Towards a Theory of the Racialization of Space

Urbanists and race scholars have been attentive to issues relating to race and space for over 100 years. Though some scholars allude to how race is spatialized or space is racialized, that is, to say race is constructed in space and space is inscribed with race, a transportable and multifaceted theory of the racialization of space has yet to emerge. This paper advances a theory integrating racialization theory and Lefebvre’s trialectic theory of the social production of space. I consider how physical, mental, and social facets of space constitute intersecting “racial projects” in the context of societies in which race plays a determinative role. I illustrate this perspective pointing to findings from studies approaching issues of race and space from a variety of vantage points and conclude with suggestions for the further application of this theory.

Racial formation and education: A critical analysis of the Sewell report

The article provides an analysis and critique of the education component of the 2021 Sewell Report on Race and Ethnic Disparities. It commences by providing a critical summary of the report focusing on its spurious claims to objectivity, the erasure of racism and the inadequacy of its recommendations. The second part of the article focuses on developing a contextualised analysis of the report. Omi and Winant’s ideas about racial formation are used to provide a lens through which to interpret the Sewell report as part of a wider hegemonic project of the right to redefine what it means to be British in the context of a deepening organic crises of capitalism. The article outlines the nature of the crisis. It locates the report within a consideration of three ‘racial projects’ that have shaped education policy, namely, the nationalist, multicultural and antiracist projects. Through advocating a ‘colourblind’ approach to education policy and the selective appropriation of multicultural discourse, it will be argued that the report needs to be understood as part of a wider effort to reconfigure the nationalist project in response to crisis. It is suggested, however, that despite its many flaws, the Sewell report poses challenges for those who have traditionally been aligned to multiculturalism and antiracism in education. The article concludes by setting out a vision for a new progressive project aimed at advancing racial and cultural justice that it is suggested, can begin to address these challenges.

Productive myopia: Racialized organizations and edtech

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization (CMO-LAX), a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education.

#ChinaMustexplain: Global Tweets, COVID-19, and Anti-Black Racism in China

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.

Doing Racial Projects in Requests for Police Service: The reproduction of racial common sense in emergency calls

Patterns of racial inequality are well-documented in domains like criminal justice, but the interactional mechanisms that produce these inequalities and constitute race remain underspecified. In this paper, I use conversation analytic research methods to examine police service calls as one site of such mechanisms. Drawing on analysis of 64 police-relevant emergency service calls placed in the United States 2005-2015, I show how the institution of emergency calls relies upon the racial categorization practices of callers and call-takers. I further show that this routine reliance on race opens the door for participants to use racist inferences to make sense of reported complaints. In this way, I illustrate how racial projects are enacted through situated social practices.

‘Race might be a unicorn, but its horn could draw blood’: Racialisation, Class and Racism in a Non-Western Context

In this article, the concepts of ‘racialisation’, ‘racial projects’, and ‘racisms’ are deployed to analyse the social construction of distinctive groups and the dynamics of group conflicts in India where the white vs. non-white binary as the key element of race relations does not exist. My main argument is that in India the racialisation of specific groups constructs racial categories that intersect with class relations, to produce inequalities and struggles over material and non-material resources. A related argument is that despite the seemingly seamless braiding of race and class, it is in fact class that plays a more significant role in producing as well as sustaining racialised social inequality.