Seeking Liberation,Facing Marginalization: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' Conditional Acceptance in Hip‐Hop Culture

Using interview data with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip‐hop participants, we analyze how respondents construct hip‐hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip‐hop's hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip‐hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip‐hop culture. Thus, we find respondents' constructions of hip‐hop less an indicator of hip‐hop culture's openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip‐hop's conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.     

Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop

This article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars’ increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black–white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin.     

Racism and Anti‐Racism in Families: Insights from Performativity Theory

Possibilities for anti‐racism within the spaces of family life have not yet been contemplated in any depth in the extant anti‐racism literature. To address this, the first section of this paper demonstrates that families are a potentially critical site for anti‐racism, reviewing a large body of evidence demonstrating the key role families play in socialisation processes and in the development of racial attitudes. I also look at what can be gleaned from the literature on interethnic intimacy. The second section turns to the possibilities for anti‐racism within families, suggesting that too little is known about how members of families negotiate instances of racism, or the strategies used to restage or subvert racist discourses and practices within the family. The potential for anti‐racist performances to challenge expressions of racism in families has largely been overlooked in the international literature. I argue that the framework of performativity has utility for analysing responses to racism in families. Performativity theories conceptualise individual acts/utterances of racism and anti‐racism as enacting broader cultural values and structures. Viewing racism in families through theories of performativity directs us to consider how racist speech can be disrupted or strategically rejected and, hence, identify possibilities for anti‐racism.     

GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.     

Adolescent experiences with online racial discrimination: Implications for prevention and coping

Online aggression represents a wide range of negative experiences, including online discrimination targeting individuals based on race, but adolescent perspectives are not well-represented. We interviewed 15 adolescents regarding their experiences with online racial discrimination. After a phenomenological analysis, four main themes emerged: types of online racial aggression, processes supporting online racism, personal coping, and strategies to prevent online racial aggression. These themes provided insights into adolescent experiences, including feelings about targeted online racial discrimination, intersectionality with sexual harassment, and comfort through processing with friends. This study highlights adolescents' thoughts regarding advocacy, education, and social media reform to prevent online racial aggression. Future research should ensure that youth voices from minoritized racial backgrounds are integrated into efforts to address these critical social issues.     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Restructuring for Whom? Race,Class, Gender,and the Ideology of Invisibility

This paper examines how changes resulting from economic restructuring affect views of racial inequality across different race, class, and gender groups. First reviewing some of the consequences of restructuring for different race, class, and gender groups, the paper also reviews research documenting the different views of racial inequality held by dominant and subordinate groups. The paper concludes by examining how race-blind ideologies affect discussions of race and multiculturalism and suggests that race-blind thinking has thwarted teaching about structural racism.     

Walk the Walk but Don't Talk the Talk: The Strategic Use of Color‐Blind Ideology in an Interracial Social Movement Organization

In this study, I examine the strategies interracial organizations use in the twenty‐first century, where color‐blind ideology dominates. Much theoretical work on racism examines how it has evolved during different historical periods, but this work does not address how these changing forms of racism affect social movement organizations, particularly those on the left. While the literature on color‐blind ideology has examined how it is expressed by African Americans and European Americans separately, my work investigates how color‐blind ideology operates when European Americans and people of color are working together in the same organizational setting. Studies of social movements have examined how organizational culture affects strategies but have neglected how external racist culture and color‐blind ideology impacts organizational strategies. Findings from 3 years of ethnographic data collected on an interracial social movement organization and its corresponding coalition suggest that activists in interracial organizations use racism evasiveness strategically to maintain solidarity. I conceptualize racism evasiveness as the action resulting from color‐blind ideology within a larger system of racism. While activists perceive advantages to these strategies, there are also long‐term negative consequences. Without explicitly naming and addressing racism, progressive organizations may be limited in their ability to challenge systemic racism.     

Racial formation,inequality and the political economy of web traffic

ABSTRACT

Few studies attempt to demonstrate whether and how systemic racial inequality might form on the web. I use racial formation theory to conceptualize how race is represented, and systematically reproduced on the web, and how both may reveal forms of racial inequality. Using an original dataset and network graph, I document the architecture of web traffic, and the actual traffic patterns among and between race-based websites. Results demonstrate that web producers create hyperlink networks that steer audiences to websites without respect to racial or nonracial content. However, user navigation reflects a racially segregated traffic pattern; users navigate to racialized versus nonracialized websites (and vice versa) more than what would be expected by chance. These results, along with disparities in website traffic rankings, provide evidence of, and demonstrates how a race-based hierarchy might systematically emerge on the web in ways that exemplify disparate forms of value, influence and power that exist within the web environment.     

Learning Racial Literacy While Navigating White Social Studies

Abstract

How do children develop racial literacy? How do they make sense of and respond to the master narratives of race and racism? What role does elementary social studies education play in children’s racial literacy development? I explored these questions as a parent–researcher, inquiring how my child, an Asian American elementary student, develops racial literacy as she learns U.S. history at school. In the following, I first situate my inquiry within the literature on social studies education from a critical race perspective. Next, I delineate my positionality as a critical race motherscholar and the rationale for studying my own child. Last, I present the findings from my inquiry and discuss its implications for elementary social studies education.     

Public and Academic Questions on Race: The Problem with Racial Controversies

This essay offers an in‐depth look at how some national discussions of race serve to heighten divisions and to distort Americans' understandings of racism. First, I contend that these controversies produce questions that create racial and partisan divisions. In other words, they focus on who or which group is guilty of racism. Second, I argue that such questions about racism depart from the kinds of questions that sociologists seek to answer. As such, racial controversies move the public away from applying a sociological imagination to the problem of racism.     

Opposing the toxic apartheid: The painted veil of the COVID‐19 pandemic,race and racism

This article is a personal reflection of how the coronavirus exposes ‘shocking’ levels of racism against us, and our vulnerability as Chinese women living in Britain. By reflecting our experiences of verbal and physical race‐based violence connected to coronavirus, we explore the fluidity of our racial identities, the taken‐for‐granted racial stereotypes and white privilege, and everyday racism in the UK. Can the vulnerable use vulnerability as an agent to shift the moment of helplessness? We contribute to the uncomfortable yet important debate on racism against Chinese women living in the UK through voicing up our embodied vulnerability as invisible and disempowered subjects to this viral anti‐Chinese racism. This is a form of resistance where we care for the racialized and marginalized others. In doing so, we lift the painted veil of the pandemic, race and racism to collectively combat racial inequalities.     

Priming Implicit Racism in Television News: Visual and Verbal Limitations on Diversity

We highlight an understudied aspect of racism in television news, implicit racial cues found in the contradictions between visual and verbal messages. We compare three television news broadcasts from the first week after Hurricane Katrina to reexamine race and representation during the disaster. Drawing together insights from interdisciplinary studies of cognition and sociological theories of race and racism, we examine how different combinations of the race of reporters and news sources relate to the priming of implicit racism. We find racial cues that are consistent with stereotypes and myths about African Americans—even in broadcasts featuring black reporters—but which appear only in the context of color‐blind verbal narration. We conclude by drawing attention to the unexpected and seemingly unintended reproduction of racial ideology.     

The Ideologically Colonized Metropole: Dutch Racism and Racist Denial

Many in The Netherlands deny the existence of race and racism even as significant research strongly suggests otherwise. This paper synthesized existing literature to illuminate The Netherlands' unique form of racism, which is rooted in racial neoliberalism, anti‐racialism (i.e. the denial of race), racial Europeanization, and the particular Dutch history of colonial exploitation. This article summarizes existing scholarship addressing racism in wide array of social institutions in The Netherlands before addressing the historical roots of Dutch racism and how Dutch aphasia and racial Europeanization deny the links between contemporary and historical oppression before, finally, offering an explanation for this disconnect.     

Race and Reciprocity: Inter‐household Exchanges in a Multiracial Neighborhood

This study investigates the degree to which African‐American households are socially integrated into a multiracial, middle‐class suburban neighborhood near Dallas, Texas. Although U.S. neighborhoods are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in composition, little is known about black households' participation in social and informational networks within multiracial middle‐class neighborhoods. Drawing on theories of the gift and social capital, we view neighborhoods in terms of complex patterns of inter‐household exchanges of material and symbolic goods. We predict that black‐led households will exchange at a lower rate with their neighbors than will other households and test this prediction using survey data collected from 119 households and from follow‐up interviews with eight black heads of household. Our main finding from the survey is that black households exchanged at a significantly lower rate than did other households, ceteris paribus. The follow‐up interviews found little evidence of black racial homophily in neighboring or of racism within the neighborhood. However, the low rate of black inter‐household exchanges may be partly explained by black head of households' personal experiences of racism outside the neighborhood and by a racially constituted disposition against borrowing from neighbors. We discuss implications of our findings for research on racial integration and segregation.     

“A Grain of Salt in a Pepper Shaker”: Interviewing Whites,Blacks, and Latinos about Their Neighborhood Preferences

Several perspectives dominate as explanations for neighborhood preferences: pure race, racial proxy, race‐based neighborhood stereotyping, and race‐associated neighborhood factors. This analysis extends and supports the pure race and race‐associated neighborhood factors arguments by showing that these theories are applied differently depending on respondents' social class, race and ethnicity, and whether they are talking about white, black, or Latino neighborhoods. Race‐associated factors are emphasized for white and black neighborhoods, but pure race serves as a better theoretical framework for understanding people's preferences for Latino neighborhoods. I analyze qualitative interview data, using maps of real neighborhoods and hypothetical neighborhood show cards, to examine the neighborhood preferences of 65 white, black, and Latino residents in Ogden, Utah, and Buffalo, New York.     

One week in October: Luis Suárez,John Terry and the turn to racial neoliberalism in English men’s professional football

This article explores two significant incidents of racism – involving Luis Suárez and John Terry – from the 2011–2012 English Premier League football season. In particular, it analyses and contextualises the reactions and responses articulated by key stakeholders within the football industry. Discursive themes were employed by these individuals as a means of trying to mitigate and/or exonerate the actions of Suárez and Terry, to question the veracity of the allegations made against them, and to downplay the extent and effects of racism in English football more generally. The article situates these standpoints within the wider cultural politics of race in the game and extricates the connections between discourse and structure in manifestations of racism. It demonstrates that these dominant responses are indicative of colour-blind ideology, white racial framing and the rules of racial standing. It also argues that these sporting trends are part of a wider societal shift towards racial neoliberalism.     

The Case of Cubans: Racial Inequality in U.S. Homeownership and Home Values

Prior research finds that human capital may explain racial housing inequality, whereas others note the historical role that race played in creating unequal housing conditions. This study uses the case of Cubans in the United States to examine whether human capital explains Black–White housing inequalities, or if they are a result of nativity/cohort differences—a proxy for the federal policies that supported Cubans’ economic and social incorporation. Using pooled data from the American Community Survey, I examine how human capital characteristics and nativity/migration cohorts shape odds of homeownership and predicted home values among Cubans. Extended analyses using decomposition methods find that although human capital characteristics are important, they play a smaller role in explaining Black–White differences in homeownership and home values. Indicative of the changing structure of racial stratification in the United States, results reveal substantial inequality among the oldest of Cuban immigrants and U.S.‐born Cubans, despite a trend toward declining inequality among recent arrivals. Supported by the literature of systemic racism, the case of Cubans shows how human capital explanations do not sufficiently explain racial housing inequalities and how the future of racial stratification is one of inter‐ and intra‐ethnic group inequality.     

Do Preparation for Bias and Cultural Socialization Protect Against Discrimination for Transracially Adopted Adolescents?

This study of transracially adopted adolescents and their White parents examines the role of two types of parental racial socialization, preparation for bias and cultural socialization, in protecting adoptees from the impact of discrimination. Sixty-six transracially adopted adolescent–parent dyads in the United States completed an online questionnaire. Preparation for bias, and not cultural socialization, protected transracial adoptees from discrimination-related stress, in particular when experiencing high levels of racism. The importance of parents talking to their transracially adopted adolescents about racism and how to cope with it and the value of researchers examining types of racial socialization separately as opposed to broadly are discussed.