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NYTimes article on HR depts' approach to anti-racism captured problem. Whew! Much of it treats racism as almost primordial & timeless rather than a force mediated by circumstance and history. 10 alternative *historical* readings that I think are a lot better than this approach1/
These focus on history of the idea of race (and by extension racism). Excluding medicine/science and law because their influence on race-making is vast and require their own huge lists. 2/
1. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) is about how the idea of race in the U.S. grew out of a need to harmonize the colonies' reliance slavery with a rhetoric of freedom and liberty. 3/
2. Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review (1990) A brilliant anchoring of the idea of race in capitalist structures and labor. Fleshes out political implications of Morgan/David B. Davis, etc. 4/
3. Richard Turits, "A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed," Hispanic Am. Historical Review (2002). Genius article that interrogates reification of "anti-Haitianism," instead rooting it in relatively recent early 20thC DR/Haiti local border development and geopolitics.5/
4. Mara Loveman, National Colors (2014). Historical analysis of racial classification in Latin America and why different schemes have arisen and fallen.6/
5. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity (1997) Important book on how well-meaning social scientists assumed and imposed a patronizing narrative of psychological and cultural "damage" onto Af-Ams. Sadly, it persists in some social science today.7/
6. Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness (2011) How ideologies of race and criminality became intertwined.8/
7. Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation (2004) Awesome study of turn-of-century idea of African-American "racial destiny" and the contested gendered behavioral codes/mores it entailed.9/
8. Claire Kim, "The Racial Triangulation of Asians," P&S (1999) Many ppl gesture towards needing to talk beyond the "Black-white" binary. Kim situates Asian racialization in both nativist and anti-Black logics and discusses it in relationship to Black and white racialization.10/
9. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor (2013). Best analysis of how people on public assistance became stigmatized and racialized, doing for social welfare what Muhammad does for crime.11/
10. Ellen Wu, The Color of Success (2014). The notion of "model minority" and its permutations continues to influence racial discourse on Asians (and, by extension, everyone else), almost always for worse. Wu examines its historical origins.12/
Big takeaway is race/racism are fluid, contextually-dependent, contested based on time/place. Reading historical work got me a lot more than HR-ish sensitivity training-type manuals, and these authors deserve a lot more attention. #readahistorybook people! 13/13
