“Your English is so good”: Linguistic experiences of racialized students and instructors of a Canadian university

Racism has increasingly been exposed and problematized in public domains, including institutions of higher education. In academia, critical race theory (CRT) has guided scholars to uncover everyday experiences of racism by highlighting the intersectionality of race with other identity categories, among which language constitutes an important, yet underexplored, component. Through the conceptual lens of CRT and counter-storytelling as a methodological orientation, this study investigated how racialized graduate students and faculty members at a Canadian university experienced racialization and racism in relation to issues of language, including communication and the use of ethnic names as semiotic markers. Individual and focus group interviews generated participants’ stories, to which we applied a thematic analysis. Participants generally felt that they were forced into pre-determined and essentialized categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. Racialized non-native speakers of an official language—English or French—often received compliments or inquisitive comments on their language proficiency, which further accentuated their raciolinguistic Otherness and caused pain. Conversely, racialized native speakers did not report receiving compliments on language. For East Asian participants especially, speaking White English seemed to offset their racial stigma and psychologically separated them from non-native, English-speaking East Asian immigrants who looked like them. These experiences indicate normative expectations. The participants felt they were expected to not only speak, write, or communicate in the White normative language and manners, but also to use or not use an Anglicized name against their will. These impositions were questioned and resisted by some participants, and antiracist consciousness was expressed. The participants’ voices encourage universities to validate their stories as well as their ways of telling their stories.

Deconstructing Racial Stigma in the Therapeutic Relationship

This chapter seeks to deconstruct racial stigma of mental illness held by counselors within the therapeutic relationship. The authors will provide counselors with practical tools that will help them work through their own prejudices, discriminations, and stereotypes about people of color and mental illness. This chapter will provide background information on stigma, specifically racial stigma, the process for incorporating theoretical variation in clinical work, and its importance. Additionally, the authors will explore best practices that will help counselors obtain the knowledge and skills needed to effectively work with a variety of clients who are racially and ethnically diverse.

Reinventing the People’s House: Time, Space and Activism in Multiethnic Stockholm

The paper focuses on an anti-austerity and anti-racist urban movement, emerging from the multiethnic precariat in Sweden’s most disadvantaged metropolitan areas. It has catalysed the reinvention of a common space with roots in the labour movement of the late 19th century, The People’ House, a meme for contemporary community centres, loaded with hopes of contesting racial stigma and structurally conditioned precarity of citizenship and labour. Scrutinising a specific case, the authors address the ambiguous emplacement of a People’s House in a Stockholm wrought by financialisation, polarising processes of segregation, the commodification of welfare institutions and interventions by competing NGO coalitions in a post-political age.

On the perpetuation and contestation of racial stigma: Urban Roma in a disadvantaged neighbourhood of Szeged

Stigmatisation of Roma people has long received attention in the academic literature but the internalisation of stigma among segregated urban Roma has been little researched. By adopting a theoretical perspective on collective identity and (urban Roma) racial stigmatisation, this paper aims to 1) understand the broader nature of urban Roma stigmatisation maintained by the non-Roma people and among the Roma, and 2) better position the internalisation of stigma and the burden of Roma stigmatisation. The paper uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a research methodology, taking a disadvantaged neighbourhood of the city of Szeged, Hungary as a case study. The findings suggest that stigmatisation against urban Roma is a process which has deeply rooted historical backgrounds, and current efforts which strive for desegregation and integration of urban Roma will be difficult to implement , as stigmatisation remains in the collective mentality. The importance of this study rests on bringing all major dimensions of stigma together, highlighting what policymakers should consider when addressing them in the longer term. We argue that the existing urban policies towards the Roma people need to be readdressed, with clear power given to the voices of the Roma, particularly from institutions which aim to protect them.

Disentangling the Effects of Race and Place in Economic Transactions: Findings from an Online Field Experiment

Scholarship on discrimination consistently shows that non–Whites are at a disadvantage in obtaining goods and services relative to Whites. To a lesser extent, recent work has asked whether or not place of residence may also affect individuals’ chances in economic markets. In this study, we use a field experiment in an online market for second–hand goods to examine transactional opportunities for White, Black, Asian, and Latino residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods. Our results show that sellers prefer transactional partners who live in advantaged neighborhoods to those who live in neighborhoods that are majority non–White and have higher rates of poverty. This was true across all four racial/ethnic groups, revealing that neighborhood stigma exists independently of racial stigma. We discuss the implications for scholarship on neighborhood effects and we outline how future research using experiments can leverage various types of markets to better specify when characteristics like race trigger discrimination.

Manufacturing Racial Stigma

The Hollywood Jim Crow creates a resurgence of the Negro Problem previously articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in which Blackness becomes a race stigma in need of remedy. Black directors’ perspectives and career trajectories are steered in a direction to overcome Hollywood insiders’ presumption of the unbankable label—that movies with Black casts or lead actors do not make enough money and are risky investments. Directors brand their movies as human and universal, stating they are relatable to all moviegoers and not just a subsection of Black audiences. Some directors are pressured to work with mostly white or multiracial casts if they are to have increasing production budgets. This retreat from Blackness undermines the notion that Black directors in Hollywood would necessarily bring more Black movies to the screen.