The Politics of Race: Canada, the United States, and Australia, Second Edition

THE POLITICS OF RACE Canada, the United States, and Australia Second Edition The Politics of Race is an excellent resource for students and general readers seeking to learn about race policies and legislation. Arguing that ‘states make race,’ it provides a unique comparison of the development and construction of race in three White settler societies – Canada, the United States, and Australia. This timely new edition focuses on the politics of race after 9/11 and Barack Obama’s election as president of the United States. Jill Vickers and Annette Isaac explore how state-sanctioned race discrimination has intensied in the wake of heightened security. It also explains the new race formation of Islamophobia in all three countries and the shifts in how Hispanics and Asian Americans are being treated in the United States. As race and politics become increasingly intertwined in both academic and popular discourse, The Politics of Race aids readers in evaluating different approaches for promoting racial justice and trans- forming states. is Distinguished Research Professor and Emeritus Chan- cellor’s Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. is a faculty lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University and a former international development specialist. JILL VICKERS AND ANNETTE ISAAC The Politics of Race Canada, the United States, and Australia Second Edition UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London Contents Preface to the Second Edition vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: The Politics of Race in Three Settler States 3 1 Foundational Race Regimes 43 2 Subsequent Race Regimes – Segregation and Whites-Only Nationalism 70 3 Immigration Policy and Multiculturalism 103 4 Federalism and Electoral Systems: Mechanisms of the Politics of Race 134 5 The Politics of Race: Contexts and Bottom-Up Approaches to Change 169 6 Top-Down Approaches and Democratic Responsiveness 194 7 ‘Back to the Future’: Fragmented and International Race Formations 224 8 Basic Concepts for Understanding the Politics of Race 251 Appendix A 277 Appendix B 291 vi Contents Notes 293 References 307 Index 321 Preface to the Second Edition This new edition offers an updated comparative analysis of ‘the politics of race’ in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Our focus remains on how governments use state institutions and laws to ‘make race.’ Governments create, administer, and remake the founding race regimes that characterize these three federal democracies. Increasingly, however, new race formations such as Islamophobia are developing that reect international conicts, real and imagined. This edition highlights several new race formations as well as key events since the rst edition. Most signicant in this regard are the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 – the ‘9/11 attacks’ – which happened just before the rst edition appeared. While acknowledging those events, the rst edition did not consider how they would affect the politics of race. The United States suffered most profoundly and responded most ercely. But though many Australians were killed in a 2002 nightclub attack in Bali, Indonesia, there have been no attacks on Australian soil; and Canadians have largely escaped attacks. Another signicant event was the 2008 election of a U.S. president with African heritage – a po- tential game changer in American politics, and in its foreign policy. Also between the two editions, a Conservative prime minister ofcially apologized to Canada’s Indigenous people for past federal governments’ harmful policies and established remedial programs and com- pensation funds for those damaged by their experiences in residential schools. Also, Asian Americans became the ‘poster children’ of U.S. immigration policy because of their high educational achievements; but at the same time, the dramatic growth of the Asian economies is now being perceived as a threat, and local Asians are often accused of being too successful. viii Preface to the Second Edition Do such events disprove the claims we made in the rst edition that governments use state institutions and discourses to privilege many White citizens and disadvantage most of their non-White counterparts? Our ndings are mixed: some things improved between the two editions; but White privilege persists.1 Many legal practices and ideas that sustained these countries’ founding race regimes have been replaced with new ones. For example, Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘interven- tion’ in Australia’s Northern Territory denied Aboriginal communities self-government on arguably imsy grounds. Foundational race regimes are hard to dismantle, mainly because the categories they have created persist. New studies of how the U.S. Census Bureau perpetu- ates old race categories have revealed the mechanisms whereby succes- sive governments ‘make race.’ Democratic racism, which developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, and which we discussed in the rst edition, still blocks efforts to eradicate or transform old race regimes. Meanwhile, governments’ security preoccupations during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ have generated new forms of racialization, which we discuss in one of this edition’s three new chapters. As in the rst edition, the text’s approach to the politics of race is comparative and state focused. But in this edition, we discuss our historical institutionalist (HI) framework in more depth. Instead of focus- ing on ‘race relations’ among individuals or groups, HI compares the roles played by governments, state institutions, institutionalized discourses, and various historical legacies in the making of race. Despite important differences, the three states studied share federal architectures that divide power between central and state governments; and all three have hard-to-amend written constitutions that are interpreted and arbitrated by independent High or Supreme Courts. All three White settler societies reect British colonial initiatives and share a common law system as well as other institutional features, including similar electoral systems. In this edition we have added a chapter that compares how federalism and other similar institutional arrangements shape ‘the politics of race’ in the three countries. In this edition, we also focus more on how institutionalized discourses help governments and state institutions create, reproduce, and main- tain race regimes and other race formations. We have expanded the discussion of democratic racism in the Introduction; and in chapter 6 we introduce the idea of ‘democratic responsiveness,’ which shows how democratic theory and practice actually can inhibit change if democratic majorities remain White. The new chapter 3 focuses on migration and Preface to the Second Edition ix refugee policies in the context of the politics of race and includes an expanded discussion of multiculturalism. In chapter 6 we show how the key values in multiculturalism differ from those promoted by anti- racism theories. We focus on discourses that governments and state ofcials use to legitimize race regimes and their consequences. We focus less on ideologies advanced by movements, whether they seek to mobilize non-Whites against racialism or to mobilize Whites. An example of the latter is the Tea Party movement in the United States, which opposes health care reform as well as other reforms that they believe will benet non-Whites and disadvantage Whites. This doesn’t mean we consider such movements or the ideas they promote to be unimportant. A complete ‘comparative politics of race’ would include both levels. Our focus on states challenges the long-established belief that states and governments are above the fray and that they merely ‘manage’ race-based conicts. In the rst edition we focused on Anthony Marx’s proposition that ‘states make race.’ In this second edition, we also focus on how states make race, and we identify the institutional and discursive mechanisms used by each state, including the mechanisms that all three share. We focus more explicitly on comparing how institutions of governance, such as the police, the courts, immigration departments, census bu- reaux, and prison systems, make and perpetuate historical race categories and regimes, and on how they recycle ideas that sustain race hatred and conict. Many present-day state institutions remain marked by legacies dating back to when those institutions were founded; ideas the founders resorted to when legitimizing the exclusion of non- Whites (and women) from citizenship persist in tangible forms. (The U.S. Electoral College is an example.) We conceptualize political institutions as highly stable patterns of behaviour and ideas intermixed. While they are creations of specic individuals and groups, each generation experiences them as bigger than itself; and when we participate in them as citizens, legislators, bureaucrats, or judges, our behaviour is mould- ed by each institution’s norms of appropriateness. Some studies of ‘race relations’ focus on the ideas, attitudes, and behaviour of individuals, not on race relations as something shaped by state institutions and their norms of appropriateness. Approaches char- acterized by individualism assume that racism involves individuals and that institutions and states are merely the current aggregations of individuals’ preferences. In such approaches, what happened in the past is deemed irrelevant once old laws have been repealed. This fosters the x Preface to the Second Edition belief

Load more