Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms

John Solomos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138485990
• eBook ISBN: 9781351047302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of contemporary forms of racism has expanded greatly over the past four decades. Although it has been a focus for scholarship and research for the past three centuries, it is perhaps over this more recent period that we have seen important transformations in the analytical frames and methods to explore the changing patterns of contemporary racisms. The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms brings together thirty-four original chapters from international experts that address key features of contemporary racisms.

The Handbook has a truly global orientation and covers contemporary racisms in both the western and non-western geopolitical environments. In terms of structure, the volume is organized into ten interlinked parts that include Theories and Histories, Contemporary Racisms in Global Perspective, Racism and the State, Racist Movements and Ideologies, Anti-Racisms, Racism and Nationalism, Intersections of Race and Gender, Racism, Culture and Religion, Methods of Studying Contemporary Racisms, and the End of Racism. These parts contain chapters that draw on original theoretical and empirical research to address the evolution and changing forms of contemporary racism. The Handbook is framed by a General Introduction and by short introductions to each part that provide an overview of key themes and concerns.

Written in a clear and direct style, and from a conceptual, multidisciplinary and international perspective, the Handbook will provide students, scholars and practitioners with an overview of the most pressing issues of Racisms in our time.

Part I

Theories and histories

Introduction

This first part of the Handbook focuses on the role of theoretical perspectives in framing the analysis of both contemporary and historical expressions of racism. In a way this is a recurrent theme in the volume as a whole, and many of the chapters in the following parts make important contributions in terms of theoretical and historical aspects of contemporary racisms. Nevertheless, the three chapters we have been able to include in this part address important aspects of contemporary debates.

In the first chapter Sean Elias and Joe R. Feagin outline the key ideas that have framed research in the United States from scholars who have focused on systemic racism and the white racial frame. The theoretical framework on which the chapter draws is most closely associated with accounts of the history of slavery and racial segregation in the United States and the evolution of contemporary forms of racial exclusion and division. But Elias and Feagin argue that their analytical frame can be used more broadly, particularly to examine the evolution of systemic racism in countries that have been shaped by European imperialism and colonialism generated by elite white men. In developing their core arguments, they make a number of suggestive analytical points about how this could be achieved.

In the following chapter, Zacharias Zoubir and Karim Murji shift their attention to an exploration of critical theories of racism and political action that have been influenced by theoretical debates within Marxism and cultural studies. They draw on examples from the history of the US and the UK to highlight how these theoretical perspectives have sought to make sense of political and social mobilisations such as political movements of migrant workers and Black Lives Matter. In exploring these historical and contemporary struggles, they suggest that it is important to understand political action as a product of a complex interplay between social and political processes rather than the product of structural processes. They suggest that it is important to explore in more detail the utility of both Marxist and cultural studies approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racialised political action and mobilisation.

The concluding chapter in this part is by Laura Henneke and Caroline Knowles. It takes a somewhat different approach to the other chapters by using the example of the evolution and development of Chinese London in order to illustrate the need to develop new theoretical frames to analyse cities and forms of racialised migrant ethnicity. They suggest that existing conceptions of Chinatowns are of somewhat limited utility in understanding contemporary forms of Chinese migration and settlement. They argue that Chinatowns are no longer residual inner-city neighbourhoods in which ethnic migrants take refuge in seeking familiarity, and that they are in practice more likely to be on the leading edge of urban development and regeneration. Henneke and Knowles argue that we need new theoretical frameworks that admit the simultaneous emerging dynamism of cities and migrant ethnicities as co-productions of some significance, and not the marginal inner-city markings of long-term ethnic occupation. They illustrate this through a detailed analysis of the ways in which Chinese London is a living and vibrant development, and argue that we need to develop new theoretical tools to allow us to make sense of contemporary processes of migration and settlement.

1

Systemic racism and the white racial frame

Sean Elias and Joe R. Feagin

Introduction

Systemic racism and its white racial frame are concepts essential for understanding contemporary racial group dynamics and racial group conflict in the United States and other countries developed through violent social histories of European imperialism and colonialism targeting peoples of color. These racist foundations have been further perpetuated and extended through whites’ more recent racialized conquests, exploitations, and genocides targeting peoples of color. In probing the fundamental realities of contemporary societies, knowledge of the societal dysfunctionality of systemic racism and its white racial framing is necessary for conceptualizing well broader group dynamics, systemic power structures and inequalities, and group hierarchies and asymmetry in the US and other nation-states principally controlled by European invaders and their descendants. At the top of these societies, the decision-makers have largely been white men and from elite class (e.g. capitalistic) backgrounds.¹

First, we provide background on the development of the concepts, systemic racism and the white racial frame, and their relation to other racial conceptualizations. These concepts emanate from a long-marginalized tradition of critical black social thought and are ideas that often run into conflict with mainstream racial analyses produced by whites. Next, we present a theoretical discussion of systemic racism and white racial framing in the US case, assessing the relationship between the two.² Our analysis then responds to significant criticisms of systemic racism theory and concludes with a call for challenging systemic racism and white framing in both racial analyses and the larger societal world.

Background

For more than four decades now, Joe Feagin and his colleagues have been refining conceptualizations of “systemic racism” in numerous works such as Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racism and Sexism (1978); White Racism: The Basics (1995); Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Reparations (2001/2019), Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2006); White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics (2012); and Systemic Racism: Making Liberty, Justice, and Democracy Real (2017). Systemic racism refers to whites’ historical and systemic oppression of non-European groups that manifests in the structures and operations of racist societies like the United States.

Rooted ultimately in an older critical black tradition, the need and demand for a systemic racism framework was reinvigorated during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements in the US, when black American protests and community uprisings made clear that the still conventional social science and policy concepts like prejudice, bias, and bigotry were far too individualistic to understand well the character of the societal conditions giving rise to these and other anti-racist uprisings by Americans of color. The renewed emphasis on institutional and systemic racism concepts emerged very substantially out of the speeches and writings of activists in the civil rights movements (e.g. Carmichael [Ture] and Hamilton, 1967) and soon spread to the field research and conceptual work of scientists and policymakers of diverse social backgrounds (e.g. Blauner, 1972; Feagin and Feagin, 1978).

Analysis of systemic racism is fundamental in explaining “the centuries-old foundation of American society” and the “racialized character, structure, and development of this society,” specifically the “unjustly gained political-economic power of whites” and “continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines” (Feagin, 2001, p. 6, 2006, p. 2).

A central component of systemic racism is the “white racial frame,” an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate” that are part of the “color-coded framing of society,” which includes a “positive orientation to whites and whiteness and a negative orientation to racial ‘others’ who are exploited and oppressed” (Feagin, 2001, p. 11; 2006, p. 25). This concept of the white racial frame presents an epistemological tool vital for explicating systemic racism, a concept that explicitly calls out self-identified “whites” as the racial oppressor group who devised and largely supported the social structures of western slavery and colonialism. They continue as the principal engineers and operators of contemporary systemically racist societies that developed out of these earlier oppressive societal realities.

As Feagin demonstrates in The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Framing and Counter-Framing (2009/2013), the systemic racism materially and socially constructed by whites was created by, is buttressed by, and is perpetuated through a complex process involving overt and covert white racial framing. Over several centuries, the subtle-to-obvious racialized ideas, narratives, interpretations, and emotions of the white racial frame have produced a broad worldview that permeates the minds and hearts of US citizens of all racial backgrounds, as well as the citizens of other systemically racist societies. Nearly a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois (1920) perceived that “whiteness” had become the new civic religion in societies shaped by the color line and racial group hierarchies constructed by powerful whites. The white racial frame is central in the establishment, legitimation, and indoctrination of this “new religion of whiteness” and in the key structuring and functions of the socially constructed “white world.”

Through the concerted ideas and subordinating practices of whites, the white racial frame upholds and legitimates the white supremacy and Eurocentrism so central to the development and continued operation of systemic racism. This highly consequential framing of social reality in the contemporary period justifies and enables the many aspects of systemic racism. It justifies and facilitates the racist system’s unjust material gains benefiting whites and obstacles disadvantaging people of color and naturalizes the inegalitarian racial group hierarchy. And it valorizes, elevates, normalizes, and hegemonizes whites, while demonizing, stigmatizing, marginalizing, and devaluing people of color. For example, the white racial frame discounts or distorts the many societal contributions and profound acts of human agency exhibited by people of color in the face of everyday racial oppression, and it excuses or ignores recurring white mob and state violence and the exclusion or segregation of people of color from society’s major societal institutions and opportunities.

Joe Feagin’s published work, and that with colleagues and students, as well as writings of like-minded scholars who address white racism issues, reveals that systemic racism is very much alive in US society and across the globe. Much research systematically and empirically documents how whites have orchestrated a long-standing, deeply embedded societal racism through an ongoing white racial framing of social realities (see Thompson-Miller and Ducey, 2017). The central arguments of systemic racism analysis—that white racism is flourishing in plain sight and that whites are central in the construction of racist societies—counter positions of mainstream racial analyses that avoid investigating structural racism and avoid discussing whites’ role in preserving systemically racist societies and advancing the socio-economic interests of whites as a group, especially those of the white male elite. As a primary starting point, systemic racism analysis identifies whites as architects of racist societies, societies segregated by a persistent construction of the color line that divides social worlds of whites and people of color. White-constructed societies routinely create hurdles and disadvantaged realities for people of color: disparate life chances and social opportunities; differences in access to important social institutions and networks; and status distinctions and different levels of access to basic rights of citizenship and human rights in general.

A systemic racism critique of mainstream racial analysis

Systemic racism analyses often present a different portrait of social reality and of human social interaction than mainstream racial analyses. As noted, they argue that well-institutionalized racism is an ever-present reality largely defining many aspects of certain societies. In contrast, most mainstream analyses of racial matters avoid or downplay discussion of systemic white racism, including indispensable subject matter like white supremacy, racial oppression, genocide, the racial hierarchy, enslavement, colonialism, and the white racial terror, inhumanity, and social pathologies that accurately describe the disquieting realities of systemic white oppression from its earliest days. Mainstream analysts have mostly been silent or diffident on these topics and often discourage or marginalize scholarship that addresses them (Elias and Feagin, 2006).

Not only have most mainstream racial analysts dismissed a deep racism analysis and discussion of whites’ role as the responsible social actors, they have often, from the earliest days, promoted white-framed ideas and practices regarding the concept of “race.” For example, early white social theorists constructed or espoused biological understandings of race that supposedly disclosed inherent intellectual, physical, and moral differences among different race groups. Today, the growing field of socio-genomics and offshoots of sociobiology have reinvigorated a new racial biologism that substantially mimics some earlier biologic understandings of racial group differences (though now differences are often internal and invisible, not external and visible).

Assimilation theory is another major approach in mainstream racial analysis that often imbeds troubling biases and presuppositions about racial matters. The assimilationist tradition is well-represented in the classic mainstream scholarship on racial matters, including analyses of Robert Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Milton Gordon and their current acolytes. The mainstream assimilationist perspective developed as a white-framed understanding of racial relations that assumes that a white-constructed, white-run society is the model society—and that all people should generally assimilate to its white-constructed norms, beliefs, and behaviors.

While assimilation theorists often attempt to skirt this white-racialized reality, nonetheless assimilation is a mostly one-way process of adaptation to a society which is white-controlled and where whites have highly privileged access to resources and power, relative to most people of color. Assimilation theory usually avoids serious discussion of the vivid discrimination and segregation—the systemic racism—that restricts many non-white individuals and groups from fairly accessing US society’s institutions, networks, and opportunities, and thus from many of the socio-economic fruits of full societal membership.

In contrast, more critical social thinkers reflecting on assimilation have recognized that it has long meant one-way adaptation to white racial framing and white dominance and that systemic racism has been the major obstacle for full societal incorporation of most people of color. These analysts have asked such critical questions as: Exactly what are people assimilating toward? For what? And why? These critical ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Notes on the contributors
• General introduction
• PART I: Theories and histories
• PART II: Contemporary racisms in global perspective
• PART III: Racism and the state
• PART IV: Racist movements and ideologies
• PART V: Anti-racisms
• PART VI: Racism and nationalism
• PART VII: Intersections of race and gender
• PART VIII: Racism, culture and religion
• PART IX: Methods of studying contemporary racisms
• PART X: The end of racism?
• Index