Notes on race as denegated ethnicity
Keywords:
ethnicity, race, racial order, capitalism, identityAbstract
Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. I draw on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu to articulate a series of reframings designed to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position in debates about race. Next, I forge a set of novel conceptual tools to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This leads me to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality. In this article, I focus on a foundational epistemic issue, the vexed distinction between ethnicity and race, to argue for the logical and historical priority of the former and for getting rid of the latter as analytic category.
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