Concepts
Race
● emerges as an outcome of racialisation
● Lentin: is doing rather than being
○ not ontology, not essential | it can be done to you or you can do it (to
racialize)
● many-tentacled and historically grounded, created in the context
● problem in thinking about race as either purely ideological, exclusively economic, or
only ‘scientific’, but it has real attachment and consequences to raced bodies
● Race is a fiction and a force = its socially constructed AND its powerful
● Hall: race works like a language = race has a discursive structure
Colour-blindness
● Bonilla-Silva: ideology based on the myth that race is no longer relevant and that
using race is racist
● (as the race is relevant because of its structural consequences) it legitimates
contemporary racial inequality
● color-blind racism prevents whites from seeing and understanding non-white racial
reality = whites and nonwhites see two very different realities
● more here
Cultural archive
● importance of centrality of colonialism and imperialism to Western culture and
minds
● racialized common sense, similar to Bourdieu’s habitus
● Wekker: how we think, do things, and look at the world, what we find attractive was
influenced by colonialism and imperialism
● cemented in policies, in organizational rules, in popular and sexual cultures, and in
commonsense everyday knowledge
● seems natural, escaping consciousness
● Said: the cultural archive as a storehouse of “a particular knowledge and structures
of attitude and reference”, it “has influenced historical cultural configurations and
current dominant and cherished self-representations and culture”
Everyday racism
● Everyday racism is not about racists, but about racist practice, meaning racism as
common societal behavior, day-to-day practice of racism
, ● Essed: everyday racism is the integration of racism into everyday situations through
practices that activate underlying power relations
○ racism manifested in everyday (routine, without a thought)
practices/situations/actions, as in those situation are hidden power relations
● Concept of “everyday” = to bridge the structural and the interactional racism in the
fabric of the social system
● symbolic interactionism: interactions as social not individual, agency of individuals,
recognising that race and ethnicity operate through any social relation
● integration of racism into everyday practices becomes “natural”, expected,
unquestionable, seen as normal
● adds agency of individuals to Bonilla-Silva’s structural racism
Grounds for race-making
● DuBois noticed that everything can be ground for race-making, using symbolic
category of race could be justified by more means that different skin color
● Hall: religion (cleanliness, “pure Christians”), biology (scientific racism,
classification of different phenotypes into discrete races with superiority of whites,
legitimate exploitation), culture (classification of differences cultures/civilizations,
with superiority of Western culture, cultural differences used to explain oppression
and social stratification)
● Go: importance of colonialism, historical context
● Lentin’s critique: biology and culture are intertwined, presumed genetic inferiority
was always supplemented by a discourse of cultural inferiority (ethnic, cultural or
spiritual traits), they form the knowledge bank out of which racialised arguments,
laws, policies, etc. are created
Institutional racism (institutional approach)
● occurs within institutions and systems of power, unfair policies and discriminatory
practices of institutions that routinely produce racially inequitable outcomes for
people of color, e.g. Jim Crow, apartheid laws
● institutionalist approach: prejudice + power, allowing dominant race to
institutionalize its dominance
● critique by Bonilla-Silva and Essed: institutional is not enough! There’s no just
individual racism + just institutional
● Bonilla-Silva: this perspective doesn’t allows to study the operation of racially
stratified societies, obscurs the social and general character of racialized societies
● Essed: racism is more than structures and ideologies, it is a process that is routinely
creates and reinforced through everyday practices, individual racism is not outside
institutional racism
