Program

Abstracts — April 17

• Global Evidence on Colorism | Nikos Nikiforakis

  We provide global evidence of colorism using a newly collected dataset of incentivized beliefs from nationally representative samples in 70 countries (n = 65,000), covering 90% of the world’s population. We examine the relationship between skin tone and perceptions of relative honesty and intelligence, documenting substantial cross-country variation in colorist attitudes. We further investigate the factors that may explain this variation, including individual characteristics associated with colorist beliefs. By systematically measuring colorism on a global scale for the first time, our study offers new insights into its underlying drivers and societal implications.

• The Muddy Margins: On Colorism, Race, and Quantitative Methods | Robert Reece

  Quantitative methodology is essential to understanding racial stratification in the United States. They allow us to look past casual anecdotes to explore the true depths of inequality experienced by people of color. Nonetheless, the country's historically haphazard system of racial categorization classified people with vastly different phenotypes into the same racial groups. Specifically, one-drop rules forced all people with African ancestry into the category "black" despite some enjoying very dark skin tones and some sporting very light skin tones. Over the past few decades, researchers have continuously identified vast differences in the life chances of these dark and light black Americans, despite their mutual racial classification. Here, I explore how such skin tone stratification obscures the racial data we have come to rely so much on. I ask "how did we get here," "how deep is the problem," and "what can we do about it."

• The Hidden Toll: Personal vs. Vicarious Color Discrimination and Self-Rated Health in Latin America | Angela Dixon

  An extensive literature has established that perceiving racial/color discrimination is linked with adverse health outcomes. Yet, puzzlingly, studies throughout Latin America find an inconsistent association between self-reported racial/color discrimination and adverse health, suggesting a diminished importance of color discrimination in these societies. These findings are situated within a second paradox: the tendency for Latin Americans to report high levels of witnessing racial/color discrimination against another person (vicarious discrimination), but low levels of individuals reporting experiencing discrimination against themselves (personal discrimination). Using cross-sectional survey data from the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (n = 4736), I investigate the relationship between personal and vicarious color discrimination and poor health in four Latin American countries with the largest indigenous and Afrodescendant populations (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru). While personal color discrimination is not associated with poor health, vicarious color discrimination is associated with increased odds of poor health. These findings suggest color discrimination may play a more important role in shaping health outcomes in this region than previously understood and underscore the need for further investigation of both the direct and spill-over effects of color discrimination.

• Geopolitics and Liberal Racism in South Africa | Richard Pithouse

  Liberalism claims a unique moral authority. However, both its founding texts and its historical record show it to have been a philosophy that never intended to extend rights for all. It has also been constitutively tied to racism, and to what Du Bois famously called the ‘color line’.

  In South Africa, a set of liberal think tanks and media projects stridently assume the absolute moral superiority of liberalism while simultaneously taking positions on geopolitics that are patently racist. Moreover, it is evident that liberal reason runs out of road when it is asked to confront this apparent contradiction and often collapses into paranoia and conspiracy theory.

  The proposed paper will begin by noting the racism inherent in the works of liberal philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill. It will then show that liberalism was, historically, profoundly entangled with racism. It will explore this in the context of Du Bois’s idea of the ‘color line’. Moving into the present, it will note the racial double standards in Western geopolitical positions, with regard to evident double standards on many issues, arguing that there is a clear racialised variance in the value ascribed to human lives.

  The paper will then examine how white liberalism has taken this up in South Africa, with a particular focus on the Brenthurst Foundation and the Daily Maverick. It will show that these kinds of liberal ideas are patently hostile to African sovereignty and the very idea of equality between all people.

• Resisting the Colour Line: South Asian Workers and Racialized Labor Politics in the 20th Century Gulf | Hessa Alnuaimi

  This presentation examines the intersections of race, labour, and colonial capitalism by centering the mobilisation of South Asian migrant workers in the 20th-century Gulf. Drawing on archival research, particularly the accounts of South Asian migrants themselves, it challenges dominant Gulf historiography that erases their political agency and depoliticises their struggles. Rather than merely seeking labour reforms, South Asian workers engaged in broader anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance, perceiving their struggles as intertwined with Gulf Arabs and wider decolonisation movements across the Global South. The racialisation of South Asians in the Gulf — as essential yet deportable labour — mirrors colonial hierarchies theorised by W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. Du Bois’ “global colour line” is evident in the Gulf’s labour system, where South Asians were positioned as exploitable yet politically silenced. Fanon’s critique of colonial racial alienation further informs how these migrants, despite their deep entanglement in the Gulf’s economy, were denied political agency and reduced to economic instruments. By engaging with Global South thinkers and subaltern narratives, this presentation situates South Asian mobilisation within the broader structures of colourism and racial capitalism, demonstrating how colonial racial hierarchies persisted in the postcolonial Gulf. It contributes to discussions on colourism by showing how skin colour and racialised labour regimes continue to shape migration and economic exploitation. In doing so, it seeks to decolonise Gulf historiography and reaffirm the role of South Asian workers in the region’s political and social history.

• Arap as in Black: A Pre-History of Colorism & Racialized Difference Making in West Asia | Mostafa Minawi

  The late 19th and early 20th centuries were times of competitive imperialism, usually associated exclusively with French, British, and Italian expansionist logic in Africa and Asia. The Ottoman Empire, which stretched across Southeast Europe, West Asia, and Northeast Africa, maintained an expansionist posture, with its multi-cultural ruling elites adopting some of the logic of global imperialism, including the racializing of non-Ottoman and Ottoman subjects alike. Those who hailed from Arabic-speaking majority provinces, though a traditional part of the ruling elites in Istanbul, were increasingly the target of racialization along the dichotomous color rubric of White and Black, with the latter carrying with it connotations of inferiority. The word Arap had the double meaning of “Arab” as an ethnic market and “Black,” describing a racialized notion of an assumed darker skin tone associated with the Southern reaches of the empire, including Arabic-speaking parts of the Levant and Arabia. My intervention explicates how the language of color-based racialization, though not new, took on a different meaning in the context of the late 19th century and the increasingly globalized understanding of racial characteristics and the justification of colonialism across an imagined North-South divide. I argue that a close examination of some of the debates within the elites of the empire shows that a color-based racialization — White/Black, Türk/Arap — was reflected in elite urban societies of Ottoman West Asia and Northeast Africa, from Istanbul to Khartoum, well before the arrival of direct European colonial rule. This history of racialization along the color of skin (often assumed rather than observed) is a vital precursor to the later manifestation of colorism in Northeast Africa and West Asia.

• DEI – Its Connection to Racism and Colorism in U.S. Higher Education | Adah Ward Randolph

  Since the US 47th President won the election in November of 2024, I have continued to limit my exposure to the media, and in particular, the local news in the RED state of Ohio is hard to take at times. Yet, the other day, I had the television on, and this was what I heard from the recently elected Senator Bernie Moreno, who was endorsed by #47, “DEI is institutionalized racism.”  He went on to speak of his “Hispanic” origins.  What?  First, I was upset because he had never spoken of it before now that I knew of; besides he looked “WHITE.” But here is the double-edged sword; he as a “Hispanic” was supporting the oppression of others who may not be as WHITE looking as he who are of Latinx descent, particularly if they are Afro-Latin. It bubbled up in my consciousness that DEI is linked to RACISM, but it is also linked to COLORISM. How does this play out in US institutions of higher education such as the one I have been a member of for many years known for its global stance. This presentation addresses racism/colorism in higher education and how it plays out in the life of this one Black American woman with albinism. What does COLORISM look like to me? Why is a clear understanding of it important in the media? How do you be successful despite COLORISM/RACISM in a global world? These questions frame this intersectional qualitative study.

• Not by "Ocular Inspection Alone": Race, Colorism and Syrian Naturalization Cases in the United States | Sarah Gualtieri

  This presentation focuses on references to color and complexion in a series of Syrian naturalization cases that were litigated in US courts in the early 20th century. Faced with the prospect that their Asian origins would make them ineligible for US citizenship (which was available, according to the statute, only to ""aliens being free white persons or to persons of African nativity or descent), Syrian immigrants went to court to claim their whiteness. While judges argued that race was not to be determined by ""ocular inspection alone,"" it is clear from the cases that color mattered. When, for example, Judge Smith denied  applicant Faras Shahid naturalization in a South Carolina district court in 1913, he noted that Shahid was "somewhat darker than is the usual mulatto of one-half mixed blood between the white and negro races." Drawing on court documents, oral histories, newspaper articles, and other sources, this presentation probes the significance of color in the determination of Syrian racial eligibility for citizenship; and it addresses the legacies of the naturalization cases for Arab American racialization in the United States.

• Crossing the Color Line: The Rewards of Contemporary Passing | Ann Morning

  “Passing” is a form of racial transformation that arises in societies that are stratified by race. To a large extent, it plays on variations in skin color that signify distinct racial statuses. While passing is broadly understood as an attempt to enjoy the privileges of a relatively advantageous racial status, in times and places where racial hierarchies become less rigid, it is not so clear who is likely to pass for what.

  In the United States, the archetypical passer is a black person who presents him- or herself as white. In reality, historical passing was more complex, since passers were generally people of largely European ancestry, and sometimes they passed as something other than white: as South Asian, for example, or American Indian. But the 21st century has added yet another important dimension to passing: the rise of white people who present themselves as black, as Latinx, as North African, and more.

  This presentation examines a series of case studies of modern-day passers in the United States, with special attention to their methods and their motives. The alteration of skin color plays a key role among other strategies for changing physical appearance. And an important departure from historical passing is that psychological motives for race change seem to be at least as important as economic incentives. In short, a notion of passing rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries is inadequate for understanding today’s attempts at race change, or the broader cultural hierarchies of color that inspire them.

• Colorism and Racial Grammar in Morocco | Majid Hannoum

  Race studies is a recent field in Maghrebi studies that was brought to the fore by the ongoing sub-Saharan African migration. Since the 1990s, this new pattern of migration has brought the issue of race and racism not only to Maghrebi societies but also to an international level. Anti-black racism in the region reverberated not only in Africa but also beyond, given the importance of blackness in the world. This paper looks at the example of Morocco, where large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans try to cross into Europe and often get stuck. The paper examines how the new migrants, due to their blackness, are perceived within an old category of modern blackness already entrenched in Moroccan imagination. However, the paper argues that the new perception of blackness can be understood within what I term racial grammar, which involves examining the racial differences that have marked Moroccan society since colonial rule. The notion of racial grammar suggests a framework for understanding how racial categories and hierarchies are constructed and maintained over time. Colonialism introduced whiteness as the criterion against which different ethnic Moroccans situate themselves, thereby positioning blackness lower in the racial hierarchy because of its opposition to whiteness. The paper will examine the meaning of these categories, along with the variety of racial shades that influence one's positioning within this racial grammar.

• Not White But Still White-Collar: How Non-Western Expatriates do Boundary Work in the UAE | Anju Mary Paul

  There is a growing population of non-Western and non-white, highly skilled migrants working in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Despite being white-collar migrants, they may still face marginalization and discrimination because racially, they are not white. Drawing upon interviews with 48 non-white multinational migrants originally from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, working as white-collar professionals in the UAE, we find that our interviewees engaged in various types of “boundary work” to try to limit their exposure to discrimination and improve their social standing in UAE society. They engaged in boundary crossing and blurring — well-established forms of individual-level boundary work — but we also observed them engaging in “boundary switching.” This form of boundary work involves migrants who are positioned lower in the hierarchy on a particular dimension (such as race/nationality), attempting to emphasize their higher status on a completely different dimension (particularly class). Boundary switching is an important mechanism for gaining better treatment in complex social settings where multiple identity dimensions are simultaneously at play and where individuals are positioned at higher or lower points on different hierarchies. Our findings thus offer a useful vocabulary for understanding how migrants agentically respond to the plural hierarchies they encounter in new destinations.