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This chapter presents research on the social psychology of identity and belief. Beliefs tied to long-held identities resist change and bias the processing of new information. Theoe phenomena help explain defensive denigration of victims of social problems, resistance to persuasion, intransigence in negotiation, and discrimination in hiring decisions. In each case, intervention strategies based on a social-psychological analysis provide a potential remedy.

This chapter examines how the dominant racial ideology of colorblindness conforms to particular frames used by welfare rights activists to describe the way in which their organizations struggle with the politics of race and welfare. These types of frames are separated into two broad categories: traditional and “cosmetic” colorblindness. On the surface, these two frames appear quite different: traditional colorblindness avoids discussion of race, while cosmetic colorblindness engages directly with a description of racial demographics. Ultimately, however, these two categories share the same underlying avoidance of power dynamics essential in any discussion of race, whether it is external or internal to the welfare rights organization. Both frames are overwhelmingly favored by white women activists rather than women of color activists, although there are important class differences between the usage of traditional and cosmetic colorblindness.

This chapter covers the period after Fukunaga was given the death sentence to more than a year later, including his execution in November 1929. It reviews the legal appeals to save him from being hanged, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The chapter also discusses the public assertions of colorblindness in the case by the Honolulu daily newspapers, the Nippu Jiji, and the presiding judge at his trial, which all sought to deny the decisive role that race played in his conviction. It outlines the advocacy efforts by the Japanese American community organized by the Hawaii Hochi to obtain a new trial for Fukunaga and the opposition to that campaign led by the Honolulu press, including the Nippu Jiji.

The Conclusion provides a racial comparison between the Fukunaga and Kahahawai cases and argues that Joe Kahahawai was also raced to death after being falsely accused of raping Thalia Massie. Based on their previous dispensing of racial injustice against non-Haoles, Haoles knew they could manipulate the criminal justice system for their benefit. So they subverted that system to have the ten-year sentences of the convicted killers of Kahahawai commuted to one hour. The racial significance of the Fukunaga case is hence evident in its illuminating how race maintained Haole supremacy and non-Haole oppression, despite the claims of colorblind justice and multicultural harmony. The chapter discusses the most recent public assertions of colorblindness and multiculturalism in Hawai‘i, which continue to be deployed to sustain ethnic inequality.

This chapter summarizes the state of southern politics in the 1940s and describes the economic, social, and political tensions within the one-party South at this time, suggesting that by the end of World War II, one-party politics was no longer sustainable in the long term. It then describes the two major factions—Loyalists and Regulars—within the Georgia Democratic Party and gives an overview of their respective goals, defining in particular the Loyalist strategy of “progressive colorblindness.” Finally, the chapter outlines the status of the civil rights movement in Georgia at the end of World War II.

This chapter explores the implications of activists using intersections of gender and class marginalization within the framework of colorblindness. These frame categories are “gendered colorblindness” and “class colorblindness.” Like more general expressions of colorblindness, these frames minimize or avoid discussions of race when used to describe its significance for welfare politics. These frames operate on the basis of a hierarchy of oppression, where either gender or class oppression is of utmost concern. This type of frame is antithetical to an intersectional analysis that views race, class, and gender as interlocking identities and systems of oppression. Thus, in the erasure of race and racism as a critical focus of all welfare politics, they inadvertently support the racial status quo.

This chapter discusses the objectives of this book which are, first, to recapture the classical liberal tradition through the writings of men and women missing from other civil rights anthologies; second, to catch the interests of readers tired of the Left-versus-Right debates on television or the Left-on-Left offerings in the classroom; and, last, to provide a story about people and the difference they made in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. The chapter also explains a philosophy of individualism called classical liberalism. It notes that classical liberals believed in individual freedom, Christianity, the Constitution, colorblindness, and capitalism—five core beliefs that greatly influenced the classical liberal tradition of racial freedom. The chapter details that classical liberalism is a distinctive civil rights tradition, and discusses the views of the Republicans on race.

Classical liberals faced a dilemma with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where several provisions struck down state-sponsored discrimination in the South. However, two sections mandated non-discrimination in the private sector, forbidding discrimination in hiring or “public accommodations.” To emphasize the colorblindness of the law, sponsors added section 706. The Congress then mandated non-discrimination and opposed preferential treatment for any group. The move toward “group rights” began under Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson, but solidified under Republican Richard M. Nixon. Nixon's grip for racial preferences provoked debates over the meaning of equality, racial freedom, and group definition. The Democratic Party initially resisted Nixon's departure from color-blind law but soon saw the political benefits of the president's preferences. Classical liberals also offered positive alternatives to racial discrimination including school choice and welfare reform.

This chapter argues that ethnicity is the dominant organizing principle of social relations in Hawai‘i since the 1970s when it superseded race. This contention is based on the social construction of Hawaii’s constituent groups as ethnic groups rather than races, on the consequent lesser construction and assertion of racial categories and identities commonly invoked in the continental United States, and on the ongoing regulation of differential access to socioeconomic status by ethnicity and not race (or class). The chapter first discusses the conceptual difference between race and ethnicity, outlines the historical transition from race to ethnicity as the foremost structural principle of island society, reviews persisting ethnic inequality evident from 2010 U.S. Census data, and analyzes the racial dimensions of the shooting death in 2011 of a young Native Hawaiian by a U.S. State Department agent in Waikīkī. The argument that ethnicity is more significant than race as the primary principle of social organization in contemporary Hawai‘i is consistent with multiculturalism being the dominant ideology related to race and ethnicity in the islands rather than colorblindness as in the continental United States.

Drawing on concepts from critical race theory, feminist psychoanalysis and deconstruction, the Introduction exposits and explains the importance of developing a protocol of reading the law’s language of race anew. “Letters of the Law” is the conceptual term designating this protocol of reading beyond the law’s functional effects in or formal divisions from social reality, and toward the law’s language of race on its own terms. The fantasy of colorblindness serves as the entry point into the law’s language, and is further exposited through case law and critical scholarship on race and law. In the course of this exposition, the Introduction also revises the central theoretical assumptions dominating the study of race and law so that they can better reflect the centrality of fantasy, unconscious desire, and rhetoric and writing to the practice and politics of legal reform and black freedom struggle.

This chapter investigates the sexual and social reproductive disjunctures produced by international adoption as well as how this dissonance impacts the racialization of the family. Engaging scholarship concerned with queer theory and heterosexual reproduction, this chapter contends that adoptive parents of Korean children embody deviant reprosexuality, which accounts for the parents’ non-procreative sexual reproduction of the white, heteronormative family. To better understand how the adoptive family disrupts normative white and Asian American families through racial performativity, this chapter explores transraciality—the dislocation adoptees’ experience in negotiating their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in childhood and adulthood. This concept accounts for how racial difference functions within the family, including the impact of colorblindness rhetoric on adoptees’ senses of self.

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

This final chapter draws out the broader implications of this case study of midnight basketball for sport studies and sport policy, the sociology of race and the African American experience, cultural sociology, and neoliberal social policy. Particular attention is paid to deep play and the cultural politics of sport; theories of sport as intervention and development; critical race theory, racial coding and colorblindness; the centrality of sport as a social force in the contemporary world; and the transformations and limitations of social intervention and criminal justice policy under conditions of neoliberalism. Connections and intersections between and among these themes are also discussed.

This chapter examines a process of racial formation among grape growers in rural California during the twentieth century. More specifically, it considers the racialization of Japanese and Armenian immigrants, who were racialized as “Asian” when they arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the ways that Armenians and Japanese Americans attempted to challenge “the boundaries of citizenship and whiteness,” showing that only the latter were able to cross the racial divide between white and Asian. To elucidate these the divergent paths, the chapter describes the experiences of grower Harry Kubo and how he deployed his public identity as a Japanese American to defeat Proposition 14, a labor rights initiative led by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s. It highlights Kubo's fight for property rights as an illustration of colorblind politics in process of formation—what might be termed “proto-colorblindness.”

This chapter examines how racial subordination becomes naturalized and reproduced through a framework of racial colorblindness. It contends that some racial justice advocates have lost sight of the fundamental truth highlighted in Racial Formation in the United States: that the notion of race in U.S. political culture is always predominant and always evolving. The chapter begins by focusing on framing and messaging as applied to ballot initiatives that anticipate racially potent outcomes. It then highlights the apprehension, expressed by liberal political campaign consultants and media strategists during public debates over affirmative action and immigration, about explicitly mentioning race and racism or challenging the belief among many white voters that a colorblind meritocracy now prevails in the United States. It argues that racial justice cannot be secured through racial silence, but instead requires developing “new frameworks for understanding and communicating the reality of race in the twenty-first century.”

This chapter examines how the end of affirmative action in California functions as a racial project. Using Michael Omi and Howard Winant's conceptualization of racial projects, it considers the ways that the principles of “race neutrality” and “race preferences” operate in debates over “anti-preference” initiatives like Proposition 209. It shows how reinterpretation of the meaning of race through veneration of colorblindness led to the redistribution of resources along racial lines. It demonstrates this process through an inventive analysis of hypothetical personal statements written by Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas in their law school applications, arguing that bans on the explicit use of race in law school admissions do not abolish but reorder racial preferences. The chapter also suggests that racial identity can be expressed in different ways and that racial formation occurs not only at the level of social or political structure, but also at the level of identity performance.

This chapter examines the origins of racial formation theory, the political context from which it emerged, and the key theoretical currents that influenced Racial Formation in the United States. It begins by situating racial formation theory in the historical period from which it first emerged and applying it to racial politics today in the age of Barack Obama. It then discusses the problems that racial formation theory was initially designed to address before turning to some contemporary analyses of changing U.S. racial dynamics and their implications, along with new patterns of race and racism, the ongoing instability and changing meaning of the race concept, and issues such as as “colorblind” racial ideology and the role of race in electoral politics. The chapter also explores various “post-racial scenarios” that the United States might confront in the near future, as well as the tensions and possibilities authorized by the crisis of colorblindness. Finally, it raises a number of questions, such as those relating to race consciousness and a racial justice-oriented social policy.