Sean P. Hier et al. Racism and Justice: Critical Dialogue on the Politics of Identity, Inequality, and Change (original) (raw)
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Critical Philosophy of Race: An Introduction (special section)
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2019
This special section brings together scholars working in Critical Philosophy of Race to explore questions of racism, coloniality, and migration, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into some of the scholarship currently being undertaken in this emerging field. The section has its origins in a one-day workshop, On Anti-Racism: A Critical Philosophy of Race Symposium, which took place in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia in October 2017. The symposium participants, Amir Jaima, Helen Ngo, and Bryan Mukandi, are here joined by Lori Gallegos and Chelsea Bond, in an effort to continue and extend some of the conversations initiated at that event.
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019
are to be commended for coordinating and conceptually framing this special section, a most timely contribution to recent trends in the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Conversations on this important concern are being held in many parts of the world, not uncommonly within volatile climates and under embattled circumstances. I was introduced to the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (ARE) Network when I attended the European Association of Social Anthropologists' (EASA) 2016 biennial meeting in Milan, Italy. I appreciated the significance and indeed the urgency of establishing a supportive, publicly engaged space for anthropologists in Europe and their kindred thinking colleagues elsewhere who share with them interests in race and ethnicity, racialisation and racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and many related matters reflecting how race and ethnicity intermesh with each other and with other mutually constitutive axes of difference and inequality salient in various situations and contexts. The dynamic ebbs and flows along with the ambiguities and shifting terms of race-making-an assemblage of social relations, encounters and practices situated in and across time and space-make the tools, lenses and ethics of sociocultural anthropology's ethnographic inquiry particularly useful. About a year after Milan, I participated in a fairly prestigious interdisciplinary conference where I observed very different circumstances and commitments. I encountered a number of social scientists who insisted that the language of race was not appropriate for our work group's drafting of the conference's statement on the social and political challenges faced in many parts of the world today. An anthropologist from France was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the use of the race concept. The perspective he espoused in that discussion seemed to follow the colour-blind, race-evasive and post-racial line of thought that exists in parts of Europe as well as in the United States and Latin America. Contributors to this publication attest to this social fact as it is manifested in different national contexts. However, in all those settings, there are also countervailing forces, such as the socio-political confluences that have given rise to inclusive projects promoting 'Europeanisation from below', as Marleen de Witte points out in her contribution here.
Pioneering Racism in Post-Racial Canada
In our conversations on racism, when we acknowledge the dozens of black youth slain in the streets of America, we must too acknowledge the hundreds of Canadian Indigenous women that are murdered and missing in the same breath. Aside from the emotional distress and physical removal of Aboriginal peoples, tar sands and the consequent environmental pollution they cause have led to the mass destruction of Aboriginal communities, promising nothing short of steadily climbing cancer rates. How can we as Canadians, who so proudly beat our chests upon hearing terms like “post-racial” and “multiculturalism”, wade through the ignorance which drowns our own people?
Codes of Canadian Racism: Anglocentric and Assimilationist Cultural Rhetoric
2004
HE CANADIAN DISCOURSES of power that flow around race and racism infiltrate texts as diverse as a provincial referendum, the Multiculturalism Act, and prominent newspaper ads, and these discourses, both official and popular, are sources for a much wider public perception and sensibility, ones that foster attitudes intolerant of difference. Classroom study of these texts offers an opportunity to unravel the many unquestioned Canadian assumptions regarding ethnicity, visible minorities, and especially, First Nations identity and status. One of the functions of the university environment is to examine ideologies that have been previously accepted and passively consumed, enabling a rejection of these precepts and forging the possibility of radical changes in thinking. In classroom explorations of things as specific as pronouns or as expansive as national credos, one can revise and transform a Canadian ethos that has, since its inception, been founded on racist principles. Such a view of national foundations may disturb students, but it seems essential to the kind of social justice that Canada purportedly espouses that we address and reconsider this groundwork. The language of postcolonial study, while often mired in the Canadian tradition of looking elsewhere in the world for injustice, and bound by the academic tendency to distance and generalize, does offer a resource with which to describe the intricacies of racist discourses. Alongside such writers and theorists as Smaro Kam-T