Being Sociological
Chapter 9
Racializing
Background
Since the 1960s a majority of Western democracies
( for example Britain, Germany, France, Australia,
the United States of America) have taken for granted
that the political organisation of their state is based
on the acceptance of a multicultural society. This is
reinforced by the almost universal acceptance of the
various UN Covenants on Human Rights.
• The constituent divisions of these multicultural societies
are generally seen as different ethnic groups and
multiculturalism has become a code for ethnic groups.
• These examples taking place in different parts of the
globe are all contemporary manifestations of race,
although neither the terms race nor ethnicity are used.
• Of particular significance is the fact that they all refer to
aspects of culture, or in the case of multiculturalism,
define ‘ethnic’ groups in terms of culture. Race or
ethnicity has been transformed into a narrative
about cultural practices and signifiers.
The ‘imagined community’
(Anderson, 1983)
• In June 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France
argued that the burqa was ‘not welcome’ on French
soil. He argued that it was not a problem of religion but
of a conflict with the secular values, liberty and
freedom, of the French republic. The burqa deprived
women of identity and the ability to fully engage in the
life of the society. With this statement he linked the
wearing of the burqa with failure to integrate into French
culture and accept French identity.
• Sarkozy was attempting to define what it is to be
French.
Such arguments are all based primarily on visible
markers of cultural practices such as appearance
or colour, or material practices such as wearing
the burqa, language use or religious observance.
Multiculturalism vs. Assimilation
• The problem facing multicultural states today is how to
create or maintain unity while allowing for and
incorporating diversity.
• Reasons why challenges to the viability of multi-ethnic
states emerged at this historical juncture are:
• partly historical (increasing globalisation);
• partly economic (global recession);
• partly cultural (particularly the ‘war on terror’).
Race Is An Idea
• Race is socially constructed;
• Race provides a powerful system of symbolic representations
that influence behaviour and our perceptions of the world we live
in.
• The vocabulary of race is an element of everyday language
despite the fact there is no scientifically verifiable category of
race.
• Race defines membership of a social group and always
presupposes another group against which we define ourselves
and are defined in turn, so it refers to a collective.
• Racial identities are negotiated, contested and defined in a
process of oppositional interaction with ‘the other’.
• These racially constructed groups are hierarchically ranked in
society. It is in this process, which can take place through
institutional, cultural, economic or social structures and which
influences access to resources, patterns of marginalization and
exclusion, and determines power structures, that race becomes
racism.
• Race, as part of culture, provides a set of ideas through which
• The cultural dimensions of race mean that although it is
often an elusive, multidimensional and ambiguous idea,
it has real consequences in everyday life. Actions are
taken in accordance with these ideas, both within and
between states. Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust,
Apartheid and ethnic cleansing all testify to this fact.
• Further, in a globalized world the construction of a
‘national identity’ drawing on these cultural elements
functions to define the boundaries of states and
maintain unity. The paradox of race/ethnicity is that at
the same time it legitimates challenges to that unity.
Race and Early Sociology
• Largely unconcerned with the concept of race and its
consequent social effects, their focus was to explore the
evolving capitalist industrial world they lived in and
understand its emerging class structures and political
institutions.
• However, the problems of ‘race’ and the issues of
racialization are quite central to sociology today.
Race is part of the process by which we order
and give meaning to our everyday world.
Race, Ethnicity and Nationality
• These are three problematic concepts.
• They share, with the concept of citizenship, a common
reference point in that they are all used to order
collective identities, although citizenship always refers to
membership of a political collective, the state.
• However, as Steve Fenton (2003) argues, we give no
clear consistent meanings to these terms, or the
distinctions between them, and we often slip from one
usage to another both in everyday life and in sociological
analysis.
The process of constructing and ordering social
groups entails recognition of similarity with those
accepted as belonging to the same ethnic/racial
group and differentiation from other groups.
• Membership of the group is ascribed on the basis of a
variety of assumed shared characteristics, which
identify and differentiate them from other groups.
• The most important common characteristic of the three
terms, race, ethnicity and nationality, is the assumption
that members of the group share biological descent,
historical or mythical, a common ancestry or genealogy
at some point in time.
• These elements are used to distinguish them from other
groups sharing the same or adjoining social space.
• However, no discrete racial or ethnic group exists in
which all recognised members share these same core
characteristics.
• Mobility and inter-marriage have ensured this, and many
individuals can claim membership of several ethnic
groups.
Steve Fenton (2003)
It is more useful to identify the contexts in which one or
the other of these ideas becomes the basis for social
action, whether the term race, ethnicity, nationality or
today, culture, is used in the public discourse.
Until the 1960s, New Zealand government policy
assumed assimilation and mono-culturalism. The
acceptance of biculturalism was a slow process that
began in the 1960s with the Maori renaissance and
movement for Māori rights guaranteed under the Treaty
of Waitangi (Sorrenson, 1977).
Naming
• Race has frequently been used in everyday
discourse to refer to larger groups or populations
rather than social groups, such as ‘the European
race’ or the ‘white race’ as opposed to the ‘black
race’.
• Whiteness became the focus of studies as a
consequence of the black civil rights movements in
the USA.
• ‘Racial’ differences were inscribed in New Zealand
from 1840 when the country became a British colony
through the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi
between the representatives of the British Crown
and Māori chiefs.
• Race has tended to be used for larger groupings;
• Ethnic has been used mainly for smaller constituent
groupings within the larger group;
• However, today, as Fenton (2003) has noted, the term
race is disappearing from the discourse.
• But racism and racist are both still part of our
vocabulary and used to describe unacceptable
behaviour towards a particular ‘other’.
• Ethnicity has become equated with cultural
distinctiveness and seen as positive.
Terminology and Social Context
• The Holocaust, and its rationale in the supposed
purification of the ‘Aryan’ race is referred to as ‘racial
cleansing’ but the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda were
termed ‘ethnic cleansing’.
• In New Zealand, people from the Pacific Islands, for
example Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, are collectively called
Pacific Islanders. Whether this is seen as a racial or
ethnic category is unclear but it denies the cultural or
historical differences between the groups.
• In Britain in the 1960s and early 70s migrants from
Pakistan were called ‘Pakis’ and Paki bashing occurred.
Yet Pakistani refers to membership of the state of
Pakistan, the name being an acronym of the constituent
provinces that make up the state. There is no such
historical racial or ethnic grouping.
The major difference between race/ethnicity and
national identity is that the latter is associated with the
‘nation’ state so it includes a political dimension and
rights of citizenship in a given political territory.
Today no totally ethnically homogeneous states exist.
National Identity and the Imagined
Community
National identity is always constructed and involves the
melding together of different groups into an “imagined”
community under the umbrella of one dominant culture.
The idea of nationalism provides governments with a
simple and relatively inexpensive method of creating
solidarity, cohesion and commitment (Nairn, 1975).
Within a given territory it is an inclusive concept, as
opposed to race or ethnicity which is based on
distinctions between groups.
• Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 6): a nation is ‘an imagined
political community’ - and imagined as inherently limited
and sovereign. In this imagined community individuals
do not ever know all members of the community but
nevertheless feel an identity with them.
• States, as opposed to ethnic and racially based groups,
control political power and legitimate means of force,
such as the police, army and penal system, within a
defined territory.
• National identity is the identity acquired by membership
of the political community. This is the basis for
citizenship with its associated rights: political, civil and
social.
United Nations 1948 Declaration of
Human Rights
• Theoretically provided a mechanism for legal integration
within a multicultural state;
• Allows for the recognition of diversity but aims to achieve
cohesion through equal rights for all citizens;
• The Declaration asserts the universality of rights for all
individuals equally without distinction of ‘race, colour,
language, religion, political or other opinion, social origin,
property, birth or other status’. The 1965 UN Covenant on
the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination added
ethnic origin to the list;
• However, it specifically maintained the rights of states to
distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and their right
to determine processes of naturalization, provided they did
not discriminate against a particular nationality.
The Sociological Analysis of Race
• An overlapping set of contested ideas:
• Race and gender;
• Race and class;
• Race and national identity;
• Race and violence.
• Despite the lack of an explicit concern with race in the
work of the founding fathers many of their more general
insights provide the starting point for sociological work in
this area. Theorists of particular significance are Karl
Marx and Max Weber.
• Studies exploring race, inequality and the racialization of
social relations have their origins in the work of Marx.
Marxism and Race
• An analysis of race as ideology, considering the ways
in which ideas of race are embedded in the economic
historical conditions and so vary over time.
• In this approach, nationalism and race, as part of the
superstructure of society, reflect material conditions
rather than acting as causal factors.
• This focus camouflages ethnic inequality and
marginalisation while privileging aspects of local
culture as a form of folklore.
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Ideas in social action:
Culture was not purely reflective of the material
conditions but had a degree of autonomy and interacted
with economic conditions to influence perception and
action.
This focus on the role of ideas in social action has proved
useful in analysing the global re-emergence of
racial/ethnic conflicts.
Status groups:
Weber viewed ethnic groups as akin to status groups.
They were bounded groups, defined by life style and
consumption patterns as opposed to classes defined by
their position in the capitalist mode of production. He
identified the potential of these groups to mobilise for
social political action.
Robert Miles (1993)
• Argued that races are purely ideological constructs that
hide underlying economic reality. If there are no races
there can be no race relations.
• Focussing on them reifies them and gives them
legitimacy. There is not a race problem but a problem of
‘racism’.
• He argued that the institutional and legal systems put in
place in states and regional organisations such as the
European Union to combat racism actually reinforce the
idea of race.
• He proposed instead that we focus on racialization, and
in a later work, on racism.
Racialization
Racialization is the process through which ideas and
beliefs about race, together with class and gender, shape
social relationships; in other words, it is the social
construction of race. Racism applies to the set of ideas
involved in this process.
Racialization and Identity
The problem of identity in contemporary multi-ethnic
societies is to reconcile the competing claims of diversity
and unity. National identity can provide a mechanism for
ordering and integrating this multiplicity. However, the
movement from policies of assimilation to
multiculturalism from about the 1960s onwards has
created greater relativity and the assumed uniformity of
cultural beliefs has lost its ‘taken for granted’ quality.
Therefore, establishing the ‘essence’ of a
national identity, regretting its absence or
questioning its existence has become a central
problem of contemporary consciousness.
Race and Identity
Zygmunt Bauman (1992) argues that the relativity
inherent in post-modernity accentuates the dilemma for
the individual. It gives them responsibility for moral choice
but deprives them of universal norms to guide conduct.
Individuals must rely on their own subjectivity and take
responsibility for their own choice. This means that the
choice of a particular identity is always contextual and
social rather than purely individual or personal. Its
referent is always a group to which the individual is
claiming membership and it is established and validated
through a continuing process of negotiation with ‘the
other’ through a discourse of difference and mutual
recognition.
Hall (1991a, p. 13) argues that a return to the local is
often a response to this relativity inherent in the global.
In this context the idea of race/ethnicity provides a
powerful system of symbolic representations through
which groups of individuals can ground their identity and
validate, through a process of contested negotiation, a
claim to belonging within a social political space.
In this process of recognition of similarities and
differences, individuals locate themselves in relation to
others and interpret their own experience as racialized
‘others’. At the same time they also racialize ‘the
other’.
The break -up of the ex -Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
and of Czechoslovakia saw the emergence of new
states based on supposed ethnic homogeneity. The
failure of the Kurdish populations in Turkey and Iraq
demonstrate the reverse.
In all of these cases the particular global historical
context was a significant factor and the fight for
recognition had persisted over the centuries. It
demonstrates the emotional power attached to an
identity grounded in a notion of belonging based on
assumptions of common descent, kinship, and shared
tradition and historical memory.
‘Indigenous’ Minorities
• Resnick (2005) argues the basic demand of minority
groups is for recognition of their unique national
identity. Similarly the majority nationalities feel their
distinct national identity is threatened. The outcome is a
trade-off which results in either a form of federalism, a
degree of political and/or legal recognition, or of
regional autonomy.
• He notes, however, that the solutions are never final or
complete but on-going. So the relationship between
nationality and identity in the multinational state is not
unproblematic. It gives rise to a continuing dialectical
process and is an inevitable element of our
contemporary reality.
The ‘Idea’ of Race
• There is no unitary phenomenon we can define as race
and no single theory to address it.
• In the global world of today we confront multiple
racisms. It may function as ideology and serve to
validate discrimination and thereby maintain dominant
economic and political interests. Equally it may reinforce
and legitimate conservative traditional values and
provide the source of conflict with the dominant values.
Alternatively it may provide a basis for resistance and
political mobilization and the basis for the construction
of identity in a multi-ethnic society.
Discussion Point 1: Adopting an
Ethnic Identity
• An affiliative ethnic identity is one that an individual is
not connected with by ancestry but adopts through
deployment of, and identification with becomes theirs
both in their own mind and in the minds of others.
• Would adopting an affiliative ethnicity necessarily mean
the individual was rejecting their own origins or simply
demonstrate that ethnic identity is fluid, flexible, and
multiple?
•Why would an ethnic group want to reject ethnic
affiliates?
•Could there be advantages for a minority group in
adopting members of a dominant ethnic group?
Discussion Point 2: Racializing
Strangers
•What are the problems with racializing/ethnicizing groups
through government policies to enhance national
security?
•Are there other common examples of racial profiling that
are damaging to certain communities?
•What are the positive sides for individuals and groups of
being able to claim an ethnic identity that is officially
recognized?