Racialised humanity

In this piece, we draw on Jayakumar, Howard, Allen & Han (2009) for understanding how environments can become racially hostile for persons racialised as non-white – that is, a climate steeped in racial inequality and racism at interpersonal and institutional levels. We do not accept the parochial definition in popular discourse of racism that is a fringe few, far right-wing individuals. Instead, we concur with Essed (1991, p.36) who challenges this fallacy of a fringe few alongside an ostensibly non-racist ‘normal’ society by arguing:

[This assertion] places the individual outside of the institutional, thereby severing rules, regulations, and procedures from the people who make and enact them, as if it concerned qualitatively different racism rather than different positions and relations through which racism operates. . . Individual racism can only occur as an expression or activation of group power.

Therefore, our environments are charged with a hostile racial climate where schools, workplaces and public discourses are rooted in white supremacist, Eurocentric hierarchies that frame people of colour through deficit narratives. Consequently, a systematic evaluation of macro and micro forms of racism allows race critical scholars to analyse how they shape the racial climates of institutions and discourses. Pierce, an African-American psychiatrist in the US coined the term ‘racial micro-aggressions’ and through studies with Black communities, his work shed light on the ways in which racially hostile climates contribute to race-related stress (1975a, 1975b, 1995) – a type of (m)undane (e)xtreme (e)nvironmental (s)tress (MEES). As Smith, Hung and Franklin further explain:

Race-related and societal stress is mundane (M) because it is ubiquitous and oftentimes taken for granted; it is extreme (E) because it has an excessive influence on the physiological, psychological, emotional, and cognitive reactions; environmental (E) because it is part of the historical and institutionalised ideology that influences the policy practices, behaviors, and the culture, and custom of the dominant environment; and it produces stress (S) because the combination of these elements are certainly distressful and consume valuable time and energy that could be used for more creative, educative, professional, and humanitarian goals . . . Therefore, racism and racial micro-aggressions operate as psycho- pollutants in the social environment and add to the overall race-related stress for Black men, Black women, and other racially marginalized groups (2011, p.67).

In race critical literature, there is increased attention to micro/subtle forms of racism and how it impacts groups of students differently; however, less is known about the particular of coping mechanisms that may help minimise racial battle fatigue. Racial microaggressions are another form of racism that police black and brown bodies – placing racialised humans under duress – and therefore, it is also important to look at how racialised humans might find strategies to cope and reduce race related stress under such conditions because “coping is the mechanism by which individuals understand, reframe, or react to events. How an individual copes with racialized events can regulate whether the person is stressed by the experience” (Franklin, 2018, p.4). Consequently, increased literature on racism has looked at how individuals gain control over a situation in order to cope with racism (Brondolo, Gallo, and Myers 2009).

However, less is known about how groups affected by racism participate in racist acts not as self-hatred, but as a humanising mechanism for gaining control of a racist situation and reaffirming their own humanity as ‘not’ that version of Blackness/Brownness being ridiculed or de-humanised. In education, this has taken the form of Black students participating in racist humour (see Doharty 2017) and also Yosso, Smith, Ceja and Solorzano (2009) who argue that “racist humour seemed to offer white students a quick and easy method for gaining acceptance, status, and social capital in primarily white networks. When Latinas/os approved of the joke(s), through silence or other verbal/nonverbal cues, Whites granted them peripheral, temporary, or token acceptance. Latina/o students’ open disapproval led to their “voluntary” exit or dismissal from the group” (pp.671-672). It is in this paper that we explore participation in white supremacy as a coping mechanism for reducing racial battle fatigue.

Racist humour in school settings is under-theorised and underdeveloped in British
school research-based literature (Connolly 1998; Crozier and Dimmock 1999; Nayak & Kehily 2001; Nayak 1999; Thomas 2012; Doharty 2017). The literature centres on racist humour directed towards students from a minority ethnic background based on racist stereotypes or, to substantiate, construct and police (White) masculinities. In the study of humour, particularly in sites purporting to be colourblind and equal opportunities, it must be taken seriously because ‘humour is far from trivial . . . [A] sociological analysis of humour can tell us much about how existing social relations are reaffirmed and normative social boundaries maintained’ (Lockyer & Pickering 2008, 808-809). Indeed, for racist humour to be successful, it must be understood and this is achieved because society is structured in racially hierarchical ways – a product of White supremacy. Therefore, racist humour ‘plays a pernicious role in reinforcing systems of domination and inequality’ (Sue and Golash-Boza 2013, 1595). In Doharty (2017) Black students would participate in joke-telling that ridiculed Africans and one suggested it would be ‘fun’ to whip another Black student in a mock life-on-a-plantation performance. I suggest such behaviours are a
temporary reprieve from a hostile space that permits the use and abuse of Black bodies, allowing Black students to occupy a powerful position normally not afforded to them.

However, participation in this sense is not solely reliant on the intermingling of whites and non-whites; it can also happen through institutional practices and become entrenched in intra-communal dynamics. As such, dominant hierarchies of race, ethnicity and religion can come to operate in and dominate relations and interactions between members of the same racial/ethnic/religious minority group. In their research on the UK Iranian diaspora, Gholami and Sreberny (2018) demonstrate how the dominant UK discourse of ‘integration’, coupled with neo-conservative policy logics, has exacerbated racist and Islamophobic tendencies within the Iranian diaspora. The upshot is the exclusion and marginalization, as well as the crude and subtle abuse, of practising Iranian Muslims by secular, middle-class Iranians. For the latter, a key motivation is to be accepted, liked and respected as equals by white people in Western societies. To this end, they often behave in ways which they think will appease their ‘hosts’. One such form of behaviour is to embrace wholesale the current neoliberalist impetus of educational approaches and use them to instil corresponding values in young British-Iranians, typically including a suspicion of Islam/Muslims and a desire to distance themselves from their Islamic heritage. In general, however, middle-class Iranians tend to find that despite their ‘best efforts’, they continue to be represented and treated as ‘problematic Muslim others’, which only adds to their frustration.

Race is an important element in these dynamics, and it intersects with religion (specifically Islam) in complex ways. For example, a study by Leon Moosavi (2015) found that when converting to Islam, white people can become perceived by other whites as having ‘become brown’. Consequently, ‘upon converting to Islam, white converts can lose access to whiteness and therefore to white privilege too’ (Moosavi 2015: 1919). This idea can help to explain the curious relationship that many Iranians have with Islam and whiteness. On the one hand, many diasporic Iranians, especially those in privileged/elite positions, are openly Islamophobic (see also Gholami 2015). Thus, they not only declare their antagonism towards Islam but also distance themselves from the religion and its practitioners, including in some cases close friends and family members (Gholami and Sreberny 2018). On the other hand, they use this and other methods to actively draw closer to whiteness. This takes two forms. Firstly, as indicated above, Iranians are often open to full cultural assimilation and will readily adopt western cultural forms, seek to marry Western/white spouses, and so forth. Secondly, some Iranians will ascribe to themselves white racial status. Recent census data from the US and the UK show that a considerable number of Iranians identify as ethnically white, thus trying to disentangle what they believe to be their ‘light enough’ skin colour from the socio-political complexities that make up racialized, and in this case ‘religified’, identities. What is interesting, however, is that in light of continued racist abuse as well as Donald Trump’s antagonistic policies towards Iran and Iranians, there are indications of a change in attitude among some US Iranians, who are now seeking solidarity with other racial/ethnic minorities (ibid).

What is clear from both examples is that participation by non-white people in white supremacy is complex and significant: racialised humans are humans under duress because their very existence is always problematised and they are not fully afforded acceptance in Eurocentric dominant societies. In turn, this exerts huge influence on their individual and social lives, and paradoxically, as in the cases presented here, self-negation becomes a way to try to achieve self-affirmation. But no matter how they may try to ‘assimilate’ – through participation in racist humour in Doharty (2017) or hold Islamophobic beliefs and try to adopt Western cultural forms as with Gholami and Sreberny (2018), racialised humans face the not-quite-white stumbling block. The huge amounts of energy (physical, emotional and social) required to live life in this way, and hard-hitting bouts of ‘battle fatigue’ that may result from it, cannot be overstated.

To make matters worse, racialized and minoritized humans also face greater physical dangers in the ‘global risk society’. For example, it is well documented that racial and ethnic minorities are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change (see Levin and Davies 2018); and genocide and ethnic cleansing – such as that of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims – show no sign of diminishing. Therefore, any discussion or policy debate about the future of humanity must give serious attention to issues of race and racism. In this context, it is important that race critical scholars continue to analyse the shifting nature of whiteness and illuminate the ways in which racism intersects with a person’s religious, citizenship, sexuality, gender and class identities to produce complex lifeworlds and socio-political dynamics.

References

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Connolly, P. 1994. All lads together? Racism, masculinity and multicultural/anti-racist strategies in a primary school. International Studies in Sociology of Education 4 (2), 191-211.

Crozier, W. R. and Dimmock, P. S. (1999) Name-calling and nicknames in a sample of primary school children. British Journal of Educational Psychology 69 (4), 505-516.

Doharty, N. (2017) Black History month and Black History with Key Stage 3 Students in English Secondary Schools: A Critical Race Theory Approach (School of Education, University of Keele. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis).

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