Race Flashcards
Fields (1990)
“Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pi) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology”
Ahmed (2007)
Whiteness can be described as an ongoing and unfinished history which orientates bodies in specific directions- affecting how they take up space and what they can do. Whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things in reach. Race then becomes a question of what is in reach, what is available to perceive and to do things with.
Whiteness functions as a habit; whiteness is lived as a background to experience. Whiteness gets reproduced by being seen as a form of positive residence. These bodies ‘trail behind actions’- they do not get stressed in their encounters with the world.
By exploring the world as a non-white body, Ahmed describes how whiteness becomes worldly by the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies (non-white) more than others. E.g. when we describe institutions as being ‘white’, we are point to how these spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others.
“Whiteness is invisible and unmarked, as the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation”
The institutionalization of whiteness involves work- we need to realize that they are not natural. Instead, institutions become naturalized as an effect of the repetitions of decisions made over time- shaping the surface of institutional spaces
Ahmed describes how non-white bodies learn to fade into the background. However, sometimes this is not possible, and these moments result in political and/or personal trouble.
Koslofsky (2014)
The human body is comprised of four humours (phlegm, blood, black bile and yellow bile) all of which should be in balance
The emphasis here was on body colour, not skin colour. Skin was not an independent or permanent category; it was transient and dependent upon external/internal dynamics
This theory translated into geo-Humouralism. This is the idea that humours adjusted to environmental factors- all affecting complexion. This meant that Europeans were not inherently white, skin was something permeable and constantly in flux.
Banton (2013)
“‘Race’ is a concept rooted in a particular culture and in a particular period of history which brings with it suggestions about how these differences are to be explained”
Haeckel (1868)
[on polygenesis] “If one must draw a sharp boundary between other primates and humans, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals”
Ziegler (1893)
[on evolutionary theory] “According to Darwin’s theory wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species… the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower… must give place to the stronger.”
Fanon (1952)
Explores the ways in which race exists socially among the black population. Black Skin, White Masks becomes a canon text for diagnosing and threatening the societal, physiological disorder that is racism.
The binary between black/white is not natural BUT it does shape society, and this must be recognized. Fanon explores the ways in which the colonizer/ colonized relationship is normalized.
He develops an understanding of racism as generating harmful psychological constructs that blinds the black ‘man’ to his subjection to a universalized white norm. One exists only in terms of their ‘blackness’- a black person is in the world, but is locked into his body.
In an attempt to escape these associations, Fanon argues that the black man wears a white mask and internalizes white cultural values creating a disjuncture between consciousness and the body.
Fanon’s explanation of the effects of being colonized by language was also influential. Speaking the language of the colonizer meant that the colonized accepted the collective consciousness of the colonial power. This identified blackness with inferiority, evil and sin
“I came into the world imbued with the will to find meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects”
Delaney (2002)
Explores some of the aspects of the relationship and relevance of geography to the question of race in North America. The question for geographers is ‘how does the racial formation shape space, give meaning to places and condition the experience of the embodied subjects?
Elements of the social (race, gender etc.) are not simply reflected in spatial arrangements- instead, spatialities are regarded as constituting and reinforcing aspects of the social. Race is what it is and does what it does precisely because of how it is given spatial expression. Space in an enabling technology through which race is produced
Delaney questions what geography (in terms of knowledge production about race) is for- his answer is through teaching. This teaching needs to unveil white privilege and white self-interest in dismantling patterns of racism.
To be white is to be unmarked in the cultural economy of race. White people can simply forget about race- it is somewhere else. Whiteness takes on the appearance of being normal, natural and neutral. The spatialities which produce this are therefore maintained.
McKittrick (2006)
This is an interdisciplinary analysis of black women’s geographies in the black diaspora. It seeks to consider what kinds of possibilities emergence when black studies encounter human geography.
Enabling us to think about the place of black subjects in the context of taking up spatial histories as they constitute our present geographic organization; engaging with a narrative that locates and draws in black histories and subjects to make visible the social lives that are often displaced and rendered un-geographical.
The relationship between black women and geography opens up a conceptual arena through which more humanly workable geographies can be imagined. Women are negotiating a geographic landscape that is upheld by a legacy of exploitation, exploration and conquest.
Social practices create these landscapes and contribute to how we organize, build and imagine our surroundings. Black subjects are not indifferent to these practices and landscapes- they are connected to them through crude racial-sexual hierarchies and their stake in the production of space.
By considering the histories of transatlantic slavery, we are able to see that black women are both shaped by and challenge the traditional geographic arrangements
The category of the black women is intimately connected with past and present spatial organizations. Racism and sexism are not simply bodily or identity based; they are spatial acts and illustrate black women’s geographical experiences and knowledges as they are made possible through domination.
This form of slavery profited from black enslavement by extracting material and philosophical black subordinations.
Nayak (2011)
Geographers began measuring and mapping immigrant communities between the 50-70s. The tendency was to treat race as an object that could be quantified, mapped and located; it was a discrete and stable unit for analysis
This was then challenged by the early social geographical approach that led to an un-writing of essentialist representation of race- where race was a definitive and knowable category. Many of these geographers have focused on exposing the material dimensions of race in everyday life and the competing practices of racialisation
This involved opening out of the conflicting representational strategies and signs that surrounded particular racialized places and events. Looking into how popular words and phrases come to inform and speak back to a broader repertoire of race thinking and race-making devices (e.g. slums, ghettos or riots)
This can be seen in the different understandings of a particular place; police may term is as a no-go area, outsiders may see it as dangerous, but to the inhabitants it is simply home. This shows that places are assigned multiple and contested meanings by different people; this is always in a state of negotiation and is a politics of representation.
It is now commonly accepted that race is a modern invention, a fiction and a social construction. This is a key problem for geographers who are interested in looking at how race affects social life
One way to do this (in the affectual turn in cultural geography) has been to look at feelings, emotions and affective dispositions
Fanon (1970) reminds us that much of what we think about race is largely imaginary and a projection of fear/desire located in the legacy of the European Enlightenment. In a post 9/11 world, it is futile to ignore how fear, affect and emotion shape attitudes towards nation-state policy and global security.
Bonnett (1996)
Approaches to race in geography follow…
1) empiricism
2) race relations
3) social constructionism
Anderson (1993)
This work is focused on the interlocking semiotic and material processes behind the racialization of urban space.
Case study: the ‘Aboriginal suburb’ of Redfern in Sydney.
She argues that Redfern is constructed out of multiple contradictory discourses and practices; the deconstruction of which provides a way for non essentialized theorization of the people and place
Anderson identifies two competing discourses that have contributed to the racialization of Redfern:
1) ‘Aboriginal rights’ argument that position the suburb at the heart of the ‘Aboriginal community’
2) Redfern as a physical place that symbolically coalesces the multiplicity of indigenous voices into a ‘Pan-Aboriginal struggle against White Australia’
Anderson directs her critique at the fact that this cultural and political invention has come into conflict with racist, white constructs of Redfern and Aboriginality during the 1970s. She shows how politicians draw on an established set of images in order to win the support of white residents
Redfern has therefore become a central and disputed category in socio-spatial conflict which needs to be understood as historically contingent.
