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From what I can tell this is the new go-to critical theory term that progressives are advocating. I mentioned this in another post and I'd appreciate if someone could break it down for me. My guess is that this one will not last long.
I was kinda surprised that the word 'body' is being used. There's a racist history in defining black people by their bodies in contrast to defining white people by their minds. So my first reaction was this term seems to feed into that. Why are we substituting 'people' with 'bodies' when referring to POC?
Secondly, the term 'racialized' or 'racialization' seems to be misused here. From wikipedia:
In sociology, racialization or ethnicization is the processes of ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such.
So how does that apply to a typical black, brown person today? If they freely identify as black...how can they be racialized? From the definition given...I was thinking more along the lines of someone mistakenly thought to be brown while online because they identify as muslim. Or an African immigrant in North America who checks off 'black' on applications and census surveys who never identified as 'black' while growing up.
I considered the possibility that advocates of the term were saying that POC were racialized at birth....but that would apply to white people too so using the term 'racialized person' would refer to all races...not just POC.
I found this in regards to the use of 'body':
http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61206.pdf
And this which also includes 'racialization':
https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Fassin/Racialization.pdf
And I found this 'new' definition of racialization:
is the process through which groups come to be designated as different and on that basis subjected to unequal treatment. Racialized groups include people who might experience differential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, religion or culture. Racialized groups are treated outside the norm and receive unequal treatment based on their race. Racialization can extend to specific traits and attributes, which are connected to racialized people and deemed to be abnormal and of less worth. Besides physical characteristics of people, other characteristics that are commonly racialized are accent, speech, name, clothing, diet, intelligence, beliefs, practices and habits.
Notice here how this new definition has omitted what was seemingly the most important criteria of the traditional definition. Specifically, that the individual or group DID NOT IDENTIFY with the label they were given.
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