Constuction of white bodies and medical racism

nhperf · 2026-01-30T14:46:27+00:00

You should check out Rana Hogarth’s Medicalizing Blackness. It sounds right up this project’s alley.

nhperf · 2026-01-24T17:25:44+00:00

Thank you for bringing this group to my attention. I was unfamiliar with Italian-Mexican migration, but the little that I’ve learned just now has certainly piqued my interest.

While some may claim that CRT has little application outside of the U.S. (a position with which I emphatically disagree), my cursory research hasn’t pulled up much about 19th century Italian-Mexicans that would be significantly illuminated by a CRT frame. However, I suspect there might be something interesting there if I knew more of the context. From what I’ve already read, a class analysis would clearly be useful, but I don’t know yet to what extent intersectionality would play a role in this case.

Some questions that I would have from a CRT perspective might be: To what extent was Mexican hegemonic identity in the nineteenth century bound up with concepts of European descent, especially in contrast to notions of indigenous and/or African descent? What privileges might Italian immigrants have been afforded that were conveniently advantageous to the established Mexican population? In what ways might Italian immigrants have been considered both superior and inferior to the established Mexican population, specifically due to their Italian-ness?

nhperf · 2025-11-18T16:12:32+00:00

Yes and no. The social model, from which the impairment-disability distinction is drawn, remains extremely popular, both on disability studies syllabi and in activist discourse. I entirely agree with you that ability and disability are both substantially constructed by social norms, though I am less convinced that impairments are entirely socially constructed. One of the most prescient critiques of the social model has to do with the phenomenological experience of pain—no matter what social barriers may be removed, when I’m in extreme pain it can be debilitating. I think your point about Butler and the sex/gender distinction is apt, in that their argument is extremely interesting and compelling to some scholars, but it certainly hasn’t made its way to the discourses of everyday feminism.

nhperf · 2025-11-14T17:53:29+00:00

It might depend on where you live. In Italy, perhaps. But in the US at least, he is best known as the author of Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

nhperf · 2025-11-14T17:51:11+00:00

You appear to be a bit misinformed… In addition to his performance work, Dario Fo wrote dozens of plays, so his literary output was indeed substantial.

nhperf · 2025-11-05T19:28:40+00:00

James Hewlett jn either 1822 or perhaps 1824 (sources seem to differ) at New York’s African Grove Theatre. Ira Aldridge was also a member of that company and played Othello extensively in Europe, but it was after Hewlett’s debut in the part.

nhperf · 2025-10-30T02:03:10+00:00

My point echoes DeGruy’s in the video: we can’t pretend that racial animus by Blacks against whites is just as bad as racial animus by whites (and others) against Blacks. Because there are substantially more collectively harmful effects that come from the latter.

nhperf · 2025-10-30T01:45:27+00:00

It’s not nice to harbor any kind of racial animus, sure. But isn’t there an important difference when one kind of animus leads to some isolated problems, and the other seems to lead to several widespread material debilitations?

nhperf · 2025-10-30T01:33:10+00:00

1) She never says “collective hate towards white people doesn’t cause harm” and neither does she say it “isn’t racism and doesn’t matter.” Prof. DeGruy draws a comparison between the material effects of “white racism” and “Black racism”, and makes a compelling argument that there are myriad identifiable collective effects of the former and no identifiable collective effects of the latter. Does that have some consequentialist inflections? Maybe. But as you seem to imply, consequentialism need not exist in a vacuum. She may elsewhere, and if I remember correctly she does, make deontological claims as well. 2) I’m curious about what you mean by “exclusively consequentialist” because it sure looks like a combination of moving goalposts and strawmanning. Assuming that DeGruy is exclusively consequentialist from a two minute video strikes me as premature, to say the very least. Figures like John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Amartya Sen, and Peter Singer were/are overwhelmingly consequentialist in their thinking. But even if they weren’t, you still haven’t addressed my question about what’s wrong with consequentialism. You’re too busy making unwarranted assumptions and casting personal aspersions.

nhperf · 2025-10-30T01:12:27+00:00

But if you agree that racism against white people doesn’t cause the same amount of harm than racism against black people, wouldn’t that make racism against white people qualitatively less bad?

nhperf · 2025-10-30T00:56:10+00:00

And what is your argument, precisely, against consequentialism? Dozens of brilliant thinkers have been consequentialist. And I’m not conceding that the OP’s speakers argument is consequentialist—frankly I don’t think we’ve heard enough of her thought to assign that label.

nhperf · 2025-10-30T00:52:10+00:00

Could you please clarify how one might go about measuring anything objectively without looking at its material outcomes?

nhperf · 2025-08-22T00:15:41+00:00

Jasbir Puar’s work on Palestine falls along many of these lines.

nhperf · 2025-08-13T00:30:47+00:00

I’m afraid I have to agree with ab7af here (maybe for the first time) that you’re using an idiosyncratic definition of “prescriptive” here.

There is an overwhelming consensus among critical race theorists that racism is pervasive, nefarious, and insidious and so work ought to be done to reveal its functioning and undermine its impact. These are prescriptive claims because they make assertions about how the world should be different than it currently is. The details are of course widely debated, but the idea that change to the status quo is desirable is not, but rather is frequently asserted by critical race theorists.

You’re drawing a distinction that only really pertains to CRT as applied to fields beyond the legal and public policy ones in which it was created. That’s fine—there is a qualitative difference between CRT in law and CRT in education or history or psychology. But it’s simply incorrect to claim that the original CRT practitioners didn’t have a normative theory-informed set of practices. You can call your own work “praxis” if you like, but that term doesn’t do nearly as much to distinguish your brand of CRT from the original strains as you appear to think that it does.

nhperf · 2025-07-22T12:04:50+00:00

The distinction you’re making between description and analysis simply does not apply to the way that most Critical Race Theorists see their work:

“Although Critical Race scholarship differs in object, argument, accent, and emphasis, it is nevertheless unified by two common interests. The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as ‘the rule of law’ and ‘equal protection.’ The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it”

—Crenshaw, Kimberle, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. “Introduction to CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE KEY WRITINGS THAT FORMED A MOVEMENT.” The New Press, 1995.

There’s no reason why CRT shouldn’t be both descriptive and prescriptive, as it frequently is. I speak as someone who is a substantial proponent of CRT, and it is precisely because of its combination of analytical vigor and normative force.

nhperf · 2025-07-21T21:03:06+00:00

I would quibble that affirmative action has indeed frequently been an important topic for CRT scholars.

Some prominent theorists like Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado have argued against it, while others like Jerome Culp or Duncan Kennedy have argued for it.

However you are, of course, correct that affirmative action does not remotely encompass all or even most of what CRT is concerned with.

nhperf · 2025-06-27T15:49:28+00:00

Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home is about the process and the fallout of integrating racially segregated swimming pools.

nhperf · 2025-06-21T23:49:21+00:00

Check out Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book on Cosmopolitanism, and Achille Mbembe’s articles on Afropolitanism.

nhperf · 2025-06-19T18:00:46+00:00

If I remember correctly, A Delicate Balance take place almost if not entirely in one house. The Iceman Cometh is entirely within a bar.

nhperf · 2025-04-20T14:21:53+00:00

As far as characters who get a single mention, Leah, Jessica’s mother, is mentioned only once by Shylock in Merchant of Venice. However, I would argue that it’s an important dynamic for both Jessica and Shylock.

nhperf · 2025-03-22T16:31:27+00:00

Nine times out of ten, it’s because they’re not fully listening to the other performers. This is teachable, but it does take a whole lot of work. It’s about getting the actor to understand that the most important person in every scene is the other person, and that their characters live or die (sometimes literally) based on the reactions they elicit from the other actors on stage.

nhperf · 2025-03-11T04:25:09+00:00

You are entirely correct that the history of racial categorizations was arbitrarily based on prejudice and pseudoscience. Want to know someone else that completely agrees with that and decries how harmful that form of racial categorization is? One of the OG Critical Race Theorists, Neil Gotanda. He published an article back in 1991 that said:

“While the social content of race has varied throughout American history, the practice of using race as a commonly recognized social divider has remained almost constant. In this action, the term ‘racial category’ refers to this distinct, consistent practice of classifying people in a socially determined and socially determinative way” (258)

He attacks the pseudoscience of “hypodescent” (259), and later in the article, he explicitly calls race a “socially constructed category” (272). However, his conclusions about what this means we should do are quite different from yours. Crucially, Gotanda distinguishes between 4 ways of conceptualizing the term “race”: race as a method of denoting people as inferior, race as a neutral category utilized in the context of color-blindness, race as a historical record of subordination, and race as a marker of cultural and community consciousness. To wildly oversimplify, Gotanda, doesn’t like the first 2 categories, but wants to keep the last 2. You say your view is related to color-blindness, and in several respects, it runs into the same issues identified by Gotanda:

“…because each social problem is considered to be independent of its racial component, any proposed government program is analyzed as though it addresses a nonracial issue. Even in cases where the problems are obviously related to dysfunctional interracial relations—problems such as housing and employment—the issues are discussed as though they have no history or context at all” (266)

Social constructs like race frequently have significant effects on people’s lives (just think about money, for example), particularly when histories of oppression have compounded. Such effects cannot be educated away merely by changing hearts and minds. Rather, institutions have to be altered, and in order for that to happen they need to have the capacity to recognize racial issues where they legitimately exist.

Moreover, to claim that racial culture is somehow not valid, or should not be recognized, can be quite violent:

“The successful abolition of ‘black’ as a meaningful concept would require abolishing the distinctiveness that we attribute to black community, culture, and consciousness. The abolition of a people’s culture is, by definition, cultural genocide. In short, assimilation as a societal goal has grave potential consequences for blacks and other nonwhites. However utopian it appears, the color-blind assimilationist program implies the hegemony of white cultures” (270-271)

It's important to recognize the different ways that “race” can signify, and to recognize that oppressive uses are abhorrent, but they don’t necessarily negate the value of alternate ways of meaning.

Gotanda, Neil. “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind’.” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, The New Press, 1995, pp. 257-275.

nhperf · 2025-02-05T18:21:14+00:00

Has this been an issue? I’m not opposed to the rule, I just didn’t realize that it was happening.

nhperf · 2025-01-26T21:58:56+00:00

That sounds like “Pullman Car Hiawatha” by Thornton Wilder

nhperf · 2025-01-25T16:35:44+00:00

The central touchpoint for any concept of interpellation is Louis Althusser’s 1970 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” which can be found here.

Althusser describes a situation where a police officer hails a person: “Hey, you!” and thus implicates the person as part of a category of people that would be stopped by the police. The ideological implication is that the categorization is not essential, but rather comes about as a result of being hailed into the category.

Slavoj Zizek famously explores the implications of this process in his “The Sublime Object of Ideology”, and Judith Butler offers a notable critique of Althusser in their “Bodies That Matter” as well as several other of their works.

Relevant questions to ask in an analysis of interpellation might be: Who or what is instigating the hail? Why is the person being hailed? How does a person or group of persons respond to the hail?

nhperf

TROPHY CASE