The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness

Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity

by Paula Ioanide

With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support "colorblindness" and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters.

Though four case studies—the police brutality case of Abner Louima; the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib; the demolition of New Orleans public housing units following Hurricane Katrina; and a proposed municipal ordinance to deny housing to undocumented immigrants in Escondido, CA—Ioanide shows how racial fears are perpetuated, and how these widespread fears have played a central role in justifying the expansion of our military and prison system and the ongoing divestment from social welfare. But Ioanide also argues that within each of these cases there is opportunity for new mobilizations, for ethical we must also popularize desires for justice and increase people's receptivity to the testimonies of the oppressed by reorganizing embodied and unconscious structures of feeling.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Social Justice, Sociology

371 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 20, 2015

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I interviewed Paula Ioanide for our library's 1619 Project discussion group.

Professor Ioanide discusses her book The Emotional Politics of Racism. We discuss how people defend racist policies, politicians, and institutional outcomes through the system of controlled emotional responses.

You may watch the entire interview at the link below:
Paula Ioanide on Racism's Emotional Economy

[AJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this in tandem with Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child was an eye-opening experience. While this book didn't say much I didn't already know, it provided statistics and annecdotes to back up those instincts thst political beliefs are often impervious to logical arguments.

The quotes I most wanted to share were:

"Because feelings possess the unique ability to trump facts, antiracist organizers and educators who wish to disrupt the epistemologies of white ignorance must contend with the distinct operative logics of emotions."

"Rather than deal with the traumatic reality that their fantasy ideals are unattainable and that their desired pursuits are futile, people tend to project their failure to achieve grandiose ideals onto “persecutory enemies” who are blamed for national political disintegration or communal disunity."

"Projecting the cause of their failed ideals and enjoyments onto constructed persecutory enemies allows people to evade the work they must do to confront themselves . It enables people to deny their complicity in or their responsibility to confront their unjust governments"

"Those who strive for recognition and validation under the dominant ontological frames and values that govern global white supremacy concede a tremendous ethical price. In exchange for validation and recognition as a law-abiding person, as a U.S. citizen, as a “model minority,” as economically independent, these ontologies demand our adherence to a value system that constructs our worth through someone else’s denigration."

"So long as people are outraged at the by-products of warfare, capitalism, and fascism but continue to take these as historical norms, the opponents of these systems will remain complicit in their persistence."

"Feeling good for feeling bad discouraged public engagement in antiwar actions, substituting feelings of empathy for the labor of resistance."

"Although wealth and inheritance have persistently proven to be the most significant forces in determining people’s life chances and opportunities in the post– civil rights era, U.S. publics are repeatedly encouraged to inhabit an ideological fantasy of economic self-reliance predicated on concealing the ways discriminatory policies and practices in lending, real estate markets, education, transportation and employment have enabled white Americans to build inheritance while overwhelmingly denying these same opportunities to people of color."

"The affective economies of contempt and paternalism generated through the demonization of welfare dependence yield enormous affective and psychological value for those who feel threatened by shifts in racial demographics, changing family formations, the definition of marriage, and economic power structures."

"...poor people are encouraged to internalize the shame and stigma imposed on them and to lose sight of the ways in which systemic forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement work to deepen their poverty."

"The affirming notions of white propertied people’s selfreliance, familial normativity, meritocracy, and hard work stand on a stack of accumulated lies taken as truths. Any attempt to undo these lies depends on whether white people are emotionally receptive to hearing the testimonies offered by people of color."

"A person does not need to preemptively defend something as nonracist unless an affective sense of (perhaps unconscious) guilt is already present."

"We might very well value people who are law abiding, but if we are not aware of the ways in which nativist ideologies and emotions have appropriated this notion to justify the exclusion and denigration of undocumented immigrants of color, we become complicit in logics and practices whose outcomes are unjust irrespective of our intent."

[Jesus Portillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurb about the book says it best:

"With stop-and-frisk laws, new immigration policies, and cuts to social welfare programs, majorities in the United States have increasingly supported intensified forms of punishment and marginalization against Black, Latino, Arab and Muslim people in the United States, even as a majority of citizens claim to support "colorblindness" and racial equality. With this book, Paula Ioanide examines how emotion has prominently figured into these contemporary expressions of racial discrimination and violence. How U.S. publics dominantly feel about crime, terrorism, welfare, and immigration often seems to trump whatever facts and evidence say about these politicized matters."

But knowledge does not come without a challenge. Because this is an academic book the book is very dense. However once you get through the minefield of $10 words and phrases, as well as small print, The book really makes a lot of sense about of todays world of not only Alternate Facts but also how framing the problems are really framing the truth in the sense of setting up civil rights movements and social welfare programs for failure and seeks to preserve male white privilege.

[Mahali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the processes and systems that allow US white supremacist structures to continue.