Between play and the quotidian: inscriptions of monstrous characters on the racialised bodies of children

Abstract

Despite critiques pointing out that racism has become normalised in early childhood settings, relatively little attention has been paid in such contexts to the everyday practices in which racial inequities are made. In seeking to interrogate the ways in which racism roosts in the routine, this article interrogates quotidian responses to children’s playful activity, drawing on data generated in an ethnographic study in a London-based nursery. The article argues that the imaginative characters players embody become ‘fixed’ on particular children – when these characters coincide with reified assumptions about the raced, classed, and gendered body – whilst serving as mobile resources for others. Such reification, which is a concentration of complex historic and contemporary social relations in the political economy, is not only harmful and unjust but limits understandings of racialisation and inequity.     

‘You are not born being racist,are you?’ Discussing racism with primary aged-children

Ethnic-racial socialisation is broadly described as processes by which both minority and majority children and young people learn about and negotiate racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. This article extends the existing ethnic-racial socialisation literature in three significant ways: (1) it explores ways children make sense of their experiences of racial and ethnic diversity and racism; (2) it considers ways children identify racism and make distinctions between racism and racialisation; and (3) it examines teacher and parent ethnic-racial socialisation messages about race, ethnicity and racism with children. This research is based on classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents and students aged 8–12?years attending four Australian metropolitan primary schools. The findings reveal that both teachers and parents tended to discuss racism reactively rather than proactively. The extent to which racism was discussed in classroom settings depended on: teachers’ personal and professional capability; awareness of racism and its perceived relevance based on student and community experiences; and whether they felt supported in the broader school and community context. For parents, key drivers for talking about racism were their children’s experiences and racial issues reported in the media. For both parents and teachers, a key issue in these discussions was determining whether something constituted either racism or racialisation. Strategies on how ethnic-racial socialisation within the school system can be improved are discussed.     

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

On the threshold: becoming Romanian Roma,everyday racism and residency rights in transition

ABSTRACT

This article examines the reaction of welfare state actors and ‘Romanian Roma’ migrants to the political environment on migration in the UK. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork between January 2013 and March 2014, the article focuses on how processes of everyday racism infused understandings of the legal framework for European migrants’ residency rights. The article first explores how state actors developed ideas about ‘Romanian Roma families’ as opposed to ‘Romanian-not-Roma families’ in a context marked by pervasive uncertainty about legal entitlements, welfare restructuring and decreasing resources. Second, I draw on new migrants’ accounts to identify their perceptions and understandings of discrimination placed within their previous experiences of racism and state violence. The article argues that processes of racialisation are subtly enfolded into everyday life shaping the narratives through which both welfare state actors and new migrants understand their situated experiences and future plans. The article reveals the small and mundane practices that reproduce racialised hierarchies which maintain the notion of ‘Roma’ as a group with particular proclivities and the affects for their socio-legal status as European migrants in the UK.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

Indigenous identity construction: enacted upon us,or within us

ABSTRACT

This commentary essay questions, theorizes, explores and grapples with the phenomenon of the creation of racial, social and cultural identity: in childhood as Native American identity is negotiated from others; and in adulthood as Native identity is constructed from within. ‘Indigenous Identity Construction: Enacted upon Us, or Within Us?’ is a commentary piece focused around Native American identity and how it is formed both through childhood and into adulthood. I analyze and interpret my experiences and understanding of my identity formation as an indigenous person- which usually is left out of the socio-political notions of modernity. Conceptualizations from ‘othering’ racial identities are discussed along with indigenous ontologies constructed within land and water. Through metaphorically revisiting past racializing incidents this piece continues working through the idea of othering and induction into whiteness in childhood, but also focuses on how indigenous identities might be constructed and sustained in adulthood. Efforts to model the indigenous assertion of self-determination and decolonizing the mind was used to re-present thoughts on the construction of Native American identity     

Towards a Critique of the Socio-logos of Justice: The Analytics of Raciality and the Production of Universality

Fear of police terror has long been a daily facet of the lives of economically dispossessed people of colour in the urban spaces of North America, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. This essay addresses the conditions of possibility of the form of race injustice manifested in racial profiling and police brutality. It challenges the centrality of the logic of exclusion - the view that race is only politically and socially significant when race identification is explicitly or implicitly used to justify discrimination - in the understanding of race injustice. It explores the political-symbolic processes that have produced the mechanisms of racial power of which police brutality is a most dramatic example. To elaborate this critique of the logic of exclusion, I discuss the newspaper account of an episode of police terror in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. What the examination of the newspaper coverage of the Chacina de Vigário Geral reveals, is that this form of race injustice indicated the operation of meanings produced in an analytic of raciality , encompassing the various instances of manufacturing the modern concept of the racial - the science of life , the science of man , and the sociology of race relations.     

Negotiating the limits of upbringing,education, and racial hygiene in Nazi Germany as exemplified in the study and treatment of Sinti and Roma

Abstract

Like other minorities, Sinti and Roma were victims of racial persecution by the Nazis. For this group in particular, the Racial-Hygienic and Heredity Research Centre in the Reich Health Office became a central institution in the Nazi system of extermination. Eva Justin, a reseacher at the Centre, published her doctoral dissertation while working there. The dissertation discusses the possibility of ‘educating’ Sinti and Roma and of making them useful to the German Volksgemeinschaft (‘community of the people’). In this article, I examine Justin’s notions of a subject’s capacity to be brought up and educated and how these notions can be understood in the context of antiziganism, racial hygiene, and National Socialism. In particular, I elucidate her notions of a subject’s capacity to be brought up and educated and the attributes and interpretative framework with which she contrued Sinti and Roma as ‘objects of upbringing and education’.     

Self reflection(s): Subjectivity and racial subordination in the contemporary African‐American writer

Abstract

Shelby Steele's The Content of our Character, and John Wideman's Philadelphia Fire are contrasted for what they reveal about the two authors’ confrontation with self‐expression and self‐definition in a society that denies African‐American individuality. I argue that Steele's and Wideman's distinctive solutions to personal expression as demonstrated in these works constitute the discursive boundaries, the poles between which black male subjectivity oscillates in this racialist society. To explicate these particular positions, I draw on psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, masculinity, and subjectivity. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is invoked to articulate, albeit in a different society and context, the subjective crisis of the intellectual, the linkage between one's inner world and outer society, and the relation between personal identity and national self‐understanding. While Steele opts for an isolated, transcendent individualism, Wideman embraces a conception of self inextricably connected to and constrained by the wider African‐American community. I argue that each ‘solution’ produces its own form of self‐estrangement, revealing the phychic cost and intractability of racial division in America.     

The rise and fall of the ‘inner city’: race,space and urban policy in postwar England

ABSTRACT

In postwar England, the ‘inner city’ has loomed large in urban discourse and policy, serving as an important site through which ‘race’ has been rendered socially and spatially meaningful. Drawing on insights from history, geography and sociology, this paper traces the material and symbolic processes through which the ‘inner city’ has been the subject and object of socio-political knowledge and action. The article examines what shifting understandings of the ‘inner city’ and related policy responses reveal about the racialisation of space and bodies, and the role of the state in rationalising and enacting specific urban imaginings and interventions. In historicising dominant conceptions of the ‘inner city’, we identify three periods revealing key transformations within this formation: firstly, we consider how the idea operated as a spectre, in which the American ‘ghetto’ was seen as a predictor of ‘race relations’; secondly, we contend that during the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘inner city’ came to be ‘territorialised’ as a pathological, racialised space subject to particular modes of institutional regulation; finally, we examine the relative fragmentation of the ‘inner city’ in recent decades, through urban regeneration and changes in the spatialisation of ‘race’ and ethnicity.     

British Critical Theorists: The Production of the Conceptual Invisibility of the Irish Diaspora

There is a long historical narrative of the relations between Britain and Ireland in which images of the Irish have been mobilised as major changing representational resources for the making of the British nation, identity and culture. Presently, the Irish diaspora in Britain is a major racialised ethnic group. However, it is absent from contemporary British theorists' representations of race and ethnicity. The paper critically explores the dominant racial regime of representation and this accompanying conceptual absence, as illustrated in anti-racist and new cultural theory texts. There is a need to rethink the histories and geographies of social closure and cultural exclusion as defining elements of the politics of race and nation. The paper argues the need to move beyond the Americanisation of British race-relations - the colour paradigm - to a critical engagement with European explanations, focusing on questions of nation, nationalism and migration. This is not an argument for the inclusion of the Irish in the current model of British race relations, but rather seeks to investigate the denial of difference with reference to Irish ethnic minority status and the specificity of anti-Irish racism. I conclude by looking at the question of self-representation in relation to Irish cultural formation and subjectivity, suggesting that in terms of a traditional racial dichotomy of domination/dominated, the Irish are not either/or but both/and.     

Towards a theorisation of diversity. Configurations of person-related differences in the context of youth welfare practices

ABSTRACT

The article proposes a pathway towards a theorisation of diversity. It is argued that diversity can be understood as referring to the complex outcomes of multifaceted processes in which various schemes of classifications are applied to persons and segments of populations. A growing interest in individuals and their qualities, combined with the development of information technologies, has stimulated a proliferation of person-related categories. Diversity offers an analytical lens for studying the relational qualities of various person-related differences, the interaction between categories of different scale and scope and their situational organisation. Thereby, it goes beyond notions of identity, on the one hand, and intersectionality, on the other. In the second part of the article, the outlined framework is applied to the cases of youth welfare practice in Stuttgart and Frankfurt. The focus of the case analysis is migration-related categories and how they relate to larger configurations of person-related differences in the field of youth welfare practice. It is argued that a diversity perspective, as suggested here, allows us to capture an element of opaqueness and ambiguity concerning migration-related differentiations that has implications for the understanding of ongoing debates about discrimination and racialisation.     

Fluidity amidst structure: multi-racial identity constructions across the life course of Malaysians and Singaporeans

ABSTRACT

Multi-racial identity construction is understood to be fluid, contextual and dynamic. Yet the dynamics of multi-racial identity construction when racial identities are ascribed and formulated as static by governments is less explored in psychological studies of race. This paper examines the dynamics of racial identity construction among multi-racial Malaysians and Singaporeans in a qualitative study of 31 semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify the different private racial identity constructions of participants who were officially ascribed with single racial identities at birth. Participants reflected on the overwhelming influence of the state and significant Others in limiting their ability to express their multiple racial identities when they were in school, and highlighted their capacity to be agentic in their private racial identity constructions when they were older. This paper shows that across the life course multi-racial individuals possess (1) the ability to adopt different racial identity positions at different times, (2) the ability to hold multiple racial identity constructions at the same time when encounters with Others are dialogical, (3) the reflexivity of past identity positions in the present construction of identities.     

Toward a Framework for Understanding Forces that Contribute to or Reinforce Racial Inequality

For many years social scientists have debated the role of social structure versus culture in explaining the social and economic outcomes of African Americans. The position that one takes often reflects ideological bias. Conservatives tend to emphasize cultural factors whereas liberals pay more attention to structural conditions, with most of the attention devoted to racialist structural factors such as discrimination and segregation. In this article I develop a framework for understanding the formation and maintenance of racial inequality and racial group outcomes that integrates cultural factors with two types of structural forces—those that directly reflect explicit racial bias and those that do not. In so doing, I hope to spark greater interest and dialogue in the research and policy arenas around a more holistic approach to poverty alleviation.

‘In England,they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations and the production of Roma difference across Europe

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of branding while simultaneously exposing them to different categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are re-adjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last decade in British and European contexts.     

Of Mongrels and Jews: The Deconstruction of Racialised Identities in White Supremacist Discourse

ABSTRACT

This research explores the construction of race and mixed race identities in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. In white supremacist discourse, interracial sexuality is defined as the ultimate abomination, and mixed race people pose a particularly strong threat. This paper explores the ways in which mixed race people, and Jews in particular, threaten the construction of a supposedly pure white racial identity. Drawing upon the insights of poststructuralism, this analysis will explore the role of boundary maintenance and the threat of border crossings in the process of constructing racial identities.     

Apes and anticitizens: simianization and U.S. national identity discourse

ABSTRACT

Within the literature on public opinion, the mainstream framework is that in-group and out-group attitudes are distinct phenomena, especially with regard to racial attitudes. Elsewhere, in the literature on race and nationalism, scholars have concluded that the United States subscribes to cultural, color-blind racism, that has predominantly replaced biological racism. To explain the context in which white supremacy is again a viable political force in American politics, this paper argues that notions of biological racism that predate the Civil Rights Movement remain potent and continue to underlie cultural racism, and that that these out-group attitudes are not independent of in-group attitudes. This paper focuses on a form of dehumanization-simianization, or the depiction of racial groups (in this case African-Americans) as apes, tracing its origins in Enlightenment-era scientific racism, its historical role in shaping U.S. race and class relations, and as its role in defining American citizenship as hierarchical. Moreover, this paper presents evidence of simianization in contemporary political discourse surrounding African-Americans in the United States. The paper seeks to synthesize the literature on public opinion and that on race and nationalism in order to shed new theoretical light on our thinking about the relationship between in-group and out-group attitude formation.