imani perry

It’s All of Us: The Practice of Inequality The people must know before they can act. —Ida B. Wells Race like sexuality, is a place where power masks itself as nature. —Anthony Farley “To identify the practice of racial inequality, we must also have a framework for understanding what race is…. Anthony Farley offers a revision of the implied spectrum theory of sexuality to be applied to race, one that understands its structure as contingent upon situs and power. Race, like sexual orientation, is produced by social arrangements and political decision making. And these arrange ments, along with self-identification, are generative of the persistence ofmore…

“It Wasn’t Me!”: Post-Intent and Correlational Racism “Today, there is no longer any single articulating principle or axial process which provides the logic required to interpret the racial dimensions of all extant political/cultural projects.” —Howard Winant “Americans generally disavow a belief in an ideology of racism. But we must understand the terms of that disavowal. What, precisely, is being disavowed? What is the definition of racism that we have rejected in our purportedly racially egalitarian society? In U.S. race talk, we generally define racism as comprising two components: intentionality and determinism. More specifically, racism requires both the intent to disadvantage someone on the basis ofmore…

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” ~James Baldwin “I have chosen to focus our attention on what I have turned ‘the practices of racial inequality,’ by which I mean actions that individuals take that researchers can identify as being clear decisions to disadvantage others on the basis of race. Identifying these decisions based on race is made possible largely by empirical social science research that reveals trends and makes comparisons between how different groups of people are treated. When we see the cumulative effect of the choices people make about howmore…