to inequality even if they are always deeply influenced by it. They are also dimensions of self-understanding, social relationships, culture, and power. How the categories are constituted is as basic as how they figure in inequality.
Understanding race and gender, moreover, is necessarily a matter of connecting structure and action, the relationship of agency to power, and the ways culture and inequality are reproduced in institutions – in other words, all the themes addressed in prior sections of this book.
Race
What we call “race” may seem obvious but is not. It is a complex mixture of observed differences in appearance, putative biological underpinnings, correlations with social or behavioral attributes, inherited assumptions from earlier classifications, dubious histories, and essentialist thinking. It is in large part a product of racism. Understanding here race and racism come from, how they work, and how they are reproduced are basic tasks for contemporary sociological theory.
Essentialism starts with the idea that there is some common denominator that unifies all the members of a particular category and separates them from others. It commonly flies in the face of manifest statistical variation. For inside any group we call a race there is enormous variation which we have to ignore to see it as unitary. It is in this sense that racism made race; it actively produced classifications, not simply responses to pre-existing racial differences.
By the 19th century, the inheritance of previous racial ideas was incorporated into new evolutionary theories. We now see genes at work.18 Genetics makes clear that there are no sharp boundaries, only statistical patterns with varying degrees of association with popular conceptions of race. Individuals who have themselves tested commonly discover multiracial histories in what they had thought were clear racial identities. These inspire new projects of reconciliation, as, for example, Black and White descendants of Thomas Jefferson connect to each other.19 As Alondra Nelson shows, reconciliation projects are just one of the ways in which genetics changes how we reckon with the biological dimension of race.20 Are reparations due to genetically tested descendants of slaves, or should they be embedded in policies to benefit what we treat in general as races today?
The study of race has commonly focused on those marked out as different from whites. Whiteness is sometimes treated as normal and in need of no special explanation; sometimes it is strongly asserted, as by slaveowners, the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, or White Nationalists today. Only recently has “whiteness” become a significant object of sociological study, though as early as 1920, Du Bois famously asked, “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”21
Essentialism is specious. Yet it persists, and there are recurrent efforts to put the genie of variation back in the bottle of essentialism – and to base policies on racial categories.22 Why? Because thinking about race is not just an abstract intellectual exercise, but embedded in practical power politics and inequality.
The single biggest factor in modern racism was the slave trade. This gave a powerful motive to classify Africans as both categorically different and inferior even while it deposited those it captured around an increasingly colonized world. The slave trade was part of both European colonialism and the global birth of capitalism. Even as race and racism were organized into specific national histories, there remained what the sociologist Paul Gilroy called a Black Atlantic.23 Transnational networks shaped racial consciousness and racist responses. This was true for music – as in the multinational history of what became Rap and Hip hop. This was true for literature. The Black Atlantic was not an entirely separate Black culture; it was informed by different national contexts – as, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois was influenced by Marx and Weber as well as American thought and became central to Pan-Africanism. He gave the closing address at the influential First Pan-African Conference of 1900 and coauthored its “Address to the Nations of the World.” This included the line later made famous in Souls of Black Folk, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”24 Advanced by leaders in the next generation, including Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and Julius Nyerere, Pan-Africanism became a transformative social theory as well as a political movement.
In American sociology, however, Du Bois and other leading Black sociologists were often marginalized. Sociologists (mostly white) did study race and racism. They focused on “race relations” and projects of incremental improvement like the work of Booker T. Washington at the Tuskeegee Institute. But they did not integrate the more radical, transformative perspectives of Du Bois, Oliver Cox, or other early Black sociologists into dominant sociological theories or research programs. Resuming the path of sociological theory on which these classical thinkers embarked is now a central task for contemporary sociological theory, as suggested by Aldon Morris (excerpted here).
This requires appreciating both the advances made in long struggles and their limits. Demonstrating agency despite racist obstacles, Black Americans built institutions such as the historically black colleges and universities that provided education – and intellectual life – when admission to other universities was blocked. Workers like Pullman train porters fought to unionize. Most important of all was the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This renewed the progress made after the Civil War and reversed it during the Jim Crow era. It brought enormous advances, peaking in 1964–65 with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But, it also confronted violent resistance, including the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the 1960s, a new Black Power movement began to question the goals of assimilation and racial integration. The basic question was how much of their own culture, identity, and claims to respect African-Americans would have to surrender to assimilate. It appeared to many that ending forced segregation (a main goal of the civil rights movement) only addressed half the issue. It questioned keeping Blacks out of white neighborhoods and other preserves but did not question whiteness as such or the extent to which integration was only offered on the condition that Blacks act like whites. It appeared, in other words, as if greater economic and political equality for Blacks was offered at the expense of Black pride – that is, of recognition of the cultural achievements and self-understanding of Blacks themselves. Integration, as Orlando Patterson (excerpted here) suggested, was full of paradoxes. To deny it was clearly racist; to pursue it did not overcome racism. Confronting challenges of racism and shifting patterns of integration (and segregation) is never only a matter of equality. It is also one of recognizing cultural differences and creating solidarities.
Racial formation has never been just a matter of past history. Not only do struggles for social justice continue. So does a process of reproducing thinking – and both social action, and social structure – in terms of race. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant (excerpted here) have shown, racialization is reproduced with new groups in new situations.25 The way Europeans (and white Americans) thought about Africans influenced how they thought about Native Americans. These were racially othered – again, despite great variation – as they were pushed out of the way and killed to make room for first colonists and then an expanding country. Racist thinking shaped the reception – or rejection – of immigrants. Irish and Southern European immigrants were described as Black or thought of as too much like America’s Black population (with anti-Catholic religious bias reinforcing racism). Asian immigrants posed another challenge. They were valuable as labor – not least in building railroads. But, they threatened racial purity. Chinese immigration was long restricted. Indians were considered more acceptable because they were Caucasian. When the expanding United States took over territories with large Mexican populations as the result of military conquest in the West, these were described not only as ethnically or nationally distinct but also as racially different – as they often still are.
Race, racism, and racialization remain very current issues. In the United States, they are put on the public and sociological agendas by everything from police violence and murders to segregation of housing and schools to celebrations and criticisms of America’s first Black President. But the issues also come up with
