From torres@primenet.com Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 11:42:47 -0700 From: Rudy Torres To: gimenez@csf.Colorado.EDU Subject: From Race to Racism [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] Dear Martha, Greetings from So. Cal. I thought your post on "racism and racialization" was on the mark. I'm sending you a piece I wrote with Bob Miles....would like your comments. Best, Rudy Does 'Race' Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after 'Race Relations' Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres The discourse promoting resistance to racism must not prompt identification with and in terms of categories fundamental to the discourse of oppression. Resistance must break not only with practices of oppression, although its first task is to do that. Resistance must oppose also the language of oppression, including the categories in terms of which the oppressor (or racist) represents the forms in which resistance is expressed. (Goldberg 1990: 313-14) Introduction In April 1993, one year after the Los Angeles civil unrest, a major US publisher published a book with the creatively ambiguous title Race Matters by the distinguished scholar Cornel West. The back cover of the slightly revised edition published the following year categorised it as a contribution to both African-American Studies and Current Affairs. The latter was confirmed by the publisher's strategy of marketing the book as a 'trade' rather than as an 'academic' title: this was a book for the 'American public' to read. And the American public was assured that they were reading a quality product when they were told that its author had 'built a reputation as one of the most eloquent voices in America's racial debate'. **************************************************************************** ********************** Robert Miles is Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Glagow. Rodolfo D. Torres is associate professor of Chicano Studies and Public Policy at California State University ,Long Beach. Some two years later, the Los Angeles Times published an article by its Science Writer under the headline 'Scientists Say Race Has No Biological Basis'. The opening paragraph ran as follows: Researchers adept at analysing the genetic threads of human diversity said Sunday that the concept of race - the source of abiding cultural and political divisions in American society - simply has no basis in fundamental human biology. Scientists should abandon it. And, on the same day (20 February 1995), the Chronicle of Higher Education reproduced the substance of these claims in an article under the title ' A Growing Number of Scientists Reject the Concept of Race'. Both publications were reporting on the proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Atlanta. If 'the concept of race simply has no basis in fundamental human biology', how are we to evaluate Professor West's assertion that 'Race Matters'? If 'race' matters, then 'races' must exist! But if there are no 'races', then 'race' cannot matter. These two contributions to public political debate seem to reveal a contradiction. Yet, within the specific arena of academic debate, there is a well-rehearsed attempt to dissolve the contradiction which runs as follows. It is acknowledged that, earlier this century, the biological and genetic sciences established conclusively in the light of empirical evidence that the attempt to establish the existence of different types or 'races' of human being by scientific procedures had failed. The idea that the human species consisted of a number of distinct 'races', each exhibiting a set of discrete physical and cultural characteristics is therefore false, mistaken. The interventions reported as having been made in Atlanta in February 1995 only repeat what some scientists have been arguing since the 1930s. Yet the fact that scientists have to continue to assert these claims demonstrates that the contrary is still widely believed and articulated in public discussion. Because this scientific knowledge has not yet been comprehensively understood by 'the general public' (which not only persists in believing in the existence of 'races' as biologically discrete entitites but also acts in ways consistent with such a belief), it is argued that social scientists must employ a concept of 'race' to describe and analyse these beliefs, and the discrimination and exclusion that are premised on this kind of classification. In other words, while social scientists know that there are no 'races', they also know that things believed to exist (in this case 'races') have a real existence for those who believe in them and actions consistent with the belief have real social consequences. In sum, because people believe that 'races' exist (i.e. because they utilise the idea of 'race' to comprehend their social world), social scientists need a concept of 'race'. Or do they? This chapter will explore the reasons why this question needs to be asked. It will also answer it by suggesting that social scientists do not need to, and indeed should not, transform the idea of 'race' into an analytical category and use 'race' as a concept. Preemininent amongst the reasons for such an assertion is that the arenas of academic and political discourse cannot be clinically separated. Hence, Professor West, in seeking to use his status as a leading Afro-American scholar to make a political intervention in Current Affairs by arguing that 'Race Matters' is likely to legitimate and reinforce the widespread public belief that 'races' exist irrespective of his views on this issue. For if this belief in the existence of 'races' was not widespread, there would be no news value in publishing an article in a leading daily US newspaper that claims that 'Race Has No Biological Basis'. Criticising 'Race' as an Analytical Category We begin this exploration by crossing the Atlantic in order to consider the issue as it has been discussed in Britain since the early 1950s. As we shall see, the development of the British discussion has in fact been influenced substantially by the preconceptions and language employed in the US: the use of 'race' as an analytical category in the social sciences is a transatlantic phenomenon. It is now difficult to conceive, but forty years ago no one would have suggested that 'Race Matters' in Britain. The idea of 'race' was employed in public and political discussion, but largely only in order to discuss 'the colonies': the 'race problem' was spatially located beyond British shores in the British Empire and especially in certain colonies, notably South Africa. It is relevant to add that this too had not always been so. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was widely believed that the population of Britain was composed of a number of different 'races' (e.g. the Irish were identified as being 'of the Celtic race') and, moreover, migration to Britain from central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century was intrepreted using the language of 'race' to signify the Jewish refugees fleeing persccution (e.g. Barkan 1992: 15-65). But, as the situation in the port city of Liverpool after the First World War suggested (e.g. Barkan 1992: 57-65), the language of 'race' used to refer to the interior of Britain was to became tied exclusively to differences in skin colour in the second half of the twentieth century. What, then, was the 'race' problem that existed beyond the shores of Britain? Briefly expressed, the problem was that, or so it was thought, the colonies were spatial sites where members of different 'races' (Caucasian, White, African, Hindoo, Mongoloid, Celts: the language to name these supposed 'races' varied enormously) met and where their 'natures' (to civilise, to fight, to be lazy, to progress, to drink, to engage in sexual perversions etc.) interacted, often with tragic consequences. This language of 'race' was usually anchored in the signification of certain forms of somatic difference (skin colour, facial characteristics, body shape and size, eye colour, skull shape) which were interpreted as the physical marks which accompanied, and which in some unexplained way determined, the 'nature' of those so marked. In this way, the social relations of British colonialism were explained as being 'rooted' simultaneously in the biology of the human body and in the cultural attributes determined by 'nature'. But the 'race' problem was not to remain isolated from British shores, to be contained there by a combination of civilisation and violence. All Her Majesty's subjects had the right of residence in the Motherland, and increasing numbers of them chose to exercise that right as the decade of the 1950s progressed. Members of 'coloured races', from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent in particular, migrated to Britain largely to fill vacancies in the labour market but against the will of successive governments (Labour and Conservative) who feared that they carried in their cheap suitcases not only their few clothes and personal possessions but also the 'race problem' (e.g. Joshi and Carter 1984, Solomos 1989, Layton-Henry 1992). By the late 1950s, it was widely argued that, as a result of 'coloured immigration', Britain had imported a 'race' problem: prior to this migration, so it was believed, Britain's population was 'racially homogeneous', a claim that neatly dispensed with not only with earlier racialised classifications of both migrants and the population of the British Isles but also the history of interior racisms. The political and public response to immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent is now a well-known story (e.g. Solomos 1989, Layton-Henry 1992), although there are a number of important by-ways still to be explored. What is of more interest here is the academic response. A small number of social scientists (particularly sociologists and anthropologists) wrote about these migrations and their social consequences using the language of everyday life: Dark Strangers the The Colour Problem were the titles of two books that achieved a certain prominence during the 1950s and their authors subsequently pursued distinguished academic careers. Considered from the point of view of the 1990s, these titles now seem a little unfortunate, and perhaps even a part of the problem in so far as they employ language that seems to echo and legitimate racist discourses of the time. But can the same be said for two other books that became classic texts within the social sciences: Michael Banton's Race Relations (1967) and John Rex's Race Relations in Sociological Theory (1970)? Both were both published in the following decade and were widely interpreted as offering different theoretical and political interpretations of the consequences of the migration to, and settlement in, Britain of British subjects and citizens from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. And indeed they did offer very different analyses. Notably, Rex sought to reinterpret the scope of the concept of racism to ensure that it could encompass the then contemporary political discourses about immigration which avoided any direct references to an alleged hierarchy of 'races' while at the same time referring to or implying the existence of different 'races'. Banton interpreted this shift in discourse as evidence of a decline in racism, a conclusion that was to lead him to eventually reject the concept of racism entirely (1987). But what is more remarkable is that, despite their very different philosophical and theoretical backgrounds and conclusions, they shared something else in common. Both Banton and Rex mirrored the language of everyday life, incorporated it into academic discourse and thereby legitimated it. They agreed that Britain (which they both analysed comparatively with reference to the USA and South Africa) had a 'race relations' problem and Rex in particular wished to conceptualise this problem theoretically in the discipline of sociology. In so doing, both premised their arguments on the understanding that scientific knowledge proves that 'races' do not exist in the sense widely understood in everyday common sense discourse: if 'race' was a problem, it was a social and not a biological problem, a problem rooted in part at least in the continued popular belief in the existence of 'races'. Indeed, John Rex had been one of the members of one of the team of experts recruited by UNESCO to discredit officially the continuing exploitation of nineteenth century scientific knowledge about 'race' by certain political groups and to educate public opinion by making widely known the more recent conclusions of biological and genetic scientists (Montagu 1972). The concept of 'race relations' seemed to have impeccable credentials, unlike the language of 'dark strangers' for example. This is in part because the notion was borrowed from the early sociology of the 'Chicago School' in the USA which, amongst other things, was interested in the consequences of the early twentieth century migration from the southern to the northern states of 'Negroes' fleeing poverty (and much else) in search of wage labour alongside the continuing large-scale migration from Europe to the USA. As a result of the former migration, 'Negro' and 'white races' entered, so it was conceptualised, into conflictual social relations in the burgeoning industrial urban areas of the northern states and sociologists had named a new field of study. 'Coloured migration' to British cities after 1945 provided an opportunity for sociologists to import this field of study into Britain: Britain too now had a 'race relations' problem. Moreover, for Rex at least, 'race relations situations' were characterised by definition by the presence of a racist ideology. Hence, the struggle against colonialism could now be pursued within the Mother Country 'herself': by intervening in the new, domestic 'race relations' problem on the side of the colonised victims of racism, one could position oneself against the British state now busily seeking a solution to that problem by the introduction of immigration controls intended specifically to prevent 'coloured' British subjects from entering Britain. Such was the rush to be on the side of the angels that few, if any, wondered about what the angels looked like and whether there was any validity in the very concept of angel. There was a further import from the USA that had a substantial impact on the everyday and academic discourses of 'race relations' in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Britain: the struggle for Civil Rights and against racism on the part of 'the blacks' in the USA (the notion of 'Negro' was now past its shelf life and, like 'coloured' before it, it had been ejected into waste-bin of politically unacceptable language) had the effect of mobilising not only many 'blacks' in Britain but also many 'whites' politically inclined towards one or other of several competing versions of socialist transformation. And, if radical 'blacks' were busy 'seizing the time' in the names of anti-racism and 'black autonomy', there was little political or academic space within which radically-inclined 'white' social scientists could wonder about the legitimacy and the consequences of seizing the language of 'race' to do battle against racism. For it was specifically in the name of 'race' that 'black' people were resisting their long history of colonial oppression: indeed, in some versions of this vision of liberation, contemporary 'blacks' were the direct descendants and inheritors of the African 'race' which had been deceived and disinherited by the 'white devils' many centuries ago. In this 'race war', the 'white race' was soon to face the day of judgement. Possession of a common language and associated historical traditions can blind as well as illuminate. It is especially significant that both the Left and the Right in Britain looked across the Atlantic when seeking to analyse and to offer forcasts about the outcome of the 'race relations' problem that both agreed existed within Britain. The infamous speeches on immigration made by the MP Enoch Powell in the late 1960s and 1970s contained a great deal of vivid imagery refracting the then contemporary events in cities in the USA and framing them as prophecies of what was inevitably going to happen in due course in British cities if the 'alien wedge' was not quickly 'repatriated'. While at the same time, the Left drew political inspiration from the 'black' struggle against racism and sought to incorporate aspects of its rhetoric, style and politics. Hence, while there was disagreement about the identity of the heroes and the villains of 'race relations' in the USA, there was a fundamental agreement that 'race relations' in the USA provided a framework with which to assess the course of 'race relations' in Britain. Even legislation intended to regulate 'race relations' and to make racialised discrimination illegal refracted the 'American experience'. As a result, the academic response to the 'race relations' problem in Britain was largely isolated from the situations elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in north west Europe which was experiencing a quantitatively much more substantial migration than that taking place in Britain, and from academic and political writing about those situations. Two features of those situations are pertinent to the argument here. First, the nation states of north west Europe had recently experienced either fascist rule or fascist occupation and therefore the direct consequences of the so-called 'final solution to the Jewish question' which sought to eliminate the 'Jewish race'. Hence, the collective historical memory of most of the major cities of north west Europe was shaped by the genocide effected against the Jews and legitimated in the name of 'race', even if that historical memory was now the focus of denial or repression. Second, this experience left the collective memory especially susceptible to the activities of UNESCO and others seeking to discredit the idea of 'race' as a valid and meaningful descriptor. Hence, the temporal and spatial proximity of the Holocaust rendered its legitimating racism (a racism in which the idea of 'race' was explicit and central) an immediate reality: in this context, few people were willing to make themselves vulnerable to the charge of racism, with the result that supressing the idea of 'race', at least in the official and formal arenas of public life, became a political imperative. The political and academic culture of mainland north west Europe has therefore been open to two developments which distinguish it from that existing in the islands that lie to the north of the coast of France. First, in any debate about the scope and validity of the concept of racism, the instance of the Jewish experience of racism is much more likely to be discussed, and even to be prioritised over any other. Second, the idea of 'race' itself became highly politically sensitive. Its very use as a descriptor is more likely to be interpreted in itself as evidence of racist beliefs and, as a result, the idea is rarely employed in everyday political and academic discussion, at least not in connection with domestic social relations. However, in Britain, given the combination of the colonial migration and the multiple ideological exchange with the USA, there were far fewer constraints on the everyday use of the idea of 'race' and on a redefinition of the concept of racism. As a result, the latter came to refer exclusively to an ideology held by 'white' people about 'black' people which was rooted in capitalist expansion beyond Europe and colonial exploitation. Having recognised the relative distinctiveness of the political and academic space in north west Europe and then occupied it, one can view those social relations defined in Britain and the USA as 'race relations' from another point of view. For there is no public or academic reference to the existence of 'race relations' in contemporary France or Germany. It then becomes possible to pose questions that seem not to be posed from within these intimately interlinked social and historical contexts. What kinds of social relations are signified as 'race relations'? Why is the idea of 'race' employed in everyday life to refer to only certain groups of people and only certain social situations? And why do social scientists unquestioningly import everyday meanings into their reasoning and theoretical frameworks in defining 'race' and 'race relations' as a particular field of study? As a result, what does it mean for an academic to claim, for example, that 'race' is factor in determining the structure of social inequality or that 'race' and gender are interlinked forms of oppression? What is intended and what might be the consequences of asserting as an academic that 'race matters'? These are the kinds of question that one of the current authors has been posing for nearly fifteen years (e.g. Miles 1982, 1984, 1989), influenced in part by the important writing of the French theorist Guillaumin (1972, 1995). The answers to these questions lead to the conclusion that one should follow the example of biological and genetic scientists and refuse to attribute analytical status to the idea of 'race' within the social sciences, and thereby refuse to use it as a descriptive and explanatory concept. The reasoning can be summarised as follows (cf Miles 1982: 22-43, 1993: 47-9). First, the idea of 'race' is used to effect a reification within sociological analysis in so far as the outcome of an often complex social process is explained as the consequence of some thing named 'race' rather than of the social process itself. Consider the recent publication of The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard J Hernstein and Charles Murray and the authors common assertion that 'race' determines academic performance and life chances. The assertion can be supported with statistical evidence that demonstrates that, in comparison with 'black people', 'white people' are more likely to achieve top grades in school and to enter the leading universities in the USA. The determining processes are extremely complex, including amongst other things parental class position, and active and passive racialised stereotyping and exclusion in the classroom and beyond. The effects of these processes are all mediated via a prior racialised categorisation into a 'white/black' dichotomy which is employed in everyday social relations. Hence, it is not 'race' that determines academic performance: rather, academic performance is determined by an interplay of social processes, one of which is premised on the articulation of racism to effect and legitimate exclusion. Indeed, given the nineteenth century meanings of 'race', this form of reification invites the possibility of explaining academic performance as the outcome of some quality within the body of those racialised as 'black'. Second, when academics who choose to write about 'race relations' seek to speak to a wider audience (an activity which we believe to be fully justified) or when their writings are utilised by non-academics, their use unwittingly legitimates and reinforces everyday beliefs that the human species is constituted by a number of different 'races', each of which is characterised by a particular combination of real or imagined physical features or marks and cultural practices. When Professor West seeks to persuade the 'Amercian public' that 'Race Matters', there is no doubt that he himself does not believe in the existence of biologically defined 'races', but he cannot control the meanings attributed to his claim on the part of those who identify differences in skin colour, for example, as marks designating the existence of 'blacks' and 'whites' as discrete 'races'. Unwittingly, his writing may then come to serve as a legitimation of not only a belief in the existence of 'race' as a biological phenomenon but also of racism itself. He could avoid this outcome by breaking with the 'race relations' paradigm. Third, as a result of reification and the interplay between academic and common sense discourses, the use of 'race' as an analytical concept incorporates a notion which has been central to the evolution of racism into the discourse of antiracism, thereby sustaining one of the conditions of the reproduction of racism within the discourse and practice of antiracism. For these reasons, the idea of 'race' should not be employed as an analytical category within the social sciences, from which it follows that the object of study should not be described as 'race relations'. Hence, we reject the 'race relations' problematic as the locus for the analysis of racism. But we do not reject the concept of racism. Rather, we critique the 'race relations' problematic in order to retain a concept of racism which is constructed in such a way as to recognise the existence of a plurality of historically-specific racisms, not all of which employ explicitly the idea of 'race'. In contrast, the 'race relations' paradigm refers exclusively to either 'black/white' social relations or social relations between 'people of colour' and 'white people', with the result that there is only one racism, the racism of 'whites' which has as its object and victim 'people of colour' (e.g. Essed 1991). Moreover, as is increasingly recognised in the academic literature of the past decade, many recent and contemporary discourses which eschew use of the idea of 'race' nevertheless advance notions that were previously a referent of the 'idea' of 'race'. We can only comprehend contemporary discourses that dispense with the explicit use of the idea of 'race' and those discourses which naturalise and inferiorise 'white' populations if we rescue the concept of racism from the simultaneous inflation and narrowing of its meaning by the intersection of the academic and political debate that has taken place in Britain and the USA since the end of the Second World War. Reflections on the Racialisation of the USA by the American Academy When one views the contemporary academic debate in the USA about racism both from this analytical position and from Europe, one is struck by the following things. First, when compared with the mid- and late 1960s, it is now an extremely contested debate, a debate in which many voices are heard arguing different positions. On the one hand, writers such as Wellman (1993) continue to assert that racism remains the primary determinant of social inequality in the USA while on the other writers such as Wilson claim that the influence of racism has declined substantially, to the point where it cannot be considered to be a significant influence on current structures of inequality (1987). Between these two positions, one finds writers such as West who assert that the continuing impact of racism has to be assessed in terms of its relationship with the effects of class, sexism and homophobia (e.g. 1994: 44). Moreover, it is a debate in which the voices of 'Afrocentrists' (e.g. Karenga, 1993) and 'black feminists' (e.g. hooks, 1990) have become extremely influential over the past two decades, while at the same time a 'black' conservative intellectual tradition has emerged and attracted increasing attention (e.g. Sowell, 1994). Second, it remains a debate in which it is either largely taken for granted or explicitly argued that the concept of racism refers to an ideology and (in some cases) a set of practices, of which 'black' people are the exclusive victim: racism refers to what 'white' people think about and do to 'black' people. While the concept of institutional racism goes further by eschewing any reference to human intentionality, it retains the 'white/black' dichotomy in order to identify beneficiary and victim. Thus the scope of the concept of racism is very narrowly defined: the centrality of the 'white/black' dichotomy denies the possibility by definition that any group other than 'white' people can articulate, practice or benefit from racism and suggests that only 'black people' can be the object or victim of racism. Some of West's writing illustrates this difficulty. He clearly distinguishes himself from those he describes as black nationalists when he argues that their obsession with white racism obstructs the development of the political alliances that are essential to effecting social changes that will alleviate the suffering of black people in the USA and that white racism alone cannot explain the socio-economic position of the majority of black Americans (1994: 82, 98-9). Moreover, he goes so far as to suggest that certain black nationalist accounts 'simply mirror the white supremacist ideals we are opposing' (1994: 99). Yet, he seems reluctant to identify any form of racism other than white racism. In his carefully considered discussion of what he describes as 'Black-Jewish relations', he imploys a distinction between black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-black racism (1994: 104; see also Lerner and West, 1995: 135-56) which suggests that these are qualitatively different phenomena: Jews articulate racism while blacks express anti-Semitism. This interpretation is reinforced by his assertion that black anti-Semitism is a form of 'xenophobia from below' which has a different institutional power when compared with 'those racisms that afflict their victims from above' (1994: 109-110) even though he claims that both merit moral condemnation. A similar distinction is implicit in the recent writing of Blauner (1992) who, partly in response to the arguments of one of the current authors, has revised his position significantly since the 1960s. Blauner returns to the common distinction between 'race' and ethnicity, arguing that the 'peculiarly modern division of the world into a discrete number of hierarchically ranked races is a historic product of Western colonialism' (Blauner 1992: 61). This he argues is a very different process from that associated with ethnicity. Hence, Blauner refrains from analysing the ideologies employed to justify the exclusion of Italians and Jews in the US in the 1920s as racism: these populations are described as 'white ethnics' who were 'viewed racially' (1992: 64). Concerning the period of fascism in Germany, Blauner refers to genocide 'where racial imagery was obviously intensified' (1992: 64), but presumably the imagery could never be intensified to the point of warranting description as racism because the Jews were not 'black'. Yet, as we shall see shortly in the case of the writing of West, Blauner comes very close to breaking with the 'race relations' problematic when he argues (1992: 61): Much of the popular discourse about race in America today goes awry because ethnic realites get lost under the racial umbrella. The positive meanings and potential of ethnicity are overlooked, even overrun, by the more inflammatory meanings of race. Third, it is a debate which is firmly grounded in the specific realities of the history and contemporary social structure of the US, or rather a particular interpretation of those particular realities. It is perhaps not suprising therefore that scholars of racism in the USA have shown so little interest in undertaking comparative research. There are important exceptions. Some comparative work has been undertaken which compares the USA with South Africa (e.g. van den Berghe 1978, Fredrickson 1981), and a comparison between the USA and England achieved some prominence some twenty years ago (Katznelson 1976; for a recent analysis, see Small 1994). More recently, the 'neo-conservative' Sowell (1994) has chosen a comparative international arena to demonstrate what he sees as the explanatory power of his thesis although it is arguable whether this constitutes a contribution to the sociology of racism. But the vast bulk of work by scholars in the USA on racism focusses on the USA. The fact that this is so may be explained as the outcome of a benign ethnocentrism but one also wonders whether it is not also a function of the limited applicability of a theory of racism that is so closely tied to the 'race relations' paradigm and a 'black/white' dichotomy that it has limited potential to be used to analyse social formations where there is no 'black' presence. Yet, there is evidence of an increasingly conscious unease with this 'race relations' paradigm and the 'black/white' dichotomy. For example, as we have already noted, West argues in a recent book that 'race matters' (1994: 155-6): Race is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia, despair and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy. But he also argues that it is necessary to formulate new frameworks and languages in order to not only comprehend the current crisis in the USA but also to identify solutions to it (1994: 11). Indeed, he asserts that it is imperative to move beyond the narrow framework of 'dominant liberal and conservative views of race in America', views which are formulated with a 'worn-out vocabulary' (1994: 4). But it seems that West does not accept that the idea of 'race' itself is an example of this exhausted language for he employs it throughout with even a momentary hesitation, despite the fact that he believes that the manner in which 'we set up the terms for discussing racial issues shapes our perception and response to these issues' (1994: 6). Later in the book, he seems to be on the verge of following through the logic of this argument to its ultimate conclusion when he argues that the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings demonstrate that 'the very framework of racial reasoning' needs to be called into question in order to reinterpret the black freedom struggle not as an issue of 'skin pigmentation and racial phenotype' but, instead, as an issue of ethics and politics (1994: 38). And yet West cannot follow through the logic of this argument to the point where it is acknowledged that there cannot be a place for the use of the idea of 'race' as an analytical concept in the social sciences. But there is a transatlantic trade in theories of racism and this is now a two-way trade. Some scholars in the USA are not only aware of debates and arguments generated in Europe, including those contributions which question some of the key assumptions that characterise the debate. in the USA Some of these writers have also acknowledged and responded to the criticisms of one of the authors of this paper of the use of the idea of 'race' as an analytical concept and of the way in which the concept of racism has been inflated (e.g. Miles, 1982, 1989, 1993). Recent contributions by Wellman (1993), Blauner (1992), Omi and Winant (1993, 1994) and Goldberg (1993) all refer to and comment on these arguments, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Interestingly, they all seem to ignore the writing of Lieberman and his associates (e.g. Lieberman 1968, Reynolds 1992) in the USA who argue for a position which overlaps in important respects with that outlined here. Goldberg offers perhaps the most complex and thoughtful response in the course of a wide- ranging and, in part, philosophically inspired analysis of contemporary racisms and of the conceptual language required to analyse these racism. His important analysis requires a more extended evalution than is possible in the limited space available here. We have chosen to focus instead on the work of Omi and Winant. This is in part because their writing has already had considerable influence in both the USA and in Britain, partly because of the way in which some of their key concepts have parallels in the equally influential work of Gilroy (1987). And this influence is deserved. There is much to admire and to learn from their theoretical and conceptual innovations. We prefer to employ a concept of racialised formation (rather than racial formation), but we agree that racialised categories are socially created, transformed and destroyed through historical time (1994: 55). We can recognise that it is essential to differentiate between 'race' (although we do not use 'race' as a concept but rather we capture its use in everyday life by referring to the idea of 'race') and the concept of racism, a distintion that allows us to make a further distinction between racialisation and racism (although Omi and Winant refer to this as a distinction between racial awareness and racial essentialism) (compare Omi and Winant 1994: 71 with Miles 1989: 73-84). And we also agree that it is essential to retain the concept of racism (Wellman is simply mistaken when he claims that Miles argues that racism is not a useful concept: 1993: 3) to identify a multiplicity of historically specific racisms, with the consequence that there is 'nothing inherently white about racism' (Omi and Winant 1994: 72; see also 1994: 73 and compare with Miles 1989: 57-60, 1993). It is important to highlight these areas of agreement prior to considering Omi and Winant's defence of the use of the idea of 'race' as an analytical concept in the social sciences in order to indicate both the innovations that they have effected within the discussion in the USA about racism and their failure to pursue the logic of these innovations to their ultimate conclusion. Partly as a result of their emphasis upon the way in which the idea of 'race' has been socially constructed and reconstructed, there is now a debate within the literature in the USA about the theoretical and analytical status of the idea of 'race'. Other scholars in the USA have made important contributions to the development of this debate, notably Lieberman (1968), Fields (1990) and Roediger (1994). Fields' work is especially significant because it reaches a conclusion that is close to that reached by one of the current authors (see Miles 1982, 1993: 27-52). Omi and Winant have criticised Fields' conclusions in the course of defending their continued use of 'race' as analytical concept and it is therefore important to reflect upon the arguments and evidence that they have employed. Omi and Winant offer two criticisms of the position that the idea of 'race' should be analysed exclusively as a social or ideological construct (1993: 5). First, they suggest that it fails to recognise the social impact of the longevity of the concept of 'race'. Second, they claim that, as a result of this longevity, 'race is an almost indissoluble part of our identities', a fact that is not recognised by those who argue that 'race' is an ideological construct. They are mistaken on both counts. The writing of Miles highlights the historical evolution of the meanings attributed to the idea of 'race' and, for example in his discussions of colonialism and of the articulation between racism and nationalism, stresses the way in which the idea of belonging to the 'white race' was central to the construction of the identity of the British bourgeoisie and working class (1982, 1993). Indeed, these claims can be refuted simply by citing a quotation from Fields that Omi and Winant themselves reproduce (1993: 5). Fields writes (1990: 118): Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualise it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and this continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we choose to do now. Thus, Fields certainly does not deny that, in the contemporary world, people use the idea of 'race' to classify themselves and others into social collectivities and act in ways consistent with such a belief, actions which collectively produce structured exclusion. And, hence, Omi and Winant's critique is shown to be vacuous. Fields key objective is to critique the way in which historians invoke the idea of 'race' to construct explanations for events and processes in the past, and her critique applies equally to the work of sociologists such as Omi and Winant who have reinvented and re-ritualised the idea of 'race' to fit their own terrain within the academy (which is after all only one more arena of social life). Let us examine how Omi and Winant reinvent and thereby reify the idea of 'race' in the course of their sociological analysis. Consider the following claim: 'One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is their race' (1994: 59). Elsewhere, they argue that 'To be raceless is akin to being genderless. Indeed, when one cannot identify another's race, a microsociological "crisis of interpretation" results ... ' (1993: 5). How are we to interpret this assertion? While they also claim that 'race is ... a socially constructed way of differentiating human beings' (1994: 65), the former assertion is at the very least open to interpretation as suggesting that 'race' is an objective quality inherent in a person's being, that every human being is a member of a 'race', and that such membership is inscribed in a person's visible appearance. It is in the interstices of such ambiguity that the idea of 'race' as a biological fact does not just 'live on' but is actively recreated by social scientists in the course of their academic practice. This argument commonly stimulates incomprehension on the part of scholars in the USA who echo arguments employed in some critiques of this position in Britain. Thus, it is often said: 'How can you deny analytical status to the idea of race and ultimately the existence of race when blacks and whites are so obviously different and when all the evidence demonstrates that their life chances differ too?' In responding to this question, it is necessary first to problematise what it takes for granted, specifically that the 'black/white' division is obvious. The quality of obviousness is not inherent in a phenomenon, but is the outcome of a social process in the course of which meaning is attributed to the phenomena in a particular historical and social context. The meaning is learnt by those who are its subject and object. They therefore learn to habitually recognise it, and perhaps to pass on this signification and knowledge to others, with the result that the quality of obviousness attributed to the phenomenon is reproduced through historical time and social space. Skin colour is one such phenomenon. Its visibility is not inherent in its existence but is a product of signification: human beings identify skin colour to mark or symbolise other phenomena in a historical context in which other significations occur. When human practices include and exclude people in the light of the signification of skin colour, collective identities are produced and social inequalities are structured. It is for this reason that historical studies of the meanings attributed to skin colour in different historical contexts and through time are of considerable importance. And it is in relation to such studies that one can enquire into the continuities and discontinuities with contemporary processes of signification which sustain the obviousness of skin colour as a social mark. Historically and contemporarily, differences in skin colour have been and are signified as a mark which suggests the existence of different 'races'. But people do not see 'race': rather, they observe certain combinations of real and sometimes imagined somatic and cultural characteristics which they attribute meaning to with the idea of 'race'. A difference of skin colour is not essential to the process of marking: other somatic features can and are signified in order to racialise. Indeed, in some historical circumstances, the absence of somatic difference has been central to the powerful impact of racism: the racialised 'enemy within' can be identified as a threatening presence even more effectively if the group is not 'obviously different' because 'they' can be imagined to be everywhere. Omi and Winant reify this social process and reach the conclusion that all human beings belong to a 'race' because they seek to construct their analytical concepts to reproduce directly the common sense ideologies of the everyday world. Because the idea of 'race' continues to be widely used in everyday life in the USA (and Britain) to classify human beings and to interpret their behaviour, then Omi and Winant believe that social scientists must employ a concept of race. This assumption is the source of our disagreement with them. We argue that one of the contemporary challenges in the analysis of racisms is to develop a conceptual vocabulary that explicitly acknowledges that people use the idea of 'race' in the everyday world while simultaneously refusing to use of the idea of 'race' as an analytical concept when social scientists analyse the discourses and practices of the everyday world. It is not the concept of 'race' that 'continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world' (Omi and Winant 1994: 55) but rather the idea of 'race', and the task of social scientists is to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of this process of structuring and representing which breaks completely with the reified language of biological essentialism. Hence, we object fundamentally to Omi and Winant's project of developing a critical theory of the concept of 'race' (1993: 6-9) because we also recognise the importance of historical context and contingency in the framing of racialised categories and the social construction of racialised experiences (cf. Omi and Winant 1993: 6): we believe that historical context requires us to criticise all concepts of 'race' and this can be done by means of a concept of racialisation. Omi and Winant's defence of the concept of 'race' is a classic example of the way in which the academy in the USA continues to racialise the world. Furthermore, the concept of racialisation employed by Omi and Winant is not fully developed, nor do they use it in a sustained analytical manner, because it is grounded in 'race relations' sociology, a sociology that reifies the notion of 'race' and thereby implies the existence of 'racial groups' as monolithic categories of existence. Additionally, they fail to take into account the impact of the social relations of production within the racialisation process. The authors of this paper advance the position that the process of racialisation takes place and his its effects the context of class and production relations and that the idea of 'race' may indeed not even be explicitly articulated in the racialisation process (see Miles 1989, 1993). Conclusion West begins his first essay in his book Race Matters with a reference to the Los Angeles riots of April 1992. He denies that they were either a 'race riot or a class rebellion'. Rather, he continues (1994: 3-4): ... this monumental upheaval was a multi-racial, trans-class, and largely male display of social rage ... Of those arrested, only 36 percent were black, more than a third had full- time jobs, and most claimed to shun political affiliation. What we witnessed in Los Angeles was the consequence of a lethal linkage of economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy in American life. Race was the visible catalyst, not the underlying cause. And he concludes by claiming that the meaning of the riots is obscured because we are trapped by the narrow framework imposed by the dominant views of 'race' in the USA. The Los Angeles Times Opinion Editor, Jack Miles, rendered a different version of the narrow framework of the 'black/white' dichotomy. In an essay in the October 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled 'Blacks vs Browns', Miles suggested that Latinos were taking jobs that the nation, by dint of the historic crimes committed against them, owed to African-Americans. He blamed Latinos for the poverty in African-American communities - a gross misattribution of responsibility - while reinforcing 'race' as a relevant category of social and analytical value. His confusion was revealing: the `two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal' dichotomy made famous by the 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders cannot provide an analytical framework to deconstruct the post-Fordist racialised social relations of the 1990s. The meaning of West's argument is constructed by what is not said as much as what is. There is a silence about the definition of 'race riot': what would have had to have happened for the events to be classified as a matter of 'race'. Presumably, the events of April 1992 would have been a 'race riot' if the principal actors had been 'blacks' and 'whites'. Hence, West refers to 'race' only as the visible catalyst: Rodney King was 'obviously black' and the policmen who arrested him were 'obviously white'. But the riots themselves did not fit the 'race relations' paradigm because the rioters and those who became the victims of the riot were not exclusively 'blacks' and 'whites'. Indeed, as the media were framing the events of April 1992 in 'black/white' terms in the great melodrama of 'race relations', the first image across the airwaves was of men atop a car waving the Mexican flag! Thus, 'Hispanic' may signify presumptively as 'white' in the ethno-'racial' dynamics that rest on a system of neat racialised categories, but this has little to do with the popular understanding and experience of Latinos. The outcome of such practices has led to superficial analysis of the full impact of the riots within the context of a changing political economy. The analytical task is therefore to explain the complex nature of the structural changes associated with the emergence of the post-Fordist socio-economic landscape and the reconfigured city's racialised social relations. Perhaps half of the businesses looted or burned were owned by Korean-Americans and another third or so were owned by Mexican-Americans/Latinos and Cuban-Americans. Those engaged in the looting and burning certainly included Afro-Americans, but poor, recent and often undocumented immigrants and refugees from Mexico and Central America were equally prominent. Of those arrested, 51% were Latinos and 36% were African-Americans. And, of those who died in the civil unrest, about half were African-Americans and about a third were Latinos. All this is only surprising if one begins with the assumption that the events were or could have been 'race riots'. Such an assumption is problematic for two reasons. First, academics, media reporters and politicians 'conspired' to use the vocabulary of 'race' to make sense of the Los Angeles riots because it is a central component of everyday common sense discourse in the USA. And, when it became overwhelmingly apparent that it was not a 'black/white' riot, the language of 'race' was nevertheless unthinkingly retained by means of a switch to the use of the notion of 'multi-racial' in order to encompass the diversity of historical and cultural origins of the participants and victims. Thus, while the 'race relations' paradigm was dealt a serious blow by the reality of riots, the vocabulary of 'race' was retained. But, and here we find the source of West's unease, the idea of 'race' is so firmly embedded in common sense that it cannot easily encompass a reference to 'Koreans' or 'Hispanics' or 'Latinos' for these are neither 'black' nor 'white'. It is thus not surprising that pundits and scholars such as West stumble over 'racial' ambiguity. The clash of racialised language with a changing political economy presents challenges for scholars and activists alike. Second, if one had begun with an analysis grounded simultaneously in history and political economy rather than with the supremely ideological notion of 'race relations', one would have quickly concluded that the actors in any riot in central Los Angeles would probably be ethnically diverse. Large-scale inward migration from Mexico and Central America and from south east Asia into California has coincided with a restructuring of the California economy, the loss of major manufacturing jobs and large-scale internal migration within the urban sprawl of 'greater' Los Angeles, with the consequence that the spatial, ethnic and class structure that underlay the Watts riots of 1965 had been transformed into a much more complex set of relationships. The most general conditions were structural in nature, and thus the decline and shift in the manufacturing base in Los Angeles was not unique but represented a shift in the mode of capital accumulation worldwide (Fordist to Flexible). 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