Critical Race Studies

The village in the city: Critical race theory, schooling and a life

by Kevin Burke

Burke, K. (2012). The village in the city: Critical race theory, schooling, and a life. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 8(1), 1-18.

The research is framed around stories—counternarratives in the tradition of Critical Race Theory (CRT)—of the author... more The research is framed around stories—counternarratives in the tradition of Critical Race Theory (CRT)—of the author coming to know his own historical racism as rooted in his geographical, political, racial, classed and religious upbringing in Chicago, United States. The paper specifically attends to the socioeconomic and religious aspects of race as defined and constrained by a place run through with its own racial historical leavings. As such, the work can be read as one continuous journey, or two very fractured versions of coming to know (the self and the boundaries around two fields of inquiry). The purpose is twofold: to explore the ways in which the disciplinary boundaries of two fields, CRT and Critical Geography, can inform a critical contextualisation of race and place for the author and the reader.

White, whole wheat, rye: Jews and ethnic categorization in Washington, DC

by Gabriella Modan

They (Don’t) Care About Education: A Counternarrative on Black Male Students’ Responses to Inequitable Schooling

by Charles H.F. Davis III

CITATION
Harper, S. R., & Davis III, C. H. F. (2012). They (don’t) care about education: A counternarrative on Black male students’ responses to inequitable schooling. Educational Foundations, 26(1), 103-120.

Presented in this article is a counternarrative concerning one particular message that is consistently reinforced in... more Presented in this article is a counternarrative concerning one particular message that is consistently reinforced in academic and public discourse about Black male students: they don’t care about education. Little is known about those who graduate from high school, enroll in college, and subsequently commit themselves to various career pathways in education fields (K-12 teaching and administration, the postsecondary professoriate, education policy, etc.). What compels these men to care so much about education, despite what is routinely reported in the literature regarding their gradual disinvestment in schooling? This question is explored in the article using data from 304 Black male undergraduates attending 209 colleges and universities across the United States. It counters longstanding perspectives on Black men’s oppositional responses to inequitable schooling.

Call for Papers: Understanding Ethnic Privilege and Power at Work, Organizations and Management

by Ahu Tatli

Call for Papers: Journal of Managerial Psychology Special Issue: Understanding Ethnic Privilege and Power at Work, Organizations and Management

Journal of Managerial Psychology Special Issue

Understanding Ethnic Privilege and Power at Work,... more Journal of Managerial Psychology Special Issue

Understanding Ethnic Privilege and Power at Work, Organizations and Management

Special Guest Editors:
Dr Akram Al Ariss, Champagne School of Management, France
Professor Mustafa Özbilgin, Brunel Business School, UK
Dr Ahu Tatli, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Dr Elaine Swan, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Professor Kurt April, University of Cape Town, South Africa

The deadline for receipt of manuscripts is March 1, 2012.

• “Entre lo transatlántico y lo hemisférico: Los proyectos raciales de Andrés Bello” [“Between the Transatlantic and the Hemispheric: Andrés Bello’s Racial Projects”]. Eds. Eyda Merediz and Nina Gerassi Navarro. Más allá de lo transatlántico, special issue of Revista Iberoamericana 75. 228 (julio-septiembre 2009): 719-735.

by Ruth Hill

• “Towards An Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Critical Race Theory.” Literature Compass 3.2 (March 2006): 53-64. Republished in History Compass 6 (Virtual Issue: “Race and Racism”) (February 2008) and in Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (February 2008).

by Ruth Hill

• “Casta as Culture and the Sociedad de Castas as Literature.” Interpreting Colonialism. Eds. Byron Wells and Philip Stewart. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004. 231-259.

by Ruth Hill

• “Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Pre-History of Race in Latin America: Reflections on Caste and Hegemony in Valle y Caviedes.” Afro-Hispanic Review 26. 2 (Fall 2007): 77-86.

by Ruth Hill

• “Teaching the Pre-History of Race Along the Hispanic Transatlantic.” Dieciocho 30.1 (Spring 2007): 105-117.

by Ruth Hill

• “ ‘Country Dumb’ Down in Santo Domingo: ‘Rustiquez’ in Peguero’s Historia de la conquista de la Isla Española.” Eds. José R. Jouve-Martín and Renée Soulodre-La France. Constitución del Barroco, special issue, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33.1 (Otoño 2008): 195-213.

by Ruth Hill

Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed-Race Children: Evidence From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

by David Brunsma

The Invention of Race in the European MIddle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages

by Geraldine Heng

LITERATURE COMPASS 8.5 (MAY 2011): 258-274.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lico.2011.8.issue-5/issuetoc

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical... more “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race

by Geraldine Heng

LITERATURE COMPASS 8.5 (MAY 2011): 275-293.

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical... more “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

“Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis,” in Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, editors, The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, June 2009), 116-142.

by Jacob Dorman

This will be part of a second book.

This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who... more This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

Lifted Out of the Commonplace Grandeur of Modern Times: Reappraising Edward Wilmot Blyden's Views of Islam and Afrocentrism in Light of His Scholarly Black …

by Jacob Dorman

This will become a chapter in my second book project, "Black Orientalism." I'm honored it was published in the late Manning Marable's journal, Souls.

Although the West Indian-born West African intellectual Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden praised the societies of Africa and... more Although the West Indian-born West African intellectual Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden praised the societies of Africa and the Orient, he was actually a lifelong Christian whose thought followed Orientalist templates, from his acquisition of “Oriental” languages, to his use of Orientalist learning to evangelize Muslims, to his advocacy of Islamic education as a means of strengthening British imperialism in West Africa. While Blyden’s view of Islam was far more Orientalist and far less positive than most accounts portray, it nonetheless played an important part in the formation of Afrocentrism and in Black appreciation of Islam.

“Back to Harlem: Abstract and Everyday Labor during the ‘Harlem Renaissance’” in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters, ed. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 74-90.

by Jacob Dorman

Part of a planned future project on the social history of Harlem during the New Negro Renaissance.

Examining everyday life and work patterns in 1920s Harlem illustrates that the abstracted Harlem of the literary... more Examining everyday life and work patterns in 1920s Harlem illustrates that the abstracted Harlem of the literary imagination is an inadequate replacement for the knowledge of Harlem to be gleaned through social history. Harlem's black workers inspired and helped create the abstraction of Harlem, but discrimination prevented them from earning their due. In theoretical terms, one could say that their labor never became fully abstracted. Whereas the abstract image of Harlem became a commodity to be sold in the primary market of publishing and the secondary market of academe, laboring Harlemites were unable to receive adequate compensation for their labors, cultural and or otherwise. And so living in Harlem not only systematically impoverished them, but in so doing distanced them from the abstraction of Harlem that was their original creation. Yet it is the abstract Harlem, and not the street-level version of living laborers, that which has come to stretch its mantle across the entire era of the "Harlem Renaissance." A close examination of the working life of 1920s Harlemites both retrieves and destroys different versions of Harlem: bringing into focus Harlem at the level of lived experience makes it clear that the "Harlem" in the name of the designation "Harlem Renaissance" is not a place but is rather rather is a symbolic abstraction. Appreciating this duality allows us to have our "Harlem Renaissance" and understand Harlem, too.

“Skin Bleach and Civilization: The Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4 no. 4, (June 2011): 46-79 - Special Issue: Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy.

by Jacob Dorman

Unlike previous scholarship on skin-bleaching advertisements conducted by scholars such as Lawrence Levine and Kathy... more Unlike previous scholarship on skin-bleaching advertisements conducted by scholars such as Lawrence Levine and Kathy Peiss, this paper finds those advertisements reflected a definite and widespread preference for light skin among African Americans in 1920’s Harlem. Newspaper records and historical archives demonstrate that tangible if permeable boundaries existed between “black,” “brown,” “light brown,” and “yellow” “Negroes” in 1920’s Harlem. Skin bleaching was far more than merely cosmetic: it was a profoundly micro-political form of self-masking and identity shifting mediated by the new mass market. The advertisements not only appealed to the desire to be beautiful but also to the desire to find a mate, get a better job, and associate oneself with the future, modernity, and progress. Skin bleaching was one practice in a universe of speech and speech-acts that constituted an African American version of the discourse of civilization. At one extreme, skin-bleaching represented part of a “Great White Hope” that light-skinned “New Negroes” might actually be able to escape their “Negro” past and become a new near-white “intermediate” race, as anthropologist Melville Herskovits pronounced them in 1927. Uncritical reconstructions of a unitary “black” subject position in 1920’s Harlem obscures the deep divides and antagonisms based on class and color that striated Harlem society. Recognizing these truths suggests that multiple “Negro” racial identities were constructed through quotidian actions both pedestrian and potent.

Postelection Blues

by Myra Mendible

Black No More?

by Hettie Williams

This paper is an examination of the "new" racial genetics and African Americans. This paper is an examination of the "new" racial genetics and African Americans.

« Plus blanc que blanc », Une étude critique des travaux sur la whiteness

by Bastien Bosa

Published in a book edited by Didier Fassin: "Les nouvelles frontières de la société française. Enquête sur l'altérité nationale" (La découverte, 2010 )

À la différence des États-Unis ou de la Grande-Bretagne, les questions « raciales » restent très largement un «... more À la différence des États-Unis ou de la Grande-Bretagne, les questions « raciales » restent très largement un « impensé » scientifique pour les chercheurs français en sciences sociales et, de fait, les travaux en langue anglaise sur les questions de « race » restent, jusqu’à une période récente, mal connus en France. Je voudrais combler en partie cette lacune en présentant un secteur de la recherche très dynamique aux États-Unis, mais dont on n’a reçu quasiment aucun écho en France : celui des études sur la whiteness.