INTRODUCTION
Synchronizing and building upon recent theoretical innovations in the area of race, we lend some conceptual clarification to the nature and dynamics of race and racial domination, providing in a single essay a source through which thinkers—especially those seeking a general (if economical) introduction to the vast field of race studies—can gain basic insight into how race works as well as effective ways to think about racial domination. Unable to locate a single and concise essay that, standing alone, summarizes the foundational ideas of a critical sociology of race and racism, we wrote this article to provide scholars and students with a general orientation or introduction to the study of racial domination. In doing so, we have attempted to lend analytical clarity to the concept of race, as well as to its relationship with ethnicity and nationality. Perhaps more important, along with advancing a clear definition of racial domination, we have identified five fallacies—recurrent in many public debates—that one should avoid when thinking about racism. Although we believe this paper will provide guidance for advanced scholars conducting empirical and theoretical work on race, we have composed it primarily with a broader audience in mind.
WHAT IS RACE?
You do not come into this world African or European or Asian; rather, this world comes into you. As literally hundreds of scientists have argued, you are not born with a race in the same way you are born with fingers, eyes, and hair. Fingers, eyes, and hair are natural creations, whereas race is a social fabrication (Duster Reference Duster, Goodman, Heath and Lindee2003; Graves Reference Graves2001). We define race as a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category.Footnote 1 This definition deserves to be unpacked.
Symbolic Category
A symbolic category belongs to the realm of ideas, meaning-making, and language. It is something actively created and recreated by human beings rather than pregiven, needing only to be labeled. Symbolic categories mark differences between grouped people or things. In doing so, they actually bring those people or things into existence (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu, Raymond and Adamson2003). For example, the term “Native American” is a symbolic category that encompasses all peoples indigenous to the land that is known, today, as the United States. But the term “Native American” did not exist before non-Native Americans came to the Americas. Choctaws, Crows, Iroquois, Hopis, Dakotas, Yakimas, Utes, and dozens of other people belonging to indigenous tribes existed. The term “Native American” flattens under one homogenizing heading the immensely different histories, languages, traditional beliefs, and rich cultural practices of these various tribes. In naming different races, racial categories create different races.Footnote 2
Such insights into the importance of the symbolic have not always been appreciated. Consider, for example, Oliver Cromwell Cox's hypothesis “that racial exploitation and race prejudice developed among Europeans with the rise of capitalism and nationalism, and that because of the worldwide ramifications of capitalism, all racial antagonisms can be traced to the policies and attitudes of the leading capitalist people, the [W]hite people of Europe and North America” (Reference Cox1948, p. 322). Though few scholars today would agree fully with Cox's reduction, many continue to advance structuralist claims, filtering racial conflict through the logic of class conflict (e.g., Reich Reference Reich1981), regarding racial formation as a political strategy (e.g., Marx Reference Marx1998), or concentrating on the legal construction of racial categories (e.g., Haney-López Reference Haney-López1996).Footnote 3 Helpful as they are, structuralist accounts often treat race as something given and accepted—that is, as a “real” label that attaches itself to people (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva1997) or as an imposed category that forms racial identity (Marx Reference Marx1998)—and thereby overlook how actors create, reproduce, and resist systems of racial classification, dynamics documented in works such as Kimberly DaCosta's Making Multiracials (Reference DaCosta2007), Thomas Guglielmo's White on Arrival (Reference Guglielmo2004), John Jackson, Jr.'s Harlemworld (Reference Jackson2001), Robin Sheriff's Dreaming Equality (Reference Sheriff2001), or John Hartigan, Jr.'s Racial Situations (Reference Hartigan1999). Political and legal racial taxonomies do not necessarily align with quotidian processes of recognition and identification practiced by classified subjects (Loveman Reference Loveman1999). Since no institution, regardless of its power, monopolizes the definition of race (Brubaker and Cooper, Reference Brubaker and Cooper2000), we must resist assuming an easy correspondence between “official” categorizations and the practical accomplishments of racial identification.
Phenotype or Ancestry
Race also is based on phenotype or ancestry. A person's phenotype is her or his physical appearance and constitution, including skeletal structure, height, hair texture, eye color, and skin tone. A person's ancestry is her or his family lineage, which often includes tribal, regional, or national affiliations. The symbolic category of race organizes people into bounded groupings based on their phenotype, ancestry, or both. It is difficult to say which matters more, phenotype or ancestry, in determining racial membership in the United States. In some settings, ancestry trumps phenotype; in others, the opposite is true.
Recent immigrants often are pigeonholed in one of the dominant racial categories because of their phenotype; however, many resist this classification because of their ancestry. For instance, upon arriving in the United States, many first generation West Indian immigrants, quite familiar with racism against African Americans, actively resist the label “Black.” Despite their efforts, many are considered African American because of their dark skin (that is, they “look” Black to the American eye). The children of West African immigrants, many of whom are disconnected from their parents' ancestries, more readily accept the label “Black” (Waters Reference Waters1999). And many individuals with mixed heritage often are treated as though they belonged only to one “race.”
Some people, by contrast, rely on their phenotype to form a racial identity, though they are often grouped in another racial category based on their ancestry. Susie Guillory Phipps, a blond-haired blue-eyed woman who always considered herself “White,” discovered, upon glancing at her birth certificate while applying for a passport, that her native state, Louisiana, considered her “Black.” The reason was that Louisiana grouped people into racial categories according to the “one thirty-second rule,” a rule that stated that anyone who was one thirty-second Black—regardless of what they looked like—was legally “Black.” In 1982, Susie Guillory Phipps sued Louisiana for the right to be White. She lost. The state genealogist discovered that Phipps was the great-great-great-great-grandchild of a White Alabama plantation owner and his Black mistress and, therefore—although all of Phipps's other ancestors were White—she was to be considered “Black.” (This outlandish law was finally erased from the books in 1983.) In this case, Phipps's ancestry (as identified by the state) was more important in determining her race than her phenotype (Davis Reference Davis1991).
Social and Historical Contexts
Racial taxonomies are bound to their specific social and historical contexts. The racial categories that exist in America may not exist in other parts of the globe. In South Africa, racial groups are organized around three dominant categories: White, Black, and “Coloured.” During apartheid, the Coloured category was designed to include all “mixed-race” people (Sparks Reference Sparks2006). More recently, the Black category has been expanded to include all groups oppressed under apartheid, not only those of African heritage but also those of Indian descent and (as of 2008) Chinese South Africans. In Brazil, five racial categories are employed in the official census: Branco (White), Pardo (Brown), Preto (Black), Amarelo (Asian), and Indígena (Indigenous). However, in everyday usage, many Brazilians identify themselves and one another through several other racial terms—including moreno (other type of brown), moreno claro (light brown), negro (another type of black), and claro (light)—which have much more to do with the tint of one's skin than with one's ancestry (Stephens Reference Stephens1999; Telles Reference Telles2004). Before racial language was outlawed by the Communist regime, Chinese racial taxonomies were based first and foremost on blood purity, then on hair, then odor, then brain mass, then finally—and of least importance—skin color, which, according to the taxonomy, was divided into no less than ten shades (Dikötter Reference Dikötter1992). And in Japan, a group called the Burakamin is considered to be unclean and is thought to constitute a separate race, although it is impossible to distinguish someone with Burakamin ancestry from the rest of the Japanese population (Eisenstadt Reference Eisenstadt1998; Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma, Reference Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma1994).
Cross-national comparisons, then, reveal that systems of racial classification vary greatly from one country to the next. Racial categories, therefore, are place-specific, bound to certain geographic and social contexts. They also are time-specific, changing between different historical eras. As a historical product, race is quite new. Before the sixteenth century, race, as we know it today, did not exist. During the Middle Ages, prejudices were formed and wars waged against “other” people, but those “other” people were not categorized or understood as people of other races. Instead of the color line, the primary social division in those times was that between “civilized” and “uncivilized.” The racial categories so familiar to us only began to calcify around the beginning of the nineteenth century, a mere two hundred years ago (Gossett Reference Gossett1965; Smedley Reference Smedley1999). In fact, the word, “race,” has a very recent origin; it only obtained its modern meaning in the late eighteenth century (Hannaford Reference Hannaford1996).
But racial domination survives by covering its tracks, by erasing its own history. It encourages us to think of the mystic boundaries separating, say, West from East, White from Black, Black from Asian, or Asian from Hispanic, as timeless separations, as divisions that have always been and will always be. We would be well served to remember, with Stuart Hall, that we must grapple with “the historical specificity of race in the modern world” (Reference Hall1980, p. 308) to gain an accurate understanding of racial phenomena. In the American context, the “Indian” was invented within the context of European colonization, as indigenous peoples of the Americas were lumped together under one rubric to be killed, uprooted, and exploited. Whiteness and Blackness were invented as antipodes within the context of English, and later American, slavery. More than any other institution, slavery would dictate the career of American racism: Blackness became associated with bondage, inferiority, and social death; Whiteness with freedom, superiority, and life. The Mexican American was invented within the context of the colonization of Mexico. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Asian American was invented as a response to immigration from the Far East. Whiteness expanded during the early years of the twentieth century as new immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe transformed themselves from “lesser Whites” to, simply, “Whites.”Footnote 4 All the while, White supremacy was legitimated by racial discourses in philosophy, literature, and science. By the middle of the twentieth century, the racial categories so familiar to us today were firmly established. Although the second half of the twentieth century brought great changes in the realm of race—including the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the fall of Jim Crow—the racial categories that emerged in America over the previous 300 years remained, for the most part, unchallenged. Americans, White and non-White alike, understood themselves as raced, and, by and large, accepted the dominant racial classification even if they refused to accept the terms of racial inequality.
Misrecognized as Natural
The last part of the definition we have been unpacking has to do with a process of naturalization. This word signifies a metamorphosis of sorts, where something created by humans is mistaken as something dictated by nature. Racial categories are naturalized when these symbolic groupings—the products of specific historical contexts—are wrongly conceived as natural and unchangeable. We misrecognize race as natural when we begin to think that racial cleavages and inequalities can be explained by pointing to attributes somehow inherent in the race itself (as if they were biological) instead of understanding how social powers, economic forces, political institutions, and cultural practices have brought about these divisions.
Naturalized categories are powerful; they are the categories through which we understand the world around us. Such categories divide the world along otherwise arbitrary lines and make us believe that there is nothing at all arbitrary about such a division. What is more, when categories become naturalized, alternative ways of viewing the world begin to appear more and more impossible. Why, we might ask, should we only have five main racial groups? Why not ninety-five? Why should we divide people according to their skin color? Why not base racial divisions according to foot size, ear shape, teeth color, arm length, or height? Why is ancestry so important? Why not base our racial categories on regions—North, South, East, and West? One might find these suggestive questions silly, and, indeed, they are. But they are no sillier than the idea that people should be sorted into different racial groups according skin color or blood composition. To twist Bourdieu's phrase, we might say, when it comes to race, one never doubts enough (Reference Bourdieu, Wacquant, Farage and Bourdieu1998 [1994], p. 36).
The system of racial classification at work in America today is not the only system imaginable, nor is it the only one that has existed in the young life of the United States. Race is far from fixed; rather, its forms, depending on the social, economic, political, and cultural pressures of the day, have shifted and fluctuated in whimsical and drastic ways over time (Duster Reference Duster, Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica and Wray2001). Indeed, today's multiracial movement is challenging America's dominant racial categories (which remained relatively stable during the latter half of the twentieth century) as people of mixed heritage are refusing to accept as given the state's racial classification system (DeCosta Reference DaCosta2007). Race is social through and through. Thus, we can regard race as a well-founded fiction. It is a fiction because it has no natural bearing, but it is nonetheless well founded since most people in society provide race with a real existence and divide the world through this lens.
ETHNICITY AND NATIONALITY
The categories of ethnicity and nationality are intrinsically bound up with race. Ethnicity refers to a shared lifestyle informed by cultural, historical, religious, and/or national affiliations. Nationality is equated with citizenship, membership in a specific politically delineated territory controlled by a government (cf. Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946). Race, ethnicity, and nationality are overlapping symbolic categories that influence how we see the world around us, how we view ourselves, and how we divide “us” from “them.” The categories are mutually reinforcing insofar as each category educates, upholds, and is informed by the others. This is why these three categories cannot be understood in isolation from one another (Loveman Reference Loveman1999). For example, if someone identifies as ethnically Norwegian, which, for them, might include a shared lifestyle composed of Norwegian history and folklore, language, cultural rituals and festivals, and food, they may also reference a nationality, based in the state of Norway, as well as a racial group, White, since nearly all people of Norwegian descent would be classified as White by American standards. Here, ethnicity is informed by nationality (past or present) and signifies race.
Ethnicity often carves out distinctions and identities within racial groups. Ten people can be considered Asian American according to our modern racial taxonomy; however, those ten people might have parents or grandparents that immigrated to the United States from ten different countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and Laos. They might speak different languages, uphold different traditions, worship different deities, enjoy different kinds of food, and go through different experiences. What is more, many Asian countries have histories of conflict (such as China and Japan, North and South Korea). Accordingly, we cannot assume that a Chinese American and a Japanese American have similar lifestyles or see the world through a shared vision simply because they are both classified as “Asian” under American racial rubrics.Footnote 5 Therefore, just as race, ethnicity, and nationality cannot be separated from one another, neither can all three categories be collapsed into one (cf. Brubaker et al., Reference Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov2004).Footnote 6
Race and ethnicity (as well as nationality) are both marked and made.Footnote 7 They are marked through America's racial taxonomy, as well as a global ethnic taxonomy, which seeks to divide the world into distinct categories. In this case, race and ethnicity impose themselves on you. They are made through a multiplicity of different practices—gestures, sayings, tastes, ways of walking, religious convictions, opinions, and so forth. In this case, you perform race or ethnicity. Ethnicity is a very fluid, layered, and situational construct. One might feel very American when voting, very Irish when celebrating St. Patrick's Day, very Catholic when attending Easter mass, very “New Yorker” when riding the subway, and very Northern when visiting a relative in South Carolina (Waters Reference Waters1990). Race, too, can be performed to varying degrees. One might act “very Black” when celebrating Kwanza with relatives but may repress one's Blackness while in a business meeting with White colleagues. Race as performance is “predicated on actions, on the things one does in the world, on how one behaves.” As anthropologist John Jackson, Jr. notes, “You are not Black because you are (in essence) Black; you are Black … because of how you act—and not just in terms of one field of behavior (say, intellectual achievement in school) but because of how you juggle and combine many differently racialized and class(ed) actions (walking, talking, laughing, watching a movie, standing, emoting, partying) in an everyday matrix of performative possibilities” (Reference Jackson2001, pp. 171, 188). Because racial domination attaches to skin color, a dark-skinned person can never completely escape its clutches simply by acting “not Black.” But that person may choose one saying over another, one kind of clothing over another, one mode of interaction over another, because she believes such an action makes her more or less Black (cf. Johnson Reference Johnson2003). This is why we claim that race and ethnicity are ascribed and achieved, both marked and made.
One may create, reproduce, accept, or actively resist imposed systems of racial classification; one may choose to accentuate one's ethnicity or racial identity. But in many cases, one's choices, one's racial or ethnic performances, will have little impact on how one is labeled by others. A person born to Chinese parents but adopted, at infancy, by a Jamaican American couple might identify as ethnically Jamaican. She might enjoy Jamaican cuisine, read Jamaican literature, listen to Jamaican music, and study Jamaican history. However, although her adopted parents may be classified as racially Black, she would be classified as Asian, her race decided for her (Conley Reference Conley, Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica and Wray2001). The crucial point is that the degree to which an individual can slip and slide through multiple ethnic identities depends on the degree to which those identities are stigmatized. White Americans typically enjoy a high degree of fluidity and freedom when self-identifying ethnically. They can choose to give equal weight to all aspects of their ethnicity or to highlight certain parts while de-emphasizing others. For instance, the same person could identify as either “half-Italian, quarter-Polish, quarter-Swiss,” “Polish and Italian,” or just “Italian.” Many people of color do not enjoy the same degree of choice. Someone whose father is Arab American and whose mother is Dutch American could not so easily get away with ethnically identifying only as “Dutch.”
In some instances, non-Whites may perform ethnicity in order to resist certain racial classifications (as when African migrants teach their children to speak with an accent so they might avoid being identified as African Americans); in other instances, they might, in an opposite way, attempt to cleanse themselves of all ethnic markers (be they linguistic, religious, or cultural in nature) to avoid becoming victims of discrimination or stigmatization. Either way, their efforts may prove futile since those belonging to dominated racial groups have considerably less ethnic agency than those belonging to the dominant—and hence normalized—group.Footnote 8
One reason why race and ethnicity are relatively decoupled for White Americans but bound tightly together for non-White Americans is found in the history of the nation's immigration policies and practices. Until the late nineteenth century, immigration to America was deregulated and encouraged (with the exception of Chinese exclusion laws); however, at the turn of the century, native-born White Americans, who blamed immigrants for the rise of urban slums, crime, and class conflict, began calling for immigration restrictions. Popular and political support for restrictions swelled and resulted in the development of a strict immigration policy, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. America's new immigration law, complete with national quotas and racial restrictions on citizenship, would fundamentally realign the country's racial taxonomy. “The national origins system classified Europeans as nationalities and assigned quotas in a hierarchy of desirability,” writes historian Mae Ngai in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. “[B]ut at the same time the law deemed all Europeans to be part of a White race, distinct from those considered to be not [W]hite. Euro-American identities turned both on ethnicity—that is, a nationality-based cultural identity that is defined as capable of transformation and assimilation—and on a racial identity defined by [W]hiteness” (Reference Ngai2004, p. 7). Non-Whites, on the other hand, were either denied entry into the United States (as was the case for Asian migrants) or were associated with illegal immigration through harsh border control policies (as was the case for Mexicans). Indeed, the immigration laws of the 1920s applied the newly formed concept of “national origin” only to European nations; those classified as members of the “colored races” were conceived as bereft of a country of origin. The result, Ngai observes, was that “unlike Euro-Americans, whose ethnic and racial identities became uncoupled during the 1920s, Asians' and Mexicans' ethnic and racial identities remained conjoined” (Reference Ngai2004, pp. 7–8).
The history of America's immigration policy underscores the intimate conception between race, ethnicity, citizenship, and national origin. Racial categories often are defined and changed by national lawmakers, as citizenship has been extended or retracted depending on one's racial ascription. The U.S. justice system has decided dozens of cases in ways that have solidified certain racial classifications in the law. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legal cases handed down rulings that officially recognized Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Filipinos, Koreans, Native Americans, and mixed-race individuals as “not White.” In 1897, a Texas federal court ruled that Mexicans were legally “White.” And Indian Americans, Syrians, and Arabians have been capriciously classified as both “White” and “not White” (Haney-López Reference Haney-López1996). Briefly examining how the legal definitions of White and non-White have changed over the years demonstrates the incredibly unstable and fluid nature of racial categories. It also shows how our legal system helps to construct race. For instance, the “prerequisite cases” that determined peoples' race in order to determine their eligibility for U.S. citizenship resulted in poisonous symbolic consequences. Deemed worthy of citizenship, White people were understood to be upstanding, law-abiding, moral, and intelligent. Conversely, non-White people, from whom citizenship was withheld, were thought to be base, criminal, untrustworthy, and of lesser intelligence. For most of America's history, courts determined race, and race determined nationality; thus, nationality can only be understood within the context of U.S. racial and ethnic conflict (Loury Reference Loury2001; Shklar Reference Shklar1991).Footnote 9
FIVE FALLACIES ABOUT RACISM
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2005), there are hundreds of active hate groups across the country. These groups are mostly found in the Southern states—Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina have over forty active groups per state—but California ranks highest in the nation, housing within its borders fifty-three groups. For some people, hate groups epitomize what the essence of racism amounts to: intentional acts of humiliation and hatred. While such acts undoubtedly are racist in nature, they are but the tip of the iceberg. To define racism only through extreme groups and their extreme acts is akin to defining weather only through hurricanes. Hurricanes are certainly a type of weather pattern—a harsh and brutal type—but so too are mild rainfalls, light breezes, and sunny days. Likewise, racism is much broader than violence and epithets. It also comes in much quieter, everyday-ordinary forms (cf. Essed Reference Essed1991 [1984]).
Americans are deeply divided over the legacies and inner workings of racism, and a large part of this division is due to the fact that many Americans understand racism in limited or misguided ways (Alba et al., Reference Alba, Rumbaut and Marotz2005; Nadeau et al., Reference Nadeau, Niemi and Levine1993). We have identified five fallacies, recurrent in many public debates (see, e.g., Harper and Reskin, Reference Harper and Reskin2005; Reskin Reference Reskin1998; Sears et al., Reference Sears, Sidanius and Bobo2000), fallacies one should avoid when thinking about racism.
(1) Individualistic Fallacy.—Here, racism is assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and prejudices. Racism is only the collection of nasty thoughts that a “racist individual” has about another group. Someone operating with this fallacy thinks of racism as one thinks of a crime and, therefore, divides the world into two types of people: those guilty of the crime of racism (“racists”) and those innocent of the crime (“non-racists”) (Wacquant Reference Wacquant1997). Crucial to this misconceived notion of racism is intentionality. “Did I intentionally act racist? Did I cross the street because I was scared of the Hispanic man walking toward me, or did I cross for no apparent reason?” Upon answering “no” to the question of intentionality, one assumes one can classify one's own actions as “nonracist,” despite the character of those actions, and go about his or her business as innocent.
This conception of racism simply will not do, for it fails to account for the racism that is woven into the very fabric of our schools, political institutions, labor markets, and neighborhoods. Conflating racism with prejudice, as Herbert Blumer (Reference Blumer1958) pointed out fifty years ago, ignores the more systematic and structural forms of racism; it looks for racism within individuals and not institutions. Labeling someone a “racist” shifts our attention from the social surroundings that enforce racial inequalities and miseries to the individual with biases. It also lets the accuser off the hook—“He is a racist; I am not”—and treats racism as aberrant and strange, whereas American racism is rather normal. Furthermore, intentionality is in no way a prerequisite for racism. Racism is often habitual, unintentional, commonplace, polite, implicit, and well meaning (Brown et al., Reference Brown, Carnoy, Currie, Duster, Oppenheimer, Shultz and Wellman2003). Thus, racism is located not only in our intentional thoughts and actions; it also thrives in our unintentional thoughts and habits, as well as in the social institutions in which we all are embedded (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva1997; Feagin et al., Reference Feagin, Vera and Batur2001).
(2) Legalistic Fallacy.—This fallacy conflates de jure legal progress with de facto racial progress. One who operates under the legalistic fallacy assumes that abolishing racist laws (racism in principle) automatically leads to the abolition of racism writ large (racism in practice). This fallacy will begin to crumble after a few moments of critical reflection. After all, we would not make the same mistake when it comes to other criminalized acts: Laws against theft do not mean that one's car will never be stolen. By way of tangible illustration, consider Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that abolished de jure segregation in schools. The ruling did not lead to the abolition of de facto segregation: fifty years later, schools are still drastically segregated and drastically unequal (Neckerman Reference Neckerman2007; Oaks Reference Oaks2005). In fact, some social scientists have documented a nationwide movement of educational re-segregation, which has left today's schools even more segregated than those of 1954 (see Eaton Reference Eaton1994; Harris Reference Harris2006; Orfield Reference Orfield1993).
(3) Tokenistic Fallacy.—One guilty of the tokenistic fallacy assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the eradication of racial obstacles. Although it is true that non-Whites have made significant inroads to seats of political and economic power over the course of the last fifty years, a disproportionate number remain disadvantaged in these arenas (Alexander Reference Alexander2006; Patterson Reference Patterson1997). Exceptions do not prove the rule. We cannot, in good conscience, ignore the millions of African Americans living in poverty and, instead, point to Oprah Winfrey's millions as evidence for economic equality. Rather, we must explore how Winfrey's financial success can coexist with the economic deprivation of millions of Black women. We need to explore, in historian Thomas Holt's words, how the “simultaneous idealization of Colin Powell,” or, for that matter, Barack Obama, “and demonization of blacks as a whole … is replicated in much of our everyday world” (Reference Holt2000, p. 6).
Besides, throughout the history of America, one has been able to find at least a handful of non-White individuals who excelled financially and politically in the teeth of rampant racial domination. The first Black congressman was not elected after the Civil Rights Movement but in 1870. Joseph Rainey, a former slave, served four terms in the House of Representatives. Madame C. J. Walker is accredited as being the first Black millionaire. Born in 1867, Walker made her fortune inventing hair and beauty products. Few people would feel comfortable pointing to Rainey's and Walker's success as evidence that late nineteenth-century America was a time of racial harmony and equity. Such tokenistic logic would not be accurate then, and it is not accurate now.
(4) Ahistorical Fallacy.—This fallacy renders history impotent. Thinking hindered by the ahistorical fallacy makes a bold claim: Most U.S. history—namely, the period of time when this country did not extend basic rights to people of color (let alone classify them as fully human)—is inconsequential today. Legacies of slavery and colonialism, the eradication of millions of Native Americans, forced segregation, clandestine sterilizations and harmful science experiments, mass disenfranchisement, race-based exploitation, racist propaganda distributed by the state caricaturing Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics, racially motivated abuses of all kinds (sexual, murderous, and dehumanizing)—all of this, purport those operating under the ahistorical fallacy, are too far removed to matter to those living in the here-and-now. This idea is so erroneous it is difficult to take seriously. Today's society is directed, constructed, and molded by—indeed grafted onto—the past (Ngai Reference Ngai2004; Patterson Reference Patterson1998; Winant Reference Winant2001). And race, as we have already seen, is a historical invention.
A “soft version” of the ahistorical fallacy might admit that events in the “recent past”—such as the time since the Civil Rights Movement or the attacks on September 11—matter while things in the “distant past”—such as slavery or the colonization of Mexico—have little consequence. But this idea is no less fallacious than the “hard version,” since many events in America's “distant past”—especially the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans—are the most consequential in shaping present-day society. In this vein, consider the question French historian Marc Bloch poses to us: “But who would dare to say that the understanding of the Protestant or Catholic Reformation, several centuries removed, is not far more important for a proper grasp of the world today than a great many other movements of thought or feeling, which are certainly more recent, yet more ephemeral” (Reference Bloch and Putnam1953, p. 41)?
(5) Fixed Fallacy.—Those who assume that racism is fixed—that it is immutable, constant across time and space—partake in the fixed fallacy. Since they take racism to be something that does not develop at all, those who understand racism through the fixed fallacy are often led to ask questions such as: “Has racism increased or decreased in the past decade?” And because practitioners of the fixed fallacy usually take as their standard definition of racism only the most heinous forms—racial violence, for example—they confidently conclude that, indeed, things have gotten better.
It is important and useful to trace the career of American racism, analyzing, for example, how racial attitudes or measures of racial inclusion and exclusion have changed over time, and many social scientists have developed sophisticated techniques for doing so (e.g., Almaguer Reference Almaguer1994; Bobo Reference Bobo, Smelser, Wilson and Mitchell2001; Patterson Reference Patterson1998; Schuman et al., Reference Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan1997). But the question, “Have things gotten better or worse?,” is legitimate only after we account for the morphing attributes of racism. We cannot quantify racism like we can quantify, say, birthrates. The nature of “birthrate” does not fluctuate over time; thus, it makes sense to ask, “Are there more or less births now than there were fifty years ago?” without bothering to analyze if and how a birthrate is different today than it was in previous historical moments. American racism, on the other hand, assumes different forms in different historical moments. Although race relations today are informed by those of the past, we cannot hold to the belief that twenty-first-century racism takes on the exact same form as twentieth-century racism. And we certainly cannot conclude that there is “little or no racism” today because it does not resemble the racism of the 1950s. (Modern-day Christianity looks very different, in nearly every conceivable way, than the Christianity of the early church. But this does not mean that there is “little or no Christianity” today.) So, before we ask, “Have things gotten better or worse?,” we should ponder the essence of racism today, noting how it differs from racism experienced by those living in our parents' or grandparents' generation. And we should ask, further, to quote Holt again, “What enables racism to reproduce itself after the historical conditions that initially gave it life have disappeared” (Reference Holt2000, p. 20)?
RACIAL DOMINATION
We have spent a significant amount of time talking about what racial domination is not but have yet to spell out what it is. We can delineate two specific manifestations of racial domination: institutional racism and interpersonal racism.Footnote 10Institutional racism is systemic White domination of people of color, embedded and operating in corporations, universities, legal systems, political bodies, cultural life, and other social collectives. The word “domination” reminds us that institutional racism is a type of power that encompasses the symbolic power to classify one group of people as “normal” and other groups of people as “abnormal”; the political power to withhold basic rights from people of color and marshal the full power of the state to enforce segregation and inequality; the social power to deny people of color full inclusion or membership in associational life; and the economic power that privileges Whites in terms of job placement, advancement, wealth, and property accumulation.
Informed by centuries of racial domination, institutional racism withholds from people of color opportunities, privileges, and rights that many Whites enjoy. Social scientists have amassed a significant amount of evidence documenting institutional racism, evidence that demonstrates how White people—strictly because of their Whiteness—reap considerable advantages when buying and selling a house, choosing a neighborhood in which to live, getting a job and moving up the corporate ladder, securing a first-class education, and seeking medical care (Massey Reference Massey2007; Quillian Reference Quillian2006). That Whites accumulate more property and earn more income than members of minority populations, possess immeasurably more political power, and enjoy greater access to the country's cultural, social, medical, legal, and economic resources are well documented facts (e.g., Oliver and Shapiro, Reference Oliver and Shapiro1997; Pager Reference Pager2003; Western Reference Western2006). While Whites have accumulated many opportunities due to racial domination, people of color have suffered from disaccumulation (Brown et al., Reference Brown, Carnoy, Currie, Duster, Oppenheimer, Shultz and Wellman2003). Thus, if we talk about “Hispanic poverty,” then we must also talk about White affluence; if we speak of “Black unemployment,” then we must also keep in mind White employment; and if we ponder public policies for people of color, then we must also critically examine the public policies that directly benefit White people.Footnote 11
Below the level of institutions—yet directly informed by their workings—we find interpersonal racism. This is racial domination manifest in everyday interactions and practices. Interpersonal racism can be overt; however, most of the time, interpersonal racism is quite covert: it is found in the habitual, commonsensical, and ordinary practices of our lives. Our racist attitudes, as Lillian Smith remarked in Killers of the Dream, easily “slip from the conscious mind deep into the muscles” (Reference Smith1994 [1949], p. 96). Since we are disposed to a world structured by racial domination, we develop racialized dispositions—some conscious, many more unconscious and somatic—that guide our thoughts and behaviors. We may talk slowly to an Asian woman at the farmer's market, unconsciously assuming that she speaks poor English; we may inform a Hispanic man at a corporate party that someone has spilled their punch, unconsciously assuming that he is a janitor; we may ask to change seats if an Arab American man sits next to us on an airplane. Miniature actions such as these have little to do with one's intentional thoughts; they are orchestrated by one's practical sense, one's habitual knowhow, and informed by institutional racism.
Conflict between Racially Dominated Groups
“Can people of color be racist?” This question is a popular one in the public imagination, and the answer depends on what we mean by racism. Institutional racism is the product of years of White supremacy, and it is designed to produce far-reaching benefits for White people. Institutional racism carries on despite our personal attitudes. Thus, there is no such thing as “Black institutional racism” or “reverse institutional racism” since there exists no centuries-old socially ingrained and normalized system of domination designed by people of color that denies Whites full participation in the rights, privileges, and seats of power of our society (Brown et al., Reference Brown, Carnoy, Currie, Duster, Oppenheimer, Shultz and Wellman2003). Interpersonal racism, on the other hand, takes place on the ground level and has to do with attitudes and habitual actions. It is certainly true that members of all racial groups can harbor negative attitudes toward members of other groups.
Indeed, some non-White groups have a deep, conflict-ridden history with other non-White groups. Consider the tense relationship, found in many urban areas, between Korean immigrants and African Americans. Immigrant groups have always found a way to establish a business in the inner city. Throughout the twentieth century, Jewish shopkeepers were a regular fixture in the center of town; but as their children inherited, not just the opportunities their parents had worked so hard to provide, but also the opportunities involved in being welcomed deeper into the ranks of Whiteness, they took leave of their shops and opened up in turn new opportunities for streams of other ethnic immigrants. Koreans have filled the business niche left by Jewish shopkeepers, and many have opened up shops in the Black ghetto because they can afford to live there and because they do not have to compete with large corporations, which are much more interested in the deeper pockets of suburban residents (Lee Reference Lee2002; Waldinger Reference Waldinger1996).
Some Black ghetto residents, however, view Korean shopkeepers with a fair degree of animus and resentment. Although Blacks and immigrants usually compete for different jobs (Baker Reference Baker and Browne1999; McCall Reference McCall2001), many poor Blacks feel that Korean entrepreneurs have stymied the growth of black business. Conflicts between Black patrons and Korean storeowners regularly are colored by racist language, with each party exchanging epithets (Kim Reference Kim2000; Lee Reference Lee2002). Black-Korean conflict boiled over in the early nineteen-nineties. In 1991, a Korean merchant shot and killed a Black teenager in South Central Los Angeles. A year later, Los Angeles went up in flames as insurgents of all racial identities took to the streets after four White police officers, who had been caught on videotape beating Rodney King, a twenty-five-year-old motorist, were acquitted. As the smoke settled from the country's first multiethnic uprising, fifty-two had been killed and millions of dollars worth of property had been destroyed. Korean storeowners were hit the hardest, suffering almost half the total property damage—roughly $400 million (Lee Reference Lee2002).
Black-Korean conflict, as well as other antagonistic relations between racially dominated groups—including the so-called Black-Brown divide, bitter relations among Hispanic subgroups, and animus between various American Indian Nations—remind us how racial domination can occlude and distort, how it can hide the real causes of human misery under false arguments that attribute those causes to certain dominated racial groups. Instead of examining processes of disinvestment and deindustrialization that hollowed out the city's core, ongoing modes of capitalist exploitation that keep plump the unemployment rolls, or America's skimpy welfare state and the retreat of state involvement in poor urban areas, the mind clouded by racial domination prefers to blame immigrants or Blacks. The distrust and fear that different racial and ethnic groups living in poor urban neighborhoods harbor towards one another is matched only by the interests and struggles shared by these groups.
People of color, then, can help to reinforce the White power structure by lashing out against other non-White groups. That said, we must realize that interpersonal racism targeting dominated groups and interpersonal racism targeting the dominant group do not pack the same punch. Take, for example, the following scenario: Two young men, one Black, the other White, bump into each other on the street. The Black man calls the White man a “honky.” In response, the White man calls the Black man a “boy.” Both racial slurs are racial slurs and should be labeled as such, and both reinforce racial divisions. However, unlike “honky,” “boy” connects to the larger system of institutional racial domination. The word derives its meaning (and power) from slavery, when enslaved African men were stripped of their masculine honor and treated like children. “Boy” (and many other epithets aimed at Blacks) invokes such times—times when murdering, torturing, whipping, and raping enslaved Blacks were not illegal acts. Epithets towards White people, including “honky,” have no such equivalent. “Boy” also reminds the Black man how things stand today. If the confrontation escalates and the police are called, the Black man knows that the police officers will probably be White and that he might be harassed or looked upon as a threat; if the two men meet in court, the Black man knows that the lawyers, judge, and jurors will possibly be mostly (if not all) White; and if the two men are sentenced, the African American man knows—as do many criminologists (e.g., Tonry Reference Tonry1995)—that he will get the harsher sentence. “Boy” brings the full weight of institutional racism—systematic, historical, mighty—down upon the Black man. “Honky,” even if delivered with venomous spite, is powerless by comparison.
Moreover, sociologists have shown that, unlike White people, people of color are confronted with interpersonal racism on a regular basis, sometimes daily. For people of color, there is a cumulative character to an individual's racial experiences. Humiliating or degrading acts always are informed by similar acts that individuals have experienced in the past. To paraphrase Joe Feagin (Reference Feagin1991), the interpersonal events that take place on the street and in other public settings are not simply rare and isolated events; rather, they are recurring events shaped by historical and social forces of racial domination.
Symbolic Violence
Because racism infuses all of social life, people of color and Whites alike develop thoughts and practices molded by racism; people of color and Whites alike develop stereotypes about other racial groups. People of color often internalize prejudice aimed at their own racial group, unintentionally contributing to the reproduction of racial domination.Footnote 12 Psychologists have labeled this phenomenon “internalized oppression” or “internalized racism” (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1967). Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we label it “symbolic violence”: “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992, p. 167). In the case of racial domination, symbolic violence refers to the process of people of color unknowingly accepting and supporting the terms of their own domination, thereby acting as agents who collude in the conditions from which they suffer. “So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit,” laments Smith, “step by step by step, we who were [W]hite and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking” (Reference Smith1994 [1949], p. 96).
A good example of symbolic violence is the nearly worldwide acceptance of European standards of beauty. The false aesthetic separation between “White beauty”—epitomized by long, straight, blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin—and “Black ugliness”—epitomized by short, curly, black hair, brown eyes, and dark brown skin—grew out of slavery. Features associated with the African American phenotype were demonized. Since the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, many African American women have resisted such standards, taking pride in their curly hair and their ebony-colored skin. Nevertheless, many others have internalized White standards of beauty. As such, they use costly and painful methods to straighten and dye their hair and, less frequently, to lighten their skin. In fact, Madame C. J. Walker, the first Black millionaire mentioned above, made her fortune developing a product to straighten Black women's hair! Today, many Black women and other members of dominated races, to borrow Sartre's line, have been “poisoned by the stereotype others have of them” (Reference Sartre and Becker1960 [1946], p. 95).
Symbolic violence operates by virtue of the fact that the dominated perceive and respond to the structures and processes that dominate them through modes of thought—and, indeed, also of feeling—which are themselves the product of domination. The “order of things” comes to seem to them natural, self-evident, and legitimate. Such an insight neither grants everything to structural causation nor blames the hapless victim. “[T]he only way to understand this particular form of domination is to move beyond the forced choice between constraint (by forces) and consent (to reasons), between mechanical coercion and voluntary, free, deliberate, even calculated submission. The effect of symbolic domination … is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing consciousnesses but through the schemes of perception, appreciation, and action that are constitutive of habitus and which, below the level of the decisions of consciousness and the controls of the will, set up a cognitive relationship that is profoundly obscure to itself” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice2001 [Reference Bourdieu, Wacquant, Farage and Bourdieu1998], p. 37). This in turn has an important practical implication. What is required is a radical transformation of the social conditions that produce embodied habits, dispositions, tastes, and lifestyles that lead people to become actively complicit in their own domination. The only way to bring about change that does not entail merely replacing one modality of racial domination with another is to undo the mechanisms of dehistoricization and universalization—“always and everywhere it has been this way”—through which arbitrary workings of power are enabled to continue.
Intersecting Modes of Domination
Racial domination does not operate inside a vacuum, cordoned off from other modes of domination. On the contrary, it intersects with other forms of domination—those based on gender, class, sexuality, religion, nationhood, ability, and so forth. The notion that there is a monolithic “Arab American experience,” “Asian American experience,” or “White experience”—experiences somehow detached from other pieces of one's identity—is nothing but a chimera. Researchers have labeled such a notion “racial essentialism,” for such a way of thinking boils down vastly different human experiences into a single “master category”: race (Harris Reference Harris, Delgado and Stefancic2000). When we fail to account for these different experiences, we create silences in our narratives of the social world and fail to explain how overlapping systems of advantage and disadvantage affect individuals' opportunity structures, lifestyles, and social hardships. The idea of intersectionality implies that we cannot understand the lives of poor White single mothers or gay Black men by examining only one dimension of their lives—class, gender, race, or sexuality. Indeed, we must explore their lives in their full complexity, examining how these various dimensions come together and structure their existence. When we speak of racial domination, then, we must always bear in mind the ways in which it interacts with masculine domination (or sexism), heterosexual domination (or homophobia), class domination (poverty), religious persecution, disadvantages brought on by disabilities, and so forth (Collins Reference Collins2000; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1990; Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003).
In addition, we should not assume that one kind of oppression is more important than another or that being advantaged in one dimension of life somehow cancels out other dimensions that often result in disadvantage. While it is true that poor Whites experience many of the same hardships as poor Blacks, it is not true that poverty somehow de-Whitens poor Whites. In other words, though they are in a similarly precarious economic position as poor Blacks, poor Whites still experience race-based privileges, while poor Blacks are oppressed not only by poverty but also by racism. In a similar vein, well-off people of color cannot “buy” their way out of racism. Despite their economic privilege, middle- and upper-class non-Whites experience institutional and interpersonal racism on a regular basis (Feagin Reference Feagin1991). But how, exactly, should we conceptualize these intersecting modes of domination? Many scholars have grappled with this question (e.g., McCall Reference McCall2005; Walby Reference Walby2007; Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis2006), and we do so here, if only in the most provisional way.
The notion of intersectionality is perhaps as old as the social problems of racial, masculine, and class domination, but in recent memory it was popularized by activists who criticized the feminist and civil rights movements for ignoring the unique struggles of women of color. The term itself is credited to critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1989), who imagined society as divided every which way by multiple forms of inequality. For Crenshaw, society resembled an intricate system of crisscrossing roads—each one representing a different social identity (e.g., race, gender, class, religion, age); one's unique social position (or structural location) could be identified by listing all the attributes of one's social identity and pinpointing the nexus (or intersection) at which all those attributes coalesced. This conception of intersectionality has been the dominant one for many years, leading scholars to understand overlapping modes of oppression as a kind of “matrix of domination” (Collins Reference Collins2000).
Recently, however, scholars have criticized this way of thinking about intersectionality, claiming that it reproduces, in minimized form, the very essentialist reasoning it sought to dismantle (see Ferree Reference Ferree, Lombardo, Meier and Verloo2009; McCall Reference McCall2005). For example, those who have concentrated on the ways that “class intersects with race” largely have bifurcated racial groups (especially African Americans) into two classes—the middle class and the poor (or “the underclass”)—attributing to each certain social characteristics, principles, and practices (e.g., Jencks Reference Jencks1992; Massey and Denton, Reference Massey and Denton1993; Wilson Reference Wilson1978). Thus, instead of Black culture, we now have two distinct Black cultures; instead of the Black community, we think in terms of subcommunities. When scholars divide racial groups into a set number of classes, genders, sexualities, and so forth, the end result is not a critique of essentialism but a new, softer kind of essentialism, resulting in “a multichrome mosaic of monochrome racial, ethnic, or cultural blocs” (Brubaker et al., Reference Brubaker, Loveman and Stamatov2004, p. 45). At best, a model that represents society as a hierarchy of culturally discrete boxes—divided by vectors of social identity—encourages us to conceptualize oppression through a simple additive model (one often hears of a “double jeopardy” or “triple oppression”); at worst, it replaces larger homogenizing rubrics (“Hispanics”) with smaller ones (“Hispanic women”) and offers little conceptual refuge from reductionist and reifying tendencies.
We believe a more analytically sophisticated and politically useful rendering of intertwined oppressions is Myra Marx Ferree's model of “interactive intersectionality” (cf. Prins Reference Prins2006; Walby Reference Walby2007). In this version, overlapping social identities are best understood, not as a collection of “points of intersection,” but as a “figuration” (as Elias would have it) or “field” (as Bourdieu would) of shifting, deeply-dimensioned, and “mutually constituted relationships.” This means “the ‘intersection of gender and race’ is not any number of specific locations occupied by individuals or groups (such as Black women) but a process through which ‘race’ takes on multiple ‘gendered’ meanings for particular women and men…. In such a complex system, gender is not a dimension limited to the organization of reproduction or family, class is not a dimension equated with the economy, and race is not a category reduced to the primacy of ethnicities, nations and borders, but all of the processes that systematically organize families, economies, and nations are co-constructed along with the meanings of gender, race, and class that are presented in and reinforced by these institutions separately and together” (Ferree Reference Ferree, Lombardo, Meier and Verloo2009, p. 85).
The best metaphor for intersecting modes of oppression, therefore, may not be that of crisscrossing roads but of a web or field of relations within which struggles over opportunities, power, and privileges take place (cf. Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Emanuel1996 [1992]; Emirbayer Reference Emirbayer1997). The implication of this new theoretical development is that if we focus strictly on race and ignore other sources of social inequality (such as class and gender), not only will we be deaf to the unique experiences of certain members of society—their voices drowned out by our violent and homogenizing categorization—but we will also (and always) fundamentally misunderstand our object of analysis: race itself. Intersectional analysis of the type that breaks with old modes of thinking (e.g., society as a “matrix of domination”) and adopts a thoroughly relational perspective on multiple modes of oppression (e.g., “interactive intersectionality”) is not an option but a prerequisite for fully understanding the nature of racial identity and racial domination.
CONCLUSION
The aim of this paper was to advance a socioanalysis of racial domination in embryonic form, introducing students to the analytical building blocks of a sociology of race and ethnicity. We strove to consolidate—in a single essay—insights from diverse bodies of scholarship, critically interrogating several ideas along the way. In so doing, we underscored a shared set of definitions and concepts and emphasized effective (and dissected fallacious) ways of thinking about racial domination. Racism can be slippery, elusive to observation and analysis. Twenty-first century patterns of racial stigmatization, exclusion, and repression—as well as promises of racial reconciliation and multicultural coalitions—do not immediately resemble those of the twentieth century. Like a recessive tumor, twenty-first-century racism has disguised itself, calling itself by other names and cloaking itself behind seemingly “race-neutral” laws, policies, practices, and language. As students of society—and as citizens of a world that grows more racially diverse every year—we must work to render apparent this pervasive, corrosive, and dehumanizing form of domination that infects the health of our society. We must understand how race works, developing tools to analyze this well-founded fiction responsible for so many cleavages and inequalities in our world today. This article has attempted to lay the groundwork necessary to do just that.
