Critical Whiteness

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.

In recent years a host of scholars have considered the contributions of various critical and poststructural perspectives to the study of college student development. This body of work has drawn on critical race theory, intersectionality, and queer theory, among others, to advance more power-conscious approaches to student development. Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), a body of scholarship that seeks to expose the ways in which whiteness functions to maintain racial oppression, has received far less attention in the study of college student development (Jones & Abes, 2013). Consistent with third wave theorizing, we considered the contributions of CWS to student development research and theory.

This contribution interprets the east-central European post-liberal governments’
recent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights hysteria in the context of the increasing dependence of the region’s societies for livelihood on employment in the western EU, the widespread racialization of east European labor in the western EU, and the refusal of east European political elites and societies at large to consider possible “Left” critiques of the EU. Given those circumstances, and laboring under related anxieties, post-state-socialist political elites and societies have assumed a fundamentalist-racialist posture. They redirect their repressed anger toward incoming refugees, claim an ahistorical, essential kind of Whiteness and contribute to rigidifying European discussions of “race.”

To access the article, please follow the link to the publisher https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/unbearable-whiteness-of-the-polish-plumber-and-the-hungarian-peacock-dance-around-race/59244B15CB295020E51DF252BDA76604.

If the above link does not work, please look up Slavic Review in your own institution's library website and download the paper from there.

If that fails, please contact the authors at jborocz@rutgers.edu or jborocz@gmail.com or msarkar@binghamton.edu and they will be happy to provide a copy. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Abstract: The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Section One is a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multi-sited, global institution that is shaped by and shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Section Two provides a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. Section Five is a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the “helping” discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to “help” Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop.

In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance.

This essay succinctly combines the historical trajectories of whiteness in Europe and the United States regarding Spanishness underscoring the situationality of whiteness at large as an ideological means that goes beyond the mere physiology of white bodies. Firstly, the essay probes into the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization of Spanishness. It is, then, followed by an exploration of racism against, and racialization of, Hispanic whiteness in the United States. Lastly, this essay offers reflections on the current emergence of Hispanic Whiteness in the United States. Theorizing the case of White Spaniards who transition between ‘whitenesses’ from Europe to the United States –while revealing some specificities on the conceptualization of parallel rhetorics of whiteness– informs readers about the historical, ideological fantasies of race discourse as a whole.

This is the first-ever volume appeared on whiteness in the Hispanic and Lusophone Studies and published by Transmodernity in 2018. Overall, this issue offers a thorough and comprehensive interdisciplinary study of whiteness including a fair range of aesthetic forms, periods and traditions. I hope that it will become an intense, enriching, interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue, one that will contribute to the rethinking of how the structures of difference and the processes of legitimization operate and replicate in contemporary societies and towards a revealing of white structures in the context of Lusophone countries and global Hispanism.

This paper considers the positionality and reflexivity of non- Romani, ally-identified researchers vis-à-vis insider/outsider research by critically examining – or queer(y)ing – non-Romani researcher identity and the privilege that goes with it. On a theoretical level this can be facilitated by, for example, queer theoretical concepts and the concept of critical whiteness. Critical whiteness is “queer” by virtue of being counter/non/ anti-normative in relation to whiteness as a social norm (white- normativity). In practical terms, employing queer, feminist, and critical whiteness methodologies means that reflective and reflexive researchers conducting research “with,” “for,” and “on” Roma do not “have to be” Romani in order to participate in knowledge production on Romani communities. Nonetheless, it implicates their ability to critically examine their own privilege and challenge it accordingly, that is, not only academically but also politically and socially.

Als Gründungsmitglied der Politgruppe Reclaim Society! 2010, sowie mit einem zeitlichen Abstand zu dessen Auflösung im Herbst 2012, versuche ich in folgendem Artikel einige Reflexionen zur politischen Arbeit bei/mit RS! öffentlich wahrnehmbar und somit diskutierbar zu machen. Dies ist vor allem durch die konstante Unterstützung, solidarische Kritik und Bestärkung verschiedener Genoss*innen angestoßen worden und lässt sich im aktuellen Rahmen eines sowohl in linken als auch in PoC-politischen Kontexten verallgemeinernden und undifferenzierten RS!-Bashing als Versuch werten, Überlegungen und selbstkritische Positionierungen für eine transparente und ehrliche linksradikale Politik greifbarer zu machen.

Zuerst erschienen auf: https://cosasquenoserompen.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/20/shut-up-and-listen-reflexionen-zur-arbeit-vonmit-reclaim-society/ (September 2015)

Gender is a catastrophic oppressive imposition. Gender structures and is structured by settler colonialism, just as it marks and is marked by ongoing investments in anti-blackness. Not only is gender a violent erasure of Indigenous ways of being, but as Spillers (1987) detailed, gender-specifically femininity and womanness-are foreclosed to Black women as an ongoing effect of chattel slavery. In this article, we focus on the pronouns she, her and hers as an artifact of white womanness. In so doing, we trace how white women not only articulate gender as a site of possession-here we specifically draw on Harris's (1993) notion of the absolute right to exclude-but consume gender in a move toward necrocapitalism. Put another way, white women consume gender to further their presumed goodness, at the same time as-and indeed as a function of-desiring the death of trans women. As a result, trans women are rendered killable subjects, with their killability acting as a necessity for the furtherance of the catastrophe of gender itself. Through the commodification of the pronoun as a signifier of gender (e.g. pronoun stickers and pins, the performative nature of bringing trans women to speak without any resulting transformative change), we argue this acts to further necrocapitalism, especially in the notion "economy of deadly violence", as it "ensures the maintenance of authority's spread and permanence" (Sheehi in conversation with Shalhoub-Kevorkian; see Introduction to this special issue for further details).

The exclusive geographical placement of industrial machinery—what I henceforth refer to as “the machine”—was singularly important in securing and stabilizing the White working class
male subject as an exceptionally productive one. Such spatial anchoring allowed the machine’s profoundly superior technological abilities to be singularly claimed by, associated with, mapped onto, and incorporated into the body of industrial man and nation. In so doing, both were categorically rendered phallic (exceptional) agents of progress and history.
      The geopolitical and psychical security afforded by  supremacist national and bodily mappings was significantly challenged in the 1970s when deindustrialization and restructuring began to gain strong international hold. The slow removal of one of the main historical props of White male subjectivity and nationhood—the machine—led some to armor themselves psychically against (racialized) others, accusing the latter of stealing their industrial jobs, or of stealing (migrating) illegally into the nation. I argue that such defensiveness must be seen not simply in terms of simple economic stresses related rationally to unemployment, but in psychical terms as anxieties unconsciously related to bodily and, as we will see, parental loss.

This paper is structured in three parts. Firstly, the introduction aims to visualize the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization, thus offering an explanation to the acute lack of studies regarding Spanish whiteness. Subsequently, I offer a study that revisits the cultural, symbolical transformation following the Transición Española through Amanece, que no es poco (1988) to examine how Spain disregarded notions of mestizaje in this period, beginning to bound up Spanish whiteness with European multiculturalism, as much as with a long-imagined, Western modernity. The analysis demonstrates how Spain instrumentalized blackness merely as an ideological means to raise awareness of social distance in the Spanish white racial formation, while subsuming the experience of blackness into the cultural practices of whiteneness. To conclude, I link the study to the present day’s racial conceptions, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, Spain may have decisively integrated into a relatively homogeneous, glocal sensibility of whiteness.

This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and commemorating white activism against apartheid, specifically war resistance in 1980s South Africa. As such, the chapter analyses the politics of complicity in activism by privileged subjects, the obscuring and exposing of complicity in the commemoration of previous activism and the role of academic research in upholding and threatening ongoing ‘ignorance’ about such complicity.  In a reflexive account of researching and analysing the social and political activism of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), a white led anti-apartheid movement and specifically the responses to published work and analysis of the ECC, I argue that the ECC challenged many fundamental aspects of militarised apartheid governance, but my analysis of the movement also traced the compromises and contradictions of the ECC and the gendered political messages it posed. As white South Africans, activists were also caught in debates about complicity and privilege in racial, economic and gendered terms. Furthermore, when researching in the 2000s, I became aware that former activists and conscientious objectors were keen to obscure former divisions in the movement and emphasise their agency and heroism in opposing apartheid, narratives that fed into broader political discourses premised on white citizenship claims in contemporary South Africa. The chapter explores the outraged responses to analyses by some former ECC activists, resistance to the study and questioning of whiteness as a salient category of research and an attempt by the (white led) parliamentary opposition (the Democratic Alliance) to rehabilitate white liberal agency in ending apartheid and discrediting the ANC government. This white 'backlash' politics is also contextualised as emergent from the responses to the  #RHODESMUSTFALL and # FEESMUSTFALL movements. The chapter also relates this to the increased focus on supposed white suffering during apartheid (of conscripts and other soldiers) and the decentring of injustice suffered by the black population. I argue that that these are socio-political narratives premised on ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2000) and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007 ; Steyn 2012): a politics of obscuring and complicit with ongoing white privilege.

The purpose of this multicase study was to examine how race functioned to shape life in campus residence halls. Guided by theories of neoliberalization and racialization, this study highlights the racialized meanings attached to particular campus housing options across three universities in the United States. I highlight commonly held racialized perceptions of campus housing and the ways these meanings reify racist ideologies about Students of Color. Results illuminate how such racialization functions to police racial boundaries and creates a social status hierarchy on campus. Although living on campus is frequently championed as an important learning environment that prompts cross-racial interaction, this study illuminates how campus housing arrangements mirror broader patterns of racial segregation.

As Europeans we are all privileged. Not acknowledging that fact, makes us guilty. This paper was developed throughout a semester abroad in India and reflects personal lessons about privilege, class, and gender. It centres privilege not as something god given but rather as a constructed set of mechanisms that is still unchallenged by many Europeans, because doing so would also mean challenging the foundation of our origins: The European nation-states – Humanism, Christianity, Enlightenment, Capitalism, and so on – in short, everything that we have been, in a Freudian sense, repressing for so long would then painfully return. Nevertheless, it is a necessary process to initialize a project of real decolonization and liberation, and to ask for a starting dialogue, on an eye to eye level. The psychological and the political reconciliation will have to go hand in hand in this dialogue, though, it is questionable if there can ever be anything but a one-sided (colonized) psychological reconciliation. In this essay, I outline how our brain sanctions moral misbehavior in a way that we feel guilty for it. Furthermore, this paper should be read as an appeal to understand this process as the major task of our generation and to stop talking about climate change or development aid, as single standing challenges.

The purpose of this paper, given at the conference on INEQUALITY at the Munich Bavarian American Academy weekend July 9-11, 2015 conference ( see  http://www.amerika-akademie.de/php/pub/main.php?db_id=663&lang_id=1)  will be to join the recently revived debate about "inequality" from an antagonistic, and quite an agonizing angle.  Addressing the so-called „water crisis“ in one of the US’ oldest, post-industrial, post-modern and socially precarious urban zones demands, that is, to put classical leftist-social-democratic and even Marxist repertoires of reading late capitalist politics of decay – in which the term and concept of inequality originates and resonates – in sharp relief.

This essay probes into the rise and deterioration of multiculturalism in the West, paired with the notion of white guilt. It further explores the shift of the Western discourse to inform of the present-day conflation of populism and white nostalgia, which, this essay claims, may be the result of the end of the white guilt era and the subsequent rise to what I refer to as magical populism: a racial desire of the West to rewind globalisation in an effort to restore the lost sense of home and security of whites. The essay engages in a review of literature on critical post-theories, moving from the Frankfurt School to, among others, postcolonialism and postmodernism. It provides a trajectory of intellectual thinking as well as of the cultural dynamics from the end of WWII to date. It then explores how this trajectory fits into the current white political and cultural turn to scepticism over the multicultural paradigm with which to build Western societies in a globalised world. As such, this essay contributes to the study of whiteness in assessing the concept of white guilt in the West as advanced by Shelby Steele almost two decades ago.

Mises à mort et nouveaux princes, pour répondre à Black Lives Matter et à tout désir d’émancipation, la République française dégaine ses politiques de respectabilité. Stratégies de terreur et de récompenses, rien de nouveau qu’un vieux cocktail colonial qui divise, pour mieux régner, l’indigène et le servant. Un air de déjà-vu pour le conteur créole. « Les Empires Intérieurs », texte de 2019, écrit à l’horizon de « l’année de l’Afrique en France » est plus que jamais d’actualité.

"L’année 2020 devait être l’année de l’Afrique en France. Année électorale oblige, cette grande manifestation nationale augurait de quelques cacophonies et de nouveaux exercices de contorsion linguistique pour séparer les bons sauvages de l’ivraie et les électeurs des terroristes. Comme on ne sait plus très bien si « la colonisation fut un crime contre l’humanité » ou pas tout à fait puisqu’« il y a eu des éléments de civilisation1», l’année de l’Afrique qui était aussi celle des Jeux au Japon promettait d’inscrire le dérapage contrôlé aux disciplines olympiques. On aurait pu faire l’aveu que ce n’était pas l’année de toutes les Afriques, mais plutôt l’année d’une certaine Afrique en France, une Afrique luisante à souhait, une Afrique sans signaux faibles2, sans ombre, sans trace sur le front, projetant à l’envie de splendides signaux forts, Afrique exubérante et hors d’elle-même comme une marchandise qui ne cesse de déborder de son emballage bariolé."

I. PROBLEM: LACK OF ALTRUISM IN MEDIA PORTRAYAL
You can read English Anglo-Saxon able-bodied Hellenistic narcissism in any Guardian headline. For example, in Prince Harry being the first Royal to reach the South Pole, the physically challenged are compromised in "Prince Harry's Race Abandoned for Safety Reasons".
II. SOLUTION: SHIFTING FOCUS TO GENERATE IRONIC ALTRUISM FOR HANDICAPPED AS "PIGS"
I propose a change in cognitive styles regarding the handicapped begins with changing the title to "Prince Harry is the first Royal to Reach the South Pole while Wounded Warrior Altruistic Pigs' South Pole Race Cancelled by a Princely Media Presence."
III. METHODOLOGY: UTILIZING IRONIC APPEAL IN ANALYZING AND SHIFTING FOCUS OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES

Franks, P.E (1988) : Favouritism:  a dynamic process in organizational politics.  South Africa Journal of Labour Relations 12 (1), pages 21 - 25.

Franks, P.E (1987) : Favouritism : a dynamic process in organizational politics.  Paper presented to the 5 National Congress of the Psychological Association of South Africa, University of Cape Town, 7 - 9 September.

Paper presented to the Psycological Association of South Africa Congress, Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg, 7th October, 1986.
Published as:
Franks, P.E (1987) : White resistance to black advancement : empirical findings.  South African Journal of Labour Relations, 11 ( 1), pages 30 -39.

""Contemporaneous with the rise of the post?racial has been the critique of mainstream HipHop as minstrel reprise (Kitwana 2003, Crouch 2004, Little Brother 2005, Louis 2006, Ogbar 2007, Paris 2008). My paper applies Toni Morrison’s concept of American Africanism to this critique in order to expose how versions of it, like post?racial discourse, may serve to secure white supremacism while announcing its absence. 
The post?racial, as deployed in mainstream discourse, is a rearticulation of ‘colourblind’ racism.  Although both terms have relatively recent origins, America has performed projects of domination through disavowal from its inception.  In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison introduces the concept of “American Africanism”  to explore how an artificial African presence, whether overtly denigrated, ostensibly embraced or implausibly omitted, has always functioned as the foil for forging an American identity. Such projects pervade disparate national discourses, from the constitution, to the first manifestations of popular culture - the minstrel show - to the development of a literary canon.  While Morrison’s work focuses on the latter, she opens an invitation to broader applications. 
I accept Morrison’s implicit invitation to uncover the workings of American Africanism in other genres, specifically, as a crucial motivation behind the production of mainstream rap. For Morrison, blacks haunt USAmerican canonical literature even in their ostensive absence; an ever-present shadow informs the meanings of USAmerican and white, and USAmerican as white. Correspondingly, I argue that in USAmerican mainstream rap, where whites are seemingly absent, a persistent halo of whiteness looms. Exposing how American Africanism works through rap culture offers a fuller and more complex way to understand minstrelsy in rap. Such an analysis provides a broader vantage to examine the context in which black artists participate in modern minstrelsy. Further, it flags causal factors beyond individual black cultural producers and towards systemic representations of the national imaginary.""

An innovative, wide-ranging collection of essays that address 'trans' topics in spirited and challenging ways."-Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Columbia University "

Lori Celaya and Sonja Watson's intriguing and wideranging collection explores the multiple dimensions of the trans prefix-transnational, transcultural, transcontinental, and even transracial-among people of Latin American origin in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. This well-edited volume provides fresh insights on novels, poems, chronicles, popular songs, telenovelas, and other cultural genres, especially by promoting a broad interdisciplinary dialogue about the transformative implications of the massive movement of people across national borders. I recommend it as a significant and original contribution to the intertwined fields of Latino, Latin American, Caribbean. and Afro-Latino studies."-Jorge Duany, author of Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (2011)

During the first one hundred and fifty years of European settlement in Australia, whiteness as a social construction underlay continuous definition and redefinition with regard to its boundaries of belonging. Initially, the convicts usually dwelled at the social fringes of the early settler society and only expe- rienced symbolical admittance to ›whiteness‹ in contradistinction to the indige- nous people. Subsequently, members of the labour movement were able to draw on ideological elements of ›whiteness‹ to maintain their ground in the struggle against capital. When, at the turn of the twentieth century, legislation and a broad desire for a ›White Australia‹ helped the Queensland sugar industry to become the model for a physically, socially and demographically ›white‹ industry, labour was enabled to fight successfully for tangible ›wages of whiteness‹. Though the consumption of Australian sugar then became the outward profession of faith to white supremacy, during the following dec...

During the first one hundred and fifty years of European settlement in Australia, whiteness as a social construction underlay continuous definition and redefinition with regard to its boundaries of belonging. Initially, the convicts usually dwelled at the social fringes of the early settler society and only experienced symbolical admittance to ›whiteness‹ in contradistinction to the indigenous people. Subsequently, members of the labour movement were able to draw on ideological elements of ›whiteness‹ to maintain their ground in the struggle against capital. When, at the turn of the twentieth century, legislation and a broad desire for a ›White Australia‹ helped the Queensland sugar industry to become the model for a physically, socially and demographically ›white‹ industry, labour was enabled to fight successfully for tangible ›wages of whiteness‹. Though the consumption of Australian sugar then became the outward profession of faith to white supremacy, during the following decades the subsidization of Australian sugar remained the basis on which doubts about the intra-Australian demarcation of ›whiteness‹ were expressed.