Mastodawn

Nicholas Vargas Dec 3, 2022

My first peer-reviewed paper just came out!

In it, I use the sudden removal of racial vocabulary in social-science textbooks in Spain to investigate what happens to the concept of race when racial vocabulary is removed from the public sphere?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2022.2146451?journalCode=rers20

#race #sociology #sociodon #academicmastodon #academia

Racism without race: reconstructing race through culture in Spanish social-science textbooks

What happens to race when racial vocabulary disappears? This paper leverages a sudden change in the Spanish social science curriculum in the 1990s to empirically trace how the removal of the langua...

Taylor & Francis

Show thread

Mireia Dec 3, 2022

Using the unique case of Spain, where racial vocabulary was prevalent in social science textbooks until the 1990s and was then abruptly removed from them, I trace the ways race continues to structure the social world presented in the books through the vocabulary of culture.

Analyzing 82 textbooks in Spain from 1975 till 2017, I suggest that we can’t understand current conceptions of culture-based classification systems in Europe without understanding in what ways they are rooted in racial ones.

Show thread

Mireia Dec 3, 2022

I find that while biological race is at face value being directly challenged in Spanish textbooks, the turn to culture as a classificatory system only satisfies the most superficial goal of abandoning biological race science: that of removing its vocabulary.

Culture paradoxically legitimizes and enables the belief in naturally different people, differences that are innate and essential, cannot be overcome and that are visible and recognizable in phenotypical markers.

Show thread

Mireia Dec 3, 2022

A revealing exception to the removal of racial vocabulary from the textbooks is the continuation of the use of the category Black. The persistence of “Blackness” creates a process of “asymetric racialization”, by which Black populations continue to be racialized, while white people in Europe can symbolically remove themselves from the racial hierarchy in a way that makes racial inequality seem an issue of only those who are racialized.

Show thread

Mireia Dec 3, 2022

The case of the Spanish erasure of “race” also shows how racial classifcatory systems respond and adapt to social and politcal moments. At a time when European integration was a high political goal and immigration was dramatically increasing in Spain, the resulting “cultural” classificatory system proved to be more flexible and better equipped at classifying Spaniards within a larger “European culture” while drawing harsher boundaries between Spaniards and non-European immigrants.

You hear it everywhere in Europe now. 'not our culture', white supremacy replaced by cultural supremacy.

Show thread

andrés castro araújo Dec 3, 2022

@mireiatriguero very cool, reminds me a little of Trouillot’s Adieu Culture essay. Will read!

Show thread

DJ Dr. Maitxinha Dec 3, 2022

@mireiatriguero This looks fascinating, especially because I grew up in Spain learning from those textbooks. Do you have a link to the study?

Show thread

DJ Dr. Maitxinha Dec 3, 2022

@mireiatriguero Oh, I saw it at the end. Will read it with pleasure!!

Show thread

@krisnelson Dec 3, 2022

@mireiatriguero Oooh, this sound like really excellent research! The European “colorblind” thing keeps needing investigation and pushback—color me not surprised that the same biases just get reproduced as “culture” instead of phenotype when not critically examined and addressed.

(Now I just need to find a way to read the full article bc I don’t have institutional access right now.)

Show thread

Mireia Dec 3, 2022

@krisnelson hi! So glad you find the research interesting! If you give me an email I can send you a free eprint!

Show thread