Fighting Discrimination In A Hostile Political Environment

The book investigates the experience of ethno-racial discrimination in France and the forms that resistance takes in a colour-blind context. Among pluriethnic, multi-religious, post-colonial states with a long immigration history, France holds a specific place in international comparisons due to its distinct colour-blindness. It does not recognize racial or ethnic groups either as legitimate social or political categories or as targets for policy. Nevertheless, the book embarks in testing existing theories on the experience of discrimination, and on the diverse repertoire of collective action to fight discriminatory practices in France. It features chapters that draw on empirical qualitative research done at various levels of political action (city, regional or national) and focusing on various actors (inhabitants, activists, administrative, judicial and elected officials). The contributors argue that far from disappearing, race operates at the political level and is embedded in policy design. They highlight the centrality of institutions and policies in the production of a colour-blind racial regime. Despite the hostile character of the French political environment, the fight against discrimination takes renewed forms, from infrapolitical tactics to legal battles. While the social sciences have, themselves, been under attack, scholarship on France demonstrates the reproduction of ethnoracial inequalities and investigates the forms that resistance to discrimination takes. Fighting Discrimination in a Hostile Political Environment will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Race and Ethnic Studies, Politics and Public Policy, European Studies, Research Methods and Sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book investigates the experience of ethno-racial discrimination in France and the forms that resistance take in a colour-blind context. It embarks in testing existing theories on the experience of discrimination, and on the diverse repertoire of collective action to fight discriminatory practices in France.

Many racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and others, have historically faced severe discriminationâ€"pervasive and open denial of civil, social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. Today, large differences among racial and ethnic groups continue to exist in employment, income and wealth, housing, education, criminal justice, health, and other areas. While many factors may contribute to such differences, their size and extent suggest that various forms of discriminatory treatment persist in U.S. society and serve to undercut the achievement of equal opportunity. Measuring Racial Discrimination considers the definition of race and racial discrimination, reviews the existing techniques used to measure racial discrimination, and identifies new tools and areas for future research. The book conducts a thorough evaluation of current methodologies for a wide range of circumstances in which racial discrimination may occur, and makes recommendations on how to better assess the presence and effects of discrimination.

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality. Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice. Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

This book explores the diversity-related labour that marginalized faculty, students, and staff are expected to perform because of their social identities – i.e., “identity taxation” in US higher education institutions. It compiles new research on cultural and identity taxation to highlight how systemic racism and patriarchy perpetuate identity taxation in 21st century US academe. Amado Padilla coined the term “cultural taxation” nearly 30 years ago to outline the expectations that faculty of colour address diversity affairs on their campuses. In this insightful volume, Laura Hirshfield and Tiffany Joseph expand the concept, adopting the term “identity taxation” to accentuate the labour members of marginalized groups participate in due to their intersectional identities. Beyond bringing these terms into conversation with others highlighting marginalized academics’ experience, this volume empirically explores how identity taxation affects students and staff, not just the faculty who were the focus of previous scholarship. It provides insight into the consequences of taxation at a moment when change and dismantling structural racism is most needed in universities and society. Reexamining Racism, Sexism, and Identity Taxation in the Academy will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of race and ethnic studies, education, research methods, sociology, and cultural studies.This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

This book offers a systematic historical analysis of the relationships between migration and the development of cities, including their physical, economic, and cultural evolution. The volume results from a comparative project that examines the interface between migration and the development of cities throughout different periods including current conditions. Nine strategic sites are examined: Three cities in Europe, three in Latin America and three in North America. The editors contribute to the analysis by summarizing lessons from the cases discussed and by providing a glimpse at the relevance of the study of migration and cities historically. Urbanization and Migration in Three Continents will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and students of sociology, migration studies, race and ethnic studies, history, anthropology, urban studies, and economics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

As the population of older Americans grows, it is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Differences in health by racial and ethnic status could be increasingly consequential for health policy and programs. Such differences are not simply a matter of education or ability to pay for health care. For instance, Asian Americans and Hispanics appear to be in better health, on a number of indicators, than White Americans, despite, on average, lower socioeconomic status. The reasons are complex, including possible roles for such factors as selective migration, risk behaviors, exposure to various stressors, patient attitudes, and geographic variation in health care. This volume, produced by a multidisciplinary panel, considers such possible explanations for racial and ethnic health differentials within an integrated framework. It provides a concise summary of available research and lays out a research agenda to address the many uncertainties in current knowledge. It recommends, for instance, looking at health differentials across the life course and deciphering the links between factors presumably producing differentials and biopsychosocial mechanisms that lead to impaired health.