Racial Whitening as a Global ‘Innovation’

‘Abdu’l-Baha came to North America in 1912 to bring about what may be characterized as “interracial emancipation.” As son, successor and spokesman of Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha proclaimed Baha’i principles of ideal race relations (including interracial marriage), gender equality, and world peace: “I am here in this country making an appeal on behalf of universal peace, unity, love and brotherhood,” ‘Abdu’l-Baha told a journalist. “The Bahaist [sic] must be free from religious prejudice, patriotic prejudice, racial prejudice.” These were radical teachings during the Jim Crow era of forced racial segregation, to be sure. The black intelligentsia took notice.

We are all Americans!: the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA

When the well-respected scholar and editor W. E. B. Du Bois arrived in Los Angeles, California, in May 1913 as the guest of African Wesley Chapel, one of the elite African American churches in the city, it was estimated that more than two thousand people--African Americans, other people of color, and even some whites--were there to greet him; and over the next week they showed him westerners' grand hospitality. Subsequently, he published in The Crisis magazine a detailed account of his visit to various parts of the Golden State. Du Bois was greatly impressed by the accomplishments of the African Americans he met, and he believed he had found in the City of Angels something unique and special about the nature of race relations: One never forgets Los Angeles and Pasadena: the sensuous beauty of roses and orange blossoms, the air and the sunlight and the hospitality of all its races linger on. Du Bois deemed Los Angeles among the best places for African Americans to live in the entire nation because of the relative freedom from overt discrimination in housing, employment, and the political arena. (1) Du Bois arrived in the city on the eve of World War I and observed certain differences between black Angelenos and African Americans across the country. The city's vibrant social and political environment was comprised of not just black--white interactions, but a range of multiethnic relations involving Anglo and African Americans, Native and Mexican Americans, and European and Asian immigrants. (2) Race relations in the South were bifurcated, but Du Bois found African Americans in Los Angeles working and living alongside Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and European immigrants, and other people from all over the world. Du Bois traveled throughout California and conducted an unofficial field study that many researchers believe was the first sociological study of African Americans in that state by an African American scholar. (3) Du Bois found that Los Angeles had a pleasant and healthful climate that seemed to have a positive effect on the residents because Angelenos were hospitable and African Americans were pushing [forward] and energetic. (4) Agricultural and industrial workers as well as small business owners had beautiful homes, and they lived and worked with other people of color. Du Bois also reported that black Angelenos working together had created many employment and business opportunities for themselves. (5) Du Bois focused primarily on the African American professional and business elites who had organized day nurseries, homes for working girls, and other charitable and self-help organizations. He actually toured the businesses owned and operated by African Americans throughout the city, particularly in the downtown area. (6) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Du Bois also commented on racist practices and segregation in Los Angeles. The Anglo-owned hotels and restaurants and some local storeowners refused service or discriminated against African Americans. In the face of such discrimination, Du Bois reported that African Americans regularly challenged the practices: Black folk are fighters and not followers of the doctrine of surrender. (7) However, he understood that race relations in California were much more complex. DuBois observed, Here, I had my first sight on the Pacific and realized how California faces the newest color problem, the problem of the relation of the Orient and Occident. The colored people of California do not realize the bigness of this problem and their own logical position. (8) With immigrants arriving daily from around the world, California had become a crossroads for clashing cultures and economic conflicts. Du Bois recognized the potential competition coming from people of Asian descent, particularly Japanese immigrants, in business and labor. He first noticed this competition in San Diego along the harbor, but he also observed it in other parts of the state. …

Individual and systemic racism are pervasive in K-12 schools in the United States and threaten the well-being of Students of Color. Understanding the extent to which school psychology research has examined students’ perceptions of individual and systemic racism in schools is critical for advancing the field’s antiracist scholarship and practice. The present review systematically evaluated empirical articles published in eleven major school psychology journals between 2011 and 2021 that focused on K-12 students’ perceptions of individual and systemic racism. Twenty studies met criteria for inclusion and examined racism in relation to: (a) interpersonal relationships; (b) mental health and psychological outcomes; (c) academic outcomes; (d) school climate; and (e) behavioral outcomes. A majority of these studies included racially/ethnically diverse students (n = 6; 30%) or exclusively Black/African American students (n = 7; 35%) in their samples. Most used quantitative methods (n = 16; 80%), whereas relatively few employed qualitative methods (n = 4; 20%). These findings suggest the presence of a foundational yet developing literature on students’ perceptions of racism in schools. Implications for school psychology practitioners and researchers in furthering antiracist efforts are discussed.

New Geographies of China and Latin America Relations:Introduction to the Special Issue Julie Michelle Klinger and Tom Narins The geographic relations between China and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) have deepened and diversified in the twenty-first century, coinciding with the ebb and flow of the "pink tide" in Latin America, massive Chinese economic growth, and a recalcitrant United States. Accordingly, grounded, transnational, and ethnographically driven research on this relationship has emerged in recent years, with contributions coming from across the social sciences (Lau-sent-Herrera, 2013; Kong & Gallagher, 2016; Oliveira, 2016; Klinger, 2017). This special issue of the Journal of Latin American Geography presents a collection of articles that broaden and deepen the scope of geographic literature on China and Latin America in light of contemporary change in both regions. We note that Latin America is a cultural and geographic construct that includes territories, people, and politics throughout the Americas, and as such the entire hemisphere is a valid site of inquiry for China–Latin America relations. Latin America is not simply a neutral site that is impacted by China, nor China by Latin America; rather, the articles in this issue question the forms of agency exercised by multiple actors constituting China-LAC/LAC-China relations in diverse locations and sectors. We further note that there is no single monolithic "China" acting across global space; rather, there are specific actors with distinct sets of interests, even within the same sector and site. In the present global political juncture where social and environmental justice, international cooperation, government transparency, corporate accountability norms, and human rights are under siege, it is especially important for scholars to advance understandings of the dynamic and multiscalar processes that shape the future of Latin America in broader regional and global perspectives, including in relation to China. Toward that end, the articles in this issue explore specific dimensions of the geographies of China-LAC relations, delving into themes as diverse as migration and ethnic politics, local and transnational food justice movements, infrastructure construction, the seafood trade, defense partnerships, and outer [End Page 6] space cooperation. These investigations use an array of methodological approaches to advance grounded empirical work on actually occurring spatial practices. In this introduction to the special issue, we briefly review some major trends in the literature on research of the geography of LAC-China, discuss contemporary developments, and put forth some questions for further inquiry. approaches to the geography of china-lac relations While the literature on LAC-China relations has grown prodigiously over the past fifteen years, work that focuses on the spatial aspects of this relationship has grown more slowly. This is in part due to the methodological commitments of grounded empirical research, which often involve extensive ethnographic fieldwork, sometimes in multiple languages and countries. In the twentieth century, the most robust research on the spatiality of LAC-China relations occurred in the areas of historical and diaspora studies (Chang-Rodriguez, 1958; Farley, 1968; Conrad, 1975). A strong tradition of historical, ethnographic, oral history, and multilingual archival research has since emerged, tracing the movement of Chinese people to and from the Americas over the past three centuries (Hsu, 2000; Quiros, 2016; Seijas, 2016), revealing transnational relations that decenter overwhelmingly Euro-American and white definitions of settlement and belonging in the western hemisphere (Siu, 2007; McKeown, 2010; López, 2013; Young, 2014). This is part of a larger project to recenter Latin America in world history (Benton, 2004; Besse, 2004; Vaughan & Weinstein, 2004; Sebastiani, 2012). Deploying post-colonial and critical race theory, many of these histories examine how the multiple pathways through which people from China came to the Americas were crucial to the formation of race, national identity, and labor relations in the Americas (Jung, 2006; Roediger & Esch, 2012; DeLugan, 2016; González, 2017). Histories of the introduction of coolie labor to the cane fields, gold mines, and railroads of the Americas lend considerable empirical and theoretical richness to the important Anglophone histories of "the Chinese" in "America" (that is, the United States) (Lee, 2003; Jung, 2008; Meagher, 2008; Zhou, 2009). The persistent official categorization of people of Chinese descent as "other" in much of Latin America erases both the...

Latin America ranks highest in the world in markers of social and economic inequality, as well as in the negative effects of inequality on other realms of social life, such as access to basic services, political power, and, in many countries, unfair treatment by police and the justice system. Yet in Latin America it is not possible to talk about racism, ethnic-racial discrimination, and inequality without taking into consideration the hegemonic narratives of mestizaje and racial democracy that shape the way many Latin American nations think about themselves today. Can a region characterized by extreme levels of social inequality also be ethnically and racially democratic? The pattern of ethnic and racial relations in Latin America is marked by discrimination, but at the same time, it creates mechanisms that prevent individuals from recognizing the existence of discrimination against themselves. This reality carries several complications for census-taking and other forms of statistical data collection intended to measure ethnic-racial inequality. Because the main paradigms of analysis of social inequality prioritize economics and class, they have directly or indirectly strengthened the discourse that in Latin America, there is no racism. Certainly, the future of research on race relations and inequality in Latin America will benefit from new demographic data and public opinion surveys, carried out since the turn of the century, which include the identification of indigenous and Afro-descendant people. This trend may advance the production of studies grounded in more robust empirical evidence of ethnic-racial asymmetry.

This article examines the historical records of poor economic performance of Latin America compared to East Asia's relative success in the 1970s and 1980s. Although both regions adopted similar postwar protective inward‐oriented development strategies, their experiences and economic outcomes diverged significantly in subsequent years. Some have argued that East Asian countries outperformed Latin American ones because they implemented appropriate policies that were adaptive to changes in the global market scene. This study shows that the respective sociopolitical and institutional environment of the two regions was also an important factor contributing to their economic outcomes. A growth model augmented with policy‐driven and sociopolitical variables is developed. Using data for selected countries in both regions, the results confirm the hypothesis of a negative direct (efficiency) effect of sociopolitical instability on growth, with an additional indirect (accumulation) effect through investment, irrespective of a country's location. Policies adopted by governments, particularly to control inflation and foreign indebtedness and to enhance economic freedom and human capital accumulation, appear crucial for stability. Such policies influenced economic performance through both the direct and the indirect channels. (JEL B25, E13, F43, H19, O57)

Latin America has long been a religious laboratory: behind an imposing Roman Catholic institutional structure one finds African and pre- Columbian animisms, Protestant confessions introduced by European immigrants, aggressive Evangelical missions, and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses in growing proportions. This chapter treats the features that have stood out during the century-long rise of the classical Pentecostals in Latin America to show how these conspicuous characteristics have played an important role in the movement's effectiveness. While scholars have explained this religious surge in various ways, the most frequent explanation for the Pentecostal contagion has been the personal rewards afforded the participants, especially a sense of self-worth and personal dignity, as well as a supportive community and a purposeful existence. Keywords:Latin America; Pentecostals; Protestant; Roman Catholic

For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage. Clearly, the phenomenon of interracial marriage involves the making and remaking of notions of race, gender, and culture in individual lives, as well as at the level of social and political policy. Yet, the potential of the subject has barely been tapped. The vast majority of studies have been carried out by social scientists, who search for laws of social behavior that might either predict or account for the incidence of interracial marriage.1 The handful of historians who have taken up the topic use their insight into change over time to expose flaws in nearly every theory social scientists have proposed. But whether historians focus on the actual patterns of intermarriage or on the enactment of laws against it, they tend to accept the social-scientific assumption that race and sex themselves are immutable categories, the givens of historical analysis; they stop short of investigating historical changes in notions of race and gender. Assumptions like these are distinctly at odds with the work of both the vast majority of feminist scholars, who see gender as a social construction, and a growing group of ethnic studies scholars, who challenge the notion that race should be conceived of as a biological category. When I started to think about writing a history of interracial marriage, I found the gap between these two sets of assumptions at first puzzling, then intriguing. Now, I think it is a vital clue to the way a study of interracial marriage might address three central conceptual

This paper explores the changing role of world regions (North America, EU15, South EU, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Former-USSR, Latin America, Asia Pacific and the Middle East) in science from 1981 to 2011. We use bibliometric data extracted from Thomson Reuter’s National Science Indicators (2011) for 21 broad disciplines, and aggregated the data into the four major science areas: life, fundamental, applied and social sciences. Comparing three sub-periods (1981–1989, 1990–2000 and 2001–2011), we investigate (i) over time changes in descriptive indicators such as publications, citations, and relative impact; (ii) static specialization measured by revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in citations and papers; and (iii) dynamic specialization measured by absolute growth in papers. Descriptive results show a global shift in science largely in quantity (papers) and much less in impact (citations). We argue this should be interpreted as a shift in science’s absorptive capacity but not necessarily a shift of knowledge generation at the world science frontier, which reflects the nature of science systems operating with high inertia and path dependency in areas of their historically inherited advantages and disadvantages. In view of their common historical legacy in science we are particularly interested in the process of convergence/divergence of the catching-up/transition regions with the world frontier regions. We implement an interpretative framework to compare regions in terms of their static and dynamic specialization from 1981–1989 to 2001–2011. Again, our analysis shows that while science systems are mostly characterised by strong inertia and historically inherited (dis)advantages, Asia Pacific, Latin America and CEE show strong catching-up characteristics but largely in the absorptive capacity of science.

The candidacy of Barack Obama has led some commentators to proclaim that the United States is now a post-racial society. But recent survey data suggest another story. In late-June 2008, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that nearly half of all Amer icans thought that race relations were in bad shape and that 3 in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice (Cohen and Agriesta 2008). And the differences between black and white attitudes were stark and profound. In mid-July 2008, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 4 in 10 blacks believed that no progress in eliminating racial discrimination had been made in recent years while fewer than 2 in 10 whites thought the same (Nagourney and Thee 2008). The present moment constitutes a bundle of contradictions in respect to racism. How is it possible to have persistent forms of racial inequality in a period in which colorblind ness is the hegemonic racial ideology and most whites claim that racism is no longer relevant? Both Feagin and Bonilla-Silva engage these contradictions by specifying the nature of contemporary racism in the U.S. Charac terized as systemic (Feagin) or structural (Bonilla-Silva), racism is seen by both authors as a fundamental social fact, a constitutive and highly resilient organizing principle that has shaped US society both historically and in the present. In their respective accounts racism is both flexible and enduring, both consistent and variable. In Systemic Racism, Feagin addresses racis m's comprehensive presence in US society and continues his qualitative emphasis on the lived reality of racism. The official ver sion of the nation's history goes to great lengths to deny or at least minimize racism's ineluctable presence. Feagin's approach is the direct opposite. He shows how racial injustice and oppression have pervaded Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, by Joe R. Feagin. New York: Routledge, 2006. 368pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780415952781.

This article explores the main features of the “sustainability of life” approach, a theoretical and political approach specifically developed in the context of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean feminist economics in the last two decades. It dialogues with decolonial feminisms; ecofeminisms and degrowth ecological proposals; the popular, social, and solidarity economy; and feminist reflections on “good living” and “good co-existence.” The article situates this approach within the wider spectrum of feminist economics as a plural school of thought and examines its particular characteristics in greater detail. Specifically, the article highlights sustainability of life as a multilevel approach that connects economic, social, and ecological systems and reveals the capital-life conflict that runs through them; offers a non-Eurocentric and intersectional perspective for analyzing the diverse implications of this conflict; and presents a political positioning that draws emancipatory imaginaries and horizons that place life at the center. HIGHLIGHTS Sustainability of life has come to be a main theoretical approach of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean feminisms. It offers an emancipatory roadmap for organizing life outside of capitalist structures. It proposes a vision for constructing an economy that is feminist, plural, and inclusive, prioritizing women and peripheral subjects. It presents a political proposal for collective action to confront the logic of capitalist, patriarchal, and racist systems. It harbors as its ultimate goal the sustaining of a “good collective life.”

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

This special issue on race relations and racial inequity in Library and Information Science (LIS) is a response a recent wave of advocacy, activism, and protests. Its explicit purpose is to address the lack of research on race and inequity within our field. The purpose of this contribution to the issue is to substantiate that statement by performing a bibliometric analysis of the last 40 years of LIS scholarship to quantify the amount of attention given to race and racial inequality over that period. We find that despite an important increase in BIPOC-related research in LIS, the numbers remain quite low with approximately 2% of LIS publications containing terms related to racial inequality and BIPOC communities, and this research also tends to be less cited than the average LIS papers in the same area. We also find that this research is present in several areas of the field, although unevenly distributed across them. The trends presented in this paper may help when discussing sensitive issues regarding systematic discrimination, help create and sustain momentum towards change, and address the persistent lack of diverse perspectives and approaches across LIS scholarship and practice.

There are at least two reasons for United States and Latin American historians to bring their work together in a comparative thesis, the first being the need to maximize control of generalizations, and the second being the need to write the history of the social process by which a single world community has been developing since the sixteenth century. Recently, considerable progress with the first task has been made in the study of slavery and race relations, but little progress can yet be reported with the second.One result of the work on slavery and race relations ought to warn and encourage us. Without entering here into a discussion of the specific points of view advanced by Frank Tannenbaum, Marvin Harris, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, Herbert Klein, and so many others, it could be demonstrated that the comparisons of slavery in the United States, South America, and the Caribbean have so far proven enormously important in clarifying issues and stimulating new research and yet have failed to yield some of the most sought-after generalizations.