Joshua Price

CRITICAL RACE THEORY’S DREAM NARRATIVES – A METHOD FOR AN ANTI-RACIST SOCIAL SCIENCE?

Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers. Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a large segment of America.2 This denial of racism is one in which many people seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.

Participatory research as disruptive?: a report on a conflict in social science paradigms at a criminal justice agency promoting alternatives to incarceration

This is an ethnographic study of a clash of two paradigms of knowledge in an organization that provides alternatives‐to‐incarceration programs for the criminal justice system in a large city. As a new program evaluator for the organization I used participatory action research to evaluate the programs he was assigned to study. Through an account of how that participatory research was dismissed as valueless, we can see the administrative demand in a dominant strain of criminology for data to appear objective and parsimonious, to rely on experts, and to take the form of aggregate numbers (statistics) used for risk management. Research is used instrumentally to secure continued funding, to enhance surveillance, and to enhance output. Overall, the dominant paradigm objectifies the human subject at the heart of its research, withdrawing credibility from him or her. The participatory research, housed in another paradigm, resists this process of objectification. Its end is social change through a process of consciousness‐raising within a project of community organizing. Not all paradigms are created equal, however. Some are institutionally backed and others are marginal – or marginalized – in criminal justice. The case study is a narrative means of exploring the contours of each kind of knowledge and how participatory research is viewed, and rendered, insignificant from the standpoint of the mainstream standards of knowledge production.

Psychic investment in cruelty: three parables on race and imprisoning the mentally ill

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic and activist work in New York, I analyze three contemporary cases of mentally ill people charged violent crimes. State violence against them can be characterized as a differential and differentiated set of racial and gendered practices. The case studies offer something between a parable, a field report, and a cautionary tale of the dystopian tendencies already embedded within the criminal justice system in the United States. Based on these cases, I will argue that despite recent liberal reform, scant evidence suggests any deep shift in the web of agencies that pipe people, especially the mentally ill, into prison and jail, or a shift in the cruel and humiliating practices these agencies embody. For the society to achieve what Du Bois called an abolition democracy, the affective infrastructure and psychic investment in debasing subordinated others would have to be abolished.

Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. By Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 304.

for short (“Light,” actually a popular girl’s name), and Saladin, whose given name was Yusuf (Joseph), becomes Yusuf al-Din (“Joseph of the Faith”). Other compound names and titles get similar treatment; for example, the historian Ibn al-Athir (“son of al-Athir”) becomes al-Athir for short. Man’s understanding of Islam is also shaky. He uses this term for the faith, but also at times for the lands in which the faith was dominant; this should be, more accurately, the Muslim world. He seems to have a somewhat confused understanding of the various strands of Shi‘ism and sees the Isma‘ili branch as having originated with the Fatimids, when in fact the Fatimids were just one group that grew out of the Isma‘ili movement. He also adopts a simplistic understanding of jihad as “holy war,” despite the numerous modern works that explain that this aspect is only part of a wider concept of struggle for Islam that can be expressed in speech, writing, and (most importantly) the struggle against one’s own inner sinfulness. Man’s use of other terms such as “Arab,” “Arabic,” “caliph,” and “sultan” is similarly imprecise and inconsistent. The historical information in this book is also periodically inaccurate or based on stereotypes; for example, the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, not 1098; Ismat al-Din (“Purity of the Faith,” whom Man calls Ismat) was Saladin’s only wife, not his fifth; and the idea of the First Crusade as being “extreme and unprovoked aggression” is decidedly open to question. Man also at times commits anachronisms, for example describing some of Saladin’s followers as “jihadists,” a twentyfirst-century neologism that only refers to modern, militant Muslim extremists. Even accepting that he does not read Arabic, most of the errors in Man’s book could have been avoided with a modicum of more thorough research, both in the sources that he does cite in his bibliography and the much wider range of available scholarly literature that he ignores. Those looking for an accurate biography of Saladin are advised to look elsewhere.

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Hay dos trabajos que considero ejemplares en el tratamiento de la violencia, que dan muestra de una manera de reconstruccion etnografica. Karen Wenzel ha escrito un trabajo sobre las estrategias de resistencia de una mujer golpeada. Sholom Ansky documento las matanzas de los pueblos judios en la Galicia rusa. Tome de sus trabajos aquellas lineas metodologicas que dan cuenta deuna cuidadosa deliberacion sobre el lugar desde el que uno se para, el lenguaje que uno usa, la descripcion de violencia que uno tiene, el sentido de audiencia, y la transformacion del ser, en un contexto de violencia. – La voz subalterna y el punto de vista subalterno son basicos para nombrar y describir la violencia. – Los usos politicos de la descripcion de la violencia se han convertido en un criterio fundamental para el desarrollo del analisis. Los investigadores ven una relacion crucial entre el investigador y su sujeto de estudio, relacion que explicitamente forma parte del contexto de produccion de conocimiento. Ansky y Wenzel elaboran una praxis etnografica. Me intereso en como ellos terminan ocupando esa posicion intermedia, mas alla de los limites disciplinarios de la produccion de conocimiento haciael punto de vista del sujeto oprimido. Finalmente, presento mi propia aplicacion de este marco metodologico, con una investigacion hecha en colaboracion con un grupo de jovenes delincuentes, para trabajar en contra del crecimiento de las prisiones como una forma de institucionalizacion de la violencia en los Estados Unidos.