1. Gunther Jikeli
“*Jew” as an insult and as a pejorative adjective in **French **and
German today*
The German and French word for “Jew” (“Jude” and “juif” or the verlan slang word “feuj”) is used among some as an insult against non-Jews and in a pejorative way in recent years. I want to discuss this phenomenon by reviewing the findings of three empirical studies, some newspaper articles on the issue and analysing own empirical data from interviews in Berlin and Paris. I examine its antisemitic connotations and its function within the social circle where it is used. Is it part of an antisemitic ideology and is it different from other similar pejorative expressions as e.g. “getürkt”, “scheiss Türke” or “travail arabe” or “sale arabe” and if it is different, in which ways?
2. Monica Moreno
'Mestizaje as Fragmented Whiteness; The Logics of Mexican Racism'
This paper focuses on the contemporary understandings of the notion of mestizaje as an ideology of racial mixture and its effectiveness as a category of analysis to explore the lived experience of racism. I will argue that mestizaje can be analysed as a form of 'fragmented' whiteness, that is, as a site of privilege that is not consistently attached to the white body but to the legitimacy of the Mestizo subject and her body. Mestizaje will be critically assessed simultaneously as a political ideology, as a complex configuration of national identity, as a racist logic that organises everyday life and deepens the strategy of negotiating national identity and as both an achieved and ascribed status. Based on empirical research that explores Mexican women's understandings of mestizaje, Mexicanness and their experiences of racism, the paper explores how racism exists in Mexico through practices structured around racialised constructions of identity and within a 'raceless' (Goldberg 2002) social configuration. Through an analysis of racist moments the paper engages with the debate about the existence of racism and the ways it operates in its 'omnipresent dimension' (Knight 1990) in Mexico. It will also emphasize a critical analysis of the subjects that can assert themselves within the category of Mestizas and investigate how they understand their positioning and the dynamics related, generated and produced with such identification.
3. Peter Martin
Attitude or discourse or ideology? Mixing methods in racism research
In the empirical study of everyday racist ideology, qualitative and quantitative paradigms are, on the whole, still vigorously opposed to one another. Researchers who conceptualize racism as a social representation, or a discourse, use interviews and interpretive textual analysis to describe features of racist rhetoric and thinking. Survey researchers, on the other hand, view racism as a prejudice, a specific form of attitude. Discourse analysts and other qualitatively minded scholars tend to criticize the survey researchers’ concepts of ‘prejudice’ and ‘attitude’ as too narrow, and the survey situation as too artificial, to represent the complex structures of racist ideology. Survey researchers, on the other hand, tend to ignore this critique and to get on with their business of measuring. This paper presents a case study of racism in contemporary London that aims to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative paradigms. The study design has the form of a sandwich: qualitative cognitive interviews both precede and follow a survey study. On the methodical level, qualitative data collection and analysis facilitate and complement the quantitative survey; that is, the qualitative data are helpful both in improving the survey design, and in limiting the danger of facile interpretation of survey data. On the theoretical level, I shall argue that although some of the criticism against survey studies of racism is justified, it can be addressed by a reconceptualization of the concept of a ‘racist attitude’ as a stance taken within contexts of ideological controversy.
Key words: Mixed Methods, Racism, cognitive interviews
4. Claudia Globish
Claudia Globisch, Department of Sociology, University of Leipzig
On the Interrelationship of (Anti-)Racism and (Anti-)Anti-Semitism
Two crucial events in the last years may be regarded as exemplary in that they demonstrate the highly problematic relationship of anti-racist positions towards Antisemitism: The UN World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 and, in 2002, the suspended publication of a survey conducted by the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA, Berlin) which had been commissioned by the former European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights
While in Durban attempts were made at declaring Israel a racist state and introducing the term ‘holocausts’, results of the survey by Juliane Wetzel and Werner Bergmann from the ZfA were criticized for diagnosing Anti-Semitism within the studied groups of ‘young Muslim’ or ‘Arabic or North-African Muslim migrant’ perpetrators. Beate Winkler, then director of EUMC, declared this group description a „not sustainable and damaging/ dangerous generalization” (cf. the interview by Igal Avidan, Platform Quantara.de, 2004) and thus justified a non-publication of the study. One may surmise this to have been a political decision by the EUMC, which saw its own anti-racist work endangered by the description of Muslims as perpetrators. As I will argue, similar stances towards Antisemitism in Muslim contexts on the one hand and with regard to Israel (as were taken in Durban) on the other can be found in many texts by leftist groups.
Obviously, most anti-racist discourses claiming to ‘speak (out) for the Other’ reject any allegations of antisemitic argumentation or of relativizing Islamist Antisemitism within their own formation. They invoke both their antifascist agenda and their professed multiculturalism in order to clear their own positions from all suspicions of Anti-Semitism – a knee-jerk response to such criticisms which, as I will argue, does not only short-circuit the problem but does simply not address the point in question. For the strategy of legitimation used simply makes evident how certain anti-racist positions consider Antisemitism a mere variant of racism and how they conclude in the assumption that antiracism automatically were to result in Anti-Antisemitism.
The glaring lack of analytical distinction between Anti-Semitism and racism (and their negations) can be currently observed in a broad range of discussions which identify Anti-Semitism with Anti-Islamism or ‘Islamophobia’ as well as in argumentative positions which declare Palestinians to be today’s Jews. Evidently, apart from an attribution of antisemitic stereotypes to Israel, the conflation of racism and Anti-Semitism has also resulted in a highly problematic attitude towards Anti-Semitism among Muslim migrants. Oftentimes their Anti-Semitism is either made excuses for, claiming that it were a mere result of their own oppression, or tiptoed around, fearing that locating Anti-Semitism within Muslim migrant groups would only lead to their further discrimination.
Using as empirical examples select texts from both the radical right and radical left, my presentation tries to develop a set of distinctive criteria for differentiating between Anti-Semitism and racism. I will analyze potential connections between the two phenomena as well as foreground current problems within anti-racist strategies of legitimation which result from a lack of differentiation. I will also point out how and why a criticism of certain antiracist positions does not necessarily entail an abandonment of a non-racist stance.
5. Mark Elchardus
Ethnocentrism as processed vulnerability
Many authors consider ethnic prejudice and ethnocentrism as a consequence of uncertainty and vulnerability. That frequently observed relationship does however remain in need of a theoretical explanation. The goal of this paper is to present such a theoretical argument.
Vulnerability can haven many causes (poverty, poor schooling, ill health, social isolation…) but it is a condition or set of experiences that people have to cope with. They must “process” it to be able to live with it without suffering too much psychic damage. Our basic proposition is that this coping is not an individual process, but a collective one, based on socially constructed coping mechanisms or interpretive frames, that perform a therapeutic function for the individual, while at the same time stimulating ethnocentrism.
Two mechanisms play an important role in linking vulnerability and prejudice. The first is the quasi universal tendency to associate threat with the strange and unfamiliar. That association should probably be considered a legacy of psychological evolution. Its cognitive implication is that an association between the sense of vulnerability and threat on the one hand, the presence of “strangers” on the others, has an immediate plausibility.
That association does however not arise as an abstraction, but in a specific cultural context. This context provides the second mechanism linking vulnerability and ethnic prejudice. It consists of interpretive frames that can be diffused under the form of narratives and discourses, among others by the mass media. Those interpretive frames or coping strategies proper must assign a concrete cause to the risk or threat, that can be associated with the “strangers”, that makes the vulnerable persons into victims of an injustice , and in that way justifies negative feelings towards the strangers as the cause of the threat.
Three coping strategies were identified in the population under study. Vulnerability is processed and ethnocentrism stimulated by (a) viewing the strangers as favored by government policy to the detriment of the native population, (b) viewing the strangers as frequently involved in crime, (c) viewing the strangers as profiteering from the social security system.
6. Christine Achinger
The bourgeois subject and its enemies – ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Woman’ in Otto Weininger’s "Sex and Character"
My research in recent years has been concerned with tracing the connection between antisemitism and the rise of modern, capitalist society in a number of different genres from the late 18th to the early 20th century. I have been particularly interested in the relation between antisemitic constructions of ‘Jewishness’ and other stereotypes of race and gender. Currently, I am working on Otto Weininger’s best-selling book "Sex and Character" (Vienna 1903), a manichean theory of modern life in general, based on the alleged opposition between male and female principle, which devotes a whole chapter to the ‘Jewish Character’. Reading the text against theories of the modern subject such as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment", I argue that Weininger’s oppositions between ‘ideal man’ and ‘ideal woman’ as well as between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jew’ can be understood as outward projections of the immanent contradictions of the modern, bourgeois subject onto racialized and gendered ‘others’.
7. Nonna Mayer et Guy Michelat
The perceptions of the "other" in France: foreigners, immigrants, Muslims_
Using the data of the annual survey on racism and xenophobia done for the CNCDH (National commission for the defense of human rights), we analyse the way the representations of Muslims in France are changing, with the rise, in the last three years, of new, although limited, forms of islamophobia in the sense of a specific rejection of islam, distinct from the traditional forms of anti-immigrant prejudice.
8. Ian Law
'A State of Denial, racism against the UK Chinese population'
UK Chinese people are subject to very substantial levels of racist abuse, assault and hostility. Because of their distrust of police and other criminal justice agencies - a distrust based on many years of experience of a lack of their complaints being taken seriously - many Chinese people have given up reporting racially-motivated crimes against them. This general experience of agencies, together with the failure of many statistical and research reports to identify the experience of Chinese people separately from that of 'other' minorities has meant that their experience of racism remains hidden from view. This paper will report on a recently completed national study carried out in conjunction with Min Quan, which is a TMG (The Monitoring Group) project based in London.
9. Marieke van Londen
Effects of Issue Frames on Aversion to Ethnic-Targeted School Policies[1]
Authors: Marieke van Londen, Marcel Coenders, Peer Scheepers
Abstract.
In this contribution, I would like to discuss the results of a survey experiment designed to examine the impact of issue framing on the level of aversion to ethnic-targeted school policies in the Netherlands, in 2000 and 2005. Emphasizing the costs for Dutch children increased the level of aversion to these policies, compared to the level of aversion expressed by respondents in the unframed, control group. Emphasizing the benefits for ethnic minorities was less effective in altering the level of aversion. Moreover, when respondents were confronted with both the cost and benefit frame – a situation which closely resembles the political and public debate – they still showed less support for ethnic-targeted school policies. We also found that aversion to ethnic-targeted school policies is driven by negative considerations such as a preference for hierarchical societal relations and perceptions of ethnic threat. Emphasizing out-group benefits did neither decrease the impact of these negative considerations on the level of aversion to ethnic-targeted school policies nor strengthen the liberalizing effect of education.
Keywords: issue framing, counter-framing, affirmative action, equal opportunity policies, computer assisted survey experiments
10. Robert Fine
Ways of thinking about antisemitism: difficulties in relation to contemporary Europe
This paper is about difficulties in understanding antisemitism in the current period. My propositions are i) there is little or no common agreement on what antisemitism is; ii) this lack of agreement is partly because antisemitism today, unlike in the past, rarely declares itself; iii) either the old European antisemitism vanished (inexplicably?) into thin air in the post-Holocaust period or it lies concealed because it is discredited; iv) the post-Holocaust condition of Europe has given rise to two polarised discourses, ‘new antisemitism’ and ‘no antisemitism’ which now dominate public debate; v) these discourses feed off mutual hostility and negative caricatures of one other; vi) there is agreement that the Holocaust was not a ‘learning experience’ for most Europeans after the war but that everything began to change in the 1960s; vii) these changes were seemingly for the good but their benign character was contested both by ‘new antisemitism’ and ‘no antisemitism’ approaches; viii) the former detected the emergence of a new antisemitism behind the universalistic language of the European postnational project; ix) the latter hears talk of antisemitism in the context of no actual antisemitism as the expression of a new conservatism and of a new inhibition on critical thought, especially in relation to Israel; x) in the context of these polarised and negative ways of thinking, the difficult task we face is to reconstruct a sense of European responsibility not only for recognising the antisemitism of the past alongside other forms of European racism but also for combating the antisemitism of the present.