Everyday racism long escaped formal histories but survived in poetry and autobiography

Evidence

Until recently the day-to-day realities of racism did not have a place in political and sociological histories. Barry Adam, one of the first authors to analyze strategies employed to cope with everyday inferiorization, puts his finger on the spot when he states that “Behavior which is mundane, routine, and taken for granted tends to escape the notice of the more dramatic macro histories” (Adam, 1978:1-2). This does not mean that everyday experiences of racial discrimination have been absent from discourse and collective memory. Written materials on everyday racism could be found in poems, literary narratives, and autobiographies. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1455

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adam’s 1978 work on everyday inferiorization and to the broader invisibility-of-the-mundane theme — macro histories skipping routine life. Also echoes the reader’s interest in how ordinary experience escapes institutional record, as in A Midwife’s Tale where domestic/routine labor went unrecorded. — connects to: Spectacular anti-apartheid narratives displaced ordinary black rural life from fiction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 521