Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

ABSTRACT Utilizing a critical whiteness studies framework, the authors analyzed the experiences of a cohort of predominantly White pre-service social studies teachers discussing race and Whiteness in relation to education. The pre-service teachers resisted identifying White privilege as a form of structural racism, instead preferring individualized understandings of racism. The participants also utilized their personal biographies to accept or reject aspects of race privilege. The authors highlighted three tensions for teacher educators to consider when engaging pre-service teachers in discussions about race privilege, including recognizing the unfamiliar nature of structural thinking, appreciating the limitations of personal experience, and acknowledging the challenges of structural considerations within individual classrooms. The authors’ findings – and the tensions they highlight– depart from previous literature on White teachers and race by paying specific attention to pedagogical issues related to developing a critical racial consciousness in White teachers and by attending to the ways in which Whiteness, as a structural force, limits the ability of White teachers to engage in conversations about race. The authors attempt to trouble the assumption that the pedagogical practices in teacher education adequately create an environment in which White teachers can thoroughly engage in the problematics of race, racism, and Whiteness.

This paper argues that capitalist accumulation requires imperialist expansion, and that this expansion creates a “raced” surplus laboring population. The argument proceeds in seven parts: that Marx’s assertion in chapter 25 of Capital that capitalism produces an ever-increasing relative surplus population is tenable in all but the longest of time frames; that imperial expansion played an important role in the transition to capitalism, though not for the reasons traditionally given; that overinvestment rather than the increasing organic composition of capital best explains imperial expansion in the capitalist era; that the uneven development of capitalism produces at the same time an uneven development of the surplus laboring population; that race has served as a mark of membership in the surplus laboring population; that by intertwining itself with the surplus laboring population, race serves to perpetuate itself despite its contradictions; and that despite this resilience, the contradictions of race also set in process conflicts that make it possible to overcome imperialism.

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

While the idea that racism is accompanied by its denial is well established, this paper examines the widespread explicit advocacy of a stance of ‘not racism’. The rejection of racism by proponents of positions that hinder the cause of racial justice is the discursive next step in ‘postracial’ racism. I examine the various ways in which racism has been proposed to be an ‘unhelpful’ framework. I make the case that the dominant position within philosophy of race that racism is, first and foremost, a moral failing has unwittingly contributed to the emergence of ‘not racism’ as a dominant expression in race thinking today. Following an examination of several key moral philosophical analyses of racism, I illustrate my argument that ‘not racism’ is a form of racist violence with reference to several recent and contemporary cases against the backdrop of the rise of ‘Global Trumpism’.

This practice-research based article explores the relationship between mana motuhake (indigenous sovereignty) and white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on Ngāti Tūwharetoa as a case study. It seeks to find the relevance of Aboriginal academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson's white possessive doctrine to the Aotearoa New Zealand context. In particular, it highlights the racist nature of the law and planning systems and their inadequacies to provide for hapū and iwi (indigenous nation/s). It provides a key theoretical analysis regarding the nature of white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa and the need of the state to appear virtuous, to continue the legacy that started with the Treaty of Waitangi to maintain this whenua (land) as a white possessive. Lastly, the piece questions the position of Britishness within Aotearoa New Zealand and asks key philosophical questions for all about the need to find common understandings or māramatanga about our collective future as a society.

Background/Context
With a rationale informed by the demographic imperative, the resegregation of public schools, and our positionalities as researchers, we understand both the high stakes and the complexity of capacitating White preservice and in-service teachers capable of anti-racist praxis and race-visible teaching and learning in public school classrooms.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
Deploying the framework of color blind racism, we systematically reviewed race-evasive White teacher identity studies and answered the question: What can we learn from twenty-five years of research?
Research Design
In using the method called the synoptic text, we engaged electronic databases, with special emphasis on ERIC EBSCOhost.  The simple and general search term “White teachers” conducted using year-by-year parameters provided most systematic net for capturing relevant studies.  In narrowing our focus, we developed the following criteria: (a) White teachers as central topic; (b) analytical emphases on color blind racism; (c) publication in peer-reviewed journals; (d) use of qualitative and/or narrative research methodologies; and, (e) publication date between 1990 and 2015.
Data Collection and Analysis
Our general search yielded one-hundred and thirty-six (N = 136) peer-reviewed empirical qualitative and/or narrative studies between 1990 and 2015, and after narrowing our criteria, we found forty-seven race-evasive White teacher identity studies (n = 47, 47/136) that we reviewed here. Each study in the document universe was abstracted, added to a spreadsheet, and categorized by emergent themes.
Findings/Results
The following five themes emerged and developed over the last twenty five years: (a) racialized silence and invisibility (9/47), (b) resistance and active reconstruction of White privilege (12/47), (c) whiteness in institutional and social contexts (8/47), (d) fertile paradoxes in new research (9/47), and (e) reflexive whiteness pedagogies (9/47).
Conclusions/Recommendations
We believe our literature review identifies the complex contours of White preservice and in-service teachers’ silence, resistance to, engagement in, and pedagogical grappling with racism, whiteness, and White privilege. The importance of preservice and in-service teachers being able to engage, understand, and challenge these issues becomes critically important at our crossroads in the present, especially given the recent election that bolstered open and tacit White supremacists into power. If White teachers are to engage racism, whiteness, and White privilege, they must do so with as opposed to for their students in a Freirean sense.  If teaching for social justice is important, renewed interest and investment in White teacher identity studies and related whiteness pedagogies is key for the next twenty five years.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

This course provides an overview of social justice theories in communication studies. As a discipline, communication draws from theories across the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy, leading to an eclectic mix of theory that is taken and applied to communicative issues. To get a foothold in communication theory, then, requires reading primary texts from outside the field, as well as applications of those texts within the field. Therefore, this course endeavors to provide a basis in critical theories of communication by connecting foundational theoretical readings with their use in critical/cultural studies of communication.

Social justice work in communication is intimately concerned with power. As such, we will be exploring how different scholars have conceptualized power inequities since what is often dubbed “the critical turn” in our field. Students will leave the class equipped with multiple theoretical lenses through which to investigate communicative issues of power, control, inequality, and oppression in our society. These theories will also provide the means to think through how communication can help us to build coalitions and relations that move social structures toward equality, justice, and liberation.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) revolutionized how we investigate race in education. Centralizing counterstories from people of color becomes essential for decentralizing white normative discourse-a process we refer to as realities within the Black imagination. Yet, few studies examine how whites respond to centering the Black imagination, especially since their white imagination goes unrecognized. We propose utilizing Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) to support CRT to aid in deconstructing the dimensions of white imaginations. Our findings describe how the white imagination operates inside the minds of white teacher candidates, namely through their (a) emotional disinvestment, (b) lack of critical understanding of race, (c) resurgence of white guilt, and (d) recycling of hegemonic whiteness, all of which negatively impact their role in anti-racist teaching in urban schools.

The pursuit of a deeper understanding of the societal barriers that African Americans face in their quest for equality can be aided by Critical Race Theory (CRT), developed primarily by lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist Derrick Bell (Minow, 2012), as well as by Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams and Kimberlé Crenshaw (Khalifa, Dunbar, & Douglasb, 2013). Critical Race Theory has six main principles that help explain the issue of race relations in North America (Freemen, 2011). This study will explore the literature that identifies these six principles and the theoretical impact on various aspects of society, including education, and leadership.

Teacher educators are constantly trying to improve the field to meet the needs of a growing urban populace. Inclusion of socially just philosophies in the curriculum is indeed essential, yet it can mask the recycling of normalized, oppressive Whiteness. This reflective and theoretical paper employs critical race theory and critical Whiteness studies to deconstruct Whiteness, abuse, and love in teacher education. Using an interdisciplinary and emotion-based approach to understanding Whiteness, this paper examines how denying race during white childhood via a color-blind ideology leaves lasting emotional scars, impressions that perpetuate the institutional silencing of race in teacher education. This "abuse" is projected onto urban students of color and, more broadly, people of color. This paper asserts that until teacher education programs make confronting and exploring Whiteness a priority, they cannot truly love their urban students of color as complete beings and so deny humanity full and just consideration.

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

I met Kimberlé Crenshaw at the Sorbonne University in Paris in January 2019, at a conference organized by Marta Dell’Aquila and Eraldo Souza dos Santos to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of intersectionality. Kimberly Crenshaw developed the notion of intersectionality in 1989 in her paper “De-marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. On that occasion, her goal was to challenge the limitations of anti-discrimination laws that looked at gender and race as separated and mutually exclusive categories. Over the past thirty years, intersectionality has become an essential analytical tool to explore how multiple structures of oppression shape individual vulnerability. In this interview, Kimberlé Crenshaw offers not only a crash course in intersectionality for our readers, but tells us why intersectionality is vital to transform the current political situation. In a majestic example of theoretical sophistication and simplicity, Crenshaw uses the notion of intersectional failure to explain the election of Donald Trump. It is not simply the resentment of a white working class that feels “left behind” which explains the electoral triumph of the far right, she argues. It is working class resentment rooted in male entitlement and white supremacy, which determines this victory. In this sense, the triumph of the far-right in countries such the United States or Italy that have an un-resolved history of white supremacy and fascism, can be seen as the result of a number of intersectional failures – when class consciousness doesn’t contest the logics of racism, when anti-racism doesn’t contest the logics of patriarchy, when feminism doesn’t contest the logic of racism, they end up reinforcing them all.

"Wendy Anderson delves deeply into the heart of inferential racist discourse in “(De)coding Whiteness: Rhetorical Refinement of Coded Rhetoric by White Nationalist Women.” Appropriated by U.S. politicians in 2007, White Nationalist women became a primary source of inferential racism directed at white women and girls in online spaces. Anderson argues that White Nationalist women’s webspaces functioned as a space of rhetorical refinement for coded rhetoric used by Republican and Libertarian politicians in the 2016 election cycle. As a result, during his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump gained and maintained public support by appropriating coded racist rhetoric."

Taking issue with the erasure of the race in much of the contemporary (feminist) intersectionality scholarship, this essay examines a number of troubling patterns and trends which contribute to whiten, discipline and dilute an initially insurgent knowledge firmly rooted in black feminist thought and activism. The analysis reads these makeover efforts of intersectionality against the backdrop of the broader incorporation of various progressive struggles into the neoliberal governance of ›diversity‹ and minority difference, to which the questions of knowledge production and dissemination are integral. Special attention is given to sociology, as sociology stands out by its disciplinary defensiveness against minority generated counter-hegemonic knowledges, by its eagerness to restate the adequacy of its disciplinary structure and fundamental categories.

(Published in Racism and Sociology, Wulf D. Hund & Alana Lentin eds., Berlin: Lit. Verlag, 2014, pp.175-205).
ISBN:  9783643905987
PLEASE USE THIS REFERENCE WHEN QUOTING.

At the end of the 1970s a racist rock music movement known as White Power music emerged in Great Britain in connection with political parties of the extreme right and remains a vibrant force in racist social movements today. Throughout the 1990s, White Power music expanded significantly from its origins in a clandestine network of punk-inspired live shows and record promotions into a multi-million dollar, international enterprise of web-pages, radio stations and independent record labels promoting White Power musicians performing a wider range of musical genres. In this article, we view White Power music as a cultural resource created and produced by racist movements and used as a tool to further key movement goals.  Specifically, we examine White Power music’s role when used to 1) recruit new adherents, especially youth, 2) frame issues and ideology to cultivate a White Power collective identity, and 3) obtain financial resources. In doing so we rely upon in-depth interviews with W...

Although law prohibits race-based exclusion in college sororities and fraternities in the United States, racial segregation prevails. As a result, nonwhite membership in white Greek-letter organizations (WGLOs) is often hailed as a transformative step toward equality and unity. The bulk of work on such cross-racial membership centers on comparative-historical and survey data and treats integrated membership as the successful end, rather than a problematic beginning, of analysis. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in three university campuses on the East Coast, I shift the focus from resource factors that either prevent or enable membership to the strategies of action that nonwhite members employ in their everyday lives in order to be perceived as full, belonging members. By drawing upon the insights of the sociology of culture, I argue that robust racialized schemas simultaneously enable and constrain inclusion. Rather than hide explicit racial-ethnic difference or accede to traditional expectations of Anglo conformity, I find that nonwhite members are enmeshed in a paradox of participation: their ability to frame themselves as equal and belonging Greek "brothers and sisters" remains tied to a patterned reproduction of their racial and ethnic identities as essentially different and inferior. Such a paradox emerges as an important theoretical and pragmatic dilemma with implications for an array of institutional contexts.

Call for papers + Call for visual contributions / Deadline for submission: 15 November 2015



Secondo simposio di InteRGRace – Interdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms (FISPPA, University of Padova)

[email protected]

www.intergrace.it

Despite the racial inequality in the Irish labour market, race is still not centred in the discourse. This article examines the skin colour based racism in the labour market particularly targeted against Blacks. It exposes the colour-coded hierarchy which attributes differentials in outcome to some form of deficit among marginalised groups. The article argues that a migrant deficit approach is counterproductive and should be discouraged as it perpetuates racial stereotypes and presupposes that labour markets are meritocratic socioeconomic environments.

Chapter 12 of
Racial Battle Fatigue: Insights from the Front Lines of Social Justice Advocacy, Edited by Jennifer L. Martin

Available at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1440832099?keywords=racial%20battle%20fatigue&qid=1445438162&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Confederate monuments figure prominently as epicenters of social conflict. These stone and metal constructs resonate with the tensions of modern America, giving concrete definition to the ideologies that divide us. Confederate monuments alone did not generate these feelings of aggravation, but they are far from innocent. Rather than serving as neutral objects of public remembrance, Confederate monuments articulate a narration of the past that forms the basis for a normative vision of the future. The story, told through the character of a religious mythos, carries implicit sacred convictions; thus, these spires and statues are inherently theological.

In Cut in Stone, Ryan Andrew Newson contends that we cannot fully understand or disrupt these statues without attending to the convictions that give them their power. With a careful overview of the historical contexts in which most Confederate monuments were constructed, Newson demonstrates that these "memorials" were part of a revisionary project intended to resist the social changes brought on by Reconstruction while maintaining a romanticized Southern identity. Confederate monuments thus reinforce a theology concerning the nature of sacrifice and the ultimacy of whiteness. Moreover, this underlying theology serves to conceal inherited collective wounds in the present.

If Confederate monuments are theologically weighted in their allure, then it stands to reason that they must also be contested at this level―precisely as sacred symbols. Newson responds to these inherently theological objects with suggestions for action that are sensitive to the varying contexts within which monuments reside, showing that while all Confederate monuments must come under scrutiny, some monuments should remain standing, but in redefined contexts. Cut in Stone represents the first detailed theological investigation of Confederate monuments, a resource for the larger collective task of determining how to memorialize problematic pasts and how to shape public space amidst contested memory.

This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers on the subject and using direct interviews and material from radical Queer activists and academics in the field.  It examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the course of the research involved in this project.  Many of them  were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race, Poverty & the Environment http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).

The history of Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in the Southwest suggests the danger of allowing state actors or private entities to discriminate on the basis of language or cultural practice. Race in the Southwest was produced through the practices of Jim Crow, which were not based explicitly on race, but rather on language and culture inextricably tied to race. This Article looks at three sets of encounters between Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California-trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion-to see the way in which state actors used Mexican Americans' nominal white identity under the law to create and protect Jim Crow practices. First, it argues that whiteness operated primarily as a "Caucasian cloak" to obscure the practices of Jim Crow and to make them appear benign, whether in the jury or school context. If Mexican Americans were white, then they were represented so long as whites were represented. Second, it demonstrates that Mexican-American civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals in the courtroom did not simply identify as white; some showed a more complex understanding of "Mexican" as a mestizo race, and others pointed to the idea of race as a status produced by racist practice. Mexicans were nonwhite if they were treated as nonwhite under Jim Crow. Finally, it argues that, at least in twentieth-century Texas and California, cultural discrimination was racial discrimination, and that continuing discrimination on the basis of language ability and other cultural attributes should be scrutinized carefully under antidiscrimination law.

This paper is concerned with the ethics of knowledge production when conducting research on racial injustice. The discussion draws upon my doctoral research, in which I interviewed 23 racialized social workers in Toronto, Canada, about their encounters with racism in the workplace. The discussion centres on my role as a racialized researcher and the effects of any assumed " insider-ness " on how I heard and interpreted participant narratives. Although the workers and I shared experiences of racism, I could not assume " sameness, " nor could I adopt an authentic voice about how racism is experienced. This paper examines the significance of producing research about racial domination, but argues for an anti-essentialist stance. I explore the ethical dilemmas involved through examining the dominant assumptions underlying insider research. Only when we come to be very clear about how race is lived, in its multiple manifestations, only when we come to appreciate its often hidden epistemic effects and its power over collective imaginations of public space, can we entertain even the remote possibility of its eventual transformations. (Alcoff, 2002, p. 267) This paper is concerned with the ethics of knowledge production when conducting research on racial injustice. I specifically examine the ethical dilemmas that arise from the assumptions that constitute insider/outsider debates in research, and I make the argument that the danger for essentialism poses significant risks to research. The discussion draws upon my doctoral research, in which I interviewed 23 racialized social workers in Toronto, Canada, about their encounters with racism in the workplace. The study focused on the ways in which racialized workers negotiate professional practice within a white-normed profession, with a specific emphasis the ways in which racial injustice manifests in everyday social work. The stories shared by participants in this study were emotionally heavy, complicated, hard to tell (and hear). The workers shared narratives describing how clients would refuse to work with them, utter racist comments toward them, and in some situations, used physical violence (Badwall, 2014). Furthermore, they relayed how co-workers and managers responded to these acts, which more often than not resulted in no action or support. Instead, their stories reveal the ways in which social work values of helping,

The absence of the racial and cultural
Other in mainstream media is noted by
many scholars. In this article, a number
of newspaper articles about asylum
seekers in lip sewing episodes at
Woomera in 2002 are examined using
critical discourse analysis and drawing
on critical race and whiteness studies.
While many news articles depict asylum
seekers negatively, most of the selected
texts provide a positive depiction of
asylum seekers. A combination of
discourse analysis and literary exegesis
demonstrates how journalists draw on
existing discourses in the cultural
imaginary to shape their depictions of
cultural and racial Others. The
suggestion is made that different
narratives and rhetorical formations are
deployed not merely to depict the
asylum seeker as an abject Other to be
pitied or reviled, but also to construct
different versions of Jennifer Rutherford’s
“good (white) Australian” reader. These
constructions of the reader form a
subtext beneath the reporting of news
and reveal the extent to which the
representation of the Other involves
white projections, desires and imaginings
of the cultural Other. Rather than
providing information about and insight
into the cultural/racial Other, such texts
may be better understood as
interventions in an ongoing discourse
within the White “mainstream” about
Our national identity.

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

This is Chapter 1 of the New Handbook of Political Sociology. Andy Clarno and I envision the piece as a three-fold intervention to the theory of power in political sociology. First, as a preliminary point, we document the general drift of the canonical literature from coercion to consent. Second, we argue that this development rests upon the assumption that power under liberal democracy does not operate on exclusion, suppression, and violence. Thus, it becomes necessary to explain how and why we participate in our own subordination, especially the ways in which we internalize dominant discourses and then act against our own interests.  Finally, we challenge this assumption by drawing on theorists who emphasize the violent and exclusionary underpinnings of liberal democracy, especially Critical Race Theorists, post-colonial scholars, and theorists of elimination, death, exploitation, and disposability.

This article points at the limits of Canadian multicultural citizenship from a feminist anti-racist perspective. It aims to illustrate the racialization effects of Canadian multiculturalism as a biopolitical apparatus of state-diversity-management that depoliticizes civil society’s decolonial and anti-racist struggles. This article reclaims the necessity of challenging Canada’s narrative of benevolence towards immigrants and so-called visible minorities. It proposes to flip the script from an unproblematized focus on the failures of multiculturalism, such as tropes about the ghettoization and excessive religious demands of visible minorities, towards a genuine engagement with the many contradictions of Canadian society. Given that multiculturalism can adopt a wide range of meanings, my argument is that multiculturalism should not simply be researched as an ideological position, but analyzed through the specific historical conditions that have led to its enshrinement in Canada; changes in policy and political party discourse; its power as an apparatus of racialization; and its potential to act both as a tool to protect migrants, racialized communities and minority groups, and a vehicle to engage genuinely with Canadian society’s contradictions and structural inequalities.