Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T14:14:40.122Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RE-THINKING RACIALIZATION

The Analytical Limits of Racialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

Deniz Uyan
Deniz Uyan*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Boston College
*
Corresponding author: Deniz Uyan, Department of Sociology, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, McGuinn Hall 410C, Chestnut Hill, MA02467. E-mail: uyan@bc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper seeks to scrutinize the most recent definition of racialization, as proposed by Adam Hochman, and interrogate its utility as a productive analytic for social scientists. Due to theoretical conflations between race and racism, and analytical conflations of groupness and category, racialization functions as a tautological descriptive rather than an agenda-setting theoretical framework for scholars studying race. The most recent definition of the concept cannot, and does not try to, account for a mechanism for the process of racialization. Such an accounting is a necessary component of any conceptualization that aims to help identify the origins of racialization. Second, in the absence of locating an agent or mechanism, the concept is tautologized: racialization, with an inability to locate a mechanism, offers itself up as the mechanism. Third, this tautologizing leads to a profound conflation of racialization offered as both a descriptive and a causal concept. Not only does this conflation halt the analytic capacity of the term as it applies to social scientific uses, but this conflation proves harmful for the anti-realist agenda as proposed by Hochman. By conflating analyses of causality with description, the latest definition of racialization unknowingly countersigns a uniquely American ideological conception of race; that is, the latest definition allows a description of the appearance of race to stand in for an explanation for race.

Keywords

RacializationRacialization TheoryRacial FormationRace Anti-realismRacial Essentialism
Type
State of the Discourse
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 15 - 29
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Banton, Michael (2005). Historical and Contemporary Modes of Racialization. In Murji, Karim and Solomos, John (Eds.), Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, pp. 51–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barot, Rohit, and Bird, John (2001). Racialization: The Genealogy and Critique of a Concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(4): 601–618.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blum, Lawrence (2010). Racialized Groups: The Sociohistorical Consensus. The Monist, 93(2): 298–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers, and Cooper, Fredrick (2000). Beyond “Identity”. Theory and Society, 29(1): 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers (2005). Ethnicity Without Groups. Reprinted in Adams, Julia, Clemens, Elisabeth S., and Orloff, Ann Shola (Eds.), Remaking Modernity: Politics, Processes and Sociology, pp. 470–492. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers, Loveman, Mara, and Stamatov, Peter (2004). Ethnicity as Cognition. Theory and Society, 33: 31–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Wacquant, Loïc (1999) On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. Theory, Culture & Society, 16(1): 41–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cainkar, Louise, and Selod, Saher (2018). Review of Race Scholarship and the War on Terror. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 4(2): 165–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fields, Barbara J. (1982). Region, Race, and Reconstruction. In Joseph. M. Kousser and McPherson, James M. (Eds.), Essays in Honor of C. Van Woodward, pp. 143–177. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fields, Barbara J. (2001). Whiteness, Racism, and Identity. International Labor and Working-Class History, 3: 48–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fields, Karen E., and Fields, Barbara J. (2014). Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Garner, Steve, and Selod, Saher (2014). The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies in Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1): 9–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gans, Herbert (2017). Racialization and Racialization Research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(3): 341–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, David Theo (2005). Racial Americanization. In Murji, Karim and Solomos, John (Eds.), Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, pp. 87–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gonzalez-Sobrino, Bianca, and Goss, Devon (2019). Exploring the Mechanisms of Racialization Beyond the Black-White Binary. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(4): 505–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Handlin, Oscar, and Handlin, Mary F. (1950). Origins of the Southern Labor System. The William and Mary Quarterly, 7(2): 199–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochman, Adam (2017). Replacing Race: Interactive Constructionism about Racialized Groups. Ergo, 4(3): 61–92.Google Scholar
Hochman, Adam (2019). Racialization: A Defense of the Concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(8): 1245–1262.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollinger, David A. (2003). Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States. The American Historical Review, 108(5): 1363–1390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Husain, Atiya (2017). Retrieving the Religion in Racialization: A Critical Review. Sociology Compass, 11(9). <https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12507> (Accessed December 18, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Husain, Atiya (2019). Moving Beyond (and Back To) the Black-White Binary: A Study of Black and White Muslims’ Racial Positioning in the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(4): 589–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1777). Of the Different Human Races. In Bernasconi, Robert, and Lott, Tommy L. (Eds.), The Idea of Race, pp. 8–22. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.Google Scholar
Loveman, Mara (1999). Is “Race” Essential? American Sociological Review, 64(6): 891–898.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, James (2004). Revisiting General Theory in Historical Sociology. Social Forces, 83(2): 459–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morning, Ann (2014). And You Thought We Had Moved Beyond All That: Biological Race Returns to the Social Sciences. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(10): 1676–1685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murji, Karim, and Solomos, John (2005). Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard (2015). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 3ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Oyama, Susan, Griffiths, Paul E., and Gray, Russell D. (2001). Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rana, Junaid A. (2011). Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rattansi, Ali (2005). The Uses of Racialization: The Time-spaces and Subject-objects of the Raced Body. In Murji, Karim and Solomos, John (Eds.), Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, pp. 271–302. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Reed, Adolph (2013). Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism. New Labor Forum, 22(1): 49–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saperstein, Aliya, Penner, Andrew, and Light, Ryan (2013). Racial Formation in Perspective: Connecting Individuals, Institutions, and Power Relations. Annual Review of Sociology, 39(1): 359–378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Selod, Saher, and Embrick, David (2013). Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship. Sociological Compass, 7/8: 644–655.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wimmer, Andreas (2008). Elementary Strategies of Ethnic Boundary Making. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(6): 1025–1055.CrossRefGoogle Scholar