Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

While schema theory motivated the original measures of automatic cognitive associations between constructs in memory, researchers soon modified these to explore a different domain: implicit attitudes about social groups that elude standard self-reports. As the so-called implicit attitude revolution gained steam, the original measurement goal got much less attention, especially in political science. We believe the schema concept – automatic cognitive associations between features of an attitude object – continues to hold great value for political psychology. We offer a retrofit of the popular implicit association test (IAT), one more efficient than many lexical tasks, to tap these associations in surveys. The new technique captures the degree to which citizens link ideas about ostensibly group-neutral policies to specific social categories. We use this measurement strategy to explore the psychological mechanisms underlying group centrism in politics, an effort that has been largely abandoned due to measurement difficulties. Results from four studies offer practical suggestions about the application of implicit measures for capturing the automatic ways people link groups to important political objects. We conclude by discussing the broader promise of implicit measurement of group schemas, not just implicit affect, for political psychology.

Chapter 7 explores how the logic of UN mediation as an art produces masculinities, particularly the subjects of ‘the mediator’, ‘conflict parties’, and ‘youths’. The first part examines the narrative representations of ‘the mediator’ as a political man who should show good judgement, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be spatially mobile. ‘The mediator’ has to be empathetic and good at listening – feminised traits that operate as capital for male mediators, but less so for women. In addition, the selection process for mediators draws from the masculinised professions of diplomacy and politics and the informal, male-dominated networks of diplomats at the UN. This chapter presents descriptive findings on the gender and career backgrounds of senior UN mediators. The second part of the chapter examines representations of local men. ‘Local men’ – often equivalent to the ‘conflict parties’ – function as the constitutive outside of ‘the mediator’. ‘Conflict parties’ are represented as emotional, traditional, and irrational, recalling colonial constructions of the ‘other’. Meanwhile, male ‘youths’ appear not as political agents, but as vectors of senseless violence. Thus, a colonial hierarchy of masculinities exists in which local men are subordinate to the mediator.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.

This chapter focuses on historian Charles Sellers’ argument that by the mid-nineteenth century, many white southerners, influenced by the spirit of American democracy and the values of evangelical Christianity, could never fully embrace the proslavery argument and maintained only a half-hearted commitment to the region’s peculiar institution based on economic necessity and racial fear. Sellers argued that most white southerners experienced moral unease if not full-fledged guilt over how to justify living in a slaveholding society. In Sellers’ view, this “travail of slavery” burdened white southerners throughout the late antebellum period and even beyond emancipation. Subsequent scholarship initially supported Sellers’ argument that white southerners experienced varying measures of guilt over slavery. But during the 1970s, an array of new scholarly studies revealed that most white southerners eagerly defended slavery as a necessary institution and accepted the racial justification for slavery and thus retained a deep commitment to white supremacy.

This chapter addresses the contributions of the Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His influence on historical scholarship through The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history. Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the Black experience in the United States, and lent the DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Black Reconstruction challenged the existing literature emphasizing the democratic achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, and slave political awareness, as well as a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy. DuBois’ work stood as the basis for an anti-triumphalist interpretive thrust to American history, a thrust which persists down to the present day.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

What are the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection for thinking, prejudicial or otherwise, about foreigners, race, Jews, sexual orientation, and women? Did Darwin himself, caught in Victorian prejudices, have any awareness of the full implications of his theorizing?

Riffing on the narcissism of male grooming, Devin Garofalo discusses the Romantic impulse to “manscape” – that is, to “read… a culturally specific conception of the human into the landscape such that it is invisibilized as the world’s structuring principle.” This culturally specific conception of the human, she clarifies, building on the pathbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter, is that of man as a bourgeois colonialist, a tamer, and a conqueror. He is Hannibal and Napoleon and the Wordsworthian poet all in one. The Romantic nature poem that is the hallmark of early nineteenth–century poetry, then, recruits the ecological imagination as it consolidates and eradicates all threats to whiteness.

This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.