Connexions Resource Centre
Focus on Race, Caste, Ethnicity, Racism, Multiculturalism, Identity Politics
Recent & Selected Articles
This is a small sampling of articles related to education and children in the Connexions Online Library. For more articles, books, films, and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as
education,
children,
youth,
post-secondary education,
film,
and schools.
- Racism (January 12, 2010)
An overview of racism
- Tactics of desperation: Using false accusations of 'anti-semitism' as a weapon to silence criticism of Israel's behaviour (December 27, 2009)
The Israeli state and its defenders are increasingly attempting to silence critics because they are losing the battle for public opinion.
- Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea (November 29, 2009)
Across South Korea hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas. Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them. South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.
- Connexions Archive seeks a new home (November 18, 2009)
The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
- Feeling Racism (October 26, 2009)
I have found that when a person has faced racism and discrimination, he can never forget it, it stays with him always. Seeing my mother treated with such disrespect and rudeness, only because of her race, was worse than being discriminated against myself. It burned into my soul, and it will never go away.
- Fearsome Words? (October 14, 2009)
We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival.
- Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews (September 7, 2009)
The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.
- Israeli Rabbis Ban Marriage For Jewish ‘Untouchables’ (August 7, 2009)
New immigrants to Israel from Russia with inadequate documentation have found themselves on a collision course with Israel’s Orthodox rabbis, who regard themselves as guarding the Jewish people’s ethnic and religious purity.
- Race and Class in Civil War Mississippi (August 6, 2009)
The poor whites of Mississippi who fought the Confederacy alongside slaves did so because of working class values that they shared with slaves. The fact that poor whites may have believed some racist lies about blacks that constituted the dominant ideas of the day is not nearly as important or significant as the fact that their working class values led them to ally with slaves to fight the racist ruling class. Racism came from the upper class, and anti-racism came from the working class--black and white.
- The White Cop and the Black Professor (July 26, 2009)
Police are trained to act as authoritarian thugs when they are dealing with people who are not obviously of, or loyal to, the very wealthy elite who rule the nation. The police are trained to enforce law and order in an unjust and unequal society, and a big part of doing this requires that they make ordinary people obey them out of fear.
- Confronting fears of Eurabia (July 20, 2009)
Growing anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiments have been fueled by statistics that claim to show that countries such as Germany and France will have Muslim majority populations by the turn of the century.
- "Two State Solution" Equals Racism (April 23, 2009)
The mutual fear and distrust between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine today is no more innate to these people than the belief in anti-black stereotypes so widely accepted by white Americans in the past was innate to white people. The animosity between Palestinians and Israeli Jews was deliberately fomented by Israeli Zionist leaders with the help of British and American leaders for decades. It was not the presence of Jews in Palestine, per se, that angered the native Palestinians; rather it was the intention (and then the reality) of Zionists removing non-Jews from their homeland to turn most of it into an exclusively Jewish state.
- Race Obsession harms those it is meant to help (March 29, 2009)
Ethnic monitoring does not just produce misleading data. The process of classification often creates the very problems it is supposed to solve. Local authorities have used ethnic categories not only as a means of collecting data but also as a way of distributing political power – by promoting certain ‘community leaders’ – and of disbursing public funds through ethnically-based projects. Once the allocation of power, resources and opportunities becomes linked to membership of particular groups, then people inevitably begin to identify themselves in terms of those ethnicities, and only those ethnicities.
- Black Immigrants, 'Model' Minority? Plus: Don Imus (February 25, 2009)
'Black' is a label which obscures more than it illuminates.
- Why make a fuss about the murder of a brown-skinned Muslim girl? (December 16, 2008)
History gives us numerous examples of social movements which come, over time, to adopt positions directly opposed to the principles on which they were founded. It appears this has happened to the 'feminists' who seek to silence those who speak out about violence against Muslim women.
- Inclusion or exclusion (August 10, 2008)
People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.
- Mistaken Identity (July 1, 2008)
Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have 'conflicting credos but the same vision of the world'. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to 'confine individuals to their group of origin'. Both undermine 'any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples'. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
- Why both sides are wrong in the race debate (July 1, 2008)
For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms.
- Law and the wives of others (June 28, 2008)
How does a modern, plural democratic society deal with the desire of some minority groups to observe cultural norms at odds with the law of the land?
- Of National Lies and Racial America (March 18, 2008)
To some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life.
- The “Honor” Killing of Aqsa Parvez (2008)
Feminists and reformist left have for the most part met the spate of “honour” killings within Canada with disgraceful silence.
- Identity is that which is given (2008)
In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture.
- Thinking Outside the Box (January 1, 2007)
Ignoring racism on the grounds that all citizens are equal and hence that racial or cultural differences are immaterial is clearly unacceptable. But so is labelling individuals by race, culture or faith and creating conflicts by institutionalising such differences in public policy.
- Why do we still believe in race? (2007)
Races are difficult to define and there are no objective rules for deciding what constitutes a race or to what race a person belongs. People can belong to many races at the same time.
- Black Women's Narratives of Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction (February 4, 2005)
Anyone who has ever wondered how black people managed to struggle and survive the hideous tortures meted out during slavery and afterward would gain from reading these books. They offer inspiration to a new generation of fighters.
- Born in Bradford (2005)
Multiculturalism transformed the character of antiracism. By the mid-1980s the focus of antiracist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues: a demand for Muslim schools and for separate education for girls, a campaign for halal meat to be served at school, and, most explosively, the confrontation over the publication of The Satanic Verses. Political struggles unite across ethnic or cultural divisions; cultural struggles inevitably fragment.
- How 'diversity' breeds division (August 19, 2004)
Diversity training is supposed to help 'promote good relations' between different ethnic groups and capitalise on workforce diversity. However, there is warranted scepticism about whether such training alleviates tensions or exacerbates them. Much of the content of this training is overreliant on pop sociology and pseudo-therapeutic techniques. Participants are expected to talk about stereotypes they harbour deep in their subconscious, and disclose feelings of harassment and victimisation. Trainers claim to eliminate stereotypes in the workplace, yet in talking about 'different cultural perspectives' they end up generating new and more insidious stereotypes in their stead.
- Against multiculturalism (2002)
Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
- The Real Value of Diversity (2002)
The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'.
- Israel's approved ethnic cleansing (June 1, 2001)
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has always presented a moral problem to the West, as that treatment has violated every law and moral standard on the books.
- Multiculturalism or World Culture? (2000)
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- Race and the Enlightenment (1999)
- Before the White Race Was Invented (1998)
With white racial oppression in place, the ruling class could promote poor and propertyless European-Americans into the "middle class," the same way the British promoted "mulattos" in the Caribbean, but they would have to do so strictly in token-name only, saving them countless billions of dollars, since the fantasy of social mobility was made conditional not on acquiring their own property, their own means of employment, or their own education, but on keeping African Americans poor and oppressed.
- Race and the Communist Manifesto (1998)
We need to pay attention to the Marxist traditions that rose out of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century.
- Asian American Incorporation or Insurgency? (1997)
- Quebec Agrees to Negotiate, Kidnap Crees First But "Negotiate" (1997)
Canadians as a whole seem to be unaware of the depth of the double standards advocated by the separatist leaders. We Crees are only too grimly aware of them, however, since we will be the first and most deeply affected community if the separatists ever get a chance to put their current secessionist policies into practice.
- Race and the Enlightenment (1997)
- Stanley Crouch, Neocon or Ellisonian? (1997)
Crouch clearly feels isolated within progressive circles, but it is the Left that most desperately needs to retain the message about building a cohesive democratic society. With that instinct for improvisation and bricolage which Crouch and his gurus most admire about Americans, we must read Crouch closely and adapt whatever points in his work we find correct and useful.
- The Writings of David Roediger (1997)
Roediger criticizes Marxists for too often reducing racial discrimination to conflicts over resources, such as jobs or housing, that are manipulated by a society's upper classes in order to divert attention from the real sources of inequality. Such a focus, he argues, ignores the manner in which race and racial consciousness is integrally tied to class formation and working-class consciousness.
- The Black Panthers Reconsidered (1996)
To understand the Black Panther Party, we must place it in the context of the exhaustion of the Civil Rights movement by the mid-to-late sixties.
- Class and the African-American Leadership Crisis (1996)
This market economy can't solve the real problems of African Americans. Worse, the scapegoating of society's most vulnerable members (immigrants, people of color, women and gays) is on the rise.
- New York's Latino Workers Center (1996)
By organizing around both "labor" and "social" issues-and seeking to transcend this distinction-workers' centers can integrate a variety of unifying issues into their efforts to build an organization that can fight for their members' varied social, political and economic interests.
- Thinking About Self-Determination (1994)
Does that familiar canon of the left, 'the right to self-determination', actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main utility is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically?
- American Primitive in Red, Black and White: Race and Class in the U.S. (1989)
The centrality of race in the formation of the American working class, its inseparability from the question of class, can be stated very succinctly: in 1848 and 1968, when working-class upsurges exploded in Europe under the slogans of "socialism" and "communism", American working-class containment in the Democratic Party was exploded by the race question. This is the key to the Americanization of Marxism.
- The Fusion of Anabaptist, Indian and African as the American Radical Tradition (1987)
The native American radical tradition, originating ultimately in the radical religious currents who "lost" at the very dawn of capitalism, and their meeting with the non-Western peoples--Indian and African--who shaped early American culture as much as white people, might have something very unique to contribute to the current and still completely unresolved crisis of the international revolutionary left.
- Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype (1977)
The real Jewish question in Marx's time was: For or against the political emancipation of the Jews? For or against equal rights for Jews?
- Revisiting 'Black Power,' Race and Class (1967)
There is no such suprahistorical abstraction as racism. In each historical period it was something different. It was one thing during slavery, another during Reconstruction, and quite something else today. To further insist that "Whatever their political persuasion," "All Whites" are "part of the collective white America" so that the U.S. has "180 million racists" is to blur the class line which cuts across the race divisions as well as to muffle the philosophy of total freedom which has created a second America.
- The roots of anti-Semitism (1960)
There are reasons why the discrimination against a certain race suddenly bursts forth into the lynching of an individual Negro. There are reasons why discrimination against another race takes the form, in late 19th century France, of a single wronged individual as happened in the military conspiracy against Dreyfus, whereas in another country, like Tsarist Russia, it took the form of anti-Jewish pogroms.
Selected Websites and Organizations
This is a small sampling of organizations and websites concerned with education and children in the Connexions Directory. For more organizations and websites, check the Connexions Directory Subject Index, especially under topics such as
education,
children,
youth,
post-secondary education,
film,
and schools.
- Malik, Kenan
The website of Kenan Malik, featuring articles on race, identity, multiculturalism, diversity, and censorship.
Books, Films and Periodicals
This is a small sampling of books related to education and children in the
Connexions Online Library. For more books and other resources, check the Connexions Library
Subject Index, especially under topics such as
education,
children,
youth,
post-secondary education,
film,
and schools.
- Beyond Chutzpah
On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
Author: Finkelstein, Norman
A meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bringing to bear the latest findings on the conflict and recasting the scholarly debate, Finkelstein points to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record. Why, then, does so much controversy swirl around the conflict? Finkelstein's answer, copiously documented, is that apologists for Israel contrive controversy. Whenever Israel comes under international pressure, another media campaign alleging a global outbreak of anti-Semitism is mounted.
- Black or White? The origins of racism
New Internationalist March 1985
A discussion of racism as a white problem, including articles on South Africa, New Zealand, mixed-race families and multi-culturalism. The issue looks back at the history of racism, and to the future with suggestions for anti-racist action.
- Combatting Caste
New Internationalist July 2005
A look at the caste system in South Asia and Africa. Discussion of the Dalit system in India.
- Combatting Racism in the Workplace
A Course for Workers
Author: Thomas, Barb; Novogrodsky, Charles
- The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism
Author: Perlman, Fredy
- The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Author: Pappe, Ilan
Israel historian Ilan Pappe recounts the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from Israel during the war of 1948.
- From Fatwa to Jihad
The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy
Author: Malik, Kenan
- The Gulf Within: Canadian Arabs, Racism, & The Gulf War
Author: Kashmeri, Zuhair
The Gulf Within documents the experiences of Arab and Muslim Canadians during the Gulf War. It's about the subtle and not-so-subtle anger and distrust other Canadians and institutions demonstrated towards these groups.
- If I Am Not For Myselt
Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew
Author: Marqusee, Mike
In A journey through family memory and leftwing history, Marqusee introduces us to Jewish heretics and heroes. In proudly reclaiming the Jewish radical tradition, he reminds us that cultures are not the exclusive franchises of nation-states, and that Zionists and anti-semites share the same sinister, racialized concept of group identity.
- The Invention of the Jewish People
Author: Sand, Shlomo
In this new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times — when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation.
- The Invention of the White Race
Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control
Author: Allen, Theodore W
One of the great contributions of Allen's study is a complete debunking of the myth that race and skin colour are the same thing.
- The Invention of the White Race
Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
Author: Allen, Theodore W.
Argues that the propertyless classes in continental Anglo-American and United States society have been recruited into the "intermediate buffer control stratum" (the so-called "middle class") through anomalous white-skin privileges.
- Judeophobia: The scourge of antisemitism
New Internationalist October 2004 - #372
A look at the history of antisemitism and the fight against it.
- Man, Beast and Zombie
What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature
Author: Malik, Kenan
Drawing upon the ideas of evolutionary biology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, Malik questions many of our assumptions about human nature.
- The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
Author: Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson
Robinson recounts the origins and sustaining force of the famous boycott led by Montgomery's African American women.
- The National Question
Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg
Author: Luxemburg, Rosa (edited by Davis, Horace B.)
In her penetrating analysis of nationalism, Rosa Luxemburg argues that the formula, “the right of nations to self-determination,” is essentially not a political and problematic guideline in the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding that question.
- The Nazi Connection
Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism
Author: Kuhl, Stefan
This book shows the eugenic/racist connections between Nazi Germany and the US. Responsibility for the holocaust extends beyond Germany.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste & Hierarchies
Author: Seabrook, Jeremy
Concentrates mainly on the history of social hierarchy in Western civilization, and particularly the struggles of the working class.
- The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration
Author: Stalker, Peter
- The Other
Author: Kapuscinski, Ryszard
The Other is made up of a series of lectures that Kapuscinski delivered in Austria and in Poland, eloquent speeches in which he considers the history, the present and the future of our relationship with the Other, a term he employs to distinguish Europeans from "non-Europeans, or non-whites -- while fully aware for the latter, the former are just as much 'Others'."
- The Politics Of Anti-Semitism
Author: Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey (eds.)
How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians? This is the question considered in these 18 essays (by nine Jews and nine Gentiles), including Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, Lenni Brenner, and Uri Avnery.
- The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s
Author: Aguilar-San Juan, Karin
Aguilar-San Juan offers a complex understanding of race and racial identity, and a critique of the narrow identity politics -- defined as "ethnic consciousness". She writes, "Identity politics -- while they have created occasional possibilities for dark-skinned individuals to move up the socioeconomic ladder -- unfortunately have seduced many people into putting their identity issues at the center of the debate, while shunning the more substantive issues of racism and class oppression.... Reducing race to a matter of identity, rather than expanding our experience of racism into a critique of U.S. society, is detrimental to our movement. In the Asian American community, we often make the dangerous mistake of equating the process of acquainting ourselves with our ethnic, linguistic, religious, or historic roots with activism against racism. If in our desire to claim our identity, we overlook, for example, the ways that race is connected to imperialism . . . then we hover perilously close to the trap of defining race as a biological rather than a social construct."
- Strange Fruit
Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
Author: Malik, Kenan
Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
- Towards the Abolition of Whiteness
Author: Roediger, David
Roediger's genda is to show how race consciousness among whites needs to be fought so that the working class can be brought to an emancipatory agenda.
- The Wages of Whiteness
Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Author: Roediger, David
A book that has reoriented how historians look at the American working class.
Learning from our History
Coming soon
Resources for Activists
The Connexions Calendar - An event calendar for activists.
Media Names & Numbers - A comprehensive directory of Canada's print and broadcast media. (CX5857).
Sources - A directory that enables journalists to find spokespersons of organizations. Organizations that list themselves in Sources signficantly increase their odds of getting called by reporters when they are doing a story of their issues..
