The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

Unpopular culture: The case of ‘white trash’

ABSTRACT

This article examines ‘white trash’ as a rhetorical identity in a discourse of difference that white Americans deploy in deciding what will count as whiteness in relation to the ‘social bottom’. Surveying historiographic efforts to valorize ‘poor whites’ in contrast to ‘white trash’, and tracking the redemption of ‘redneck’ as a popular identity, the author delineates how a pollution ideology maintains a portion of whites as fitting problematically into the body of whiteness. Rather than finding an authentic voice in the numerous, current uses of ‘white trash’ in a range of popular culture production, the author instead summarizes ‘white trash’ as an other within the popular — an unpopular culture.     

Ideologies of dedication vs. blueprints of expedience 1

The motivating role of ideology seems central to the antagonists in a polarizing conflict. Apartheid is frequently associated with an elaborate ideology of puritan calvinist authoritarianism, aimed at legitimating white domination, at least in the perception of its beleaguered defenders. However, it may be argued that compared with the role of ideologies in other conflict situations and dictatorships, the defence of White privileges does not represent a fixed belief system or the self‐delusion of a false consciousness, which constitutes both the strength and weakness of white South Africa at the same time. By allowing for ideological cleavages and tactical splits among its ruling group instead of an encapsulating monolithic static ‘siege culture’, the South African system of pragmatic racial domination is rather flexible in accommodating pressure and adjusting to new situations outside dogmatic and rigid ideologies.     

Applying critical race theory in social work education in Britain: pedagogical reflections

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on personal experiences of teaching white British and Black African students on a social work Master’s course in England. In this paper, I critically discuss the fire at Grenfell Tower in London (14 June 2017) and how it served as a pedagogical tool to open up critical discussions among students about racial in/justice, intersectionality and neoliberal racism. I also explore how Black students were enabled to share their experiences of immigration, racism, and racial inequality in Britain as part of these discussions. Inviting personal experiences of race in the classroom can be highly emotive; but, as this paper shows, these voices can also highlight institutionalized racism and provide a way for Black and ethnic minorities’ histories to be told and learned. These histories matter and can develop student consciousness about racial inequality for pursuing a social agenda. They also challenge claims that Britain is now a ‘post-racial’ society. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) provided a way to counter such claims and critique my ‘whiteness’ and socio-economic class in my teaching, as well as challenge the neoliberal ideologies and structures that reproduce and mask ‘white privilege’ and racial injustice in Britain today.     

Negotiating cultural boundaries: Confucianism and trans/national identity in Korea 1

Abstract

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea.     

Racializing Redemption,Reproducing Racism: The Odyssey of Magical Negroes and White Saviors

Recent research on the intersection of race and media describes a trend of progressive, even antiracist, narratives that showcase close inter‐racial friendships and camaraderie on the silver screen. Films in which one character saves or helps another from some unholy or disastrous plight are common in films like The Green Mile (1999), Bruce Almighty (2003), Amistad (1997) and The Blind Side (2009). While these films present a stark change from the patently racist and on‐screen segregationist history of Hollywood cinema, these films often trade on racist meanings and expectations. Many of these films are what critics call “Magical Negro” or “White Savior” films – cinema in which implicit and explicit racial stereotypes are employed to structure the inter‐racial interactions where one character labors to redeem another. In comparing these two genres, this article provides an overview for how both cinematic forms reproduce racist messages by naturalizing the supposed cerebral rationality, work ethic, and paternalistic morality of select White characters while normalizing Black characters as primordially connected with nature, spiritually connected to the carnal, and possessive of exotic and magical powers. Together, these films subversively reaffirm the social order and relations of racial domination by reproducing centuries’ old understandings of racial difference.     

Race,power and white siege cultures

A group's awareness of its own particular ‘identity (racial, cultural, ethnic, etc.) is heightened when it competes with other groups for power, privilege and resources. It is especially when a group (be it a dominant or subordinate group) perceives its culture threatened that it mobilizes its resources, articulates its beliefs and organizes its followers to assure its cultural survival. When its protective efforts are blocked or stymied, the group is transformed into what Smelser terms a ‘value‐oriented movement’. It becomes a culture under siege, and its development closely follows those characteristics and stages of collective behaviour that Smelser identifies. Continued stress or threats to a siege culture also lead to the transformation of the group's beliefs into what Rokeach identifies as a ‘closed belief system,’ characterized by dogmatic beliefs and, among its members, highly rigid and intolerant forms of behaviour. Where a group's racial beliefs are threatened, the group is readily transformed into a siege culture. This is evident especially in three historical/contemporary cases: White Southerners in the U.S., Afrikaners in South Africa, and White Rhodesians. Their cultural/racial beliefs (based on White superiority and White supremacy) threatened, the three groups became value‐oriented movements, their transformation and characteristics (closely paralleling each other) easily identified in terms of the analyses of Smelser and Rokeach.     

The relationality of law and culture: Dominant approaches and new directions for cultural sociologists

Much of the cultural sociological research in law and culture falls into one of the following approaches: (1) law as a structure that enables and constrains culture; (2) culture as a structure that enables and constrains law; and (3) law as a cultural toolkit or repertoire upon which actors draw to orient strategies for action. This article briefly reviews these approaches, then, drawing from the generative socio‐legal tradition in law as culture, highlights a fourth approach. While law and culture are often analyzed as autonomous forces in ongoing contention, negotiation, and reconciliation, the socio‐legal approach conceptualizes the relationality of law and culture as constituted by ongoing contention. I argue that this relational approach may offer cultural sociologists who do not study law a framework for better analyzing how power undergirds, enables and constrains cultural meaning. I offer examples to illustrate the utility of this research agenda through three areas of interest for cultural sociologists: (1) embodiment; (2) emotions; and (3) political culture. Such an approach encourages a two‐way bridge between cultural sociology and socio‐legal studies conceptualizing culture as a dynamic system of power relations.     

The influence of southern culture on race‐specific homicide rates

The influence of cultural and structural variables on race‐specific homicide rates in the political subunits of Louisiana is analyzed with the purpose of further explication of the independent role these factors play as determinants of lethal violence. It is argued that the southern culture of violence hypothesis is more appropriately tested through separate examination of white, black, and total rates of homicide. The results of this study indicate clear differences in the effects of cultural and structural factors on these different rates. One of the more interesting findings is the inverse relationship between black homicide rate and percent nonwhite, which casts some doubt on sociological interpretations of the relatively higher rates of black violence as resulting from racial oppression alone. Implications are discussed.     

Where Do Our Children Fit In?: White Mothering of Asian Children and the Construction of Racial and Ethnic Identities

Abstract

This research investigates white adoptive mothers' mothering related to their adopted children's racial and ethnic socialization. Drawing upon in-depth face-to face interviews with thirty-eight women who have adopted children from China, South Korea or the Philippines, this paper first examines why white mothers de cided to adopt an Asian child and then explores mothering strategies for deal ing with their children's racial and ethnic identity formation. The study contrasts "colorblind mothering," which I also call the "assimilative fitting-in strategy," and "color-conscious mothering," also referred to as the "birth-culture fitting-in strategy." This study also found significant variations in color-conscious adoptive mothers' mothering based in part on the level of the family's embracement of the adopted child's birth culture and on the level of social networking with and outreach to not only other adoptive families but also Asian or Asian American communities. Finally this study critically reviews how race matters to white adoptive mothers.     

The Nature of Freedom

A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to complicate perceptions of race relations in the United States. When combined with historical inquiry, or the act of “doing” history, anti-essentialist historical content can help students articulate a more complex understanding of history. Studying Mendez v. Westminster, a 1940s California case about Mexican American desegregation, offers an opportunity for educators to leverage these historical and racial/ethnic complexities. Specifically, we highlight how to (1) provide background on the historical and racial/ethnic context of the 1940s, (2) highlight Mexican Americans’ racial/ethnic and language complexity, and (3) use historical inquiry to expose the multidimensionality of Mexican American discrimination.     

Social media,temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors’ efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an ‘episodic’ perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.     

Second-generation Central Americans and the formation of an ethnoracial identity in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Whether Latinos in the United States are an ethnic or racial group is extensively debated. Some propose Latinos are an ethnic group on their way to becoming white, others contend Latinos are a racialised group, and an alternate perspective posits Latinos are an ethnoracial group. This study intervenes in this debate by examining the identities of second- and 1.5-generation Central Americans in Los Angeles, California. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews, I show Central Americans have an identity repertoire, which includes national origin, panethnic, racial, and minority identities. I also capture the situations and reference groups that influence the deployment of ethnic and racial identities. These results suggest Central Americans develop an ethnoracial identity. I argue Central Americans’ ethnoracial identity emerges from agency – subjective understandings of themselves and resisting invisibility in Mexican Los Angeles – and from structure – a racialised society, institutionally-created panethnic categories, and racially-based experiences.     

The racialised mobility of transnational working holidays

This study explores how transnational working holidaymakers imagine and negotiate their identity positions in ethno-racial structures of the host society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 53 Korean working holidaymakers in Canada, the study addresses how the young people are racialised by being exposed to the ‘white gaze’ and re-ethnicised by engaging with the Korean diaspora. The study examines how the transnational mobility of working holidays both breaks from and continues the mobile subjects’ ethno-racial identity. The study’s findings contribute to the understanding of the racial dimensions of working holidaymaking, a largely overlooked topic in previous tourism studies.     

Mediating affect in John Pilger’s Utopia: ‘the good life’ as a structure of whiteness

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that whiteness should be thought of as an affective structure, theorizing whiteness in terms of optimism, possessive subjectivity and multiculturalism. The article shows how the optimism of ‘the good life’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] is linked structurally to whiteness in the construction of the Australian nation-state. In this context, Utopia [2013. Film. Directed by John Pilger. Australia: Antidote Films] specifically identifies whiteness as an affective structure. The article develops by unpacking this claim. First, I consider how the affective structure of the Australian nation-state is encountered through the mutual mediation of ‘media’ and ‘place’. I focus on the example of the film's journey to Rottnest Island – formerly an island prison, now the destination of holiday makers – to highlight how the optimism of arrival links whiteness to the present. Second, I develop an analysis of the affective surfaces of whiteness by analyzing the film's encounter with ‘White Man faciality’ [Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] and Indigenous ‘slow death’ [Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. Through producing a series of faces, Utopia portrays whiteness as a deflective surface that propagates the ‘onto-pathology’ of white Australia [Nicolacopoulos, T. and Vassilacopoulos, G., 2014. Indigenous sovereignty and the being of the occupier: manifesto for a white Australian philosophy of origins. Melbourne: Re.press]. Utopia also portrays whiteness as an absorptive surface in which Aboriginal self-possession – including, in the form of life – disappears. The film emphasizes the loss of Aboriginal life through illness and suicide linked to incarceration, overcrowding and state-induced impoverishment. The article concludes by locating media (including Utopia) within the tension between absorption and deflection as a tension between the different spatial actions of the affective relations that mediate whiteness.     

The Impact of Comedy on Racial and Ethnic Discourse

An overwhelming facet of race literature suggests that American society has entered an era of colorblindness; where instead of perpetuating racist ideology through blatant discriminatory legislation, racial differences are either understated or ignored entirely. These new racial processes are reflected in the policies of major social institutions, but also within popular culture. Yet, as made evident by the success of comedians such as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, stand‐up comedy challenges acceptable racial discourse, placing race in the forefront. Comedy persists as a facet of popular culture where racial difference is made apparent, yet ironically the art of comedy is usually overlooked by sociologists. What is lacking in the humor research is an understanding of how comedy creates an environment where race can be spoken about directly, and often times harshly. Through the analysis of focus groups, this study finds evidence to suggest that racial and ethnic comedy serves to both reinforce and wane racial and ethnic stereotypes, similarities, and differences. After watching stand‐up comedy clips of popular comedians, black and white respondents show both agreement and disagreement on the following: (1) the offensiveness of ethnic comedy, (2) stereotypes and perceived truths, and (3) the utility of ethnic comedy in everyday interactions. These findings are helpful in understanding how comedy serves as one of the few openly racialized facets of popular culture as well as uncovering some of the ways in which race works within the culture of a self‐proclaimed colorblind society.     

The Role of Perceived Racial Discrimination in the Marriage Gap Between Black and White People

Abstract

Many explanations offered for the gap in marriage rates between Black and White people are economic and cultural. Less often considered are how racial social psychological factors influence marriage rates. In this study, we use critical race theory and the life course perspective to investigate how perceived racial discrimination impacts the likelihood of marriage for Black and White people. Data for the study are taken from the Portraits of American Life Study (N?=?678). The results of logistic regression analyses show that among people who report perceived racial discrimination, White people generally have a higher probability of being married compared to Black people. Analyses by age demonstrate that among younger adults, Black people who perceive racial discrimination are equally likely to be married as White people and have a higher probability of being married than Black people who do not report perceptions of racial discrimination. A negative influence on the odds of marriage related to perceived racial discrimination for Black people becomes clearer as respondents age. The findings highlight the importance of considering perceptions of racial discrimination to better understand the marriage gap between Black and White people across the life course.     

Racial inequality and social control: Historical and contemporary patterns in the U.S. South

Research dealing with disproportionate criminality, arrest, and incarceration among African Americans has tended to emphasize cultural, familial, and structural differences between racial groups while at the same time neglecting patterns and processes of race‐ and class‐based antagonism and subordination that are central, especially in the case of the U.S. South historically. We attempt to address this limitation by posing a model of the contemporary black‐white arrest differential across counties of one southern state. The model itself takes into consideration class‐ and race‐based subordination processes and their impact on local levels of stratification and arrest. Results suggest the continuing influence of racial competition and class dynamics. Racial competition enhances the arrest gap by disproportionately increasing unemployment and family dissolution among African Americans. The existence of a strong and concentrated traditional elite is shown to depress the racial gap, presumably by increasing poverty, unemployment, and family dissolution for both groups or by shaping what it means to go to jail, especially for blacks. In general, the arguments and findings presented suggest that criminological literature and theorizing should take note of local racial and political‐economic processes that, through the perpetuation of race and class inequality, reproduce disparate patterns of criminality, arrest, and incarceration.