Indeed, just as CRT was taking off in American law and education studies, where it was predominantly focused on a white–Black axis, other racially minoritized groups in the US used this foundational work to explore the educational and legal experiences of Latinos (which gave rise to ‘LatCrit’),37 South Asian Americans (which gave rise to ‘DesiCrit’)38 and indigenous Americans (which gave rise to ‘TribalCrit’).39 This early US-centricity of CRT led to some early charges of methodological nationalism, with scholars such as Goldberg and Essed (2002: 4–5) arguing that CRT is:
unfortunately marked by an American parochialism, with being caught up with the more or less restricted considerations of legal structures, conditions, and rationalities in the US context. Scant attention is paid either to the applicability and implications of its key concepts outside of that context, or perhaps more importantly […] to thinking its central concepts through their globalizing significance and circulation.
The wider international community then answered this call to think through American CRT’s ‘central concepts through their globalizing significance and circulation’. However, even as CRT expanded beyond the US borders, this scholarship remained rooted in the first ‘two waves’ rather than engaging with the racialized social system approach. In Europe, for instance, the majority of CRT scholarship seemed to go one of two ways.
Firstly, there emerged a wave of scholarship which looked at how legal systems across the European continent – despite the pretence of being against discrimination – reproduced structural racism; this scholarship was very much informed by American critique of civil rights legal reform. Thus, scholars such as Möschel (2011) point out that post-war European anti-discrimination law has largely gone down the route of equating anti-racialism (arguing that we should not use racial terms) with anti-racism (actions to dismantle racism); preamble No. 6 to the European Racial Equality Directive (ERED), Directive 2000/43/EC, for instance, holds that ‘the European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races. The use of the term “racial origin” in this Directive does not imply an acceptance of such theories.’40 In response to this ERED, countries across Europe such as Italy, Austria, Germany and France have all avoided using ‘race’ in national legal frameworks, favouring notions of citizenship, nationality or ‘ethnic belonging’, consequently making it extremely difficult to actually unearth dimensions of racial inequality.
Secondly, there was a wave of scholarship, mostly located in Britain, which looked at structural racism in the education system – this movement has been termed ‘BritCrit’.41 Such scholarship engaged a great deal with the US education CRT scholarship, but again took no notice of the racialized social system approach. Thus, as Gillborn (2011) argues, CRT’s inception in the UK was beneficial because it created a context where British racism could be taken as a starting point for analysis in education, rather than as something that had to be proved. BritCrits thus produced invaluable evidence of racial inequality in the British education system, from means testing (Gillborn 2010), through to academic hiring (Rollock 2021) and stigmatizing pupils (Rollock et al. 2015), all of which challenged the dominant colour-blind rhetoric which was being enforced across the British schooling system. However, the majority of this BritCrit scholarship adopted Delgado and Stefancic’s tenets of CRT, and did not think about how Bonilla-Silva’s racialized social systems approach could be useful for social analysis. In co-edited books and review articles focusing on CRT in Britain, such as Atlantic Crossings: International Dialogues on Critical Race Theory (Hylton et al. 2011), Warmington’s (2020) ‘Critical race theory in England: Impact and opposition’ and Gillborn’s (2006b) ‘Critical race theory beyond North America: Toward a trans-Atlantic dialogue on racism and antiracism in educational theory and praxis’, we therefore see no mention of the racialized social system approach.
Central to this book’s mission, therefore, is to bring some wider international visibility to the racialized social system approach, and to how it is an effective theory for thinking about racialization and racism in different temporal and spatial locations. The aim is not to attempt any universalization of the racialized social system approach, but rather to show how it enables us to think critically about racism and its articulation across the micro, meso and macro levels. In order to do this, I have divided the book as follows.
Chapter overviews
In the first chapter, ‘The Racialized Social System and Social Space: Racial Interests and Contestation’, I define the racialized social system in depth. In particular, I look at how the racialized social system involves the construction of race and unequal distribution of resources across this racial hierarchy. I then pay attention to how differently racialized actors develop racial interests to either preserve or challenge the racial order, and how the racialized social system therefore becomes a site of perpetuating contestation. In order to explore such phenomena, I take inspiration from Bourdieu’s theory of social space, essentially arguing that the racialized social system approach is a certain analysis of social space.
In the second chapter, ‘Racial Ideologies and Racialized Emotions: Seeing, Thinking and Feeling Race’, I look at the reproduction and articulation of the racialized social system at the micro level. Firstly, I pay attention to racial ideologies as the everyday frameworks people use to explain racial phenomena in a way that reproduces racism. I then connect such ideologies to racialized emotions – the emotional bonds that act as vehicles for the transmission of racial ideologies. I conclude this chapter by looking at three political projects – Trumpamerica, Brexit Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – to demonstrate how emotions and ideologies come together in the reproduction of racism.
I stay with the micro in the third chapter, ‘Theorizing the Racialized Interaction Order’. In this chapter, I draw on interactionist sociology to show how the racialized social system necessarily entails a diffuse system of interactional risks, and interactional rights, and that such risks and rights are unequally distributed across the racial hierarchy. I therefore use this chapter to clarify how racial projects of segregation – such as Apartheid or Jim Crow – show very explicit interaction orders, with legally distributed interactional rights and risks. Further, I also focus on the contemporary to show how differently racialized people continue to be afforded different ‘legitimate’ interactional rights and risks, using examples such as that of Black professionals in the workplace.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Meso Racial Structures and Racialized Organizations’, I turn to the meso. This chapter homes in on recent scholarship on racialized organizations, paying specific attention to how such meso structures constrain the agency of people of colour, free up the agency of whites, and legitimate the unequal distribution of societal resources. I use case studies ranging from sport to the professional workplace and creative industries to highlight how studying organizations is a crucial way for us to understand the processes of racialization and racism.
I conclude in the final chapter, ‘What is Critical about Critical Race Theory?’ In this chapter, I try to look at the potential limitations of CRT and how various critical race theorists have therefore tried to stretch its conceptual apparatus. In particular, I look at the postcolonial challenge to CRT, questioning the extent to which CRT is able to engage in transnational, historical analysis, and the extent to which it practises methodological nationalism. Further, I also specify some key dimensions of contemporary social life that necessitate a CRT analysis – from the rise of ‘diversity training anti-racism’ through to ongoing climate crises and hierarchization of different ‘racisms’, therefore concluding that CRT may not be perfect, but it is indeed necessary.
Notes
1 1 https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1306217761564241920.
