Читать книгу The Racialized Social System - Ali Meghji - Страница 11

Whether or not the majority of people really care about whether or not X is a social theory, social theorists themselves seem to place a lot of emphasis on this question. For at least several decades, for instance, many sociologists have been lamenting a ‘crisis in social theory’, characterized by a lack of theoretical work at the expense of a more positivist empiricism.²⁰ Even sociologists of race have joined in this debate about a supposed crisis of theory. Bonilla-Silva (1997: 465), for instance, claimed that ‘the area of race and ethnic studies lacks a sound theoretical apparatus’, while Winant (2000: 178) stated that ‘the inadequacy of the range of theoretical approaches to race available in sociology at the turn of the twenty-first century is striking’, Feagin (2001: 5) claimed that in race theory ‘we do not as yet have as strongly agreed-upon concepts and well-developed theoretical traditions as we have for class and gender oppression’, and – as aforementioned – Emirbayer and Desmond (2015: 1) went as far as saying ‘there has never been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race’.²¹