Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender and Sexualities
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Summary readings week 3 Intersectionalities
Essed, P. (2002). Everyday racism: A new approach to the study of
racism.
Goal: the need to make visible the lived experience of racism and, more specifically, to analyze Black
perceptions about racism in everyday life. Du Bois was among the first to point out that, over the
generations, Blacks in the United States developed a ‘double consciousness’.
Everyday racism:
- Connects structural forces of racism with routine situations in everyday life
- Links ideological dimensions of racism with daily attitudes
- Interprets the reproduction of racism in terms of the experience of it in everyday life.
Through a detailed theoretical analysis, this study articulates new sets of meanings in the
concept of everyday racism. Everyday racism = bridge between interactional and structural.
Everyday racism = a process in which:
- Socialized racist notions are integrated into meanings that make practices immediately
definable and manageable
- Practices with racist implications become in themselves familiar and repetitive
- Underlying racial and ethnic relations are actualized and reinforced through these routine or
familiar practices in everyday situations
Difference racism and everyday racism: everyday racism involves only systematic, recurrent, familiar
practices. The fact that it concerns repetitive practices indicates that everyday racism consists of
practices that can be generalized. Because everyday racism is infused into familiar practices, it
involves socialized attitudes and behavior. Finally, its systematic nature indicates that everyday
racism includes cumulative instantiation. Everyday racism cannot be reduced to incidents or to
specific events. Everyday racism is the process of the system working through multiple relations and
situations. Finally it should be stressed that not all racism is everyday racism. In the experiences of
black communities, everyday racism does not exist in the singular but only in the plural form.
Institution/institutional = structuring relations of the ruling apparatus organized around different
functions.
Systematic racism = the systematic realization of institutional racism in terms of day-to-day
interactions within institutions.
Racism is defined in terms of cognitions, actions, and procedures that contribute to the development
and perpetuation of a system in which whites systematically dominate blacks through the pattern of
organization of the system as a whole. The dominant group structurally benefits from racism.
Arendt argues that power is never the property of an individual. It belongs to a group as long as the
groups stays together. Group power can only empower individuals when they have a sense of group
membership. Therefore, it is necessary to keep alive a permanent sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.
Contemporary racism is mostly the passive tolerance of racism and the inaction of the dominant
group. Individuals are involved differently in the process of everyday racism according to gender,
class, status, and other factors determining the content and structure of their everyday lives.
, Everyday life always takes place in and relates to the immediate environment of a person. Everyday
life is not only reproductive of persons but also of the positions of persons in social relations and of
social relations themselves.
The structure of everyday racism must be seen as a complex of practices made operative in race and
ethnic relations. Race relations in this sense are a process present in and activated at the everyday
level as well as prestructured in a way that transcends the control of individual subjects. When racist
notions and actions infiltrate everyday life and become part of the reproduction of the system, the
system reproduces everyday racism.
The firm interlocking of forces of domination operates in a way that makes it hard to escape its
impact on everyday life.
The presence of a system of racial meanings is a permanent feature of European culture. Not only
through direct interaction with blacks but also through indirect contact.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1952). The negro and the Warsaw ghetto.
Because race problems at the time were to Du Bois purely problems of color, and principally of
slavery in the US and near-slavery in Africa, he never thought about race problems in Poland. He
gradually became aware of the Jewish problem of the modern world and something of its history. It
had never occurred to him until then that any exhibition of race prejudice could be anything but
color prejudice. In Berlin, he sensed something of the Jewish problem and its growth in the
generation since his student days.
To treat fellow human beings as Warsaw had been treated, would be seen as impossible for a
civilized nation with deep religious convictions and outstanding religious institutions. There had been
complete, planned and utter destruction. The astonishing thing was the way that in the midst of all
these memories of war and destruction, the people were rebuilding the city with an enthusiasm that
was simply unbelievable.
The result of Du Bois’s three visits to Warsaw was a much clearer understanding of the Jewish
problem in the world, but above all it was a real and more complete understanding of the Negro
problem. The ghetto of Warsaw helped Du Bois to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a
broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the
oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.
Negroes are dividing by social classes, and selling their souls to those who want war and colonialism,
in order to become part of the ruling plutarchy, and encourage their sons to kill ‘Gooks’. Among Jews
there is the same dichotomy and inner strife, which forgets the bravery of the Warsaw ghetto and
the bones of the thousands of dead who still lie buried in that dust.
Wekker, G. (2016). ‘Suppose she brings a big negro home’: case
studies of everyday racism.
Cultural archive = a storehouse of ideas, practices, and affect, that which is in between our ears, in
our hearts and minds, regarding race. It located in the way we think, do things, look at the world, in
what we find attractive, how our affective and rational economies are organized and intertwined,
based on 400 years of imperial rule. Gendered, sexualized, and classed meanings during 400 years of
colonial domination.
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