Critical Sociology

Residential and social hypersegregation of whites from blacks furthers a socialization process we refer to as “white habitus.” “White habitus” geographically and psychologically limits whites' chances of developing meaningful relationships with blacks and other minorities. Using data from the 1997 Survey of College Students' Social Attitudes and the 1998 Detroit Area Study on White Racial Ideology to make our case, we show that geographically, whites' segregated lifestyles psychologically leads them to develop positive views about themselves and negative views about racial others. First, we document the high levels of whites' residential and social segregation. Next, we examine how whites interpret their own self-segregation. Finally, we examine how whites' segregation shapes racial expressions, attitudes, cognitions, and even a sense of aesthetics as illustrated by whites' views on the subject of interracial marriage.

One central area of dispute in current racial politics is whether an act, policy, or event constitutes racism. I contend that the core of these debates involves competing conceptions of racism. Using text from a variety of media sources, I examine the different ways in which racism is defined and how claims and counterclaims are contextualized. I also explore how the dynamic nature of racial discourse leads to the emergence of new ways of defining racism as advocates seek advantages in political debate. Finally, I connect the struggle involving racism as a contested concept to two larger racial ideologies: color-blindness and systemic racism.

Educational workshops are a common approach to addressing racism and homophobia in institutional and organizational settings. One underlying rationale of these efforts is that more knowledge of “the other” — non-white and queer participants — will lead to greater equity. This article investigates this premise through empirical research into anti-racist and anti-homophobic workshops in a variety of settings. In particular, our analysis focuses on the uses of “storytelling” and other workshop strategies commonly employed to encourage the disclosure of personal stories by and about the “other.” We argue that, particularly in anti-racist contexts, these strategies have exacted a heavy toll on the tellers, reinforced the exclusionary notions of identity that underlie a racist culture, and had only a limited effect in fostering organizational change. While many of these same problems are present in anti-homophobia educational workshops, differences in the relations of power between the “tellers” and the “listeners,” between who is solicited to tell stories and how, and in the nature of sexual versus racial identity also suggest important distinctions between these different forms of educational practice. Within this context however, queer youth of color and transgender youth continue to report that storytelling can exact a heavier toll on them than others. There is little empirical literature analyzing anti-oppression workshops and their effects in both schools and community organizations. Our study addresses this gap in the sociological literature.

Turning to the work of bassist and composer Charles Mingus and critic and record producer Nat Hentoff, I examine challenges to the liberal discourse of postwar jazz culture. Both were vocal critics of the cultural and racial politics of jazz. Because ideals of integration and democracy had long been central to its identity as a cultural practice, its participants saw jazz culture as a barometer of the national character and potentially representative of the fulfillment of democratic society. The participants were often less willing to see the effects of the nation on this world — jazz culture echoed evolving cultural and social discourses about racial and gender identity, the demands of the market, national boundaries, deviancy, and the function of artistic practice. Hentoff and Mingus present competing perspectives that offer suggestive avenues for rethinking jazz historiography and race.

This paper addresses the politics of color-blindness in comparative perspective as its meaning has changed over the past half-century. Drawing on the cases of South Africa and the United States, I focus in particular on the socio-political and psychological functions that color-blind ideology performs for whites in defending white advantage in the present context. Although in the past color-blindness served as an effective rallying cry for the abolition of Jim Crow and the demise of apartheid, the very same principle serves in the post-segregation context to stall transformation of the racial order in the direction of greater equality. It is an irony that the principle of color-blindness that so effectively mobilized opposition to the institutionally racist order in both national contexts mutates at the very moment of apparent victory into one that radically limits the anti-racist imagination.

The transnational, transracial adoption of children provides the opportunity to explore how race binds and differentiates kinship and national belonging, especially when considered in relation to options for adopting both at home and abroad. More specifically, the reasons white parents give for choosing to adopt from China reveal how the normative white, American family is constructed through discourses of foreign and domestic, Asian and black. I explore three themes that contribute to the relative desirability of adopting Chinese children: they are seemingly unfettered by attachments, racially “flexible,” and readily constructed as rescuable. In these discourses that bring Chinese children home, blackness serves as a mediating backdrop — a domestic “white noise.” But China — US adoption unsettles as much as it reproduces racial stratifications; ongoing encounters with intimate relations of difference push at the boundaries of white privilege and weak multiculturalism.

Although students of race have produced impressive works on global Western racism, their mostly macro-level focus has not addressed how marginal groups respond to Western racial ideology and do so based on state and cultural influences. To capture Asians' localized responses to white-American superiority specifically, the author conducts a comparative case study of South Koreans and Korean American immigrants, fitting groups given US geopolitical dominance in South Korea since 1945 and large numbers of Korean immigrants in the USA. Drawing on 66 combined interviews (in-depth, open-ended, and focus group) in Seoul and in Los Angeles County, the author finds that while South Koreans and Korean Americans at times similarly adopt and resist white racial hegemony, their responses differ by way of state and cultural ideologies and practices. The US military presence in South Korea, supported by the Korean state, and imported American mass media culture centrally shape the residents' narratives. In the United States, the American “racial state” and attendant cultural ideologies (“democracy,” racial categories) figure centrally in Korean Americans' narrative responses to hegemony. The author concludes with the implications of localized analyses for global racism scholarship.

In the past few decades, the social sciences have turned decidedly away from essentialist and reductionist ways of theorizing race and its articulations with nation and class. Though invaluable in advancing the social-scientific study and critique of race and racism, this turn has led many to conceptualize race increasingly as an empty signifier whose articulations with nation and class are wholly a matter of contingency This article suggests that we reengage the project of theorizing the insistent, historically recurrent articulations of race, nation, and class without falling into the old traps of essentialism, reductionism, and ahistoricism. Taking colonial Hawai`i as an example, this article analyzes how these categories articulated to racialize Japanese and Filipino migrant labor differentially in the age of empire.

Advances in information technology (IT) have been critical to the USA for maintaining its competitive edge in the global economy, and the role of workers on the H-1B visa has been central in this process since the 1990s. The H-1B visa program, which allows US employers to hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis, enabled the recruitment of thousands of IT professionals, the majority of whom has been from India. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Indian IT workers in the USA, this paper illustrates how the interplay between visa policies and flexible hiring in IT marginalizes this workforce. As a result of their fragile immigration status under H-1B visa terms, these workers are disproportionately employed as contract labor in an exploitative system of subcontracting. As an employment-based visa, the H-1B makes these workers dependent on their visa-sponsoring employers for immigration status and livelihood. The compulsion to remain employed and legal drives H-1B employees to accept severely exploitative work conditions, including wage cuts, deduction of commissions from hourly wages, lack of benefits, and frequent relocations. Theoretical insights from Asian-American studies, which foreground the historical nexus between US immigration policies and the gendered racialization of immigration, anchor the analyses of how current visa policies sustain the exigencies of late-capital.

Critical race theorists have applied the concepts of micro-aggressions and macro-aggressions to characterize the racial affronts minorities encounter in the criminal justice system, particularly in the War on Drugs and in the use of racial profiling. Building on LatCrit and critical race scholars, I analyze the function that immigration raids serve as a policing practice that maintains and reinforces subordinated status among working-class Latino citizens and immigrations. Using a case study approach, I analyze a five day immigration raid in 1997. locally referred to as the “Chandler Roundup.” Immigration policing constructed citizenship as visibly inscribed on bodies in specific urban spaces rather than “probable cause.” The Chandler Roundup fits into a larger pattern of immigration law enforcement practices that produce harms of reduction and repression and place Mexican Americans at risk before the law and designate them as second-class citizens with inferior rights. Latino residents experienced racial affronts targeted at their “Mexicanness” indicated by skin-color, bilingual speaking abilities, or shopping in neighborhoods highly populated by Latinos. During immigration inspections, individuals stopped were demeaned, humiliated and embarrassed. Stops and searches conducted without cause were intimidating and frightening, particularly when conducted with the discretionary use of power and force by law enforcement agents. In urban barrios, the costly enterprise of selected stops and searches, race-related police abuse, and harassment results in deterring political participation, identifying urban space racially, classifying immigrants as deserving and undeserving by nationalities, and serves to drive a wedge dividing Latino neighborhoods on the basis of citizenship status.

In this article, I develop an argument about the radical nature of black politics that is based on individual and collective becoming. The process of becoming is immanent to blackness, which can be understood as a dynamic collective reservoir marked by time, space, and power. Such collective reservoir is not only in constant transformation, but also can be accessed though countless routes — for example, art, spirituality, and political organizing. Thus, as black people, we are always becoming black. While the understanding and employment of the concept of race are central to these forms of political blackness, the dangers of race-thinking are permanently debated. The resulting political vocabulary and practices, ever reformulated, self-critical, and drawing their acumen from a cultivation of vulnerability, emphasize race as an energizer of political identification and action that moves beyond traditional identity politics whose political programs reflect the consciousness and experience of belonging to discrete (racialized, gendered, sexualized, national) groups. The radical nature of this specific form of black politics is based on (a) its constant self-critique and reformulation, (b) its Afrodiasporic transnationalism, and (c) its commitment to social justice. To make this argument, I draw on ethnographic data gathered while collaborating with activists in Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, and engage with black feminisms, critical race theorists, and the art of John Coltrane. Black radical becoming offers both a vital critique of our colonization and a blueprint for the formation of new, ethical, and anti-fascist subjectivities and sociabilities.

In March 2003, the US government launched a military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was one more phase of the US National Security Strategy doctrine that promises militarism, war, and disruption in various sovereign states. These wars abroad and the unprecedented powers of government and police agencies in the USA represent powerful intersections of patriarchal authority, racism, militarism, and elitism. Africana communities have a long history of resisting repression both directly and indirectly related to US foreign policy. Social scientists writing from a black feminist perspective have described how such mutually constructing forces of race, class, gender, and nation have influenced the lives of people of color, women, and the poor in American society and have highlighted the historical and sociological importance of resistance by these oppressed groups. Specifically, this paper addresses ways in which a black feminist analysis and praxis offer useful perspectives on activism concerning issues of peace and justice post 9—11—2001.