Race and Racism: Overview

The interrelated terms of race and racism should be examined separately before their connection is explored. This entry defines both terms and explores their meanings and new approaches to these concepts in the twenty-first century.

Defining Race

Race can be understood as a concept that signifies and symbolizes sociopolitical conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race appeals to biologically based human characteristics (so-called phenotypes), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. There is no biological basis for distinguishing human groups along the lines of "race," and the categories employed to differentiate among these groups reveal themselves, upon serious examination, to be imprecise. Although they refer to corporeal characteristics like skin color, hair texture, and eye shape, these categories acquired their significance for sociohistorical reasons, not because they have any "natural" importance. For this reason the boundaries of racially defined groups are both uncertain and subject to change. Indeed whole groups can acquire or lose their racialized character as historical and social circumstances shift.

Dilemmas of Meaning: The Concept of Race

Few ideas have been so fraught with controversy, or have provided as much occasion for discussion and debate, as that of race. Race is a highly contradictory notion. Although deeply intertwined with the development of the modern world and intimately involved with the rise of Enlightenment-based rationalism, the idea of race also preserves fundamentally pre-modern and irrational characteristics. It is frequently dismissed today as an illusion ("There is no such thing as race"; "There is only one race: the human race"; etc.). Yet race continues to demarcate and stratify the world's peoples in striking ways. Indeed, at the same time as it is dismissed, race is also taken for granted. While on the one hand constituting a fundamental aspect of human identity, something recognized across the world, on the other hand race identity has very different meanings in particular societal and cultural settings, such that a person who is identified as belonging to one racial category ("white," for example) in country A, may not be afforded that same racial status in country B.

From a logical point of view this situation is at the least very peculiar, since the wide variations just discussed do not in general undercut the near-universal acknowledgment of racial identity, racial hierarchy, and racially stratified status, such that lighter skin is perceived as "better" or "more attractive" than darker, for example. So how can these problems be explained? Is race an illusion or an objective reality? Is racial identity (or racial difference) a natural or sociohistorical attribute? Is race an atavistic holdover from an earlier epoch of conquest, colonialism, and African slavery—which were all organized along racial lines—or is it a more-or-less permanent means of organizing inequality and domination on both a local and global scale? What makes the racialized body so indispensable as a marker of socioeconomic difference? And why does race continue to operate so well at the crossroads of identity and social structure? After all, despite contemporary reluctance to recognize the continuing significance of race, race still operates as a social fact (in the Durkheimian sense of that term). It links the micro-social dimension of human existence (at which are located the personal, the experiential, the direct interactions by which we know ourselves and each other); and the macro-social dimension of human existence (at which institutions, markets, nation-states, and social stratification operate).

Defining Racism

In the wake of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, racism has come to be seen as having three dimensions. Prejudice refers to unfounded and usually negative beliefs and attitudes about racially defined groups and individuals: stereotypes, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and the like. Discrimination directs attention toward preferential or detrimental actions taken toward racially defined groups and individuals because of their race. Finally institutional (or structural ) racism refers to the endemic character of racial injustice and inequality. As a social structure racism is understood to be a product of the systematic allocation of resources, privileges, and rights differentially by race: it is distributed across the whole range of social institutions both historically and in the present, and it does not require intention or agency to be perpetuated.

Dilemmas of Meaning: The Concept of Racism

As a world-historical phenomenon, racism is so large and so diverse that no definition can encompass all its varieties. The term's origins are themselves quite modern: its earliest use, in the late 1930s, directed attention chiefly toward anti-Semitism. Of course, awareness of race prejudice and racial discrimination preceded that coinage.

The prejudice/discrimination/institutional racism trichotomy still effectively encompasses many aspects of the complex and varied phenomenon of racism. That synthetic view was without doubt an advance over previous conceptions, and embodied many of the hard-won understandings of the 1960s movements for racial justice and emancipation. Notably, its emphasis on the structural dimensions of racism allowed it to address the intransigence which racial injustice and inequality continued to exhibit, even after discrimination had supposedly been outlawed and bigoted expression stigmatized.

Yet, on closer examination the trichotomy also seems problematic. As Robert Miles has argued (1989), it tended to "inflate" the concept of racism to a point at which it lost precision. If the institutional component of racism is so pervasive and deeply rooted, this makes it difficult to recognize what accomplishments antiracist movements have achieved or what progress civil rights reforms concretely represent. How, under these conditions, could one validate the premises of political action aimed at racial justice and greater substantive social equality? If institutional racism is ubiquitous, it becomes difficult to affirm the existence of any democracy at all where race is concerned. The result is a leveling critique, which denies any distinction between the Jim Crow era (or even the whole longue durée of racism beginning with European conquest and leading through racial slavery, imperialism, "Jim Crow," apartheid, and the like), and the present. Similarly, if the prejudice component of racism is so deeply inbred, it becomes difficult to account for the apparent racial hybridity and cultural interpenetration that characterizes civil society both in the United States and across the globe; this is evidenced not only by the shaping of popular mores, values, language, and style, but also by the social practices of the millions of people, white and black (and neither white nor black) who occupy interstitial and ambiguous racial positions. The result of the "inflation" of the concept of racism is thus a deep pessimism about any efforts to overcome racial barriers: in the workplace, the community, or any other sphere of lived experience. An overly comprehensive view of racism, then, potentially serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet the alternative view, which surfaced with a vengeance in the 1970s and urged a return to the conception of racism held before the movement's discovery of institutional racism, is equally inadequate. This is the neoconservative project (see, for example, Gerson 1997), which deliberately restricts its attention to injury done to the individual as opposed to the group, and to advocacy of a "color-blind" racial policy. Such an approach almost entirely neglects the continuing organization of social inequality and oppression along racial lines. It denies the continuity of racism in cultural and political life, particularly in the United States, but also in other societies in "cognate" forms such as racial "differentialism." Worse yet, such views tend to rationalize racial injustice as a supposedly natural outcome of group attributes in competition or of intractable national or cultural differences. Neoconservatism and parallel racial reactions have thus rearticulated the demands for equality and justice made by antiracist and anticolonialist movements in a conservative discourse of individualism, competition, and laissez-faire. It is this "new right" discourse which is hegemonic in the early 2000s; in these terms racism is rendered invisible and marginalized. It is treated as largely an artifact of the past.

In the post–civil rights and postcolonial era the world has undergone a substantial modification of what were previously far more rigid lines of exclusion and segregation. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed some real mobility for more favored sectors (that is, certain class-based segments) of racially defined minority groups. The entire post–World War II era also featured substantial demographic diversification as North America, Europe; other regions as well experienced new waves of immigration, notably from the global South and East. In the United States, for example, the 1965 reform of immigration laws (a civil rights measure in itself) occasioned large and continuing inflows from Asia and Latin America. In both the United States and Europe panethnic phenomena—the process by which new racial identities develop through alliance or convergence of previously distinct but socioculturally similar groups, such as Latinos/Hispanics or Asian Americans in the United States, or Muslims/Arabs/Turks in Europe—have increased throughout the global North (and elsewhere as well). This has reconfigured European and North American racial dynamics, moving them away from the former bipolar frameworks (white/black, European/ "native") and toward multipolar frameworks (multiculturalism, diversity, and the like). No longer is race a largely black–white issue in the United States; no longer is race in Europe a postcolonial confrontation between former settler and former native. Racial identity has also been problematized (at least somewhat) for whites—a fact which has its dangers but also reflects progress.

Yet at the same time, by almost every conceivable indicator researchers can bring forward, the same racial inequalities—or shall we say the same "structural racism"?—that existed in the past continues in the early twenty-first century: modified here and there perhaps, but hardly eliminated and not even much reduced in scope, for example in terms of U.S. black-white disparities, or in terms of French–North African distinctions in contemporary France. This is not the place to inventory the data, but whether we look at wealth/income (in)equality, health, access to/returns to education, segregation by residence or occupation, rates of surveillance or punishment by the criminal "justice" system, or many other indicators that compare racial "life-chances," we find strikingly persistent patterns.

New Patterns

Given the thoroughgoing and persuasive empirical data available on the persistence of racial inequality, discrimination, and prejudice it is difficult to sustain claims that racism is a "thing of the past" or that racial identities and categories have become less salient at the turn of the twenty-first century than they were at the turn of the twentieth, whose problem, as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) famously proclaimed in the early twentieth century, would be that of the "color-line."

The great achievements of the movements that challenged racism in the twentieth century, and that largely overthrew colonialism as well (a fundamentally racist system), were revealed to be partial and contradictory as the twenty-first century dawned. There is no gainsaying the transformations that have been wrought in the undoing of Jim Crow segregation in the United States or the apartheid system in South Africa, and in the restoration of some degree of self-rule in the global South and East. Yet the racial categories and racist social structures produced by centuries of white supremacism retain a great deal of force. It is more than ironic—it is a rather bitter truth—that racial rule has been strengthened in some ways by the reforms it has undergone. Racism has developed from domination to hegemony: to the extent that it incorporates its subjects it defuses their opposition. Thus in the United States, the European Union, South Africa, Brazil, and indeed in most of the world, racial repression and exclusion continue in practice while simultaneously being disavowed as doctrine (see Winant, 2001).

These racial conditions, however, are no more stable than those of the past. Injustice and inequality necessarily produce opposition. The movements of the early twenty-first century have learned the lessons of the twentieth century at least as well as the states and elites they are challenging. Once again "the wretched of the earth" assert their claims: as landless groups and workers; as women, gays, and students; as slum-and shantytown-dwellers, as prisoners and indigenous peoples. This time they have far more resources at their disposal, supporters in key positions, and indeed white allies (although far too few). All the old traditions of refusal, subversion, and racial solidarity remain available. The legacies of past cycles of resistance are never lost; they are reinterpreted, rearticulated, and put to use once again.

In the twenty-first century the task is no longer to recognize the problem of race, the problem is the color line. Rather, it is simultaneously to affirm and transcend the color line. To challenge racism is at last to be both citizen and subject.

See also Apartheid ; Discrimination ; Ethnicity and Race ; Multiculturalism, Africa ; Prejudice .

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Howard Winant