FEATURED ON THE CULTURE CRAFT
Despite the assertion that Britain is ‘much more at ease with its racial diversity than it was two decades ago’ (Mark Easton BBC News 3 January), in the UK 90 people have lost their lives in attacks with a racial element since the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, and racist attacks regularly take place on the street, in people’s homes, in taxis and taxi offices, in takeaways, restaurants, pubs and bars, as well as shops and religious institutions (Athwal et al 2010).
How to explain to you White people that have no other choice? I am at a crossroads and the wind is pushing me toward my people. I must be in solidarity with men. How do I explain this to white women? And to feminists in particular? The women who fought for the recognition that separation and non-mixing are necessary for feminism to blossom as a political project?
This program is about the hardening of attitudes towards Muslims in the West. This episode of Islam & Life investigates the root causes for anti-Muslims sentiments and the role of the press and media playing in such atmosphere.
To watch the full video click here: Causes of Islamophobia in the EU-Islam & Life
The Russian state has over centuries constructed patterns of governance and domination that have been articulated through twin hierarchies of backwardness and civilisation, multiple forms of racialisation, ethnophilia and primordialism, separations between Russia’s ‘West’ and its ‘Orient’ and undercurrents of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. Physical anthropology, ethnology and racial science have provided intellectual foundations for racial Russification, racial Sovietisation, ethnic cleansing (Pohl 1999) and post-communist racial and ethnic hostility. This cumulative historical legacy has provided some of the important pre-conditions for contemporary political racism, media race hate, racially motivated murders and attacks, and continuing racial and ethnic discrimination and marginalisation of ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation…
For a considerable time, opponents of the very notion of an Islamophobia which attacks Muslims qua Muslims took the view that it was a phenomenon without form as racism. This was based on the claim that, since Muslims do not constitute a bounded racial group, what Muslims experience as anti-Muslim racism cannot in fact be understood as anti-Muslim racism. Since we know that race is socially constructed – so there are no bounded racial groups, only subjects who are organised into a range of categories which we view as racial – this position is best understood as a cynical recentring of race with the intention of refuting Muslims’ appeals for rights to be protected against anti-Muslim racism, and it was a defining feature of Islamophobia (the ability to enact Islamophobia under the defence that it is not racism). More recently, a mode of Islamophobia has emerged which repositions itself from being a racism lacking its ideal form to a racism lacking its ideal victims…
In a recent article Naomi Klein highlighted the antagonisms that inscribed and undermined the idea and institution of Barak Obama as the post-racial president. Obama was supposed to symbolize the US as a nation at ease with itself racially. Having successfully negotiated through his election, what might be described as a post-racial landscape, it could now be declared that racial strife was no longer an item on the patriotic political agenda, and that each citizen could be judged according to the content of her character as a viable candidate for the American dream. Yet at the same time there have been growing and diverse signs of intense, thinly veiled racist hostilities to Obama, ranging from the attacks on his proposals for health reform, to the ‘birther movement’ questioning his American citizenship, to the wider populist mobilizations depicting him as the embodiment of everything un-American (e.g Muslim or Communist/Socialist). When Jimmy Carter pointed out this veiled racism, his comments were heavily reported and largely dismissed. It seems then that forty years after the Civil Rights movement publicly posing the question of racism has become a free speech liability which is complicated for two reasons…
- COMMENTARIES:
- GENERATION ZZZZZZZZ
A deadly potion mixed with the ingredients of indulgent hedonism, combined with liberal apathy, served with a helping of manic consumerism and vacuous celebrification, finished off of course with a sprinkle of amnesia, has been conjured up and sold as the opium for the masses in contemporary western plutocracies. Enchanted, bewitched and captivated by its glittering packaging, we readily inject ourselves with the venom as it puts us under the spell, our eyes dazed, our minds numb and our voices silent. As meaning is sucked out of life we live for the moment and withdraw from one another, detached from the world that surrounds us…
- REVIEWS:
- PRECIOUS
‘Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew those statements were false. There was a myth of the Negro that had to be destroyed at all costs’ (Fanon)
Precious takes us on a harrowing journey of a teenage girls life living in Harlem 1980s, she is raped by her father who impregnates her twice, bullied by her mother, illiterate, poor, overweight, she learns she has HIV passed on by her father, and of course she is Black. Critics in America are on two opposing camps, on the one hand it is argued that the film shows the ‘reality’ of Black teens living in the USA in which the life of Black people is far from the perfect picture as illustrated by the Cosby Show. On the other hand it has been condemned for adopting a plethora of racist tropes which work to place Blacks firmly in the position of inferiority…
CERS
Centre of Racism and Ethnicity Studies
Sociology and Social Policy
http://www.sociology.leeds.ac.uk/research/ethnicity-racism/cers/
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