Table Of ContentEdited by
Philomena Essed, Karen Farquharson,
Kathryn Pillay and Elisa Joy White
Relating Worlds of Racism
Philomena Essed • Karen Farquharson
Kathryn Pillay • Elisa Joy White
Editors
Relating Worlds
of Racism
Dehumanisation, Belonging, and the
Normativity of European Whiteness
Editors
Philomena Essed Karen Farquharson
Antioch University University of Melbourne
Yellow Springs, OH, USA Parkville, VIC, Australia
Kathryn Pillay Elisa Joy White
School of Social Sciences Department of African American and
University of KwaZulu-Natal African Studies
Durban, South Africa University of California at Davis
Davis, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-78989-7 ISBN 978-3-319-78990-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78990-3
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Preface
Populist views that foreground Whiteness as the formative criterion for
belonging in contemporary societies significantly underpin current politi-
cal and social discourse in various regions of the world. Whether cloaked in
anti-immigration rhetoric such as Australian approaches to immigration
detention, or discourses of security masking anti-Muslim racism as is cur-
rently occurring in the United States, the implicit yet often masked engage-
ment with racism represents a legacy of colonial, white supremacist, racial
and cultural hierarchies that persist in contemporary times. This centralisa-
tion of Whiteness in notions of belonging and the construction of the
European as the universal human, marginalises Blackness in particular.
Old and new forms of dehumanisation continue to reinforce European
rooted hierarchies of races representing Black lives and ways of being as
less human. Whether Blackness is expressed or perceived culturally,
socially, or phenotypically, the continued devaluing of individuals and
communities perceived or identifying as Black is manifest in a variety of
arenas, which include anti-immigration policies, violent policing, profil-
ing of individuals under the guise of national security, aesthetics of cul-
ture and physical appearance, and curtailed access to resources. Starting
at the end of the 20th century, global proliferations of biotechnological
techniques facilitated the return of never-gone ways of racialised think-
ing about bodies, health, morality and safety. The centuries old stereo-
type of Blackness which relates to wildness being tamed and subjected to
v
vi Preface
surveillance lives on. And so do forms of resistance. Patterns of racism
influence and reinforce each other across locations and nations.
Individuals and institutions can identify in terms of racist ideologies
across borders, but also in terms of racism as experience. Antiracism
knows no borders either. Critical scholars, activists and forms of resis-
tance influence each other globally. For these and other reasons contribu-
tions to this volume were selected in view of enabling readers to find
recognition and relate to developments across nations and peoples.
The global reach of 21st century Black liberation movements such as
#BlackLivesMatter indicates the prevalence and relatedness of contempo-
rary anti-Black racism across local communities. Despite decades of strug-
gle for social justice and dignity, racism continues to be a pressing social
issue and, quite significantly, racism emerges and extends from cultural,
social and political systems in which anti-Blackness finds its core. Indeed
there has been a backlash against policies to promote equity in many
nations. Anti-Black, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism in the United
States, Europe, Australia, South Africa and other places are all part of ongo-
ing patterns of racism that, while being context-specific, are related and
share key features that continue to place targeted groups, in particular
African descent and indigenous populations, at the bottom of racialised
social hierarchies. While certainly not suggesting a hierarchy of bad and
worse racisms, the contemporary obsessive European and US racialisation
of religion in the name of anti-terrorism also enables more open forms of
anti-Black racism. In this context the term Afrophobia has been introduced
recently in various European circles of activism and scholarship. While
‘race’ is a social construction, the material effects of racism have profound
and lasting impacts on individual lives. As global movements of people
increase, ongoing colonial anti-Black discourses that contribute to the glo-
balisation of racism become reinforced and further entrenched.
The title of this volume is Relating Worlds of Racism. We aim to do just
that in this volume, showing how racism trajectories and manifestations in
different locations relate to and influence each other. In light of this the
collection performs two tasks. First, it works to unmask and foreground
ways in which notions of European Whiteness have found form in a variety
of global contexts that continue to sustain racism as an operational norm
resulting in exclusion, violence, humiliations, human rights negations, iso-
lation and limited degrees of citizenship for individuals who are not
Prefac e vii
racialised as White. The chapters in this book specifically implicate
European Whiteness – whether attempting to reflect, negate, or obtain it –
in social structures that facilitate and normalise racism. Second, the book
interrogates the dehumanisation of Blackness, arguing that dehumanisa-
tion enables the continuation of racism in White dominated societies. Our
chapters explore instances of dehumanisation across different contexts,
highlighting that although the forms of dehumanisation may be locally
specific, the outcomes are continually negative for those racialised as Black.
Dehumanisation can be absolute, as in the animalisation of Blackness; it
can also be relative as in equating being Black with a lesser cultural, social
or psychological degree of being human, thereby normalising (imagined)
characteristics of Whiteness as the epitome of humanity. The politicisation
of individual lives turned into faceless, nameless, feeling-less and human-
less refugees on populist governing agenda’s across, in particular, the eco-
nomically rich nations, continues to feed this trend.
Unlike most volumes, which focus on either one context or a compari-
son of two or three locales, this volume extends the analysis of racism
beyond Europe and the United States, and, when considering the west,
brings forth fresh perspectival examinations of the extent and manifesta-
tion of racism in ways that have not often been explored in related litera-
ture. The volume includes contributions from North America, Western
and Eastern Europe, Africa, South America and Australia.
Taken together, the chapters argue that while anti-Black racism is
enacted in different ways in different contexts, it shares key elements
everywhere that maintain and reinforce racist ideologies: beliefs in racial
hierarchy, positioning of Black peoples at the bottom of the racial hierar-
chy, humiliations, and well entrenched structures that reinforce European
Whiteness as the desirable norm. Fundamentally, anti-Black racism relies
on the implicit dehumanisation of the ‘Black other’ through hierarchies
and practices with far-reaching effects on global communities that are not
racialised as White. The two operate in relation to each other, maintain-
ing colonialist racial hierarchies in our post-colonial times. The volume is
organised across two related themes. Part one explores ‘Racism and the
normativity of European Whiteness’; and part two interrogates ‘Racism
and the dehumanisation of the imagined Black’. Together they provide
an innovative and useful lens into both the shared mechanisms of racism
across contexts and the specificities of local racisms.
viii Preface
Part I: Racism and the Normativity of European
Whiteness
The eight chapters in part one explore how the normativity of European
Whiteness contributes to racism in Africa, Mexico, Australia, Eastern and
Western Europe and the United States. Each chapter highlights a specific
example of Whiteness and its relationship to racism.
In Chap. 1 Moses Ochonu sets the scene of an alternative way of
examining the ‘normativity of European Whiteness’ as we see how it per-
sists in a community that is predominantly racialised as Black. Ochonu
links postcolonial systems of privilege, identification and social hierar-
chies that emerge from colonisation with contemporary African social
practices. He argues that this historical racist legacy that links Black moral
character and conformation to White standards of respectability with
civilisation and worth continues to shape contemporary African society,
maintaining ideologies of White supremacy in Black societies. This chap-
ter highlights the ways in which colonial legacies continue to maintain
the normativity of European Whiteness in the post-colony:
Racial pathologies in Africa often take the form of what Anglophone
Africans call colonial mentality, a term which refers to the conscious and
subconscious mimicry of behavioural and cultural standards established by
European colonisers, European expatriates, and other perceived agents of
Euro-American modernity. Anglophone Africans use the rubric of colonial
mentality to express or lament many practices, attitudes, and states of
mind.
In this way, Whiteness shapes experiences, even when there are few
White people present. Danielle Boaz then moves us into a more direct
consideration of Whiteness through exploring the conversion by white
people to minority religions and the interrogation thereof by the United
States legal system. By examining four of the most significant cases
related to religious freedom in the United States in the last forty years,
Boaz reveals how the court regulates Whiteness in an attempt to rescue
“innocent [white] victims” from religious practices often regarded as
Prefac e ix
uncivilised, and in opposition to religious practices from the West,
arguing that decision making by the court in these free exercise cases
continue to “hinge on the intersections of race and acceptable spiritual
practices”.
Kathryn Pillay moves us out of an exclusive Black/White binary
through an examination of the ‘Indian problem’ in South Africa. South
Africa provides an interesting case as it remained overtly organised around
White supremacist apartheid racial ideologies through most of its post-
colonial period. Thus, the norms described by Ochonu as implicitly valo-
rising Whiteness in other African nations were organising principles and
policies in South Africa as well. By unpacking the management of
‘Indians’ in the early 20th century, Pillay is able to shed light on the con-
tinued contemporary racist othering of South Africans of ‘Indian’ descent.
She critiques the persistence of racial classification in post-apartheid
South Africa as a way of maintaining White privilege at the expense of
other groups.
While Pillay’s engagement with the perceptions of ‘indigeneity’ in
the South African context provides an insight into the more invidious
impacts of such claims to indigeneity, Sharon Fuller in Chap. 4 high-
lights empowering claims to indigeneity by a negatively racialised
‘other’ who is not considered ‘of the land’. Reading Pillay and then
Fuller provides a fascinating opportunity to consider how circum-
stances that are prima-facie conditionally similar, can be so dissimilar
or offer different power-related outcomes when one interjects the con-
dition of Whiteness as normative. Fuller demonstrates that while west-
ern narratives of Blackness locate people of African descent within the
“realm of the primitive” the Gulla Geechee in opposition to this, con-
struct themselves as powerful, remaining “steadfast in pursuits of self-
determination”. Pillay and Fuller illustrate how racism has similar
dynamics across very different contexts.
Ian Law and Nikolay Zakharov then take us out of the positionality ‘of
colour’ to consider the function of European Whiteness in navigating
racial hierarchies and sometimes marginal spaces of perceived Whiteness.
This chapter interrogates how “new nationhood projects” in post-Soviet
states, together with significant socio-economic and political processes
x Preface
contribute to the continuing trajectory of racism in Russia and the delib-
erate “investment” in Whiteness. It further highlights links between
Russian and eastern racism, and western racisms.
Law and Zakharov’s tracking of the development of racial categorisa-
tions in Eastern Europe is particularly interesting when juxtaposed with
Linnete Manrique’s examination of racial categorisation in the ‘mestizaje’
identity construct or trope persistently manifest in Mexico in Chap. 6.
Bringing us into the realm of media studies, Manrique conducts an anal-
ysis of Crónica de castas, a Mexican television show that chronicles daily
experiences of racism and classism. She argues that Crónica de castas chal-
lenges the official Mexican racial ideology of mestizaje (defined as racial
and cultural mixture), highlighting how mestizaje is underpinned by a
desire for Whiteness. Despite the very different postcolonial context of
Mexico from those discussed in the previous chapters, and the different
mechanisms by which Whiteness is reinforced as the normative category,
its dominance nevertheless persists.
In Chap. 7 we move from Mexico to Australia and an exploration of
how racism is managed in junior sport. Karen Farquharson, Ramón
Spaaij, Ruth Jeanes, Sean Gorman and Dean Lusher examine how diverse
junior sports clubs attempt to protect their players from racism through
informal means, such as negotiating with other clubs immediately after
matches. While less stressful for the children experiencing racism, these
informal means are also largely ineffective. The chapter highlights the
challenges of enacting antiracist efforts in a context where racism is at
times seen as a legitimate sporting tactic.
After considering the purchase of Whiteness through the lens of
sport in Australia, we move to Chap. 8, Alina Rzepnikowska’s examina-
tion of Polish migrants and the fluidity of social capital corresponding
to racialised Polish identities in the UK and Spain. This final chapter of
Part One, identifies that Polish migrants’ access to the privilege of
Whiteness is contingent upon whether their European status is per-
ceived as marginal or valued as negatively/positively foreign. European
identities either afford access to the privilege of Whiteness or become a
close cousin to Blackness. This, of course, also moves us to the next
section.
