Melissa Weiner

Textbooks are explicitly racial texts that offer important insights into national memories of slavery and colonialism. The Dutch have long engaged in the social forgetting of slavery even as race served as an organizing principal during centuries of colonial domination of the Dutch West Indies and Suriname. While the Dutch have recently begun to address their history of enslavement, they have yet to sufficiently address how the discursive legacies of slavery continue to impact the lives of Afro-Dutch descendants of enslaved2AfricansandWhite Dutch in The Netherlands today. This paper uses qualitative content and discourse analytic methods to examine the depiction of slavery, The Netherlands’ role in the slave trade and enslavement, and the commemoration of slavery in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980 to address questions of whether textbooks feature scientific colonialism to perpetuate The Netherlands’ social forgetting of slavery in a nation that denies the existence of race even as racialized socioeconomic inequalities persist. A Eurocentric master narrative of racial Europeanization perpetuates Dutch social forgetting of slavery and scientific colonialism to both essentialize Afro-Dutch and position their nation squarely within Europe’s history of enslavement even while attempting to minimize their role within it. Findings have important implications for both The Netherlands and all nations with histories of enslavement as the discourses and histories presented in textbooks impact generations of students, who shape local and national policy regarding racial minorities, racial identities, and ideologies.

Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land’s rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and ‘permission to narrate’ their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and ap...

In 1804, New Jersey (NJ) legislators enacted a 'Law for Gradual Abolition.' However, this act did not free a single person nor did the 1846 'Act to Abolish Slavery,' when all those still enslaved became 'apprentices for life.' Contributing to the growing literature addressing enslaving in the Northern US, and various gradations of freedom and unfreedom within and across wage labour and enslaving within shifting and developing capitalist economies, this article uses Census records and registers of children born to enslaved women to reveal enduring patterns of bondage holding Black people, particularly children, in conditions of unfreedom through and possibly after the Civil War, with far more enslaved people existing than is currently recognized. This data suggests the necessity of reconceptualising the lived experiences of 'free' Black people there as closer to enslaved, or 'unfree,' similar to that which has been documented elsewhere in the US and globally. These findings have significant implications for the longevity and potential contemporary legacies of legal mechanisms enabling this labour exploitation and divesting Black people of their freedom, earnings, and legal personhood in Northern states post-emancipation.

Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.

Há muito, os holandeses se orgulham de sua identidade de povo tolerante, "terra prometida" para imigrantes perseguidos e generosa com fundos de "desenvolvimento" direcionados a outras nações. Esquivam-se, contudo, do papel que desempenharam historicamente no imperialismo, na escravatura e no genocídio colonialistas e consideram os não brancos, tanto na Holanda quanto fora dela, ingratos para com a ajuda de seu país. Esse artigo sintetiza pesquisas anteriores1 sobre as representações de escravidão, imigração e da África em todos os livros didáticos de história para ensino fundamental na Holanda publicados a partir de 1980, argumentando que estes apresentam metanarrativas eurocêntricas de europeização racial no contexto único da sociedade holandesa. Esses livros perpetuam o esquecimento social, pelos holandeses, da escravidão e do colonialismo científico, justificam intervenções históricas e contemporâneas na África, essencializam e problematizam os imigrantes e su...

The Netherlands is known worldwide for their tolerance and multiculturalism. In addition to their permissive drug and prostitution policies and early adoption of gay marriage legislation, the country has long acted as a “Promised Land” for religious refugees and, more recently, implemented explicit multicultural policies of the 1980s and 1990s to promote immigrant immigration. Thus, The Netherlands has long been a receiving nation for immigrants, particularly those seeking religious freedom and opportunities in a thriving trade-based economy. This history, combined with the Dutch history of colonialism, resulting in migrants from former colonies, and their recruitment of “guest workers” in the 1960s and 1970s, has resulted in considerable racial diversity among the population, as well as significant stratification and conflict. Recently, like much of Europe, Dutch popular and political discourse has shifted to the right alongside a corresponding enactment of restrictive immigration policies that reversed many of their multicultural policies. This chapter highlights the history of race, racial diversity, and racism in The Netherlands that laid the foundation for its diversity today. Following this historical overview, the chapter addresses current demographic and socioeconomic trends, contemporary immigration policies, and racial attitudes and concludes with speculation of the nation’s racial future.

This article provides a theoretical account of anti-Jewish prejudice and empirically tests this model using data from a recent national survey of adults in the United States. Whereas much prior research emphasizes the religious and cultural foundations of anti-Semitism, the present research provides an alternative framework that builds on Herbert Blumer’s (1958) theory of prejudice as a sense of group position. Two related yet distinct lines of research have evolved from Blumer’s seminal work, one emphasizing the position of an individual’s group mem-bership relative to other groups and a second that focuses on aggregate factors such as local economic conditions and minority group size. These themes are integrated to investigate the individual and contextual correlates of anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States. The findings suggest that anti-Jewish sentiments are most prev-alent among African Americans and individuals residing in places with larger per capita Jewish populat...

My father Mendel was born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1920. He eventually graduated from Straubenmuller Textile High School in Chelsea in 1939. His brother Abie was born in 1918 and their older sister Kayla in 1916. Their father Zalman arrived in New York in 1909 from Galicia in Poland, now the Ukraine. Their mother Fayga followed him four years later. My father and his siblings spoke Yiddish at home and in the street, first learning English in school. Their mother never learned to speak English. Their father could pray in Hebrew, but he was a garment worker, not a religious scholar. He spoke Yiddish and workplace Polish and English. Zalman was a loyal member of the ILGWU but never an activist. Katie toyed with socialism as a teenager. Abie and Mendel were always street kids. When they misbehaved, which appears to have been frequently, at least for Abie, Kayla would be called to the office because their parents would have nothing to do with school.

Smash the Pillars builds on the efforts by scholars and activists to decolonize Dutch history and memory, as they resist the epistemological violence imposed by the state, its institutions, and dominant narratives. Contributions offer an unparalleled glimpse into decolonial activism in the Dutch kingdom and provide us with a new lens to view contemporary decolonial efforts. The book argues that to fully decolonize Dutch society, the current social organization in the Kingdom of the Netherlands relying on separate pillars for each religious and/or racial group, must be dismantled.

Accounts of Jewish immigrants usually describe the role of education in helping youngsters earn a higher social position than their parents. Melissa F. Weiner argues that New York City schools did not serve as pathways to mobility for Jewish or African American students. Instead, at different points in the city's history, politicians and administrators erected similar racial barriers to social advancement by marginalizing and denying resources that other students enjoyed. Power, Protest, and the Public Schools explores how activists, particularly parents and children, responded to inequality; the short-term effects of their involvement; and the long-term benefits that would spearhead future activism. Weiner concludes by considering how today's Hispanic and Arab children face similar inequalities within public schools.

The stories found in history textbooks are profound statements about how nations see themselves. Textbooks that exclude certain groups alienate these children, leading to educational disengagement. The Netherlands is known internationally for its tolerance and multiculturalism, particularly toward immigrants, and sees these elements as critical to their national identity. However, historical and contemporary policies and social attitudes toward immigrants reveal levels of racism and xenophobia not unlike their European peers. This article examines how immigrants, multiculturalism, and tolerance are represented in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published between 1980 and 2011. I find textbooks depict immigrant groups as culturally different outsiders from underdeveloped, poor, and violent nations who cause problems for the Dutch society that benevolently allows them entry. Textbooks fail to meaningfully address discrimination in the Netherlands, suggesting that immigrants’ failure to integrate is due to cultural differences, which will alienate immigrant students encountering these texts and white students from immigrant peers. Findings are of relevance to all nations with student immigrant populations, particularly those experiencing increasing anti-immigrant sentiment or the rise of far right politicians.

Human Exhibitions: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Ethnic Displays, by Rikke Andreassen, mines a treasure trove of data found in the basement of the Copenhagen zoo to take readers on a comprehensive journey through 30 years (1879–1909) of Danish human zoos. Human Exhibitions documents their creation, visitors, and publicity, with a focus on the encaged, including their acts of resistance, about which writing is rare. In doing so, Andreassen reveals race and colonialism as central elements of Denmark’s history while resurrecting the humanity of the men, women, and children who experienced dehumanization, the seminal element of historical and modern racism. Discussions of gender and sexuality are largely limited to discussions of interracial marriages between Asian men and white Danish women. Therefore, though addressed intersectionally, these topics appear far less substantial than discussions of race. The book begins with a summary of Danish racial history and science, both taboo subjects, particularly when it comes to eugenics and slavery. Andreassen describes how, in the late 1800s, Danish scientists and anthropologists desecrated Greenlandic graves (i.e., grave-robbed) for eugenic research. A generation later, in 1904, a Danish race science committee found, much to the Danes’ chagrin, that they were mixed ethnic, rather than pure, resulting in fears that less desirable groups, stereotyped similarly to Africans, could politically dominate the country. After setting the stage on which racialized others would be displayed, readers encounter the human exhibitions themselves through a thorough analysis of implicit and explicit messages in the zoos’ internal correspondence and documentation, publicity fliers, newspaper accounts of exhibits, and photographs. These exhibits served two purposes. First, they justified exploitation and colonialism by shaping racial ideologies about people and groups that most Danes would never encounter. They also positioned Denmark among other European colonial powers with more expansive global colonial networks, revealing important information about Denmark’s relationship to other European countries. Therefore, these exhibits positioned Danes above those on display and among other European groups with Denmark as a similarly civilized metropolis. These exhibitions did not, however, have profit making as their purpose; most either broke even or lost money. The real strength of Human Exhibitions is its focus on the people exhibited, who they were (by name), where they came from, how they got there, their experiences during, and what happened after their exhibition ended. Although Denmark exhibited people from across the globe—Sioux Indians, indigenous Australians, U.S. Black musicians, subSaharan Africans (including Abyssinians, ironically the only group not colonized at this historical point), Lapps, Bedouins, Japanese, Moroccan artists, Sinhalese dwarfs, Kyrgyz, and Chinese—only a handful came from the Danish Virgin Islands. Danes depicted “human development” by displaying “cultural people” (particularly west Asian peoples) above the savagery of “natural people” (largely Africans and indigenous peoples), thereby rendering visible the ascribed links between physical traits and mental capacity, rationality, and modernity. These displays simultaneously romanticized indigenous “noble savages,” who many believed would die out from natural selection, and alleviated European responsibility for genocides across the globe. The discussion of “cultural people” foreshadows contemporary cultural racism, which Andreassen could have explored further. 645804 SREXXX10.1177/2332649216645804Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review book-review2016

Although U.S. scholars have long documented the stereotypical appearance of Africa in textbooks, scant research does so in the Netherlands. The Dutch, internationally recognized for generous aid, contributed to Africa’s historical underdevelopment by kidnapping, trading, and enslaving Africans. In this study, the author uses content and discourse analysis to examine how Africa, African independence, and European, particularly Dutch, aid organizations operating in Africa are represented in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980. A Eurocentric neocolonial master narrative homogenizes and essentializes Africa as a poor, primitive, and violent continent; discursively denies Dutch historical responsibility for African underdevelopment; excludes African nationalist efforts; and depicts the Dutch engaging in benevolent aid efforts toward African nations and peoples unable to help themselves. These textbooks, in constructing and perpetuating racialized conceptions o...

a change in the state’s government. She also recognizes that no one factor is the lynchpin for making scorecard diplomacy effective— people matter, institutions matter, organizations matter, receptivity matters—but all of them matter in different ways in different countries. Kelley shows how multiple factors working in combination increase effectiveness and that the absence of any one factor does not necessarily sound the death knell for scorecard diplomacy in a particular country. Scorecard Diplomacy is a clinic on how to do good, hypothesis-driven social science research. It is motivated by a clear question, the research is thoughtfully designed, and the author states clear hypotheses that are followed by lists of observable implications. Kelley carefully specifies her strategies of measurement and then applies a wealth of data from a variety of different sources to detail the causal processes at work, while at the same time paying close attention to possible alternative explanations and falsifiability. In fact, Kelley collected so much data to bring to bear on her questions that she is only able to use a fraction of it in the book. This is unfortunate since the case studies, all available online, are so rich and detailed that they deserved more space. In taking such careful steps to prove her argument about how scorecard diplomacy has worked in the sphere of human trafficking, the book occasionally repeats itself, but this is a minor flaw. Kelley is also tremendously committed to data transparency, and I would encourage all readers to spend time with the data and coding, including the longer versions of the case studies, which have been made publicly available on the book’s website (www.scorecarddiplomacy.org). Overall, Scorecard Diplomacy demonstrates that U.S. influence in the realm of human trafficking policy is real, and it works because other countries care about how they are perceived. Through the TIP report, the United States has helped to frame the problem, advocate for a set of policy solutions that many states have adopted, spur the creation of new institutions to fight human trafficking, and, in some cases, even change the attitudes and norms surrounding human trafficking in the eyes of government actors. The TIP report’s repeated nature opens the door to conversations and, when combined with assistance, can lead to real change. But there is a powerful set of lessons for policy-makers in this book as well. The effectiveness of scorecard diplomacy relies on consistency and credibility. Once rankings are perceived to be politically motivated rather than based on the facts on the ground, or the goalposts are perceived to have moved unreasonably, they lose their power, perhaps forever. In sum, this is an excellent book that resonates strongly with my own experience doing research on human trafficking in Russia during the same time period as Kelley’s study. I imagine that it also resonates with those who have worked on human trafficking issues in other countries that Kelley did not focus on specifically. Scorecard Diplomacy would be a worthy addition to syllabi for courses in international relations, public policy, human trafficking, methodology, and diplomacy.

This chapter describes both theoretical and empirical concepts and activities utilized in a diverse, but predominantly-white, classroom to facilitate knowledge development of processes replicating racial inequalities. Central to this chapter is an in-class activity, suitable for classes specializing in race/ethnicity as well as courses related to education, social class, and inequality broadly, which draws on students’ experiences with education to create a “perfect school.” This provides students with the opportunity to articulate a wide array of resources, facilities, student-teacher interactions, and curricular components that often exist in white middle-class schools but are absent from low-income minority schools. This exercise explicitly addresses the important links between race and social class in America resulting from historical legacies of contemporary inequality (i.e. segregation created and enforced by FHA housing policies, the reliance on property taxes to fund local schools, and No Child Left Behind’s punitive aspect the punishes failing schools by decreasing funding). By the end of this unit, which can range from one day to a week or more, students will be able to clearly articulate multiple educationally-based racializing mechanisms, that often exist as hidden curriculum and exclude minority youth from a quality education, upward socioeconomic mobility, and access to full citizenship rights. Students will become aware of how their former lack of knowledge about these inequalities is not only purposeful and intentional, but also perpetuates large-scale inequality both in the educational system, and society-at-large.

Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 The Sociological Context of Pedagogical Practices 9 2 Teachers' Two Pillars: Social Problems and Citizenship Education 27 3 The Emergence of the "Prejudice Reduction Course" 55 4 Fifty Years of Confusion 81 5 Consensus: Sociology ...

Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and
empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a
century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.

In both Europe and the US, racial and ethnic minority students experience
discrimination at the hands of teachers that negatively impacts academic achievement. In the US, scholars have documented how a predominantly white teaching force racializes students of color through discipline and low expectations, which impact educational attainment. But in Europe, the denial of race’s existence hinders research regarding structural explanations for minority educational inequality and often explains low educational attainment as a function of cultural differences. Examining classroom practices in a diverse Amsterdam primary school, this article documents racializing mechanisms that found minority students disproportionately disparaged, disciplined, and silenced. In addition, many were students under-recommended to higher level secondary school tracks. These findings reveal that Dutch schools are not racially meritocratic institutions and are relevant for scholars in the Netherlands and all other nations with educational institutions dominated by colorblind ideologies, white norms, and large immigrant populations.

Diverse schools have become the norm throughout much of what is considered the West. Many urban classrooms feature few white European children but are located in nations dominated by Eurocentric epistemologies and discourses that oppress minority students by devaluing their cultures. Most European scholarship fails to analyse cultures of whiteness in educational settings. This paper addresses this gap by documenting cultural discourses of whiteness infusing a diverse primary school classroom in Amsterdam. Discourses reflecting white cultural norms of order, time, cleanliness, and Western and Christian superiority dominated a classroom containing only one white Dutch child. These discourses contribute to diverse students' explicit racialization while promoting the supremacy of white Dutch culture. They are both assimilationist and exclusionary, suggesting that many students, because of their backgrounds, will never be considered fully Dutch. Findings are of relevance to all nations dominated by white cultures with large populations of students of colour.

The Dutch have long taken great pride in their identity as tolerant, both as a “promised land” for persecuted immigrants and for generous “development” funds in foreign nations. However, the Dutch eschew their role in historical colonial imperialism, enslavement and genocide and consider non-whites, both in The Netherlands abroad, ungrateful for their nation’s aid. This chapter consolidates previous research  addressing depictions of enslavement, immigration, and Africa in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980 to argue that textbook depictions feature Eurocentric master narratives of racial Europeanization within the unique context of Dutch society. These books perpetuate Dutch social forgetting of slavery and scientific colonialism, justify historic and contemporary interventions in Africa, essentialize and problematize immigrants and their cultures, highlight Dutch superiority, and facilitate a “Dutchman’s burden” that finds The Netherlands reluctantly aiding minorities within and outside of their borders. Findings have important implications for both The Netherlands and all nations with increasing immigrant populations as discourses, knowledges presented in textbooks impact generations of students’, who shape local and national policy regarding racial minorities, racial identities and ideologies.

This article addresses the difficulty of local-level qualitative educational research in Amsterdam in light of changes related to contemporary political discourse on decades of immigration, especially from the 1970s onward, and increasingly critical assessments of Dutch education in the literature. It considers recent developments in the Netherlands while taking into account similar processes elsewhere in the European Union, with the aim of understanding taboos and problems associated with research on immigration, racism, and discrimination. Specifically, we utilize one researcher’s efforts to gain access to educationally based field sites to focus attention on the links between contextual political discourses and policies excluding immigrants with efforts to sociologically examine the experiences of immigrants. We conclude with a discussion of broader challenges faced by social scientists, including the benefits and disadvantages of having outsider status, attempting to utilize ethnographic methodology abroad when scrutinizing politically sensitive topics.

The meanings attached to “race” across the globe are myriad, particularly as anti-Islamic discourse once again links race and religion. Yet scholars lack a common terminology to discuss this phenomenon. This article hopes to expand critical race theory and scholarship across national lines. This critical examination of recent race-related scholarship provides scholars with empirical suggestions to uncover and document the different processes, mechanisms, trajectories and outcomes of potentially racialized practices that essentialize, dehumanize, “other,” and oppress minority groups while imbuing privileged groups with power and resources in nations across the globe. Ten empirical indicators will allow international researchers to assess the particular situation of different groups in different nations to determine whether, and the extent to which, they are subject to racialization. Specifically, this paper calls for a unified terminology that can accurately account for and address race when and where it occurs and a global broadening of a critical comparative dialogue of racial practices.

Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 The Sociological Context of Pedagogical Practices 9 2 Teachers' Two Pillars: Social Problems and Citizenship Education 27 3 The Emergence of the "Prejudice Reduction Course" 55 4 Fifty Years of Confusion 81 5 Consensus: Sociology ...

... John Stokes, William vanden Heuvel, Laneuville Scott Walker, Patricia Watkins, Lacy Ward, the Reverend L. Samuel Williams, and Ken Woodley. ... Kara Miles Turner and Brian Lee, two scholars who have conducted valuable research on Prince Edward, ditched the common ...