Historically White Colleges and Universities: The Unbearable Whiteness of (Most) Colleges and Universities in America

In this paper, we examine the academy as a specific case of the racialization of space, arguing that most colleges and universities in the United States are in fact historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). To uncover this reality, we first describe the dual relationship between space and race and racism. Using this theoretical framing, we demonstrate how seemingly “race neutral” components of most American universities (i.e., the history, demography, curriculum, climate, and sets of symbols and traditions) embody, signify, and reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. After examining the racial reality of HWCUs, we offer several suggestions for making HWCUs into truly universalistic, multicultural spaces.

Not White Saviors, but Critical Scholars

Gifted Black and Brown students are not voiceless; their voices are suffocated under the knee of systemic racism and white supremacy. This chapter proposes that the field of gifted education advocates for needed structural and systemic change through the discourse of critical race theory. A model of gifted critical race studies (GTCrit) is presented and described as both a way to understand race and racism in gifted education and to drive social change. GTCrit theorizes about the ways in which race, racism, ability, potentiality, and deficit ideology are built into daily interactions and discourses, informal and formal policies and procedures, and systems and structures of education, which disproportionately impact students of color qualitatively differently than white students.

Race, Geography, and School Choice Policy: A Critical Analysis of Detroit Students’ Suburban School Choices

The purpose of this study is to advance our thinking about race and racism in geospatial analyses of school choice policy. To do so, we present a critical race spatial analysis of Detroit students’ suburban school choices. To frame our study, we describe the racial and spatial dynamics of school choice, drawing in particular on the concepts of opportunity hoarding and predatory landscapes. We find that Detroit students’ suburban school choices were circumscribed by racial geography and concentrated in just a handful of schools and districts. We also find notable differences between students in different racial groups. For all Detroit exiters, their schools were significantly more segregated and lower quality than those of their suburban peers. We propose future directions for research on families’ school choices as well as school and district behavior at the intersection of race, geography, and school choice policy.

Warriors, pacifists and empires: race and racism in international thought before 1914

Before 1914 scholars of international thought frequently relied on racist arguments, yet the ways that race was used varied widely from author to author. This article charts the way that race was used by two groups of Anglophone writers. The warriors used biological arguments to construct views of international affairs that relied on racist analysis. Pacifists might have used racist language that relied more on cultural prejudices, and would often base their more progressive views of international affairs on the idea of a civilizing mission. Using A. T. Mahan and Brooks Adams as exemplars of the warrior approach, and Norman Angell and H. N. Brailsford for the pacifists, I argue that race and racism play an important part in international thought before the First World War. This racism was directed at the colonized in the global South, Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states, and Jews in the global North. This use of race and racism in pre-First World War international thought has implications for how we view the development of International Relations today. It is not just statues and stately homes that require a thorough reassessment of attitudes to race, but also our understanding of the progression of ideas in international thought.

Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order

While race existed as a cultural marker in earlier history, a mutually-reinforcing link between racism, slavery and empire is a distinct product of western Europe and the US-led world order. Yet, mainstream scholarship on International Relations has obscured the question of race or worse, legitimized its exclusion in discussions of world order-building. At the same time, demand for racial equality from anti-colonial forces presented an alternative and inclusive conception of world order. The first part of this article offers a brief discussion of concepts of race, racism and world order. The next part examines how racist ideas and norms created exclusionary frameworks and approaches of world order, such as the European ‘standard of civilization’ principle. The third part looks at the role of racism in the emergence of the American-led world order, including US President Woodrow Wilson's rejection of the ‘racial equality’ principle in the League of Nations Charter, the privileging of ‘sovereign equality’ over ‘racial equality’ in the UN Charter, and the scant attention given to the link between colonialism and denial of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, anti-colonial leaders and conferences, especially the 1955 Bandung Conference, integrated ‘national sovereignty, racialism and colonialism’, and demanded racial equality as a fundamental human right. The final part cautions against the dangers of complacency and compartmentalizing the study of race and racism, and calls instead for viewing racism as an inter-linked global challenge, hence integral to the emerging research agenda of Global International Relations.

The COVID States Project #73: American Attitudes Toward Critical Race Theory

In a few short years, the scholarly approach known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) went from a relatively obscure academic framework to the new front in the American culture wars. CRT has made its way to the front pages of newspapers, cable news show’s primetime specials, Presidential executive orders, and a slate of laws and regulations dictating how history can be taught in public schools. Critical Race Theory1 is an academic movement of scholars who investigate and seek to change the existing power dynamic between race and racism in society.CRT began in the 1970s among legal scholars and has since influenced other fields such as sociology, education, and ethnic studies. CRT consists of several basic tenants or themes, although substantial individual variation exists across scholars. Among these is the notion that race is socially constructed (there is no biological basis for what we think of as race), the idea that racism is normalized as part of everyday society (it is entrenched in modern institutions and policies and can be difficult to combat), and the idea that the dominant group have little incentive to eliminate racism because the current racial hierarchy serves important material and psychological needs. Other themes in CRT include the idea of intersectionality which argues that belonging to multiple oppressed groups is a distinctive experience that is more than just the sum of its parts.

Advancing Research Within Asian American Psychology Using Asian Critical Race Theory and an Asian Americanist Perspective

Research within Asian American psychology continually grows to include a range of topics that expand on the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of the Asian American psychological experience. Still, research focused on distinct racialization and psychological processes of Asians in America is limited. To advance scientific knowledge on the study of race and racism in the lives of Asian Americans, we draw on Asian critical race theory and an Asian Americanist perspective that emphasizes the unique history of oppression, resilience, and resistance among Asian Americans. First, we discuss the rationale and significance of applying Asian critical race theory to Asian American psychology. Second, we review the racialized history of Asians in America, including the dissemination of essentialist stereotypes (e.g., perpetual foreigner, model minority, and sexual deviants) and the political formation of an Asian American racial identity beginning in the late 1960s. We emphasize that this history is inextricably linked to how race and racism is understood and studied today in Asian American psychology. Finally, we discuss the implications of Asian critical race theory and an Asian Americanist perspective to research within Asian American psychology and conclude with suggestions for future research to advance current theory and methodology.

The Global Dialogics of the New Age

The London-based weekly the New Age, edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922, was known for promoting spirited debates on politics, literature, and the arts. Scholars have been attentive to what Ann Ardis terms the magazine’s ‘unusual commitment to […] Bakhtinian dialogics in the public sphere’, but less so to the role that the letters column played in facilitating these often contentious, often transnational debates. This essay argues that the letters column functioned as a forum for linking not only individual readers and contributors from around the world, but also wider discursive and periodical communities. A case study of global dialogics, the essay focuses on an eleven-month debate that unfolded in New Age correspondence concerning the so-called black peril — the purported epidemic of black men attempting to rape white women in South Africa, which historians today regard as a moral panic fuelled by a desire to reinforce white supremacy. The flames of the panic were stoked by the Umtali case of 1910, in which Lord Gladstone commuted the death sentence of an Umtali native convicted of attempted rape to life imprisonment. This decision sparked mass protests and petitions among the white community in South Africa and a heated discussion about race and racism that reverberated throughout the empire, including in the columns of the New Age. The letters column served as an international forum, drawing in white settlers from Johannesburg, Crisis editor and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, Sudanese-Egyptian writer Dusé Mohamed Ali, and British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, among others. This essay examines the gendered and racial politics of this debate and how it was shaped by its specific periodical context and by the national and ideological contexts of its interlocutors.

White Innocence / White Supremacy

This article starts from the observation that current debates about race and racism are often couched in soteriological terms such as guilt and forgiveness, or confession and exoneration, and it argues that this overlap calls for theological analysis. Using the debate about Achille Mbembe’s disinvitation from the German art festival ‘Ruhrtriennale’ 2020 as a case that is typical of a specifically Western European discourse on race, it first sketches a brief genealogy of the modern/colonial history of religio-racialisation and its intersections with Christian tradition, in which racial categories were forged in soteriological discourses, and in which, in turn, soteriological categories were shaped by racist discourses. It proposes that in this process, Christianity, Whiteness and salvation were conflated in a way that has sponsored White supremacy, disguised as innocence. Engaging with performative race theory, the article concludes by making a constructive proposal for a performative theology of race that can account for the profound intersections between racism and soteriology, but also opens trajectories for transforming hegemonic discourses of race and their theological underpinnings.