'A foundation-hatched black elite’: Obama, the US establishment and foreign policy

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power. The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies during Obama’s two-term presidency

New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: the persistence of anglo-conformity in the American motion picture industry

Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain overrepresented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los Angeles, New York and other large cities, where British ancestry is rare. Jewish actors are overrepresented, yet many have Anglo surnames. Compared to athletes and politicians, actors are significantly more likely to have Anglo surnames, especially those in genres depicting the nation. After declining among cohorts of stars born between the 1800s and 1961, the share of British Isles surnames has stabilized and remains in the majority. We argue that despite rising diversity, this reflects the continuing importance of the Anglo-Protestant ethnic imago for American national identity

The Meanings of Discounts in Contemporary Art Markets: The Case of India

Although discounts in art markets are commonplace, the phenomenon remains largely unresearched. This paper looks at how art market actors understand the functions of discounts, focusing on ‘suppliers’ of the market and drawing on qualitative interviews with artists and art dealers from New Delhi and Mumbai, conducted in January-April 2013. The theoretical basis of this paper is a cultural sociological stance on the functioning of markets, showing how a shared system of norms and values affects the operation of a market. Two circuits of commerce are distinguished in the Indian art market: internationally oriented artists and dealers, whose attitude towards discounts is shaped by the desire to defend the aesthetic value of art; and locally oriented artists and dealers, who are positive about giving discounts and embrace them as a legitimate element of their national culture