The purpose of this article is to unpick and explore Du Boisian ideas of minority consciousness and double consciousness, to elaborate why they are of value, and to situate them in relation to the ...Hegelian phenomenology. The article shows that while an understanding of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic is helpful in grasping how Du Bois conceives of the power held by a dominant group to afford status, Du Bois was keenly aware that no less important was the ability to invoke complicity or use coercion in denying recognition. To this end the article refuses the view that Du Bois straightforwardly adopted a Hegelian approach in a manner that minimises how this aspect of Du Bois’ work also reflected remarkable intellectual originality. The article goes on to demonstrate how Du Bois’ concept presents sociology with something of normative category that captures the dual character of unrecognised minority subjectivities and their transformative potential, alongside the conditions of impaired status that are allocated to racial minorities.
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) adopts neither an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. ...It maintains instead that the accumulated struggle for racial justice invites us to recognise certain starting points, including our organising categories, before tracing seeming success and failure empirically through case studies. In their rigorous and wide-ranging appraisals, Fadil, Favell and St Louis identify a number of possible weaknesses as well as strengths in this approach, and I take the opportunity of this reply to respond to the former.
How might we move the current discussion of W.E.B Du Bois from a concern with omission to re-construction within modern social theory? Bhambra and Holmwood offer a novel means to do this through ...revisiting three texts: The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935). The following account explores the benefits of this approach, what it highlights for students and teachers, and discusses where other emphases might also lead a contemporary understanding of Du Bois.
The contributions in this symposium have considered and debated the distinctiveness of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM) for an understanding of political theory, broadly conceived. In ...this discussion, I would like to add an account of what the BSM has done for an understanding of the sociology of identity, specifically a political sociology that is concerned with minority and majority-relations (constituted in terms of power and not only numbers). While this is a theoretical matter, it is also an empirical one that in our case spans a sociology of racialisation which pluralises the criteria of relevance for studying these relations, specifically by adding ethno-religious culture. Equally, it brings religion and especially Islam into the field of ethnic and racial studies broadly conceived, not least in the discussion of British national identity. Of course in speaking of BSM approaches in broad terms, there is a risk that this may overlook internal differences amongst colleagues associated with it. This is not the intention. The purpose here is to take stock of a number of BSM contributions that might otherwise be overlooked or misattributed.
This article analyses the relationship between the accommodation of Dispersed asylum seekers and urban gentrification in the UK. We argue that alongside other racialised and classed minorities, ...asylum seekers are vulnerable to spatial strategies associated with gentrification such as neighbourhood ‘dumping’, containment and ‘territorial stigmatisation’, the highly coercive quality of the UK government’s Dispersal Scheme means that any relationship between asylum and gentrification must be treated as deliberate, the result of the multiscalar interests which have a stake both in Dispersal and urban ‘development’. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Glasgow, the recipient of the largest asylum seeking population annually in the UK, we find that asylum accommodation processes and gentrification have developed a symbiotic dynamic, whereby the ‘failure’ of mid twentieth-century urban ‘regeneration’ provided means and motive for Dispersal, and Dispersal provided sufficient resources to fuel further rounds of urban ‘regeneration’. We also find that recent changes to the Dispersal contract, from a dynamic in which resources were associated with housing availability, to one in which they are associated with maximum housing capacity, have created conditions for alternative forms of gentrification, in which strategies such as rent gap suppression are seen as having potential to yield more capital than infrastructural development. Finally, we argue that the respective spatial politics of both Dispersal and gentrification must be understood as mutually-interested, coercive technologies, which work together to contain and exploit racialised and bordered urban minorities. We call for urgent further research into how the asylum border is embedded in contemporary urban spatial economies.
It is striking to observe the virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia; something that is only marginally more present in the discussion of ...antisemitism. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies locates the contemporary study of antisemitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such it problematizes the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this special issue makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits.
Political responses to ethno-religious diversity often include the idea of a common culture or (core) values, e.g., the German Leitkultur and comparable concepts in Denmark and the Netherlands. These ...intellectual debates underlie and inform different types of civic integration policies. Their structure demonstrates the discursive connection between the ostensibly liberal and universal components of the latter – which are often heralded as signs of waning nationalism – with strong emphases on identity and cultural identity. Hence, each debate concerns (1) forms of societal integration, oriented towards (2) forms of civicness, which are nonetheless (3) also cultural, and (4) national. Within this common structure, variation exists as to what should be ‘common,’ what it takes to share it, and the very point of doing so. Advocacy of Leitkultur as so many attempts to civilise newcomers – or exclude those who are unamenable to such efforts – reflects the continuing core of nationalistic ambition despite novel semantic content. This ambition, which equivocates between dubious ‘manifest’ functions – educating minorities, reminding majorities of forgotten heritage – fails also to serve ‘latent’ functions of trust and solidarity building.
The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (Meer 2022) considers a seemingly simple question: what can we learn from success and failure in the pursuit of racial justice in the UK and elsewhere in the ...Global North? Sensitive to the broad aperture with which I seek to survey the problematic, Jean Beaman, Brendan McGeever and Victor Ray provide generous reflections and raise constructive queries spanning matters of space, categories of analysis and sources of hope. This reply seeks both to address these important queries and further elaborate on some key themes further stimulated by their readings.
"A conceptually power-packed volume that is at once erudite and accessible, expansive and focused, true to sociological traditions yet stimulatingly exploratory. Scholars and students will be served ...very well by this absorbing, far-reaching enquiry into ethnicity and race." \- Raymond Taras, Tulane University "This concise, profound, and beautifully written book offers a tour de force across the landscape of race and ethnicity by a young author who masters them all." \- Per Mouritsen, Aarhus University This book offers an accessible discussion of both foundational and novel concepts in the study of race and ethnicity. Each account will help readers become familiar with how long standing and contemporary arguments within race and ethnicity studies contribute to our understanding of social and political life more broadly. Providing an excellent starting point with which to understand the contemporary relevance of these concepts, Nasar Meer offers an up-to-date and engaging consideration of everyday examples from around the world.This is an indispensable guide for both students and established researchers interested in the study of race and ethnicity.
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