Content area
Full text
Paula loanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp.
In the social sciences, there is a dearth of scholarship connecting the politics of emotion with the politics of racism. Paula Ioanide's work in The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness makes a significant contribution toward filling this gap by showing the ways in which emotion reinforces structural and institutional racism. With this project, she argues that we need to recognize public feelings as currency in emotional economies, a metaphor that captures how many US citizens feel about an investment in gendered and racial discrimination and violence, which comes to be expressed through political desires, pleasures, fears, and/or anxieties. By focusing on the impact of emotions on political debates, Ioanide beckons us to consider how to more effectively achieve racial and gendered justice when skeptics and opponents dismiss and/or disavow social scientific facts that have been carefully accumulated over decades of research. As she astutely frames it, the problem is that, unfortunately, facts by themselves don't debunk the stereotypes. This is because emotions shape our "sense of realness" and buttress racial and gender ideologies (2). Therefore, Ioanide rejects notions that only gathering more data to disprove the latest neoliberal, racist, and sexist discourse blaming the most marginalized groups for their discrimination will be effective in itself. Rather, she argues persuasively that anti-racist and feminist scholarship and practices need to incorporate knowledge of emotions as well as account for the weight of ideological fantasies in constructing realities. She aptly characterizes her book in the title, which also signals the structure of the text as she takes four cases where emotional attachments to racist stereotypes are marshaled against the groups who are under attack. As she covers the expansive ground laid out in these cases, her narrative is sensitive, moving, and necessarily upsetting.
She follows in the steps of Herbert Blumer (1958) in his classic work on race prejudice. He asserted that race is socially constructed through the sense of being part of a racial group and that that sense of groupness has influential feelings attached to it. Ioanide also considers feelings of race prejudice from the...