Introduction: Politics of Recognition and Myths of Race

Baca, George

doi:10.3167/015597705780886220

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…And while black economic success is novel and commendable, the stories of redemption meant to explain their undoing have unwittingly legitimized conservative politics by drawing attention away from fiscal policies that have increased racial inequality and constricted black politics to ever more narrow channels of business development. The careful combining of racial reform and conservative fiscal policies have defused struggles against racism and recuperated the energy of these struggles to uphold liberal forms of power in Fayetteville and elsewhere in the U.S. South (Baca 2006).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neoliberalism and stories of racial redemption

Baca

2008

Dialect Anthropol

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Two contradicting ideas dominate political discussions of race in the United States. In the first, Americans of all political stripes glory in the idea that the country's race relations have improved, largely due to changes collectively labeled as 'the civil rights movement.' Yet when Americans move their gaze to broader issues-often presumed to be beyond ''race''-of economics, public education, and civic life, they embrace a second, and seemingly opposed narrative of decline. There, social scientists have wedded this image of social decay into ideas of neoliberalism, which they take to be the state's steady disinvestment in public goods like education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation. Though the rise of civil rights and neoliberalism have overlapped historically, social scientists have shown determined reluctance to make any connection between the two; and further, few have been willing to see the two processes as interwoven and collaborating in the production of the contemporary political economic landscape. This essay argues that academic neoliberal discourse has unwittingly functioned to relieve civil rights institutions of any responsibility for current racial conditions in the US by taking critical attention away from how federal agencies and local politicians have implemented racial reforms. In the current scenario, neoliberalism is to blame for undermining or retrenching the nation's commitment to racial equality, and civil rights victories are the victim. Ethnographic and historical material on race relations in Fayetteville NC, USA, is presented to argue instead that the relationship between the two turns out to be much more complex.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neoliberalism and stories of racial redemption

Baca

2008

Dialect Anthropol

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“…By 1820, four times as many Africans as European colonizers were living in the new lands (Williams 2014 ). It was the involvement of the Anglo-American world in the slave trade from Africa (Alcoff 2015 ; Baca, 2005 ; Baker 2018 ; Eddo-Lodge 2017 ; Morgan 2007 ; Painter 2008 ; Williams 2014 ) then bounded the racial inventions of categorial whiteness and blackness closely to each other.…”

Section: The Whiteness-racialization Dialecticmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The category of whiteness came to describe the colonizers in relation to black slavery, distinguishing them from African blackness and negating any non-white differences within Africa (Alcoff 2015 ; Simon 2017 ): “Whiteness ‘at home’ was intimately and inextricably related to blackness abroad” (Anderson 2013 , p. 36). The white-black dialectic persisted in the new continent and cemented the differences between the white and black populations, with race ultimately being interpreted as one of the major structuring axes of societal distribution of advantages and disadvantages in the USA and Canada (Block and Galabuzi 2011 ; Chaskin et al 2019 ) and emerging as an international framework of taxonomic analysis (Baca 2005 ). With the rise of multiculturalism in North America, the white-black dialectic stretched to juxtapose whiteness to the idea of race more generally, and thus to include both brown and black bodies in the racialized pole of the whiteness-race dyad (Alcoff 2015 ; Eddo-Lodge 2017 ).…”

Section: The Whiteness-racialization Dialecticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whiteness in Question: the Anatomy of a Taxonomy Across Transnational Contexts

Bejan

2022

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The idea of whiteness has been used in the Anglo-American, middle-class, liberal settings to denote an essential group appurtenance on phenotypical and cultural terms and to code such appurtenance as a universal marker of privilege that cuts across any other differentiating axes that allocate societal advantages and disadvantages. The assumption that racialized skin colour and low social status are inferiorizing attributes of racialization, while white skin colour and high social class are privileged attributes of whiteness, has constructed the idea of whiteness as one that encompasses and supersedes the idea of class. Immigrants to Anglo-American multicultural societies have always been relegated to the margins of their host societies, and their economic exclusion, in particular, has been theorized as resulting from their racialization. This paper, however, compares and contrasts the marginalization of two migrant populations—namely, high-skilled immigrants to Canada, and Eastern European low-skilled immigrants to the UK—to problematize the assumption that whiteness has an essential sameness that universally cuts across other stratifying axes in society, and to show that an essentialist understanding of whiteness disregards class-based explanations for the economic exclusion of migrants, explanations which are often bound with the global circulation of capital and the dominant economic position of the rich nations from the Global North.

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“…An institution ostensibly set up to end racism that instead re-inscribes race in ways that intersect with a far greater set of social process can be criticized as a failed institution (in the sense that it doesn't do what it says it does), but that criticism is perhaps the least important thing that might be said about it. And so, while I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Austin-Broos that a relationship between racial ideology and economic policies is rooted in the ''making of the New World by means of slavery and invasion'' (see Baca 2006), the question I seek to answer here is to how that relationship has continuously managed to incorporate even those institutions set up to dismantle that very connection.…”

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confidence: 94%