Allegories of white masculinity in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor

Urban residents across Africa are neither simply the subjugated nor the purveyors of skilled survival. Rather they continuously navigate a world where no one set of assumptions or clearly delineated trajectory of efficacy and livelihood applies. In some Central African cities, such as Kinshasa, notions of economy concern practices of taking discrete people and things and interweaving them with others in relations that often have little familiarity, make little sense. Things that don't readily belong are assembled into provisional bundles. In this essay on an important retail market, urban agriculture, and a superblock development in Kinshasa, economy is demonstrated to be a way of keeping the value of things open to new uses and sites. Thus, to grasp the fierce ambivalence of many clearly impoverished urban districts requires an appreciation of the oscillations of value.     

Far Away So Close: Race,Whiteness, and German Identity

Race and nation have been difficult concepts in Germany since the Holocaust. Although race has seemingly disappeared from public discourse, the concept is very present in the narrative construction of white German national identities. In fact in Germany, race, and more specifically whiteness, disappears into a national naming. On the basis of a qualitative study on women activists, I examine to what extent the research participants struggle with the racialized discourse on German identity and what this struggle looks like. Using John Hartigan's (2000 Hartigan, John Jr. 2000. Object lessons in whiteness: Antiracism and the study of white folks. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7(3): 373–406. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) approach to analyzing ethnographic accounts of whiteness, I show how a racialization of German identity plays out in complex and complicated ways. On the one hand, the narratives are complicit with a racialized Germanness, yet on the other hand, the idea of a unified, white, cultural community is being challenged. To move toward a postcolonial narrative of Germanness that includes Germany's history of colonialism as well as fascism, we need to move away from race, but we also need to move toward race. A starting point would be provided by focusing on racism, not as a fringe issue of German society but rather as an urgent matter that is located at the centre of German politics and is actively shaping its history.     

Morality and Patriarchal White Sovereignty

This article offers a reading of three separate stories of gang rapes that have been prominent in the Australian media since 2000. The men involved – an Indigenous leader, young Sydney men identified as Muslim and several ostensibly un-raced professional footballers, have been positioned through different legal outcomes, media representations and through a prominently deployed discourse of morality. The article locates the gang rape stories in mutual inter-relationship with the expression of racism in Australia and the performance of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ by the Australian state in the 2000s in the global climate since 11 September 2001. It argues that the politics of race and whiteness, and the protocols for their speaking, have been central in the telling of the rape stories. These stories of gang rape have also created differently racialized positions for women including some remarkably respectful mainstream representations of the women raped by non-white men. The article concludes that these stories perform a gendered and raced moral justification for the racist and colonialist policies of the Australian state, both within national borders and beyond, that characterized the national government led by Prime Minister John Howard (1996–2007).     

The return of the native: racialised space,colonial debris and the human zoo

This article takes Zurich’s Masoala Halle as an example to show how the spatial redistribution of whiteness, as Sara Ahmed calls it, is tied to a specific use of science and the scientific through two interconnected arguments. First, the difference between the scientific human and the ‘native informant’ is taken up. As Gayatri Spivak’s account of the native informant indicates, the displaying of whiteness relies on the racialised Other who stands in for the premodern ways of life as well as the basic and primitive aspects of human existence. Second, the current return of representations of the native Other to zoo exhibitions, as exemplified by the Zurich Zoo, needs to be seen within the trajectory of the human zoos of the late nineteenth century that were crucial for the popular establishment of a racialised gaze, which drew heavily on the emerging scientific approach to the world and vice versa.     

Who's the fairest of them all? Television ads for skin-whitening cosmetics in Hong Kong

This paper explores the notion of fair skin and its relationship to the construction of a Hong Kong ‘racial’ identity by Hong Kongers. It examines a local television advertisement for a cosmetic product named ‘UVWhite whitening softener’. Based on the interpretations of focus-group participants in Hong Kong and the UK, and his own in the role of analyst, the author explores three different perspectives on the advertisement. A triangulation of these three perspectives reveals a number of possible meanings and symbolic functions of fair skin in forming identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and their relationships with class, gender and, above all, race in various sociocultural contexts. These perspectives, and the differences between them, also closely reflect the sociocultural backgrounds of the participants and provide clues to an understanding of the ways in which skin colour operates as a visual agent in defining the boundaries of cultural identity, and in identifying a person's place in a local social hierarchy, if not an increasingly global one.     

Activating Controlling Images in the Racialized Interaction Order: Black Middle‐Class Interactions and the Creativity of Racist Action

This paper investigates the link between the racial hierarchy and the racialized interaction order, questioning how controlling images of blackness are mediated in interactions. I explore this through interviews with thirty‐two black British middle‐class individuals, examining their interactions in the professional workplace. I argue that white people often draw on a practical knowledge of “white ignorance” to activate controlling images in their interactions with black professionals. This white ignorance allows for white people to find creative ways to irrationally deploy controlling images, and to adapt controlling images to specific interactional settings.     

Differential Status Evaluations and Racial Bias in the Chilean Segregated School System

Although there is growing interest in studying the long‐ignored relationship between stratification and race in Chile, racial bias in person perception remains unknown. We hypothesize that the segregation of the Chilean school system generated a prestige order in which pupils are differentiated by status characteristics according to the type of school they attend, and that these evaluations are based on racial traits. To test this hypothesis, we study whether facial appearance is sufficient to impute the type of school a pupil is attending, and whether these categorizations evoke different status evaluations of wealth and morality based on race. Results confirm that participants’ perceptions of facial appearance allow them to situate pupils in the Chilean social structure. Faces categorized as studying at different types of schools varied in their perceived wealth. However, the relationship between moral traits and types of schools was weak. We also found evidence of racial bias in the participants’ perceptions of pupils’ faces: faces categorized as enrolled in municipal schools (low status) were judged with Amerindian or mestizo racial traits, while faces categorized as attending private fee‐paying schools (high status) were judged with white racial traits. We did not find a relationship between race and morality.     

The power of Hyphen-Nationalism: Martin Scorsese's sojourn from Italian American to White-Ethnic American

Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated American filmmakers of the last 50 years. This essay looks at his public story in films, books, television, radio, journals, and newspapers. This story reflects the personal and artistic journey of Scorsese and the collective rendition of this journey by Scorsese, critics, journalists, and others. It shows the intersection of the personal life, public biography, creative work, and critical reception of a public intellectual negotiating his ethnic and racial-identity for six decades. Informed by work in Race and Ethnic Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Critical Rhetoric Studies, this essay uses this story as a case study of the ideological power of white ethnic-identity and white racial-identity in the racial formation of post-civil rights America. I show how the public story of one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American artists over the last half-century transcribed the conversion of an ‘unmeltable’ Italian-American of the late 1960s Ethnic Revival to a White-Ethnic American of an end-of-the-century Hyphen-Nationalism. I demonstrate the power embedded in the institutional and cultural regime of Hyphen-Nationalism in the United States that acts to erase in personal memory, creative imagination, and art the power and legacy of white privilege.     

The Problem People and the Hard Workers: whiteness and small town response to economic decline

This paper explores the role of race and class in post-industrial economic decline and revitalization in a predominantly white town in the northeastern United States. Ethnographic research in this small town revealed that residents commonly identified lazy, welfare-dependent substance abusers as the source of local problems. At the same time, they lauded workers, drawing on a national white hard worker mythology. Poor and underemployed workers themselves thus negotiated between the problem people and white worker ideals. I argue that the white worker myth provides a symbolic escape hatch, which reinforces hegemonic whiteness and the US racial order despite the lack of material payoff for economically marginalised white workers. As such, I call for a shift away from measuring degrees of white privilege towards an analysis of how people in various classed and gendered positions mobilise or contribute to white power differently.     

‘Let’s hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American’: racialising Muslims and the politics of white identity

This paper examines public discourse on race, whiteness and Muslims through an in-depth exploration of an online media controversy following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. On 16 April, the day after the attacks, the liberal magazine Salon.com published David Sirota’s article, ‘Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American’. A firestorm of commentary followed, with conservatives defending the profiling of Muslims, and accusing Sirota of anti-white racism. Anchored in questions of race, racism and Muslims and marked by a sharp partisan polarisation, these discussions intensified after 18 April, when the Tsarnaev brothers were identified as the perpetrators. The ensuing debate surrounding the racial identity of the Tsarnaevs displays how Muslim racialisation occurs and operates within a conservative discourse strongly committed to a colour-blind ideology. Our paper moves beyond this affirmation of literature on Muslim racialisation and sets this process within a relationally constructed and performative white racial identity.