Asian Americans have been spat on, verbally assaulted and physically attacked in more than a thousand race-related incidents in the United States as a result of fear evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. During a virtual town hall webinar, Alexa Alice Joubin provided a historical context for the discussion. She said connecting the language of disease to racism is not a new phenomenon. ...continue reading "Anti-Asian Racism during COVID-19 Pandemic"
Tag: critical race theory
Race and the Epistemologies of Otherness
Excerpted from chapter 5 of Race by Martin Orkin and Alexa Alice Joubin. New Critical idiom Sereis. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 193-227. Full text available online
When confronted with the unknown, many societies tend to transfer observations of unfamiliar phenomena onto their mental map of what is already known. Race as a category is entangled with empirical knowledge, misinformation, and ideology, all of which seek to justify and sustain particular beliefs. Knowledge about otherness is socially constructed. Knowledge of race results from taxonomical observations made for colonial, medical, bureaucratic, or other purposes such as political movements. ...continue reading "Race and the Epistemologies of Otherness"