IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/prodev/v6y2006i1p40-54.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The elephant in the room: racism in representations, relationships and rituals

Author

Listed:
  • Emma Crewe

    (Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT)

  • Priyanthi Fernando

    (Centre for Poverty Analysis, 29 Gregory’s Road, Colombo 7, Sri Lanka)

Abstract

Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized representations of ‘racial’groups are pervasive and can be trivial in impact. But when combined with exclusionary social networks and rituals, and used to justify white-dominated power structures, the result can be systematic discrimination against people based on their racial identity. With examples from encounters between staff working in development in international agencies, networks, governments and national organizations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we illustrate how racism is played out. We suggest that such observations emphasize the need to decentralize power to the South and that the subject deserves more thorough investigation.

Suggested Citation

  • Emma Crewe & Priyanthi Fernando, 2006. "The elephant in the room: racism in representations, relationships and rituals," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 6(1), pages 40-54, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:prodev:v:6:y:2006:i:1:p:40-54
    DOI: 10.1191/1464993406ps126oa
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1191/1464993406ps126oa
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1191/1464993406ps126oa?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Annisette, Marcia & Prasad, Ajnesh, 2017. "Critical accounting research in hyper-racial times," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 5-19.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:prodev:v:6:y:2006:i:1:p:40-54. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.