Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice - Softcover

Molina, Natalia; Gutiérrez, Ramón A.; HoSang, Daniel Martinez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520299671 ISBN 13: 9780520299672

Publisher: University of California Press, 2019

Synopsis

Relational Formations of Race brings African American, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, and Native American studies together in a single volume, enabling readers to consider the racialization and formation of subordinated groups in relation to one another. These essays conceptualize racialization as a dynamic and interactive process; group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups. The chapters offer explicit guides to understanding race as relational across all disciplines, time periods, regions, and social groups. By studying race relationally, and through a shared context of meaning and power, students will draw connections among subordinated groups and will better comprehend the logic that underpins the forms of inclusion and dispossession such groups face. As the United States shifts toward a minority-majority nation, Relational Formations of Race offers crucial tools for understanding today’s shifting race dynamics.
 

About this title

About the Author

Natalia Molina is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of two award winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940.

Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.
 
Ramón A. Gutiérrez is Professor of American History at the University of Chicago.

From the Back Cover

"These fine scholars argue persuasively that the next new direction in the field of Ethnic Studies should be to study race relationally: an old idea made new again by building on the robust scholarship produced in comparative and transnational ethnic studies during the past three decades or so."--Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

"Studying race as a relational formation is more than powerful--it is necessary. This important gathering of essays challenges even the most radical thinkers on race to repattern the ways we understand social justice, human rights, and struggles that form in mutual action toward a common good. Together, these essays refuse the dominance of whiteness in studies and enactments of racial relations, generating new theories and conversations that reveal historic and powerful connections among freedom seekers across the globe."--Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity and coeditor of Futures of Black Radicalism

"Studying Race Relationally demonstrates beautifully the insights produced by examining systems of race alongside each other. This generative, exciting volume offers essential contributions to critical Ethnic Studies and American Studies."--Emily K. Hobson, author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left

"What if we could think about race and racism differently? Go beyond thinking about race mainly in terms of whiteness and its 'others'? Dispense with fatuous denunciatoions of 'groupism' and recognize the centrality of racialization in the construction of our world? In Relational Formations of Race, some of our most profound race theorists do just that. They explore how racial identities and racialized groups interact and overlap. They show how racial formation involves permanent conflict with the U.S. empire-state and simultaneously constitutes that state. Exclusion and inclusion; conquest and social control; struggles over racialized labor, gender, migration, and, indeed, U.S. imperialism and 'nation-building'--all are reconceptualized here. Our understanding of race and racism is both deepened and broadened by this exceptional book, which will certainly become a central text across the disciplines. A tour de force and a must for course adoption!"--Howard Winant, coauthor of Racial Formation in the United States

"This is a must-read for everyone in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Africana Studies, and, indeed, for anyone who wants to understand how and why difference and disadvantage are created and perpetuated, and how we are all, in some way, complicit in this creation and perpetuation. It is destined to become a big-hearted model of scholarly praxis on race, a core text for the next generation of young scholars who recognize that activism and deeper understanding are joined at the hip."--Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

From the Inside Flap

&;These fine scholars argue persuasively that the next new direction in the field of Ethnic Studies should be to study race relationally: an old idea made new again by building on the robust scholarship produced in comparative and transnational ethnic studies during the past three decades or so.&;&;Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

&;Studying race as a relational formation is more than powerful&;it is necessary. This important gathering of essays challenges even the most radical thinkers on race to repattern the ways we understand social justice, human rights, and struggles that form in mutual action toward a common good. Together, these essays refuse the dominance of whiteness in studies and enactments of racial relations, generating new theories and conversations that reveal historic and powerful connections among freedom seekers across the globe.&;&;Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity and coeditor of Futures of Black Radicalism

&;Studying Race Relationally demonstrates beautifully the insights produced by examining systems of race alongside each other. This generative, exciting volume offers essential contributions to critical Ethnic Studies and American Studies.&;&;Emily K. Hobson, author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left

&;What if we could think about race and racism differently? Go beyond thinking about race mainly in terms of whiteness and its &;others&;? Dispense with fatuous denunciatoions of &;groupism&; and recognize the centrality of racialization in the construction of our world? In Relational Formations of Race, some of our most profound race theorists do just that. They explore how racial identities and racialized groups interact and overlap. They show how racial formation involves permanent conflict with the U.S. empire-state and simultaneously constitutes that state. Exclusion and inclusion; conquest and social control; struggles over racialized labor, gender, migration, and, indeed, U.S. imperialism and &;nation-building&;&;all are reconceptualized here. Our understanding of race and racism is both deepened and broadened by this exceptional book, which will certainly become a central text across the disciplines. A tour de force and a must for course adoption!&;&;Howard Winant, coauthor of Racial Formation in the United States

&;This is a must-read for everyone in American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Africana Studies, and, indeed, for anyone who wants to understand how and why difference and disadvantage are created and perpetuated, and how we are all, in some way, complicit in this creation and perpetuation. It is destined to become a big-hearted model of scholarly praxis on race, a core text for the next generation of young scholars who recognize that activism and deeper understanding are joined at the hip.&;&;Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Relational Formations of Race

Theory, Method, And Practice

By Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, Ramón A. Gutiérrez

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29967-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, 
PART ONE THEORIZING RACE RELATIONALLY, 
1 • Race as a Relational Theory: A Roundtable Discussion George Lipsitz, George J. Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, 
2 • Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens Natalia Molina, 
3 • Entangled Dispossessions: Race and Colonialism in the Historical Present Alyosha Goldstein, 
PART TWO RELATIONAL RESEARCH AS POLITICAL PRACTICE, 
4 • The Relational Revolutions of Antiracist Formations Roderick Ferguson, 
5 • How Palestine Became Important to American Indian Studies Steven Salaita, 
6 • Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery Tiya Miles, 
7 • "The Whatever That Survived": Thinking Racialized Immigration through Blackness and the Afterlife of Slavery Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, 
PART THREE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORKS, 
8 • Indians and Negroes in Spite of Themselves: Puerto Rican Students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Catherine S. Ramírez, 
9 • Becoming "Hawaiian": A Relational Racialization of Japanese American Soldiers from Hawai'i during World War II in the U.S. South Jeffrey T. Yamashita, 
10 • Vietnamese Refugees and Mexican Immigrants: Southern Regional Racialization in the Late Twentieth Century Perla M. Guerrero, 
11 • Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red: The Relational Racialization of Space in the Stockton Metropolitan Area Raoul S. Liévanos, 
PART FOUR RELATIONAL FRAMEWORKS IN CONTEMPORARY POLICY, 
12 • Border-Hopping Mexicans, Law-Abiding Asians, and Racialized Illegality: Analyzing Undocumented College Students' Experiences through a Relational Lens Laura E. Enriquez, 
13 • Racial Arithmetic: Ethnoracial Politics in a Relational Key Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, 
14 • The Relational Positioning of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post-9/11 Racial Politics Julie Lee Merseth, 
Further Reading, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Race as a Relational Theory

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

George Lipsitz, George J. Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina

This roundtable features three scholars who have produced some of the most groundbreaking and generative work on the relational study of race: George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández. Recorded at the University of Southern California in December 2016, their wide-ranging discussion addresses the particular role of Los Angeles and California in relational studies of race; the challenges of teaching and research using a relational framework; and the importance of such frameworks beyond the academy.

George Sánchez, author of the award-winning Becoming Mexican American (Oxford University Press, 1993), has spent more than two decades chronicling the complex multiracial relationships in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles through an array of research, teaching, and public impact projects, including collaborations with several local museums and history projects.

George Lipsitz has authored dozens of articles and books that incorporate a relational framework, including many works that address the particular role of music, the arts, and other forms of cultural production in this process. He is also the editor of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, one of the first scholarly journals to explicitly foreground a relational framework.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is the author of the celebrated Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging, 1771–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Both works exemplify the most far-reaching and sophisticated insights that can be produced through relational studies of race.

DANIEL MARTINEZ HOSANG AND NATALIA MOLINA: Can you describe for us how your teaching and research came to address and incorporate relational frameworks of race?

GEORGE LIPSITZ: I don't think there are many people who set out to say, "I am going to do a comparative and relational ethnic studies project." I think they found it in the complexity of the world. And I think that had two ramifications. One, it meant that they had to break with this notion of a one-at-a-time relationship with whiteness for each aggrieved group. We didn't know until we were doing the comparative and relational work that there was an uninterrogated privileging of whiteness that had been there — the issue was [always] "How does each group deal with the white center?" not "How are polylateral relations among aggrieved communities of color formulated?" There is this line in a Chester Himes article in the Crisis. He was writing about the Zoot Suit Riots and the Japanese internment. And he basically said, "I came to Los Angeles, and it hurt me worse than Cleveland. And it hurt me racially worse than any place I have seen. But until I saw the Zoot Suiters getting attacked, I secretly thought it was something wrong with us. When I saw what they were doing to the Japanese, saw what they were doing to the Mexicans, I realized it was them, not us. And rather than apologizing or explaining ourselves, we had to basically see that there is a system at work there." Himes reiterated this line of thought in his 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, where he describes "little Riki Oyana" singing "God Bless America" and being hauled off to the internment center at the Santa Anita racetrack the next day. I think most of the work that will come to the fore of the studies we talk about comes from the ways in which race becomes transposed into mass incarceration, environmental racism, descriptions of nonnormative sexual and gender behavior, and low-wage labor. None of these issues can be solved one group at a time. So part of the difficulty of [most] racial studies is that you take the tort model of law and say, "There but for race, people would have been OK." But we know that race is intersectional. It's the life of the party; it never goes anywhere alone. Because race has to do with differential citizenship, lesser citizenship, premature death, disproportionate exposure to violence, it makes you look at more than one group. But I also think it's important for us not to privilege one way of looking at things and say we always want things to be comparative and relational. There is a time to [look at things] together; there is a time to [look at them] apart. There are things that are enabled by looking comparatively and relationally, and there are things that are inhibited by it.

GEORGE SÁNCHEZ: I didn't enter looking for relational approaches, but I was drawn there by the consistency of what I kept finding. And so my first book, Becoming Mexican American, though now people look at it and they think, "Oh, relational this, relational that." I didn't see that at all. To me, [getting to the idea of the relational] was a learning process of having been trained in an older ethnic studies model and attempting to stay focused on the subject at hand and constantly being pushed. But also realizing that while on the one hand [relationality] did happen everywhere, on the other hand, it manifested itself in certain places in certain kinds of ways. So that was, for me, an eye-opening thing. And then I wanted to systematically go back and think about how we write this different kind of history. What are the various ways one can approach that?

For me, the other big revelation came from the 1992 LA riots. Experiencing that in Los Angeles, experiencing it at the end of publishing my first book, meant that I had to deal with a real-time historical event that I kept seeing as completely multiracial. And seeing where whiteness fits into all this. It was easy to point to [Police Chief] Darryl Gates ... and [Mayor] Tom Bradley [in terms of speaking to the Black-white dynamics]. But I like microstories, so I turned to those on the ground. Their own individual stories said volumes about where they fit into different kinds of racial orders. You know, at those moments, you don't simply sort of raise your hand and offer a history lesson. You actually have to deal with what it means to be in the moment.

I was taken aback by how much everyone wanted to reframe the LA riots as a two-dimensional thing. Whether you were framing it from the perspective of Koreans or from the perspective of African American young men or from [the perspective of] law and order. It was almost impossible for people to frame it in its full complexity: to me that was very instructive. This is not an easy task. It's one of the most difficult tasks, and we haven't mastered the way in which we have to understand it. And literally this was something happening right before our eyes. And so I never bemoaned the fact that there are a lot of different models at work in ethnic studies, because this complex relational analysis seemed really difficult to do when you are actually trying to interpret something that's happening right in front of you in real time.

For me, teaching is maybe the easiest way to try to understand something, because you are trying to process things at a whole bunch of different levels. So you are trying to put stories together at similar times. To teach the history of Los Angeles is, for me, to teach a history that is constantly unknowing itself. You have to constantly push out. Why are you using that framework? Doesn't that framework come from somewhere else? Isn't that something that you don't know? How do you deal with what Patty Limerick would call the "legacy of conquest"? If you understand Indigenous stuff, how do you put African American history into that? So it's a constant kind of trying to get students to feel that they don't know what is familiar.

LIPSITZ: Part of what's interesting about Sánchez as a scholar is that he carried Los Angeles with him to Harvard [as an undergraduate], and to [graduate school at] Stanford. And you can see it in Becoming Mexican American. There is this place where he talks about the Asian dentists in the East Side [of Los Angeles] because they couldn't practice on the West Side. And so Asians became important in the Chicano community as professionals because white racism kept them out of the West Side. The Repertorio Musical Mexicana record store [he wrote about] was of interest because it was a business that was an ethnic-specific site, but it resonates with the ways in which Black culture, especially Black pop, became a point of entry into America for Mexican immigrants in a way that white Anglo society for the most part didn't. And the issues of the internment — which is always considered a footnote on the East Coast — have a different meaning here. And it's a powerful meaning, not just because of what happened to Japanese Americans but because it maintains [the age-old] trick: "We won't let you assimilate, and now we'll lock you up because you are unassimilable." And so there is something about the state's relationship to racism that becomes evident from that. And then the additional thing that Sánchez did is this amazing discussion of northern Mexico and U.S. capital's penetration into it. There is already baseball instead of bull fighting and beer instead of tequila and Protestant churches all over the place. So Sánchez didn't [start with an assumption about] a blank slate of coming to America and becoming Americans. The ethnic studies that was taught at the institutions where he was, was [like] Mary Antin's The Promised Land: "I was nobody; I lived in the dark ages. And now that I am an American, here is my American story." [Sánchez] didn't do that. I think part of it is because you walk around Los Angeles and it's not the Lower East Side Jewish, Polish, Irish, Italian kind of immigration thing. You are forced to see the whole thing differently.

SÁNCHEZ: I think the specific things that I brought were a kind of immersion in a particular racialization of Mexicans in Los Angeles that didn't fit any other patterns that I saw. For me the relationship between Mexicans and Blacks was a very vibrant, powerful experience. So making sense of the diversity of all that was a fundamental thing for me. I started to see in that experience what was unique about Los Angeles. Part of it was the relationship with Blacks. Part of it was a sense that to my family, Los Angeles did not seem foreign. So discussions like [Oscar] Handlin's about moving to a place and cutting off from [the past] and having to start anew and that sort of stuff — that made no sense to me, being from Los Angeles. My parents felt very comfortable in Los Angeles. It wasn't that it was the same as Mexico, but it was familiar in a very particular way, place names and everything else. So I had to make sense of that very fundamental history — and then I had to ask, How do other groups deal with that? So there were a lot of those kinds of questions coming at me that I knew didn't fit in the paradigms that were being set up on the East Coast.

HOSANG AND MOLINA: Kelly, can you talk about how your experiences growing up near San Diego shaped the relational focus of your scholarship?

KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ: I grew up as a Black girl on the border and part of a very small Black community, where our frame of reference wasn't back East or South. Certainly, there is the weight of the South, but we are always looking toward Mexico. And these are areas of escape, of possibility, of solidarity. That was really what brought me to this way of studying race — our relationships with Mexicans and the way that our possibilities for love and community and survival rested with understanding the Mexican community and the Mexican American community and building with them. That's the history I need to understand: Who are my neighbors? How did they get here? I saw how me and my friends were being policed by drug police in particular, and that gave me a frame of reference for how undocumented folks are being policed on the border, a real critical frame. So that's where Migra! came from — from trying to understand what the hell is going on here. What is this process of race that allows the Border Patrol to come on to a bus, pick out everybody who looks Mexican, take them off the bus, and scare them to death, and only half of them come back? I got that as a Black kid. And the other thing I got was, they weren't coming after us. The Border Patrol were the only armed officers who weren't coming after us.

I grew up speaking quite a bit of Spanish. My parents simply said, "You are going to learn. We live near the border. You are going to learn." And my parents enforced that. So the Spanish language comes from a family that said, "At every opportunity we will send you with our friends to spend the day to speak, to be — to travel back and forth across the border, but you will also learn the academic level of it as well." I have carried that with me. After my undergraduate years, I went to live in South Africa and did a typical teaching-abroad program. And it was in South Africa that I began to think more seriously about indigeneity and about the relationships between Blackness and indigeneity, and I came back to the States wanting to think and do a dissertation on African Americans, Native peoples, and land. But when I was in graduate school, I started looking ahead [and trying to figure out], What can you commit yourself to thinking about for 10 years, 20 years? I knew that it was the passion and the politics that I learned in the undocumented labor camps around Proposition 187 [in 1994] that was going to carry me through the dissertation. And [the other thing that pushed me through was] this question that I always had about the bogeyman or the Border Patrol that defined so many people's lives. The personal experiences [that drove me] were much like George [Sánchez]'s. Simply coming up in a diverse community and thinking about how our neighbors were being impacted in ways that were specific to them but that had carryovers or scripts for ourselves. [I saw] that to unravel anti-Blackness, I was going to have to take on what was happening with the undocumented folks, and antibrownness, and also think through indigeneity. It is [a sense of] solidarity but is also an understanding that it's not just relationships. It's that your freedom is my freedom. Your struggle is my struggle. Your sacrifice is my sacrifice. And that, I think, came to me growing up in this small Black community on the border. And a family that was really rooted in the Black radical tradition of internationalism. I really owe them so much.

LIPSITZ: I do think for a lot of people, Black internationalism is an important part of this. So often the Black radical tradition is misconstrued as being a desire for a temporal homeland along the [lines of Marcus] Garvey, but it was really a form of world-transcending citizenship. This is an ingredient that's important to a lot of the people doing this work. The whole tradition of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois's "common cause of the darker races" held the belief that the U.S. global empire was a consequence of slavery and segregation and that anticolonialism was important to Black freedom. When I was in high school in Paterson, New Jersey, the stores around the high school would get Black newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier — and this is a tradition that goes back to the 1930s that considered [Indian prime minister Jawaharlal] Nehru a part of the Black community. The Indian National Congress was a part of Blackness in a way that made no phenotypical or bloodline sense, but it was a family of resemblance that was clearly there. And as Robin [Kelley] and Betsy Esch wrote, the tremendous prestige of the Chinese revolution in Black communities, the Panthers' interest in China and North Korea, was an important part of everyday life in those circumstances. In [pianist] Horace Tapscott's discussion of this collective that he had in South Los Angeles, he says newspapers from all over the world just showed up. Immigrants and exiles came through the door. By contrast there have been tremendous institutional philanthropic subsidies since then for separate groups for encouraging Black capitalism, for encouraging a Mexican American center, but not a Third World Studies center. It almost makes us forget how interconnected these things were. But I do think that for everybody, even when Blacks don't appear, Blackness becomes an important epistemological tradition for people to draw on. So what comes with great difficulty in our scholarly categories flows inexorably in the life of aggrieved communities.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Relational Formations of Race by Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520299671
• ISBN 13: 9780520299672
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 380