Encyclopedia Entry: Antiracism, Critical Race Theory Racism: The challenge of dismantling lies in the dilemma of definition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critical race and whiteness studies: What has been, what might be (Editorial)
2019
After a hiatus of several years, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal is reemerging. We do so in recognition of the exceptional scholarship the Journal has produced in the past with writers like Nicoll, Moreton-Robinson, Randell-Moon, Riggs, Watson, Ahmed, Heiss, and countless others providing incisive renderings of the social cartographies, discursive and non-discursive manifestations of race, which have parsed new ground. We acknowledge the important impact the Journal and its contributors have made to social practice and debate worldwide, and the ‘large shoes’ consequently sitting before us. The Journal, then, is returning to engage in debate and efforts that have aimed to ameliorate the effects of racism and interrupt the reproduction of race and racialised hierarchies. Yet the passing of time not only serves to remind us that there remains much to do if this is to be achieved. Within the contemporary geopolitical environment, these concerns loom somewhat larger and more ...
SYLLABUS - "Theorizing Race" - Spring 2017
Modern racial ideologies are inseparable from the production of hierarchical differences giving shape to what Frantz Fanon characterized as a "division of the species". The process has historically accompanied European imperial and colonial expansion and the conceptualization of whiteness as a self-conscious project of global supremacy along political, economic, and epistemic lines. Drawing on long-standing images casting blackness or darkness as the opposite of morality, progress, and civilization, the globalization of White supremacy sought legitimacy in definitions of humanity that defined the Black as its inhuman other. Violent Black enslavement and the Middle Passage turned the division of the species into a principle of organization, unity, and value for White/Human civil society.
Beyond the pale: A pragmatist approach to whiteness studies
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2005
Abstract The recent growth of whiteness studies has brought whiteness under increasing scrutiny as a racial category that is both constructed and morally problematic. Two approaches dominate this relatively new discourse on the proper approach to whiteness. The first approach is eliminativism, which starts from the insight that the discursive categories of race, including whiteness, lack the biological ground that Enlightenment era theorists thought they had, and therefore calls for the elimination of the idea of race. The other, more heterogeneous, approach is that of the critical conservationists who agree with the general spirit of the eliminativists (namely that the idea of whiteness lacks a biological referent) but for various reasons do not think that racial categories should be eliminated.
RE-VISIONING RACE: DISMANTLING WHITENESS
2003
African American writers and theorists have represented and analyzed whiteness for over a century; such analysis has been necessary for social and physical survival. Only within the past decade have white scholars heeded the call to interrogate whiteness as an ethnicity and to come to terms with its accompanying benefits of power, privilege and cultural dominance. Whiteness studies examines race as performance, perception, ideological category and social reality, acknowledging that while race is a biological fiction, the lived experience of race is shaped by very real existing structural and institutional inequalities. From the inception of what is now the United States, race has been an organizer of power, although white colonizers did not think of themselves as raced. Colonists conceived of race as a quality of the other. Consequently, “whiteness” was defined by absence or negation, particularly of slavery, synonymous in the minds of 18th century U.S. whites with blackness. Following “Enlightenment” philosophies of humanity, the prevailing notion of whiteness came to mean universality and normality while refusing to acknowledge any racial character. By the twentieth century, whiteness was redefined and policed by court battles over segregation and immigration law. Changing census categories currently appear to offer more freedom to redefine one’s race, but nostalgia for an imagined white core of U.S. identity lingers. Whiteness theorists therefore argue for the abolition of the white race and its accompanying racial privilege and domination. They call for treason to whiteness through solidarity and anti-racist forms of white identity. Whiteness studies is crucial to contemporary understandings of “race,” as well as the inevitable intersections of race, ethnicity, social class, gender and sexuality.
Critical Race Theory: Its Origins, History, and Importance to the Discourses and Rhetorics of Race
Frame—Journal of Literary Studies, 2014
Critical Race Theory (CRT) originated in US law schools, bringing together issues of power, race and racism to address the liberal notion of color-blindness and argues that ignoring racial difference maintains and perpetuates the status quo with its deeply institutionalized injustices to racial minorities. This essay introduces CRT as a theoretical frame by which to better understand discourses of race and racism in contemporary colorblind and supposed post-racial societies. This work is situated within rhetorical studies so as to trace connections between CRT scholarship and literatures in anti-racist rhetoric that seek to understand, challenge, and dismantle systems of racism.
Rethinking Race in the 21st Century, A New Approach for Future Rethinking Race in the 21st Century, A New Approach for Future World-Making: Looking Back to Move Forward World-Making: Looking Back to Move Forward, 2020
Color blindness, the end of race, and white privilege are but a few phrases that begin to capture the messy confusion of a zeitgeist that is 21st century discussions on race. At a time when race is such a necessary topic to delve into, it seems that there is a lack of history injected into the conversation. Race becomes an external motor of history, racism pathological and immovable. An unthinking decision. In other words, race and racism, from the standpoint of an organizer or academic in the 21st century, becomes near impossible to break down and work against. This paper is first and foremost an effort in accordance with scholars like Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, and Barbara Fields, who seek to historicize race and racism in an effort to organize against white supremacy. Such an effort will require an analysis of (1) the system these processes take place in, the Capitalocene, or perhaps the Racial Capitalocene (2) the ways in which whiteness changes over time, enlarging and becoming stratified, and (3) the racialized, contradictory spaces made under the Capitalocene. All to open up ontological fractures that can work against and within/through capitalism and white supremacy. (4) Leading us to engage with the Black Radical Tradition and diasporic studies, movements at the forefront of abolitionist/ontological fractures within/through and beyond capitalism.