Translating Difference: The Ambiguous Representation of the ‘Exotic’ in Wyndham Lewis’s Journey into Barbary: Travels across Morocco

Difference is dealt with paradoxically in discourse: sometimes, it is admired and eulogized by the perceiver to the extent of fetishism; other times, however, it represents a mixture of both love and repulsion. The concept of representation does not stand for a homogeneous idea, but engenders a plethora of other concepts that lead to an inevitable crossing of various disciplines. In this regard, Journey into Barbary offers a rich territory for the study of crosscultural encounters and the representation of difference. The paper investigates the discursive ambiguity in Lewis’s representation of Morocco. The focus is on the fluctuation between a celebration of exoticism, and an assertion of ethnocentrism and superiority. The paper analyses Lewis’s travelogue considering recent theories in postcolonial criticism, attempting to unravel and demonstrate the author’s biased racial attitudes and ethnocentric tendencies in representing Moroccan people and culture, as well as his representation of other cultures – which I refer to as the translation of difference – as manifested in his description of Berbers.

Prejudice, Bigotry, and Support for Compensatory Interventions to Address Black-White Inequalities: Evidence from the General Social Survey, 2006-2020

The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black-white inequalities has increased substantially, while prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.

White Parents’ Socialization of Racial Attitudes: A Commentary on Scott et al. (2020)

In the September 2020 issue of Perspectives, Scott et al. argued that there is insufficient empirical work on White parents’ racial-socialization strategies to support generalizations about the topic and, therefore, that journalists’ recommendation that White parents discuss race and racism with their children represents a case of speculation without evidence. Although we strongly support Scott et al.’s call for additional, rigorous research on racial socialization in White families, we argue that their critique of popular-press pieces was unwarranted. Specifically, we argue that, although definitive tests of the effects of specific White parental racial-socialization strategies are lacking, the recommendation for parents to discuss race and racism with their children is both appropriate and empirically grounded. We describe research on racial socialization, intergroup contact, and cognitive development that is consistent with recommendations from developmental scientists reported in the popular press. Furthermore, we argue that parents may be the ideal socializers of racial attitudes. We conclude with a discussion of the broad context concerning media reports of findings from psychological science.

Racial demographics explain the link between racial disparities in traffic stops and county-level racial attitudes

Disparities in the treatment of Black and White Americans in police stops are pernicious and widespread. We examine racial disparities in police traffic stops by leveraging data on traffic stops from hundreds of U.S. counties from the Stanford Open Policing Project and corresponding county-level data on implicit and explicit racial attitudes from the Project Implicit research website. We find that Black-White traffic stop disparities are associated with county-level implicit and explicit racial attitudes and that this association is attributable to racial demographics: counties with a higher proportion of White residents had larger racial disparities in police traffic stops. We also examined racial disparities in several post-stop outcomes (e.g., arrest rates) and found that they were not systematically related to racial attitudes, despite evidence of disparities. These findings indicate that racial disparities in counties’ traffic stops are reliably linked to counties’ racial attitudes and demographic compositions.