200 words research paper proposal
lishabaiyi
Raceahistoryofanidea2017raceandethnicityto19001.pptx
Comments and reflections from last week’s film?
The truth about stories is that they are all that we are. Stories tell us about to think about the past, the present and the future.
Stories can be dangerous.
Stories can help us heal.
Stories and responsibility
overview
Ideas of race are not timeless
Not to project the present into the past
Not human nature
Not a natural antipathy to difference
Race rooted in unequal relations of power
overview
Race as a social construct with regulatory power
The social construction of race
Historically grounded in European expansion
Institutional forms of racism
Racialization of the west
Enlightenment philosophers
1700-1800 scientific inquiry
classifying men & animals
1800s biological origins
19th century: the rise of modern race prejudice
Linked to changes in production & distribution
Race as a cultural idea
Ivan Hannaford
Race: A History of an Idea in the West
Not to project of our ideas into the past
Martin Bernal
Black Athena
The aryanization of Greece
2 models of Greek history
Ancient and euro-aryan
When Europe chose Greece as the cradle of western civilization, it erased everything about it that was Jewish, Arabic, and African
Frank Snowden
Before Color Prejudice
Color prejudice major issue in the modern world not so in the ancient world
Color not the focus of irrational sentiments or judging a man or a woman
Majority of slaves in the ancient world were white not black
No single ethnic group associated with slave status
Audrey Smedley
Dispossession of the Irish
The colonization of Ireland
Skin color is not the crucial sign of
Otherness
Avoid colourism
Douglas Lorimer
Color, Class and the Victorians
mid-19th century
New doctrine of racial supremacy
White skin becomes the essential marker of a gentleman
Crawford Killian , Go Do Some Great Thing: Black Pioneers of British Columbia
James Douglas, first governor of British Columbia
Born in Demerara, Guyana, mixed descent (his father was Scottish and his mother was Creole from Barbados)
Douglas married to Amelia Connolly, whose mother was Cree
Historian Sylvia Van Kirk
Many founding Victoria families mixed descent
Erasure of history
Invalidation of mixed marriages
“Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria” Issue BC Studies Studies no. 115/116 Autumn/Winter 1997
Robert Young
Colonial Desire
1850s
Hardening of social attitudes
From universal brotherhood to imperial hierarchy
(Indian Mutiny of 1857; American Civil War 1861-65; Jamaican Insurrection 1865; Red River Resistance 1869)
Rethinking slavery
History of whiteness
Some groups considered “white” today were not considered white in the early part of the twentieth century
Expanding the category of whiteness to include formerly excluded groups helps to support white supremacy
Marxist sociologists (Oliver Cox; Robert Miles)
Racism as integral process of capital accumulation
Race as an ideological effect that hides
Real economic relationships
Racism as an ideology to justify exploitation
Stigmatizing a group as inferior so that the exploitation of the group may be justified
(Miles) Racialization: process of signification tied to process of domination
Timothy Stanley
Older language of visible minority suggests that ‘difference’ is in “plain sight”
New language of racialization: cultural practices
social meanings assigned to bodies
“socially imagined difference”
social construction & contested categories of race
The social organization of exclusions
The distribution of political, social, cultural & economic power
Stanley cont.
Racialization as
Discursive process (Ideology)
Linguistic performance (Language)
Organization of the land (Space)
Representation (Art, Stories, Images)
Not about naturally occurring difference
But about the distribution of political, social, cultural & economic, power
Human difference does not make racisms but racisms make race
It is racism that makes particular differences (both real and imagined) count in specific times & places
Racism is not only about individual prejudice or discriminatory acts but racism is a historical process that leads people to believe that racial categories are meaningful and enact consequences on people based on the categories in which they are placed
Stanley continued
Racism is not the inevitable outcome of human difference
Racism makes particular or imagined difference important
Racism shapes how people interact with each other based on those differences
Racism, not race, structures contemporary societies
Stanley on racisms
Plural
Many different kinds of racisms
Nothing inevitable about racisms
Racism is contested and changes over time
Racism is the outcome of human action
Stanley on racialization
Race difference is made through social processes rather than natural or biological ones
Racialization is the term for those processes
Racialization involves patterns of cultural representation, knowledge production, social organization
Racialization gives meaning to ‘socially imagined difference”
Racialization organized around exclusions that have negative consequences for the racialized and excluded
Racializations are historically produced, invented & popularized over time
Language & representations
Language does not reflect race
Language makes race
Language about race does not record or document an objective reality of real biological, social & cultural difference; rather language creates the idea of such difference
Representation of racialized difference depends on socially & culturally available repertoires for representing difference
Representations racialize, they don’t record objective and natural differences
Racializations are always relational
One group is racialized in relation to another group
Representations active recreate pre-configured differences
These categories are historically invented, created & reinvented
Over time, these categories become common sense, taken for granted
Representations are signs, symbols, words, phrases, & sounds that communicate meanings
Meanings are never fixed
Power intervenes to refix meanings
Racialized exclusions
Material, spaces
Wealth, services, social statues
Networks, institutions, political rights
Symbolic exclusion
Self presentation ignored
Someone is excluded; someone is included
If someone is being oppressed; someone is being privileged
power
It takes power to organize exclusions
Government
Institutions
Rituals
Language
Knowledge
Political arrangements
Ways of being
This week’s readings
Notes
“Settler Colonialism Primer”
“Settler Colonialism Primer”
Colonialism usurps/ land / resources from one group of people for the benefit of another
Settler colonialism: replacement of indigenous peoples by settlers
Attempted erasure/ disappearance / dispossession of indigenous peoples
Invasion / colonialism is a structure not an event. Colonialism is ongoing
Settler: anyone not indigenous living on indigenous land
Not all settlers have equal power
“Settler Colonialism Primer”
Racial formation
Race as a doctrine
Racialization
Racism as a system, a web of interlocking, reinforcing institutions, economic, military, legal, educational, religious, cultural
As a system, racism affects every aspect of life in a country
“Settler Colonialism Primer”
Whiteness
Peggy McIntosh on white privilege
https://www.pcc.edu/resources/illumination/documents/white-privilege-essay-mcintosh.pdf
Dominant culture’s idea that white people are superior to other racialized groups
Despite history of invasion and genocide, image persists of white purity and superiority
White supremacy (not just KKK, neo-Nazi skins) but also a central pillar to the Canadian settler colonial system; inherent in every day thinking
Indoctrinated belief that settlers are entitled to the land
solutions
Creation of collective structures
Dismantle systems that enable these privileges
Collective ethic of accountability
Balance reciprocity
Unsettling of settlers
Repatriation of the land
Accountability to indigenous sovereignty
Settler moves to innocence
Terra nullius
Claiming indigenous ancestry
Fantasizing adoption
Colonial equivocation
Free your mind
Colour blindness
Land bridge migration
Helping
Cultural appropriation
Audra Simpson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWzXHqGfH3U
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus
Colonialism and anthropology as the means through which indigenous people have been known
Relationship between territorial dispossession & science
Imperatives of empires (to obtain space & resources)
Technologies of rule: knowing and representing people in those require more than military might, it required methods & knowledge
The distribution of power
Lawful land theft
Foreign power occupies the semantic and material space which is naturalized through the writing of history & the analytics of knowledge
Audra Simpson
Accounts generated by explorers & missionaries (now used as authoritative accounts by historians)
Stories of ‘difference,’ culture and race
But the story is really about sovereignty
Occupation naturalized as immigration, as multiculturalism as legalized settler occupation of the territory that Canada claims
Knowledge and empire
The links between the textual & juridical
Captain Cook in Australia; John Locke On Property
Doctrine of terra nullius
Forms of recognition & misrecognition are indebted to deep philosophical histories of seeing & knowing tied to legal fiat, enabled forms of empire
Land taken through “knowing” and force
Indigenous voices not heard or imperceptible
Colonialism as structure not event
Contemporary world order presumes & is predicated on indigenous disappearance
Move away from difference
Voice; sovereignty at the level of annunciation when people speak for themselves
Dissonance between the representations that were produced and what people say about themselves
Analysis when the goals & aspirations of the subjects are central
Sovereign articulations
Ethnographic refusal
An ethnographic calculus between what the reader needs to know and what Simpson refuses to write (p.105)
Refusal articulates a mode of sovereign authority over the representation of ethnographic data & so does not represent ‘everything’
To protect the concerns of community
To acknowledge asymmetrical relations
Refusal of the authority of the state
Reinstating a different kind of authority
“On Orientalism” Edward Said
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8EYd_Z_g
First 14 minutes
https://www-nfb-ca.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/film/reel_injun/
2009 Canadian documentary
From “The Savage Injun” (25:58) to “The Groovy Injun” (49:20)
