Читать книгу Race - Paul C. Taylor - Страница 23

Studying race systemically means attending to the way these systems change over time. This is why I started referring above to dynamics of various kinds. Social structures are dynamic phenomena, transforming in response to changing conditions and shifting power relations. Race is no different.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant foreground the connections between race, power, and processes in their theory of racial formation. This theory has become controversial in some circles, but for reasons mostly unrelated to the core idea I mean to borrow from it. This key idea is that races are the evolving products of ongoing sociopolitical contests, not the free-standing objects that lazy race-talk invites us to imagine. Racial formation in this sense is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”¹² This process unfolds by means of racial projects, which are political contests that attempt to do two things: to define the concept of race and to distribute social goods in accordance with the mode of race-thinking that results. These projects are, therefore, binary affairs, running simultaneously along parallel semantic and structural tracks. Semantics and structure, social meaning and social distributions, are connected here like two sides of the same coin, and they work together to drive racial practices along their historical trajectories.

US history provides an example that may help make clear how these parallel tracks are supposed to work. When nineteenth-century US slaveholders linked blackness to irrationality, emotionality, and incapacity for self-government, they were interpreting race in a way that linked blackness with generalized inferiority. But in offering this interpretation of race they were also justifying a particular social structure. They were justifying the enslavement of most black people and explaining the economic and political marginalization of free blacks. Modern chattel slavery was, then, a racial project, one among many such projects – including more progressive ones, like the nobler forms of abolitionism – that suffused nineteenth-century European and American cultures.

The nineteenth century’s dominant racial projects gave way to others, and these successor projects have reinterpreted race and reorganized society in ways that US politics neatly exemplifies every ten years. The federal government sponsors a decennial census of the US population, and each round is preceded by a great deal of lobbying, debate, and handwringing about how to design the questions around ethnic and racial identity. In the last few decades the categories and the instructions about how to apply the categories have changed pretty substantially. These changes have concrete implications for the allocation of government resources and for the work of tracking and representing the patterns of advantage and disadvantage that define US society.

Whatever else it does, racial formation theory models the systemic and process-oriented focus on political context that is essential to the proper study of race. There are important conceptual questions to settle about what race means and how it works. But what is ultimately at stake in these questions has to do with the way these concepts shape and get shaped by politically charged racial projects. I’ve tried to write this book in a way that keeps these stakes in mind.