Textbooks are explicitly racial texts that offer important insights into national memories of sla... more Textbooks are explicitly racial texts that offer important insights into national memories of slavery and colonialism. The Dutch have long engaged in the social forgetting of slavery even as race served as an organizing principal during centuries of colonial domination of the Dutch West Indies and Suriname. While the Dutch have recently begun to address their history of enslavement, they have yet to sufficiently address how the discursive legacies of slavery continue to impact the lives of Afro-Dutch descendants of enslaved2AfricansandWhite Dutch in The Netherlands today. This paper uses qualitative content and discourse analytic methods to examine the depiction of slavery, The Netherlands’ role in the slave trade and enslavement, and the commemoration of slavery in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980 to address questions of whether textbooks feature scientific colonialism to perpetuate The Netherlands’ social forgetting of slavery in a nation that denies the existence of race even as racialized socioeconomic inequalities persist. A Eurocentric master narrative of racial Europeanization perpetuates Dutch social forgetting of slavery and scientific colonialism to both essentialize Afro-Dutch and position their nation squarely within Europe’s history of enslavement even while attempting to minimize their role within it. Findings have important implications for both The Netherlands and all nations with histories of enslavement as the discourses and histories presented in textbooks impact generations of students, who shape local and national policy regarding racial minorities, racial identities, and ideologies.
Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia By Christopher Bonastia. 2012. University of Chicago Press. 337 pages. $45.00 (cloth)
Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation o... more Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land’s rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and ‘permission to narrate’ their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and ap...
In 1804, New Jersey (NJ) legislators enacted a 'Law for Gradual Abolition.' However, this act did... more In 1804, New Jersey (NJ) legislators enacted a 'Law for Gradual Abolition.' However, this act did not free a single person nor did the 1846 'Act to Abolish Slavery,' when all those still enslaved became 'apprentices for life.' Contributing to the growing literature addressing enslaving in the Northern US, and various gradations of freedom and unfreedom within and across wage labour and enslaving within shifting and developing capitalist economies, this article uses Census records and registers of children born to enslaved women to reveal enduring patterns of bondage holding Black people, particularly children, in conditions of unfreedom through and possibly after the Civil War, with far more enslaved people existing than is currently recognized. This data suggests the necessity of reconceptualising the lived experiences of 'free' Black people there as closer to enslaved, or 'unfree,' similar to that which has been documented elsewhere in the US and globally. These findings have significant implications for the longevity and potential contemporary legacies of legal mechanisms enabling this labour exploitation and divesting Black people of their freedom, earnings, and legal personhood in Northern states post-emancipation.
Decolonial sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois's foundational theoretical and methodological contributions
Sociology Compass, 2018
Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical an... more Decolonial theory offers sociologists, especially critical race scholars, powerful theoretical and methodological tools to understand historical and contemporary injustice and resistance. As a revolutionary epistemology, decolonial theory and methods feature critical insights into knowledges from subaltern voices concerned with how the implementation of modern technologies shape colonial structures, inequalities, the daily lives of the colonized, and resistance strategies. However, decolonial studies have long been the purview of the humanities and remain marginal to the social sciences due, partially, to a dearth of foundational theorizing. Challenging scientific colonialism, historicism, and Eurocentric conceptions of civilization while simultaneously linking these phenomena to racialized exploitation of labor within a modern global capitalist system and resistance to it, W. E. B. Du Bois's sociological theories, methods, and advocacy offer insightful ways to begin decolonizing the discipline, theoretically and in practice, in scholarship and in the world. This article outlines Du Bois's theoretical and empirical contributions by putting him in dialogue with a century of decolonial scholarship before offering suggestions for how to mobilize Du Bois's decolonial theory and methods for a pluriversal decolonial sociology.
Racial humor among students of color presents a sociopolitical dilemma for teachers, requiring ra... more Racial humor among students of color presents a sociopolitical dilemma for teachers, requiring rapid calculations of if and how to respond in ways that support an inclusive and equitable classroom climate. This analysis uses two instances of racial humor in an elementary classroom to unpack a White teacher's responses to students of color who were both creators of and audience to racial jokes. Starting from the point of affirming the teacher's decision to intervene, findings explore the ramifications of how intervening had multiple, layered consequences for the dynamics of silencing and racialization among students of color. The purpose of this approach is to model how to sift through the complications of silencing race talk and to support conceptual and practical conversations about anti-racist pedagogical moves in the midst of fleeting, meaningful moments in classroom socialization to race.
Há muito, os holandeses se orgulham de sua identidade de povo tolerante, "terra prometida&qu... more Há muito, os holandeses se orgulham de sua identidade de povo tolerante, "terra prometida" para imigrantes perseguidos e generosa com fundos de "desenvolvimento" direcionados a outras nações. Esquivam-se, contudo, do papel que desempenharam historicamente no imperialismo, na escravatura e no genocídio colonialistas e consideram os não brancos, tanto na Holanda quanto fora dela, ingratos para com a ajuda de seu país. Esse artigo sintetiza pesquisas anteriores1 sobre as representações de escravidão, imigração e da África em todos os livros didáticos de história para ensino fundamental na Holanda publicados a partir de 1980, argumentando que estes apresentam metanarrativas eurocêntricas de europeização racial no contexto único da sociedade holandesa. Esses livros perpetuam o esquecimento social, pelos holandeses, da escravidão e do colonialismo científico, justificam intervenções históricas e contemporâneas na África, essencializam e problematizam os imigrantes e su...
All the news that's fit to print? Silence and voice in mainstream and ethnic press accounts of African American protest
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 2010
Page 1. ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT? SILENCE AND VOICE IN MAINSTREAM AND ETHNIC PRESS A... more Page 1. ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT? SILENCE AND VOICE IN MAINSTREAM AND ETHNIC PRESS ACCOUNTS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN PROTEST Melissa F. Weiner ABSTRACT Consistent research highlighting ...
The Demography of Race and Ethnicity in The Netherlands: An Ambiguous History of Tolerance and Conflict
The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity, 2015
The Netherlands is known worldwide for their tolerance and multiculturalism. In addition to their... more The Netherlands is known worldwide for their tolerance and multiculturalism. In addition to their permissive drug and prostitution policies and early adoption of gay marriage legislation, the country has long acted as a “Promised Land” for religious refugees and, more recently, implemented explicit multicultural policies of the 1980s and 1990s to promote immigrant immigration. Thus, The Netherlands has long been a receiving nation for immigrants, particularly those seeking religious freedom and opportunities in a thriving trade-based economy. This history, combined with the Dutch history of colonialism, resulting in migrants from former colonies, and their recruitment of “guest workers” in the 1960s and 1970s, has resulted in considerable racial diversity among the population, as well as significant stratification and conflict. Recently, like much of Europe, Dutch popular and political discourse has shifted to the right alongside a corresponding enactment of restrictive immigration policies that reversed many of their multicultural policies. This chapter highlights the history of race, racial diversity, and racism in The Netherlands that laid the foundation for its diversity today. Following this historical overview, the chapter addresses current demographic and socioeconomic trends, contemporary immigration policies, and racial attitudes and concludes with speculation of the nation’s racial future.
The meanings attached to ''race'' across the globe are myriad, particularly as anti-Islamic disco... more The meanings attached to ''race'' across the globe are myriad, particularly as anti-Islamic discourse once again links race and religion. Yet scholars lack a common terminology to discuss this phenomenon. This article hopes to expand critical race theory and scholarship across national lines. This critical examination of recent race-related scholarship provides scholars with empirical suggestions to uncover and document the different processes, mechanisms, trajectories and outcomes of potentially racialized practices that essentialize, dehumanize, ''other,'' and oppress minority groups while imbuing privileged groups with power and resources in nations across the globe. Ten empirical indicators will allow international researchers to assess the particular situation of different groups in different nations to determine whether, and the extent to which, they are subject to racialization. Specifically, this paper calls for a unified terminology that can accurately account for and address race when and where it occurs and a global broadening of a critical comparative dialogue of racial practices.
Much of the sociological and historical literature, ignoring long-standing interclass disputes ov... more Much of the sociological and historical literature, ignoring long-standing interclass disputes over integration, takes for granted that during the 1950s, all blacks, parents, and members of civil rights organizations included, sought desegregation. This article examines the interests of different segments of New York City's black community regarding the public schools during that era. I use contemporary newspaper accounts of protests and more recent theoretical insights to analyze and interpret differences in expressed goals and demands. This article not only documents considerable educationally oriented protest in a Northern city during a decade often overlooked by scholars, but highlights important class-based differences within a single city's black community regarding changes needed. Of particular interest to social movement scholars are findings that reveal a large disjuncture between the demands of the grassroots parents' organizations and established, elite civil rights organizations. While civil rights organizations sought abstract ideals of integration, parents demanded tangible improvements in their children's schools. Class-based cultures and experiences are posited as the root of this disjuncture.
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