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Can I Touch You? Everyday Racism

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Understanding Racism in a Post-Racial World

Abstract

This chapter examines the materiality of everyday racism through the relationship between bodies and spaces. The interaction between bodies within a particular space as well as the positioning of those bodies in the space becomes manifest as visibility and/or invisibility, which are also the mechanisms through which racism is produced and sustained. While examining how space organises racial experiences, the chapter highlights the value of an embodied and spatial framework that allows for an analysis of how race is mobilised in different everyday spaces, thereby pinpointing the subtle ways that racism continues to be silently perpetuated. The state of being visible or invisible is a primary characteristic of racialised experiences and therefore should be central to discussions about racism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reminiscent of the Rosa Parks’s incident and her act of defiance, in 2011, an Israeli woman refused to sit at the back of a bus which was travelling to an ultra-orthodox neighbourhood in Jerusalem. Her refusal came after she was pressured to leave her seat by ultra-orthodox Jewish men. Israel’s ultra-orthodox community has attempted to force gender segregation on buses in the country in the name of religion. This clearly highlights how these larger cultural issues get played out in ordinary spaces (Stewart 2011).

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  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Sunshine Kamaloni

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  1. Sunshine Kamaloni
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Correspondence to Sunshine Kamaloni .

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Kamaloni, S. (2019). Can I Touch You? Everyday Racism. In: Understanding Racism in a Post-Racial World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10985-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10985-1_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-10984-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-10985-1

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