The Body Authenticity And Racism

The modern world may believe that authenticity empowers us to be our true selves. However, is this really true for all people? Would authenticity be accepted by others if it does not fit within the conceptions of those who embody "nationally authorised" attributes? Drawing upon an in-depth study of young children in Dublin’s North inner city, The Body, Authenticity and Racism offers detailed insight into how racism is created and perpetuated within 7–9-year-old boys’ interactions with one another. Indeed, through unique empirical data, this enlightening title demonstrates the importance of discussing the body when examining racism – not only in how the body is judged and racialised by other people, but how it is an apparent medium through which racism operates and disappears into. Garratt also explores how masculinity, belonging to a local area and being accepted as ‘Irish’ is intricately interwoven within gendered and racist assumptions; which comes not only from wider discourses but are actively constructed and reconstructed by children themselves. Using a Bourdieusian method of analysis and phenomenological philosophy, this book ultimately highlights the role of authenticity in hiding racism amongst children. A timely volume, it will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Irish Studies and Masculinities Studies.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Black Authenticity exposes fundamental differences in the psychologies of people of African and European descent. These differences, which are manifested in the oppressive behavior of Europeans, must be revealed before Africans can recreate an authentic Black psychology. Marcia Sutherland analyzes the various problems which plague the African world and outlines a liberated psychology which must be adopted if people of African descent are to become an independent people.

At a time in which race lies at the heart of so much public debate, Talking Race in Young Adulthood comes at an important moment. Drawing on ethnographic research with young adults in Manchester, Harries engages with ideas of the post-racial to explore how young adults make sense of their identities, relationships and new forms of racism, consequently revealing how and in what ways race remains a salient dimension of social experience. Indeed, this book presents news ways of thinking about how we live with difference, as Harries analyses the relationship between racism, generational identities and the spatial configurations of a city. Offering a distinct contribution to the sociology of race, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Urban Sociology, Human Geography, Youth Studies, Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology.

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises. Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

To live authentically and with integrity in the face of a rampant oppression, which daily seeks to sequester the spirit and rape the soul, one must recognize themselves as one with the God and in this move each day with an authority grounded in a great mystical love which really has no words. Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression is an autobiography of faith. It is the life of a black transgender woman living a life of faith in the face of institutional and economic oppressions, and the cultural and social stigma of racism and transgender phobia. This book emerges then as a strategy for liberation by nourishing the soul through the provocative acts of prayer, memory, sharing, and acting, thus making real a sure hope grounded in the divine call of Isaiah 61:1. Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression is a hopeful discourse on mysticism in the context of loving one's God and oneself within a lived communal reality of earth embodiment and the development of a sacred space of irresistible hope.

Trumpism and the racially implied Islamophobia of the "travel ban"; Brexit and the yearning for Britain’s past imperial grandeur; Black Lives Matter; the public backlash against Merkel’s refugee policies in Germany. These seemingly national responses to the changing demographics in a multitude of Western nations need to be understood as effects of a global/transnational crisis of whiteness. The Intersections of Whiteness brings together scholars from different disciplines to shed light on these manifestations in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany. Applying methodology stemming from critical race theory’s investment in intersectionality, the contributions of this edited collection focus on specific intersections of whiteness with gender, class, space, affect and nationality. Offering valuable insights into the contours of whiteness and its instrumentalisation across different nations, societies and cultures, this incisive volume creates transnational dialogue and will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as critical whiteness and race studies, gender studies, cultural studies and social policy.