Читать книгу Understanding Racism - Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl - Страница 10

White supremacy is often, in contemporary terms, understood within the confined ideas of White supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Les Identitaires. White supremacy is apparent through the existence of such groups, but it can also operate on a level that appears more covert to some through means such as incarceration, immigration, and even access to good schools. As society has generally moved away from overt racism to more covert racism, theories of how racism persists have burgeoned. The theories addressed in this book are primarily from the sociological discipline, as sociology is the study of society, but also included are theories from philosophy, psychology, and law.

There are 13 theories covered in this book: prejudice and discrimination, White privilege, White supremacy, implicit bias, microaggressions, racial formation, systemic racism, critical race theory, laissez-faire racism, structure and culture, color-blind racism, colorism, and intersectionality. Some of these theories are largely undisputedly understood as theories, such as racial formation, systemic racism, and laissez-faire racism. Yet there has been debate, which will likely continue, about whether all 13 theories covered in this book actually constitute theory. Some might instead label them as “frameworks,” “approaches,” or even “concepts.” Tanya Golash-Boza engages in a similar conversation in her article “A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism,” wherein she contests the idea that a sociological theory of race and racism does not exist. Yet in her article, the comprehensive theory of racism offered relies on a synthesis of works by multiple scholars.¹⁵ I do not contest Golash-Boza’s conclusion, but I do suggest that each of the 13 works covered in this book can be and should be understood distinctly as a theory in its own right. As outlined previously, the most fundamental characterization of a theory is an abstraction or generalization. The 13 chapters in this book meet this definition. For example, work on implicit bias describes how people generally have biases that they are unaware of, and scholarship on colorism describes the general effects of one’s placement on a skin-tone continuum from light to dark. In this sense, I think that scholars of race and racism have done a disservice by not seeing how these “frameworks” or “approaches” are theories (albeit at various stages of theoretical development).