The Development of Racial Ideologies and Attitudes

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-122
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462199268
Author(s):  
Anwar Ouassini ◽  
Mostafa Amini ◽  
Nabil Ouassini

One of the consequences of the emergence of COVID-19 has been the glaring racial and ethnic disparities that have defined the course of the spread of the virus. As a recent migrant-minority community in China, the Black community’s experience has been defined by vulgar racism, exploitation, and stigmatization. In the context of COVID-19, the Black community in China was again a target of multiple racial projects which sought to label their bodies as diseased and physical presence as a threat to the viability and safety of the Han majority. The global response was to mobilize online to expose how the Chinese government is systematically facilitating discriminatory policies against Black migrants in China. In the present paper, we explore how Twitter was utilized to mobilize awareness about anti-Black racism in China. We first present a brief history of African migration to China and then discuss the Han racial ideologies that are inspiring the anti-Black racism. We then use latent Dirichlet allocation as a topic modeling algorithm to extract underlying themes to discuss how anti-Black racism in the COVID-19 context was framed and subsequently challenged by the global community. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion on COVID-19 and the future of the Black community in China.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003464462199600
Author(s):  
Diego Ayala-McCormick

It has become common to compare racial inequality in the United States with a “Latin American” pattern of racial inequality in which egalitarian racial ideologies mask stark socioeconomic inequalities along racial lines. However, relatively few comparative studies exist attempting to analyze variations in degrees of racial inequality in the Americas. To stimulate further research in this area, the following study analyzes census data on racial inequality in unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The results suggest that while Brazil is similar to the United States in displaying large levels of racial inequality in the areas measured, Cuba and Puerto Rico display significantly lower levels of racial inequality and Colombia falls in between, undermining conceptions of a monolithic Latin American racial system.


Author(s):  
Brooke N. Newman

Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1085-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Brock

The browser has become part of our communicative infrastructure, invisible to our information literacy practices until a rupture occurs. In December 2008, the Mozilla-variant ‘niche’ browser, Blackbird, was released. Blackbird’s cultural affiliation with African American users became the rupture for pundits and early adopters. It was derided as racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black internet users. This article examines the racial and technological discourses surrounding Blackbird’s release on technology and cultural blogs. Findings indicate that racial ideologies play a factor in the reception of this culturally themed ICT artifact.


2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Knadler

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."


Author(s):  
Matthew C. Reilly

This chapter explores socioeconomic interactions between “Poor Whites” or “Redlegs” and Afro-Barbadians as interpreted through material culture and a particular reading of a Barbadian plantation landscape. The tenantry of Below Cliff, now shrouded in dense forest, is located on the “rab” land or marginal zone of Clifton Hall plantation deemed unsuitable for large-scale agricultural production. Despite the marginality of the space in terms of plantation production and a perceived socioeconomic isolation of island “poor whites” in general, Below Cliff was a space of heightened interracial interaction. I argue that such seemingly marginal spaces (as well as the people who inhabit them) are significant arenas through which to explore the dynamic and nuanced race relations that play out in everyday life on and around the plantation. While plantation slavery was crucial in the development of modern racial ideologies and hierarchies, including attempts to rigidly impose and police racial boundaries, archaeological evidence suggests that on the local level these boundaries were exceedingly porous.


Author(s):  
Christopher C. Fennell

These case studies of the Virginia and Illinois regions have been presented with diverging themes of ethnicities and racism. At a practical level, analytic concepts of ethnicities can be employed effectively to understand some places, times, and populations. One should expect change in these social networks, often within just a few decades. For other times, locations, and communities, the impacts of racial ideologies make the analysis of racism a more productive approach. That contrast of ethnicity and racism arises in larger-scale debates concerning the usefulness of these two conceptual frameworks. Researchers have frequently examined the question of whether an analytic concept of racism is better replaced by concepts of ethnic group relations. No consensus has emerged over decades of debates. Scholars in some regions are affected by “post-racial” political agendas that influence them to depart from the terminology of racism in favor of alternative concepts of ethnicities. Such initiatives have impacted researchers in South Africa. They often frame their research within the broader social context of the post-racial policies of the Mandela presidency and later administrations. The U.S. certainly has not entered such a post-racial era.


Author(s):  
Amy Murrell Taylor

This chapter focuses on the relationship between race and space—between competing ideas for how people of different races should reside spatially—by looking at the Union army’s various attempts to remove refugees en masse. These removals attempted to resettle the people in places far removed from active combat, including northern states, islands in the Mississippi River, and even Haiti. Some of these efforts bore a great deal of resemblance to antebellum colonization plans, and, as in those cases, black men and women in the Civil War largely resisted being sent away. Most of the removals were justified by white officials in environmental terms, driven by racial ideologies that linked particular climates and landscapes to people of color. The chapter also argues that removals were sometimes triggered by concerns about gender and sex too—by beliefs that the physical proximity of black women and white men in military encampments had made rape inevitable.


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