by Daniel Martinez HoSang
about Daniel Martinez HoSang
Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University. He is co-author (with Joe Lowndes) of Producers, Parasites and Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity.
Racialization
In contrast to keywords such as “race” and “racist,” “racialization” is relatively new to American studies and cultural studies. The term has a diverse lineage but is most often associated with the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986/1994), who helped make the concept of racialization a central analytic within both fields. Omi and Winant utilize the term to “signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Racialization is an ideological process, an historically specific one” (64). In contrast to static understandings of race as a universal category of analysis, racialization names a process that produces race within particular social and political conjunctures. That process constructs or represents race by fixing the significance of a “relationship, practice or group” within a broader interpretive framework. Working within this paradigm, scholars have investigated processes and practices of racialization across a wide range of fields, including electoral politics, music, literature, sports, aesthetics, religion, public policy, and social identity. Any use of the term “racialization” requires some account of the theoretical status of race within popular culture and mainstream social science. Inherent in Omi and Winant’s definition are three assumptions common to much of the...
Intersectionality
In 1976, five black women who labored on the assembly line at General Motors in St. Louis sued their employer, alleging that the auto giant's seniority-based layoff system, in which the last workers hired were the first to be fired, discriminated against them on the basis of both race and sex. In the subsequent _DeGraffenreid v. General Motors_ ruling, the Court rejected their claim, arguing that protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 permitted them to bring forth a complaint of race-based discrimination or of sex-based discrimination, but in the court’s terms, “not a combination of both.” Because the company could prove that it had hired some women (who were all white) who did not face the same seniority-based layoffs experienced by the black women plaintiffs, as well as some African Americans (who were all men) who also did not lose their jobs, the _DeGraffenreid_ plaintiffs found little protection under the prevailing interpretation of the law. In a landmark law review article in 1989, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” to name the complex and uneven ways that the law and social power operated to render the experiences of the _DeGraffenreid_ plaintiffs illegible within dominant legal...
Intersectionality & Populism
For a limited time, read the full keyword essays on “[Intersectionality](/american-cultural-studies/essay/intersectionality/)” and “[Populism](/american-cultural-studies/essay/populism/)” So much changes, so much remains the same. We excerpt here a passage from our recently co-authored [_Common Dreams_](https://urldefense.com/v3/ __https:/www.commondreams.org/views/2021/01/12/will-more-dangerous-far-right-spring-corpse-trumpism?fbclid=IwAR1J3KGzK2mOySt1_A26IKV-4f6ttuxGgRRSxma8S5E7L7XcIORckn5-pZ0__ ;!!C5qS4YX3!XFgixRZymszxMFNalmTotFW_IWFg8s8lzRzBkjhKL1Icy-Wf1Rz6JsnYT3HMn-jtWak%24) article since it extends themes we developed in our keyword essays on “Populism” and “Intersectionality.” Tens of millions of Americans believe that they were victims of a left-wing coup. For many of them the storming of the Capitol was a democratic act. They watched as people like themselves acted together to disrupt that supposed coup, and defend popular sovereignty. Right-wing insurgency is endlessly nourished by populist narratives that pit the "the common people" against elites, which includes both the storming of the Capitol and the pleasures of excess once inside—from feet on the desks of legislators to the wrecking of historical artifacts. The bipartisan condemnations of Trump and those who besieged the Capitol have been accompanied by calls for a return to "normal," in which the adults in the room would safeguard civility and reason and restore the authority of U.S. economic and democratic institutions from the populist mob. Yet these responses play right into the hands of the very elites who rob us of the...