̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - racism

Racial discrimination linked to increased risk of premature babies

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 08:16:17 +0000

̽��ֱ��findings add to growing evidence that racial discrimination is a risk factor for poor health outcomes, say the researchers.

For several decades, race has been recognised as a social determinant of health and a risk factor for numerous diseases. ̽��ֱ��evidence increasingly suggests that social, environmental, economic and political factors are fundamental drivers of health inequities, and that it is often racial discrimination or racism, rather than race, that is the root cause of racial disparities in health outcomes.

For example, maternal death rates among Black and Indigenous women in the USA are two to three times higher than those of white women. Similarly, in the UK, maternal death rates are two to four times higher among Black and Asian women compared to death rates among white women.

To explore the existing patterns of racial discrimination and adverse pregnancy outcomes, the researchers carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis, pooling and analysing data from the available evidence. This approach allowed them to bring together existing and sometimes contradictory or under-powered studies to provide more robust conclusions. Their results are published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health.

̽��ֱ��team searched eight electronic databases, looking for relevant studies on self-reported racial discrimination and premature birth (that is, before 37 weeks), low and very low birthweight, small-for-gestational age, and high blood pressure associated with pregnancy.

In all, the results of 24 studies were included in the final analysis. ̽��ֱ��majority of studies (20) were carried out in the USA. Study participants were of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Black or African American, Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, Mãori, Pacific, Asian, Aboriginal Australian, Romani, indigenous German and Turkish.

̽��ֱ��pooled analysis showed that the experience of racial discrimination was significantly associated with increased risk of premature birth. Women who experienced racial discrimination were 40% more likely to give birth prematurely. When low quality studies were excluded, the odds of a premature birth were reduced, but still 31% higher in those experiencing racial discrimination.

While not statistically significant, the results also suggest that the experience of racial discrimination may increase the chance of giving birth to a small-for-gestational age baby by 23%.

Co-first-author Jeenan Kaiser, who did her MPhil in Public Health at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and is currently a medical student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Alberta, said: “Racial discrimination impacts the health of racialised communities not only in direct and intentional ways, but also in how it shapes an individual’s experiences, opportunities, and quality of life. These are fundamentally driven by structural and social determinants of health.

“While our study focused on its impact on pregnancy outcomes, it is becoming increasingly evident that it negatively impacts a myriad of health outcomes. Efforts to counter racial discrimination and promote health must focus on systemic policy changes to create sustainable change.”

Co-first author Kim van Daalen, a Gates Cambridge and PhD candidate at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Dismantling structures and policies that enable institutional and interpersonal racial discrimination, underlying racial and ethnic disparities in health and intersecting social inequalities, is essential to improve overall health in societies. Partnerships of health care professionals with community-based reproductive justice and women’s health organisations who work in this area can improve health for racialised women in a community-centred way.”

̽��ֱ��researchers point out that racial discrimination impacts what health services and resources are available, such as referral to specialist care, access to health insurance and access to public health services.

Co-author Dr Samuel Kebede, who did his MPhil in Epidemiology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and is currently at Montefiore Health System/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City said: “Historically there have been countless examples of where medicine and public health have been furthered by the subjugation and experimentation of Black and indigenous people. But the influence of structural racism is still present within the healthcare system today. From segregated healthcare for uninsured and under-insured people of colour in the United States, to the global disparity in COVID-19 vaccinations, structures continue to perpetuate inequities. Health professionals can play a vital role in dismantling these systems.”

Many of the studies were of limited quality and included few marginalised racial or ethnic groups other than African Americans; as such, their applicability to other ethnic groups and cultural settings may be limited. However, the researchers argue that when pooled, the data clearly demonstrate the negative impact of racial discrimination on pregnancy outcomes.

Reference
van Daalen, KR, & Kaiser, J et al. Racial discrimination and adverse pregnancy outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Global Health; 3 Aug 2022; DOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2022-009227

Women who experience racial discrimination on the basis of their ethnicity, race or nationality are at increased risk of giving birth prematurely, according to a team led by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Racial discrimination impacts the health of racialised communities not only in direct and intentional ways, but also in how it shapes an individual’s experiences, opportunities, and quality of life

Jeenan Kaiser

Ariel Skelley (Getty Images)

Black woman holding newborn baby in hospital bed

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Whiteness of AI erases people of colour from our ‘imagined futures’, researchers argue

fpjl2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 07:08:06 +0000

This is according to experts at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who suggest that current portrayals and stereotypes about AI risk creating a “racially homogenous” workforce of aspiring technologists, building machines with bias baked into their algorithms.

They say that cultural depictions of AI as White need to be challenged, as they do not offer a "post-racial" future but rather one from which people of colour are simply erased.

̽��ֱ��researchers, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), say that AI, like other science fiction tropes, has always reflected the racial thinking in our society.

They argue that there is a long tradition of crude racial stereotypes when it comes to extraterrestrials – from the "orientalised" alien of Ming the Merciless to the Caribbean caricature of Jar Jar Binks.

But artificial intelligence is portrayed as White because, unlike species from other planets, AI has attributes used to "justify colonialism and segregation" in the past: superior intelligence, professionalism and power.

“Given that society has, for centuries, promoted the association of intelligence with White Europeans, it is to be expected that when this culture is asked to imagine an intelligent machine it imagines a White machine,” said Dr Kanta Dihal, who leads CFI’s ‘Decolonising AI’ initiative.

“People trust AI to make decisions. Cultural depictions foster the idea that AI is less fallible than humans. In cases where these systems are racialised as White that could have dangerous consequences for humans that are not,” she said.

Together with her colleague Dr Stephen Cave, Dihal is the author of a new paper on the case for decolonising AI, published today in the journal Philosophy and Technology.

̽��ֱ��paper brings together recent research from a range of fields, including Human-Computer Interaction and Critical Race Theory, to demonstrate that machines can be racialised, and that this perpetuates "real world" racial biases.

This includes work on how robots are seen to have distinct racial identities, with Black robots receiving more online abuse, and a study showing that people feel closer to virtual agents when they perceive shared racial identity.

“One of the most common interactions with AI technology is through virtual assistants in devices such as smartphones, which talk in standard White middle-class English,” said Dihal. “Ideas of adding Black dialects have been dismissed as too controversial or outside the target market.”

̽��ֱ��researchers conducted their own investigation into search engines, and found that all non-abstract results for AI had either Caucasian features or were literally the colour white.

A typical example of AI imagery adorning book covers and mainstream media articles is Sophia: the hyper-Caucasian humanoid declared an “innovation champion” by the UN development programme. But this is just a recent iteration say researchers.

“Stock imagery for AI distills the visualizations of intelligent machines in western popular culture as it has developed over decades,” said Cave, Executive Director of CFI.

“From Terminator to Blade Runner, Metropolis to Ex Machina, all are played by White actors or are visibly White onscreen. Androids of metal or plastic are given white features, such as in I, Robot. Even disembodied AI – from HAL-9000 to Samantha in Her – have White voices. Only very recently have a few TV shows, such as Westworld, used AI characters with a mix of skin tones.”

Cave and Dihal point out that even works clearly based on slave rebellion, such as Blade Runner, depict their AIs as White. “AI is often depicted as outsmarting and surpassing humanity,” said Dihal. “White culture can’t imagine being taken over by superior beings resembling races it has historically framed as inferior.”

“Images of AI are not generic representations of human-like machines: their Whiteness is a proxy for their status and potential,” added Dihal.

“Portrayals of AI as White situate machines in a power hierarchy above currently marginalized groups, and relegate people of colour to positions below that of machines. As machines become increasingly central to automated decision-making in areas such as employment and criminal justice, this could be highly consequential.”

“ ̽��ֱ��perceived Whiteness of AI will make it more difficult for people of colour to advance in the field. If the developer demographic does not diversify, AI stands to exacerbate racial inequality.”

̽��ֱ��overwhelming ‘Whiteness’ of artificial intelligence – from stock images and cinematic robots to the dialects of virtual assistants – removes people of colour from humanity's visions of its high-tech future.

If the developer demographic does not diversify, AI stands to exacerbate racial inequality

Kanta Dihal

ITU/R.Farrell

Sophia, Hanson Robotics Ltd. speaking at the AI for GOOD Global Summit, Geneva

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Opinion: Racism in the US runs far deeper than Trump's white supremacist fanbase

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 14:32:18 +0000

Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the presidency has put racism at the heart of American politics. From the very start of his campaign, Trump called Mexicans “criminals” and “rapists” while pledging to build a wall between the US and its southern neighbour. He shocked the world by promising to ban Muslim visitors from the US, and is now reportedly considering a “Muslim registration system”. He dismissed the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement and refused to disavow the support he received from white supremacists.

Among his supporters is David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who described Trump’s triumph as a victory for “our people”. A week after Trump’s victory, a white nationalist group met in Washington DC to “hail Trump” with Hitler salutes and decry the mainstream media with the Nazi-era term “Lügenpresse”, or “lying press”.

After the symbolic breakthrough of Barack Obama’s presidency, this feels like a shocking step backwards on the issue of race. But it’s important not to overstate America’s progress during the Obama years, nor to ignore the ways in which racism extends far beyond the “whitelash” of Trump’s improbable rise.

Instead, to properly confront America’s racist reality, we need a properly nuanced way to think about it in all its complexity and intractability. Broadly speaking, we can divide racism into three categories: structural, unconscious and unapologetic.

Structural racism refers to the ways racial inequality endures across generations. Racial gaps in household wealth, homeownership and unemployment rates are still enormous. According to the federal government, America’s schools are more segregated today than they were a decade ago. Unarmed African-Americans are substantially more likely to be physically harassed by the police, and around six times as likely to be incarcerated as whites.

Playing into these problems is unconscious racism. This term describes the ways people unintentionally discriminate against others on the basis of race. We know from extensive research that many employers treat people of colour differently from whites when they apply for jobs or promotions, even though they insist that they aren’t personally racist. Social scientists call this “unconscious bias”, and many US government agencies, public institutions and companies have only recently begun to tackle it.

With such stark differences at the root of black and Latino experience, why don’t white people see racial equality as an urgent national imperative? Unconscious racism shapes and sustains structural racism, and leads white people away from the facts of persistent inequality. This interplay helps to explain how American society fails to prioritise racial justice despite the existence of these enormous divides.

From implicit to explicit

̽��ֱ��third form of racism is what we’ve seen in the Trump campaign: overt efforts to stereotype or rank people on the basis of race, and “dog-whistle” racism which uses coded language to achieve the same effect.

Overt racism is alarming and dangerous, and has the potential to set back race relations considerably. But to solve the deeper problem of race relations, the US’s leaders must not only condemn the unapologetic racists of the far-right; they must tackle racism’s structural and unconscious dimensions. This can only happen if the past and the present are kept in sharp focus.

American racism is not just history. EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo

Black people in America were denied the opportunity to own property for centuries; in fact, they were themselves held as property, and exploited to produce enormous wealth for their white owners and for the nation more broadly. Even after slavery was abolished in 1865, African-Americans were subjected to another century of open discrimination in housing, employment and every other aspect of communal life.

As did the emergence of a black middle class in the 1960s and 1970s, Barack Obama’s rise to the White House has had a huge and positive effect on American society. But Obama’s election also enabled some (mostly white) commentators to declare that the US had “moved beyond” race – that the debts of slavery and racism had been paid in full, and that anyone still complaining was guilty of “racial entitlement”.

Armed with this mistaken assumption, many white conservatives have dismissed black complaints of police misconduct as spurious or entitled, insisting that Obama’s victory proved there is no ceiling for people of colour in America. With this cynical twist, they can frame any action against racial inequality as a form of undeserved special treatment.

Obama himself has addressed the question of race sporadically and cautiously, no doubt reasoning that white conservatives would seize on a full-scale assault on unconscious and structural racism as evidence of “bias” or self-interest. With Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats and progressives have a fresh opportunity to attack the problem of racism in all its guises.

They won’t have the support of the president or a Congressional majority, until the 2018 midterm elections at least. But racism has always run deeper than the electoral cycle. Solving it demands education, dialogue, protest, activism and energy. These resources will be in limited supply given the sheer number of challenges thrown up by a Trump presidency, but they will be vital to the work of healing the deepest division in American life.

Nicholas Guyatt, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in American History, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Racism in the US has always run deeper than the electoral cycle, writes Nicholas Guyatt, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in American History. Solving it demands education, dialogue, protest, activism and energy.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies

amb206 — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000

In the mid-17th century, a French missionary called Pierre Pelleprat visited several Caribbean islands before travelling to French Guyana and the South American mainland. In an infamous account of his travels, he described the blacks of the Caribbean as “so hideous and misshapen that they fill you with horror”. Tellingly, however, he did not consider this ugliness to be beyond salvation: “I do not know whether my eyes were charmed, but I usually found [the negroes] better shaped and more pleasant after their baptism.”

Pelleprat was part of a generation of Europeans who began to travel widely, crossing oceans to encounter people whose cultures seemed alien and uncivilised. Arriving on the shores of the tropical islands of the Caribbean after a long and perilous sea voyage, Pelleprat and his compatriots would have met for the first time large native populations of Caribs as well as Amerindians and Africans. Many were enslaved to white settlers making fortunes in commodities such as sugar and tobacco.

̽��ֱ��missionary's words make shocking reading. But, says Dr Mélanie Lamotte (Faculty of History and Newnham College), it is worth exploring the beliefs that underpinned them. Lamotte is a researcher whose work focuses on colour prejudice and interethnic antagonism in the early modern French empire. A French national, educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Cambridge, Lamotte has a personal reason to be interested in the experiences of enslaved people. On her mother’s side, she is the descendant of a slave who, in the 18th century, was taken from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

A project to trace her own family ancestry took Lamotte on an often frustrating journey into archival materials. Accounts written by slaves are few; for generations, they were denied the opportunities afforded by education and literacy. She says: “I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies whose history has long been neglected or twisted by analysts – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.”

Research into the various ways in which race has been understood has generally taken the 18th century as its starting point. Encounters between people with different cultures have, of course, taken place for millennia – and it is hard to know how such differences were registered by those who experienced them. Lamotte suggests that records of 17th-century encounters between Europeans and inhabitants of distant lands reveal something remarkable. She says: “Rather than focusing on race as something inborn, early European travellers saw difference as something more fluid – and often as something that could be corrected by imposing ‘civilising’ influences.”

On the basis of her extensive work on underexplored archival material, Lamotte argues that before the 18th century, “race didn’t matter” in the same way that it came to matter when ideas of racial differences became more fixed, most famously by laws that prohibited marriages between different groups. Accounts from travellers in the French empire reveal that, although notions of blood and breeding were powerful in French society (for example in the preservation of the lineages of French nobility), the non-whites encountered by France’s empire-makers were initially not seen in the same terms.

Lamotte has looked in detail at records relating to the French empire in three contrasting locations: the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, Ile Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, and Louisiana in the former French colonies of north America. In making direct comparisons between these widespread colonies, her research extends existing scholarship to a global scale and also reflects the fact that many travellers sailed throughout the French empire. Their ideas circulated too – including the notion that non-Europeans could be schooled out of ‘backward’ customs.

In arguing that “race didn’t matter”, Lamotte does not suggest that prejudice did not exist (it most certainly did) but rather that it took forms dictated by the preoccupations of a society concerned with behaviour, dress and manners – and, of course, with religion. During an era in which the outward signs of politesse were paramount, newly-encountered people were judged, and categorised, in terms of their level of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ or (at the other end of the scale) ‘civilisation’.

A good measure of self-interest fuelled the initially cordial relations between the colonialists and the inhabitants of lands seen to be rich in possibilities. In some cases, by forging alliances with the local population, the incomers were able to tap into the local trade networks that were vital to securing goods for export – fur from North America and spices from the East Indies.

Many of the early French settlers were men, and marriageable women were in short supply. In 1690 only 16 white women were recorded on Île Bourbon (now La Réunion), an island located in the Southwest Indian Ocean. Most European men on Ile Bourbon married non-white women – despite an ordinance issued in 1674 which forbade “Frenchmen to marry negresses” and “blacks to marry whites” in the colony.

In New France (Acadia, Canada, the Great Lakes and the Illinois Country), miscegenation (the mixing of groups) was pursued as a deliberate policy to assist integration. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain, French explorer and founder of the Quebec settlement, reportedly assured local communities that “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people”. From the outset of French colonisation in the Caribbean, the need to maintain a buoyant slave population created a comparatively more prejudiced and segregated ‘plantation society’.

Father Mongin, a Jesuit missionary who spent time in the French Caribbean in the 1680s, wrote that “some [negroes] do not lack intelligence and are capable of all sorts of arts and sciences, should they receive the right education”. Thousands of miles across the world, a surgeon named Sieur Dellon, who had spent some time on Ile Bourbon 20 years earlier, wrote in a similar vein that “among [Malagasies], there are some with common sense, quick witted, and who would be fit for the arts and sciences, if they were educated”.

Education in this context involved imposing all-important French rules of politesse, conversion from idolatry to Christianity, and the stamping out of “absurd” beliefs and “ridiculous” ceremonies. Non-Europeans were described as “sluggish” and indolent. Outrage was expressed when some French settlers in North America, rather than ‘Frenchifying’ the natives, became ‘Indianised’ themselves. In the early 17th century a French administrator complained that, living among the native people, the French coureurs de bois (woodsmen) behaved “like the savages” and enjoyed “an animal life”, doing little more than hunting and fishing.

̽��ֱ��start of the 18th century witnessed a change in attitude on the part of the colonisers. French administrators in North America began to argue against interracial marriages which “would mix good [French] blood with bad [Native American] blood”. In 1723 the colonial Council of Louisiana issued an edict forbidding “all Frenchmen and any other subjects of the king who are white to marry savage women”. ̽��ֱ��number of mixed marriages dropped, and in 1738 one governor observed that “the Illinois Indians do not invite the French to marry their daughters any longer, and the French do not think about this anymore”.

Children of mixed European and indigenous heritage (métis) were, by the middle of the 18th century, frequently considered to be inferior. French colonialists complained that métis children were “extremely swarthy” and “naturally lazy”. Dark complexions were seen as indicators of ‘racial’ inferiority – and the alleged licentiousness and brutishness that had long been attributed to the natives were increasingly believed to be ‘fixed’. Official documents listed colonial populations under headings such as Nègre (negro), Mulâtre (mulato), Métis (mixed) and Sauvage (indigenous).

“Ultimately, ‘racial’ discourses developed partly because the French needed to justify discrimination and segregation towards people who were viewed as a threat to French socio-economic and imperialist ambitions. These people included slaves who could claim emancipation, free peoples of colour who presented as economic competitors, and the large Native American population, unreceptive to French policies of ‘Frenchification’ and evangelisation,” says Lamotte.

“People continue to use language and ideas inherited from colonial times, for example, by using the term ‘nègres’ to designate blacks, and maintaining the image of blacks as lazy or violent. As the result of centuries of prejudice, many blacks in the Antilles consider themselves inferior to whites. A creole phrase often heard in Guadeloupe when a baby is born is ‘ti-moun la bien soti’, meaning ‘your baby looks good as he or she doesn’t have too dark a skin’. Exposing the ways in which such views took hold over the centuries, and telling the tales of those who lived with prejudice, is a powerful way of shaping a more equal world.”

As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave, is researching a brief period when European notions of ethnicity were relatively fluid. Early French settlers believed that non-white inhabitants of the colonies could be ‘civilised’ and ‘improved’.

I see my work as a form of historical reparation for the inhabitants of France’s former colonies – and I hope that a better understanding of France’s colonial past will shed light on the roots of the social tensions apparent in France today.

Mélanie Lamotte

Image from Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles

Mélanie Lamotte: my family history

I was born in France, and my mother comes from the island of Guadeloupe, an overseas department in the French Caribbean. ̽��ֱ��history of France’s colonial empire was, until recently, largely absent from my country’s school curriculum. But I wanted to know more about my family. When I was 20 years old, I reconstructed my family tree, tracing it back three centuries to a slave called Anne Rose. My research inspired me to become a historian. From 2006 to 2015, I received grants from the EU and the UK government to study history at the Sorbonne and Cambridge. Today I’m a historian of slavery, ethnic prejudice and early modern French colonialism.

In the 18th century, Anne Rose was transported from the coast of Senegal to work on a sugar cane plantation in Guadeloupe. White planters were making fortunes in commodities such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and indigo. One of Anne Rose’s children, a man named Quidi, moved to Pointe Noire, Guadeloupe in 1794. My extended family still lives in that same town. Slavery was officially abolished in the 1790s, in the aftermath of the French revolution. Records suggest that Quidi was freed and, remarkably for a former slave, lived for nearly 100 years. He had a daughter, Demoiselle Anne Rose, in 1799. ̽��ֱ��title ‘Demoiselle” suggests that she may have been of relatively high status.

Slavery was permanently abolished in the French colonies in 1848, and blacks in the French Caribbean began to use the names of their slave ancestors as their family names. My family on my mother’s side is still called ‘Annerose’. ̽��ֱ��grandson of Demoiselle Anne Rose was my granddad’s grandfather. My granddad was told that his grandfather had been homeless, and lived on a beach called ‘Plage Caraïbe’ in Pointe-Noire.

Slavery is a significant part of French history. ̽��ֱ��four French overseas departments (former French colonies) are ranked among the poorest regions of the EU. Researchers have shown that this economic distress is in part a consequence of the slavery. ̽��ֱ��French government has been working to raise the profile of Atlantic slavery in French consciousness. ̽��ֱ��Law of May 2001 declared slavery and the slave trade to be ‘crimes against humanity’. May 10th is now an annual day of commemoration of Atlantic slavery in France.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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When beauty matters: the politics of how we look

amb206 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:31:16 +0000

We live in a world brimming with images. But the pictures that perhaps most powerfully evoke our individual life stories are seldom seen. Stored in personal albums or pushed to the back of drawers, these are not the images that we necessarily choose to share on social media. Taken on occasions that are both special and ordinary (the first day at school, that family trip to the beach), these photographs are imbued with feelings, many of them complex and complicated. Looked back on from a distance of time passed, they reveal our vulnerability: how we were and how we are, how we and others saw us and see us.

When sociologist Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa interviewed a group of Mexican women about their lives, she invited them to share their photo albums and reflect on their feelings about their bodies and the multiplicity of connections developing around them over time. Her objective was to explore women’s lived experiences and reveal the powerful role that ideas about beauty and race play in shaping individual lives. Moreno Figueroa sought a complex account from her interviewees, but the route those narratives took and the depth of their emotions surprised her. So much so, that she decided, on publishing her work, not to reproduce any of the women’s photographs.

Much has been written about women and beauty. Far less has been written about the ways in which notions of beauty, femininity, age and race intersect to create strongly perceived ‘differences’ which have profound and enduring effects. To be deemed beautiful confers immediate advantages – yet beauty is fleeting and fragile. A state of being beautiful is either displaced to the past or deferred to the future. As Moreno Figueroa has written, in a paper with her colleague Rebecca Coleman, “beauty is not a ‘thing’ which can be experienced in the present, but is that which is felt in different temporalities”.

Next week (30 August to 3 September 2016) Moreno Figueroa and colleagues (Dr Dominique Grisard from the ̽��ֱ�� of Basel & the Swiss Center for Social Research and Dr Margrit Vogt from the ̽��ֱ�� of Flensburg) will stage a ground-breaking summer school and conference titled ‘ ̽��ֱ��Politics of Beauty’. Participants will include academics and artists who will share professional and personal experiences to encourage wide-ranging debate on topics related to beauty.

As a sociologist concerned with understanding the ‘quality’ of inequality, the depth and feeling of racism and sexism, Moreno Figueroa argues that beauty should be understood as an “embodied affective process” – not so much a state of being as a feeling about being. “We’re inviting our participants to engage with the politics of beauty and its ramifications. How does beauty travel? What kinds of beauty discourses are created and transmitted in such journeys? How are the politics of beauty reconfigured both through its travels and its locatedness? When do they matter and to what effect and extent? These are important questions because they go to the heart of many human experiences,” Grisard, Vogt and Moreno Figueroa write in their invitation to this event.

Moreno Figueroa has written extensively on beauty and race – especially in the context of Latin America – and has helped to raise awareness of the ways in which they contribute to the reproduction of pervasive forms of racism and sexism and the reinforcement of structures of inequality. ̽��ֱ��Mexican women who shared their photographs were educated lower and middle-class professionals. They were also, like the majority of Mexico’s population, mestiza (racially mixed). ̽��ֱ��interviews revealed the strong concern with appearance, skin colour, physical features which are in turn deeply intertwined with notions of acceptable femininity and national belonging – and the words that cropped up again and again was morena (dark-skinned) and fea (ugly). One woman reported that, as a child, she used to ask her uncles, when they teased her about her looks, “Why am I so morena?”

“This question sounds naïve but it’s not, as it comes from a context where racial mixture has given a sense that different physical features are possible. Some get ‘lucky’, some don’t,” says Moreno Figueroa. “Mexico is a highly racialised society in which issues of racism, and particularly prejudices about skin colour, are neither acknowledged nor addressed – but have remained hugely influential both in the intimate environment of the family and in the wider world outside it. Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.”

In interviewing contemporary mestiza women about their life stories, Moreno Figueroa was asking them to describe the form of racism that exists within the majority population and not the more familiar type of racism directed by a majority to a minority.

“In the context of everyday experience framed by the racial logics of mestizaje, there are no fixed racial positions and people are not engaged in processes of identity politics as found in other parts of the world. This is what is so striking about mestizaje: people are not white or black, but rather, they are whiter than or darker than others,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��category of mestizo which epitomises Mexican national identity is relative. As the historian Alan Knight has pointed out, mestizo represents an achieved and ascribed status underpinned by whitening practices and promises of whiteness as privilege.”

It is within this framework that the racialisation of understandings of beauty comes to the fore. ̽��ֱ��infamous Mexican Caste Paintings (Pinturas de Castas) give a sense of how during colonial times artists recreated highly composed scenes that represented the routes for racial and class improvement underlined by aspirations of beauty, refinement and leisure. A union between a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman would produce a mestiza child; one between a Spanish man and a mestiza woman, a castizo child; and between a Spanish man and a castizo woman a Spanish child. In this rationale, in three generations, with careful planning and no mixing with Indigenous or Black blood, people could whiten themselves by ascription and make sure their descendants would fare better in life.

While Moreno Figueroa is careful not to claim a direct line between the Colonial period (1521-1810) and contemporary Mexico, it cam as no surprise that one of her participants shared stories of unease when young whiter women were courted by darker men, or of exasperation when a relative decided to marry a woman as dark as him. ̽��ֱ��reported dialogues are revealing: “How come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like? And even nowadays he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s, they still ask him ‘If you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’. Why didn’t he think about ‘improving the race’.”

While the Mexican racial project is specific to its context, it shares some similar experiences of colonisation with other Latin American countries, as well as strong responses to 19th-century scientific racism, such as the trend to develop official ideologies of racial mixture (for example, Mexican Mestizaje or Brazil’s racial democracy) as part of nation-building strategies. As Moreno Figueroa explains: “These racial projects, and many others around the world, are tightly entangled with ideas about femininity where notions of beauty, its oppressiveness and fascination, play a central role in filtering privilege and crystalising paths of purity and belonging.”

Beauty might not be tangible, not a ‘thing’, but the promise of it underpins a global business worth many millions of dollars, generated by an industry that trades on vulnerability as well as pleasure. “It would be easy perhaps to dismiss the cosmetics and beauty treatment industries as somehow superficial and exploitative,” says Moreno Figueroa. “But beauty lies in a difficult terrain – it is also a question of hope and pleasure, pain and shame. These are profoundly felt human emotions for both women and men. They deserve our full attention.”

Participants in the summer school and conference include: Diane Negra ( ̽��ֱ�� College Dublin, Ireland); Francis Ray White ( ̽��ֱ�� of Westminster, UK); Jackie Sanchez Taylor ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester, UK); Joy Gregory (Slade School of Fine Art, UK); Marcia Ochoa (UC Santa Cruz, USA); Meeta Rani Jha, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Winchester, UK); Mimi Thi Nguyen ( ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA); Ng’endo Mukii (independent film maker, Nairobi, Kenya); Paula Villa (LMU Munich, Germany); Rosalind Gill (City ̽��ֱ��, London, UK); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory ̽��ֱ��, USA); Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC Annenberg, USA); and Shirley Tate, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds, UK).

For details of the Politics of Beauty summer school and conference go to https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/about/events/beauty-summer-school

Questions of beauty and its politics will be discussed at a summer school and conference next week (30 August to 3 September 2016). Participants will examine the ways in which perceptions and experiences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and colonialism converge to exert powerful influences on our lives.

Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.

Monica Moreno Figueroa

Pinturas de Castas

Mexican Caste Paintings from the 18th century

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“You need to ignore it, babe”: how mothers prepare young children for the reality of racism

amb206 — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:00:00 +0000

An in-depth study of mothers and young children living in multicultural areas of London found that many of the women interviewed had prepared children for coping with a social environment that might be likely to include elements of racism. Many parents advised their children to ignore racist barbs which were made by people who were “rude and ignorant”.

While at the Centre for Family Research, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Dr Humera Iqbal carried out a small-scale but intensive study of 36 British-born mothers – 12 British Indian, 12 British Pakistani and 12 White British – living in multicultural areas of the capital.This qualitative research into families from the UK’s three largest ethnic groups was part of a larger project on ethnicity and family life.

̽��ֱ��study, ‘Multicultural parenting: Preparation for bias socialisation in British South Asian and White families in the UK’, is published in the January 2015 issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations.

̽��ֱ��36 families studied in depth were all non-immigrant British citizens. ̽��ֱ��mothers interviewed were at least the second generation to live in the UK. All had one child or more aged between five and seven years old. ̽��ֱ��children, who came from a range of socioeconomic settings, attended state primary schools in areas of London with high proportions of each of the groups being studied.

Iqbal found that, overall, parents described positive experiences of diversity. However, mothers and children from all three groups also reported experiencing discrimination – sometimes on a daily basis. Mothers of children as young as five found themselves addressing topics related to racism, either as a result of prejudice or in anticipation of it, to help their youngsters cope with the discrimination they were likely to face.

A marked difference emerged in the use of these ‘preparation for bias’ strategies across the three groups studied with 75% of British Pakistani families reporting their use, compared with 50% of White British families and just 16% of British Indian families.

“It’s important to stress that my research looks at a small number of families. However, it is clear that increased diversity in the UK has encouraged families to adapt their parenting strategies.This is particularly the case for groups who are experiencing wider societal pressures. British Pakistani Muslims, for example, increasingly face Islamophobia,” said Iqbal.

“International political events, such as the rise of the Islamic state and local negative attitudes towards immigration and the corresponding rise of UKIP in Britain, have all heightened the current mistrust towards Muslims - a highly diverse and complex set of groups often described as a single entity which is seen to include British Pakistanis.”

̽��ֱ��research is notable for its inclusion of White British families who, as the dominant group, might not be expected to experience discrimination. “It was important to include White mothers and children because few studies have looked at the experiences of majority ethnic groups,” said Iqbal.

“A shift in the demographics of an area can mean that White British families find that, in their particular neighbourhood, they are no longer in the majority. One mother described this as ‘informal segregation’. She felt that many of the White families previously living in the community had chosen to move outwards leaving fewer White families behind and a predominance of families from one or two other ethnicities,” said Iqbal.

“Several of the White families interviewed reported feeling different and more vulnerable to experiencing both subtle and less subtle forms of discrimination as they now represented a group that was in smaller numbers.”

Previous research into similar issues has concentrated on older children, particularly teenagers. In concentrating on young children, who were just starting school, Iqbal shows that issues related to race and ethnicity begin to impact on children very early in their lives. Her study makes an important contribution to awareness of the potential implications of racism for child health and development.

“Previous research has found that stressful environments and ethnic inequalities are associated with unfavourable development profiles in children,” she said. “For example, a recent big study found that mothers who had experienced racism first-hand were more likely to have children at risk of obesity. Other research showed that mothers’ perception of racism was associated with socio-emotional difficulties in children such as being withdrawn or isolated.”

Iqbal looked at two types of ‘preparation for bias’ strategies: reactive and proactive. Her research showed that, while some parents downplayed race-related incidents and encouraged children to ignore such behaviour, other parents addressed incidents directly and urged their children to make a stand.

A White British mother told her son to ignore news reports and comments related to racism. “I’ll try to explain what’s going on, and, I just kind of say to him that you need to ignore it, babe… Don’t bite back if it happens, because…that’s what they want.”

How parents responded to discrimination depended on a range of factors – including their own experiences of racism. A study by researchers at New York ̽��ֱ�� found that parents who had been victims of discrimination were more likely to prepare their children to cope with similar problems. This concurred with findings from the present study. British Pakistani parents, in particular, anticipated that their child would encounter racial barriers and did their utmost to equip their child with tools for future success by stressing the importance of a good education.

Some mothers used a discussion about racism as an opportunity to promote the importance of equality and to bolster their children’s psychological resources. Also, talking about discrimination following an incident emerged as an important way of protecting the emotional state of the child.

A British Pakistani mother had experienced frequent racism about her niqab (head covering with veil) from a group of teenagers, and these incidents had made her young son increasingly distressed and angry. She worried that as a result he would have negative views of white people and explained that he shouldn’t “discriminate against a whole bunch of people because there’s a few idiots…”

A British White mother said that her child and his friends had been called “white rats” by some children visiting the same block of flats. “My attitude is… you’re no different, you’re a different colour but you are no different to us… I won’t have racism at all…”

However, a number of White parents did look for “people like us” when choosing a school. Some felt that a multicultural school intake was a good thing but should be a “healthy” mix – in other words not too diverse. Two White British mothers reported moving their children to schools with more White pupils as they were worried about their children being marginalised.

Mothers did not always agree with schools about the best way to handle questions relating to race and faith and gave examples of schools either being heavy-handed or lacking in awareness of children’s sensitivities about differences.

A White mother said that her son had asked for the halal dish being served to his Muslim friend in the school canteen.Told he couldn’t have it, because he was “clearly not a Muslim child”, he was upset and asked his mother if he was “only allowed to eat Christian food”. She said that the incident was “making him aware of differences between everyone when really there was no need for it or it could have been dealt with in a more positive way”.

Iqbal’s study gives a vivid, and valuable, snapshot of the topics navigated by many parents living in multicultural areas in talking to young children about issues of profound importance to their development. She emphasises that, while parents spoke of many positive encounters with diversity, discrimination remained an underlying problem in modern Britain. Experiences varied in intensity and severity between groups.

She concludes that parents are often instilling protective and positive messages about race and ethnicity. Researchers and policy-makers, she argues, need to acknowledge the way in which parents adapt to changing environments and, in particular, how interactions within these settings lead to discussions of race and ethnicity with children at an early age.

Humera Iqbal was a member of the Centre for Family Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge until 2014. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Education in London.

Research among mothers with young children living in multicultural London shows that racism is a reality for children as young as five – and that many mothers adopt parenting strategies to help their children deal with it.

It is clear that increased diversity in the UK has encouraged families to adapt their parenting strategies. This is particularly the case for groups who are experiencing wider societal pressures – British Pakistani Muslims, for example.

Humera Iqbal

A child's portrait of multiculturalism in the playground

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Skulls in print: scientific racism in the transatlantic world

sjr81 — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:41:06 +0000

A mummified corpse. An embalmed head. A neat bullet hole in the side of a skull. These are just some of the 78 disturbing illustrations which make up Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana, undoubtedly the most important work in the history of scientific racism.

Published in Philadelphia in 1839, Morton divided mankind into five races before linking the character of each race to skull configuration. In a claim typical of the developing racial sciences, Morton wrote of Native Americans that “the structure of his mind appears to be different from that of the white man”.

Within a few years Crania Americana had been read in Britain, France, Germany, Russia and India. James Cowles Prichard, the founding father of British anthropology, described it as “exemplary” whilst Charles Darwin considered Morton an “authority” on the subject of race. Later in the nineteenth century, other European scholars produced imitations with titles including Crania Britannica and Crania Germanica.

James Poskett, from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, is working to uncover how Crania Americana became so influential, not only in the United States, but in Europe and beyond. He has also curated a new exhibition for readers at the Whipple Library charting this history. ̽��ֱ��showpiece is undoubtedly a copy of Crania Americana itself. ̽��ֱ��book is extremely rare. Only 500 copies were ever printed with no more than 60 being sent outside of the United States.

“This research is crucial for understanding how racist theories gain credibility,” said Poskett. “Particularly in the early nineteenth century, European scholars tended to treat American science with suspicion. Morton had to work hard to convince his peers across the Atlantic that Crania Americana should be taken seriously.”

̽��ֱ��illustrations, now on display at the Whipple Library helped Morton establish his reputation in Europe. Reviewers in Britain were astounded by the eerie, life-like quality of the skulls. To create such an effect, Morton’s artist, John Collins, used a new technique called lithography. He first drew each image onto a limestone block in wax before fixing, inking and printing. ̽��ֱ��limestone allowed Collins to create fine-grained textures, reproducing the subtle contours of each skull in Morton’s collection.

Previously, such impressive images could only be found in European scientific metropolises such as Paris and Edinburgh. “Crania Americana was the first example of American scientific lithography to gain widespread acclaim in Europe,” said Poskett. “ ̽��ֱ��textured effect also allowed men like Prichard to make the perverse claim that Native American skulls were actually of a different consistency to Europeans.”

̽��ֱ��Whipple Library exhibition also features a series of recently-discovered loose plates, printed to promote Crania Americana in Britain. “These images are unique,” added Poskett. “I was amazed when I discovered them, just tucked into the back of the book.”

Morton sent early copies of his illustrations to men of science in Europe. This allowed him to garner support prior to the arrival of the finished volume. Prichard himself first displayed Morton’s cranial illustrations to a European audience in Birmingham in 1839. Darwin was there in the crowd. “I had read about Prichard’s use of these plates in letters, but never imagined I would find copies,” said Poskett. By putting these images on display for the first time, visitors can get a sense of how European scholars must have felt on initially seeing Morton’s work.

Whilst men like Prichard and Darwin found it easy to access Crania Americana, not everyone was so fortunate. ̽��ֱ��book was expensive, costing Morton $2175 to print. That’s at least $50,000 in today’s money. And to buy a copy, you’d need $20, equivalent to about two months’ wages for an average farm labourer. Particularly in Europe, where import duties inflated the price even further, Crania Americana could only be found in the most prestigious institutions. ̽��ֱ��Royal Society owned a copy, whereas the London Mechanics’ Institute did not.

Despite these limits to access, Morton’s ideas and images did penetrate beyond the scientific elite with working-class readers certainly aware of Morton and his skulls according to Poskett. In Britain, phrenologists such as George Combe promoted Crania Americana in cheap periodicals, some of which were available for just a couple of pence. A full page notice of the work appeared in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal in 1840, a magazine with a circulation of at least 60,000 at the time. Copies of Morton’s illustrations were also reproduced in cheap formats. ̽��ֱ��Phrenological Journal in Edinburgh, on display at the Whipple Library, features small woodcut copies of “Ancient Peruvian” skulls from Crania Americana.

Women too were excluded from most of the libraries in which Morton’s work was held. Still, periodicals aimed at female readers once again ensured his ideas reached a wider audience. In 1840 the Ladies’ Repository, a magazine for Methodist women in Ohio, quoted Morton in an article entitled “Man”. ̽��ֱ��author described Native Americans as “adverse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge.” For white settlers living to the west, this was exactly what they wanted to hear. Crania Americana was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea that Native Americans could not integrate into modern industrial society was central to both Morton’s argument and Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal,” said Poskett.

People often associate Crania Americana with slavery. But, according to Poskett, this is a mistake. It wasn’t until later in the century that southern slave owners really started to take up Morton’s ideas in earnest. And in Europe, the majority of readers were abolitionists. ̽��ֱ��phrenologist Combe was an antislavery man, as was Prichard. It was an odd logic: according to these men, if non-European races were inferior, that meant they deserved protection, not enslavement.

“Anti-slavery and scientific racism were not mutually exclusive in the nineteenth century,” explained Poskett. In Quentin Tarantino’s recent film, Django Unchained, it is the slave owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio who takes up phrenology. In real life it was just as likely to be an abolitionist.

“This research shows just how alert we must be to the variety of places in which racist theories can take hold,” added Poskett. “It can seem counterintuitive at first but, in the course of advocating for the freedom of African slaves, men like Prichard and Combe allowed scientific racism to flourish. ̽��ֱ��Crania Americana exhibition at the Whipple is a stark reminder of this unsettling history.”

A PhD student’s research at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science has revealed how racist ideas and images circulated between the United States and Europe in the 19th century.

In the course of advocating for the freedom of African slaves, men like Prichard and Combe allowed scientific racism to flourish.

James Poskett

Crania Americana

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Female conversion to Islam in Britain examined in unique research project

sjr81 — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:19:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��report, produced by the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS), in association with the New Muslims Project, Markfield, is a fascinating dissection of the conversion experience of women in Britain in the 21st Century.

̽��ֱ��first forum of its kind held in the UK, the study concludes with a series of recommendations for the convert, heritage Muslim, and wider British communities. ̽��ֱ��129-page report also outlines the social, emotional and sometimes economic costs of conversion, and the context and reasons for women converting to Islam in a society with pervasive negative stereotypes about the faith.

Project Leader and Director of CIS, Yasir Suleiman, said: “ ̽��ֱ��consistent themes flowing through the report is the need for increased levels of support for the convert community – and the converts’ own potential to be a powerful and transformative influence on both the heritage Muslim community and wider British society.
“Another of the recurring themes was the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the UK media and what role the convert community might have to play in helping to redress the balance.

This report seeks to dispel misapprehensions and misrepresentations of female converts to Islam.”

A key revelation of the study was the heavily disproportionate attention, bordering on obsession in some cases, given to white, female converts to Islam by both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike.

This is often to the detriment of African-Caribbean converts, thought to be the largest ethnic group of converts to Islam, who are often ignored and left feeling isolated by both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities.

Added Suleiman: “White converts can be regarded as ‘trophy’ Muslims and used in a tokenistic fashion by various sections of society, including the media. African-Caribbean converts remain largely invisible, uncelebrated and frequently unacknowledged. They can feel like a minority within a minority and this is something that must be addressed. I found this part of the conversion narratives hardest to bear.”

Meanwhile, the project also reveals the complex relationship between female converts and their families, ranging from exclusion, disbelief and denial - to full and open acceptance of their faith. It also brings to light responses of converts to issues of sexuality and gender including homosexuality, ‘traditional’ roles of women and transgenderism.

Project Manager Shahla Suleiman said: “Considering the stereotypical and largely negative picture Islam has in the media and society at large, and considering that quite a lot of this revolves around the position of women in Islam, we wanted to understand the seemingly paradoxical issue of why highly educated and professionally successful Western women convert to Islam.

“ ̽��ֱ��basis of conversion is faith and spirituality - but conversion is also a social phenomenon that has become political. In this sense, conversion concerns everyone alike in society.

“ ̽��ֱ��debate is just starting and we need to have more informed studies about conversion to Islam that directly address public interest and concern. ̽��ֱ��struggle for a better future relies on overcoming the politics of exclusion and absolute difference based on an ideological dislike for multiculturality, not just multiculturalism. Fear of immigration, Islam and conversion to it are a proxy for views on race, prejudice, anxiety and fear.”

̽��ֱ��converts explored the issues of women’s rights and dress etiquette at some length, with the issue of wearing the hijab and other Islamic forms of dress heavily discussed. Although all views were represented in the debate, a common approach among many coverts was the adaptation of Western style dress to accommodate Islamic concepts of modesty and decency.

Women’s rights are a highly charged political issue within Muslim communities and while participants were not unanimously supportive of feminism as defined in the West, the need to raise the status of women within Muslim communities was fully acknowledged. Attempting to realise the practise of these rights has proven more difficult to achieve. Participants were especially critical of the concept of Sharia Council/courts operating in Britain in terms of the courts’ potential to jeopardise the rights of women.

̽��ֱ��report says: ‘Converts serve to confound and challenge negative racist or clichéd narratives depicted in the media of heritage Muslims because their culture and heritage is intrinsically reflective of British culture.

‘But we also find that not all conversions are equal socially in the eyes of some members of the heritage Muslim community. ̽��ֱ��conversion of white women seems to be more socially valued than African women by some. There is also greater depth to the hijab than is thought to be the case among heritage Muslims and the non-Muslim majority in Britain. There is a distinction to be made between wearing the hijab and being worn by it. This puts the convert women in control. ̽��ֱ��hijab signals modesty, but it is not intended to hide beauty.’

A ground-breaking report examining the experiences of nearly 50 British women of all ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and faiths (or no faith) – who have all converted to Islam - was launched in London yesterday by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Converts have the potential to be a powerful and transformative influence on both the heritage Muslim community and wider British society

Yasir Suleiman

Beth Rankin

Woman praying

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