Suchergebnisse

Arab Americans are fertile ground for scholars interested in studying processes of racialization and race-making. The ambiguous, or "in-between," racial status of this population has caused some obstacles for scholars attempting to theorize the source and persistence of discrimination against this group. This article attempts to address these paradoxes by examining the history of Arab ethnic and racial activism in the civil rights/Cold War period and uses this empirical case to argue for an historical interpretation of Arab racialization. Specifically, this article asks two questions: "What international and historical contexts shaped the development of Arab ethnic identity in the United States?" and "How do these historical mechanisms inform and amend current theories of Arab racialization?" To answer these, the article employs a "theoretical frontier" analytic architecture to analyze archival sources documenting Arab ethnic advocacy and organizing strategies during the critical civil rights/Cold War period. The article finds that prominent Arab organizations and their leaders navigated a hostile American public that levied both politically and ethnically motivated attacks against their advocacy, and argues that this historical context in turn shaped later Arab organizations' approach to formal recognition as an ethnic and racial group. Ultimately, the article argues that racialization—in this case, the decision by Arab organizations beginning in the mid-1970s to pursue a project of Arab ethnic advocacy disarticulated from its political origins—was an historical development that requires reckoning with within the theoretical literature on Arab ethnic formation.

AbstractThis paper seeks to scrutinize the most recent definition of racialization, as proposed by Adam Hochman, and interrogate its utility as a productive analytic for social scientists. Due to theoretical conflations between race and racism, and analytical conflations of groupness and category, racialization functions as a tautological descriptive rather than an agenda-setting theoretical framework for scholars studying race. The most recent definition of the concept cannot, and does not try to, account for a mechanism for the process of racialization. Such an accounting is a necessary component of any conceptualization that aims to help identify the origins of racialization. Second, in the absence of locating an agent or mechanism, the concept is tautologized: racialization, with an inability to locate a mechanism, offers itself up as the mechanism. Third, this tautologizing leads to a profound conflation of racialization offered as both a descriptive and a causal concept. Not only does this conflation halt the analytic capacity of the term as it applies to social scientific uses, but this conflation proves harmful for the anti-realist agenda as proposed by Hochman. By conflating analyses of causality with description, the latest definition of racialization unknowingly countersigns a uniquely American ideological conception of race; that is, the latest definition allows a description of the appearance of race to stand in for an explanation for race.