally and legally legitimate race-neutral processes. Historical analysis challenges this color-blind interpretation, identifying the nominally class-based interests of north Fulton residents with systemic racial discrimination and the politics of secession with historic patterns of spatial politics that have sought not only to exclude but also to manipulate political space to limit the ability of black voters and officials to make decisions affecting whites and their property.”
    • This research explored effects of sex, age, interethnic contact, and outgroup representation on subtle and blatant prejudice toward Africans in Italian adolescents attending ethnic heterogeneous/homogeneous Secondary Schools. Measures: Subtle and Blatant Prejudice Scale (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995) referred to the Africans and Semantic Differentials (Falanga et al., 2010) to analyze representation of Self, the Italians, and the Africans. Results showed that girls and the youngest adolescents expressed lower levels on some components of subtle prejudice and on blatant prejudice than boys and the oldest ones. Adolescents with friends from other ethnic groups and those attending ethnically heterogeneous schools displayed positive attitudes toward the Africans. Representation of the Africans had an impact on levels of subtle and blatant prejudice.Selection and peer review under the responsibility of Prof. Dr. Servet Bayram.
  • Kleisath, E. Michelle. “The Costume of Shangri-La: Thoughts on White Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, and Anti-Asian Racism.”  Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol.18, 2 (2014), 142-157. (locked)
    • “This piece poses cultural appropriation as an undertheorized aspect of white privilege in White Privilege Studies. By way of narrative exploration, it asserts that a paucity of scholarship on Orientalism and anti-Asian racism has created a gap in White Privilege Studies that curbs its radical transformative potential. It argues for the value of a structural and historically focused lens for understanding the issue of cultural appropriation, and extends questions of culture and race relations beyond the borders of the United States. It also explores the complex ways that interracial and transnational relationships can influence white racial identity, and illustrates the disruptive potential that queer interracial relationships can offer to dominant historical patterns of white behavior.”
    • “White privilege constructs whiteness as normative and central to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) identities and is reproduced through social norms, media representations, and daily interactions. We aimed to enhance understanding of the processes by which white privilege was experienced among lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women of color in Toronto, Canada. We conducted two focus groups with LBQ women of color, one with participants who self-identified as masculine of center (n = 8) and the second with participants who identified as feminine of center (n = 8). Findings indicate that LBQ women of color experience intersectional stigma (e.g., homophobia, racism, sexism) on a daily basis. Participant narratives revealed that white privilege shaped the representations of women of color in a particular way that promoted their exclusion from white LBQ spaces and broader society. By representing queerness as white, LBQ women of color were rendered invisible in both queer and racialized communities. LBQ women of color were further marginalized by constructions of “real” women as passive, feminine and white, and conversely perceptions of women of color as aggressive, emotional, and hypersexualized. These representations inform spatialized practices and social interactions through constructing racialized communities as discriminatory and “backwards” while maintaining the invisibility of white privilege and racism in LBQ spaces.”
    • “This article investigates the extent to which the emerging trend of do-it-yourself anti-ageing skin-whitening products represents a re-articulation of Western colonial concerns with environmental pollution and racial degeneracy into concern with gendered vulnerability. This emerging market is a multibillion dollar industry anchored in the USA, but expanding globally. Do-it-yourself anti-ageing skin-whitening products purport to address the needs of those looking to fight the visible signs of ageing, often promising to remove hyper-pigmented age spots from women’s skin, and replace it with ageless skin, free from pigmentation. In order to contextualize the investigation of do-it-yourself anti-ageing skin-whitening practice and discourse, this article draws from the literature in colonial commodity culture, colonial tropical medicine, the contemporary anti-ageing discourse, and advertisements for anti-ageing skin-whitening products. First, it argues that the framing of the biomedicalization of ageing as a pigmentation problem caused by deteriorating environmental conditions and unhealthy lifestyle draws tacitly from European colonial concerns with the European body’s susceptibility to tropical diseases, pigmentation disorders, and racial degeneration. Second, the article argues that the rise of do-it-yourself anti-ageing skin-whitening commodities that promise to whiten, brighten, and purify the ageing skin of women and frames the visible signs of ageing in terms of pigmentation pathology.”
  • Park, Augustine SJ. “Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship.” International Political Sociology 8, no. 1 (2014): 43-62. (OA)
    • “Until 2012, Omar Khadr was both the only former child soldier and Western national left in Guantanamo Bay. Captured by US forces at the age of 15, this Canadian youth would spend more than 40% of his life in US custody during the War on Terror. This article advances two key arguments. First, as a child soldier, Khadr is simultaneously cast as an object of sympathy and suspicion. The construction of Khadr’s childhood is animated by a cultural racism, which casts Khadr as both a victim of an extremist family and the evil outcome of a “jihadi” upbringing. Second, this article examines competing culturally racialized claims about citizenship, prompted by the failure of the Canadian government to seek Khadr’s repatriation. While the central preoccupation of liberal citizenship discourse is the erosion of Canada’s identity as a Western, liberal democracy, “racial-nationalist” discourse raises the alarm on the threat posed by “citizens of convenience” who must be cast out of the polity through practices of “pure exclusion.”
  • Zinga, Dawn Michelle, and Megan Kathleen Gordon. “‘Racism under the radar’: Student perceptions of school experiences in a multicultural context.” Race Ethnicity and Education ahead-of-print (2014): 1-29. (locked)
    • “In this study focus groups were conducted to explore Aboriginal and Caucasian student perceptions of school experiences within a multicultural context. Five major themes emerged from students’ dialogues that pose several questions about what sort of racist atmosphere the members of this community are being exposed to on a daily basis. The findings of this study underscore an understanding of Aboriginal student resiliency within a school setting that employs successful school initiatives that aim to promote student success. Further inquiry into these findings is needed.”