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The Sociology Colloquium Series: Welcomes Yannick Coenders

On Monday, October 24, 2022, the Sociology Colloquium Series will feature Yannick Coenders. Yannick Coenders (ABD, Northwestern University) is a Du Boisian sociologist of race and space, adopting a historical perspective. His research agenda interrogates how race persists and continues to shape the social life of populations on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the global decline of institutions that brought it into being, such as European colonialism, slavery, and de jure segregation. Yannick’s collaborative research has been published in Antipode, Public Culture, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. His dissertation, Dispersal: How Western Cities Came to Oppose Non-White Residential Concentration Post-WWII, poses a question crucial to contemporary urban race governance. Why did Western cities shift from their colonial tradition of segregating and concentrating non-white populations to an embrace of residential dispersal in the latter half of the twentieth century? Based on extensive archival research in Birmingham (UK) and Rotterdam (NL), it challenges the mainstream conception that Western cities embraced dispersal to confront racism. Instead, it shows that elites adopted these policies to appease white constituencies, to assimilate non-white populations, and to undermine anti-racist resistance.

Colloquia Title and Topic:

“From Racial Vigilantism to White Appeasement”

What is the relationship between racial vigilantism and formal politics? Surveying different government responses to white violence, my talk offers a typology that distinguishes responses of condonement, containment, suppression, and appeasement. While the first three have been theorized in distinct scholarly traditions, appeasement, a strategy characteristic of racialized liberal democracies, has received less attention. Strategies of appeasement seek to end white violence while simultaneously reassuring vigilantes and their supporters that the racial status quo will be preserved through other methods of governance. My study draws on the history of the 1972 Afrikaanderwijk riots in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, conceptualizing the response of Rotterdam’s left-wing municipal government to vigilante actions as “white appeasement.” During the riots, mobs raided and occupied Turkish lodgings in the Afrikaanderwijk neighborhood, revenging the increasing presence of migrants. To appease the rioters, the Labor Party-led city council announced and passed discriminatory legislation to limit the presence of migrants in the city through neighborhood quotas and lodging closures. I will conclude by identifying three conditions that made appeasement a possible response: the presence of non-violent translators speaking on behalf of the vigilantes, the ability to legitimize violence as inevitable and borne out of emergency, and a successful denial of racism.