Course Description:
Since the 1950s, we are repeatedly being told by a diverse group ranging from right-wing politicians to some race theorists that racism is history, the future is raceless, we are living in a post-racial world, and we should no longer use ‘race’ (with mandatory scare quotes) in our analyses because doing so reproduces racism. The fear of the people who voice these ideas is warranted: the concept of race has a dangerous history of reiteration in social sciences, and the boundary between free speech and hate speech, between an honest question and a dog whistle can be a hair’s breadth when it comes to race. However, racism does not dissolve with silence, scare quotes or the wishful thinking of multiculturalism either. Often, they invalidate and marginalize the serious demands of abolition, reparations, and racial justice.
In this class, we will learn about theories of race and ethnicity as well as multiple and conflicted histories of racism around the world. We will explore how ethnicity came to be accepted as a natural fact of acculturation and race became associated with the erroneous belief of biological difference. We will read on race as Blackness, race as social death, race as Islamophobia, racial triangulation that pits one racialized group against another, how race interacts with gender, class, language, and religion as systems of social difference, and mostly produces more hierarchy and domination. We will see that racial thinking and race-making operate not only through explicit classification of the superiority of one race over another but also through racial erasure, racial erosion, silences, exclusions, emotions trapped in bodies, and racialized affects. And we will explore all of this in historically and contextually specific and geographically focused ways. We will pay attention to the particular ways in which capitalist expansion proceeds by using both assimilation and differentiation, both aggressive and violent inclusion and segregation and exclusion, and we will analyze how this occurs through discourses, ideologies, and social processes related to race.
- Teacher: DENIZ DURUIZ