Paula Ioanide

The Emotional Politics of Racism

How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Paula Ioanide is Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race & Ethnicity at Ithaca College.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Mai 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 150mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9780804793599
• ISBN-10: 080479359X
• Artikelnr.: 41751083

Autorenporträt

Paula Ioanide is Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race & Ethnicity at Ithaca College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Facts and Evidence Don't Matter Here
chapter abstract
The introduction theorizes how and why emotions play a central role in
fostering people's investments in oppressive institutional practices in the
United States and globally. It argues that hegemonic fears, resentments,
and stigmas attached to criminality, terrorism, welfare dependency, and
undocumented immigration make beliefs and stereotypes about Black,
Latino/a, Arab and Muslim people intransigent. Psychoanalytic and social
psychological frameworks help explain how affectively charged ideologies
tend to diminish people's receptivity to facts and evidence that challenge
their beliefs. The introduction argues that understanding gendered racism
through purely cognitive frameworks of racist intent or ignorance limits
our ability to account for people's unconscious, unintentional and embodied
investments in oppression. Understanding how unconscious affects structure
people's ideological fantasies, identities, and political purpose increases
our ability to create counter-cultures of ethical witnessing and effective
antiracist feminist strategies.
Part I: "Criminals" and "Terrorists": The Emotional Economies of
Military-Carceral Expansion
chapter abstract
Part I offers a broad overview of the apparatuses that helped construct
public desires for the unprecedented expansion of the military-carceral
state since the 1980s. It outlines the national political discourses, media
representations and state policies that helped construct emotional
economies of fear and aggression about "criminality" and "terrorism."
Color-blind and racially coded discourses and representations encouraged
U.S. constituents to support forms of punishment and containment that
targeted Black, Latino/a, Arab and Muslim people through the War on Drugs,
immigrant detentions, and the War on Terror. Part I pays particular
attention to socially shared emotional economies attached to the
ideological fantasies of law and order and American exceptionalism. These
hegemonic emotions reward people who identify with being law abiding
(through racial appearance, behavior, style or speech) with an affective
sense of superiority over those who are assumed to be criminals and
terrorists.
1New York, NY: The Raging Emotions of White Police Brutality
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 investigates the 1997 case of police brutality against Abner
Louima, a Haitian immigrant. It offers a localized reading of the ways
dominant stereotypes and feelings about Haitian immigrants and Black
"criminality" in New York City helped structure NYPD police officers'
violence toward Louima and other Black residents. Officer Justin Volpe and
the other white police officers involved in Louima's brutalization employed
historically haunting scripts of anti-Black sexualized violence to
recuperate their sense of patriarchal white dominance. This instance of
brutality was part of a continuum of police violence and harassment
encouraged by Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's "zero tolerance" measures, which
popularized emotional fears that Black "criminality" and Haitian immigrant
"contamination" posed threats to (implicitly white) property, bodies and
space. The chapter explores multi-racial alliances that protested police
brutality after Louima's case was publicized.
2Abu Ghraib, Iraq: The Evasive Emotions of U.S. Exceptionalism
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 analyzes liberal and conservative responses to the tortures
against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The case examines the ways dominant
stereotypes and feelings about "Arab terrorism" manifested in sanctioned
expressions of sexualized racial violence in the U.S. military. Liberal
frames of reception that expressed sympathy, shock, and shame generally
continued to remain wedded to orientalist projections and the ideological
fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism. Both liberal and conservative American
publics expressed affective investments in notions of "justice" predicated
on bodily punishment, incarceration and obliteration. The War on Terror
extended the logics of domestic mass incarceration and U.S.-Mexico border
militarization into the global arenas of the Middle East. The chapter
considers how the Abu Ghraib tortures ruptured investments in U.S.
exceptionalism and 'benevolent' U.S. imperialism, opening possibilities for
ethical solidarities and affinities that challenge the expansion of U.S.
militarism.
Part II: "Welfare Dependents" and "Illegal Aliens": The Emotional Economies
of Social Wage Retrenchment
chapter abstract
Part II outlines the macro-political, economic and emotional processes that
garnered public support for social wage divestment in the post-civil rights
era. It outlines how political discourses, media representations, and
institutional policies that worked together to popularize resentments and
stigmas toward welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants. Colorblind,
gendered and racially coded discourses and representations encouraged
publics to invest in the ideological fantasy of economic self-reliance and
to direct their anxieties about economic, demographic and cultural shifts
toward poor Black people and Latino/a immigrants. Projecting these
demographics as "taxpayer burdens" encouraged dominant majorities to invest
in hostile privatism and defensive localism. Stereotypes about Black and
Latina women's "hyper-fertility" and "sexual non-normativity" offered
affective rewards to those invested in normative family ideals and
sexuality. Such projections and emotional economies supported broader
neoliberal privatization and divestment from public goods that worked
against most American people's economic interests.
3New Orleans, LA: The Demolishing Emotions of Neoliberal Removal
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 examines the emotional and property interests that led to the
2007 demolition of thousands of public housing units in New Orleans even
though Hurricane Katrina had created a crisis in affordable housing. The
circulation of racial stereotypes about Black "welfare dependence," "family
and sexual deviance," and "criminality" amplified emotional economies that
stigmatized and demonized impoverished people. Though liberals and
conservatives in New Orleans expressed stereotypes and feelings about
public housing differently, they shared affective attachments to white
spatial, sexuality, familial, and property ideals. Both liberal and
conservative public feelings resulted in housing policies that accelerated
the organized abandonment of working and workless people in New Orleans and
accelerated neoliberal privatization. Grassroots organizing challenged the
paternalist and neoliberal logics that dominated discussions of spatial
reconstruction in New Orleans through Africanist blues epistemologies that
favored people over property.
4Escondido, CA: The Exclusionary Emotions of Nativist Movements
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 interrogates a municipal ordinance in Escondido, California that
sought to deny undocumented immigrants rental housing. It argues that
nativist emotional economies encourage exclusionary measures and hostility
toward Latino/a immigrants as a way to encourage Latino/a
"self-deportation." Projecting Latino/a immigrants as "taxpayer burdens"
that cause "overpopulation" in the U.S., nativist organizers reconfigure
emotional stigmas attached to Black "welfare dependence" and
"hyper-fertility" to Latino/a immigrants. The anti-Latino/a housing
ordinances in Escondido and other locales were justified through
color-blind arguments about "legality" as well as paleoconservative
arguments about "mongrelization" and "Mexican reconquest." Mass
pro-immigrant mobilizations in Escondido and across the nation asserted the
significance of Latino/a immigrant labor and culture in the U.S. by
foregrounding emotional economies that honored workers' dignity and human
rights under the banner of "No One Is Illegal."