Enacting Ought: Ethics, Anti-Racism, and Interactional Possibilities

Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and language is not an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that the enactive approach presents open-ended cultivation of virtue as embodied, contextualized, and dynamic know-how and destabilizes an individualist metaphysics. Putting this framework to work, we turn to the interactional challenges of conversations that concern differences and that involve potentially oppositional parties, offering a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. Finally, we make explicit Rankine’s normative project of mindful navigation of multiple perspectives in an interaction. We abstract three interrelated spheres of participatory intervention: location, language, and labor. These also indicate routes for empirical investigation into complex perspective-taking in dynamic interactions.

Racism: A Part of History That Has Never Been Lost

There have been many cases of racism in its history that have occurred from ancient times to the present. Many factors cause racial conflicts. Factors that often trigger these actions, among others, are due to injustice, oppression, and racial discrimination by certain groups against other groups. In America itself, the era of slavery was a dark period in American history. This article aims to find out the impact and solutions to the problem of racism in general. How to find out the impact and solution to the problem of racism is to examine some of the cases that have occurred recently. The method used in this research is qualitative-descriptive with a literature review method to analyze data with 20 sources from books, journal articles, theses and websites. The findings of this study reveal that cases of racism still occur today, for example, last year because of the COVID-19 problem that initially occurred in Wuhan, China, Asian people received hatred from citizens and Western media. There are many factors that cause racial conflict, and the triggers vary in each country that experiences it, among others, because of injustice, oppression, and racial discrimination by certain groups against other groups. Through cases of racism that have occurred, one thing that according to the researcher can be concluded is how before the conflict between groups occurred, actually it started from problems that occurred between individuals. Tolerance is the main thing to stem this kind of thing.

Race-Relations Theories and the Racial Dynamics of Basketball Performance

Does the local, racial context influence racial differences in culture? I answer this question by testing predictions from group threat theory and the cultural division of labor about which high schools have greater black-white differences in basketball performance. Data are from the National Education Longitudinal Study are analyzed with multilevel ordered probit models. After controlling for predictors of sports performance in students’ families, schools, and neighborhoods, we find evidence for both theories. Black-white differences in basketball performance is greater in schools that are about 50% black, as group threat predicts, and in schools with more hierarchical segregation within them, as the cultural division of labor predicts. We also find that racial conflict within the schools mediates the effect of group threat. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Economic and political determinants of the South African labour share, 1971–2019

This study examines the drivers of the steady decline in South Africa’s private sector labour share between 1971 and 2019. The focus on South Africa is instructive as its distributional contestation is bounded in a matrix of racial conflict. Crucial reforms on trade, finance and welfare were undertaken since 1994, but the study finds little evidence that the extension of the franchise promoted egalitarianism, since white economic elites invested in de facto political power. This study employs an Unrestricted Error Correction Model to estimate the drivers of the private sector labour share, and the findings suggest that globalisation, financialisation and public spending have decreased the labour share, while the effects of education have been positive but insufficient to halt the decline.

Inequality, identity, and partisanship: How redistribution can stem the tide of mass polarization

The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes toward out-party members and policies has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as intergroup and racial conflict, have been identified as important contributing factors to this phenomenon known as “affective polarization.” Research shows that partisan animosities are exacerbated when these interests and identities become aligned with existing party cleavages. In this paper, we use a model of cultural evolution to study how these forces combine to generate and maintain affective political polarization. We show that economic events can drive both affective polarization and the sorting of group identities along party lines, which, in turn, can magnify the effects of underlying inequality between those groups. But, on a more optimistic note, we show that sufficiently high levels of wealth redistribution through the provision of public goods can counteract this feedback and limit the rise of polarization. We test some of our key theoretical predictions using survey data on intergroup polarization, sorting of racial groups, and affective polarization in the United States over the past 50 y.

Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya's Racial State, 1945–1954

ABSTRACT This article analyses the physical and discursive displacement of Malay Muslim advocates of a cosmopolitan and multiracial form of Malayan citizenship from the arena of “legitimate” national politics between the Second World War and the mid-1950s. It discusses the trajectory of the Malayan Left during this period, with a special focus on the work of Abdullah C. D., a Malay Muslim leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Abdullah's work included helping to build the Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) under the MCP's United Front strategy from 1945, creating the MCP's Department of Malay Work in 1946, and establishing the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in 1949. This work was essential to the MCP's outreach to Malay Muslims after Malaya's failed national revolution, which collapsed into racial conflict without achieving independence for the British colony. The Malayan Emergency was declared in 1948, and its military and social campaigns eliminated or displaced the MCP's leadership and much of the MNLA, including Abdullah and the rest of the Tenth Regiment, to Thailand by 1954. Despite his continued engagement with political movements in Malaya, Abdullah's vision for a new politics for Malay Muslims was effectively displaced into the realm of nostalgia. His ideas, outlined in MNLA pamphlets and periodicals like Tauladan (Exemplar), never made significant inroads in Malaya, whose racial state the Emergency re-established, using race to manage the threat to its interests posed by leftist politics.

BLACK GIRL TRIES KOREAN MAKEUP: RACE, GENDER, AND TRANSNATIONAL PLATFORM

This study aims to theorize how YouTube fundamentally capitalizes the racial and gender identity of women of color and local culture in a way it facilitates inter-racial and inter-cultural conflicts. I specifically focus on so-called K-beauty (Korean beauty), a catchy trend on YouTube which encompasses aesthetics, cosmetic products, and beauty ideals from South Korea, characterized by pursuing glowing, dewy, and light skin tone featuring a variety of skincare products. K-beauty is now being adopted by non-Koreans in North America including Black women influencers on the borderless platform of YouTube, who created the Black Girl Tries Korean Makeup video series. By using a Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis approach, I examined YouTube videos, comments, as well as the module titled “Building a Global Channel” to analyze not only the contents and discourses around that but also the platform that might have shaped this intercultural flow on YouTube. Black women YouTubers actively critiqued the light skin preference, as well as anti-Blackness reflected in K-beauty brands through the Black Girls, Tries Korean Makeup video series. Korean viewers, on the other hand, strongly rejected these accusations of the anti-Black aspect of K-beauty, explaining distinctive Korean racial dynamic as a one-ethnic country where the light skin preference is not translated to the anti-Blackness. I argue that this inter-cultural and inter-racial conflict arguably has been shaped by YouTube’s digital infrastructure that prioritizes short, trendy, how-to-style videos, that do not require a lengthy contextualization of each culture’s beauty practices, and history of oppressions.

“What Is the Real Belief on Campus?” Perceptions of Racial Conflict at a Minority-Serving Institution and a Historically White Institution

An organizational conflict lens offers a distinct understanding of how higher education administrators and postsecondary students experience racial conflict on their campuses. Despite students of color historically reporting incidents with overt and subtle forms of racism on college campuses (George Mwangi et al., 2018; Hurtado & Ruiz, 2015; Nguyen et al., 2018; Serrano, 2020), postsecondary leaders continue to report positive race relations on campus (Jaschik & Lederman, 2017). This conflict in perception is the focus of this article. To understand how race-related conflicts are perceived in higher education, I examined perceptions of racial conflict across two types of postsecondary campuses. I used compositional diversity, or a numerical illustration of various racial and ethnic groups (Hurtado et al., 1998; Milem et al., 2005), as a determinant to decide which campuses to study for how racial conflict is understood by administrators, faculty, and students. Drawing from organizational conflict theory, this year-long qualitative study involved 35 open-ended interviews conducted at a minority serving institution (MSI) and a historically White institution (HWI). The main research question was: How does compositional diversity shape stakeholders’ perceptions of racial conflict? Across both campuses, and despite differences in compositional diversity, administrators responded similarly: they noted minimal problems among students regarding racism on their campuses. Alternately, students across both campuses responded similarly: they noted these issues as well but described it in terms of frequency and severity. To make sense of this, I describe findings in three ways: interpersonal and structural racism, intergroup conflict, and historical perspectives about racial conflict. Background/Context: Despite students of color historically reporting incidents with overt and subtle forms of racial conflict on college campuses, postsecondary leaders continue to report positive race relations on campus. Unfortunately, various forms of conflict are often reduced to isolated incidents that are disconnected from aspects of campus culture and climate. Although conflict is a permanent and indelible aspect of organizations, racism and other forms of race-related conflict on college campuses continue to be studied on an interpersonal level, less so at the organizational level of higher education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: An organizational conflict lens offers a distinct understanding of how higher education administrators and postsecondary students experience racial conflict on their campuses. Despite students of color historically reporting incidents with overt and subtle forms of racism on college campuses, postsecondary leaders continue to report positive race relations on campus. This conflict in perception is the focus of this article. To understand how race-related conflicts are perceived in higher education, I examined perceptions of racial conflict across two types of postsecondary campuses. I used compositional diversity, or a numerical illustration of various racial and ethnic groups, a determinant to decide which campuses to study for how racial conflict is understood by administrators, faculty, and students. The main research question I asked was: How does compositional diversity shape stakeholders’ perceptions of racial conflict? Research Design: To understand perceptions of racial conflict, I conducted a multiple case study of two types of institutions in the northeastern United States: a historically white institution (HWI) and a minority-serving institution (MSI). I purposely selected two racially distinct institutions to explore compositional diversity in higher education. I first asked: How does compositional diversity shape stakeholders’ perceptions of racial conflict? Drawing from organizational conflict theory, this year-long qualitative study involved 35 open-ended interviews conducted at a MSI and an HWI. Specifically, I sought respondents who were positioned informants. This approach assumes that informants’ positions inform their behaviors. Conclusions/Recommendations: Although the data here cannot be applied to all institutions, some lessons can be extracted for further exploration, should administrators and researchers desire to understand race-based organizational conflicts. Indeed, across both campuses and despite differences in compositional diversity, administrators responded similarly: they noted minimal problems among students regarding racism on their campuses. Alternately, students across both campuses responded similarly: they noted these issues as well but described it in terms of frequency and severity. To make sense of this, I describe findings in three ways: interpersonal and structural racism, intergroup conflict, and historical perspectives about racial conflict.

The “Great Replacement”

This chapter explores contemporary ideas of racial conflict and its manifestation in forms of racial domestic terrorism. First, the chapter explores importance of Enoch Powell’s late 1960s polemics against immigration in the United Kingdom. For Powell, the fear that unregulated immigration would be symptomatic of a larger concern of the decline of the West. Nonetheless, Powell’s position regained salience with the contemporary articulation of fears that immigration from the global South will “replace” Western population. Here the work of Renaud Camus is salient. The chapter argues that the idea of a world in which white Western racial hierarchy is dismantled is a world at odds with the imagined social cohesion of the West itself.

From Social Justice to Metaphor: The Whitening of Othello in the Russian Imagination

Othello was the most often-staged Shakespeare play on early Soviet stages, to a large extent because of its ideological utility. Interpreted with close attention to racial conflict, this play came to symbolize, for Soviet theatres and audiences, the destructive racism of the West in contrast with Soviet egalitarianism. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, it is not unusual for Russian theatres to stage Othello as a white character, thus eliminating the theme of race from the productions. To make sense of the change in the Russian tradition of staging Othello, this article traces the interpretations and metatheatrical uses of this character from the early Soviet period to the present day. I argue that the Soviet tradition of staging Othello in blackface effectively prevented the use of the play for exploring the racial tensions within the Soviet Union itself, and gradually transformed the protagonist’s blackness into a generalized metaphor of oppression. As post-collapse Russia embraced whiteness as a category, Othello’s blackness became a prop that was entirely decoupled from race and made available for appropriation by ethnically Slavic actors and characters. The case of Russia demonstrates that staging Othello in blackface, even when the initial stated goals are those of racial equality, can serve a cultural fantasy of blackness as a versatile and disposable mask placed over a white face.