Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also have played out in relation to pre-existing social relations of inequality, poverty, and global exclusion. We are also interested in the ambiguities and challenges of racial meanings as they operate within multiple orders and different scales, especially in relation to contemporary intellectual silences.

Privileged Exclusion in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Ethnic Return Migration, Citizenship, and the Politics of (Not) Belonging

“…Processes of racialisation affect migrants from the Global South as they encounter institutions in the Global North (Thomas & Clarke 2013). Racial markers can have lingering effects-as with Asian-Americans who are marked as 'migrants' even after living in the United States for several generations (Lowe 1996).…”

The World as the American Frontier: Racialized Presidential War Rhetoric

“…82 The disciplining of Muslims as raced threats follows the path set by the U.S. in the American Indian Wars. Local constructions and disciplining of race affects and reflects global understanding of race.…”

Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy

“…Yet, it remains difficult to link, even broadly, anthropological scholarship on globalization and on racialization. Deborah Thomas and Kamari M. Clarke (, 318) argue that “not only has globalization not produced the new cosmopolitanisms some scholars expected (and still desire), but contemporary assertions of being post‐racial have also served only to mask the ongoing structural inequalities—now viewed in terms of abjection or ethnicity—that were put into motion by modern processes of racialization.” Such views, they continue, undermine “our ability to understand how structures and institutions still undergird particular racialist meanings and orders” (318). We insist, however, on naming those particular racialist meanings and orders by stressing that they are organized through structures of global white supremacy.…”

“…In other words, one cannot speak of gendered racial discriminations in Brazil, for example, without acknowledging the ways that racial processes in Brazil are part of a global phenomenon of racial distinctions and gender and class inequalities that date back to European expansion and the colonization of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans in the process of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands, and the governance, classification, and ordering of people based on epidermal difference, what sociologist Edward Telles () has described as “pigmentocracies.” We must therefore situate the interconnected local and global histories of race and racialization in relation to global and local forms of white supremacy. As scholars have demonstrated, it is important to examine the connections of ongoing racialized inequalities throughout the world—inequalities that render analogous the experiences of various far‐flung communities (Lake and Reynolds ; Mills ; Pierre ; Thomas and Clarke ). We argue that, as anthropologists, we should make it our task to “develop theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to advance our understanding of these new [and old] manifestations of race and racism,” an understanding that includes a thoughtful consideration and attention to how white supremacy functions within these racialist orders (Mullings , 667).…”