Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power Looking as white: anti-racism apps, appearance and racialized embodiment (original) (raw)
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Antiracism apps: framing understandings and approaches to antiracism education and intervention
Mobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.
Affecting whiteness : racism as technology of affect (1)
This paper concerns itself with contemporary hegemonies of ‘whiteness’ which typically exist tacitly, in extensions and variations of historical forms of racism with which they share similar patterns of identification, aggrandizement and exclusion. ‘Whiteness’ here is conceptualized in two ways. Firstly, as a silent denominator of postimperial privilege that underpins even leftist celebrations of national/historical/cultural belonging (as in the example of David Blunkett’s affirmations of Englishness). Secondly, as an affective formation, a relational interplay of attractions and aversions, as a mode of subjectification that appears to exceed explicitly discursive forms. I focus here on the ideological life of affect, two examples of which are the ‘proof of affect’ - the warranting of particular relations of entitlement and exclusion on the basis of how real they feel and hence must be - and the constitutive role of the deployment of certain ‘affect positions’. I am interested in ho...
Black Mirror: The Virtual Encoding of the Racial Self
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty, 2019
The rapid proliferation of access to digital platforms and social media sites has radically refigured the terms and topography of racial representation, politics, and cultural expression. Within such domains race is being subtracted from itself on a microlevel and lent a verisimilitude of essential purity in which certain racial subjects portrayed as dominant, and all others consigned to an inveterate alterity. Digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. Ethnic and racial coding has become synonymous with mediation itself and the fate of bodies determined by the way the digital apparatus compels them to perform restively within a certain affective identity’s limited contour. The passive reception of what is being projected cannot be classified as a leisure activity, or a frivolous encounter so long as the masses continue to perform the productive activity of making operative a system of subjective predication. Digitisation has emerged as an apparatus for reinforcing this order, through its assignation of certain identifiable traits to distinct races within society and manufacture of complex narratives for explaining and maintaining such hierarchies as an intrinsic phenomenon. As such the virtual raciality of the 21st century must be approached critically, not as something that offers greater self understanding, but rather something that gives a crucial insight into the ways in which humanity is being aggressively mobilised to reproduce a society of control through our fascination with the capture and differentiation of ourselves and others. In this sense, the “screen” becomes a forcing arena for the digital repression of certain races.
Black Mirror: Black Mirror: The Virtual Encoding of the Racial Self
The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty , 2019
he rapid proliferation of access to digital platforms and social media sites has radically refigured the terms and topography of racial representation, politics, and cultural expression. Within such domains race is being subtracted from itself on a microlevel and lent a verisimilitude of essential purity in which certain racial subjects portrayed as dominant, and all others consigned to an inveterate alterity. Digital media now serves to legitimise and promote a customised micropolitics of identity management. Ethnic and racial coding has become synonymous with mediation itself and the fate of bodies determined by the way the digital apparatus compels them to perform restively within a certain affective identity’s limited contour. The passive reception of what is being projected cannot be classified as a leisure activity, or a frivolous encounter so long as the masses continue to perform the productive activity of making operative a system of subjective predication. Digitisation has emerged as an apparatus for reinforcing this order, through its assignation of certain identifiable traits to distinct races within society and manufacture of complex narratives for explaining and maintaining such hierarchies as an intrinsic phenomenon. As such the virtual raciality of the 21st century must be approached critically, not as something that offers greater self understanding, but rather something that gives a crucial insight into the ways in which humanity is being aggressively mobilised to reproduce a society of control through our fascination with the capture and differentiation of ourselves and others. In this sense, the “screen” becomes a forcing arena for the digital repression of certain races.
Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms, 2020
Despite the fact that much of ‘the history of anti-racism consists of the actions of ordinary people’, studies on ‘everyday anti-racism’ remain little consolidated in racism and anti-racism theory (Bonnett, 2000: 88). Following from Essed’s (1991) seminal work on the concept of ‘everyday racism’, the term ‘everyday anti-racism’ has been employed across varied studies to refer to the ways in which individuals respond to racism in interpersonal interactions and spaces of encounter in their day-to-day lives (Bonnett, 2000; Lamont and Fleming, 2005; Pollock, 2008; Mitchell et al.,2011; Nelson, 2015a; Aquino, 2017). This can include the actions of victims confronting perpetrators, witnesses speaking out against racism, practices that bridge cultural di!erence, material and subjective strategies deployed by those on the receiving end of racism to repair stigmatized identities, and aestheticized expressions through popular culture such as forms of music, youth cultures and media that challenge racism. In this chapter, I review selected works examining anti-racism in everyday life and draw out its key tenets as an area of study with the aim of highlighting how it contributes to broader anti-racism theory and praxis.