Journal for the anthropology of North America最新文献

In Miami, the US racial category of “white” is being re-defined to include light skinned Latinx immigrants. In the process, US-born white Miamians find themselves displaced from the top of Miami's social hierarchy as light skinned Latinx immigrants take over these social positions. This racialized Latinx social re-positioning is particularly visible in Miami's restaurant industry where the developing social hierarchy leaves white women restaurant workers juggling their white privilege and their traditional gendered roles, with this playing out most profoundly amongst those who occupy “back of house,” or kitchen jobs, where they become both racial and gender minorities.

Through the case study of Geena, a white female cook, I will explore the extent to which the precarity of privilege motivates white women to be audacious actors of resistance in a racialized, hetero-patriarchal restaurant industry. Using an intersectional framework to analyze Geena's lived experiences, this paper focuses specifically on the degree to which her ideas of hope are shaped by class, language, ableism, and sexual orientation. As I will demonstrate through Geena's case study, ideas of hope allow white women to reposition themselves as white saviors, effectively reasserting and reifying whiteness as a superior social category.

This article is a collaborative ethnographic examination of the formation of white, middle-class, suburban mothers’ subjectivities and mothers’ roles in the reproduction of racial inequity and structural violence. We focus on their affective labors transforming home spaces and suburban landscapes into white fantasies of childhood, which we describe as kind of domestic magic. We argue at the heart of this white racial habitus is the figure of the child and childhood. The child embodies mothers’ hopes for happy families and motivates their work and sacrifice. Our aim in this article is to show how racialized suffering and violence may not be reproduced by racial animus, neglect or ignorance but by seemingly innocuous hopes to make or conjure idyllic fantasies for children.

For decades, studies have shown that white households have greater access and benefit most from the racialized US housing market. Homeownership is the material realization of the American dream, and for many it is read alongside middle-classness and normativity as cultural markers of hegemonic whiteness. Conversely, this article explores personal narratives from white homeowners that are excluded from this dominant understanding: white mobile-homeowners. I apply the concept of “untruths” to illustrate how my interlocutors discursively situated their racialized hopes, anxieties, and aspirations against the disparaging “white-trailer trash” trope. I then consider how I, as a white, working-class anthropologist conducting “home-work,” was figured into these narratives as representing this idealized—yet deeply problematic—whiteness. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on lies and sincerity, I show how white racial “untruths” reveal a more complex and fragmented whiteness that belies the dreamlike fiction of hegemonic white normativity.

Capoeira is a martial art that is said to have arisen out of the colonial encounter in Brazil. Forbidden from practicing martial arts, the enslaved Africans supposedly added music to their training and disguised it as dance, an artful subterfuge sustaining their hopes that they might one day be able to escape from bondage. Regardless of this story's veracity, it has become a foundational tale that practitioners in the United States reference as justification for a variety of social justice efforts they undertake as capoeiristas. This article introduces the concept of affective habitus as a way of thinking about how membership in a serious leisure community alters the ways in which individuals relate to the world around them, offering hope that the capoeirista's affective habitus might disrupt white supremacy.

This article introduces and explores two intersections between hope and whiteness: first, how various forms of hope alternately operate as discursive techniques that reproduce or resist whiteness; and second, whether theorists have warrant to hope for changes in whiteness itself. In order to prompt further study of both, I survey literature to propose seven dimensions for comparing forms of hope. I then apply this incipient typology of hopes to ethnographic evidence of white people who relocated to live in predominantly Black neighborhoods. I argue that their modes of hope transformed to become less agentic, less optimistic, and less conformed to white supremacist modes of hope. I close with a reflexive look at the place of hope in whiteness studies itself, pointing to two possible foundations of hoping for better future possibilities of whiteness.

The Shrimp-Petroleum Festival is an annual event in Morgan City, Louisiana, that celebrates the history of the two industries in this coastal city. The festival came under media scrutiny and public criticism in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in part because of the seeming incompatibility and incongruence of the two things being celebrated. From a local perspective, however, the convergence of the two industries is far from incompatible and the two resources in question, shrimp and oil, are categorically similar within local discourses of identity, well-being, and economic prosperity. In that capacity, it offers an insight into how precarious and contingent the seemingly self-evident dichotomies commonly invoked in normative environmentalism are. It also offers insight and into the range of assumptions and signification practices involved in assigning meaning to particular kinds of resources and particular kinds of human–nature relations.