The Persistence of Racial Constructs in Spain: Bringing Race and Colorblindness into the Debate on Interculturalism

In this article, I argue that persisting racial constructs in Spain affect conceptions of national belonging and continue to shape and permeate contemporary discriminations. I begin by describing several recent political events that demonstrate the urgent need for a discussion about “race” and racialization in the country. Second, some conceptual foundations are provided concerning constructs of race and the corollary processes of racism and racialization. Third, I present data from various public surveys and also from ethnographic research conducted in Spain on mixedness and multiraciality to demonstrate that social constructs of race remain a significant boundary driving stigmatization and discrimination in Spain, where skin color and other perceived physical traits continue to be important markers for social interaction, perceived social belonging, and differential social treatment. Finally, I bring race into the debate on managing diversity, arguing that a post-racial approach—that is, race-neutral discourse and the adoption of colorblind public policies, both of which are characteristic of the interculturalist perspectives currently preferred by Spain as well as elsewhere in Europe—fails to confront the enduring effects of colonialism and the ongoing realities of structural racism. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of bringing race into national and regional policy discussions on how best to approach issues of diversity, equality, anti-discrimination, and social cohesion.

Mind, Body, and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun

Working at the intersection of cognitive and critical race narratology, the essay examines the relationship between the embodied mind and the social construction of race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928/2011). The essay argues that Fauset’s African American passing novel rejects the notion of a solely ‘inward turn’, which is commonly associated with modernist literature, in favor of a more dynamic understanding of embodied cognition that acknowledges the shaping force of race and racialization. Using a seemingly traditional omniscient narrator, Fauset not only draws attention to the failure of U. S. American racial hierarchies, but she also lays bare how race impacts both individual consciousness and social cognition.1

Subcontracted racial capitalism: the interrelationship of race and production in meat processing plants

The aim of this paper is to extend discussion on subcontracted labour by focussing on the labour process and on the role of race and racialization within it. The existing literature has so far analysed the factors that have encouraged employer decisions to outsource labour, together with its effects on labour conditions and on industrial relations. Missing, however, has been any detailed analysis of the role of race and racialization processes, pivotal elements in the facilitation of subcontracting thereby accelerating the worsening of labour conditions.Based on qualitative empirical research on the meat industry in Northern Italy, this article highlights how the processes of outsourcing and racialization intersect to support the segmentation of labour within the workplace. In particular, we argue that, through contracting out work to racialized groups of migrant workers, outsourcing has been both facilitated and legitimized. Furthermore, the presence of in-plant contractors has fostered the implementation of racializing practices, which in turn have bolstered workforce fragmentation on racial lines.Notwithstanding this, our findings show that race can be a factor in the mobilization of subcontracted migrant labour through the production of pragmatic (racial) solidarities. These informal ties are a key component in the development of the everyday struggles and alliances that emerge within grass roots worker organisations as well as beyond their boundaries through hybrid forms of collective organisation.

AS MULHERES NEGRAS E A VIOLÊNCIA CONTRA AS MULHERES

O presente artigo visa refletir acerca da violência contra a mulher, pensando especificamente na necessidade do recorte racial na tratativa dessa temática. Entendendo a raça e a racialização da população brasileira como um ponto de partida para a compreensão da exploração e do estabelecimento das opressões contra o povo negro e consequentemente da estruturação da sociedade brasileira da forma como a conhecemos. Raça e violência são elementos que operam juntos na criação e manutenção das hierarquias sociais, essenciais ao modo de produção capitalista, criam hierarquias inclusive no gênero. Palavras-chave: Mulheres Negras. Violência Contra Mulher. Representação. Representatividade. Abstract This article aims to reflect on violence against women, specifically thinking about the need for a racial approach in dealing with this theme. Understanding the race and racialization of the Brazilian population as a starting point for understanding the exploitation and the establishment of oppression against the black people and consequently the structuring of Brazilian society as we know it. Race and violence are elements that operate together in the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, essential to the capitalist mode of production, creating hierarchies even in gender. Keywords: Black Women. Violence Against Women. Representation. Representativeness.

Unpacking the Logic of Compliance in Special Education: Contextual Influences on Discipline Racial Disparities in Suburban Schools

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ([IDEA] 2004; IDEA Amendments 1997) is a civil rights–based law designed to protect the rights of students with disabilities in U.S. schools. However, decades after the initial passage of IDEA, racial inequity in special education classifications, placements, and suspensions are evident. In this article, we focus on understanding how racial discipline disparities in special education outcomes relate to IDEA remedies designed to address problem behaviors. We qualitatively examine how educators interpret and respond to citations for racial discipline disproportionality via IDEA at both the district and the school level in a suburban locale. We find that educators interpret the inequity in ways that neutralize the racialized implications of the citation, which in turn affects how they respond to the citation. These interpretations contribute to symbolic and race-evasive IDEA compliance responses. The resulting bureaucratic and organizational structures associated with IDEA implementation become a mechanism through which the visibility of race and racialization processes are erased and muted through acts of policy compliance. Thus, the logic of compliance surrounding IDEA administration serves as a reproductive social force that sustains practices that do not disrupt locally occurring racialized inequities.

The Afterlife of Soviet Russia's “Refusal to be White”: A Du Boisian Lens on Post-Soviet Russian-US Relations

In this essay I address a gap in the study of contemporary Russia-US relations. I argue that the concepts of race and racialization are active in these relations and available for analysis, but they continue to receive very little attention as compared to concepts of democratization and securitization. My main intervention is the introduction of “race-conscious reading” as a methodological approach relevant not only to the narrow sphere of Russia-US relations, but to the field of Slavic studies more broadly. Presenting the concept of “race-conscious reading” first, I then sketch out a research agenda that extends W.E.B. Du Bois's race-conscious observation of Soviet Russia's “refusal to be white” into the contemporary era. My goal in sketching out this research agenda is to show how a race-conscious approach to reading post-Soviet Russia-US relations can bring fresh perspectives to long-standing questions—Is Russia part of the west?—and generate new questions of urgent relevance: Is there a difference between American and Russian conceptions of “whiteness,” and how and when do they clash?

A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies

Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.

Latino/a Sociology: Toward a New Paradigm

Despite the proliferation of significant scholarship on Latinos/as over the past four decades and the formal establishment of a Latina/o sociology section in the American Sociological Association in 1994, Latino/a sociology has yet to be systematically defined or fully developed. This essay isolates the underlying premises that mark this developing field. Latino/a sociology is grounded in the standpoints of Latinos/as and anchors its analyses in theories of race and racialization. Latino/a sociology also transcends disciplinary boundaries, incorporating developments in intersectionality, critical race theory, and postcolonial theories. Drawing from transnational perspectives—on migration, globalization, and the experiences of borders and borderlands—Latino/a sociology remains attuned to social processes across boundaries and is oriented to social justice and human rights. Here we propose a new paradigm for Latino/a sociology that moves beyond the Black-White binary to build more comprehensive understandings of race and racialization in the twenty-first century.

Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning

Ethnographic film, given its history as a vestige of colonial visual culture, has been defined by and constrained by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who were the earliest ethnographic filmmakers. Scientistic, distanced, observational film-making techniques continued the colonial quest for totalizing knowledge through the romantic ideal that film was “objective.” At the same time, the earliest ethnographic films relied on the perceived difference between white, Western, “civilized,” “modern” filmmakers and non-white, “primitive,” tribal, backwards peoples rendered mute on-screen. This ethnographic film history was predicated on observing and salvaging the histories of the “primitive,” soon-to-be-extinct peoples through visual documentation and, in so doing, these ethnographic films neatly mapped race onto culture, unabashedly fixing “primitive” practices onto bodies. Such films also differentially imposed sexist stereotypes on both men and women, pre-determining hierarchies of colonial heteronormative masculinity and femininity within which non-white Others were slotted. In the past thirty years, anthropologists realized the fallacy of essentialized biological racial difference and began reckoning with the role that visual technologies played in re-producing “culture-as-race” mythologies. And yet, ethnographic filmmakers have largely neglected the explicit conversation on race and racialization processes that their projects are inevitably a part of despite the fact that the subjects and objects of ethnographic filmmaking continue to be, for the large part, previously colonized peoples whose contemporary practices are still heavily impacted by the racialized values, institutions, and technologies of the colonial period. As a response, this entry provides a history of ethnographic film which focuses on processes of racialization and the production of “primitive” subjects over time. Part of the task in this entry is to begin to “re-read” or “re-see” some traditional and iconic ethnographic films through an attention to how decolonial visual anthropologists have theorized the ways that the film camera (and visual technologies more broadly) has been used to primitivize, facilitate racializing processes, and produce the expectation of radical cultural alterity. The entry will engage with content that has been produced by anthropologists while also engaging with films outside of the anthropological canon that disrupt, disturb, and unsettle anthropological ways of seeing. These disruptions have obviated the fact that anthropological filmmakers cannot revert our gaze, but instead must find new ways of acknowledging the complex and messy histories from which the discipline has emerged while carefully engaging with the emerging global hierarchies that rely on neocolonial ideologies and produce new racist ways of seeing for (still) largely white and white-adjacent audiences. Each section will include texts and films as examples of how various visual techniques have emerged in order to challenge earlier processes of visual primitivizing. Note: Words such as primitive, tribal, and backwards are used here to describe characterizations imposed on anthropological subjects by (neo)colonial ethnographic filmmakers and do not reflect the views of the author.

Preface

The Preface outlines the ways in which this volume’s essays on questions of race and racialization, sexuality and the politics of gender identification, and the new storytelling possibilities of television in the post-network era place Discovery in its larger Star Trek canon, show how it engages the history of this canon and reinvents the series through the new critical perspectives of twenty-first century cultural politics.