The Racial Order 022625349X, 9780226253497, 9780226253527, 9780226253664

Citation preview

The Racial Order

The Racial Order m u s ta fa e m i r bay e r a n d m at t h e w d e s m o n d

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Mustafa Emirbayer is professor of sociology at the University of  Wisconsin– Madison. Matthew Desmond is assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard University. Together, they are the authors of Race in America, a companion to this volume. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­25349-­7 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­25352-­7 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­25366-­4 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226253664.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Emirbayer, Mustafa, author. The racial order / Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-­0-­226-­25349-­7 (cloth : alk. paper) —­isbn 978-­0-­226-­25352-­7 (pbk. : alk. paper) —­isbn 978-­0-­226-­25366-­4 (e-­book)  1. Race.  2. Race relations.  3. United States—­Race relations.  I. Desmond, Matthew, author.  II. Title. ht1521.e48 2015 305.800973—­dc23 2014041072 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

for anne

Contents

1  A New Theoretical Framework for Race Scholarship

1

part i  Reflexivity 2  Race and Reflexivity

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part ii  Relationality 3  The Structures of the Racial Order

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4  The Dynamics of the Racial Order

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5  Interactions, Institutions, and Interstices

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6  The Social Psychology of the Racial Order

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part iii  Reconstruction 7  Race and Reconstruction

285

8  Summary and Implications for Race Scholarship

333

Acknowledgments  361 Notes  363 Index  457

ARVIRAGUS Are we not brothers? IMOGEN So man and man should be, But clay and clay differs in dignity, Whose dust is both alike. w i l l i a m s h a k e s p e a r e , Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2

1

A New Theoretical Framework for Race Scholarship

There never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race. In more than a century of modern race scholarship, many impressive efforts in that direction have been undertaken, but all have contributed something other than a comprehensive and systematic theory. For instance, in a remarkable body of work spanning poetry, fiction, autobiography, topical commentaries, historical monographs, ethnography, and several collections of essays, W. E. B. Du Bois examined a vast range of issues having to do with race in America and, along the way, opened up multiple lines of theorization and empirical research still being developed today. Not even he, however, was analytically consistent and systematic—­one strains to impose systematicity on so many disparate insights and arguments—­and his perspective kept evolving over an immensely long and fruitful career, one extending over seven decades.1 Other influential scholars—­ one thinks, for example, of twentieth-­ century sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox—­ theorized race mid-­ in a more systematic fashion yet hardly were comprehensive; moreover, as a neo-­Marxist, Cox paid little heed to the many dimensions of racial life itself, choosing to reduce it analytically to the level of class dynamics.2 His contemporary, Gunnar Myrdal, compiled a massive study of virtually every important aspect of race in the United States, yet his work, more a compendium of findings by a team of social researchers than an endeavor in original race theorizing, fell well short of providing a rigorous analytic approach.3 Frantz Fanon offered brilliant insights into the social psychology of race, but these insights largely were psychoanalytic in inspiration; like Cox, he sought to reduce racial phenomena to some other underlying principle. Several generations of Chicago School sociologists, extending well into midcentury and beyond, also had a great deal to say about racial topics. But while their work,

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including Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s notion of a race relations cycle, was imbued with a pragmatist sensibility and with numerous insights from sociological theory, its strengths lay more at the level of middle-­range theorizing.4 More recently, Michael Omi and Howard Winant have attempted to engage in rigorous theory building in respect to race.5 Yet, while producing useful concepts for understanding race, such as “racial projects” and “racial formation,” their influential efforts have represented only a first step toward an encompassing theory of racial domination and racial progress.6 Race scholarship, meanwhile, has produced an impressive array of empirical investigations. In recent years, especially, some of the most empirically sound and policy-­relevant findings in all of social science have belonged to the field of race studies. Much of this work has been highly rigorous. If there is methodological advancement in the social sciences, a new statistical method or in-­depth interviewing technique, one can rest assured it soon will be employed in the service of racial inquiry. Nor has there been a problem of volume or mass—­that is, of scholarly productivity. Empirical studies of race—­ethnographic and historical, but especially statistical—­have appeared in prodigious quantities. In both the core disciplines and the interstitial spaces of ethnic and cultural studies, inquiries have been undertaken from almost every conceivable point of view, bringing to light broad social and economic trends, cultural meanings, and political dynamics. Substantive issues including neighborhood effects, segmented assimilation, labor market discrimination, residential segregation, immigration, mass incarceration, racial movements, stereotyping, whiteness, hybridity, oppositional culture, and the intersections of race with gender and class all have been addressed.7 In the grand style of landmark works such as The Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois) and The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki), which dominated the sociological scene at the dawn of the last century, or Black Metropolis (St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton) and An American Dilemma (Gunnar Myrdal) at midcentury, some of the most in­ fluential major works of the last few decades also have dealt squarely with racial tensions and inequalities—­such works as American Apartheid (Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton), Still the Promised City? (Roger Waldinger), and the famous trilogy by William Julius Wilson: The Declining Significance of Race, The Truly Disadvantaged, and When Work Disappears.8 Add to these a small library of other monographs and articles—­more are generated with each passing year—­and the conclusion is unmistakable: the sociology of race is flourishing. Putting together race scholarship’s theoretical thinness and its empirical richness, we arrive at the problem that drives the present work: from the

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very start, and in recent decades more than ever, there has been a grossly uneven development of theory and research in race studies and an ensuing (and predictable) decoupling of one from the other. The ceaseless production of empirical work has not proceeded apace with the building of comprehensive and systematic theories. Despite the outpouring of empirical research, there have been no comparable advances at the level of theoretical insight. Indeed, the currently most influential wide-­ranging theoretical statement on race—­Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States—­appeared more than a quarter century ago. Among the many explanations for this disparity between empirical efflorescence and theoretical atrophy, especially in recent years, one is especially telling. The shift from openly violent to more hidden forms of racism has given rise to congratulatory shouts (most, but not all, emanating from the public sphere) that race no longer is a defining feature of American society. This, in turn, has resulted in a surge of voices from the social sciences arguing otherwise. Accordingly, race studies have moved from analyses of how race works (as in Black Metropolis) to demonstrations that racial inequality or discrimination continue to exist (as in studies that “test” for discrimination and conclude more or less as follows: “This study has shown that race matters in fill in the blank: politics, voting patterns, housing discrimination, etc.”).9 Much of our best work no longer tells us how to understand or reconstruct racial dynamics but simply gives us concrete proof of their continuing significance. A few sociologists do take as their interlocutors not those in the public sphere who speak of an era “beyond race” but other critical-­minded scholars of race.10 Yet those sociologists seeking to point out the lacunae in current research trends fail to develop superior ways of conceptualizing race and the racial order. Their contribution is less the generation of new theories than it is the criticism of existing scholarship. Social thinkers—­and the public—­are left with no clear alternative language in which theoretically to articulate and systematically to address racial concerns. The yawning gap between theoretical inquiry and empirical research is so pervasive that it has come to be viewed by analysts of all persuasions as natural and unproblematic. The “theorist” and the “empiricist” (artificial labels to which social thinkers have resigned themselves without much protest) can labor in relative isolation from one another, as if belonging to different disciplines entirely, and when forced to confront each other’s work, as during a tenure review or some keynote address, often can experience confusion or frustration (and sometimes awe) but rarely familiarity or fraternity. Such an arrangement, one that would scandalize most natural scientists, literary critics, or mathematicians, now is widely accepted in race studies simply as the order of things. But this theory/research gap—­a “social division of scientific

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labor,” as Pierre Bourdieu would have it, “which splits, reifies, and compartmentalizes moments of the process of construction of the sociological object into separate specialties”11—­is not innocent of consequences. It leads, for one, to fractionalization, which impedes the circulation of ideas and promotes the shrinking of research questions. It leads, for another, to misleading assumptions about the nature of social reality, perhaps the most insidious of these being substantialism, a way of thinking that snaps apart the totality of interconnected race relations and treats racial groups, in Eric Wolf ’s words, as “internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects,” like so many different plant varieties.12 Assumptions of this sort seep quietly into the academic unconscious of empirical race scholarship until they function like a kind of implicit theory. As Talcott Parsons recognized, every mode of thought, even that presenting itself as raw positivism, necessarily relies on some kind of theory. “All empirically verifiable knowledge,” he wrote, “even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life—­involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory. . . . The fact [that] a person denies that he is theorizing is no reason for taking him at his word and [for] failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.” Parsons drove the point home by quoting Alfred Marshall: “The most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves.”13 Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of the decoupling of theory from empirical research, however, has been a gradual loss of scholarly energy and dynamism in race scholarship. To use the words of Clifford Geertz, race studies today finds itself in a state of “general stagnation,” pursuing “minor variations on classical theoretical themes” (e.g., inequality, discrimination, institutional racism) and small modifications to well-­known hypotheses (e.g., segmented assimilation, spatial mismatch), each study another brick added to a long road trailing off into the darkness, leading, we hope, to some unknown destination.14 We find ourselves pursuing relatively similar questions, even if in different spheres of life (e.g., the political, economic, aesthetic, intimate), and generating important facts but rarely big new ideas. To a large degree, race scholarship has become the stuff of normal science. “Empirical inference,” John Dewey wrote in How We Think, “follows the grooves and ruts that custom wears, and has no track to follow when the groove disappears. . . . Passivity, docility, acquiescence, come to be primal intellectual virtues. Facts and events presenting novelty and variety are slighted, or are sheared down till they fit into the Procrustean bed of habitual belief.”15 When social inquiry is at its best, we arrive face-­to-­face with the novel by sliding down the curve of a question mark. Yet the seemingly simple act of asking new questions, which is not the same thing as applying old questions to new

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settings or problems, often does not appear to our mind’s eye as a possibility, so busy are we with the everyday work of routine, conventional research. “Theory,” to quote Parsons once more, “not only formulates what we know but also tells us what we want to know, that is, the questions to which an answer is needed.”16 But without a comprehensive and systematic theory of race, new questions remain in the shadows just beyond the peripheries of our collective vision. “There are problems,” Bourdieu and his colleagues once wrote, “that sociologists fail to pose because the tradition of the discipline does not recognize them as worthy of being posed or does not offer the conceptual tools or the techniques that would make it possible to treat them in canonical fashion; and conversely, there are questions they feel bound to pose because they rank high in the consecrated hierarchy of research subjects.”17 A race scholarship divorced from theory does not enable us to cope with the novel. And if it throws no light on the novel, then empirical race scholarship—­however sound its methods, correct its findings, or relevant its implications—­is in danger of becoming irrelevant, of speeding off in one direction while the whole world goes in another. For, undeniably, something new has emerged. Today we find ourselves in a remarkable historical moment, attempting to make sense of a nation tossed about violently by the push-­pull of racial domination and racial progress, one beset by racial contradictions and paradoxes. Barack Obama was elected president in a country that imprisons more of its citizens than any other, the incarceration rate of poor black men soaring high above the national average. Astounding racial pro­g­ ress has been documented at the individual level (consider that, merely forty years ago, a near majority of Americans favored a ban on interracial marriage), while, at the social level, racial inequality remains entrenched (consider the degree to which our cities remain starkly segregated). One Native American nation flourishes while another sinks deeper into poverty. Latinos have moved closer to the center while anti-­immigrant sentiment and a spirit of “opportunity hoarding,” to use Charles Tilly’s powerful term, stretches the length of the southern border.18 And as more African Americans ascend the socioeconomic ladder, making significant inroads in business, politics, science, and art, millions more slip further into despair. Perhaps most perplexingly, politicians and citizens alike promote multiculturalism today and xenophobia tomorrow, cosmopolitanism in some respects and jingoism in others, tolerance for some people or practices and prejudice for others. Much overt racism still exists, while a new racism of today is more intangible, invisible, and insidious. This quieter, more subtle racism often is described as the emblematic form of racial domination in our age, yet there is nothing particularly quiet, subtle, or invisible about the staggering racial disparities

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along the poverty line or within the criminal justice system. Racial dynamics continue to permeate all domains of contemporary life, from the intimate realm to that of large-­scale institutional structures. And they bring with them new uncertainties in interpersonal life, workplace relations, and public policy. The problems and uncertainties we face, however, are not merely those of the past few decades. While much has changed, much also remains the same, and the continuities in our racial life—­in its structures and dynamics, not to mention its social psychology—­are every bit as noteworthy as the disjunctures. Indeed, the very opposition between permanance and change in our racial life is misleading. Historical invariants we need also to understand, relative constancies, beneath the visible transformations that have occurred (not all for the better). Orlando Patterson has termed this “the puzzle of persistence.”19 How has racial division endured for so long? And how has this cultural arbitrary come to appear so natural and eternal? To paraphrase Bourdieu, “One should not try to deny the permanences and the invariants, which are indisputably part of historical reality; but, rather, one must reconstruct the history of the historical labor of dehistoricization, or, to put it another way, the history of the continuous (re)creation of the objective and subjective structures of [racial] domination, which has gone on permanently so long as there have been [races], and through which the [racial] order has been continuously reproduced from age to age. . . . Posing the question in those terms [can] mark an advance in the order of knowledge which can be the basis of a decisive advance in the order of action.”20 Thus far at least, race scholars have yet to elaborate a system of concepts or a research agenda fully adequate to such an ambitious endeavor. More than a generation after the Civil Rights Movement, we continue to lack a clear and unitary conceptual language for discussing race. Whether as citizens in the public sphere, politicians inside the Beltway, or scholars in the ivory tower, we find ourselves unable to gain analytic leverage on the deeper meanings and significance of the commingling of racial domination and racial progress. Now more than ever, we need a conceptual framework in which to think and talk about such issues and developments.21 As Winant has written, “We are in a quandary, we sociologists of race. . . . No new sociological paradigm of race has appeared in quite some time, as the field struggles—­and the nation . . . struggles—­with the ongoing racial crisis of the post–­civil rights . . . era. The old has died, but the new cannot be born.”22 To the extent that race scholars do take up theoretical questions, recent contributions have been concerned less with the overall workings of the racial order than with adding to what might be termed “empirical theory,” the accumulation of “explanatory statements at a high level of generality.”23 Such

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relatively circumscribed—­or, in academic jargon, middle-­range—­theories reflect the triumph of specialization and fragmentation in today’s academy, a trend that, while certainly fruitful in some respects (we would not have been able to write the present work without it, and we seek to push forward from it and not to repudiate it), is not conducive to the elaboration of broad theoretical perspectives. These studies might be understandable as a reaction to the grand theorizing of a Talcott Parsons. But as philosophers Pierre Duhem and W. V. O. Quine noted long ago, in what now is known as the Quine-­Duhem thesis, it is systems of concepts that face the empirical test in science, not particular, isolated propositions or sets of hypotheses.24 Scientific progress is much like “a symbolic painting in which continual retouching gives greater comprehensiveness and unity[,] . . . whereas each detail of this picture, cut off and isolated from the whole, loses all meaning and no longer represents anything.”25 A more fundamental approach to understanding the racial order is needed. We shall have more to say about analytically focused, middle-­range analyses—­and their relation to our own efforts—­later in this chapter. We do not mean to leave the wrong impression. At the risk of reifying an artificial division to shore up the point, we stress that the problem primarily does not belong to the empiricists but to the theorists. For decades now, the empiricists have done their job expertly and proficiently, and we rely heavily on their work in this volume. It is the theorists who are responsible for the lopsided development of race scholarship and the consequences of this imbalance. It is we who have lagged behind in race studies, even as exciting and fruitful theoretical advances have taken place in other areas of the social sciences, including the blossoming of relational sociology, the pragmatist revival, the cultural turn, and the international dissemination of Bourdieu’s work, to name but a few recent developments of major importance. We do not seek here to dismiss or to criticize empirical sociology. Nor do we wish to preside over a remarriage of theory and research so much as to “cause them to interpenetrate each other entirely,” as Dewey would have it. What is needed is not less empirical work but more theoretical labor, more theoretically driven empiricism and empirically grounded theory, “a conjoint process of analysis and synthesis,” the former bringing “the added factor of certainty or proof,” the latter “accounting for the ability to cope with the novel and variable.”26 Like an architect working with the most up-­to-­date tools but no blueprint, the typical race scholar today employs technically cutting-­edge methodological devices but far less advanced theoretical ones. The new systematic and comprehensive theory of race of which we speak must be informed by and in turn designed to inform empirical scholarship; it must be a blueprint, a map, that weaves together theoretical advances with empirical work and

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that unifies the increasingly splintered field of race studies, exposing and correcting the often-­unspoken mistaken assumptions of current modes of thought, posing new questions and opening up new lines of research, and preparing us to comprehend novelty and permanence alike in racial life. It also must break at turns with intellectual customs that have come to define contemporary race scholarship. For, as Geertz also noted, it is only by abandoning “that sweet sense of accomplishment which comes from parading habitual skills and address[ing] ourselves to problems sufficiently unclarified as to make discovery possible” that we can hope to gain a deeper understanding of complex and intangible, frustrating yet familiar, fluid yet fixed objects of study—­objects such as the American racial order.27 Theoretical Touchstones One of the touchstones of The Racial Order is the truth of American pragmatism. By this, we mean the ideas of Dewey in particular, but also the works of other pragmatist thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, and Du Bois himself.28 The writings of these classical pragmatists deeply influenced early American sociology and, more recently, have been at the heart of what is being termed a pragmatist revival.29 In the pragmatist way of thinking, social life entails engagement with obstacles to effective action. It requires the exercise of intelligence, or practice informed by knowledge and good judgment and carried out in an open-­ended, experimentalist spirit. Addressing perplexing or unsettled situations, intelligent action effects their creative reconstruction and seeks out a richer and more inclusive experience. One deeply problematic situation today, of course, is that of the color line. The classical American pragmatists themselves did at best an uneven job of addressing its many challenges. Peirce, James, and Mead had little to contribute to the analysis of race as such. By virtue of  her work in the settlement movement, Addams was confronted in a more practical way by racial challenges, but she hardly engaged with them intellectually in a sustained or systematic fashion. And Dewey devoted little attention to the issue in his voluminous writings and, whenever he did, conceptualized it in reductionist fashion as a “sign” or “symbol” of external political or economic forces, “bear[ing] much the same relation to the actual forces which cause [racial] friction that a national flag bears to the emotions and activities which it symbolizes, condensing them into visible and tangible form.”30 Only Locke and Du Bois faced the complexities of race directly and tried to grapple with them, although they also were the

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social thinkers perhaps most distant from the mainstream of the pragmatist tradition.31 The pragmatist tradition did, however—­and still does—­provide important guidance for students of the racial order. It contributes insights, articulated most powerfully by Dewey, into the habitual and dispositional nature of action, the logic of problem solving, the link between experimentalism and creative democracy, and the ideal of growth. It seeks also to overcome the age-­old divide between theory and practice and to return to the world of concrete experience. It champions, throughout, an eminently relational way of thinking, one that regards engagements between subject and object, mind and world, as transactions rather than static oppositions. And it leads us to reconsider prevailing modes of racial analysis and to gain a newfound appreciation for the logic of racialized practices. Pragmatism’s insights have made themselves felt throughout the twentieth-­century history of social thought. Influential in the rich tradition of Chicago-­style urban ethnography initiated by Thomas and Znaniecki and in the current of symbolic interactionism originating in the early work, some of it on race, of Herbert Blumer, they further were developed in midcentury by Du Bois, the pragmatist Marxist Sidney Hook, and the hard-­hitting critical sociologist C. Wright Mills.32 And they have been picked up yet again in the recent pragmatist revival in sociology and social thought more generally, in works by Hans Joas in Germany; Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot in France; and Nancy Fraser and Cornel West in the United States.33 We ourselves draw on that tradition in The Racial Order, in ways we outline in greater detail below. However, a second great tradition of sociological inquiry also has inspired us, one whose founder, Émile Durkheim, himself was a contemporary of the classical American pragmatists. Later contributors to that tradition, including Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Jeffrey Alexander, not to mention Pierre Bourdieu, rank among the most creative and seminal figures in twentieth-­century social thought.34 The Durkheimian tradition provides illuminating ways to think about issues central to the racial order. Indeed, as Karen Fields has pointed out, some of its key ideas probably emerged in the very crucible of racial conflict, Durkheim likely having witnessed anti-­Semitic rallies at a young age in his native Alsace, unsettling events that may have inspired his notion of totemic identification (and blood as a carrier of totemic essence) and, of course, his idea of collective ef­ fervescence.35 These two crucial contributions, in fact—­theories of symbolic (racial) classification and of the sacralization of (racialized) practices; or, more briefly, of cultural structures and ritual process—­form the basis of

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much of our analyses of the symbolic dimensions of race. They open the door to a comparative and historical sociology of symbolic, including racial, boundary making and the attendant processes of racial inclusion and exclusion, as well as to an investigation of how racial differences are naturalized.36 (Durkheim makes a powerful argument for the relative autonomy of the symbolic order vis-­à-­vis social relations. On this score as well, we closely follow his thinking.37) More relevant still to our purposes, Durkheim allows us to think of race itself as a collective representation: race is real because it is socially real, not because it is biological. Indeed, race is historically real, in the sense of being a cultural structure historically sedimented in both our social institutions and our personal dispositions. Such insights set Durkheimian sociology well apart from spontaneous, commonsense ways of thinking about history, society, and the individual. Indeed, Durkheim explicitly called on sociologists to effect a critical break with the “prenotions” that distort our thinking as scholars and as citizens.38 Nowhere is this more important than in the study of race, where prenotions decisively shape our relations to the object of study—­and in ways we often hardly realize. In works such as Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim distanced himself from unexamined, commonplace definitions and used the process of carving out his alternative definition as a model for how methodically and scientifically to construct an object.39 In approaching our own object, that of race, we follow a similar path. In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim also showed how to develop a comprehensive theorization of a complex phenomenon, breaking it down into its “elementary,” constitutive features. Our own approach, to be sure, differs in some respects from his. For one thing, it does not see race as an “eternal” structure, as Durkheim deemed religion; nor does it seek to locate its origins in an archaic or premodern civilization. Rather, it stresses the temporal and spatial specificities of race, even as it regards race as a social formation that has been rendered unhistorical. For another thing, it does not direct equal attention to racial formations in all points in time and space; as our opening remarks indicate, our keenest interest is in the American racial order. However, our approach does at least aim to generate the lineaments of a broad and encompassing framework for racial inquiry. It seeks to provide in a single work concepts and modes of thinking needed for an illuminating sociology of race. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms constitutes for us a crucial reference point as we pursue that ambitious goal. Neither of the above two traditions, however—­those of Dewey and Durkheim—­provides a fully satisfactory model for thinking about the racial order or about the dynamics and mechanisms of its reproduction. For a third

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and final major touchstone to The Racial Order, we turn to yet another source, one that subsumes many of the key insights of both Deweyan and Durkheimian ways of thinking. We speak here of Bourdieu, inheritor to Durkheim of the grand tradition of French sociology and, at least in the deep structure of his thought, a figure also highly resonant with pragmatist ideas.40 Bourdieu’s sociology revolves around a small number of profound insights into the logic of practical action (recalling pragmatism) and the importance of symbolic classification struggles (recalling Durkheim). It adds to these insights a keen interest in “fields of practice,” Bourdieu’s term for the spaces or microcosms within which practical action and conflicts over symbolic systems unfold; it adds as well a concern with systems of dispositions, modes of perception, and patterns of thought and feeling—­he calls them “habitus”—­that generate the strategies through which actors engage in their field-­specific struggles. From this sociological perspective comes a deep concern with questions of power and conflict. One might say it adds to our work a critical dimension similar to that which Max Weber’s political sociology of domination added to Mills’s pragmatism.41 Like Dewey and Durkheim, Bourdieu had little to say in systematic terms about racial fields or habitus, an important absence in his work. Although in his early writings he theorized colonialism as (in part) a system of racial domination, he devoted most of his analytic attention to class rather than to race.42 But in what follows, we seek, in Bourdieuian fashion (and while building on a growing body of analogous work in race studies), generatively to extend his method of analysis from the many fields of practice he did discuss to the study of the racial order.43 Perhaps the deepest of Bourdieu’s contributions was his lifelong exploration of reflexivity. Repeatedly, he stressed, as had Durkheim before him, the importance of turning the instruments of social-­scientific objectification back upon the subjects of objectification themselves—­the scholars engaged in systematic inquiry—­so as to free their work of presuppositions that otherwise might limit their scope and value. Here we generatively apply Bourdieu’s insights, warnings, and injunctions regarding reflexivity to the field of race studies and, ultimately, to our own work. For help in that endeavor, we benefit from social science research that deploys some of the most advanced methods and instruments of its day, in a long and distinguished line stretching from Du Bois’s pioneering inquiries at the turn of the last century to the aforementioned classics of more recent times.44 We also learn from a wide range of contemporary currents in race, gender, and postcolonial theory.45 Finally, we draw on essayists, social commentators, and literary figures who, in a different way, have sought to liberate the study of race from self-­limiting and narrowing assumptions.46 All these sources help us to pursue the regulative

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ideal of a social science that advances through hard-­won victories in reflexive and critical analysis. Only by such a path, we believe (with Bourdieu), can it approach the goal of generating telling and challenging insights into our social (and racial) world. Contributions and Limitations Having set forth the important touchstones of our overall theoretical argument, let us offer now a few added remarks to clarify the nature and limits of our contribution. In contrast to the previous section, where we described the positive aspirations of our project, here we concern ourselves with demarcating in negative terms what it does not aim to do. To begin with, drawing inspiration from the various sources mentioned above does not commit us to the view that all converge on the same theoretical position. We do not deny that the three tendencies we highlight—­Deweyan pragmatism, the Durkheimian tradition, and Bourdieuian sociology—­were constructed in very different ways in relation to Western philosophy, the Deweyan and Bourdieuian strains at variance with the dualistic current running from Descartes to Kant (and beyond) and Durkheimian sociology itself an extension of that current. Nor do we deny that, in many instances, these tendencies of thought stand in considerable tension with one another, if not outright opposition. By no means do these tendencies flow together seamlessly and without conflict or contradiction. Durkheim was a severe critic of pragmatist philosophy, Bourdieu drew as much on Marx and Weber as he did on Durkheim, and Dewey surely would have been at odds with Bourdieu’s stress on determination and constraint, not to mention also his underdeveloped theory of democracy. Not surprisingly, moreover, symbolic interactionism, deeply influenced by pragmatism’s action-­theoretic orientation, sits uncomfortably with Bourdieu’s strong emphasis on structural compulsion. Since Bourdieu’s passing, French social theory has moved noticeably in the direction of pragmatism—­and away from what the French call “critique,” leading in turn to new attempts to reconcile the two. Boltanski, a former student of, and collaborator with, Bourdieu, first broke with the latter’s “critical sociology” and, together with Thevenot, embraced pragmatist ideas in their masterwork, On Justification. More recently, he has sought (in terms still less than clearly formulated) to bring pragmatism and critique together.47 We do not fail to recognize, moreover, that within each tendency there are significant internal variations. Traditions of thought never are entirely unified. Within the pragmatist tradition, for instance, James’s subjectivism and individualism do not sit well with Dewey’s more objectivistic and

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collectivistic approach. Charles Horton Cooley’s close linkage of collective and individual disorganization is at odds with Thomas and Znaniecki’s explicit decoupling of the two. Du Bois’s efforts at race theorization and research proceeded along quite separate lines from those of the early Chicago School, due in considerable part to the close biographical and intellectual connections between Park and Booker T. Washington, Du Bois’s chief nemesis and target within the world of black politics.48 Within the Durkheimian tradition, some have further developed the Elementary Forms’s ritual theory; others selectively have focused on its theory of symbolic classification. Alexander has modified the conceptualization of “profane” in that latter theory to include “evil” and “pollution” under its aegis. With time, there doubtless will emerge (more) fissures within the Bourdieuian tendency as well. As we discuss in greater detail below, our own undertaking is best conceived of, accordingly, as a creative drawing together of disparate and sometimes divergent, even internally divergent, currents. It also is important to note that our endeavor draws as well, sometimes extensively, on social-­scientific traditions as different from one another as psychoanalysis, social network theory, ethnomethodology, and even structural functionalism. These also do not see eye to eye in every instance on substantive or theoretical issues. We do not always, in every phase of our discussion, give equal weight to our three guiding thinkers and theoretical orientations. Our focus on Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu is meant only as a simplication—­for purposes of exposition—­of a considerably more complex and multifaceted theoretical picture. At various points in our argument, we accord one or another of the approaches or traditions mentioned above greater emphasis than the rest. We refer most often in this work to Bourdieu (including in the next chapter on reflexivity—­always Bourdieu’s forte), not only because his contributions to social thought are the most recent and, accordingly, the most in touch with substantive and theoretical problems to which we ourselves wish to respond, but also because in his life’s work there came together several of the themes we also draw on from Dewey and Durkheim. However, the latter two figures—­and the traditions coming out of them—­also appear throughout the work, to such an extent that this volume could be deemed just as much a pragmatist or a Durkheimian work as a Bourdieuian one. We are not concerned to follow a specific master or to work out the implications of one or another research program, as some in the philosophy of science would call on us to do.49 Notwithstanding the view that scientific progress entails first “defin[ing] certain hard core postulates” to be accepted “by convention,” then defending the “research program” built around them “by introducing auxiliary theories that expand the explanatory power of the core postulates,” we

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hold that an inclusive, pragmatically open, cross-­fertilizing approach is what most is needed at the present time.50 It is this approach that Dewey himself pursued—­and Durkheim—­and Bourdieu. Concerned as we are with reconstructing race theory, we do not discuss the methodology of race scholarship in any systematic way. Issues such as the opposition between quantitative and qualitative approaches do not receive consideration here. Of course, it is inevitable that, in the study of race, issues of a methodological nature continually should arise. We discuss them briefly in chapter 8. Our stance in respect to them is to stress the same spirit of creative problem solving we also deem crucial to theoretical innovation. Race scholarship ought always to deploy the most advanced instruments of social science in addressing its substantive concerns, allowing the question to determine the method, not the other way around. Total sociology is our motto: by all means necessary.51 That also would be in the spirit of Dewey himself, who was nothing if not experimentalist in his approach; or of Durkheim, who produced work using both statistical (Suicide) and historical (The Evolution of Educational Thought) modes of inquiry; or of Bourdieu, who never ceased to bemoan the academic division of labor that gives rise to pointless methodological disputes or to criticize the disastrous tendency to fetishize specific techniques, alluding at one point to the “monomaniacs of log-­linear modeling.”52 (The principle of methodological pluralism, he suggested—­and can this really be denied?—­may widely be accepted in today’s scholarly community, but it remains only occasionally followed in practice, with most researchers preferring instead to stick to their signature research techniques.) This does not mean that the relational way of thinking we develop here does not bear an elective affinity to certain methodological approaches, such as social network studies and relational ethnography, or that it does not lead us to question certain others, such as variable-­based methods.53 But even with respect to multivariate approaches, it is perfectly appropriate, in our view—­ not to mention often quite useful—­to pursue a strategic regressionism not dissimilar to the strategic essentialism now widely embraced at the level of political practice.54 The point throughout is to address problems in an “all hands on deck” spirit, attending to them in whichever way might be necessary for getting the job done. The present volume is focused squarely on theoretical concerns; it does not provide an empirical interpretation of how race works in the different life spheres of contemporary society.55 It is not a substantive work in that regard. We take on the question of how race, in all its analytic dimensions, is to be investigated. As indicated at the start of this chapter, we build a theoretical

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framework within which to think and talk about the workings of our racial order. Despite the intuitive appeal of providing some kind of empirical problem as our point of reference or touchstone—­that is, some specific, concrete illustrative example to which continually to return—­it makes little sense for us to do so given the far-­reaching theoretical aims of this work. As will become clear, no particular substantive example, no matter now complex or multifaceted, would suffice. Instead of a running confrontation with some singular problem, we are careful to provide many empirical examples all along the way to illustrate our analytic reasoning. This is not to say we do not engage throughout with problem solving; the opening section of this chapter was concerned specifically with delineating the theoretical object of this work. It is only to suggest that our problem-­solving endeavors do not revolve around some singular empirical object. Nor would it be helpful, for similar reasons, to frame this work as some kind of grand hypothesis-­testing venture, with our theoretical framework pitted against an array of alternative approaches in some sort of test of its analytic power or effectiveness. Such an organizational format again would presume there is a singular, specifiable empirical problem to be addressed. We offer at many junctures not only theoretical but also empirical arguments on behalf of the different elements in our comprehensive framework. The present volume is not concerned exclusively with American racial life. To be sure, our theoretical framework is replete with illustrative examples from the present-­day American context. We hew close to the empirical materials we know best. We speak often of “our” racial order or of “our” contemporary racial life. However, our theoretical approach is meant to apply not only to the United States but also to a wide range of other national (as well as subnational) terrains, whether in Latin America or in Western Europe, in sub-­ Saharan Africa or in the Caribbean. Although we do not assume that “race” existed always and everywhere—­“race” actually is a phenomenon secondary to ethnicity, logically as well as chronologically, as we discuss in greater detail in chapter 2—­we do proceed from the notion that, after the so-­called “Age of Discovery” and of European expansion, and after Europeans extended colonial rule over much of the rest of the world (a process coterminous with the rise of Western modernity and of modern social thought, which partly re­ flected and partly was constitutive of that development), a global racial order came into being that organized social relations, symbolic classifications, and even collective emotions in terms of a white/nonwhite polarity. We recognize that this global racialization of ethnicity received a different inflection in each specific spatial locale (different in the United States, for instance, than

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in Brazil), but we also affirm that in every instance it evinced certain shared, essential features. And we direct our analytic attention to the phenomena of this global racial order, providing a new way of conceptualizing fundamental regularities in racial life, providing, that is, an approach that can be adapted in creative and generative spirit to the particularities of many different racial settings.56 (Our approach also can shed indirect light on other questions of ethnic conflict, given the close relation between ethnicity and race.) It will be useful to recall that Bourdieu’s Distinction, despite its own “very French” subject matter, concerned itself above all with a theoretically defined object: the field of social classes in modern societies. Readers outside France who engaged with that work were meant to extend its insights to their own respective settings, seeking in each instance to balance sensitivity to contextual specifici­ ties with an ambition to identify illuminating generalities. The present work is designed quite self-­consciously on that model, with nationally specific racial formations analogous to nationally specific class formations and set against the backdrop also of a comprehensive global order—­but one of race. Nor is this work concerned exclusively with black-­white relations within the American racial order. Many purportedly comprehensive studies of racial life do in fact confine themselves to this axis, whether explicitly or implicitly.57 But in the pages that follow, we devote attention to a wide range of racial and ethnic groups, not just to blacks and whites. As race scholars increasingly have noted, racial life, never itself a matter of black-­white relations alone, has become all the more variegated and many sided in recent decades with the large influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, a shift that has been transforming the very face of American society.58 The field-­theoretic approach we develop in subsequent chapters—­one of the ways in which we build on Bourdieu’s theoretical model—­is meant to make sense of this growing complexity. This does not mean, however, that when attending to American racial life we do not prioritize the black-­white dimension. Conceiving of race in field-­theoretic terms underscores the necessity of asking in empirical terms which positions happen to be the most dominant (or dominated) in the field. Historians such as Winthrop Jordan and Thomas Gossett long have argued, at least in the US context, that the antipodal pairing of whiteness and blackness indeed is the foundation on which the idea of race has been erected; this pairing, moreover, continues to be foundational right up to the present day.59 Whiteness and blackness do in fact mark the two poles of the American racial field. The race scholar’s goal ought not to be, then, in some unthinking fashion always to “reach beyond” the black-­white binary but rather to study the structure and dynamics of the racial field at hand,

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recognizing that this space empirically is structured in those very terms, even if not entirely reducible to them. Yet another related issue has to do with the theoretical connection between racial domination—­our primary concern in this work—­and “race” per se. We contend that race always has borne within itself the marks of structural oppression. From its origins, it did not have an innocuous or innocent meaning, and this still holds true to the present day. Many race scholars have become all too comfortable studying “race” when really it is racial inequality and subjugation that matter. That having been said, however, we also must ask: What about the playfulness and joy of race? What about the linguistic innovations, jokes, styles, food, music, and so forth, that are racialized? What about feelings of solidarity when with “our people” or equally rewarding feelings of hope and promise when participating in genuinely multicultural events? What about racial dynamics that have to do with beauty, affect, home, or parenting? One might recall here that Bourdieu himself forcefully underscored the intrinsic gratifications and rewards associated with different locations or positions in a structure of inequality. For instance, intellectuals as he depicted them not only strive for domination in their own field (while being dominated in a larger societal field of power); they also genuinely love their work, take joy in the life of the mind, and strive for truth. Fields provide multiple alternative sources of gratification and fulfillment.60 The racial field, too, provides affirmative pleasures. Consider, for example, the possessors of black capital, to whom we return in a later chapter. Although they are located in the more dominated sectors of the racial space, does not their blackness provide them with deeply felt gratifications? And with a shared culture? And is it not the same also with whites (including white ethnics) toward the more dominant regions of the racial space? It would be a failure of analysis to call these gratifications simply illusory or to depict them as a kind of fool’s gold. In this book, we place a heavy accent on the theme of racial inequality and subjugation. But we also acknowledge and inquire into the underpinnings of this other, more affirmative mode of investment in racial belonging. Let us turn now to some considerations regarding the overall nature of the theoretical contribution this present work aims—­and does not aim—­to offer. On the one hand, this work does not aim to provide explanations of the sort once envisioned by George Homans, for whom any theory worth its salt simply was an explanation of a phenomenon.61 The causal-analytic approach has been widely influential over the decades, and most recently it has been given new life by “analytical sociology,” which announces itself as a theoretical program “concerned first and foremost with explaining important social

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facts.”62 So far as it goes, there is nothing objectionable about such a program, and, indeed, its call for finding and specifying causal mechanisms is unproblematic and one that we wholeheartedly endorse. Yet our work cannot straightforwardly sink or swim on the basis of a small number of empirical findings alone. The very expectation that theoretical frameworks could be tested in this way—­in direct, unmediated fashion—­itself is seriously wrongheaded. One often needs to think through specifically theoretical problems and issues, such as the relation between culture and social relations, or the nature of social action, or the limits and usefulness of interactionist vis-­à-­vis structural analyses, before proceeding to offer specific explanations. Theoretical reflec­tion must be recognized as possessing its own autonomy, its own integrity as a mode of inquiry, and not be subordinated straightaway to the task of explaining particular outcomes. On the other hand, we are not seeking here, either, to construct a Parsonian-­style grand sociological theory. Although there are, as we discuss below, a few similarities between our approach and that of Parsons, there also are significant differences. It is not enough simply to point out that we do not engage in functionalist reasoning; nothing here comes out of a functionalist program. Nor does it suffice to affirm that, in our own theory-­building efforts, we continually are informed by empirical social inquiry; indeed, our work, unlike that of Parsons, is deeply grounded in empirical studies. Far closer to the heart of the matter is that, again unlike Parsons, in true pragmatist fashion we conceive of our efforts as an extended venture in creative problem solving—­with the aim ultimately of moral and social reconstruction. As remarked above, a defining insight of pragmatism is that we are faced at times with a problematic (or, as Dewey would call it, “indeterminate”) situation in which there is a blockage to effective action and the way of proceeding is unclear. On those occasions, practical action is suspended and a moment of reflective thought ensues. “Thinking begins in what may fairly enough be called a forked-­road situation, [one] which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, [and] which proposes alternatives.”63 (Glossing Dewey, Durkheim spoke, too, of a “cross-­roads situation” in which “nonadaptation occurs” and “consciousness and reflection” become salient.64) In any thought process, new conceptions more adequate to the circumstances at hand are formed—­ and a new plan of action formulated. Mills, deeply imbued as he was with pragmatist ideas, spoke often in The Sociological Imagination of the need at critical “junctures in the process of work” to “pause,” step back, and reflect.65 His complaint against grand theorizing was not that theoretical reflection is engaged in but rather that it “exists and flourishes within what ought to be

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pauses in the working process.”66 Our own work engages in theory building not for its own sake but as a way creatively to solve the problems extant in race studies today—­and in the broader racial order. This is not to say that our work does not share with that of Parsons a number of important features, which now deserve comment. To begin with, the theoretical venture presented here aims, as does Parsons’s, to draw selectively and creatively on alternative perspectives in fashioning a more comprehensive viewpoint. It does so by identifying common themes that serve to connect disparate approaches, common underlying bases such as the relational mode of thinking shared by Dewey and Bourdieu. Perhaps the paradigm of such synthetic reasoning, at least in the tradition of classical social thought, was Marxian theory itself, whose dialectical method successfully fused German idealism, French socialism, and British political economy. Bourdieu’s work has much the same encompassing quality, as do all attempts, regardless of scale or ambition, to construct a broad, overarching theoretical perspective.67 For all such efforts, the assertion by Seneca regarding his claim on “borrowed thoughts” is a useful motto: “Anything true is mine.”68 Long before social science existed, many ancient philosophers concerned themselves with how best to combine elements from preceding schools in pursuit of a higher truth. One example is Cicero, who aimed in De Finibus to resolve the impasse between Stoic and Epicurean philosophies. “I am dragged in different directions,” he confessed, “now the latter view seems the more plausible, now the former; and yet I firmly believe that unless one or the other is true, virtue is overthrown.”69 The specter all such synthesizers faced, of course, was that of eclecticism. Even now, Bourdieu describes Cicero’s attempted theoretical resolutions themselves as “soft and spongy,” “syncretic, not synthetic,” likening them to Parsons’s more recent (in his view, equally unsatisfactory) effort.70 The challenge surely is to avoid the “confused mixture,” in Epicurus’s phrase, of disparate and heterogeneous notions.71 Eclecticism flourished during and after the 1970s “crisis of sociology,” when it became increasingly popular to speak of borrowing as needed from one or another theoretical approach. The result was some of the difficulties indicated at the start of this chapter, difficulties that persist to the present day. Easy and facile unities—­a false unification—­ are among the most significant obstacles to the advancement of scientific understanding.72 But so too is the scholastic tendency to set up canonical divisions among schools of thought and then to adhere, in the name of theoretical consistency, to rigid prohibitions on creative reworkings and meldings. A second similarity between our mode of theoretical reasoning and that of Parsons is a shared emphasis on the drawing of analytic distinctions.

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Parsonian theory revolved around an “AGIL” model in which different “systems” were subdivided into different “subsystems,” and so forth, while our own approach, too, stresses the analytic autonomy of different orders of phenomena and different fields of inquiry. It complexifies rather than simplifies. The shortcoming inherent in all such theories featuring analytic distinctions and analytically autonomous realms of inquiry, of course, is that they quickly become intricate and unwieldy. It is difficult to know precisely what one is to study. One easily could caricature the present work, in fact, by alluding to all the rooms we have built in our sprawling mansion. Far more intuitively appealing, more easily translatable into an empirical research agenda, are approaches (such as classical Marxism) that make bold and ringing claims (“Material interests are paramount!”) and that provide clear, unmistakable guidelines for inquiry (“Lay bare the dynamics of the class struggle!”). As Mills expressed it, “The liberal ‘multiple-­factor’ view does not lead to a conception of causation which would permit points of entry for broader types of action, especially political action.”73 And yet, what does lend superior power to frameworks such as ours that feature a relatively high degree of internal analytic differentiation—­or “ontological depth,” as the critical realists would have it74—­is their greater capacity not only to incorporate a wide range of theoretical dimensions or elements (not to mention also empirical problems) into a complex whole but also to give each moment its due. While the true may be the whole, as G. W. F. Hegel asserted, each moment in the whole also retains its distinctiveness and integrity.75 Is one compelled to take into account everything all at once and in all its inner complexity? What are the implications for those who might wish to focus on but one specific theoretical or substantive issue or problem? John Stuart Mill once observed in respect to Bentham and Coleridge that those with a one-­eyed view of the world often make the most important and long-­lasting contributions. “We have a large tolerance for one-­eyed men,” he wrote, “provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one line of inquiry.”76 (F. Scott Fitzgerald had much the same insight: “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”77) Partial scholarly investigations remain useful; our own work builds in large measure on them. The point is not to replace analysis with synthesis tout court but rather to redress in dialectical spirit the present-­day tilt in race scholarship toward exclusively analytic reasoning. Finally, both approaches—­ours and Parsons’s—­evince a certain universalizing ambition. Here we need to remind ourselves that all theoretical reasoning, even when complex and intricate, exists to make our lives easier and to enhance our powers of thought, “enlarg[ing],” in Mills’s words, “the

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scope of [our] sensibilities, the precision of [our] references, the depth of [our] reasoning.”78 Often it cannot do so when it breaks up the world into discrete, unrelated, bite-­size pieces. Here again the Quine-­Duhem thesis is relevant. Universalizing theories, not only Parsonian structural functionalism but also Marxism, Bourdieuian sociology, and a host of other approaches such as rational choice theory, all aim to show how the world—­or, at least, within certain scope conditions, some significant portion of it—­makes sense as a unified whole. All attempt, as in Bourdieu’s call for a “general theory of fields,” to understand the meaningful connections between each instance or iteration and every other.79 As Mills pointed out, sometimes one needs to “fly high” in order to take in a larger vista.80 This is important, for even when one focuses empirically on one aspect of a phenomenon, one has a sense of its theoretical relations with all the rest. One knows where one is. Findings in one empirical area, too, fruitfully can be brought to bear on those in others. The danger specific to universalizing reasoning is that the particularity of one’s substantive problems easily might be lost. Many of the theoretical arguments presented in this work can with little modification apply to topics quite distinct from race itself, topics such as gender or class. Yet this, too, might be a good thing. For has not race scholarship been confined for much too long to its own particular, segmented domain? Perhaps it is to be regretted that Mills’s attack on grand theorizing—­and Robert Merton’s parallel and contemporaneous critique of “total systems of sociological theory”81—­were so devastatingly effective that many sociologists, at least on the American scene, refrained for decades from venturing onto theoretical terrain, rarely grasping that grand theories and universalizing theories are not the same thing.82 It came to be, in fact, part of the common sense of the social sciences—­and of the world of race studies itself—­that legitimate scholarship can be pursued only at the so-­called middle range. Ironically, after inveighing so much against what he dubbed “the methodological inhibition,” Mills himself helped to institute a still more “theoretical” inhibition by means of his own critiques.83 If we return to pragmatism, where Mills’s roots lay, we can begin to overcome this long-­lasting and unfortunate tendency. Not even Dewey, we should recall, refrained from producing volume upon volume of abstract theoretical reflection, aimed in each instance at shedding light on the crucial problems and challenges of his day. For all pragmatists, including us, the relevant standard ought to be the intelligence with which our theoretical endeavors, whether they be middle-­range or universalizing, engage with and seek to resolve the difficulties facing them. If the theoretical efforts in which we engage are an “orientation” and not a “theory” (or perhaps a “preliminary to a theory”), then so be it: those are no more than verbal

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quibbles.84 Cooley once put it this way: “The test of intelligence is the power to act successfully in new situations.”85 He could just as well have been speaking of scholarly work, with its concern to address specifically theoretical and empirical research challenges, as he was of the more practical forms of action which attend to challenges in mundane daily existence. In sum, the present work ought to be judged on whether it brings together theoretical ideas of diverse origins into a coherent framework and, in turn, opens up new questions and lines of inquiry which help to refocus old ones. It ought to be judged on whether it takes race scholarship to higher levels of theoretical clarity and illumination. The various analytic moments of this work, each concerned with a different constituent feature of racial life, all must fit together. And the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts, many of which will have been developed at greater levels of specificity in other bodies of work. Only if those requirements are met can we ask of it, as Dewey would: “Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-­experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before?”86 As the pragmatists believed, inquiries perforce must begin and end in concrete experience. They must engage in real problem solving in a resolutely pragmatist spirit, taking their lead from real theoretical challenges in race studies, not from a concern, as with Parsons, to develop a theory prior to any actual problems we might confront. But not all inquiries must be empirical through and through. Indeed, as noted just above, many of Dewey’s own writings were deeply philosophical, much as some of Durkheim’s—­and even Bourdieu’s—­were social theoretical and abstract. Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction The present work is organized around three fundamental ideas: reflexivity, relationality, and reconstruction. In part 1—­“Reflexivity”—­we begin with Durkheim’s imperative that sociological inquiry construct its own scientific objects rather than receive them preconstructed from common sense. This includes the injunction to denaturalize the objects of racial inquiry, both at the societal level (race as a historical product) and at the personal level (race as a system of categories that are learned—­and that can be unlearned). Our thinking, especially our taken-­for-­granted, habitual orientation to the world, is a product of long centuries of (racialized) discourses and practices.

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It is conditioned by what colonizers thought when they were arriving in the “New World,” what slaves and slave masters thought during the early years of America, and what all were thinking during the Indian Wars and the era of Jim Crow. Since so much of our thought is internalized and forgotten history, we must strive, through repeated acts of reflexivity, to rehistoricize it. Such a stance ought never to be confused with relativism, which sees reality as existing only in the mind. We reject this idea, as do the millions of people suffering from the inflictions of racial injustice and poverty, people who know that social realities are all too real. Far from reducing reality to one’s own perspective, reflexivity teaches that one’s own point of view must be studied, questioned, and picked apart if one truly is to know reality. Nor is the point of reflexivity to discover if one is a “racist” or “nonracist.” The point, rather, is to uncover unconscious assumptions that produce blind spots in our thinking about race, assumptions that lurk in the shadows and that impede critical thought. We explore the different epistemological obstacles most often encountered in race studies and consider some ways of overcoming them (chapter 2). In part 2 of the work—­“Relationality”—­we highlight an idea that traces all the way back to the relational, transactional way of thinking so characteristic of pragmatist philosophy and given a sociological twist by Bourdieu’s concept of fields.87 In these core chapters of the book, we develop the notion of a specifically racial field, exploring the ways in which this field, a matrix of social, symbolic, and psychical structures, is held together by what Bourdieu termed illusio (or belief), an investment in the game of racialized practices that occurs at the level of the taken-­for-­granted (chapter 3). We examine how struggles over racial domination have as their stakes (and weapons) systems of racial classification and sacralization and how these struggles are aided or obstructed by forces emanating from other societal fields (chapter 4). We also show how racial structures and racial agency come together, as it were, in the interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena (such as publics and social movements) of racial life (chapter 5). Turning from the collective to the individual level, we further explore how this racial order produces—­and in turn is reproduced by—­racialized modes of thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting, or the habitus, and how “symbolic violence,” the perpetuation of domination through the active complicity of the dominated, is enacted through the workings of racialized habitus (chapter 6). Finally, in part 3 of the work—­“Reconstruction”—­we turn back to the pragmatists’ original idea of creative and intelligent problem solving. If the above insights can help us better understand the structures and processes of

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racial inequality, then how do we replace such a state of affairs with ways of living free of symbolic (and other forms of) violence and arrive at modes of social existence marked by racial justice, creative democracy, and growth? Part of the challenge here is to pursue a politics of the habitus that involves the unlearning of dispositions conducive to the perpetuation of racial inequalities. Indeed, this reconstructive strategy involves bringing to light the illusio of the racial field itself, eliminating the hold that belief in race as a naturalized, dehistoricized entity has on our thinking and action. But another part of the challenge—­an equally important one—­is to pursue a reshaping of interactions, institutions, and interstitial spaces wherein those very dispositions are produced and reproduced. This latter dimension of our politics of reconstruction redirects us from individualistic solutions toward a broader focus on historical forces and structures, while not avoiding the question as to what damage racism effects in people’s souls. It helps us better grasp what a racial democracy would look like and how one might get there (chapter 7). Let us underscore that the very dualism of solutions of a structural nature versus those highlighting social psychology needs to be avoided. Perhaps the most pernicious of all epistemological couplets in race studies, it long has prevented us from coming to terms with the racial dilemmas that beset us. The analytic strategy we develop here is relevant to all configurations of racial life, past and present, in the United States or elsewhere, even as it focuses primarily on the contemporary American context. It also can be generatively extended to other stratification orders (e.g., those of class and gender) or to other substantive orders (e.g., the political or the aesthetic sphere). In the conclusion (chapter 8), we explore those issues in greater depth and consider as well the challenge of theorizing race while also thinking intersectionally about how the racial order is interwoven with other aspects or domains of social life. In addition, we examine a series of implications of our arguments for different dimensions of racial inquiry. Theoretically, we consider the task of moving from a complex and differentiated theoretical framework to straightforward directions for empirical research. Substantively, we discuss the bearing of our approach on the formidable and perplexing challenges of the post–­Civil Rights Era. Methodologically, we examine the implications of our way of thinking for such issues as the quantitative-­qualitative divide, which persists in race scholarship; the dualism of description and explanation; and the opposition between particularizing and generalizing investigation. And normatively, we speak of the need to recover some of early American sociology’s primordial unity of scholarship and moral-­practical concerns. These various considerations help to situate the present work in a wide range of

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important conversations currently (or in some cases, long since) underway in race studies.

* It is our hope that The Racial Order can provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—­and intelligently to address—­the problems of race in today’s society. We believe that language is important. As Ralph Ellison asserted half a century ago, “Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. . . . For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.”88 What Ellison noted in respect to segregation applies to all forms of racialized practices. Partly because of the growing narrowness in scope and ambition of recent theoretical frameworks, race persists as among the most difficult and intimidating of our contemporary problems. Americans continue to be tongue-­tied when it comes to discussing race. Drawing on the vocabulary of classical pragmatism, one might even say that we find ourselves in an “unsettled or indeterminate situation,” uncertain as to which course of conduct to follow or which road to pursue.89 While Dewey stressed the cognitive dimensions of such indeterminacy, his friend and fellow pragmatist, Jane Addams—­who termed it “perplexity”—­treated it also as an existential condition, one marked not by cognitive uncertainty alone but also by moral and emotional confusion.90 It is to this state of perplexity in our racial lives that we must address ourselves. Of course, racial solutions are not to be found exclusively in the realm of language, despite the strong presumption in that direction in postmodernist thought; indeed, to believe in such a thing would be a travesty and an affront to struggles on behalf of racial justice. Nevertheless, as Kurt Lewin has put it, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.”91 It has been a good while since race scholarship witnessed an attempt to provide an encompassing and systematic new theoretical framework. We need new words, a new theory, with which to address the complexities of our present racial order. A comprehensive and rigorous approach to theorizing race long is overdue, one that avoids the pitfalls of grand theorizing and middle-­range theorizing alike and that pursues creative problem solving in a pragmatist spirit, reconceptualizing racial life and unpacking its inner logic and dynamics. The present work presents an analytically complex—­ while nonabstract—­response to the task of theorizing racial structures and dynamics today. It aims to do so, moreover, in ways that have both public and academic significance. The problem of race is not merely a challenge for the

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ivory tower and for the social scientists lodged inside it; it also is a challenge for all citizens in our troubled and uncertain civil sphere. Without a more adequate theoretical perspective, our understanding of the racial challenges facing us will be incomplete—­and our attempts to overcome them hopelessly and demoralizingly incoherent.

pa r t i

Reflexivity

2

Race and Reflexivity

If more than a century of American race scholarship—­including work in sociology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and a whole host of related scholarly areas—­has taught us anything, it is the unique importance of critical and reflexive thought. If only belatedly, we have come to see that our understanding of the racial order forever will remain unsatisfactory so long as we fail to turn our analytic gaze back upon ourselves, the analysts of racial domination, and inquire critically into the hidden presuppositions that shape our thought. Ever since its inception, race scholarship has paid too little heed to this cardinal principle. Critical surveys have shown that, even when driven by the enlightened ideal of a fair and just society, some race studies have fallen short in examining and acknowledging their own guiding presuppositions, leading to work that reveals as much about those who produced it—­and their distinctive perspectives on the racial order—­as it does about the putative objects of racial analysis itself.1 Race studies often are as valuable for providing an unwitting phenomenology of the social experience of those engaged in them—­that is, a vantage point onto the positions they occupy in different social worlds and the modes of perception associated with those positions—­as they are for the light they shed on actual structures and dynamics of racial domination. This is as true of classical writings on race of the mid-­twentieth century, writings that stressed assimilation, cultural pluralism, and the surmounting of prejudice and discrimination, as it is of the biologistic and often white supremacist paradigm they replaced. And it is every bit as true of perspectives in the post–­Civil Rights period as it is of black nationalist and other such approaches from the standpoint of the racially oppressed, many of which came to the fore during the Civil Rights Era.

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Some might point out that today is an age of reflexivity, in which everyone is aware (or seeks to be) of his or her own biases and blind spots and points them out frequently and forcefully to others. Impressive strides have been made toward genuine reflexivity since the time when Durkheim enjoined social thinkers to enact deliberate epistemological breaks with their everyday categories of thought. Especially in the last forty years, with the ascendency of postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, standpoint epistemologies, queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory, not to mention the proliferation of “diversity consultation” in academic and corporate settings, many sociologists, anthropologists, historians, literary critics, philosophers, and others have acknowledged that their taken-­for-­granted assumptions about the social world often do affect intellectual inquiry. Many today recognize that their positions in overlapping social hierarchies condition their outlooks as social thinkers. But we hesitate to pronounce prematurely the triumph of reflexive thinking within the social sciences and humanities.2 Despite the elevated position that Durkheim and Bourdieu occupy in the discipline, the weight they placed on the importance of reflexivity has yet to be fully felt in mainstream sociology. One must bear in mind, too, that certain other disciplines actually have proven resistant to calls for rigorous and systematic self-­analysis. Indeed, the social-­scientific disciplines flourishing most today—­economics and political science—­seem among the least oriented toward critical reflexivity.3 Moreover, even in those areas of research that have witnessed the widest popularization of reflexivity—­or, at least, of a specific variant of it having to do with scholars’ personal identities—­ideas about self-­objectification appear to have run their course, burning hot and fast in the beginning with works such as Hayden White’s Metahistory and James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture but now, as a roman candle brushing the crest of its arc, producing only a few new sparks.4 By and large, reflexivity has been conceived in too narrow and underdeveloped a fashion: what the vast majority of thinkers typically have understood by it has been the exercise of recognizing how aspects of one’s identity or social location can affect one’s vision of the social world. Such a view is necessary but insufficient; it also is an increasingly threatened perspective, for as identity politics falls out of fashion, eclipsed by calls for cosmopolitanism or, more directly, by injunctions to move “beyond identity,”5 reflexivity itself approaches a crisis point, with many scholars stymied and unsure as to how to push forward their fields of inquiry.6 Pragmatists and sociologists of the classical generation were well aware of the importance of reflexivity. Pragmatist thinkers always stressed that perspectives on social life are grounded in social practices, particularly those, as Locke put it, of the “dominant or ruling groups.”7 Dewey, while not highly

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attentive to the significance of racial presuppositions (although he spoke in more general terms of “prejudices” and “prejudgments”8), did stress, in a line of argument partly anticipating our own, the class character of scholastic modes of reasoning. In The Quest for Certainty, he examined at length the age-­old tendency to see thought as outside of and superior to experience, a view he traced back to the ancient Greek division between a higher realm of Being and an inferior realm of changing and uncertain things. In his view, this division was promulgated by a “class having leisure and in a large degree protected against the more serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity.”9 Far removed from material necessity, the leisured class promoted ideas that in turn served to “glorify [its] own office.”10 Although Dewey did not pursue the point, one still finds this structure of thought in everyday racial discourse today, in dualisms of mind and body, intellect and action, and knowledge and toil that map invidiously onto racial categories. Du Bois highlighted much more forcefully the racial presuppositions shaping social inquiry. In a famous passage in Black Reconstruction in America, he lamented that his literature review was “of sheer necessity an arraignment of American historians and an indictment of their ideals.”11 Elsewhere, he spoke in more general terms of the hidden assumptions pervading white scholarship: “It is so easy for a man who has already formed his conclusions to receive any and all testimony in their favor without carefully weighing and testing it, that we sometimes find in serious scientific studies very curious proof of broad conclusions.”12 Du Bois held that we must gain reflexive control over such assumptions and deliberately form new ones. “Some assumptions are necessary. [But] they must be held tentatively ever subject to change and revision.”13 As for the founding fathers of sociology, the idea of effecting a sharp epistemological break (in Gaston Bachelard’s evocative phrase14) with the common sense of social and intellectual milieux already had been fundamental to the work of Marx, who broke, of course, with the taken-­for-­granted assumptions of bourgeois society and classical political economy; in the classical generation, it also animated (perhaps to a lesser degree) the work of Weber. But it was in Durkheim’s sociology that this doctrine was given its most explicit and programmatic expression. In The Rules of Sociological Method, he spoke of “prenotions” that, “resembling ghost-­like creatures, distort the true appearance of things, but which we nevertheless mistake for the things themselves.”15 These prenotions antedated the rise of modern social science; social actors long had held to deep-­seated, commonsense beliefs regarding the various aspects of social life, from morality to law, politics to family life. In developing a rigorous scientific approach, Durkheim believed, one must discard such preconceptions and proceed from systematically developed categories,

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not ones plucked haphazardly from the undisciplined discourse of the public realm. “The sociologist,” he advised, “either when he decides upon the object of his research or in the course of his investigations, must resolutely deny himself the use of those concepts formed outside science and for needs entirely unscientific. He must free himself from those fallacious notions which hold sway over the mind of the ordinary person, shaking off, once and for all, the yoke of those empirical categories that long habit often makes tyrannical.”16 Sociology, then, was to constitute itself against the presuppositions governing everyday life. It was methodically to break from taken-­for-­granted truths and unquestioned assumptions.17 The classical generation of pragmatists and sociologists certainly understood the importance of questioning the hidden preconceptions that orient social thought. The great figures of that generation went far toward placing reflexivity at the center of social inquiry. Adding new dimensions to this awareness, a critical sociology of knowledge, influenced by Karl Mannheim, blossomed around midcentury, as did the evolving traditions of Western Marxism and the Chicago School.18 Harrison White’s network structuralism, which harkened back to Durkheim by way of midcentury structuralist anthropology, also made the questioning of prenotions a cardinal principle of social science: all social inquiry, White suggested, should be driven by “a desire to probe beneath common sense, which is chockablock with misleading notions. In social science the only sanity is to eschew sanity, common sanity. To be sane is by definition not to penetrate the common-­sense that conceals the inner mechanics of social reality.”19 However, the theme of reflexivity received its most definitive treatment in Bourdieu’s writings, which held that reflexivity is necessary for gaining limited but real control over our inclinations and dispositions and for transforming us from the agents of action into something more like the true subjects of action. “The Stoics used to say,” Bourdieu noted approvingly, “that what depends on us is not the first move but only the second one.”20 Reflexivity would lead to an expansion of vistas—­an “opening up of inquiry,” to borrow a Deweyan formulation21—­and the enlargement, at least to some modest degree, of our freedom from determination. In what follows, we pursue the implications of Bourdieu’s ideas—­insights that challenge, deepen, and enrich current standards of reflexivity—­right into the heart of race studies, a terrain he himself left relatively unexamined. We discuss as well several other themes of relevance to reflexive inquiry: the significance thereto of a historical perspective; the usefulness of assaying a preliminary definition of one’s object of inquiry; and the importance, after effecting a deliberate break with commonsense ideas from the world of racial

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practice, of returning to—­and incorporating into research—­the ineliminable moment of primary experience. Despite our focus on problems that repeatedly come up in race scholarship, our investigation into race and reflexivity serves as a response also to challenges arising more generally, whether in respect to race itself or to any other principle of division, such as gender or class. The difficulties encountered in these terrains—­and the possible ways of overcoming them—­all are nearly identical. Our aim is to shed light on theoretical issues encountered all across the social sciences, even as we devote attention most closely to substantive problems in the racial field.22 In response to these challenges, we develop a basic set of distinctions and insights that one can employ in elucidating and perhaps disavowing oneself of unfounded assumptions and intellectual habits that encumber scientific thought. We hope the structure and logic of our argument will help to impose some order on what otherwise is a sprawling and relatively unfocused, if crucially important, terrain. For reflexive thinking to survive and, what is more, to be employed widely in the interest of scientific truth, analysts must produce works that challenge, deepen, and further its current standards, for what constitutes critical reflexivity, we argue, entails much more than observing how one’s social position affects one’s scientific analyses or political imagination. Three Levels of Presuppositions In what follows, we develop a three-­tiered typology of racial reflexivity and analyze the epistemological presuppositions of each tier. We take our cues from a suggestive set of observations by Bourdieu. In Pascalian Meditations, he argued that our commonsense assumptions preconstruct the objects of our inquiry at several distinct levels, each more deeply hidden than the last and requiring a more searching and penetrating mode of reflexivity. The first concerns “occupation of a position in social space and the particular trajectory that has led to it.”23 Bourdieu characterized this first level, perhaps surprisingly, as “the most superficial,” since its presuppositions—­including those noted by Du Bois—­are “unlikely to escape from the self-­interested criticism of those who are driven by other prejudices or convictions.”24 The second concerns positioning in fields of cultural production, such as disciplinary fields. Each of the latter has its own internal logic and dynamics, which can profoundly shape what investigators see and fail to see. The third level is that of the “invisible determinations inherent in the intellectual posture itself, in the scholarly gaze that [one] casts upon the social world.”25 Echoing Dewey here, Bourdieu spoke of “presuppositions constituting the doxa generically associated with . . . skholè, leisure, which is the condition of existence of all

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scholarly fields.”26 In this first section of the chapter, we show how, at each of these three levels, reflexivity helps to initiate the epistemological breaks enjoined by Bourdieu—­and by Durkheim before him. We survey the obstacles distinctive to each level and the ways in which reflexive thinking can—­and, at least in some race scholarship, has—­overcome these obstacles. We discuss many positive examples, but we also examine some of the ways in which the exercise of reflexivity has not gone quite far enough. the social unconscious The starting point of our inquiry is the principle that scientific endeavors, including those addressing the topic of race, are far reaching and probing only to the extent that they apply, in reflexive fashion, their own powers of objectification to the very subjects of objectification themselves. Race scholars must recognize that their location in (and trajectories across) the racial order affect their presuppositions in respect to it.27 Hardly free floating or socially disembedded, scholars are deeply shaped, privileged, or disadvantaged by a racialized society, and their social experiences condition the very perspectives they assume on it—­“enter[ing],” as Du Bois put it, “into the most cold-­ blooded scientific research as a disturbing factor.”28 Typically, the processes whereby such determination occurs largely are unacknowledged by the social thinkers themselves. Deep correspondences between the objective structures of their social world and their own subjective structures of understanding lead them to a doxic experience (to borrow an idea from Edmund Husserl29) in which all the fundamental divisions of that world, all the arbitrary fictions (such as race) that define and constitute it, are apprehended as natural and self-­evident—­and thereby legitimized. Indeed, this doxic experience justifies the existing order of things even more insidiously than do the racist ideologies and attitudes that psychologists of prejudice have made their distinctive object. The workings of these mechanisms of legitimation, the biographical preconditions of which are long-­term processes of socialization and internalization, serve as a hidden roadblock to scientific progress. They do so, at least, for so long—­and only so long—­as they fail to be submitted to rigorous and disciplined scrutiny. C. Wright Mills saw this clearly in “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” where he exposed the tacit outlook of authoritative social analysts of his day, assumptions he claimed supported the hegemony of small-­town, middle-­class, white Anglo-­Saxon Protestantism in American social life.30 Racial principles impose themselves as part of the very order of things because they are deeply inscribed in the objective structures of the American

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racial field, which some analysts subjectively take for granted.31 When asked by a reporter for his views on America’s “Negro problem,” African American novelist Richard Wright replied, “There isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a white problem.”32 Since at least Du Bois, critics have underscored the dubious impact of racial disparities on social thought. Racial domination, they have observed, leads a twofold existence, not only in the objectified state of structures of white privilege but also in the embodied state of dispositions and modes of being. Their key insight has been that whiteness is not simply another racial category but the dominant category, the standard against which all other categories (implicitly) are compared—­the consummate “reference category,” in the parlance of regression analysis.33 In the innermost logic of their analyses, unreflexive scholars fail to treat whites as a racial group; they take whiteness for granted, viewing it simply as “normal.” This occurs in the common and uncritical use of concepts such as “mainstream culture” and “middle-­class values”—­supposedly commonplace categories, widely rec­ og­nized, unquestionably stable, and internally consistent—­as plumblines against which all other (nonwhite, non-­middle-­class) communities are measured. It also occurs, as Mary Pattillo observed, in studies that assume that blacks’ preeminent goal should be residential integration with whites;34 in anthropological works, such as Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom, that treat nonwhite culture as something that can be “measured and understood in terms of an ascendency to [or distance from] white cultural patterns”;35 in the innumerable studies that hope to explain black crime, (nonwhite) Hispanic poverty, and Asian success as if white crime, poverty, and success were themselves deracialized phenomena;36 and in statements such as this one by a well-­known whiteness scholar: “Few Americans have ever considered the idea that African Americans are extremely knowledgeable about whites and whiteness.”37 Whiteness often informs the types of questions sociologists pursue and the audiences they address. Needless to say, behind each sociological question inevitably stand a whole host of background assumptions.38 When sociologists attempt, without questioning their own questions, to address such issues, they implicitly affirm the legitimacy of these threads of inquiry. For many who are not white, of course, whiteness very much is a visible reality: “Of them,” wrote Du Bois, “I am singularly clairvoyant.”39 (To which Drake and Cayton added in Black Metropolis: “They know white America far better than white America knows them.”40) Nonwhites daily have whiteness on their minds. In Ruth Frankenberg’s words, “Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it definitively excludes and those to whom it does violence.”41 Since the times of slavery and Jim Crow, in fact, many African Americans intently have studied white folks—­both

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from curiosity and from a need for survival. Often they have done so with the help of knowledgeable intermediaries. As bell hooks has pointed out, “For years black domestic servants, working in white homes, acted as informants who brought knowledge back to segregated communities—­details, facts, observations, psychoanalytic readings of the white ‘Other.’ ”42 This does not mean that their insights could be heard widely, for the dominated had no voice. As the chorus in Medea sang of gender, one could just as well say of race: “For not on us did Phoebus, lord of music, / Bestow the lyre’s divine / Power, for otherwise I should have sung an answer / To the other sex.”43 But there is more to the story than a simple inability to be heard. Whiteness also has established itself as the unspoken norm of the racial order, to an extent infiltrating all minds. The nomos of social relations, it has become the nomos of social reflection itself, which is why whites and nonwhites alike often find themselves similarly influenced by racialized modes of thought.44 “It must be remembered,” wrote James Baldwin, “that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.”45 If Du Bois laid the foundations of whiteness theory—­not only in Black Reconstruction but also, among other writings, in his 1920 essay “The Souls of White Folk,” where he brought into focus a white discourse founded on the notion that “of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan”46—­Baldwin became its next seminal analyst. In a late essay, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” he argued that, while deep seated and even unconscious, whiteness nevertheless is “a moral choice.” “There are no white people,” he noted, for “America became white—­the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white—­ because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.”47 During the past quarter century, whiteness theory has become an established field of inquiry in race studies, at least partly answering Bourdieu’s call for a “generalizing of the imperative of reflexivity and the spreading of the indispensable [theoretical] instruments for complying with it”: an institutionalization of epistemological vigilance.48 In intellectual and social history, scholars have opened up new avenues of research into the making of white America, pursuing Du Bois’s insight that white workers in the nineteenth century were compensated for their low wages “by a public and psychological wage”; moreover, they have pursued Baldwin’s claim that “no one was white before he/she came to America.”49 In legal studies, critical race theory has firmly established itself as one of the most exciting and productive bodies of scholarship on whiteness and racial domination.50 In cultural

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studies, Toni Morrison has explored how, if centuries of racial domination have infused whiteness with an essence of the positive, this essence only could exist through its negation, an essence of the negative attached to nonwhiteness.51 (As Orlando Patterson further has shown, in the shadows of even the free concepts—­ “enlightenment,” most objectively neutral, universal, race-­ 52 “freedom,” “rationality”—­crouches a black slave. ) In sociology, too, whiteness scholars have supplemented such historical work with a more present-­ centered ethnographic perspective.53 And reflexive critiques have gained further specificity through the development of intersectional analyses.54 Through such contributions, scholars have explored the impact on social thought not only of racial position and trajectory—­that is, whiteness—­but also of class and gender, not to mention also education, religion, and sexuality, demonstrating as well the importance of multiple identities. Critical reflection of this sort has done much to enrich the study of race relations. It has influenced the work of many race scholars not even directly associated with whiteness studies. One would have good cause, indeed, to dwell at length on its many positive outgrowths. However, in the interest of provoking a more careful and thoughtful assessment, we submit here that the insights it has generated often have failed to shake analysts free of the prenotions that fill up their scholarly unconscious. After centuries of studying without being studied, of examining without being examined (or so they thought), scholars have found themselves face-­to-­face with members of minority communities who write back, who analyze back—­and perhaps have felt, as Jean-­Paul Sartre felt, “the shock of being seen.”55 Accordingly, many have conflated reflexivity with self-­effacing self-­disclosure, the ritualistic quality of which often serves more to establish legitimacy than genuinely to advance social science.56 “When an agent vocalizes or imputes motives,” noted Mills, “he is not trying to describe his experienced social action. He is not merely stating ‘reasons.’ He is influencing others—­and himself.”57 Such persuasion is possible because fellow scholars, through a tacit agreement grounded in scholastic custom, often mistake brief instances of self-­ evaluation for authentic practices of reflexivity. They engage in motions of reflexivity, observed Alvin Gouldner, “that do not touch and quicken [them] but . . . only create an illusion of self-­confrontation.”58 Ethnography, of course, demands that its practitioners traverse social boundaries, that they attempt to grasp the rhythm and logic of a world not their own. However, ethnographers, too, may deploy unreflexive reasoning informed by their position in the social (and racial) order, whether contempt for the observed Other (as in Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s criticisms of Islam in Tristes Tropiques) or admiration

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(as in Carol Stack’s portrait of the black poor in All Our Kin).59 Thankfully, a few recent critiques of the whiteness literature have exhibited a keen awareness of these limitations and have shown how a more searching and critical reflection might be undertaken.60 In still other instances, however, critical insights into the importance of social position have resulted in more questionable epistemological claims. These include, prominently, the “insider doctrine” so memorably analyzed by Merton, a perspective that deems only members of particular groups to have access, or at least privileged access, to the truth regarding them: “The Outsider has a structurally imposed incapacity to comprehend alien groups, statuses, cultures, and societies.”61 Modern incarnations of this doctrine can be found in claims that disadvantaged groups are best represented in the political field by members of those same groups, in calls for “racial matching” in social science, and in some works informed by standpoint epistemology.62 We agree that one’s position in the racial order conditions one’s perceptions and that, quite often, persons of color (as remarked above) evince a remarkable knowledgeability in respect to white culture and social psychology. However, we disagree that an insider’s vantage point in and of itself  leads to scientific discoveries unavailable to the outsider. After all, one would be hard pressed to find a thinker who applied the insider doctrine to members of dominant groups—­who argued, for example, that only capitalists can advance knowledgeable claims about capitalists, or men about men. “No human culture,” writes Henry Louis Gates Jr., “is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn to inhabit another world.”63 Scientific insight comes by way of rigorous reflexivity and is not the inevitable result of one’s position in social space. The notion that white scholars, strictly because of their whiteness, are blind to certain dimensions of racial domination, while nonwhite scholars, strictly because of their nonwhiteness, are keen to these dimensions, is too simplistic a proposition and carries with it the danger of both white and nonwhite scholars absolving themselves of genuinely reflexive practices.64 the disciplinary unconscious Critical reflection on one’s own (or others’) social location has not succeeded in freeing race analysts of the prenotions that fill up their scholarly unconscious. For epistemological vigilance of this sort is to be found now in the regular practices of race scholarship, not to mention the habitus of race scholars themselves. And more importantly, while one cannot doubt that

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location in the racial order, either considered alone or in some combination with gender, class, and so forth, is salient for the positions one takes in respect to racial issues, one also must bear in mind that the impact of whiteness, or of any other such determination, always is transmitted “through the specific mediation of the specific forms and forces” of more delimited fields—­in our case, the specialized fields of intellectual or scholarly production.65 Like a Freudian compromise formation, any intellectual product is a mediation, a sort of “euphemization and sublimation,” as Bourdieu would have it, between the expressive impulses emanating from a social field and the forms imposed by disciplinary conventions and languages.66 Structures and dynamics of a scholarly field profoundly affect how larger societal (racial) influences come to be expressed within it.67 And the national particularities of each academic tradition shape these influences as well. If one denies to less encompassing spaces this capacity for mediation of broader influences, then one runs the risk of committing what Bourdieu liked to call the “short-­circuit fallacy,” that of “passing directly from what is produced in the social world to what is produced in the [more specific] field.”68 It is not enough, then, to inquire reflexively into “who one is” or where one is positioned in the social space as a whole in order to understand one’s position-­takings. One also must inquire into the objective position occupied by subjects of objectification within an academic discipline—­and the location in turn of that discipline within the larger universe of the social sciences. Even more to the point, one must try to understand and map out the common sense, or doxa, of each intellectual context, “each discipline having its own traditions and national particularities, its obligatory problematics, its habits of thought, its shared beliefs and self-­evidences, its rituals and consecrations, its constraints as regards publication of findings, its specific forms of censorship, not to mention [a] whole set of presuppositions inscribed in the collective history of the specialty (the academic unconscious).”69 This means one has to devote attention simultaneously to at least two mutually constitutive components of a disciplinary (or larger social-­scientific) field: its social-­organizational dimension (in our case, the social relations underlying the production of racial knowledge); and the different intellectual or scholarly currents (position-­takings) prevailing, often in mutual antagonism, within that space. Indeed, one might render this challenge still more daunting by adding a third context, that of the collective emotions and psychical investments that mark and often divide academic settings. In what follows, we highlight, if only for the sake of simplicity, only the first two of these dimensions, the general principle still holding, however, that one fully is able

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to objectify the academic constraints and opportunities facing professional subjects of objectification only when one examines the positioning of race scholars in all three contexts together. Constraints and opportunities must be mapped out and explored not only from the vantage point of the social-­scientific observer but also, perhaps more importantly, from that of the race scholar herself. From the latter’s point of view, the space of position-­takings in race scholarship is apprehended (in Bourdieu’s phrase) as a “space of possibles,” a realm of viable opportunities, lines of thought to accept or reject, scholastic positions to be colonized, or battle lines to be drawn.70 This space of possibles appears to the race scholar as a set of openings or windows of opportunity for innovative scholarship. It also appears, by the same token, as a space of im-­possibles or constraints on scholarly innovation, sharply delimiting what conceivably can be attempted or accomplished. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the various disagreements and controversies that serve to organize race scholarship in constricting and bipolar terms.71 Not only do race scholars occupy different positions in the racial order and in various academic fields; they also engage in very different ways with the intellectual and scholarly possibles (and im-­ possibles) before them, sometimes resulting in turn in very significant differences in the kinds of work they produce. If one wished to analyze the refractive effects of academic fields on the production of race scholarship, it would be necessary to examine how the space of (intellectual or scholarly) possibles has presented itself to students of race at given junctures, always bearing in mind the differential location of these scholars in analytically demarcated structures of constraint and opportunity, as well as the different schemes of perception and thought they bring with them to the situation. If one’s object were race relations in America, such an analysis likely would begin by focusing on the disciplinary context of American sociology. The analysis would by no means be confined, however, to that discipline or national context alone; it would be necessary also to situate it within the field of the social sciences more broadly—­and, one might add, within the field of the humanities as well, including history and cultural studies—­and perhaps even to place these, in turn, within a global academic context.72 It also would be important to place any given configuration of (race-­analytic) possibles against a wide historical canvas, temporal contextualization being every bit as important as spatial. For example, if one wished to understand the current state of race studies in the United States, including the different frameworks of thought (position-­takings) available to race scholars and how those frameworks constrain and enable racial analyses, it would be necessary to see where such frameworks originated as well as the

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earlier configurations against which they were constructed, each framework bearing within itself, after all, a long and contentious history which it is crucial to unpack.73 (Where does the recent culturalist trend in race studies come from, together with its occasionally excessive interest in language and meaning? What of the more structuralist orientation that preceded it? What are the origins of the current disciplinary ambivalence regarding cultural inquiry?) In short, as Margaret Somers has written, it would be necessary to develop a “historical epistemology” that “begin[s] by looking directly at questions, at problem formation and its history, . . . the rise and fall of questions. . . . The real challenge is to problematize our problems.”74 In this context, it is important to note not only the trajectory of dominant paradigms but also the career of ideas now treated as foils, hypotheses rendered in the collective memory of the discipline as harmful inventions or as primitive tools that must be replaced by more refined instruments. These ideas or hypotheses wield enormous power over the space of intellectual possibles and im-­possibles and usually are presented as signposts along a supposedly linear pathway of scientific advance. Often one defines one’s intellectual position through a negation of these commonplace foils or through full-­out assault on ideas that long have been denounced; but often those foils themselves have not been adequately understood. For example, far too many scholars, familiar with the initiation rites of their discipline, take to criticizing traditional assimilation theories without ever having engaged seriously the works of Milton Gordon, or to railing against the likes of Oscar Lewis or Daniel Patrick Moynihan without ever having picked up La Vida or The Negro Family, or to dismissing the “oppositional culture” hypothesis associated with John Ogbu without ever having read Minority Education and Caste.75 Conversely, much as we should pay heed to ideas that have been demonized—­ evaluating them on their own terms, documenting the processes of defamation, and evaluating the extent to which those processes have benefited or injured critical thought—­it also is important to look critically on figures who have assumed a kind of sainthood in the field. We should treat skeptically those who almost universally are held in positive regard, those whose ideas, far from being given serious treatment, often are evoked as a marker associating one’s own work with the heroic: “If Du Bois is with me, then who can be against me?” In the discipline of sociology, works or theories tend to become foils for political, not intellectual, reasons. If ideas associated with the likes of Lewis, Moynihan, or Ogbu are summarily dismissed, it has much less to do with standards of evidence or rigor of thinking than with the possible implications these ideas could have for a political agenda. Witness the recent fallout from a

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study reporting that adult children whose parents had same-­sex relationships suffer more social and emotional disadvantages than their counterparts with married heterosexual parents.76 Sociologists doggedly attacked the researcher, his methods, his conclusions, and even the academic journal that published the study. Are we to believe they did so out of a deep concern for scientific integrity and intellectual rigor? About this case, Christian Smith was right to observe that most critics of the study “cannot admit their true political motives, so their strategy has been to discredit [the author] for conducting ‘bad science.’ . . . [The] influence of progressive orthodoxy in sociology is evident in decisions made by graduate students, junior faculty, and even senior faculty about what, why, and how to research, publish, and teach.”77 The point is not to defend or defame this study (or those of Lewis, Moynihan, or Ogbu, for that matter) but to draw attention to how the nature of our disciplinary unconscious is deeply shaped by the political positions of analysts and their disciplines. Reflexivity requires not only exposing one’s intellectual biases but also being honest about how one’s political allegiances and moral convictions influence one’s scientific pursuits. It also is important that we regard one other feature of disciplinary life with deep skepticism—­namely, academic tendencies toward parochialism and overspecialization. Long established in intellectual life, such tendencies have had visible and unfortunate consequences. “Of one subject we make a thousand,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, “and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into [an] infinity of atoms.”78 Scholars specializing in racial stratification are able to go about their research often with only superficial knowledge of the race scholarship of specialists in other approaches—­and vice versa. Even more troubling, race scholars often relegate themselves to the study of one single racial group (or of certain classed or gendered groups within racial groups) and thereby propagate a distorted view of the social world wherein (reified) racial groups exist in relative isolation from one another. Thus, the sociologist who specializes in the black-­white education gap can ignore the rich literature on Hispanics in the American educational system, while the historian who concentrates on Asian immigration to America can wave off the sprawling literature on Eastern European migratory patterns, not to mention also Asian immigration to other countries. As historians studying the emergence of racial categories have observed, one cannot hope to understand the dynamics of the social world by apprehending racial groups merely as individual cases with semiautonomous histories and lifestyles; the true object of analysis is the space of interracial conflict itself.79 In short, one must avoid what Rogers Brubaker and his colleagues have termed the fallacy of “analytical groupism,” “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated,

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internally homogeneous, and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis. [If] ethnic groups, races, and nations continue to be treated as things-­in-­the-­world,” they have written, “as real, substantial entities with their own cultures, their own identities, and their own interests,” then the resultant picture of the social world misleadingly will resemble “a multichrome mosaic of monochrome racial, ethnic, or cultural blocs.”80 the scholastic unconscious Not even all these considerations together exhaust the full range of critical reflection required to rid scholarship of its hidden and unexamined prenotions. There remains one final level at which epistemological vigilence must be exercised, perhaps the most overlooked of them all: that of scholastic life itself, with its characteristic attitude of pure, disinterested thought, of detached intellectuality, unconstrained by social and economic necessity and drawn toward a playful, “as-­if ” mode of engagement with the world and its problems. If there is anything this mode of engagement finds it difficult to objectify and place at a critical and reflexive distance, it is its own distance from necessity and the habits of thought to which that conduces. The disposition of skholè—­that is, of scholastic freedom from constraint—­is shared by all who, regardless of the disciplinary and other particularities that divide them, have in common the capacity and privilege “to withdraw from the world so as to think it” (to quote Bourdieu), a freedom to engage in cultural production under conditions well insulated from practical urgencies and concerns.81 (In The Evolution of Educational Thought, Durkheim spoke of how these conditions shaped the instruction and intellectual formation of young members of “polite society” as far back as the sixteenth century.82) Many analysts today enjoy something approaching that privilege. By Durkheim and Mauss’s thesis of the correspondence of social and mental structures, they may be expected to share as well in its accompanying scholastic disposition.83 Many race scholars may reflect on their positions in social hierarchies and some also may examine how they are positioned in disciplines. But virtually all, like fish in water, remain less than fully aware of how their thinking as scholars carries with it unexplored assumptions that distort their perceptions of the racial order. “There are many intellectuals who call the world into question,” wrote Bourdieu, “but [there are] very few who call the intellectual world into question.”84 Bourdieu’s most important insight into the scholastic condition was that it conduces to a “systematic principle of error” operative across three separate

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realms of social thought: the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic.85 The unrecognized presuppositions of the scholastic perspective bear on the theoretical, practical, and expressive domains alike, distorting reasoning in all three areas in distinct but interrelated ways. In particular, the scholastic disposition leads to prenotions about race that, in the cognitive realm, neutralize the specificities of its practical logic, replacing its dispositional bases, if not with varying forms of determinism, then with intentionalist constructions (racial action as rational choice) grounded in the sense of volitional freedom that race scholars themselves hold dear. In the moral realm, the scholastic disposition leads to taken-­for-­granted assumptions that stipulate, in Kantian fashion, an abstract moral universalism (color blindness, in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s well-­known term86) that attributes to the larger world the peculiar sense of universality that academics enjoy. And in the aesthetic realm, the scholastic disposition results in a kind of populist expressivism (a tendency to exalt racialized cultures) that accomplishes only a false inversion—­not an overcoming—­of cultural hierarchies plainly still existing in concrete practice. The first form, which Bourdieu liked to call “intellectualism” or “theoreticism” (he spoke as well of “scholastic epistemocentrism”), involves an elision of practical knowledge, that “primary understanding of the world that is linked to experience of inclusion in this world,” in favor of theoretical knowledge, which, like the “Reason” of which Dewey spoke, contemplates the world from above, as it were, and retrospectively.87 (Precisely here, as mentioned above, Bourdieu’s arguments dovetail most closely with those of Dewey.) In this way of thinking, the researcher proceeds by reducing the social world, despite all its dynamism and process, to the status of a lifeless intellectual construct or model. Or else she acknowledges action but attributes to the actors she studies the same theoreticist orientation (complete with analytic constructs, models, or other instruments of objectification) the researcher herself uses when attempting to make sense of their actions. Typically, intellectualism or theoreticism leads to understandings of the world marked, if not by mechanistic objectivism, in which actions are seen as the automatic effect of external “causes” (as in structuralist analyses), then by intentionalist subjectivism, in which actions are explained in terms of the “reasons” that produce them (as in logocentric or purposive-­action models). In race scholarship, this involves, correspondingly, either theoretical perspectives that minimize the agency of racial actors, especially that of people of color, stressing instead the determinations imposed by racial structures, or theoretical perspectives that depict racial actors, no matter their position in a racial field, as deliberate and strategic: one thinks here of Michael Banton’s “rational choice theory of racial and ethnic relations” or of the many substantive studies that attempt

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to rationalize ostensibly irrational behaviors of marginalized groups, such as drug dealers or street hustlers, or of overtly racist groups, such as white supremacists or neo-­Nazis, by suggesting that, were we in their shoes, we would have done the very same.88 Both theoretical perspectives entail a certain epi­ stemic erasure. In both, the specific logic of practice, “the socially constituted practical sense of the agent,” is overlooked or forgetten.89 Modes of practical action that, grounded in dispositions, escape this Procrustean bed tend to be absent from such approaches.90 In chapter 4, we seek to develop a theory of racial agency that reserves a place for such disposition-­driven, or what we term “iterational,” action. The second form of the scholastic fallacy is moral universalism; it involves a similarly false universalization of the view of the world associated with freedom from necessity, although in this case the reasoning in question is moral and political in nature. This mode of scholastic thought attributes to public life a fictitious and abstract universalism, one that “grant[s] humanity to all, but in a purely formal way,” leaving out of account entirely the inequalities still existing in conditions of access to the universal.91 Such a perspective, the paradigm of which is to be found in Kantian moral philosophy (most recently, in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice), has the effect of excluding from the Kingdom of Ends, “under an appearance of humanism, all those deprived of the means of realizing it.”92 In American racial discourse today, this universalism generally assumes the form of color blindness, a notion according to which, after the gains achieved by the Civil Rights Movement, race has ceased to be a basic principle of division in US society. For some, color blindness is a matter of explicit doctrine, typically serving to justify critiques of affirmative action.93 But in a more liberal version, it combines with a call for more class-­based and progressive politics, in opposition to the putative divisiveness of identity politics today.94 And in still other versions, a color blindness that dares not speak its name (one often associated with the radical left), this scholastic perspective is to be found in works that seek to move “beyond reification.” Such works encapsulate race in quotation marks (but rarely other equally fictitious social categories, such as nationality or gender) and eschew the “rigidities” of racial classification and labeling in favor of a more fluid approach—­for example, that of postmodern “identity politics” or a “politics of difference.”95 In chapter 7, we discuss the ideal of color blindness in greater detail. The final form of the scholastic fallacy is aesthetic universalism. This way of thinking takes pure disinterested pleasure as the norm of all possible cultural experience.96 It erects a hierarchy between those privileged with access to rare experiences of high culture and to the conditions in which the modes

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of perception and appreciation of such culture are cultivated and those others who lack that privilege; this hierarchy often is tacitly accepted by the latter as well as the former in ways that lead to feelings, in the one case, of entitlement, and in the other, of inadequacy. Aesthetic universalism also sometimes eventuates, unexpectedly, in a false inversion of this very hierarchy, a revaluation in the spirit of the Beatitudes (“the last shall be first”), where what is exalted is brought low and what is lowly is exalted. In race studies, these alternatives assume the guise, respectively, of condescension toward the putatively inferior “popular culture” of stigmatized minorities and, inversely, of cult-­like celebration or affirmation of the “authenticity” of those same racial groups. Between tendencies to denigrate and to rehabilitate oppressed cultures, a hidden affinity often lurks. Indeed, not only Afrocentric and Indian manifestos, but all forms of racial romanticism or assertions of “epistemic privilege,” starting with Du Bois’s own “The Conservation of the Races,” perpetuate a mode of thinking in which marginalized groups are depicted as “paragons of virtue, delightful in their manners—­better, in fact, than is common for human creatures to be.”97 Such a perspective not only confers legitimacy on illegitimate racial divisions, exaggerating racial or ethnic differences, but also can promote within dominated groups a code of silence—­“quiet as it’s kept”—­whereby those who speak out against, say, alcoholism on American Indian reservations, the domination of Arab American women, black-­on-­black crime, or other internecine acts of violence are seen as “race traitors.”98 Populist appeals to “the people” provide, in Bourdieu’s words, “all the profits of a show of subversive, paradoxical generosity, while leaving things as they are, with one side in possession of its truly cultivated culture (or language), . . . and the other with its culture or language devoid of any social value and subject to abrupt devaluations (like the ‘broken English’ Labov refers to).”99 There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue; the second is to cleanse them of all sin.100 objectivity and truth The critical and reflexive posture outlined above, which aims at uncovering and thereby gaining control over the hidden workings of the social, disciplinary, and scholastic unconscious, by no means amounts to a repudiation of objectivity. It hardly implies epistemological perspectivism. There is a theory of truth here. But it is a different theory of truth than the conventional “ ‘view from nowhere’ (Thomas Nagel’s phrase), a pre-­critical certainty which accepts without examination the objectivity of a non-­objectified point of view.”101 In renouncing such certainty, it is not necessary to embrace radical

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skepticism. It is not necessary to be confined within the terms of that sterile opposition, one the classical pragmatists were so concerned to question, between transcendentalism and historicism. “We have to acknowledge that reason did not fall from heaven as a mysterious and forever inexplicable gift, and that it is therefore historical through and through; but we are not forced to conclude, as is often supposed, that it is reducible to history.”102 In particular, it is not incumbent on race scholars to accept the all-­too-­facile notion that, since social (including racial) inquiry is shot through with presuppositions, nothing like a scientifically warranted truth can be attained. Race studies is not a realm in which partisanship rules; assertions colored by unconscious prenotions are not the expression merely of  “one’s own truth” or of the putative truth of one’s background setting. To discover the manifold ways in which racial ideas can be influenced by forces working behind one’s back is not to arrive at an impasse. Reflexive inquiry can help rather than hinder the pursuit of social-­scientific insights. It can lead race scholars to a greater, not lesser, likelihood of being objective in their research. By carving out more intellectual space for systematic, controlled inquiry, critical reflexivity can help to make race studies better and to advance the search for truth. The more we are able to identify the prenotions that cloud our racial vision, the more acutely we are able to see how the racial order actually works. Reflexivity thus is indispensable for knowledge production. Truth can be realized even in the context of radical epistemological vigilence and methodical doubt. As Bourdieu pointed out, “Radical doubt is only a preamble to a more controlled science, a science more conscious of itself.”103 In helping investigators to attain a larger measure of (conscious) mastery over the (otherwise unconscious) dynamics of their knowledge production, it can foster a critical, liberatory self-­knowledge. Indeed, reflexivity in respect to one’s instruments of thought can be “an instrument of extraordinary freedom.”104 It can advance the pursuit of a more pragmatically useful race scholarship. Bourdieu came to believe that critical, reflexive socioanalysis does more to help us comprehend and master the forces that dominate us than even the prolonged and arduous labors of psychoanalysis. At the very least, it can complement the latter in a sort of joint labor of emancipation. “Breach[ing] the sacred boundary . . . between scholarship and commitment,” it can contribute to the project of humanity’s conquest of freedom.105 Sadly, the landscape of racial inquiry is littered with studies that failed to generate liberatory knowledge precisely because of a lack of reflexivity. These studies stand as testimonials to their authors’ unacknowledged blind spots and limitations of vision more than they provide liberating vantage points onto racial reality. We can learn

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as much or more about their authors as we can about the objects their work was meant to illuminate. To be sure, no matter how critical and reflexive one may be, one also has to set (racial) assertions to the test of “objective reality.” But here another difficulty arises, for “objective reality” itself hardly is unproblematic. Once again, there is no transcendental arbiter to which appeal can be made. One must accept, in fact, that “this ‘objective reality’ to which everyone explicitly or tacitly refers ultimately is no more than what the researchers engaged in the field at a given moment within a community of inquiry agree to consider as such, and it only ever manifests itself in the field through the representations given of it by those who invoke its arbitration.”106 Objective reality, in other words, itself is “an intersubjective product,” “the result of the intersubjective agreement within the field.”107 As Peirce observed long ago, the real is disclosed, and the true set off from the false, through a process of critical inquiry undertaken by an active community of investigators. This community persistenly adheres to the methods of science, tests assertions against contrary assertions and against concrete experience itself in what in principle is an indefinite process of inquiry, and converges in the long run on a stable or ultimate belief.108 As pragmatist philosopher Cheryl Misak has described the result: “A true belief is one that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter. A true belief is such that, no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument.”109 (As we shall see in chapter 7. Dewey considered this way of thinking also relevant to ideals in the moral-practical domain.) Regrettably, in a scholarly field that uncritically and unreflexively takes certain constructions of reality for granted—for instance, a version of reality in which one “race” is deemed superior to all others—even the most questionable assertions are granted a favorable verdict. Not only is objectivity lodged within subjectivity in the form of the social, disciplinary, or scholastic unconscious, but also, subjectivity is lodged within objectivity in the form of intersubjectively agreed-upon versions of reality. But when there is a pragmatic encounter between reflexively scrutinized subjective viewpoints, on the one hand, and claims about “objective reality” that have been substantiated through rigorous argumentation and the use of the most advanced analytic instruments, on the other, then social-scientific knowledge indeed can advance. There is no easy way to abridge this spiral of truth, just as there is no easy way to make reason prevail outside or beyond the “uncrossable limits” of history.110 But through such a process, something approaching “warranted assertibility,” to invoke Dewey’s phrase, and a liberating truth about the social (and racial) world, can—at least ideally—be achieved.111

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Toward a Scientific Construction of the Racial Object It is the part of critical reflexivity to probe the social, disciplinary, and scholastic unconscious for its unacknowledged prenotions and assumptions—­ and in uncovering those influences to free race scholars at least of some of their baleful influence. Only by attaining to knowledge of their very ways of knowing racial objects, and thereby gaining mastery over the hidden forces that determine their thinking, can scholars truly fulfill their scientific mission. “The sociologist’s only choice,” wrote Bourdieu and his colleagues in The Craft of Sociology, “is between unconscious, and therefore unchecked and incoherent, hypotheses and a body of hypotheses methodologically constructed with a view to experimental proof.”112 Without a doubt, constructing the racial object is the race analyst’s most important task, one to be pursued with utmost care and sophistication. Too few social scientists pay heed to this practice, an omission that allows the conflation of social (“commonsense”) problems with sociological problems and the proliferation of what might be called “false questions,” lines of inquiry posed by audiences outside the field of social science (e.g., a white middle-­class readership, political pundits) and then taken up, unreflexively, by social scientists. The key step toward reflexive sociology, accordingly, is the interrogation of our scientific puzzles, the vigilant questioning of our questions. “What counts, in reality, is the rigor of the construction of the object.”113 We now offer some preliminary guidelines in respect to the scientific construction of the racial object. Two practices have proven invaluable, we argue, when constructing that object: building definitions and pursuing contextualizing analyses. In what follows, we review each of these in turn—­then discuss the importance also of returning, once all this is accomplished, to the realm of primary experience where this journey of reflexivity began. defining the racial object One important lesson that race scholarship can learn from Durkheim’s earlier warnings against an unreflexive reliance on prenotions, a lesson toward which all the foregoing suggestions point, is that the starting point of scientific inquiry must be a rigorous and methodical delineation of the problem at hand, rather than an uncritical acceptance of definitions already provided by folk wisdom and/or academic culture. That is, one must seek always to establish control over the scientific process of constructing one’s object of inquiry—­not only “race” itself but also other important concepts, such as “urban poverty,” “single motherhood,” “racial segregation,” “assimilation,” and

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so forth—­rather than allow that object to be preconstructed by taken-­for-­ granted, commonsense understandings, by ways of thinking deeply rooted in the social, disciplinary, and scholastic unconscious. Durk­heim stressed, in fact, that crafting a scientific definition is among the most effective ways of exercising such epistemological vigilance. In the Rules, he observed that widely shared ideas rarely are formulated at sufficiently high degrees of clarity, precision, and rigor. Accordingly, they must be discarded, and specifically scientific concepts or ideas of the object must be put in their place.114 With regret, Durkheim acknowledged that deliberate construction of the object might prove difficult. Rarely was it undertaken, in fact, by the sociologists of his day, the latter remaining content to embrace the categories of practice already widespead in everyday life.115 However, in his own scientific practice—­ and in his teaching of sociology to others—­Durkheim sought rigorously to adhere to these strictures. In study after study, he offered careful and systematic definitions of the phenomena under investigation. Suicide began, literally on the first page, with a repudiation of “the words of everyday language” and the assertion that scholars “employing them in their accepted use without further definition would risk serious misunderstanding. . . . So, if we follow common use,” Durk­heim wrote, “we risk distinguishing what should be combined, or combining what should be distinguished, thus mistaking the real affinities of things, and accordingly misapprehending their nature.”116 Similarly, the Elementary Forms began with a call for defining “what is properly understood as a religion.” “If taking this step is to yield the results it should,” Durk­heim asserted, “we must begin by freeing our minds of all preconceived ideas. . . . Since these notions are formed unmethodically, in the comings and goings of life, they cannot be relied on and must be rigorously kept to one side.”117 And so it was throughout Durkheim’s writings, including his other inquiries into the family, state, and educational institutions. Durkheim’s students and followers, too, such as his nephew, Marcel Mauss, took pains to assay rigorous (if provisional) definitions of their objects of study. Indeed, the most extended treatment of this theme perhaps is to be found in one of Mauss’s monographs, On Prayer, in which appears the following formulation: “We cannot rely on our own impressions or preconceptions, nor on those of the group under observation.” That is, we cannot allow the preeminently scientific task of constructing our object of study to be done for us, as it were, behind our backs. “When there is no fixed terminology, the author passes imperceptibly from one order of facts to another, or the same order of facts goes under different names with different authors. . . . A preliminary definition would spare us this deplorable vagueness and those endless

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debates between authors, who, under the same heading, do not talk about the same things.”118 Despite these formidable examples from Durkheimian sociology—­and repeated admonitions from others as well, including Florian Znaniecki in The Method of Sociology, who advocated that “final use of [a] term be very different from its popular use; [for] if it is not, there is a strong presumption that . . . research has been as superficial as common-­sense reflection”119—­ such teachings on the importance of sociological definitions have not had the decisive impact one might desire. Mills himself suggested as much: “It must be admitted,” he wrote, that “some men working in social science do not have any ready answer to the signal question of the lineup of their problems. They do not feel the need of any, for they do not, in fact, determine the problems upon which they work. Some allow the immediate troubles of which ordinary men in their everyday milieux are aware to set the problems upon which they work; others accept as their points of orientation the issues defined officially or unofficially by authorities and interests.”120 And Bourdieu concurred: “Insufficient attention,” he wrote, “has been paid to the break-­ inducing function that Durkheim ascribed to the preliminary definition of the object as a ‘provisional’ theoretical construct intended, above all, to ‘substitute an initial scientific notion for common-­sense notions.’ ”121 Race scholarship hardly has been immune to such criticisms, for there, too, the break with taken-­for-­granted or authorized ideas has been “more often proclaimed than performed,” with “a number of so-­called ‘operational’ definitions [of race being] nothing more than a logically controlled or formalized version of common-­sense ideas.”122 This raises a crucial question for any study of the racial order that wishes to be critical and reflexive: If one is not to define race simply in terms of unconscious assumptions, then just how is one to construct this most basic of objects for racial inquiry? Let us present here, for illustrative purposes, our own provisional definition of the phenomenon and unpack it, one element at a time, providing historical examples as we go along. In our view, race is a symbolic category based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, a category that is misrecognized as natural. Symbolic categories belong to the realm of ideas, meaning making, and language, as opposed to that of nature or biology. They actively are created and re-­created by humans rather than pregiven. The notion of symbolic classification systems has been a familiar one since Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, and it was developed with specific reference to ethnicity by anthropologist Fredrik Barth.123 In the American sociology of race, it was one of the signal contributions of the Chicago School, for which “humans are constituted

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by symbolic or cultural elements, not biological forces or instincts,” and in more recent times achieved canonical expression in the social constructionism of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, for whom “racial formation” is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”124 More recently still, it has been taken up in the research program associated with Michèle Lamont, who defines symbolic boundaries—­or “patterns of boundary work”—­as “cultural structures, that is, institutionalized cultural repertoires or publicly available categorization systems.”125 Symbolic categories are important because they mark differences between grouped people or things, and, in so doing, actually help to bring those people or things into existence.126 For example, “Native American” is a symbolic category that encompasses all peoples indigenous to America. But the term “Native American” did not exist before non–­Native Americans—­in particular, Europeans—­came to the Americas. Choctaws, Crows, Iroquois, Hopis, Dakotas, Yakimas, Utes, and dozens of other peoples belonging to indigenous tribes existed. “Native American” is a category that subsumes all these tribes under one homogenizing heading. It flattens out the different histories, languages, traditional beliefs, and rich cultural practices of the various indigenous tribes. Similarly, people have traveled from one geographic territory to the next since the beginnings of humanity, but it was not until national borders were erected and strictly enforced that people came to be known through such symbolic categories as “immigrant” or “refugee.” The same is true of other racial categories. In naming different entities, racial categories create different entities. The current American racial taxonomy is imposed by nearly all the institutions in the United States, from political institutions such as the US Bureau of the Census, which asks citizens to check one or more boxes next to racial categories, to educational institutions such as universities, which carry out surveys to ascertain the racial composition of their schools. Racial taxonomies in other societies operate differently. Race, then, is a symbolic category, but it also is based on phenotype or ancestry. A person’s phenotype is her or his physical appearance and constitution; a person’s ancestry is her or his family lineage, which often includes tribal, regional, or other such affiliations. The symbolic category of race organizes people into bounded groupings based on their phenotype, ancestry, or both.127 It is difficult to say which matters more in determining racial membership in the United States. In some settings, ancestry trumps phenotype; in others, the opposite is the case. Furthermore, in some cases, imposed racial categorization relies on one criterion while self-­administered categorization relies on another. For example, recent immigrants often are pigeonholed in one of the dominant racial categories because of phenotype; some, however,

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resist this classification by basing their racial identity on their ancestry (or national origin). On arriving in the United States, many first-­generation West Indian immigrants, quite familiar with racism against African Americans, actively resist the label “black.” Despite their efforts, many are considered African American because they “look” black to others, and the children of West African immigrants, many of whom are disconnected from their parents’ ancestries, more readily accept the label “black.” Certainly, any critical definition of race must resist accepting as given the existence of natural physical differences or phenotypes that, through processes of racialization, are ascribed social importance or meaning. Since Weber, sociologists have defined race as a form of social classification based on “obvious physical differences” or “different types of human bodies.”128 But these outward features prove insufficient in a nontrivial number of contexts, where the process of racialization relies on nonobvious, or even nonexistent, physical attributes (as in the case of light-­skinned African Americans or Native Americans). Banton was correct to observe that people “do not perceive racial differences . . . [but] phenotypical differences of colour, hair form, underlying bone structure and so on.”129 But we can go further still, acknowledging that processes of racialization actually can demarcate difference where previously no phenotypical or biological difference existed. Historically, this would be done, at least in the American South, by tracing ancestry through the one-­drop rule. But a more recent and alarming example is to be found in genetics. Accepting racial boundaries as legitimate demarcations of populations, scientists have sought out and documented different distributions of genetic sequences across racial groups, leading them to advance claims about the genetic foundations of racial variation. However, as Troy Duster repeatedly has stressed, “Finding a higher frequency of some alleles in one population versus another is a guaranteed outcome of modern technology, even for two randomly chosen populations. . . . The technology will be increasingly available to provide [genetic] profiles of populations. When the phenotype distinguishing these populations is race, the likelihood of committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, in science, is overwhelming.”130 There remains one final part of our definition: the process of naturalization. This word signifies a metamorphosis of sorts, whereby something humanly created is misrecognized as fixed and immutable, as if dictated by nature. As ethnomethodologists would have it, the very naturalness and objectivity of “facts” is an interactional accomplishment.131 We misrecognize race as natural when we begin to think that racial cleavages and inequalities can be explained by pointing to attributes somehow inherent to race itself—­as if they were biological—­instead of understanding how social powers,

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economic forces, political institutions, and cultural practices have brought about these divisions. Naturalized categories are powerful; they are the categories through which we understand the world around us. They divide the world along otherwise arbitrary lines and make us believe there is nothing at all arbitrary about such division. When categories are naturalized, alternative ways of viewing the world appear more and more impossible: “What is problematic is the fact that the established [racial] order is not problematic; and that the question of the legitimacy of the state, and of the order it institutes, does not arise except in crisis situations. The state does not necessarily have to give orders or to exercise physical coercion in order to produce an ordered social world, as long as it is capable of producing embodied cognitive structures that accord with objective structures and thus of ensuring the belief of which Hume spoke—­namely, doxic submission to the established order.”132 Race, then, is social through and through, a “well-­founded fiction,” as Durkheim said long ago of religion.133 It is a fiction because it has no natural bearing, but it is well founded because most people accord it a real existence and divide the world along its lines. Noting this, some analysts, following the cognitive and relational turns in the social sciences, have suggested that, in the study of race and ethnicity, the proper scientific object be not preexisting racial or ethnic groups and their differences but the process of racialization. Thus Brubaker and colleagues advocate “treating racial, ethnic, and national groups not as substantial entities but as collective cultural representations, as widely shared ways of seeing, thinking, parsing social experience, and interpreting the social world. . . . Rather than take ‘groups’ as basic units of analysis, cognitive perspectives shift analytical attention to ‘group making’ and ‘grouping’ activities such as classification, categorization, and identification.”134 With the publication of Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, Brubaker carried out this theoretical program of analyzing “ethnicity without groups” by fusing comparative-­ historical inquiry with sociological ethnography.135 We believe that cognitivist approaches to the study of racial formation are among the most promising and exciting developments in race scholarship today. At least since Durkheim, sociologists have grappled with the incorporation of folk concepts into the social-­scientific lexicon and the problem of reifying social groups. The cognitivists’ solution to this problem is to purge sociology of its fascination with racial variation—­indeed, to rid it of its concept of “racial groups”—­and to replace this with an emphasis on the construction and naturalization of racial boundaries. A robust racial theory would incorporate this novel and rigorous analytic platform while, at the same time, allowing for endeavors that document racial inequality between groups as well

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as investigations that trace the career of American racism.136 We must heed the criticisms advanced by Brubaker and others against “analytical groupism” but also allow for reflexive work that necessarily and strategically accepts relations between racial groups as units of analysis in order to document modes of social stratification as well as racial progress. This might resemble something like what Leslie McCall has described as an approach to intersectional analysis that recognizes “intercategorical complexity”: “Scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions.” In this approach, scholars proceed from “the observation that there are relationships of inequality among already constituted social groups, as imperfect and ever changing as they are, and [take] those relationships as the center of analysis.”137 We believe race scholars must begin, in like fashion, to develop a perspective that does not pit “theoretical work” (focused on naturalization processes) against “empirical work” (documenting inequality between naturalized groups) but rather allows approaches that analyze boundary formation and those that document social stratification to operate under a single unified frame of reference. r a c e i n r e l at i o n t o e t h n i c i t y a n d n at i o n a l i t y Much ink has been spilled over the question of how race ought to be defined in relation to ethnicity and nationality. Here a few brief analytic observations are in order. In recent years, numerous scholars, including Brubaker himself, have asserted the logical priority of ethnicity over race and nationality, defining ethnicity, to quote now from Andreas Wimmer, as “a subjectively felt belonging to a group that is distinguished by a shared culture and by common ancestry.”138 According to Wimmer, “In this broad understanding of ethnicity, ‘race’ is treated as a subtype of ethnicity, as is nationhood. If phenotypical features or genealogical descent indicate group membership, we speak of ethnosomatic groups. If members of an ethnic community have developed national aspirations and demand (or already control) a state of their own, we describe such categories and groups as nations.”139 Seemingly innocuous, these terminological distinctions turn out to have important theoretical as well as substantive implications. They connect race scholarship to a much broader enterprise of ethnicity and nationality studies, one in which racial conflict between whites and nonwhites becomes not the fundamental case but rather a special case, one standing alongside antagonisms such as those between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians in present-­day Ukraine.140 This enterprise, certainly as envisioned by

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these Bourdieu-­inspired scholars, explores the full range of ethnic conflict, past and present and across many societies. It is conducive to sweeping comparative inquiry on a nearly universal scale. It also highlights the coming together in empirical cases of a wide array of recurrent social processes, in particular those having to do with the making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries. Even discrimination—­a seemingly race-­specific mechanism—­is seen as occuring in instances quite distant from the white-­nonwhite divide, including cases of legal differentiation between Moslems and non-­Moslems in the Ottoman Empire or the deprivation of French Protestants’ rights and protections after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.141 Many other generalizable causal mechanisms also are invoked, such as categorization, segregation, ghettoization, and racial violence (Loïc Wacquant’s inventory); or (briefly to summarize Wimmer’s more elaborate catalogue) “strategies that seek to redraw a boundary by either expanding or limiting the range of people included in one’s own ethnic category; those that modify existing boundaries either by challenging the hierarchical ordering of ethnic categories, or by changing one’s own position within a boundary system, or by emphasizing other, nonethnic forms of belonging”; and all of these combined with application of certain generalizable means of making boundaries consequential: discourse and symbols; discrimination; political mobilization; and the use of violence and terror.142 With its useful highlighting of analytic linkages between ethnicity, race, and nation, its nearly limitless empirical scope, and its salutary emphasis on causal mechanisms, particularly those involving boundary making and unmaking, this approach represents a positive new contribution to the scholarly literature.143 We are in essential agreement with many of its claims, especially those regarding the desirability of comparative, mechanisms-­based inquiry centering on boundary processes.144 (That this work is interpretively thin—­ that is, inattentive to the crucial fact that “mechanisms . . . emerge upon a landscape of meaning”145—­is a different matter; we discuss the importance of culture and collective emotions in the next chapter.) In respect to its prioritization of ethnicity, too, we endorse the view that ethnicity comes first, indeed in the dual sense that race and nation logically are derivative phenomena, much as Wimmer suggests, and that historically they developed later.146 That ethnicity chronologically is foundational is indicated by the fact that ethnic categorization and conflict existed even in contexts spatially unaffected by, and temporally preceding, Western colonial influence. In European history, too, ethnic categorization long antedated Western expansion. Speaking in terms perhaps at odds with his critique elsewhere of “race” and “racism” as useful analytic concepts, Wacquant underscores that “racism” (more consistently he

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might have said “ethnicity” here) “is not targeted solely at ‘people of color.’ . . . The first groups to be ‘racialized’ by Europe were not colonized populations but the ‘Others from the Interior’: Jews, peasants, workers, rival and recalcitrant nationalities within nascent states, and this well before the bloom of imperialism.”147 That race and nation logically are subtypes of ethnicity, moreover, is shown by the fact that “one and the same group might be treated as a race at one point in history and as another type of ethnic category at another.”148 As Wimmer emphasizes, differences based in phenotypes also might be “evoked as one among other markers of ethnic distinction.”149 And ethnic groups might experience some of the same “forced segregation, exclusion, and domination usually associated with race.”150 Hence it is entirely wrong to claim, at least as a matter of definition rather than of contingent circumstance, as indeed happens to be the case in the United States, that ethnicity is “a matter of self-­assertion,” “a way of asserting distinctiveness and creating a sense of commonality,” or “intrinsically [not] connected to power relations and hierarchy,” as Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva would have it.151 (In making these claims, Bonilla-­Silva expresses a view quite common to American race scholars.152) Ethnicity, race, and nation belong to the same family of concepts and ought not to be rigidly, artificially separated from one another. There is one other respect, however, in which revisionist scholars such as Brubaker and Wimmer (among others) extend their analytic arguments too far. Concerned not to impose race-­centric modes of thought specific to the present-­day United States on the rest of the world and the entirety of ethnic, racial, and national history, they dispute that it makes any sense at all to speak in terms of a racial order. To do so, they argue, would entail a disastrous concession to parochialism and, indeed, to US cultural imperialism.153 Cross-­ national differences in racial categorization, as between Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, not to mention Australia, Japan, or France, among other settings, are held to belie the simple-­minded view that a unitary racial order exists (or ever has existed) worldwide. The putative error lies in reducing ethnic phenomena (in the broadest sense of that term) to their specific American manifestations; it is one thing generatively to extend the US framework to other contexts, ever mindful of variation as well as continuity, but quite another to impose the former unthinkingly and unreflexively on all instances of the latter. These revisionist claims notwithstanding, however, it is incontrovertible that race today has certain global systemic features, with Anglo-­European whiteness at its dominant pole and peoples of color in its dominated sector, “the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race,” as Anibal Quijano has put it.154 Its historical development inextricably has been bound up with the expansion of European colonialism

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and the rise of Western modernity. If racial domination is from one perspective a special case, it is from another a historical phenomenon of fundamental importance. The revisionists, in rejecting an approach that highlights the world-­historical rise of a global racial order after the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in favor of a mechanisms-­based strategy that ranges widely across world history but without recognizing the sheer centrality and importance of this development, veer too far toward the analytic side of the analytic/ historicist divide. As Bonilla-­Silva rightly asserts, “Race is a fairly modern human creation . . . connected to the extension of the modern world-­system to Africa, the Americas, and Asia.”155 And as Winant also observes, “Imperialism’s creation of modern nation-­states, capitalism’s construction of an international economy, and the Enlightenment’s articulation of a unified world culture . . . were all deeply racialized processes. . . . Modernity [was and is] . . . a global racial formation project.”156 Since the contemporary racial order is a global order, US-­based scholars cannot be parochial or US-­centric in calling attention to it. The global racial system organizes much of ethnic conflict across the world—­and has done so for centuries. Its historical emergence, not to mention also its present-­day impact, have been analogous to those of the geopolitical order, the global cultural order, and the transnational economic order. Hence no attempt to analyze ethnic, racial, or national conflict can afford to ignore it. Despite our own sharp focus, then, on generating analytic distinctions and underscoring recurrent processes, our prior assumption (based on extensive historical scholarship) of the rise and development of a global racial system since early modern times puts us squarely on the historicist side of the divide.157 We can take a cue here from Weber’s remarks (in his “Author’s Introduction” to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) on the nature and genesis of modern Western capitalism. “Capitalistic activity as such,” defined as economic action “which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange,” always has existed “in all civilized countries of the earth,” argued Weber—­“in China, India, Babylon, Egypt, Mediterranean antiquity, and the Middle Ages, as well as in modern times.” So too has noncapitalistic activity, for that matter, such as gift exchange. By contrast, modern Western capitalism, with its “rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor,” can be traced back to a specific point in time and space—­although, once developed, it spread across the earth and assumed truly global proportions.158 Much the same can be said of the modern Western racial order. Ethnic categorization and conflict “as such” have existed always and everywhere. Yet it took the expansion of Western colonial rule to form the system known today as whiteness-­centered racial domination (in a binary with people of color),

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a system that, despite idiosyncrasies of local or national context, retains its Eurocentric structure wherever it is to be found. As Du Bois trenchantly observed, “Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left, however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal worldwide mark of meanness,—­color!”159 The spread of colonialism, imperialism, and, in the Americas, plantation slavery unfolded at an uneven pace and with highly variable manifestations from locale to locale. Relations between colonizers and colonized were different in each setting—­and sometimes changed starkly over time. The social relations of racial domination took centuries to work out. This applies as well to the ideas of whiteness and color. As Wimmer points out (following Jordan), not even black slaves in the United States were thought of as “Negroes” until nearly the eighteenth century; up to that point, they were classified as pagans—­and their “white” masters as Christians.160 What Charles Mills calls the Racial Contract, a set of agreements—­political, moral, and epistemological—­whose general purpose “always [was] the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them,” “a contract between those categorized as white over the nonwhites,” was hammered out little by little, in an unplanned, haphazard, and drawn-­out fashion. “Although no single act literally correspond[ed] to the drawing up and signing of a contract, there [was] a series of acts—­papal bulls and other theological pronouncements; European discussions about colonialism, ‘discovery,’ and international law; pacts, treaties, and legal decisions; academic and popular debates about the humanity of nonwhites; the establishment of formalized legal structures of different treatment; and the routinization of informal illegal or quasi-­legal practices effectively sanctioned by the complicity of silence and government failure to intervene and punish perpetrators—­which collectively can be seen, not just metaphorically but close to literally, as its conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent.”161 Complementing these acts was the development, sometimes at rarefied levels (e.g., Kant’s anthropological writings), of racial theory, as we shall see in chapter 7. The end result was a worldwide system, simultaneously social and symbolic (and with collective-­emotional dimensions as well), of racial advantage and disadvantage. To be sure, ethnic conflicts of other sorts, including some that are nation based, continued to exist alongside those of race, much as “capitalistic activity as such,” not to mention gift exchange, persists even today in a world dominated by what began as modern Western capitalism. Ethnicity is old; race is

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the subcase of it that rose up more recently to world-­historical significance, like a small geological protuberance that, thanks to centuries-­long tectonic processes, now massively and imposingly looms above its surrounding landscape.162 (In this respect, race scholars such as Bonilla-­Silva once again are wrong to suggest that ethnicity is the product of European processes of nation-­state formation and of migration “of ‘nationals’ to foreign lands,” all of this putatively taking place since the eighteenth century—­a suggestion that in any case might be more applicable to nationality than it is to ethnicity.163) In many instances today, ethnic conflict still is relatively unaffected by race. In some others it is, as when racial categories are superimposed on preexisting matrices of ethnic dynamics. Conflicts over nationality also can be shaped and inflected by racial considerations. One important implication is that ethnicity, including nation, can be investigated using analytic insights developed in this book, for race so intimately is interlinked with them. And ideas developed for the larger study of ethnicity and nation conversely can be useful for our purposes. But the fact of their close interlinkage does not prevent us from taking on the racial order as itself historically and analytically a distinct object of investigation. Nor do the specific inflections that race acquires in different settings prevent us from thinking of it in general terms. Despite the particularities, for example, of how race is organized and operates in Brazil, particularities in the very meaning it takes on in that societal context, that country profoundly was shaped by its inclusion, since early colonial times, in the global racial order, and those particularities cannot even now be addressed without setting them against that historical backdrop and within the analytic framework of racial domination. This also holds true of countries at the very core of the system, not only the United States but also places like France, where scholarly discourse increasingly is attentive to issues of racism, whiteness, and blackness.164 It may be the case that racial structures and dynamics vary across space and time. But it also is true that there exists no advanced society in which the racial order found, say, in the United States is inverted or altered beyond recognition. Darker people are disadvantaged the world over. Before turning to the question of how race, ethnicity, and nation relate to one another in the specifically American context, one final important question must be raised. Who cares about this debate? What are the real stakes involved? Our answer here is that the stakes are politics, morality, and the legitimate right to have a say in how race is thought about today. Consider a passing remark by Bonilla-­Silva in his rejoinder to Mara Loveman’s revisionist critique of his theory of race. “The conceptual elimination of race,” he asserts, “and the utilization of ethnicity as the mantra for interpreting ethnic,

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racial, and national phenomena are usually associated with the unwillingness of members of the dominant race ‘to accept responsibility for the problem of racism.’ ”165 Immediately with this statement the political (as in “race-­ political”) stakes of the preceding discussion come into focus. Nor is Bonilla-­ Silva the only party to the dispute to raise this issue. Wimmer reciprocates by linking Bonilla-­Silva, along with Omi and Winant, for that matter, to a “left-­emancipatory Herderianism” that “dominates ethnic studies at American universities and abroad” and that “presupposes in axiomatic fashion—­ without bothering to offer any empirical support of any kind—­that the social world is made up of ethnic communities and the relations of opposition and oppression between them.”166 Hence a template of “scholarship versus commitment” is imposed by both sides on the debate—­with one side painted as unsophisticated theoretically and driven by a political agenda and the other seen as whitewashing racism—­and the debate (implicitly) also assumes certain racialized overtones. It is important reflexively to analyze such discourse and counterdiscourse at the leading edge of race scholarship. Our own position, as indicated above, is that white privilege is the essential, defining feature of the global racial order. The racial order inherently is an order of racial domination. This basic notion puts us in close proximity to the race studies side of the dispute (Omi and Winant; Bonilla-­Silva). But our approach also is determinedly causal-­analytic and universalizing in scope, both attributes of the other side (Wacquant, Brubaker, Wimmer, Loveman). Our approach also relies on some of the same aspects of Bourdieu’s sociology that the revisionists highlight, at each turn seeking to question folk assumptions about the nature of scholarly objects of inquiry.167 Neither side is likely to be entirely satisfied with our perspective. But careful reconsideration of the terms of the debate now is in order, and the position we have laid out ideally points toward a new theoretical consolidation of the field. One need not be trapped by implicit, even racialized binaries that pit scholarly rigor against a concern to address structures and dynamics of racial injustice. So then, how do race, ethnicity, and nation specifically interact in American life? As the preceding discussion should have made clear, these are overlapping symbolic categories that influence how we see the world around us, how we view ourselves, and how we divide “us” from “them.” The three categories are mutually reinforcing insofar as each educates, upholds, and informs the others. This is why they cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Consider the following example: Hispanics > Mexican Americans > Mexican American immigrants > Mexican American immigrants from Guadalajara. How is one to discuss these “Russian doll” categories without the three concepts together? What history has created, sociology cannot so easily erase. Yet

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ethnicity (together with, to a lesser extent, nation) also has acquired certain unique, US-­specific connotations. Some of the very mechanisms Wimmer inventories can be invoked to explain these peculiarities. One cannot understand fully some important subtleties of the American racial order without grasping these distinctive features. Some historical background makes this clear. In the early twentieth century, ethnicity (together with nation) was brought into racial discourse in a very particular way by American social thinkers to make sense of the new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. How were the new European immigrants to be classified in relation to whites and nonwhites? How was their difference from the Anglo-­Saxon norm to be signified without lumping them into the “racially Other” category also occupied by blacks and American Indians? No other country deployed the concept in quite this way, as an answer to this analytic challenge. When scholars export this specific race-­ethnicity-­nationality complex to other social and historical settings, they are being anachronistic and US centric. But in the American context at least, it often is useful to deploy it when studying the intricate dynamics of societal classification. Take, for instance, someone who identifies as ethnically Italian American. For them, it might entail a shared lifestyle composed of Italian history and folklore, language, cultural rituals and festivals, and food. But it also might reference a nationality, based in the state of Italy, as well as a racial group, white, since nearly all people of Italian descent would be classified as white by American standards. Ethnicity in the United States is deeply informed by nationality—­past or present—­and also signifies race. Race, ethnicity, and nationality are both marked and made. They are marked through America’s racial taxonomy, as well as through a global ethnic and national taxonomy, which seeks to divide the world into distinct categories. They are made through a multiplicity of different practices—­gestures, sayings, tastes, ways of walking, religious convictions, and the like. In this case, one performs race, ethnicity, or nationality. (We discuss performativity in greater depth in chapter 4.) Race as performance is “predicated on actions, on the things one does in the world, on how one behaves.” As anthropologist John Jackson Jr. notes, “You are not Black because you are (in essence) Black; you are Black . . . because of how you act—­and not just in terms of one field of behavior (say, intellectual achievement in school) but because of how you juggle and combine many differently racialized and class(ed) actions (walking, talking, laughing, watching a movie, standing, emoting, partying) in an everyday matrix of performative possibilities.”168 Because racial classification so often attaches to skin color, a dark-­skinned person cannot escape its labels simply by acting “not Black.” But that person might choose

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one saying over another, one kind of clothing over another, one mode of interaction over another, because she believes such a choice might make her more or less Black.169 One might create, reproduce, accept, or actively resist imposed systems of racial classification; one might choose to accentuate one’s ethnicity, nationality, or racial identity. In some instances, nonwhites might perform ethnicity or nationality in order to resist certain racial classifications (as when African migrants teach their children to speak with an accent so they might avoid being identified as African Americans); in other instances, they might, in an opposite way, attempt to cleanse themselves of all ethnic or national markers (be they linguistic, religious, or cultural in nature) to avoid becoming victims of discrimination or stigmatization. Either way, their efforts very well might prove futile since those belonging to dominated racial groups have considerably less ethnic or national agency than those belonging to the dominant—­and hence normalized—­group. Indeed, in many cases, one’s choices, one’s racial, ethnic, or nationality performances, will have little impact on how one is labeled by others. One reason why race, ethnicity, and nationality are relatively decoupled for white Americans but bound tightly together for nonwhites is to be found in the history of America’s immigration policies and practices.170 Until the late nineteenth century, immigration to the United States was deregulated and encouraged (with the exception of Chinese exclusion laws); however, at the turn of the century, native-­born whites, who blamed immigrants for the rise of urban slums, crime, and class conflict, began calling for immigration restrictions. Popular and political support for restrictions swelled and resulted in the development of a strict immigration policy, culminating in the Johnson-­Reed Act of 1924. America’s new immigration law, complete with national quotas and racial restrictions on citizenship, fundamentally would realign the country’s racial taxonomy. “The national origins system classified Europeans as nationalities and assigned quotas in a hierarchy of desirability,” writes historian Mae Ngai. “But at the same time the law deemed all Europeans to be part of a white race, distinct from those considered to be not white. Euro-­American identities turned both on ethnicity—­that is, a nationality-­ based cultural identity that is defined as capable of transformation and assimilation—­and on a racial identity defined by whiteness.”171 Nonwhites, by contrast, either were denied entry into the United States (Asian migrants) or were associated with illegal immigration through harsh border control policies (Mexicans). Indeed, the immigration laws of the 1920s applied the newly formed concept of “national origin” only to European nations; those classified as members of the “colored races” were deemed bereft of a country of origin. The result, Ngai observes, was that, “unlike Euro-­Americans, whose

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ethnic and racial identities became uncoupled during the 1920s, Asians’ and Mexicans’ ethnic and racial identities remained conjoined.”172 The decoupling of ethnicity (and nation) from race itself was a marker of white privilege. c o n t e x t ua l i z i n g a na lys i s At its best, critical and reflexive analysis in race scholarship avoids the pitfalls of presentist ways of thinking—­a focus exclusively on the (near) present—­ and embraces a more thoroughly and uncompromisingly historical perspective. It traces back to their historical origins the presuppositions one is examining, including (and especially) the very idea of racial groups and their putative differences, and explores how they emerged and evolved over time. This is the “historical sociology of concept formation”—­we would add “racial concept formation”—­of which Somers speaks.173 It is indispensable because so much social thought—­concepts and classifications, questions and problems—­is internalized and forgotten history; one must strive, through repeated acts of reflexivity, to rehistoricize it. One can learn here from Durk­ heim, for whom sociology and history were in essence inseparable: “In reality, so far as I know,” Durkheim noted, “there is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character. . . . There are not two methods and two opposing conceptions. What is true for history will be true for sociology.”174 Durkheim answered his own programmatic call for a union of sociology and history by undertaking careful historical analyses of social institutions, including secondary schooling. In his masterpiece of historical sociology, The Evolution of Educational Thought, he showed that the common sense, or tacit assumptions, behind secondary school instruction—­in a phrase, the pedagogic unconscious—­is, in fact, the product of many centuries of historical development. “The scourge and enemy of routine,” he wrote—­ that is, the solvent of taken-­for-­granted assumptions of French schooling—­ “is reflection,” to be pursued through historical inquiry.175 The latter would help to illuminate how the past of all social institutions is embodied in their current condition and systematically must be taken into account for any adequate understanding of that condition to be attained: “For the truth is that the present, to which we are invited to restrict our attention, is by itself nothing: it is no more than an extrapolation of the past, from which it cannot be severed without losing the greater part of its significance.”176 A long historical attention span, in other words, is crucial for grasping and explaining our current institutionalized assumptions. It is necessary that we denaturalize our prenotions and explore not only how these change over time but also how they are “the result of specific and mutually interacting social forces,” such that if they

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change, “this is because society itself has changed.”177 Durkheim believed that, to learn how common sense became what it is, to question the self-­evidence of all that presents itself as natural, “is the beginning of wisdom.”178 Durkheim’s historical sociology of educational institutions—­and of the ways they produce and reproduce common sense—­obviously is highly relevant to the critical and reflexive analysis of race. This is because race derives much of its power from the very self-­image it presents as standing outside of history, as a natural fact of social (and biological) existence, with no trajectory and, indeed, no past (“unlocated,” as C. Wright Mills would have it179). This self-­image clearly calls for the solvent of historical inquiry. Locke suggested as much in his own pragmatism-­inspired work. “From the minutest biological factor,” he wrote, “to the subtlest social factor, there can be discovered no factor at present which is static. . . . Race inequalities must have an historical explanation.”180 Bourdieu, who also believed, no less than his predecessors, in the necessity for historical thinking in sociology, remarked that “what appears, in history, as eternal is merely the product of a labor of eternalization performed by interconnected institutions such as the family, the church, the state, [and] the educational system.” To highlight this fact was “to reinsert into history, and therefore to restore to historical action, the relationship” between social objects (e.g., races) “that the naturalistic and essentialist vision removes from them.”181 By extension, in the study of race, to practice reflexivity means continually to struggle against the tendency to dehistoricize race, to think of the racial order (including thought about the racial order) as historically constituted.182 Recently, Stuart Hall has argued that the study of race must begin and end with the “premise of historical specificity,” seeking always and relentlessly to counter the tendency of racial prenotions to grant themselves a “ ‘natural’ and universal basis in nature.”183 Racial inquiry does well to regard every way of thinking about race, much as it does the racial order itself, as a historical product, one whose development, moreover, can be charted systematically by means of a historical sociology of institutions.184 Examples of race scholarship that carry the torch forward in this respect, showing the way for the rest of us, include classic studies such as C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Thomas Gossett’s Race: The History of an Idea in America, and Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black, not to mention more recent contributions such as Tomás Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines and Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects.185 If racial categories are time specific, they also are place specific, bound to particular social and geographic contexts. This is another crucial lesson for a critical and reflexive approach to race studies, an approach that opposes thinking of racial divisions not only in presentist terms but also in parochial

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fashion, as if those divisions were natural boundaries that exist in the same form across all societies. The racial categories that exist in the United States are not necessarily salient in other parts of the globe. In South Africa, for example, racial groups are organized around three dominant categories: white, black, and “coloured.”186 (The coloured category was designed during apartheid to include all “mixed-­race” people.) And in Brazil, five racial categories are employed in the official census: blanco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (Asian), and indígena (indigenous), while, in everyday usage, many Brazilians identify themselves and one another through still other racial terms, including moreno (another type of brown), moreno claro (light brown), negro (another type of black), and claro (light), all of which have more to do with the tint of one’s skin than with the nature of one’s ancestry.187 Or, to take still more examples, Chinese societal taxonomies—­before racial language was outlawed by the Communist regime—­were, according to Frank Dikötter, based first and foremost on blood purity, then on hair, then odor, then brain mass, then finally, of least importance, skin color, which, according to the taxonomy, was divided into no less than ten shades (“pure Chinese” being seen as “pure yellow”).188 And in Japan, even today, the Burakamin are considered “unclean” and thought to constitute a separate race, even though it is impossible to distinguish someone with such ancestry from the rest of the Japanese population.189 Cross-­national comparisons, then, reveal that systems of racial classification vary greatly from one country to the next. The same cannot be said of systems of natural classification such as those in biology. While we focus on the American context in this study, it is necessary always to bear in mind these other national cases for purposes of comparison. Thinking about race in such temporally and spatially situated terms has crucial ramifications for race studies today. In particular, it prevents race scholars focused on present-­day research problems from ratifying what in reality are little more than naive assumptions. (In later chapters, we pursue these ideas further, discussing in chapter 3 how to think about spatial situatedness in field-­theoretic terms and in chapter 4 how to approach temporality and process by means of what we term a relational pragmatics.) For example, researchers investigating how neighborhoods influence adults’ and children’s well-­being often neglect to account for multigenerational effects of spatial disadvantage. When they arrive at null findings, these analysts risk concluding prematurely and shortsightedly that poor, racially segregated, and violent neighborhoods have no effect on their residents (even though you never see these researchers picking up and moving into those neighborhoods themselves to skimp on rent). In fact, a temporally and spatially situated approach reveals, as two recent analysts have put it, that “neighborhood inequality

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cannot be fully captured at a single point in a child’s life or even in a single generation in a family’s history. . . . A large majority of African-­American families living in today’s most disadvantaged residential areas are the same families that occupied the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 1970s, suggesting that neighborhood inequality should be conceptualized and studied as a multigenerational process.”190 The same principles, moreover, also hold for racial groups and categories, for otherwise one easily could be lulled into false ideas in respect to them. Take, for instance, inquiries into why Asian Americans seem to outperform other nonwhite groups in the economic and educational spheres, why they have ascended to the status of a “model minority.” Such inquiries assume that the crucial causes of these facts inhere in the racial group itself, in its culture and practices. Moreover, they assume that all other racially dominated groups have immigrant histories similar to that of Asian Americans, that sending countries have endowed their emigrants with similar or identical levels of human capital, that the cultural practices, priorities, and lifestyles of all nonwhite groups are identical, and that racial domination somehow affected (and affects) all groups in the same way: Asians were (and are) subject to the same amounts of violence and exclusion as were (and are) blacks and nonwhite Hispanics. All such inquiries fall back on the substantialist assumption that there must be something about Asian Americans themselves that accounts for their special trajectory. In just such a way does ahistorical and parochial thinking lead to the wrong questions being asked—­and prevent scientifically fruitful questioning of our questions. Failing to historicize and situate their concepts, many race scholars devote energy to documenting racial differences as if those differences (not to mention the racial categories themselves) were not themselves products of a long historical development. Literally thousands of inquiries satisfying the sociologist’s obsession with racial difference, an obsession initiated by Francis Galton and his fellow eugenicists, are able to justify themselves by pretending that differently raced groups are innocent of history. Ironically, this is true even of those multivariate studies that attribute causality, not to racial domination itself, but to race (e.g., “the effect of being Hispanic on educational achievement”), thereby seeming, at least as an artifact of the methods they employ, to accept the false notion that racial groups are discrete and mutually exclusive units.191 Of course, studies of racial difference are useful as barometers of a society’s racial progress. But in order to explain the differences they document, such studies must avoid statistical assumptions that, having been developed by natural scientists, naturalize race. Rather than marshal a combination of reifying variables, they would do better to incorporate into their models a more detailed accounting of groups’ divergent historical trajectories

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and their divergent modes of social integration and oppression.192 Indeed, they would do well to place at the very forefront of inquiry the historical processes, always conflictual, whereby racialized groups became “groups” in the first instance. “The habit of treating named entities . . . as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and external bound­ aries,” Wolf observes, “interferes with our ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation. . . . Any account of Kru, Fanti, Asante, Ijaw, Igbo, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, or Ngola that treats each group as a ‘tribe’ suffi­ cient unto itself thus misreads the African past and the African present.”193 By extension, it also might be true that any account of African Americans, Latinos, whites, Asians, and Native Americans that treats each group as a “tribe” misreads the American past and present.194 We shall have more to say about the methodological implications of dehistoricized thinking in chapter 8. r e i n c o r p o r at i n g p r i m a r y e x p e r i e n c e The insight that race is a well-­founded fiction brings us to a final paradoxical step in our construction of the scientific object: reincorporation of the moment of primary experience. Having broken deliberately with the world of common sense in our earlier steps, both by defining the object of study and by rehistoricizing and situating it, we must, in the end, also “break with this break” in turn, reaffirming the integrity of taken-­for-­granted, naturalized beliefs that are, after all, an integral part of the object we seek to comprehend. That is, the folk notions and presuppositions with which we approach our race studies themselves are part of the object we are studying, such that neutralizing their effects is desirable only to the extent that we also recognize their centrality to the racial order and analyze how they operate within it. “The domination from which one must tear away in order to objectivize it,” explains Bourdieu, “is exercised in large part because it is misrecognized as such. Therefore it makes us forget that we need to bring back into the scientific model the fact that the objective representation of practice had to be constructed against the primary experience of practice. . . . [We need] to return to the primary experience that scholarly construction had to bracket and to set aside. . . . In sum, it does not suffice to break with ordinary common sense, or with scholarly common sense in its ordinary form. We must also break with the instruments of rupture which negate the very experience against which they have been constructed. This must be done to build more complete models, models which encompass both the primary naivete and the objective truth that this naivete conceals.”195 A second reversal, then, is needed, less a return to original naivete than a spiraling upward to a higher unity, one

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holding together “the findings of objectification and the equally clear fact of primary experience, which, by definition, excludes objectification[:] . . . [a] dual, bifocal point of view.”196 The Durkheimian moment of objectification thus is reconciled with the pragmatist moment of lived experience, each having its due even as neither holds exclusive sway. This move can bring in its train the added beneficial effect of preventing the elitism that often results from even well-­intentioned efforts to achieve an epistemological break from original naivete, a break separating folk knowledge from “genuine” scientific knowledge. Race studies risk such elitism despite—­or perhaps even because of—­their strivings toward critical reflexivity whenever they see themselves as somehow “above” the practices they seek to analyze and understand. “No doubt because the epistemological break always presupposes a social separation which, especially when it is ignored, can inspire a form of initiate’s contempt for common knowledge, treated as an obstacle to be destroyed and not as an object to be understood, there is a strong temptation—­and many social scientists fall into it—­to stop short at the objectivist phase and the partial view of the ‘half-­learned,’ who, carried away by the wicked pleasure of disenchanting, fail to bring into their analysis the primary vision, Pascal’s ‘sound truth of the people,’ against which their constructions are built.”197 This is a view embodied in, for example, the writings of certain Marxian analysts of race—­one thinks here of Cox or even (certain works by) Du Bois—­in which the seductive powers of objectivist (and historical) class analysis actually led to an occlusion of the lived experience they were meant to illuminate.198 It also is the outlook often found in structuralist analyses of the racial order, which either pay little heed to symbolic or collective-­emotional aspects of race or advance claims about such aspects without submitting the latter to rigorous socioanalysis. These and other such studies make clear that the act of effecting an epistemological break with one’s own—­or, more broadly, one’s society’s—­prenotions in respect to race is only part of what it means to be reflexive. To paraphrase James, in race scholarship one must “begin with concreteness, and [one also must] return and end with it.”199 How might the moment of primary experience be recaptured in race studies? In ancient philosophy at least, a partial model for how to take established notions seriously was propounded by Aristotle, who in the Topics stressed the inherent value of endoxa, or “reputable opinions” held by “everyone or by most people or by the wise.”200 These established and tested opinions were to be distinguished from the doxa, or less reputable beliefs of the ordinary man in the agora (the elitism of this distinction being the reason we refer to it only as a partial model). In Aristotle’s dialectic, agreements and

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disagreements among prevailing endoxa systematically were to be winnowed out: mutually contradictory beliefs were to be discarded and the rest retained. Even false opinions were to be seen also as containing an element of truth. Gathering together respectable beliefs in this way and using them as the starting point of inquiry, one was to move forward in the search for more authoritative knowledge about the social world.201 What are the implications for our present concerns of this method of reasoning from endoxa? Most important is that it underscores the settled, widely accepted, and deeply held beliefs (not necessarily of the wise) that inform our racial practices. It leads us to identify the key strains of popular wisdom shaping our racial life and to recognize that they too embody a certain subjective truth, one that must be given its proper due. But clearly, Aristotle’s emphasis on reputable opinions also must be recognized as too narrow. The investigation of primary experience must be broadened to include less reputable, more ordinary ways of thinking and being. Otherwise there is the danger of falling back into the same elitism one was concerned to escape. How might such an expanded, more inclusive mode of inquiry be pursued? One plausible means is through ethnography. At its best, ethnography directs attention to the understandings and practices—­more and less reputable alike—­that proliferate in everyday life. For our purposes, it highlights the opinions that help to perpetuate the racial order, taking entirely seriously the idea that race, after all, is a well-­founded fiction, one that cannot exist without ongoing collective belief or investment. It helps us better appreciate the “enchanted experience of the believer,” the unwavering and unreflexive commitment through which the fiction of race is enabled to persist.202 Ethnography has the potential to reveal how racial domination actually operates at ground level. It can do a great deal to shed light on the point of view of racialized subjects, “dissect the mechanisms and meanings that govern [their] practices, ground their morality (if such be the question), and explain their strategies and trajectories.”203 It can illuminate how folk categories and assumptions, often naturalized to the point of seeming eternal, unquestionable, and “resilient to easy transformation,” as Richard Jenkins would have it, are a constitutive feature of the racial order.204 It can, that is, successfully reproduce the meanings, symbols, and ideas that permeate racialized existence. It also can inquire into the collective emotions that structure racial life. Ethnography, indeed, long has accomplished this, from the works of Park’s early students, such as Charles S. Johnson, Harvey Zorbaugh, and E. Franklin Frazier, to the landmark studies of St. Claire Drake and Horace Cayton and of Elliot Liebow, to such contemporary contributions as those of Loïc

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Wacquant, Ana Ramos-­Zayas, Elijah Anderson, and Mitchell Duneier.205 It should come as no surprise that many of the leading studies in this genre have emerged from within the Chicago tradition of urban ethnography, a line of research originally inspired by the ideas and sensibilities of the classical American pragmatists.206 We have more to say about ethnographic research on race and ethnicity in chapter 5. To fully understand the American racial order, one must study it from above, focusing on the indisputable importance of macrolevel social and historical forces, as well as from below, pitching one’s analysis at the level of social mechanisms and everyday experiences involving complex interactions. A reflexive and critical sociology of race, that is, must execute the final “break with the break” we have been discussing, for otherwise the race analyst is left with a one-­sidedly objectivist perspective that fails to acknowledge the significance of meaning and emotion in racial life. A gaping hole is left in current knowledge of how race actually operates, an omission as present today as when Ellison bemoaned, “I don’t deny that these sociological formulas are drawn from life, but I do deny that they define the complexity of Harlem.” (He continued: “They only abstract it and reduce it to proportions which the sociologists can manage. I simply don’t recognize Harlem in them. . . . Which is by no means to deny the ruggedness of life there, nor the hardship, the poverty, the sordidness, the filth. But there is something else in Harlem, something subjective, willful, and complexly and compellingly human. It is that ‘something else’ that challenges the sociologist who ignores it, and the society which would deny its existence.”207) One final point ought to be mentioned in this context, however. Ethnography is useful only insofar as the analyst also takes pains to construct her ethnographic object. All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the beginning of the research process—­the selection of the basic object of analysis—­and yet field-­workers pay scant attention to this crucial task. Ethnographers have proven as cavalier about what to study as they have critical and careful about how to study. Every stone they have overturned save the bedrock, pursuing all questions save the most basic: What, exactly, should be my object? 208 Only so long as reflexive control is maintained can ethnography push sociology—­and race studies—­forward, whereas, once such control is relinquished, ethnography ceases to merit the name of critical social science and becomes, instead, an unwitting support for the established order, a mirror image to the elitism of the scholarship criticized above. In the one case, race scholarship stands “sufficiently lofty and remote” from folk categories; in the other, it loses its critical edge and distance from them.209 The

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optimal ethnographic vantage point sits in between indigenousness and foreignness. The ethnographer who is too close risks becoming oblivious to the practical achievement of interaction and may accept subjects’ explanations and rationalizations at face value. But the ethnographer who is too distant passes over the rich details of practical life and may give in to the temptation to typify individuals, to hastily impose rigid theoretical concepts, and to snuff out the delicate complexities of social action. Both researchers will produce naive arguments, the former because he is too quick to accept the world and the latter because he is too quick to ignore it.210 This point illustrates how difficult it is to balance the seemingly contradictory requirements of critical reflexivity: objectification and the reaffirmation of primary experience. Maintaining that balance remains the highest aim of social-­scientific fieldwork, although it has been accomplished in impressive form only by a few of the discipline’s most rigorous and insightful masterworks, with Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis, over sixty years after its first edition, perhaps still the chief exemplar.211 Conclusion To twist Bourdieu’s phrase, one might say that, when it comes to race, one never doubts enough.212 The potential benefits of critical and reflexive thought in race studies are considerable; let us summarize them as threefold.213 First, in the realm of knowledge, reflexivity holds out the promise of a sounder understanding of racial structures and practices. The more that race scholars uncover the hidden assumptions in their own scientific unconscious, the more they are able to undo their effects, thereby making it possible to develop deeper insights into the workings of the racial order. Reflexive analysis is to be considered not a goal to pursue for its own sake but rather an in­ eliminable means of scientific advance. Second, in the realm of ethics (or law and politics), reflexivity can make possible the elaboration of more compelling ways to think about—­and actively to address—­racial injustice. Since the very categories of normative assessment one deploys when formulating judgments about the racial order profoundly are shaped by one’s location and experiences in different orders of domination (social, academic, scholastic), one can more effectively evaluate racial situations when one undertakes the difficult work of critically objectifying those categories. Third, in the realm of aesthetics (and cultural inquiry), reflexivity can lead to more thoughtful ways of appreciating racial differences in taste and distinction, as opposed to the false choices one so often encounters between universalism and particularism or between condescension and populist self-­assertion, none of those

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conducing to a genuinely critical race scholarship or activism. Race scholars (and their efforts to address racial problems) are influenced far more by expressivist considerations than they may at first realize. If these are some of the potential gains of reflexive analysis, then how is epistemological vigilance to be carried out? One important lesson here is that reflexivity is a task not for the contemplative individual alone; it is not a narcissistic or introspective endeavor.214 The knowing subject cannot be expected, through wholly private and solitary reflection, to think what is self-­ evident and therefore unthinkable. “Only the illusion of the omnipotence of thought could lead one to believe that the most radical doubt is capable of suspending . . . presuppositions.”215 A search party of one has little hope of finding anything. “Marking who one is”—­a convention for the prefaces of race monographs (“fill in the blank: as a gay black man, as a white Christian woman, as a Chicana feminist, etc., I . . .”)—­illustrates, as discussed earlier, the limits of such heroic reflection, as do all attempts at introspective confessionalism, including when, as in the anthropological tradition, shameful supplicants (e.g., Claude Lévi-­Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, Jean Briggs in Never in Anger) receive the discipline’s highest consecration and praise.216 For this reason, the succeeding chapters, while connected integrally with this one, hardly feature attempts on our part at self-­marking or self-­disclosure, nor, for that matter, criticisms of other scholars for their own failures to do the same. Indeed, our analytic focus throughout is on larger issues, such as the importance, which more scholastic ventures have left underappreciated, of dispositional action (to be explored in chapter 3 and then again, in a somewhat different fashion, in chapter 6); or the necessity of questioning some of the questions we have been “disciplined” in recent years to ask about race (the theme of chapters 3 and 4). Reflexivity must be conceived and practiced as an eminently collective undertaking, one to be engaged in on an ongoing basis by the scientific field as a whole.217 It is a process that, in principle, ought never be seen as complete; reflexivity builds continually and necessarily on the accomplishments of past reflexivity. That is, it becomes effective only when part of a dynamic of mutual critique, one woven into the very practices of race studies as a whole. Hence it requires not merely the subjective conversion of the race scholar but an objective transformation of the social organization of race scholarship, a restructuring of the enterprise, such that there come to be real sanctions—­for example, loss of scientific prestige, difficulty in publishing, public critique of one’s arguments—­when one fails to take into account advances in reflexivity already accomplished by others. Reflexivity also requires the establishment of regularized practices of vigilance over concepts adopted (“mass incarceration”

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or “hyper incarceration”?), coding schemes deployed, and research operations carried out. Finally, it requires a culture of reflexive wisdom wherein race analysts pass on to one another their accumulated practical knowledge regarding the multifarious ways in which the academic unconscious shapes seemingly even innocuous “choices” such as the selection of research questions or the crafting of objects of study. Only when scholars keep one another honest in this way, not as a matter of personal integrity alone but in accordance with a relentless logic of academic contestation and “regulated struggle”—­Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” institutionalized—­ will the sway of critical and reflexive thought likely expand.218 Only then, in Bourdieu’s words, might sociologists succeed in “convert[ing] reflexivity into a disposition constitutive of their scientific habitus, a reflexivity reflex.”219 Nor can reflexivity be pursued through the method of Verstehen, or empathetic understanding, alone. Its proper object is not individual subjects (e.g., race scholars) understood as pregiven entities but the collective experiences that shape them. Reflexivity is a matter, that is, not merely of plumbing the subjective depths and reconstructing intimate lived experience—narrating, for example, one’s own or others’ life histories—­but also of engaging in rigorous analyses of the social and historical structures that condition individuals’ thinking and inner life. Individuals do not come into the world endowed with prenotions; they are the products—­as Durkheim and other classical sociologists often noted—­of institutions. Primary and secondary schooling, for example, help to pass on to individuals their presuppositions about the social and racial order (e.g., those of whiteness), while higher education forms the disciplinary and scholastic prenotions that in turn affect race scholarship. Delving reflexively into inner subjectivity must give way to sociological analyses of the institutional settings in which race scholars are formed, the structures and processes whereby their hidden assumptions about the world are forged. Such inquiry must have available to it the most advanced and sophisticated instruments of scientific objectification; tools of this sort can help to make sense of how institutions work, where the individuals in question are located in them, and the sometimes opaque ways in which persons’ innermost assumptions are acquired. Institutional analyses are indispensable, more specifically, for uncovering the full ensemble of forces that preconstruct race scholars’ very problems, categories of thought, and modes of inquiry. In chapter 5, we take up the topic of institutional analysis in more systematic fashion. In addition, as we have noted, reflexive and critical inquiry must be pursued in a way that is neither presentist nor parochial, neither time bound nor

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place specific (this perhaps is the guiding theme of chapters 3 and 4). The institutional contexts in which racial subjects are formed—­and the modes of thought these institutions transmit, for instance about the very meaning of race itself—­need to be submitted in rigorous manner to historical and comparative analysis. And, as we showed above as well, the prenotions and assumptions that distort one’s thinking about race need to be neutralized through systematic attempts to construct a preliminary definition of the phenomenon. In this chapter, we set forth such a definition and worked through it step by step. Finally, as we also discussed in the preceding section, steps toward an epistemological break must be complemented by a reaffirmation of the importance of primary experience. Or, to put it another way, critical reflexivity must proceed in dialectical fashion, in pursuit of comprehensive understandings that incorporate both a moment of objectivation and a moment of lived relations and meanings. Our arguments in respect to all these points have a preliminary quality about them. Nonetheless, they are a necessary preliminary, for racial analyses are limited when not accompanied by a careful and deliberate questioning of lay and academic wisdom. Analysts who fail to cast a critical eye back on their own presuppositions, taking up research projects without systematically questioning the epistemological foundations on which they rest, as well as scholars who approach reflexivity in a monochromatic fashion—­for instance, directing attention to the social unconscious while neglecting the disciplinary and scholastic unconscious—­limit severely their own possibilities for advancing inquiry. It is in the interests of scientific progress, we believe, that the meaning of reflexivity must be broadened. For if it is true that “there is no science but of the hidden,” as Bachelard once noted, then it is equally true that the hidden disastrously can impair one’s hopes ever of producing a truly scientific and warranted knowledge. We now have come to the end of part 1 (“Reflexivity”) and the threshold of part 2 (“Relationality”), which comprises this work’s core chapters. The very topic and conceptual orientation of part 2—­relational thinking about race—­is indebted to reflexive thought, for, as we demonstrated above, the opposite of relationality, namely, substantialism, long has been among the hallmarks of the scholastic mind. It remains for us to explore the implications of relational thinking, and of some of the other tools and insights we gleaned from our discussion of reflexivity, for conceptualizing aspects of racial life such as the structures that constrain, but also provide opportunities for, racial action; the agentic modalities through which such action unfolds; the interactional, institutional, and interstitial forms such racial action takes—­forms through which racial domination is exercised as well as challenged—­and the

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social-­psychological dispositions and capacities through which racial domination both is reproduced and can be overcome. In our investigation of these topics, we shall develop the comprehensive and systematic theory of race of which we spoke in the preceding chapter. The theory itself will be a kind of payoff for reflexive and critical inquiry and would not have been possible without it. It will pave the way, in turn, for a consideration of racial renovation—­or, as we term it, “Reconstruction”—­which will be the topic of part 3.

pa r t i i

Relationality

3

The Structures of the Racial Order

Our approach is influenced by—­and seeks to contribute to—­a tradition of relational thinking about the social world.1 This tradition conceives of social life as consisting in processes not substances, in dynamic, unfolding relations rather than in static, unchanging things. One cannot posit discrete, pregiven units such as the individual or social groups as the ultimate starting points of social-­scientific research. Relational social epistemology is, at the same time, a relational social ontology: the fundamental unit of social inquiry is not individuals or collectivities but bonds or, to invoke Harrison White’s felicitous phrase, “processes-­in-­relations.”2 Among European social thinkers, it was Marx who first expressed this relational point of view, asserting that “society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”3 Capital, in his view, is inseparable from wage labor, and each is to be defined in terms of the other: “Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.”4 (By the same token, as we will demonstrate, races themselves can be understood as complexes of social relations, as opposed to thing-­like substances or entities.) In a different way, Simmel, too, was deeply committed to relational theorizing; his sociology revolved around the concept of “modes of sociation.” “Through this concept,” he argued, “historical life is spared the alternatives of having to run either in mere individuals or abstract generalities. Society is the generality that has, simultaneously, concrete vitality.”5 And even Durkheim, the founding father of sociology most closely identified with substantialist ideas (his social thought long having been associated with holism or collectivism), acknowledged the force of relational thinking. In his view, it was transactions among associated individuals that generated emergent phenomena such as the conscience collective or

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collective representations. “As the association is formed,” he wrote, “it gives birth to phenomena which do not derive directly from the nature of the associated elements.”6 However, it was two other important sources in early twentieth-­century thought—­both in the discipline of philosophy—­that gave the relational point of view its most significant early formulation. One was classical American pragmatism. While in some respects individualist in its basic assumptions, James’s philosophy was deeply imbued with relational insights. In The Meaning of Truth, he wrote that “the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves. . . . Therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience.”7 Mead’s thought, too, from his theory of the origins of mind, self, and reflective intelligence in symbolically mediated interaction to his view of free and open communication in a universal community as the paradigm of social democracy, was built on a relational foundation.8 Most importantly, Dewey’s entire life’s work revolved around the idea, as he termed it in Knowing and the Known (coauthored with Arthur Bentley), of “trans-­ action,” “where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to ‘elements’ or other presumptively detachable or independent ‘entities,’ ‘essences,’ or ‘realities,’ and without isolation of presumptively detachable ‘relations’ from such detachable ‘elements.’ ”9 In this point of view, the very terms or units involved in a trans-­action derived their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they played within it. The trans-­action, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, became the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves.10 Relational thinking entailed “the seeing together, when research requires it, of what before had been seen in separations and held severally apart.”11 Dewey liked to deploy imageries of complex joint activity in his writings, imageries in which the constituent elements of any activity cannot be envisioned apart from the flows in which they are involved (and vice versa): “No one would be able successfully to speak of the hunter and the hunted as isolated with respect to hunting. Yet it is just as absurd to set up hunting as an event in isolation from the spatio-­temporal connection of all the components.”12 The other important source of relational thinking in early twentieth-­ century thought was Ernst Cassirer. In his masterful history of modern science, Substance and Function, he laid out a broad distinction between the “thing-­concepts” central to what he termed substantialist ways of thinking

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and the “relation-­concepts” pertinent to a transactional approach. The rise of the latter he charted in a multiplicity of problem areas, including the theories of space and number, geometry, and the natural sciences. In all these areas, he noted, things “are not assumed as independent existences present anterior to any relation, but . . . gain their whole being . . . first in and with the relations which are predicated of them. Such ‘things’ are terms of relations, and as such can never be ‘given’ in isolation but only in ideal community with each other.”13 Cassirer’s ideas about substantialism and relationalism deeply influenced his fellow philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, and through him, Pierre Bourdieu. A contemporary of Cassirer, Bachelard devoted many passages in his work to substantialist thinking, including an entire chapter in his major treatise, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, on the topic of “the substantialist illusion.” Although concerned predominantly with the natural sciences, he established clearly the significance of substantialism as another of the major epistemological obstacles facing social thought.14 In later years, a large number of social scientists would take up the challenge of developing a relational alternative to substantialism, replacing methodological individualism and collectivism (or holism) with such ideas as ecological context (Park and the Chicago School), social networks (Lewin, White), and figurations (Elias).15 The most prominent of the relational sociologists of the latter half of the twentieth century was Bourdieu, for whom “field”—­understood above all as a relational configuration—­became a core, indeed a signature, concept for use in analyzing a wide range of relatively autonomous realms or microcosms of social life. In a manner highly reminiscent of Weber’s thesis of the progressive differentiation in the modern age of life or value spheres, each with its own distinctive structures and dynamics and featuring its own internal logic, Bourdieu developed the vision of a diversity of fields of practice, all in some degree of tension or conflict with one another.16 Modern society, he claimed, is marked, not by the ascendancy of any singular logic such as that of the social relations of production, but by the existence of a number of more or less independent social universes that, although empirically interrelated and mutually determinative, nonetheless obey, again to some greater or lesser extent, their own inner laws and principles. Bourdieu characterized even the national society itself as a field, terming it “the social space as a whole,” although within it he also delineated a number of less expansive spaces, such as the economic field, the field of cultural production (itself encompassing still more delimited spaces, such as the literary, artistic, and scientific fields), and the field of bureaucratic powers, or the state.17 Also included in the social space

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as a whole were highly circumscribed and even microcosmic social worlds, such as individual families.18 In one work, Masculine Domination, Bourdieu also turned his attention to gender relations, again seeking to make sense of his object in field-­theoretic terms and depicting masculinity and femininity as elements in a complex of social and symbolic relations.19 Throughout, he generalized on Marx by speaking not merely of exploitation in the field of capitalist social relations but, more broadly, of the domination that characterizes nearly all fields of social practice. Virtually all fields, he posited, are domains of conflict over the conservation or transformation of relations of domination; that is, they usefully are conceptualized as spaces of powers and of struggles. Regrettably, Bourdieu never did perform the kind of analysis of the space of racial domination that he carried out of other fields, although he did devote attention to the Algerian War and the problems of Algerian immigrants in France, penned important theoretical passages on regionalism and ethnic conflict, and offered observations of a more general nature on essentialism and class domination.20 His own writings tended to highlight class relations much more prominently than they did racial division, to the extent that, in Distinction, he spoke of “the field of class relations” and “the social space as a whole” interchangeably.21 In this chapter, we seek to present field analysis—­with all the theoretical and philosophical assumptions underlying that approach—­as a crucial tool in race scholarship. For much too long, racial groups and races have been treated, at least implicitly, in substantialist fashion and reified as preconstituted, insular, self-­moving essences. Analysts too commonly have depicted race as a fixed essence that acts in the world or as a variable that must be “isolated” or “controlled for.” In race scholarship perhaps more than in other areas of specialization, sociological researchers “have given up writing about the real world, hiding in stylized worlds of survey variables, historical forces, and theoretical abstractions.”22 They have treated race as a kind of “intervening variable” without offering a theory of racial action on its own terms. Often viewing race as a rudder, never as a ship complete with a compass, destination, journey, and crew of its own, they have marshaled it as a way of explaining outcomes in other fields without analyzing it as a field in its own right.23 By contrast, we contend that racial groups must ever be situated in matrices of racial transactions, outside of which the very idea of a race—­or, for that matter, of race itself—­makes no sense. Racial entities are not substances but terms of processes-­in-­relations within a racial field, such that even specific racial groups or races themselves are relational configurations. In sum, the racial order is a framework of relations in which no discrete phenomena can

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be grasped in abstraction from the laws of functioning of the racial field as a whole. In this regard, Dewey said it best: “Association in the sense of connection and combination is a ‘law’ of everything known to exist. Singular things act, but they act together. Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation. The action of everything is along with the action of other things. The ‘along with’ is of such a kind that the behavior of each is modified by its connection with the other.”24 Dewey’s insight is relevant to students of the social world—­philosophers, historians, statisticians, and anthropologists alike—­because it has to do with that most fundamental scientific act of constructing the object of inquiry, an act that requires a basic grasp, however rudimentary, of the ontology of social objects. (Indeed, it also is in keeping with our emphasis in chapter 2 on contextualizing objects of study—­here in a more topological sense.) In what follows, we build on Dewey’s relational way of thinking by discussing how the racial order itself can be conceived as a complex of social-­structural, cultural, and what we call collective-­emotional matrices of relations. Any comprehensive study of the racial field must encompass all three of these analytically distinct but empirically interrelated contexts. The major sections of this chapter take up the three moments of the racial field in turn; the conclusion discusses how they all fit together. Chapter 4 then interweaves this synchronic analysis with a more diachronic one, while chapter 5 shows how both come together in the interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena, such as publics and social movements, which constitute the racial order. The Social Structures of the Racial Field The global racial field, which divides the world into a white race of European descent and the “less civilized” races of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, was constituted centuries ago, during the early modern era, in tandem with Western colonialism.25 Alongside it emerged, within each national society, more delimited racial fields that, while sharing some of the same characteristics as the global field, also exhibited their own highly distinctive features. For example, race has different meanings—­and operates quite differently—­in national societies such as Guatemala, Jamaica, or South Africa than it does in the United States.26 (And each of these racial fields, in turn, is different than all the rest.) Within each national field, moreover, can be found particular racial groups that also might be conceived as discrete fields. In what follows, we direct our attention predominantly, but not exclusively, to the American racial field—­and, by way of further illustration, to a subfield within it, that of American blackness. Before turning to our substantive examples,

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however, we also spend more time on theoretical preliminaries. Our guiding principle, as in each of the subsequent major sections of this chapter, is that, while each racial field or subfield has its own distinctive properties that make it unlike most or all the others, racial fields also have certain properties in common simply by virtue of being fields. It is important to understand what those universal properties are. In this section, our discussion revolves around the following questions: How are the social relations of a racial field structured? What kinds of assets or capitals are to be found therein? What kinds of capitals especially are relevant to the study of such fields? And, at the theoretical level, how is the linkage between racial fields and capitals to be conceptualized? How are they to be conceived in relation to one another? r a c e a n d s o c i a l r e l at i o n s What then, precisely is a field, at least insofar as its social structures are concerned?27 Let us return briefly to Bourdieu for a generic working definition, beginning with the abstract and then moving progressively toward the concrete. Fields are “structured spaces of positions (or posts) whose properties depend on their position within these spaces and which can be analyzed independently of the characteristics of their occupants (which are partly determined by them).”28 This means that any field—­one consisting, for instance, of two or more racial groups—­must be conceptualized as a configuration of objective social relations not between the concrete entities themselves (e.g., the specific racial groups at hand) but between the nodes those entities happen to occupy within the given configuration.29 (This is not unlike the way of thinking characteristic of some variants of social network analysis.) The unit of analysis is not concrete or empirical entities but what Bourdieu calls “epistemic objects.”30 To construct an object means to break with preconstructed, taken-­for-­granted understandings of that object in favor of “situating [it] at a determinate place in social space.”31 This is important because one thereby gains a way systematically of taking into account forces that act on and are determinative of it from elsewhere or outside: “Like heavenly bodies belonging to the same gravitational field,” objects within a space “produce effects upon one another from afar.”32 This analytic move is not deterred by the apparently self-­subsistent and self-­enclosed nature of the social objects under investigation. Racial groups give every appearance of being independent entities with their own ingrained characteristics and tendencies. In Bourdieu’s view, however, these are more field effects than qualities inherent in the objects themselves: “When I talk of [any given] field, I know very well that in

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this field I will find ‘particles’ (let me pretend for a moment that we are dealing with a physical field) that are under the sway of forces of attraction, of repulsion, and so on, as in a magnetic field. Having said this, as soon as I speak of a field, my attention fastens on the primacy of this system of objective relations over the particles themselves. And we could say, following the formula of a famous German physicist, that the individual, like the electron, is an Ausgeburt des Felds: he or she is in a sense an emanation of the field.”33 A racial field, then, can be conceptualized as a space of social forces. To put it now in a different way, it also can be seen as a configuration of power relations. Precisely here a new question arises: how are racial fields as structures of power to be mapped and investigated systematically? To achieve that end, an additional concept must be introduced, a concept of capital relationally interdependent with that of field. The structure of social positions in a racial field is determined by the volume and structure of capital held by each actor within the field. That is, the field’s power relations are determined by the structure of the distribution across it of different species of capital; positions in a field, including those that mark the dominant and dominated poles of the field, must be analyzed in terms of the distinctive profiles of capital associated with them. We speak here of species or profiles in the plural because, while often the term “capital” connotes economic resources, it also can be seen as encompassing other types of assets—­cultural, educational, legal, technical, political, and so forth—­any of which, when accrued by racial actors within the field at hand, “allows [its] possessors to wield a power, or influence, and thus to exist, in the field under consideration instead of being considered a negligible quantity.”34 Thus we deploy the concept of capital in a more comprehensive fashion than do economistic perspectives that focus analytic attention solely or predominantly on material assets. Economic capital does not exhaust the full range of species of capital at stake and in play in the contemporary world. And nowhere is this more true than in the racial field. Dominant racial groups do not occupy their positions of ascendancy in the racial order merely because of enjoying a greater degree of material well-­ being. And less privileged races are, for their own part, dominated not solely on account of their lesser average wealth or income. Whites’ racial domination derives as much from their possession of a wide array of nonmaterial assets as it does from economic considerations alone, resulting in nonwhites suffering not only economically but also “in a spiritual sense,” in Frazier’s apt phrase.35 Especially important among those other assets are cultural and symbolic capital. The former encompasses educational capital—­that is, number of

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years in school and/or degrees obtained—­as well as possession of cultural objects and (more crucially) possession of the cognitive, affectual, and even bodily means to appropriate and use them: that is, long-­lasting dispositions of the mind and body that vary significantly along race lines. (In chapter 6, we take up this latter topic in greater depth.) Cultural capital differs from economic capital in being transmissible only by means of an investment of time, which itself requires distance from necessity.36 It also differs from human and social capital—­two alternative forms of capital often featured in the race literature—­in being not an individual-­level phenomenon, as is human capital, but a subjectification of objective structures within the mind and body of the singular actor, and in being the product not merely of extant network ties, as is social capital, but, more deeply, of an entire life history, understood as the experience of and passage through a number of distinct social fields.37 Conceptualized in this way, cultural capital is a major source of power in the racial field, although it also remains, with the exception of its outward, more institutionalized modalities such as educational capital, relatively underexamined.38 In the American racial field, people of the dominated races—­with the exception of Asian Americans of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian descent, although not, say, people of Southeast Asian descent—­ tend to have higher dropout rates than whites, score lower on standarized tests, and are less present in institutions of higher learning.39 They also are less likely to be found in the occupations of schoolteacher, professor, or artist (conspicuous exceptions, such as the occupation of popular musician, notwithstanding), and are less likely to be found in the ranks of the professions, such as law or medicine. This is very well known. Less thoroughly studied, by contrast, are other indicators of cultural capital (or, more to the point, lack thereof) such as mastery of a “noble instrument” such as the piano or violin, attendance at venues of legitimate (traditionally white) “high culture” such as art museums, or facility in ways of speaking associated with educated white society—­a linguistic form of cultural capital.40 (Speech patterns and accents are important markers of cultural capital, as evidenced by widely circulated and mocking Internet videos of low-­income African Americans being interviewed by news reporters.41) Symbolic capital, for its part, designates any type of capital (including, but not limited to, cultural capital) accorded positive recognition, esteem, or, in Weberian terminology, social honor by relevant actors.42 Struggles over such capital—­or consecration, as Bourdieu, in a Durkheimian spirit, would have it—­often are among the most significant features of racial dynamics, and those racial actors that amass it gain considerably thereby in their attempts to assume a dominant position in the field as a whole.43 White people

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in the Jim Crow South possessed symbolic authority to such a degree that black men could not look at them directly or touch them physically; they were living embodiments of the sacredness defined by Durkheim as radical heterogeneity vis-­à-­vis the profane. In rare instances, specially consecrated black folk—­Booker T. Washington springs immediately to mind—­possessed symbolic authority as well, but only by virtue of the ritual transference of symbolic power from socially honorable white people themselves to a select few blacks, a process akin to the royal touch analyzed by historian Marc Bloch.44 In the chapel scene of Ellison’s Invisible Man, Dr. Bledsoe, the African American president of a black college, is depicted as uniquely empowered to touch white people, the trustees and honored guests of the school: “As I saw him placing his hand upon their arms,” notes the invisible man, “touching their backs, whispering to a tall angular-­faced trustee who in turn touched his arm familiarly, I felt a shudder. I too had touched a white man today and I felt that it had been disastrous, and I realized then that he was the only one of us whom I knew—­except perhaps a barber or a nursemaid—­who could touch a white man with impunity. And I remembered too that whenever white guests came upon the platform he placed his hand upon them as though exercising a powerful magic. I watched his teeth flash as he took a white hand.”45 Symbolic capital in this case is owed exclusively to whites’ powers of consecration, and whites in turn are possessed of it as a by-­product of their powers of coercion.46 Race scholarship would benefit from investigating more fully the significance of symbolic capital and incorporating it into its theoretical frames of reference. Relatedly, there is another important type of asset operative in any racial field. The interplay of different species of capital (including symbolic capital) within a racial field leads to the emergence of a specifically racial capital that enables the dominants of that field to exercise power over the field as a whole, including “the different particular species of capital [significant within it], and especially over the rates of conversion between them (and thereby over the relations of force between their respective holders).”47 This means that those who possess this specific capital—­whatever it might be—­ gain thereby the capacity to determine the relative values of all the other resources in the field in question, and in so doing to recast the state of power relations in that field; they gain, moreover, the capacity to produce the recognition, which also is a misrecognition, of the legitimacy of this state of power relations among all other contending parties. In the American racial field, the possession of an utterly arbitrary asset or endowment (examples might include white attributes and heritage, the purity of which historically was vouchsafed by the “one drop rule”) is decisive in determining the relative

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value of all other assets and endowments. It is the racial capital possessed by whites that dictates that light skin tone will be superior to dark or that classical (that is, predominantly Austro-­Germanic) music will be seen as a higher art form than jazz. It is this same racial capital that makes whites capable of appropriating cultural forms and artifacts of subordinated racial groups and conferring on them a heightened cultural capital. (One thinks here, for example, of Picasso and his African masks; it was Picasso, after all, who is said to have remarked, “good artists copy; great ones steal.”48) Finally, it also is this form of capital that creates in the racially dominated a feeling that such are, indeed, the proper, legitimate valuations of different assets or capitals. As a twist on the above, one might add that particular racial groups, understood, themselves, as racial fields, also have their own specific racial capital. We speak of this in greater detail below. Let us sum up now in provisional fashion. Racial fields are organized in terms of the structure of distribution of different types of capitals or assets, the most important being specifically racial capital. They exhibit a bipolar structure whose two poles are that of racial dominance, occupied by racial groups with asset structures featuring a high volume of economic, cultural, and, especially, racial privilege (in varying proportions), and that of racial subordinance, occupied by dominated racial groups with asset structures having a lesser quantity of the above.49 Nonwhite racial groups are arrayed in the dominated sector of the American racial field in terms of their proximity to whites; Asians (especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian Americans) and, perhaps, Hispanics (especially Cuban and Dominican Americans) occupy the upper portion of that sector—­that is, the intermediate position of the field overall—­while blacks and American Indians define the lower end.50 (Secondary factors such as gender and class make for some limited variability in this regard.) Regression-­based analyses of American racial life, analyses in which race is demonstrated simply to exist or is deployed as one of several independent variables (e.g., “percentage black”), fail to uncover the inherently relational nature of such racial fields, where each race is constructed in opposition to the others and gains its distinctive features from that opposition. As the authors of White-­Washing Race put it, “Discussions of racial inequality commonly dwell on only one side of the color line. We talk about black poverty, black unemployment, black crime, and public policies for blacks. We rarely, however, talk about the gains whites receive from the troubles experienced by blacks. . . . Whites have gained or accumulated opportunities, while African Americans and other racial groups have lost opportunities—­they suffer from disaccumulation.”51

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Nor do regression-­based analyses help to reveal how different capitals operate in the racial field, much less the nature of the relation itself between capital and field. The latter concepts are, as one might expect from a relational perspective, inherently interlinked. Just as the distribution of capital(s) “constitutes the very structure of the field,” so, too, conversely, “a capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field.” “There is thus a sort of hermeneutic circle,” noted Bourdieu. “In order to construct the field, one must identify the forms of specific capital that operate within it, and to construct the forms of specific capital one must know the specific logic of the field. There is an endless to and fro movement in the research process that is quite lengthy and arduous.”52 In pondering this insight, one would do well to recall the Marxian dictum, cited at the beginning of this chapter, that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation.” A succinct expression of the relational mind, its truth extends well beyond the original intellectual context of its production, speaking as forcefully and critically to race scholars today as it did to the classical political economists of a century or more ago. This insight allows us, in fact, to think our way past the tendency, still too common, to reify discrete racial categories and attributes (including assets) and to accept as our unit of analysis “races” in the sense of relatively homogeneous populations with shared purposes, lifestyles, and sufferings. This scholastic habit not only reifies “races”; it also reifies racial hierarchies, since analysts almost always treat “white” as the perfect and natural “reference category” to which all other groups should be compared. That which is accepted as the norm in our social world also is accepted as the norm in our statistical models, the results of which (in turn) reinforce the normalization of whiteness—­a mutually reinforcing cycle that only is broken when a reflexive analyst like Mary Pattillo (here speaking of the vast literature on spatial assimilation and the barriers blacks face when attempting to relocate to white suburbia) clears her throat and asks, “Who said, after all, that residential integration with whites is still the preeminent goal to which blacks (and whites) should aspire?”53 A relational perspective shifts attention (to recall here Bourdieu’s distinctive language) from concrete and hierarchically arranged races to “epistemic” races—­that is, to races understood as positions in various racial fields. Just as “real classes” do not exist but have to be constructed through theoretical and practical action, so too “real races” do not exist but had to be invented by European colonizers and then reinvented by the racially dominated themselves, who sought, from the earliest slave uprisings to the Civil Rights Movement, to unify those classified as racially inferior under a common political purpose. What exists are not races but racial fields, including the American

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racial field itself, in which the very existence of races—­and of racism—­is a matter of intense debate and struggle.54 the field of blackness Thus far, we have confined our attention to racial fields overall (e.g., the racial order of present-­day American society). However, the full analytic power of a field-­theoretic approach only can be grasped when it is recognized that its guiding insights retain a certain “self-­similarity across levels,” as White would have it, and prove useful not only when deployed horizontally, as it were, in comparisons across the selfsame level of analysis—­between, say, different racial fields of national scope—­but also vertically, encompassing not only fields of races but also particular races as fields.55 The concept of field applies at all scales and levels of analysis, from the most expansive to the most circumscribed, and each of the more delimited social microcosms, too, is its own internal field of practice. This self-­similarity across levels is important because it calls into question the false division of labor—­and along with it theoretically false and vacuous attempts subsequently at synthesis—­between macroscopic and microscopic levels of racial inquiry. All racial fields, whether large or small, exhibit properties that are invariant and universal.56 In what follows, we provide one specific example of this: the social structures of a circumscribed racial field that one might label “the field of blackness.”57 Rather than speak of a “black community” or the “black population,” still less the variable of “black,” we present here a space or field marked by a differential distribution of various types of assets, including racial capital, from which African Americans—­and some nonblacks too—­derive their racial identities. Although firmly grounded in the sociological literature, this example is meant above all creatively and generatively to extend the theoretical insights developed in the preceding pages.58 Before we complete the picture by discussing the cultural and collective-­emotional dimensions of the racial order, we hope to illustrate how structures of social relations also might be mapped at least in this specific case of the microcosm of black America. Now, to be sure, one encounters in American racial life not only the field of blackness but also fields of American Indians, Latinos, Asians, and whites. To a significant degree, all such fields are structured in terms of the volume and composition of capitals associated with different positions and the actors occupying them, such as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Dominicans in the Latino field; Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Indian Americans in the Asian American field; or Palestinians, Moroccans, and Egyptians in the Arab American field. Indeed, to increase the level of

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magnification even further, there also are ethnic and tribal groups that themselves can be seen as fields. One thinks here of the fields of Southeast Asians, West Africans, Jews, Irish Americans, or, within the field of American Indians, the Navajo, Apache, or Lakota Nations. One thinks, too, to adjust the magnification in the opposite direction, of fields of panethnicity—­such as the pan-­Asian field or what might be termed, following Paul Gilroy, the field of the “black Atlantic”59—­that stretch the world over. In yet another direction, one can speak of racial vectors that help order other fields related to social relations. Think of the field of Christianity as made up in part of different denominations that correspond to different positions within the racial field—­black Pentecostalism, Korean Evangelicalism, Mexican Catholicism, white midwestern Lutheranism—­or of the field of sport as organized around different games affiliated to varying degrees with different racial or ethnic groups: Italian men of a certain age playing bocce; Native American youth throughout the Southwest pursuing hoop dreams; white twenty-­somethings engaging in ultimate frisbee and yoga; South Asian immigrants playing cricket on Saturday mornings; African and Latin American immigrant soccer afficionados occupying the grassy field in the afternoon.60 Needless to say, possibilities for substantive research here are considerable—­and remain largely untapped. Field-­theoretic ideas have great potential for making sense of what long have been considered unrelated, self-­subsistent phenomena. We begin, however, as one always must when discussing race relations in America, with whiteness. There is, in the dominant sector of the racial field, what Bourdieu, in the somewhat different context of class relations, called the “field of power.”61 (Originally, he devised the term as a relational twist on the old Marxian idea of a ruling class, although clearly the concept can be transposed to other settings as well, such as the racial field.62) While the distribution of the volume of capital in the racial field determines its structure overall, a different opposition obtains within this field of power, a structural tension or antagonism between the holders of economic and political privilege, on the one hand, and those of educational and cultural preeminence, on the other.63 In this structural antagonism, the former typically have the upper hand and hence can be counted as the first among equals, dominants among the dominant holders of capital, while those with high educational or cultural credentials typically find themselves in a subordinated position, the dominated among the dominants. In the American racial field, whites are preeminent in the world of high culture, within the dominated sector of the field of power. But, more importantly, they also occupy most of the prominent positions of authority in the economic as well as political realms, in the dominant sector of the field. Where does one locate the field of blackness in all of this?

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Cultural Production

+

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+ +

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The Field of Blackness

+ f i g u r e 1 . The field of blackness in relation to (1) the American social space, (2) the field of power, (3) the field of cultural production, and (4) the political and economic field.

The latter can be said to occupy a dominated position in the social space as a whole (see figure 1). This does not imply that all African Americans reside in the lower reaches of American society, or even that, “on average,” African Americans possess less economic, political, or cultural capital. Instead, it suggests that the capital generated by and defining the field of blackness—­black capital, black authenticity, how black (in the symbolic sense) one is—­is a subordinated pedigree of capital, one inversely related to political, economic, and even cultural capital.64 Whereas one easily can exchange economic for political capital (e.g., fund a senate campaign) or for cultural capital (e.g., finance a college education), or in other ways convert one to the other, one cannot as easily exchange black capital for political, economic, or cultural capital. In fact, it seems that the more politically, economically, or culturally powerful one is, the less “black” one becomes. This is one reason why many upper-­and middle-­class blacks participate in activities that seem to offset the whitening effect brought about by their class position, activities such as attending a black church, signing up their children for an all-­black little league team, or

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moving from the suburbs to inner-­city neighborhoods.65 Blackness, in these cases, is treated the way an assimilated immigrant treats a mother tongue that has become a second language. It no longer marks what one primarily is; it is what one once was and what a part of one still wishes to be. What once was natural becomes a practiced discipline. To fully unpack this observation, we need to consider now the inner logic of blackness. The field of blackness is a relatively autonomous social microcosm, and blackness possesses a relatively autonomous logic, one distinct from classed, gendered, or other societal logics.66 To be sure, it hardly is immune to field effects emanating from outside the field itself. State policies, for example, do a lot to shape the contours of the racial field in general—­and the field of blackness in particular (e.g., through public housing in segregated areas or heightened police surveillance in inner-­city neighborhoods). So too do dynamics of economic deprivation or masculine domination play an important role. However, such dynamics always must be translated into the specific logic of the field of blackness. Consider material wealth or other such external markers of success. Racial authenticity, the focus of interest of important historical and ethnographic studies in recent years, including J. Martin Favor’s Authentic Blackness, John Jackson Jr.’s Real Black, and Prudence Carter’s Keepin’ It Real, long has been a crucial asset in the blackness field.67 “Selling out” or “acting white,” correspondingly, long have been typical ways of dispossessing oneself of such capital.68 Duneier’s protagonist in Sidewalk, Hakim, actively rejected white corporate America in order to preserve his humanity, his blackness.69 (Of African Americans who join whites at the table of economic or political privilege, Patricia Williams once observed, “You need two chairs at the table, one for you, one for your blackness.”70) Alternatively, consider prevailing standards of “beauty.” Light-­skinned African American women might be deemed more beautiful and desirable by those (black and nonblack alike) who collude with white standards, but, as Drake and Cayton observed long ago, they often are considered—­by heterosexual men in the field of blackness—­less preferable than darker-­toned women, and, indeed, are seen as less black.71 (“[Those] who wanted their women black wanted them black; and those who wanted their women white wanted them white,” Baldwin’s narrator observes in If Beale Street Could Talk.72) The black body is a signifier of position in the field of blackness, a theme explored by many black poets and authors of the Harlem Renaissance, from Gwendolyn Bennett (“To a Dark Girl”) to Wallace Thurman (The Blacker the Berry).73 Although black capital not always is positively correlated with the dark tone of one’s skin—­indeed, many prominent black leaders, such as Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, were light-­skinned—­bodily transformations such as

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skin bleaching and hair ironing often are thought of as antiblack practices, whereas the reclamation of “black beauty,” as in afro hairstyles, results in a higher allocation of black capital.74 (These associations can change over time; here as elsewhere, the larger field dynamics are the most important consideration, not the concrete, specific trends.75) The field of blackness can be thought of as organized around a vertical axis measuring political and economic capital and a horizontal axis measuring black capital. We highlight political and economic rather than cultural capital for purposes of simplicity here, the former types of capital being what most clearly define the dominant sector of the racial order’s field of power. (They most clearly are synonymous with white authority and privilege and most diametrically opposed to the specific capital of black authenticity.) Figure 2 offers a mapping of the internal layout of this field of blackness, a theoretical construct based on careful consideration of a wide range of evidence, from sociological accounts to media representations, from popular discourse to literary narratives. In the manner of a correspondence analysis diagram (which it is not, however), this figure represents the field by means of differently positioned entities: political figures, entertainers, intellectuals, artists, sports, foods, and geographic places.76 In the discussion that follows, we place these entities in quotation marks to remind readers that they are epistemic not concrete objects; even more specifically, readers should recall that these objects are occupants of different positions in a relational configuration, the focus of analytic interest ultimately being on structural positions not particular occupants. And we invoke them here simply for purposes of accessibility, these objects serving as ready-­made markers, easily grasped in intuitive terms, for the more abstruse theoretical and empirical points we aim to establish about this and, by extension, other racial fields. (In a few cases, we get ahead of ourselves also by mentioning entities that, strictly speaking, belong not to the level of social relations but to those of culture and collective emotions. We turn to those latter topics in more detail in the later sections of this chapter.) Undoubtedly, readers will take issue with some of our substantive choices in the figure. For example, finding the right place for “Zora Neale Hurston” was especially difficult, for, although she died penniless and was considered a traitor to her race by prominent African American intellectuals and literary critics, not the least of whom was Richard Wright, today she is revered as a scholar and accorded high black capital for her alternative and positive representations of “black culture.”77 The field is in constant motion: for example, the first-­presidential-­term “Barack Obama” would occupy a different position in this space than the second-­presidential-­term “Barack Obama.” Such

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Political & Economic Capital +

Quadrant 1 Condoleezza Rice Golf

Thurgood Marshall

Bill Cosby

Black Republicans Samuel L. Jackson Northeast Coast

Michelle Obama

Oprah Winfrey

Clarence Thomas

Atlanta Booker T. Washington

Black Executives NAACP

Spike Lee

Jay-Z

August Wilson Muhammad Ali

M.L.K.

Ebony Magazine

Jazz

Braids

Historically Black Colleges

Integrated Suburbs Black Capital -

Quadrant 3

W.E.B. Du Bois

Black Capital +

Toni Morrison Richard Wright

Harlem

The Black Press

Skin Bleaching

Soul Food

West Indian Immigrants

Ella Baker

Sambo Figure

Basketball

Labor Unions Blackface

Afro James Baldwin Malcolm X

Zora Neale Hurston

Mississippi Delta

Quadrant 4

Black Panthers

Gangsta Rap Black Ghetto Quadrant 2

Political & Economic Capital -

f i g u r e 2 . The field of blackness

Figure 2: The Field of Blackness

difficulties notwithstanding, however, this schematic offers a glance into what the field of blackness may entail. Quadrant 1 includes entities that possess a high volume of political or economic capital but little black capital. As African Americans climb the rungs of the political or economic ladder, often they are obliged to sacrifice their blackness somewhat. As Fanon observed, speaking of black individuals, “One is white above a certain financial level.”78 That is, for an African American to succeed in society, she must actively reject her roots, including perhaps her family, and take on the white imagination of blackness.79 “The black man wants to be like the white man,” wrote Fanon. “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. Long ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a white existence.”80 African Americans divest themselves of black capital in order to gain political or economic capital, which largely is dispensed by whites. Some, like the aforementioned figure in Duneier’s Sidewalk, an educated black man

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who decided to become a street-­corner book vendor rather than work in a corporate environment, choose not to participate in this Faustian bargain. Many actively are excluded from corporate settings by the prejudices of hiring staff or corporate institutionalized racism.81 But others trade in their black capital to enjoy the fruits of temporal success (at least as the latter is defined by white society); or perhaps more commonly, things are not so intentional: some African Americans are socialized away from accruing much black capital as children, and this benefits them later in life. “Condoleezza Rice,” “Clarence Thomas,” “Bill Cosby,” and “Black Republicans” are about as far away in the social space as can be from “Black Ghetto,” “Mississippi Delta,” and “Gangsta Rap.” Understood, to reiterate, as epistemic—­as opposed to concrete—­objects, they represent the limit case of an existence deemed, in the autonomous logic of blackness, to be bereft of racial authenticity. Quadrant 2 comprises agents with little economic or political capital but a high volume of black capital. Until recently, social science and literary criticism have tended to represent blackness as a whole only in terms of this quadrant.82 Cox referred to such representation as “proletarianizing a race”: “In the case of race relations the tendency of the bourgeoisie is to proletarianize a whole people—­that is to say, the whole people is looked upon as a class—­whereas white proletarianization involves only a section of white people. The concept of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘white people’ sometimes seems to mean the same thing.”83 The idea of a field of blackness, by contrast, forces the researcher to view race as a dynamic system of relations, influenced by, yet not bound to, class relations. The poor African American, who lacks other forms of capital, might claim she possesses a higher volume of black capital than do individuals who have “left the hood” or “abandoned their roots” for lucrative opportunities, just as a Bohemian artist, hungry and lacking both a large audience and a paying career, might criticize the successful artist for “selling out” for money (that is, for sacrificing artistic for economic capital).84 Thus, some black students resist adopting “standard English” because they feel that doing so would mean speaking with the oppressor’s tongue—­or, perhaps more precisely, they do so not as a conscious form of resistance but simply because they are not oriented toward the dominant pole of the racial field. And some contend that excelling in the classroom (with its Eurocentric curriculum) would require them to sacrifice their self-­respect and racial pride.85 Charles Becknell, a black professional, reflects on the community pressures against “acting white”: “When I encounter a group of Blacks on the street in my home community, I can’t go up to them and say, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. How are you doing today?’ They would laugh at me and then feel sorry for me. They’d think, ‘Poor Charles, when he left here for college, he was OK.

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But now, look what they’ve done to him!”86 A racially authentic black person, whether a denizen of the delta or of the ghetto, is the very essence of “blackness for blackness’s sake” (a principle closely corresponding to that of “art for art’s sake” in the field of high literary or artistic culture). When whites seek to appropriate “black culture,” in fact, and to make it their own, they turn to this quadrant more often than to any other. It is here that one finds the nomos of the field, the seat of its autonomous principle, the very law of functioning of the field, the source of all its specific legitimations. Despite the symbolic tension between the two poles represented in quadrants 1 and 2, one should not conclude that African Americans cannot gain political and economic capital without sacrificing their blackness or, on the other hand, that sacrificing blackness automatically leads to economic and political capital. In quadrant 3 are epistemic individuals such as “Thurgood Marshall,” “Jay-­Z,” “Michelle Obama,” “Martin Luther King Jr.,” and “Mu­ hammad Ali,” all of whom possess large amounts of political and economic capital yet still are regarded as “authentically black.” Although anomalous, these individuals have counteracted the heteronomous logic of the field—­that of bleaching—­by defining blackness as a social construct not synonymous with poverty or powerlessness. Do these entities occupy a stable position in the field? Are they secure in their anomalous status? They often do not feel secure. “I hope my black skin don’t dirt this white tuxedo / Before the Basquiat show,” sings Frank Ocean on Jay-­Z’s track, “Oceans.” In the field of blackness, temporal success has powerful symbolic associations with whiteness—­ that is, with the very negation of blackness. Suffice it to recall that Thurgood Marshall himself often was compared unfavorably to Malcolm X, a denizen of quadrant 2 who possessed unlimited black capital and whom Marshall criticized in turn (“What did he ever do for the black man?”); that Muhammad Ali, a child of the middle class and the very paragon of worldly success, worked strenuously to assert his blackness vis-­à-­vis the more “authentically black” Joe Frazier, his boxing nemesis; and that Martin Luther King Jr., on account of his willingness to engage politically with white authorities as a civil rights leader, never attained (for some in the field of blackness) to a fully unquestioned and authentic blackness, despite the towering accomplishments to which he could lay claim. Finally, at the opposite end of the field, in quadrant 4, are individuals and other epistemic entities lacking in black, as well as economic or political,  cap­ital. Here, for instance, are persons who attempt to divest themselves of blackness—­carnally, for instance, by passing—­but who still occupy a dominated position in the social space. Here too are those “first-­generation West In­dian immigrants” who, as Mary Waters showed, actively resist blackness

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and clutch their ethnic national identities to avoid the downward mobility associated with socially stigmatized African Americans. (Their children are much more likely to end up in quadrant 2 in the field of blackness; because of their weak ties to West Indian culture, these second-­generation immigrants accept America’s dominant racial categorization much more readily than did their parents.87) And then there are “Blackface” and the “Sambo Figure.” These signify the lowest reaches of the social order and are associated with popular entertainment and the white working class. In their minstrelsy and profound contempt for the black experience, they embody, no less than do the figures of temporal achievement we associated with quadrant 1, the very antithesis of blackness, a negation of its autonomous principle so profound that it is impossible to imagine anything more lacking in black capital or authenticity.88 The Cultural Structures of the Racial Field In the first section of this chapter, we began to elaborate a field-­theoretic approach to racial domination, one that draws heavily on certain elements in Bourdieu’s sociology. In the present section, we extend relational thinking more systematically into the dimension of culture. While no longer developing the same kind of graphical representation we used earlier—­the rectangular diagram so widely identified with Bourdieuian field analysis, complete with poles, quadrants, plus and minus signs, and so forth—­we nonetheless do carry forward an identical mode of reasoning, only applied now to symbolic as opposed to social structures. We show how the racial order, understood in the foregoing as itself a field of social relations, also is a space of cultural relations—­that is, of symbolic forces and powers. A cultural sociology of the racial order urgently is called for, one that embraces the symbolic dimension of racial life. Just such an approach is presented here, one that harkens back to landmarks in cultural analysis such as Durkheim’s later religious sociology but that also, in many respects, resonates with the “strong program in cultural sociology” recently annunciated by Jeffrey Alexander. By incorporating ideas from this line of inquiry—­a tradition in which Bourdieu himself participated, albeit in more ambivalent fashion, as we shall show—­it aims to demonstrate how analysis of the meanings of racial life can be fully as illuminating as that of the social structures of racial domination. Not only illuminating, we might add, but in fact necessary, for the complexities of the racial order cannot be understood without careful attention to this symbolic dimension. Race scholarship long has been marked by a division between

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culturalist perspectives and structuralist tendencies that posit the centrality of social relations. But as Orlando Patterson rightly has observed, “When people insist, as conservatives are wont to do, that only the proximate . . . cultural . . . factors are important . . . , or as liberals and mechanistic radicals are inclined to do, that only the proximate [social] factors are worth considering . . . , they are playing tiresome and obfuscating ideological games.”89 We seek to show how this analytic impasse can be avoided. c u lt u r e a n d r ac i a l d i s c o u r s e s Although the foregoing discussion has directed attention almost exclusively to the idea of racial fields as structured relations among social positions, folk knowledge of the workings of the racial order, not to mention a vast amount of empirical research, conclusively has shown that there is more to race than social relations alone. During the past several decades, a cultural turn in the human sciences has opened up exciting new avenues for investigation into symbolic formations. In race scholarship, at least since the 1980s, culturalist approaches have held that symbolic formations—­that is, configurations or patterned sets of stances, arguments, displays, and representations—­are in their own right structures that constrain and enable action, such that the very phrase so dear to social scientists, “structure and culture,” itself is a misnomer.90 The racial order is a symbolic space as well as a social one, structured as much by culture as it is by social formations. Both social structures and cultural structures are fit objects for sociological inquiry. (An important implication here is that culture also is more than just the subjective, internal dimension of action, as opposed somehow to the objective, external facticity of social structure—­a common if unfortunate way of thinking.91) Cultural analysts also have affirmed that culture is analytically autonomous, even if empirically intertwined with social relations. This theme resonates throughout American literature grappling with the “curse” of racism, from Moby-­Dick to The Human Stain. Having arisen from a matrix of social interactions, cultural formations take on a life of their own, often outliving the historical circumstances in which they arose and exerting powerful effects on social structures as well as being affected by them. (In his classic work, The Three Orders, Georges Duby showed how the tripartite construct of medieval times—­the hierarchical structure according to which society comprises those who pray, those who fight, and those who toil—­outlived the historical circumstances of its own origin and continued to structure social life for fully a thousand years.92) The scope of racial inquiry must be expanded, then, in

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such a way that inhabiting a racial field also is seen, among other things, as staking out a distinctive place in universes of meaning, or, at the very least, as having one’s place in them staked out by others. Marx and his followers in race scholarship were wrong in this regard: class analysis, political economy, and other such approaches by themselves never are quite enough. Cox once remarked that “if beliefs, per se, could subjugate a people, the beliefs which Negroes hold about whites should be as effective as those which whites hold about Negroes.”93 This tendentious statement, whose implication is that beliefs have no importance at all, clearly was off the mark, for cultural meanings do play an undeniable, if always power-­weighted, role in racial life. The cultural turn has not been uniformly embraced, whether outside or inside the world of race studies. And difficulties engendered by failing to take into account its ideas and insights have been exacerbated by the tendency of many scholars of race—­statistical sociologists, historians, and ethnographers alike—­to take as their starting point static entities delimited either by location (residents of Chinatown, a housing project, a reservation) or by social classification (jobless black men, single mothers, Jewish immigrants), thereby uncritically embracing as the legitimate units of scientific analysis what, as we mentioned earlier, Durkheim called prenotions or “concepts formed outside science,” categories often mentioned in everyday vernacular.94 Although these researchers have produced many fruitful insights, their claims about the cultural traits of racial actors must be treated as suspect if for no other reason than that those actors largely have been studied in isolation. How, after all, can one marshal claims about the “oppositional culture” of one group without embedding that group in a configuration of relations encompassing also those other groups against which its cultural traits dialogically have been constructed? As sociologists of the Chicago School demonstrated long ago, one cannot hope to understand the dynamics of the metropolis if, instead of analyzing how city dwellers exist in a state of mutual dependence and struggle, one sees them as delimited groups with semiautonomous histories and lifestyles.95 Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum—­portrayed in some of Andrew Abbott’s work as the very paradigm of Chicago School ethnography—­shows the way here toward a more truly relational way of thinking.96 To understand social segregation and neighborhood change, Zorbaugh took as his scientific object not a bounded neighborhood (with boundaries more often than not imposed, not observed, by the analyst) but transactions and migrations between neighborhoods: this amounted to a kind of field analysis of Chicago’s Near Northside. Hence he taught researchers that, to reclaim the cultural analysis of race, they rigorously must analyze

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the cultural structures of racial fields without accepting specific racial groups (and their “cultures”) as the basic units of analysis.97 Bourdieu was keenly aware of the importance of the cultural domain. He once remarked, “I do not contend that everything is symbolic; I would only suggest that there is nothing which is not symbolic at least in part.”98 Elsewhere, he asserted, too, that “within certain limits, symbolic structures have an altogether extraordinary power.”99 In one essay, he averred: “Many ‘intellectual debates’ are less unrealistic than they seem if one is aware of the degree to which one can modify social reality by modifying the agents’ representation of it.”100 And in Distinction, he announced: “The order of words never exactly reproduces the order of things. It is the relative independence of the structure of the system of classifying, classified words . . . in relation to the structure of the distribution of capital . . . which creates the space for symbolic strategies aimed at exploiting the discrepancies between the nominal and the real.”101 Not surprisingly, in his own works, Bourdieu devoted much attention to the symbolic dimension of social life. Ever the student of Durkheim, particularly of the later Durkheim of the Elementary Forms, he included in nearly all his substantive writings allusions to sacrality and its opposition to the profane, a core element in his work being the idea of symbolic classification. This idea was encapsulated in one of his signature phrases, “principles of social vision and di-­vision.” Still more systematically, he showed how what he called position-­takings—­symbolic productions of various kinds, such as literary objects, artistic styles, tastes, ways of living, and cultural innovations—­derive their significance, like positions in a social space, from their relations with and difference from all other position-­takings in a semiotic system. It was possible to construct, he asserted, “the structure of symbolic productions, or, more precisely, the space of symbolic position-­takings in a given area of practice.”102 This idea Bourdieu put to fullest use in The Rules of Art, where he mapped out the literary field of nineteenth-­century France as a space of artistic styles and genres, a “space of works,” demonstrating how its overarching structure constrained and enabled literary production.103 Yet—­perhaps not surprisingly, either, given his concern to counterpose, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, a materialist perspective to those that invest high culture with the charisma of the sacred—­Bourdieu never did work out a fully satisfactory approach to cultural analysis. Reflecting the social-­structural biases that lurked at the time within the disciplinary unconscious, he was inconsistent in his formulations of the relation between the symbolic and the social, vacillating between affirmations of the analytic independence of cultural formations (such as the ones quoted above) and reductionist arguments to the effect that

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social positions are primary.104 In most cases, he treated cultural expressions as reflections of socioeconomic differences; as he put it in Distinction, “tastes function as markers of ‘class.’ ”105 A similar tendency has been evident in the work of many race scholars. Wilson, for example, readily acknowledges the importance of culture in his influential book The Truly Disadvantaged  but prioritizes social structure. One of the aims of his work has been to recover a culturalist interest in the devastating social maladies of the urban poor while also steering clear of the pitfalls that beset earlier work on the topic. Lewis spoke of a “culture of poverty” in the ghetto—­and, at around the same time, Moynihan of a “tangle of pathology”. Wilson sought to appropriate their ideas by directing attention to the self-­destructive cultural patterns of the black underclass. However, even in doing so he distanced himself from some of these earlier authors’ underlying theoretical assumptions. Starkly counterposing his concept of “social isolation” to that of the “culture of poverty,” he argued: “What distinguishes the two concepts is that . . . culture of poverty, unlike social isolation, places strong emphasis on the autonomous character of the cultural traits once they come into existence. In other words, these traits assume a ‘life of their own’ and continue to influence behavior even if opportunities for social mobility improve. . . . On the other hand, social isolation . . . link[s] ghetto-­specific behavior with the problems of societal organization.” Wilson concluded by reemphasizing social structure: “As economic and social situations change, cultural traits, created by previous situations, likewise eventually change even though it is possible that some will linger on and influence behavior for a period of time.”106 In a later work—­More Than Just Race—­Wilson spoke of a significant shift in his position, a new opening toward cultural analysis. He urged race scholars to investigate objects of study such as “cultural repertoires (habits, styles, and skills) and the micro-­level processes of meaning-­making and decision-­making . . . reflected in cultural frames (shared group constructions of  re­ality).”107 He spoke as well of “shared outlooks, traditions, belief sys­ tems, world­views, preferences, manners, linguistic patterns, clothing styles, and modes of behavior.”108 These cultural formations, he affirmed, themselves can exert an “independent or autonomous power,” creating and reinforcing so­cial structures despite having been generated by them originally. In offering these views, Wilson aligned himself with such scholars as Michèle Lamont and Mario Small, who insist that “culture matters” in a wide variety of ways.109 However, Wilson in the final analysis also reaffirmed his position that “[social] structure trumps culture. . . . Culture matters, but . . . it does not matter nearly as much as social structure.”110 Culture, he held, is something much

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like a screen or a filter; as compared to social relations, “culture is a less causally autonomous social structure, more often playing a mediating role in determining individuals’ life outcomes.”111 Social relations are primary: culture channels their effects in specific ways. That social structure—­for example, historical and present-­day segregation and ghettoization; joblessness; racial subjugation—­generally should be accorded great explanatory weight when it comes to understanding the plight of the black inner-­city poor, few can deny. But this does not mean that culture cannot be conceptualized as an equally autonomous structure that also orientates social (and) racial action. Setting politics aside, there is nothing theoretically scandalous about Lewis’s simple assertion that culture can take on a life of its own. Of course, in the world of race scholarship, one also encounters the opposite kind of stance in understandings of the relation between culture and social relations. Consider, for instance, the theoretical posture one might term “logocentrism,” the view that problems in racial life effectively can be solved by attending to them solely at the symbolic or linguistic level. This implicit prioritization of culture over social relations, itself a prominent recent feature of the disciplinary unconscious, which has been deeply split over the issue, leads to an obsession with racial language and racial recognition. It makes much of questions of racial terminology, such as whether one ought to say “American Indian” or “Native American,” “Latino/a” or “Hispanic.”112 And it stipulates that the politics of racial recognition are crucial to the future of the racial order, such that according respect to the socially dishonored will by itself solve many contemporary race issues. Logocentrism is prevalent in race politics today; structurally associated with high-­level academics or intellectuals who enjoy the privilege of relating to the social world primarily in theoreticist or intellectualist terms, it tends to view society as itself constituted as a text. As such, it is a variant of what in chapter 2 we called (with Bourdieu) scholasticism, a view that, in Wacquant’s words, betrays “the ‘scholastic bias’ of academics who, projecting their hermeneutic relationship to the social world, forget that every relation of meaning is also a relation of force: culture . . . cannot be the means to resolve the running battle for access to recognized social existence that everywhere defines and ranks humanity.”113 Du Bois put it this way to a young reader who objected to his use of “Negro,” a common term for African Americans at the time: “Do not . . . make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name. . . . It is not the name—­it’s the Thing that counts. . . . Let’s go get the Thing!”114

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More persuasive than either of the ways of thinking about culture just surveyed—­one more materialist, the other more idealist—­is that which arises out of Durkheim’s later work on symbolic structures.115 Mid-­twentieth-­ century cultural anthropologists such as Lévi-­Strauss and Douglas contributed mightily to this program, as did Parsons with his idea of a “cultural system” neither reducible to, nor analytically more important than, the “social” or “psychological” orders.116 The cultural anthropologist who perhaps most effectively elaborated this idea was Geertz, who in a series of essays on religion, ideology, art, and common sense spoke of cultural systems as ensembles of symbols that mutually imply and reinforce one another and that thereby constitute an integral whole. Culture, he wrote in The Interpretation of Cultures, is “webs of significance [man] himself has spun.”117 These patterns or complexes of symbols “give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.”118 The importance of Geertz’s approach, as one commentator has noted, lay in its synchonic suspension or abolition of time. One was enjoined to step back and understand culture as a structure of “interlocking” symbolic formations, such that “things that actually occur in the flow of time are treated as part of a uniform moment or epoch in which they simply coexist. . . . Different times are present in a continuous moment.”119 While not effectively incorporating a diachronic moment—­one of historical transformation, not historical simultaneity—­this approach did provide a fruitful starting point for cultural inquiry. In later chapters, we attend to the question of various stuctures’, including cultural structures’, diachronic aspects, as well as to the vexed issue of how far culture actually goes toward shaping actors’ motives and concrete social actions. An important successor to Geertz’s approach, one also situated in the Durkheimian tradition, is Alexander’s “strong program” for cultural sociology. As Alexander explains it, “Commitment to . . . cultural autonomy is the single most important quality of a strong program. In methodological terms, [this requires] the bracketing-­out of wider, nonsymbolic social relations. This bracketing-­out . . . allows the reconstruction of the pure cultural text . . . [,] [thereby] creating, or mapping out, the culture structures that form one dimension of social life.”120 The antireductionist thrust of this agenda could not possibly be clearer. In an essay that attempts further to explore how such a cultural sociology could be realized—­one that takes the analytic autonomy of culture seriously—­Philip Gorski outlines how certain field-­theoretic insights might be appropriated for the study of symbolic formations.121 As he points out, a key indicator of the historical emergence of a new symbolic structure is “the articulation of a new discourse of ‘ultimate value.’ ”122 This

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would entail in our case a discourse of racial supremacy and of “race” itself. He writes: “Such discourses tend to come in two basic forms, sociodicies and mythologies. By sociodicies I mean systematic and explicit theories about the general conditions of social order and the essential character of human flourishing. . . . By mythologies I mean the popular narratives of heroism and martyrdom that serve to inspire defense of [this] value.”123 Students of race repeatedly find varieties of such discourse in racial orders large and small.124 One thinks here, for example, of the lofty philosophic discourses of “cosmopolitanism” and “multiculturalism,” symbolic formations rooted in the writings of Hobbes, Mill, and Rousseau but recently reinvented by such thinkers as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Amy Gutmann, and, perhaps most influentially, Kwame Anthony Appiah.125 Or else one thinks of the discourses and narratives of everyday racial interaction. The very idea of “color blindness,” for instance, is a cultural structure, a “system of shared meaning,” which encompasses sociodicies (of white privilege) as well as mythologies or narratives (such as those of whites overcoming racism, Latinos raising themselves up to positions of success, or blacks triumphantly being incorporated into a race-­neutral society).126 Whether in its highbrow or mundane variant, the language of liberal universalism profoundly influences our racial order. One also thinks—­to take yet another (somewhat less liberal and universalist) example—­of the shifting nature of immigrant discourses. As historian John Higham has pointed out, echoing Oscar Handlin’s realization that “immigrants were American history,” the (symbolic or epistemic) immigrant is central to America’s national identity.127 Sheer numbers alone cannot explain America’s attachment to the cultural form of the immigrant, for other countries have a greater number of foreign-­born; indeed, it is America’s sheer diversity (attracting sojourners from all corners of the globe as opposed to only a few regions), as well as its ethic of social mobility (personified most purely and powerfully by the immigrant whose gumption and hard work pull him out of poverty), which explain the country’s special attachment to the immigrant. A cultural analysis of immigrant meaning structures might examine, to take but one example, how, during the last two centuries, anti-­ immigrant discourses from the Know-­Nothing campaign against Catholics to the anti-­Asian movement of the mid to late nineteenth century have shifted in intended target, these symbolic formations finding their most recent incarnation in a discourse that decries the “immigrant invasion” from Latin America but all the while retaining their basic discursive shape, as manifest in statements such as “immigrants are stealing our jobs” or “they are increasing our crime.” Just as yesterday’s Chinese immigrants were charged with taking “bread out of the mouths of the white men and their families,” as one

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spokesman vented in 1877, so too are today’s Mexican immigrants subject to the same charge—­and entangled in a long-­established discursive web of accusations.128 Racialized discourses exist in a “total pattern of symbols,” as Douglas once put it—­a complex structure of representations—­for “a symbol only has meaning from its relation to other symbols in a pattern.”129 And the “accumulation, editing, and canonization of a stock set of characters and tales that can be readily recounted and remembered” helps to explain these discourses’ relatively predictable and unvarying nature.130 According to Alexander, cultural formations—­which, once formed, it bears repeating, have a life of their own, a relative autonomy in respect to social relations131—­are structured in terms of binary systems of symbolic classification. These divide actors’ motives, social relations, and institutions into mutually exclusive categories of sacred and profane. To this insight, Alexander adds an important inflection for which Roger Caillois, a member of the Durkheim School, is responsible: “Durkheim’s contrast between sacred and profane must be expanded to include a third term, because profane implied for Durkheim both routine (as compared with effervescent and charismatic) and evil (as compared with good).”132 Hence the sharp distinctions so common to the symbolic order—­for instance, legitimate versus illegitimate; pure versus polluted—­distinctions that, when applied to individual or collective actors, separate the privileged from the stigmatized, the valued from the scorned. Alexander observes that discourses associated with the positive also (and simultaneously) specify the negative qualities that make some entities less deserving of dignity and assistance than others. Indeed, the bipolar codes operating in racial fields are not mere opposites of one another; they are mutually constitutive, such that the affirmation of one category automatically results in the denigration of the other. Other members of the Durkheim School also have contributed to theorizing collective representations in binary terms. One, long forgotten in the American study of social stratification, is Celestin Bougle, who wrote on caste in India. His analysis of the “interpenetration of the sacred and the social” in the Indian caste system was an opening that later could have been pursued by students of racial inequality, including those intrigued by the analogies between caste in India and the Jim Crow system of racial exclusion in the US South.133 Intellectual developments in American sociology and race studies, however, did not allow for such cross-­fertilization. The opposition between white and black corresponds, in the racial field, to dualisms such as pure and polluted, safe and dangerous, orderly and disorderly, civilized and primitive, beautiful and ugly, civil and uncivil.134 Narratives that instantiate meanings in widely used vocabularies always make reference, explicitly or implicitly, to these symbolic associations.135 Indeed,

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whiteness is able to reside on the pure side of the frame only by polluting nonwhiteness (particularly blackness) and by highlighting the contrast. As Morrison convincingly has demonstrated, (white) American writers long have depicted blacks as savage and dim-­witted, thereby creating an image of whiteness as essentially civilized and intelligent—­that is, as blackness’s mirror image. It only was in Mark Twain’s enslavement of Jim, a black slave, that Huck Finn was able to experience freedom; and Ernest Hemingway made white women pure and beautiful by depicting black women as predatory and inhuman. “Africanism,” Morrison writes, “is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-­less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny. . . . The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.”136 Today one finds such binary thinking and symbolization in many aspects of racial life. For instance, the symbolic opposition between black primal physicality and white rational civility still is very much alive, a transposition of longstanding dualisms of body and mind and, perhaps as well, of slave and master. But also significant is an emergent and homologous opposition, in the field of blackness itself, between bad unassimilated blacks and good assimilated blacks. “Today,” observes one cultural sociologist, “ ‘Dr. King’ (the title Dr. or Reverend also reflects his ‘safety’) represents civil rights and peaceful change, the sacred symbolic opposite of militant, violent ‘black power’ (epitomized by Malcolm X).”137 The signifier “Michael Jordan” occupies a similarly sacred position in the symbolic structure. How reminiscent this is of the distinction, made by several urban ethnographers, between black families thought to be “mainstreamers” or “decent” and others thought to be “street.”138 Symbolic distinctions of this sort greatly influence societal patterns ranging from residential and occupational segregation to intermarriage. These points are important to bear in mind when turning to the liminal space that floats between the two poles—­dominant/sacred and dominated/ profane—­of the racial field. According to Durkheimian cultural theory, this liminal space is a domain of ambivalence, anxiety, and dread. “Danger lies in transitional states,” wrote Douglas, “simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person [or group] who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.”139 In the American racial order, this liminal space is occupied by Hubert Blalock’s so-­called “middleman minorities.”140 Since the nineteenth century, white America has regarded Asian immigrants as a “model minority.”141 And

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in the postwar period, Greeks, Italians, Indians, and Jews also have inhabited this intermediate, liminal space.142 The symbolic classification of these racial and ethnic groups as model minorities had the double effect of reasserting their nondominant status (“minority”) even while oppressing and humiliating other dominated groups (“model”). When white society looks at Asian Americans and exclaims, “You did it!,” the next moment it casts a sidelong glace at other nonwhite groups and chides, “Now, why can’t you?” As writer Michael Lind has noted, “In addition to fulfilling their immediate functions—­selling egg rolls, measuring blood sugar—­Vietnamese vendors and Filipino lab technicians serve an additional function for the white overclass: they relieve it of guilt about the squalor of millions of native-­born Americans, not only ghetto blacks and poor Hispanics but poor whites.”143 In so doing, they add yet another burden to the sagging shoulders of the dominated: the burden of invidious comparison. Not only this, but all glorifications of the model minority inevitably degrade it as well. Of Asian Americans as model minorities, Frank Wu has observed, “To be intelligent is to be calculating and too clever; to be gifted in math and science is to be mechanical and not creative, lacking interpersonal skills and leadership potential. To be polite is to be inscrutable and submissive. To be hard working is to be an unfair competitor for regular human beings and not a well-­rounded, likable individual.”144 Finally, the status of model minority, being a liminal status, carries with it more than a whiff of danger. Whites often inflate the threat posed by Asian Americans to their own educational and occupational prospects, seeing these competitors as uncanny, larger-­than-­life superachievers who are something other than truly human (“minds like computers”). c u lt u r e a n d r ac i a l c a p i ta l s In the past several paragraphs, we attended to the first major task of this section—­namely, to address the question as to how racial discourses might be analyzed. We turn now to our second major task, that of discussing the cul­ tural components of racial capital. Racial discourses and racial capital are two sides of the same coin, symbiotically fused to one another. One can accumulate racial capital by employing a racial language—­sayings, accents, intonations, words—­while, once accrued, that capital in turn can function as a boundary enforcer, such that only those who possess it can have legitimate access to the language granting it. What has become known as “standard” or “proper” English, for instance, is connected to whiteness—­more specifically, to Northern (Yankee) whiteness—­as well as to cultural capital and all the institutions (artistic, educational) that grant or bestow it, institutions to which

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people of color have limited access. The ability to speak one’s native tongue or to meld English with other languages—­as in the English and Spanish fusion heard in the Southwest or the Yiddish-­sprinkled English once spoken in New York’s Lower East Side—­is connected to various racial capitals. Some racial groups have staked out a virtual monopoly on certain words, ascriptions, and sayings, not to mention linguistic styles and bodily postures, which is why those bereft of black capital are ill advised to call a black man “brother” and forbidden to call him “nigga,” even though these terms are employed frequently and fraternally among those who possess black capital. Racial capital enables those who possess it to engage in unembarrassed and unhinged criticism of others with that same capital, and it even allows its holders to change the terms used to refer to their respective racial or ethnic groups, like Polish Americans who, after World War II, stopped referring to themselves as “We Poles” and began using the terms “Polish-­Americans” or “Americans of Polish descent.”145 Indeed, within racial groups-­as-­fields, some of the most heated debates occur over the terrain of racial language, as in the debate now taking place within the Latino field over the ascriptions “Chicano,” “Latino,” or “Mexican American.”146 Besides mapping the distribution of linguistic codes, one could examine the dispersion of other cultural spaces, practices, or symbols, such as holidays (e.g., Kwanzaa, Juneteenth, St. Patrick’s Day, Rosh Hashanah, Chinese New Year), geographic areas (e.g., Ethiopia, Haiti, Mecca, the Heartland), and mythic references (e.g., Aztlan, Dixie, Zion, Lake Wobegon), and their relation to specific breeds of racial capital. A general property of all fields, including the racial field, is that those who occupy a dominated position therein are well aware of their relative lack of capital, whereas those who occupy a dominant position often are unaware of the capital they hold strictly on account of their privileged position. “Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted.”147 Nowhere is this more true than in respect to white racial capital, or what has become known as “white privilege,” which has the unique effect of conferring on its bearers the ability to deny the existence of the field itself—­that is, to become raceless in their eyes and, to a certain degree, in the eyes of society. (We have more to say about this in chapter 6.) The closer one moves to the dominant pole of the racial field, the less one feels its weight and, therefore, the less one conceives of the social world, and of one’s self, through the logic of that field. Those with large amounts of racial capital are able to operate under a myth of individuality that enables them to attribute their own “successes,”

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that is, their dominance in the field of power, strictly to their own personality traits (gumption, work ethic, ingenuity) while attributing nonwhites’ “failures,” their dominated position in the field, to their individual attributes (apathy, dependency, anger).148 (Psychologists refer to this mode of thinking as the “fundamental attribution error.”149) White privilege, however, is invisible only to those who profit from it; those who suffer on its account need not be made aware of its presence. Most forcefully, the strictures of the racial field make themselves known to those who occupy its lowermost positions. The genesis of a racial field might well be accompanied, as Gorski points out, by “the emergence and elaboration of a new form and metric of valuation”—­that is, a new “set of practical categories and symbolic operations through which people and things, in all their particularity and individuality, are [racially] ranked in a uniform, hierarchical fashion. In other words, a mechanism of commensuration, measurement, and ranking.”150 Any type of capital, including racial capital, might be studied in comparative fashion, examining how it is produced in different social and historical contexts.151 Any capital also might be studied genealogically, with an eye to its historical genesis and development.152 Douglas provided a useful case study of the ontogenesis of a specific form of racial capital—­namely, Jewish capital—­in her analysis of the Jewish abstinence from pork. In Purity and Danger, she observed that the pig as depicted in Leviticus is not any more polluted than other animals (e.g., the camel, the rock badger), but the pig has come to be singled out among Jews as the filthiest of animals. Is this an anomaly within a more comprehensive system of totems? After paying heed to some criticisms of her interpretation—­namely, that it overlooks how dietary restrictions function to separate Jews from other groups—­Douglas returned to the question of the pig and tendered, in Natural Symbols, a better explanation: The pig has come to be abhorred in Jewish dietary codes because of the historic role it has played in the humiliation and oppression of the Jewish people. Greek conquerors blasphemed the God of Israel by immolating swine on Hebrew altars. And Jewish people were forced to eat pork to symbolize their submission; if they refused, and many did, they were put to death in a most barbarous fashion.153 Hence the intimate connection between suffering in the history of a cultural practice (dietary restrictions) and the accumulation and preservation of a particular pedigree of racial capital (Jewish capital). The memory of persecution structures many other capital-­generating practices as well, from that of black couples jumping over a broom on their wedding day (an act that solidified the union in slave times) to Jewish grooms smashing the glass in the wedding ceremony (symbolizing the destruction of the

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Temple and thus satisfying the Psalmist’s call to “consider Jerusalem as your highest joy”).154 Authenticity is bought with a pound of flesh. A complete understanding of the structural distribution of various racial capitals can be fully attained only through an intimate exploration of racial groups-­as-­fields. Within the field of blackness, to return to our previous example, there exists a cultural stock exchange of sorts, in which what is bartered and traded is black capital. We already alluded to the ways in which socioeconomic differences inform black capital, and now we add that sexuality also is marshaled to mark distinctions within the field of blackness, as heterosexual (and primarily male) actors often have pointed to other African Americans’ homosexuality to question, not simply their uprightness or masculinity, but also their racial purity.155 Thus, Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice, was able forcefully to articulate the suffering caused by racism but ignored the unique pain experienced by gay blacks. He went so far as to call Baldwin’s homosexuality “somehow un-­black”—­and labeled interracial homosexual (as well as heterosexual) romantic unions a “racial death wish.”156 Nationalism, too, functions as an important dimension in the field, one that allocates different amounts of racial capital to persons of different national origins. While many blacks during the nineteenth century and even the Civil Rights Era welcomed into their ranks first-­and second-­generation African and Caribbean immigrants (one thinks of black leaders such as Marcus Garvey or Louis Farrakhan), today the entry fee into the field of blackness is descent, not simply from slaves, but from American slaves. Patterson refers to this as the “new black nativism,” which, he claims, directly is responsible for “the growing tendency to define blackness in negative terms, [as] not white in upbringing, kinship, or manner.”157 For evidence of black nativism, one need look no further than the question that arose in the field of blackness during Obama’s presidential bid in 2008—­namely, “Is he black enough?” Consider as well the field of Indianness. Faced with a deluge of claims to Indian identity after the 1960s, one that only increased with the advent of affirmative action programs, American Indians, more than any other group, have had to develop strict definitions of Indian authenticity to guard against “ethnic fraud.” As such, they constitute an exaggerated case, in which the relationship between culture, history, authenticity, and racial capital is laid bare and made readily explicit. True “Indianness” requires one to walk in lockstep with one’s ancestors, to preserve ways of life thought to be ancient, to build “traditional futures” by returning to the past (e.g., ancestral land, performances of heritage).158 In James Clifford’s terse words: “Life as an American [means] death as an Indian.”159 This imperative is enforced by Indians

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and non-­Indians alike. To gain a taste of non-­Indians’ participation in the matter, consider court cases in which tribes hoping to “prove” their tribal identity to white judges and juries are labeled phonies on the grounds that they have traded in their horses for cars, are fond of eating at fast-­food restaurants, and have taken to relying too much on modern conveniences, such as washers and dryers and televisions. Indeed, tribes seeking federal recognition from the Branch of Acknowledgement and Research not only must show that they have been a tribe since 1900; they also must marshal evidence produced largely by non-­Indian actors, such as anthropologists, historians, and journalists. The result is that “tribes whose memberships exhibit the most cultural and physical attributes of the mythical, aboriginal ‘Indian’ will have the greatest likelihood of being acknowledged with federal recognition.”160 An ironic feature of this arrangement is that, as Indian capital comes to rely more and more on a cultural preservationist ethic, Indian culture increasingly becomes smothered by the weight of unchanging tradition. As sociologist Eva Marie Garroutte has stated, “The logic of cultural ‘authenticity’ may initially support the identity claims of individuals and tribes, only later to destroy them, along with the culture in which they arose.”161 “The people nowadays have an idea about ceremonies,” Leslie Marmon Silko has written in Ceremony. “They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done. . . . But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants. . . . The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong. . . . Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”162 As this case demonstrates, one can study not only historical dynamics of racial capitals but also present-­day dynamics of capitalizing on history. “To articulate the past historically,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”163 Within the racial field, Benjamin’s “moment of danger” is the onslaught of racism, which caused differently positioned racial groups to champion different historical narratives to maximize the currency of their racial capital. The racial field is full of claims having to do, say, with the “true cradle of civilization” residing in Iraq, Ethiopia, Greece, or Egypt. Each claim is accompanied by supporting “evidence”: for example, that Africans were responsible for the Nile Valley civilizations, or that mathematics was invented in Mesopotamia (ancient clay tablets) or India (Sulba Sutras) or Greece (Pythagoras). (As historians and art critics quickly are discovering, museums are sites par excellence for surveying the structuring of the racial

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field.) Whites maintain their dominant position in the field not only by being overrepresented in cultural institutions that control mainstream historical narratives but also by erasing nonwhites’ participation in narratives to which whites themselves hope to lay exclusive claim. Thus, fundamental to the historical account of the birth of the United States is the signing of the Declaration of Independence (but not the governance of the Iroquois Nation, from which many democratic principles were borrowed by American statesmen), the travels of Lewis and Clark (but not those of the Spaniard Juan Ponce de León, who beat Lewis and Clark to the coast of California by two hundred fifty years), and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (but not slave revolts, led by Nat Turner and countless others). White capital relies on a bleaching of history, a bleaching we detect in narratives of immigration focused exclusively on European immigrants (such as Handlin’s The Uprooted ) or in the “imperial nostalgia” (to borrow Renato Rosaldo’s fine term) that seeps through popular renderings of the Civil War.164 The Collective-­Emotional Structures of the Racial Field Thus far, our discussion has centered on two analytically separable domains of racial life, those of social relations and culture. We have examined two kinds of racial structures: the social and the symbolic. Theoretically speaking, this has kept us on well-­trodden ground, for sociologists are well accustomed to thinking in terms of a dualistic model of social life. In the pages that follow, however, we move onto less familiar terrain. We posit a third analytic realm of racial life, which we term the collective-­emotional (or, interchangeably, the psychical or passional, the realm of collective fantasies). In this domain, we argue, are to be found racial structures as well, but in this case structures of feeling, configurations of passion. (Fanon spoke of structures of collective catharsis.165) These constrain and enable racial action no less than do the other, more frequently studied kinds of racial structures. Moreover, they typically are overlaid one atop the other, such that, for example, the dominant position in a field of social relations (occupied by whites, as opposed to people of color) is homologous with the dominant position in a space of symbolic relations (occupied by the meanings and symbolizations of whiteness) and homologous as well with the dominant position in a space of emotional investments (occupied by shared fantasies of self-­sufficiency, entitlement, or victimhood). Nonetheless, collective emotions also have their own inner logic and organization and are analytically autonomous; in what follows, we examine this patterning and organization in greater detail, extending once again the field-­theoretic reasoning we deployed earlier (although, as in our

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discussion of culture, without the heuristic device of field diagrams and accompanying terminology and imagery). As in the two previous sections, our exposition necessarily is abstract, although we also attempt to provide illustrative examples as we go along. Our discussion is speculative, too, as considerably less work has been done in this area than in the other two. As we keenly are aware, we are extending our thinking into one of the most intractable and difficult areas of racial life. But this does not make the study of collective emotions any the less important. Folk knowledge of race long has been aware of their great impact. Race scholarship now must catch up. the concept of collective emotions The pragmatist philosophers and their sociological followers often invoked (if vaguely) the idea of a domain of collective emotions. “Discussion is far more than an interchange of ideas,” asserted Cooley; “it is also an interaction of feelings.”166 Blumer added: “There seems to be as much justification and validity to speak of an affective structure or ritual in society as of a language structure or patterns of meanings. . . . Social life in human groups can be viewed in one of its aspects as a network of affective relations.”167 Durk­ heim’s contribution was more forthright and systematic; if society was to be analyzed on the model of religion, then it must be recognized that social life itself is structured in emotional terms. Bourdieu’s views were more ambivalent. While his contributions to cultural analysis, clearly important and provocative as they were, were insufficient, his work on the psychical dimension of social life was even less systematically worked out. Bourdieu deemed emotions to be crucial but relegated them, like virtually all sociologists, to the social-­psychological level—­specifically, to that of the habitus—­arguing that emotions could be made the objects of a mode of inquiry not dissimilar in many respects to psychoanalysis.168 (A tantalizing exception is when he spoke of collective defense mechanisms, such as those operating in the scholarly field.169) These tendencies notwithstanding, Bourdieu’s ideas about position-­ takings, from his work on the symbolic dimension, could well be extended in generative fashion to the realm of collective emotions. The latter also could be conceptualized in semiotic terms as a space of relations of opposition and difference among what might be called “emotion-­takings.” By collective emotions, in fact, one might have in mind complexes of processes-­in-­relations that are transpersonal in scope and that consist in psychical investments, engagements, and cathexes (to invoke the old Freudian term), encompassing embodied perceptions and judgments as well as bodily states, forces, energies, or sensations. Collective emotions might be seen to include relatively

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long-­lasting sentiments of attachment and solidarity, as well as negatively toned configurations of hostility and aggression. The former, more positive emotions might include trust, idealization of leadership, and psychical investments in hierarchy; the latter, more negative emotions might encompass rivalry, shared fears and anxieties, and enmities against outsiders and alien elements.170 Two important points must be underscored here. First, collective emotions, as our term is meant to indicate, are eminently intersubjective. Not the subject (or object) alone but rather transactions among two or more actors (or other elements of a situation) must be deemed the proper unit of analysis. In other words, collective emotions do not inhere in individuals; they are not a matter of social psychology alone.171 The error of locating collective emotions inside the individual is akin to the individualizing (and psychologizing) of culture in the early years of cultural sociology—­that is, in the middle decades of the twentieth century—­when cultural realities were reduced to the status of subjective realities (“values,” “attitudes”) existing solely inside persons’ heads. (Structural functionalists often were guilty of such analytic reduction.172) Long ago, Dewey pointed out a better way when he observed that “emotion in its ordinary sense is something called out by objects, physical and personal; it is the response to an objective situation. . . . [It] is an indication of intimate participation, in a more or less excited way[,] in some scene of nature or life.”173 Here was a thoroughly relational point of view on the emotions, one that avoided the pitfalls of subjectivism while also showing, not incidentally, that the way out from subjectivism was not a “group mind” form of objectivism. Indeed, both subjectivistic and reified “group mind” approaches—­mirror images of one another—­were counterposed by Dewey to a relational perspective that saw emotions as from the beginning dialogical and transpersonal (at least when the “scene . . . of life” of which he spoke was understood as a social scene). The second important point we wish to highlight is that collective emotions have their own irreducible logic. Much as Alexander envisions not a sociology of culture but a cultural sociology, so too must we speak here of an emotional sociology.174 While, in the simplest of cases, emotional transactions occur between a single subject and a single object, often they involve a potentially greater number of actors, tied to one another sometimes in intricate patterns of emotional investments. These configurations of passion systematically can be mapped out and charted, much as their counterparts—­social and cultural formations—­ are studied always with an eye to their structural features. And the mappings that result can provide a fuller picture of the forces that constrain and enable action, including forces within the racial order.

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f i g u r e 3 . Freud’s group psychology Source: From Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Symbols, Positions, Objects: Toward a New Theory of Revolutions and Collective Action,” History and Theory 35 (1996): 369. The figure is based on Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Norton, 1959 [1922]), 61.

How might such mappings of collective emotions be undertaken? Few formal methods have been developed. However, Sigmund Freud’s pioneering work provides at least the beginnings of an approach, whatever else one may think of his controversial propositions. Freud insisted on the analytic autonomy of the fantasy life; “fantasies,” he argued, “possess psychical as contrasted with material reality.”175 In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he held that “highly organized, lasting, and artificial groups”—­that is, institutions such as churches and armies—­are constituted in part through emotional ties or “libidinal cathexes” of two kinds: horizontal ties to other group members and vertical ties to the group leader. The horizontal tie is a relation of identification, whereas the vertical tie is a relation of sublimated (aim-­inhibited) object choice.176 In later writings, he also spoke in depth of the role of aggressive impulses and fantasies in collective life.177 Overall, his contribution formally was to model the psychical constitution (a partly unconscious one) of groups and institutions in a fashion analogous to our own modelings of social and cultural structures. It is striking, in fact, to what degree his diagram of the ties linking leaders and followers and of the bonds of identification among followers themselves (see figure 3) resembles the sociograms of social network analysis, with the nodes marking neither positions nor symbols (as in social structure and culture) but, rather, objects: that is, whole persons, aspects of persons, or fantasized substitutes for persons.178 (Freud noted that the nature of an object may vary: if not a concrete leader, it can be an abstract idea, value, or even “a common tendency, a wish.” This is how the term “object” is used in psychoanalytic object relations

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theory.179) Many other emotional configurations also are possible, of course, besides those actually modeled by Freud. But the point remains that psychical reality, the realm of collective emotions and fantasies, must be regarded as structured—­and that, in principle, it can be mapped out. Since the 1990s, sociological scholarship on the emotions has begun to demonstrate that psychical engagements indeed are to be found in structured sets.180 And a new “relational psychoanalysis” has emerged that might be prepared to meet such scholarship halfway.181 But for the time being, systematic methods of analysis remain underdeveloped. the structuring of collective emotions What one commentator wrote of nationalism applies just as well to race: “Descriptions . . . note [its] passion, indeed the very pages crackle with it. But these descriptions do little to conceptualize, analyze, or interpret it.”182 The concept of collective emotions clearly is relevant to racial life, which, we need hardly point out, is suffused through and through with shared passions, imageries, and fantasies. Fear, anxiety, cruelty, hope, joy, and desire are central to racial domination and progress, as are such psychical dynamics as the “narcissism of minor differences” (to invoke another Freudian concept) or internalized guilt and externalized hatred (in Moses and Monotheism, for instance, Freud analyzed anti-­Semitism in those terms).183 All the mutual engagements into which racial actors enter, whether of attachment, deference, solidarity, or struggle, always already are emotionally constituted.184 Even the demand for morality and law—­and the insistence on equality for all group members—­have, according to Freud in Totem and Taboo, an unmistakable (if murky) basis in archaic passional experience.185 Perhaps most obviously, images drawn from the “family romance,” as he once termed it, frequently operate in race relations, including fantasized constructions of patriarchal supremacy, filial dependence, and sibling rivalry.186 This is apparent in a wide range of racial phenomena that call out for theorization. As is well known, “white culture” in the United States long has revolved around sexualized fantasies of African Americans, imageries commingled with sentiments of rage, terror, and inadequacy.187 Many African Americans, in turn, have engaged with whites, at least on an emotional level, as devils, seducers or seductresses, or ideals for emulation. Erotic and sensual themes have mixed indiscriminately with violence, guilt, and yearning, as observers from Wright and Fanon to hooks have pointed out.188 In some settings, such as the Jim Crow South, psychical constructions have even reached, in Daniel Goldhagen’s phrase, an almost “hallucinatory fantastical” level of unreality, especially on the part of

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members and sympathizers of racist organizations.189 Or consider again anti-­ Semitism, in which emotional reactions to Jews (and fantasy images thereof) always have been at least as complex and multidimensional as those involving African Americans.190 And in respect to Latinos, too, one often finds images of extravagant passion (Latin lovers), pollution (dirty spics), or penetration (illegal immigrants invading the body social).191 Fundamental to the collective emotions of racial fields is a topic to which Freud himself devoted considerable attention: fetishism. The term explicitly was invented to draw attention to racial difference. In the late eighteenth century, fetishisme entered the European lexicon as a racial concept, helping to make sense of the colonial conquest, the slave trade, the rise of mercantile capitalism, and, above all, the clash of civilizations. In the historical moment that came to be known (by Europeans) as the “Age of Discovery,” it “emerged as a creative enactment of an unprecedented situation, coming historically into being alongside the commodity form as it defined itself against two radically different types of noncapitalist society: feudal Christianity and African lineage exchange.”192 Indeed, Marx related the fetishism of commodities to processes he thought had taken place in “the mist-­enveloped regions of the religious world.”193 The fetish, then, was a product of collective-­emotional tensions, felt at the individual level but having eminently social and historical roots. Anne McClintock defines it as “the displacement onto an object (or person) of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions,” she observes, “. . . are lived with profound intensity in the imagination and the flesh. The fetish . . . stands at the cross-­roads of psychoanalysis and social history, inhabiting the threshold of both personal and historical memory. [It] marks a crisis in social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible irresolution. . . . By displacing power onto the fetish, then manipulating the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.”194 Our understanding of the racial order stands to profit greatly from studies of fetishism. These would include studies of the geography of racial fetishes, including national fetishes (flags, songs, monuments, holidays), cultural fetishes (music, art, folklore, religious artifacts), or corporeal fetishes (hair, skin, odor, blood); analyses of the racialization of sexual fetishes (the black penis, white female virginity, “yellow fever,” socially forbidden interracial affairs); and studies of scientific fetishes in respect to race (statistical habits, endless questions of racial difference, scientific objects and processes of objectification, white guilt masquerading behind a stone-­faced research agenda). All could be treated as racial structures that help order the passional dimensions of the racial field. Indeed, entire races could be seen as

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transformed into fetishes, a metamorphosis that lies at the root of all kinds of racial fantasies and desires, phobias, and repulsions.195 What better picture of the American racial fetish than the minstrel encountered earlier in our discussion of the field of blackness? Through costume, makeup, postures and movement, and a way of speaking, the “Blackface” and “Sambo Figure” become grotesque renderings on which white audiences cathect their racial anxieties and confusion, their affection and hate. Minstrel fetishes perfectly fulfill the white fantasy because they are nothing less than blackness under complete white control. They are blackness possessed by a white body, blackness (apart from which whiteness ceases to exist) excreted from the white body, blackness abjected.196 Implicit in all we have said is that, just as symbolic representations in the racial field are organized to varying degrees in bipolar schemas, so too are collective emotions. One thinks here of bifurcations of rationality from passion, brain from brawn, cold from hot, divisions that, according to Edward Said, structured (and continue to structure) the colonialist imagination: “On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-­Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things.”197 Columbus and other European explorers, as Stephen Greenblatt has found, used the concept of wonder—­an “experience of the marvelous”—­to facilitate colonial exploitation and to uphold the enduring Orientalist division of the civilized from the uncivilized. “The marvelous is a central feature in the whole complex system of representation, verbal and visual, philosophical and aesthetic, intellectual and emotional, through which people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance apprehended, and thence possessed or discarded, the unfamiliar, the alien, the terrible, the desirable, and the hateful.”198 Indeed, the marvelous can be found lurking even within the canvases of European art. Consider The Great Bath at Bursa (1885) by the neoclassical painter Jean-­Léon Gérôme (see figure 4). In this painting, Gérôme depicted a Turkish bath house filled with nude white women. In the middle of the canvas, he placed one such woman leaning elegantly on a partially clothed black woman. To its European viewers, the very presence of the black female body had the effect of sexualizing the white woman, who, had the artist not inserted the black figure, instead might have evoked the essence of purity and cleanliness. To provide added emphasis to the contrast, Gérôme intertwined the two women—­a white hand draped softly on a black shoulder and a black arm wrapped gently around a white waist. In this fleshly marriage, skin on skin, he portrayed the entanglement of pure with polluted, civilized with primitive—­the sexualized racial order as personified by two

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f i g u r e 4 . Jean-­Léon Gérôme, The Great Bath at Bursa (1885)

distinct female figures. The sexualized black body has been used time and again to uphold the bipolar organization of collective emotions in racial life. Most horridly, whites of the postbellum South, as Patterson demonstrates in his macabre book Rituals of Blood, reinvented and reinvigorated their whiteness through public spectacles of torture and murder visited on black male bodies. The white man’s impotence disappeared as the black man was castrated, white flesh grew healthy as black skin was mutilated, and whiteness was reborn in and through the black man’s sacrifice.199 Near the dominant pole of the racial field circulate feelings of security and entitlement for those who profit from white supremacy. There, too, one also finds shame and rage, as epitomized by hate groups or, in times past, by Southern segregationist politicians, whose popularity was due to the fact that they understood, and knew how to exploit, white anger; and by those thousands of working-­class white families who, unable to afford a move to the suburbs, violently defended their neighborhoods against racial integration.200 Writing in 1985, sociological ethnographer Jonathan Rieder observed that “[white] Middle Americans felt molested by formidable powers: blacks and liberals and bureaucrats. . . . The resentment of the white middle classes gave conservatives a chance to ply the politics of revenge.”201 Between these two feelings—­entitlement and rage—­sit all the collective emotions gathered under the rubric of “the costs of whiteness.” Psychologists have shown that

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whites pay a high price for their privilege, a price of walking through life filled with unhealthy doses of guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression.202 Such collective emotions, of course, are not relegated to the dominant pole of the field alone. “Shame,” wrote Fanon. “Shame and self-­contempt. Nausea. . . . All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good.”203 Such words are characteristic of Fanon’s self-­probing, relentlessly reflexive explication of black psychological and emotional suffering. (We return to his insightful observations regarding symbolic violence in chapter 6.) Rage, too, circulates within those groups held under the heel of racial domination, and often it is directed at their persecutors, at whites’ complicity, and at the violence that supports the entire system. “The projects in Harlem are hated,” wrote Baldwin. “They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world.”204 At the dominated end of the field, one often finds collective emotions experienced in explicitly contradictory ways. To be a victim of racial domination has been to curse that domination’s cruelty but, in the next breath, to laugh at its senselessness.205 Despair and hope, apathy and optimism—­ these emotional states can visit the racially dominated simultaneously, producing in them a kind of emotional schizophrenia, the two-­ness of which Du Bois spoke. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the blues. The blues represent a response to racial domination, a complex of collective emotions that permits the commingling of contradictory passions (a marriage of sorrow and laughter) definitive of the black experience. Baldwin writes: “In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-­edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them. . . . Only people who have been ‘down the line,’ as the song puts it, know what this music is about.”206 One need only listen to the folk tunes of white America (those produced by country-­western singers) alongside those of  black America (those produced by jazz and blues artists)—­perhaps better, songs written by whites but covered by blacks (such as Ray Charles’s covers of Hank Williams’s tunes) or vice versa (the Beach Boys’ taking Chuck Berry’s music)—­to understand Baldwin’s point. One can appreciate why Fanon believed that “no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.”207 Does white America have an equivalent to the “blues impulse”; does it have an answer to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” a song completely comedy and completely tragedy from the first note to the last?208

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Racial domination also entails a field-­specific distribution of the sense of belonging based on racial identity or pride—­or what might be called racial Gemeinschaft. This sense of solidarity allows racialized actors to experience races-­as-­fields as “communities” (Vergemeinschaftung) in Weber’s sense, collectivities guided by “subjectively felt (affectual or traditional) mutual be­longing.”209 Racial Gemeinschaft is found in the practice of African Americans referring to one another in familiar, indeed familial, terms, as “brothers” and “sisters”; in the linguistic exchanges, cultural transactions, and financial agreements of ethnic enclaves; and in whites’ preference to live in majority-­white neighborhoods. But perhaps it is most cherished (and visible) among groups traditionally despised by the larger society. Whereas whites (all the more so, better-­off whites) understand, at least implicitly, that social institutions—­schools, courts, museums, clubs—­exist for and benefit them, many nonwhites have the opposite feeling. As a result, they are more in need of a safe and warm space, a “home,” in Morrison’s phrase, “both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”210 Racial Gemeinschaft therefore is especially important to immigrants, particularly those forced to accept menial positions in their new host country. As Douglas has observed, “These allegiances [to one’s home country and its history] are something to be proud of in the humiliation of the unskilled labourer’s lot. At its lowest it means what haggis and the pipes mean to Scots abroad on Burns’ night.”211 This sense of home is a prime motive behind nonwhites closing ranks and denying those deemed inauthentic—­that is, lacking in racial capital—­access to their variant of racial Gemeinschaft (as also was apparent when we analyzed the field of blackness). Corresponding to this collective sense of belonging, a wide array of attitudes, practices, and dispositions educate actors’ decisions as to whom to trust or distrust, like or dislike, embrace or push away. If collective feelings of solidarity are important to the psychical life of the racial field, so too are their antithesis: sentiments of repugnance. These include shared images or fantasies of bodies touching; of sweat, skin, and sex (the exchange of fluids); of smells, tastes, and sights deemed offensive (menudo, the smell of curry, the window of a Chinatown butcher shop); of menace and threat. (During the 1970 Alabama gubernatorial race, the Committees for Wallace displayed newspaper ads with a young blond girl sitting on a beach surrounded by seven grinning black teenage boys, accompanied by the caption: “This Could Be Alabama Four Years From Now.”212) One thinks here of William Faulkner’s treatment of racial repulsion in The Sound and the Fury, in which Quentin was so disgusted by his sister’s premarital sexual affair with the dark-­skinned Dalton Ames that he imagined the baby growing in her womb to be his. To Quentin, incest was less repugnant than

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the defilement (especially by a swarthy-­skinned stranger) of Caddy’s virginal white innocence, the loss of which blackened her: “Why wont you bring him to the house, Caddy? Why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods hot hidden furious in the dark woods.”213 One also thinks here of Vietnam War literature, with its images of European and American soldiers, priests, and scientists repulsed in their guts by South Asian people, food, and culture, even by the land itself. Repeatedly, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke returns to the sticky and hot South Asian weather, its violent and torturous landscape, its smells of mildew and offal, its insects and reptiles, and its inhabitants, referred to as “superstitious vampire-­worshipers.”214 What is Tim O’Brien’s belly-­turning description, moreover—­in The Things They Carried—­of an American soldier torturing a baby water buffalo if not an analogy to US soldiers’ utter disgust not only at the pains of war but also at everything they encountered in Vietnam, even the animals?215 Though not as extreme as racial repugnance, distrust is a powerful and influential collective emotion that also pervades the racial field. It has at least three variants. The first—­interracial collective distrust—­has to do with widespread sentiments directed at members of certain racial or ethnic groups by members of another group. Here one thinks of the well-­documented tendency of nonblack employers to trust and favor immigrants over African Americans; misgivings among ethnic communities (Indian and Pakistani Americans) or American Indian tribes (Navajos and Hopis); and the criminalization of blackness, an aggregate sense of dread that in part is responsible for the prison boom and for the excessive (sometimes brutal) use of police force.216 Less well understood is intraracial distrust, a second variant pitched at members of one’s own racial or ethnic group. Dozens of researchers have identified an undertone or subtext of distrust permeating poor communities but perhaps most intense among the black poor.217 For instance, collective distrust among the latter population is analyzed directly in Susan Sandra Smith’s Lone Pursuit, which reveals that “during the job search process, jobholders and jobseekers’ pervasive distrust, non-­cooperation, and embrace of individualism is primarily a function of individuals’ psychologies of distrust and cognitive assessments of jobseekers’ and jobholders’ untrustworthiness.”218 A third variant of collective distrust is directed, not at members of certain racial or ethnic groups, but at institutions, governments, and national states. Institutional distrust is concentrated near the dominated pole of the racial field and is conditioned by a history of government-­inflicted suffering and deception. Misgivings about school curricula or the fairness of the criminal justice system fall under this rubric219; so too do more extreme forms of “racial paranoia” such as Farrakhan’s assertion that the levees

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in New Orleans were “blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry”; the theory that the American government purposefully inflicted Africans Americans with AIDS and that, in some neighborhoods, has sterilized their drinking water; or the belief that a global conspiracy aims at eradicating people of color.220 (On the opposite pole of the race field, one notices a mirror image of this phenomenon in working-­class whites’ deep anxieties over radical Islamists imposing Sharia law or an “immigrant invasion” wreaking havoc in their local schools.) Here, too, one finds convictions that evil karma or curses cling, barnacle-­like, to America, a theme thick in the writings not only of Faulkner, Morrison, and Silko, but also, more recently, of Junot Diaz, whose The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens with these words: “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation by the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuk mericanus, or more colloquially, fuk—­generally a curse or a doom or some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”221 Especially ambivalent collective emotions characterize those caught up in the liminal spaces of racial life, in the sector between its dominant and dominated regions. Here are racial groups that, as occupants of an ambiguous position in the psychical order, neither are sacred nor profane. The black middle class is, at least as analyzed by Frazier, a well-­known example. In his controversial diagnosis, Frazier proclaimed: “The world of delusions which the Negro middle class has created for itself . . . is due partly to the fact that it has no integral body of traditions. . . . Rejecting everything that would identify it with the Negro masses and at the same time not being accepted by white American society, [it] has acquired an inferiority complex that is reflected in every aspect of its life. . . . They hate themselves because they cannot escape from being identified as Negroes.”222 In Frazier’s view, black bourgeois seek to “escape from themselves” by engaging in money making and conspicuous consumption.223 They pretend to be proud and to be leaders of the black masses. But they cannot escape from their own feelings of guilt and inadequacy: “In some respects, the Negro community may be regarded as a pathological phenomenon.”224 Regardless of whether this is true today—­ and a good deal of research suggests it is not225—­this characterization still captures the troubled collective emotions often associated with intermediate locations in a racial space. (We revisit Frazier’s arguments in chapter 6.) Still other collective emotions that affix themselves to groups occupying a liminal racial location are feelings of racial sympathy for less-­fortunate members of the group (a sentiment documented by Pattillo) and statements of racial

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callousness and exaggerated lack of compassion for in-­group members in need (Macon Dead in Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon).226 And one of the most impertinent and troubling kinds of collective emotion associated with this position is that of a sense of nonexistence or, as Ellison would have it, invisibility: the sentiment that, no matter what you do, however high you climb, your skin confines you to the outside, tethering you to the destitute, exiled, and despised masses who call you “brother” or “sister.” Even Obama, after he was elected president, in one swift motion could be reduced to the “Magic Negro” by a song circulated by an RNC chairman candidate.227 What is striking here is how little the genre of cultural analysis—­that is, the study of discourses, belief systems, mythologies, and other such symbolic structures—­ can help in understanding these collective-­ emotional con­figurations.228 How might the gratuitous cruelty, for example, of whites toward blacks during times of slavery and segregation be explained simply in terms of symbolic classification? How might the sexualized violence of these relations, real and imagined—­Freud himself noted the sadomasochistic themes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin229— be understood simply in terms of cultural codes and narratives? There is a certain surfeit here, a certain excess, which can be grasped only by reference to the psychical level. To bring these themes to the surface, it takes a Kara Walker—­or an Ellison. After all, Invisible Man was about a young man who, traveling through the field of blackness, passes in and out of different collective-­emotional formations, each representing a different mode of engagement with America. Instantiated in the invisible man, these modes of emotional engagement represent different collective experiences. A structure of collective emotions centered on naivete and blind optimism (the college) is followed by one featuring shame, confusion, and a sense of betrayal (early in the invisible man’s time in New York City); then comes anger and horror, followed by defiance (the movement); then, finally, resignation, loneliness, and a deep sadness (his underground hole). Indeed, when Ellison first imagined this novel, he conceived of it as a long journey. At the end of 1946, he wrote his agent: “I myself know only this. The invisible man will move upward through Negro life, coming into contact with all its various forms and personality types; will operate in the Negro middle class, in the left-­wing movement, and descend again into the disorganized atmosphere of the Harlem underworld.”230 Hence, in his prologue, the invisible man asks, “But what did I do to be so blue?” And in the epilogue, having walked the reader through his life, one disappointment after another, he reflects, “There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. You might sneer at this, but I know

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now.”231 Sociologists would do well to take that claim seriously, to unpack the logic of collective emotions. Time and again, what scholars from Bourdieu to Morrison have proposed as an antidote to the poison of racial domination is the cultivation of yet another shared emotion, namely, love. As Ann Swidler has shown, this deserves to be thoroughly dissected as an object of socioanalysis in its own right.232 In racial fields, racial domination greatly can influence patterns of loving. Intermarriages still account only for a small fraction of all US marriages (a mere 7 percent). Indeed, intermarriage rates decrease as one approaches the extremes of the racial field (the dominant and the dominated poles), whites being the least likely to intermarry, followed by blacks; and they increase in the interstitial positions: Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics have the highest rates of intermarriage.233 One thinks also of how homophobia and opposition to gay marriage are dispersed unequally across the racial field, as well as of how familial love manifests itself differently across the space. Consider, for example, the high degree of familism observed among Hispanics and the comparably low degree of it among whites.234 Or consider the debate about the best way to raise children, a debate pitting those in favor of strictness and discipline—­as epitomized by the “Chinese Tiger Mom” figure—­against white liberal caretakers who favor a softer approach.235 But love not always is affected by racial domination; the reverse also can occur. In spite of itself, the racial order manufactures “forces capable of overcoming the antagonisms that organize and paralyze” the racial field, thereby creating a space for racial innovators able to “wrest that world from the status quo to which the balance of antagonistic forces seemed to condemn it.” Endowed with “a set of rare properties that distinguish them from the rest of the population”—­love for the oppressed—­these innovators greatly can alter the career of racial domination.236 Consider the life of John Brown, Old Osawatomie. As historian David Reynolds convincingly argues, Brown stood out among virtually all white abolitionists “for his utter lack of prejudice,” his love of blacks and black culture, and his corresponding hatred of slavery, which caused him to “to declare, or Swear: Eternal War  with Slavery,” committing “deeds unprecedented in the history of American anti-­slavery activism.” Brown’s actions eventually would spark the Civil War and seed civil rights.237 Conclusion In this chapter, we attempted to cover wide expanses of theoretical terrain. We outlined a field-­theoretic approach to the social relations of racial domination, and we provided some examples from the field of blackness as well as

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from other racial fields. In so doing, we sought to illustrate how theoretical ideas such as ours might be put to the pragmatic test. As mentioned above, field analyses can be produced in respect to a wide range of racial groups, yielding relational studies of the spaces of Caribbean immigrants, Moslem Americans, American Indians, and a good many others. They also can be undertaken for a myriad of other racial objects, large and small, bringing to attention the relational patterns within and among hate groups, local gangs, high school peer groups, and civil rights organizations. In addition, expansive possibilities exist for inquiring into the cultural and collective-­emotional levels of analysis and their interrelation with that of social structure, in research areas extending from the field of rap music or the discourse of color blindness to the collective emotions of small-­town white communities. Stud­ ies also might be carried out of how racial groups in economic competition with one another culturally as well as psychically construct their own sense of threat and vulnerability; how processes of stigmatization (and reactions thereto) unfold in different racial fields; how racial difference is accomplished—­the “doing” of race—­in putatively color-­blind formal-­ organizational settings such as university departments, corporate workplaces, and government offices; and how the “moral order” (to invoke Park’s term) of racialized settings ongoingly is negotiated at the social, discursive, and collective-­emotional levels.238 These latter topics also bring up themes of contestation, negotiation, and action, and, as such, raise questions of racial struggle to which we turn in the next chapter.239 However, before entering that terrain, let us address two final theoretical questions. These allow us to tie together some of the threads we have been pursuing up to now. First, how are we to conceive of power—­and, by implication, struggles over power—­in our three relational contexts of the racial order? Where is the power located? To answer this question, we must step back and consider what power entails in the first place. Typically, power is seen in substantialist terms as an entity or possession, as something to be seized or held. However, in a relational way of thinking, as Elias noted, “the concept of power [is] transformed from a concept of substance to a concept of relationship.”240 Far from being an attribute or property of specific actors, it is unthinkable outside matrices of force relations; it emerges from the very ways in which such relations are patterned and operate. Is power, then, to be found at the level of social relations alone, the social structures of the racial order? To be sure, the distribution of capitals or assets in the racial field is eo ipso a distribution of power, both among the racial dominants themselves and between them and the dominated. However—­and here is an insight less transparent and obvious—­the cultural and collective-­emotional levels of the racial order

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also are sites for the distribution of power. Power does not reside exclusively in the realm of social structure, in the ways in which social relations are configured, as sociologists often imply when they counterpose “culture” to “power.” Power also is to be found within symbolic formations; it flows from occupancy of the most privileged symbolic positions therein, deriving, for instance, from the capacity to speak in the name of the most highly valued or consecrated ideals of the symbolic classification system. If racial actors, individual or collective, can align themselves symbolically or discursively with the sacred pole of the racial order—­specifically, with whiteness—­then, by that fact alone, they will gain privilege. Finally, power also can be found at the level of collective emotions. Here, what is crucial is the degree of closeness actors enjoy to sacred centers of ritual and collective effervescence.241 Crucial as well is their positioning in networks of identification, fear, deference, and trust. “Those who hold trust hold power.”242 Those fantasized as powerful also are regarded as powerful. (It is striking to what degree Freud’s aforementioned sociometric diagram of group psychology also is a mapping of power relations.) Struggles over power involve contestation in all three of these analytically demarcated domains of the racial order. In chapter 4, we take up issues of power by theorizing projects to conserve or subvert racial ascendancy; more habitual ways of preserving or reproducing the racial status quo; and how actors are able (or unable) to negotiate the everyday challenges of life in contexts of racial domination. Chapter 5, too, attends to questions of power in interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena such as publics and social movements. The second question to which we are led is the following: What is the theoretical connection among these three distinct levels of social relations, culture, and collective emotions? If all three interpenetrate empirically, then how are they related to one another analytically? As we have stressed already, the three levels of the racial order retain a certain analytic independence from one another. Each possesses its own inner logic and organization. In highlighting this principle of analytic autonomy, our perspective is, as indicated in the opening chapter, not far from that of Parsons, not to mention other approaches such as Alexander’s, all of which posit the existence of multiple “environments of action” (although both Parsons and Alexander present their third element as “individual personality,” while we speak in explicitly transpersonal terms of collective emotions).243 What Alexander says of cultural inquiry applies to the other structural contexts of action as well: “Only after having created the analytically autonomous culture object does it becomes possible to discover in what ways culture intersects with other social

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forces.”244 That is, each context of action has an internal complexity that requires careful study on its own terms. We also conceptualize these structuring contexts as mutually constitutive, such that each class of elements (in our case, each context of racial action) is ordered or constituted through its pattern of interrelations with the other two.245 As we have stressed, we speak here, not of the usual duality of social relations and culture (to invoke the concept first articulated by Simmel), but of a triadic relation among spaces of social positions, symbolic position-­takings, and collective emotion-­takings.246 Galois lattice diagrams are extremely helpful in shedding light on these more complex, triadic relations. Such diagrams graphically display the co-­constitution of networks of ties from two or more analytically distinct orders of social phenomena; they represent those networks of ties in a single line diagram, showing how each network is structured in and through its relations with the others. “Galois lattice analysis makes possible a simultaneous graphical representation of both the ‘between set’ and ‘within set’ relations implied by a [multi]-­mode data array.”247 By providing such visual representations, it nicely illustrates how mutual constitution actually works—­that is, how analytically separable sets of relations also can be said to interpenetrate and to influence one another. So it is with the three distinct but intimately interrelated aspects of the racial order, each of which we have characterized as something on a model of a (bipolar) network or configuration of relations. Have we complexified matters by adding collective emotions to social relations and culture? Yes, to the precise degree that interrelations among three sets or orders of elements considerably are more complex than those among two. Race is a complex affair. But without addressing its complexity head-on, we never can hope to comprehend it in all its richness and multidimensionality.

4

The Dynamics of the Racial Order

In the previous chapter, we developed the idea of a mapping of racial fields, portraying the latter as structured patterns or configurations of social, cultural, and collective-­emotional relations. In so doing, we prioritized structure over agency, statics over dynamics, synchrony over diachrony. Racial fields, however, also are terrains of conflict within and across racial groups. They encompass often fierce struggles to conserve or subvert the structures of racial domination. Racial agency cannot, accordingly, be neglected or ignored. Two moments in a complex whole, structure and agency—­racial fields as spaces of forces and as spaces of struggles—­ideally would not be detached from one another and presented in sequential fashion. The separation of racial structure from racial agency is a false and spurious separation. Indeed, a comprehensive theory of racial domination surely is impossible without systematic analyses both of racial structures and of racial practices—­and without a clear understanding of how these relate to one another. Just such an understanding is pursued in the present chapter, as we examine how racial fields are reproduced and perpetuate themselves—­and how sometimes they are transformed. What was presented in the preceding chapter in predominantly structural terms now is set in motion, as it were—­and reanalyzed as process. (And what was said in chapter 2 about temporally contextualizing our objects of inquiry also is systematically fleshed out.) This aligns with ways of thinking in philosophy and social theory according to which social life is process, or, as Dewey put it, “an affair of affairs. . . . Every existence is an event.”1 Peirce developed a processual semiotics, according to which signs have meaning only “in the context of a continuing process of interpretation.”2 And Mead asserted in The Philosophy of the Present that “reality exists in a present. . . . A Parmenidean reality does not exist.

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Existence involves non-­existence; it does take place. The world is a world of events.”3 A similar perspective emerged in work inspired by Durkheim’s theory of ritual process, as set forth in the Elementary Forms. As we have seen, Durk­ heim presented there a structuralist account of symbolic classification, one based on a polarity of the sacred and the profane. This approach dovetailed closely with Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory (developed around the same time) and also informed the later culturalist analyses of Lévi-­Strauss, Douglas, and Alexander, among others. In the Elementary Forms, however, Durkheim also stressed a more active and performative aspect to cultural life, one focused on ritual, not sacrality; action, not structure. Moreover, he argued that, in moments of ritual activity, in times of collective effervescence, not only reproductive but also creative or transformative action is possible.4 In elaborating such a position, Durkheim dropped the other shoe, as it were, supplementing his static theory of meaning with a dynamic theory of ritual and performance. This more processual moment in Durkheim, while arguably less influential across much of the twentieth century than its structural­ ist counterpart, did receive some considerable attention from later thinkers. Anthropologist Victor Turner developed a theory of ritual process center­ ing on such ideas as social drama, liminality, and communitas.5 Sociolo­ gist Erving Goffman explicitly invoked Durkheim in a collection of essays (appropriately entitled Interaction Ritual ) on everyday episodes analyzed on the model of religious ritual.6 And toward the end of the last century, a new academic discipline called performance studies emerged to explore this dramaturgical moment in more systematic fashion.7 Alexander himself, originally an advocate of a “strong program” of culturalist structuralism, drew on these intellectual resources, not to mention also the processual thinking of the pragmatists, to present what he called a new “cultural pragmatics.” “In terms of [pragmatist] Charles Morris’s classic distinction,” he wrote, “strong programs have focused on the syntactics and semantics of meaning, on the relation of signs to one another and to their referents. Ideas about symbolic action and dramaturgy gesture, by contrast, to the pragmatics of the cultural process, to the relations between cultural texts and the actors in everyday life.” Alexander added that cultural pragmatics “maintain[s] that cultural practice must be analyzed independently of cultural symbolics, while, at the same time, remaining fundamentally interrelated with it. . . . A theory of practice must respect the relative autonomy of structures of meaning. Pragmatics and semantics are analytical, not concrete distinctions.”8 In what follows, we seek to move forward with a similar agenda for processual and agentic analysis. By stressing the moment of racial contestation and

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struggle, we hope to provide yet another sharp contrast, one complementing our earlier focus on structures of power, with theoretical perspectives that downplay the significance of racial oppression and elide the persistent efforts of oppressed groups to resist and overturn it. Such perspectives shift attention from the dynamic and conflictual engagements among dominants and the dominated to attributes of the dominant racial actors themselves: their prejudices, racist attitudes, and even the internal conflicts they experience. (Myrdal famously spoke in An American Dilemma of adherents to the American Creed who nonetheless violate that creed.9) This focus on the racially privileged—­ultimately an outgrowth of an implicitly substantialist way of thinking—­has, from Thomas to Park, from Myrdal to liberal race theorists today (not to mention also the thriving industry of diversity training and human relations workshops in corporations), held sway across much of the history of American race scholarship, in effect relegating to the shadows the relations of domination and struggle that mark all racial experience. Another implication of our approach is that it counters the tendency in much of race scholarship to produce structuralist accounts that place all theoretical emphasis on causes rather than on reasons (to invoke again that misleading dualism), with progressive scholars lining up on the side of structuralist causation in opposition to neoconservatives who endorse an abstract voluntarism that serves ultimately to blame the victim. (Perversely, racial advocates often adopt this latter perspective, too, and make it the starting point of their own politics of victimhood.10) A renewed theoretical stress on racial contestation, one recalling the spirit of Du Bois’s early focus on black agency in The Philadelphia Negro, Black Reconstruction, and other writings, precisely is what we seek to contribute.11 “Envisaged thus,” writes Boltanski, “the social world does not appear to be the site of domination endured passively and unconsciously, but instead as a space shot through by a multiplicity of disputes, critiques, [and] disagreements.”12 Our deliberate stress on racial conflict does not entail a neglect of other important aspects of the workings of the racial field, including the collusio (as Bourdieu liked to term it) of actors in the stakes and meaning of the racial struggle. For race to exist as a meaningful principle of division in the social world, all parties to racial conflict somehow or other must believe in it. An underlying consensus in the reality of this “well-­founded illusion” (or illusio) must exist—­“a collusio in the illusio, a deep-­seated complicity in the collective fantasy”13—­for race to have salience in social experience. For analysts of the racial order, this means there can be no spurious opposition between “racial conflict” and “racial consensus”; each presupposes the other. Analysts ought

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just as much to highlight the common stakes social actors hold in the racial game as to underscore the different and often contending strategies they pursue in the racial struggle. Specifically, they must be guided not only by an interest in strategies of contention and subversion (as well as conservation of privileges) but also by a focus on investments and practices that reproduce the racial order, as well as by a stress on those racial competences that allow the racial order to function smoothly. They must emphasize not only racial actors’ attempts to change or preserve but also their propensity—­often an unconscious one—­to believe in, place stock in, the racial order; relevant as well here are the skilled judgments actors make in respect to racial questions. These, too, are matters of racial agency and have been neglected all too often in the race literature, whose focus instead has been, more one-­sidedly, on large-­scale efforts at racial transformation (or large-­scale efforts to prevent racial transformation). Propensity and competence are just as crucial to the workings of racial life as are struggles—­and ought just as much to be included in studies that address the ritual processes and performances of the racial order. Inquiring into these substantive issues also raises theoretical questions regarding the nature of racial action itself, questions that lead deep into the heart of sociological action theory. How are the agentic orientations of racial actors to be characterized? Are racial actors to be seen as pursuing strategies grounded in the dispositions of their habitus, as Bourdieu, in a long line of thinkers including Dewey (Human Nature and Conduct) and Durkheim (The Evolution of Educational Thought), might have argued? Are they also to be seen as driven, at least in certain instances, by projects and strategies aimed at bringing about alternative states of the racial order? Are they further to be regarded as potentially intelligent actors (in the pragmatist sense of the term) whose competences can be raised to ever higher levels of reflexivity? A great deal is at stake here, not only for better understanding such topics as actors’ investment in taken-­for-­granted workings of the racial game, their engagement in racial struggles, and their racial competence and judgment, but also for adequately conceptualizing the racial order itself and its prospects. In particular, if racial actors are to be seen as fundamentally oriented in their actions by past patterns of thought, perception, and feeling, as in Bourdieu’s sociology, then it becomes difficult for race scholarship satisfactorily to analyze more forward-­looking, not to mention also reflexively present-­centered, instances of transformative agency.14 The concept of habitus, to which otherwise we are drawn, has little place theoretically for what one might term projectivity, or agentic engagement whose primary orientation is toward

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an alternately envisioned future rather than toward patterns inherited from the past. Additionally, the dispositional perspective tends to minimize possibilities for what we might term (following the classical American pragmatists) intelligent action driven by sound practical evaluation (i.e., agentic engagement that contextualizes past patterns of thought, perception, and feeling)—­or, for that matter, future-­oriented projects—­within the contingencies and problem-­laden circumstances of the present moment. (From the beginning, a major charge against Bourdieu has been that his social thought is marked by inadequate theoretical accounts of both projectivity and intelligent, reflexive action.) No discussion of the dynamics of the racial field can be complete without a direct and probing engagement with these issues. In what follows, we attempt just such an engagement. The point of departure for our efforts is a new understanding of agency itself. Despite all the calls for a greater theoretical emphasis on racial dynamics, this concept never has been explored in a differentiated fashion. Instead, it has maintained an elusive, albeit resonant, vagueness, despite the long list of terms with which it has been associated, terms such as “initiative,” “motivation,” “will,” “purposiveness,” “intentionality,” “choice,” “freedom,” and “creativity.” Indeed, in the effort to demonstrate an interpenetration of structure and agency, many have failed to demarcate racial agency as a theoretical category in its own right, one with its own integral elements and temporally variable manifestations. The result has been a flat and impoverished conceptualization that, even when it escapes abstract voluntarism, remains so tightly bound to structure that it loses sight of the different ways in which agency actually can shape structural (including racial) contexts. Our own approach, which closely follows earlier work by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, develops a temporal reconceptualization of racial agency.15 It suggests that the latter analytically must be situated within the flow of time. Specifically, it conceives of racial agency as a temporally constructed engagement by actors of their different structural contexts of action, an engagement that, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those contexts in interactive response to problems posed within them. Racial actors orient themselves toward the past, the future, and the present simultaneously, but in any emergent situation they orient themselves primarily toward one or another of these. As they move in and among different unfolding horizons, they switch between (or recompose) their temporal orientations—­as constructed in and by means of those contexts—­and thus are capable of changing their modes of relation to structure. Mead was right in underscoring (in The Philosophy of the Present) the positioning of human subjects within temporal passage; he also was right to argue that it is the capacity for imaginative

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distancing and communicative evaluation in relation to habitual patterns of engagement that drives the development of reflective intelligence, the capacity of actors critically to shape their own modes of response to problematic situations. Our theory of racial agency has the merit of incorporating all three of the agentic modalities to which we just now have alluded: the dispositional or habitual, the projective, and the practical evaluative. It disaggregates racial agency into these three distinct elements and presents an image of a “chordal triad of agency” in which all three moments resonate as separate but not always harmonious tones. From this standpoint, it surveys what agentic processes might entail if one or another of these tones in the chordal triad were sounded most forcefully. By developing such a tripartite analytic model, it restores to view not only habitual racial practices but also transformative, future-­directed racial action as well as intelligent problem solving, situating all three modes of agentic engagement in a broader, more encompassing theoretical framework. We show how the structural configurations of racial fields are both dynamically sustained and altered by racial agency, that is, by racial subjects capable of redeploying modes of action inherited from the past, formulating projects for the future, and realizing both—­if only in small part and with unforeseen and paradoxical outcomes—­in the present. Routine, purpose, and judgment all constitute important dimensions of racial agency, although none by itself captures all its complexity. When one or another of these elements is conflated with racial agency itself, one loses sight of the dynamic interplay among them and of how this varies across the different actual circumstances of racial life. Our theory has crucial implications for how structure and agency might be understood to work together. An adequate grasp of the analytics of racial action long has been needed in race scholarship. With the approach elaborated here, one can redress that problem and develop a more supple, flexible way of thinking about the topic. One can shed new light on such important issues, too, as the racial collusio, racial struggle, and racial competence, closely linked as these are to past-­, future-­, and present-­oriented action, respectively. And in this way, finally, one can open up promising new avenues for both empirical research and normative inquiry into the complex dynamics of the racial order. The Iterational Moment of Racial Agency If racial agency is conceptualized as a chordal triad composed of three analytically distinct elements (oriented variously toward the past, future, and present), then the iterational moment—­one also might call it the dispositional

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or habitual—­is that in which the past is the most resonant tone.16 This iterational moment entails the selective reactivation by racial actors of past patterns of thought, perception, and feeling (as routinely incorporated in practical activity), a dynamic that lends stability and order to social universes and helps to sustain identities, interactions, and institutions over time. The schematization of racial experience is the primary locus of iterational agency, manifest in actors’ abilities to recall, select, and appropriately apply the more or less tacit and taken-­for-­granted schemas of action they have developed in past interactions.17 Schemas are corporeal and affectual as well as cognitive; they consist in the interpenetration of mental categories, embodied practices, and social organization and are recursively implemented (to borrow the terminology of Anthony Giddens) in the workings of social life.18 One finds iterational agency even in the most prestructured of racial actions. Even relatively unreflective action has its own moment of effort, as the typification and routinization of experience are active processes entailing selective reactivation of received structures in expected situations, dynamic transactions between social actor and situation. Although, as Mead reminded us, all experience takes place in the present, the latter always is permeated by the conditioning quality of the past: “Its presence is exhibited in memory, and in the historical apparatus that extends memory.” One’s past experiences condition one’s present actions “when[ever] they have taken on the organized structure of tendencies.”19 t h e c o n c e p t o f i t e r at i o n Habit was an important category for the ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, who in the Nicomachean Ethics analyzed at length the habituation of character and the learning of virtue.20 In the medieval period, it was taken over by Aquinas, in whose writings, in fact, the Latin term habitus made its first appearance.21 But given the rise of modern rationalism and a “philosophy of consciousness” in early modern Europe, a development illuminatingly surveyed by Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, the concept of habit did not attain to a high profile again until the late nineteenth century, with the advent of classical American pragmatism.22 Peirce spoke from early on in his life’s work of a “calm and satisfactory” state he termed “Belief,” which “does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises.”23 Belief, he suggested, “involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit.”24 Dewey further developed this idea in a classic essay of the pragmatist tradition, “The

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Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in which he asserted that experience is a “comprehensive . . . organic unity,” a “sensori-­motor coordination,” one consisting at least as much in action as in knowledge, an organic circuit in which the contributions of object and subject, stimulus and response, could be seen “not as separate and complete entities in themselves, but as divisions of labor, functioning factors, within the single concrete whole.”25 Dewey added that, in most ordinary lived experience, there is little conscious separation among these elements, as the concrete practices in which we engage flow in “a continuously ordered sequence of acts, all adapted in themselves and in the order of their sequence, to reach a certain objective end.”26 Sounding, in fact, one of the most distinctive of pragmatist themes, he stressed the habitual and taken-­for-­granted nature of our practices, at least those found in unproblematic circumstances lacking in uncertainty. Dewey believed that, when practices proceed uninterruptedly and without resistance, their meaningfulness resides deep in them as part of an unbroken, coordinated system of activity, and the validity of objects forming part of those systems goes unquestioned as well. Dewey further elaborated these insights in Human Nature and Conduct, where he argued that “habits may be profitably compared to physiological functions like breathing, digesting. The latter are, to be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions in many respects, and especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment.”27 For Dewey, there was an important connection to be drawn between habits and common sense, for habits were preobjective or prior to the specification of objects of knowledge. This did not mean, however, that humans were automatons. They followed an “acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts.”28 Habitual practices were, at least potentially, dynamic and adaptive, plastic and educable, entailing a tacit—­indeed, bodily—­knowledge that, without resort to conscious planning or a deliberate following of instructions, enables one to react in real time to the changing vicissitudes of social situations. Dewey described such habits as “active means . . . that project themselves, energetic and dominating ways of acting. . . . Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and versions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.”29 Hans Joas has described this account of habits as a “non-­teleological interpretation of the intentionality of action,” an account that conceptualizes habitual practices as oriented neither to the attainment of externally determined goals, as in rationalist means-­ends models of action,

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nor to the carrying out of rules of action, as in the normativist model of structural functionalism.30 Habits are located, in Joas’s words, “in our bodies. It is the body’s capabilities, habits, and ways of relating to the environment which form the background to all conscious goal-­setting, in other words, to our intentionality.”31 The agentic dimension in iteration lies in how actors selectively recognize, locate, and implement such corporeal schemas in their ongoing situated transactions. While this may take place at a low level of conscious reflection, it still requires attention and engagement on actors’ part to narrow down the possibilities for action in specific contexts. The pragmatists’ conception of habit played a significant role in the Chicago School tradition of race and ethnic sociology. The founder of that school, W. I. Thomas, highlighted the significance in race prejudice of taken-­ for-­granted modes of thought and feeling, suggesting that the “normal attitude . . . [is] one of distrust toward everything not included in the old run of habits.”32 As Joas has observed of Thomas, “In the introduction to his Source Book for Social Origins (1909), a central theoretical position was . . . given to the ‘habits’ model of action. When confronted with unfamiliar stimuli, habits break down, a state of affairs that constitutes a crisis which can be overcome only by a conscious operation (‘attention’) on the part of the subject, through which new habits of behavior originate.”33 This “habits” model also was evident in the substantive analyses of The Polish Peasant, where Thomas and Znaniecki noted the growing disjuncture—­in immigrants caught between social worlds—­between “the old sentimental habits and some new ones.” For the Polish immigrants, social reorganization meant the establishment of a new order of habitual practices, ones better suited to the exigencies of modern American life.34 (Interestingly, Thomas’s most famous and widely used concept, “the definition of the situation,” reverted back from a concern with infraconscious habitual action to a more attitudinal “philosophy of consciousness” perspective.35) Park also relied implicitly on an idea of habit inherited from pragmatist philosophy. He wrote, for example, of black-­white power relations after emancipation: “There lingers still the disposition on the part of the white man to treat every Negro familiarly, and the disposition on the part of every Negro to treat every white man respectfully. But these are habits which are gradually disappearing. The breaking down of the instincts and habits of servitude, and the acquisition, by the masses of the Negro people, of the instincts and habits of freedom have proceeded slowly but steadily.”36 Finally, the urban ethnographers of the Chicago School, under the direct influence of Park, also deployed the concept of habit in their writings on race and ethnicity. Zorbaugh spoke of slum dwellers unconsciously growing so accustomed to their pitiful surroundings that “it is often remarked

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how difficult it is to get a family to consent to move out of the slum no matter how advantageous the move may seem from the material point of view,” while Gerald Suttles devoted a chapter in The Social Order of the Slum to describing the performative habits of different ethnic groups in the Addams area—­habits of greeting, eye contact, innuendos, dialects, gestures—­to show how “nonverbal communications estrange ethnic groups” from one another.37 Of course, the pragmatist tradition in philosophy and race scholarship was not alone in devoting extensive attention to habit or to what we have called the iterational moment of agency. Durkheim, too, spoke of the dispositions of the habitus (using that very term) in his major work of historical sociology, The Evolution of Educational Thought, while Weber did as well in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.38 For Bourdieu, of course, dispositions constituted nothing less than the lynchpin of his sociology. From his perspective, action was best conceptualized as nonstrategic and as driven in most instances by active dispositions. Through incorporation of objective structures into the body (in the form of schemas and principles of vision), actors developed preconscious expectations about the future, anticipations typically inarticulate, naturalized, and taken for granted. Guided by these anticipations, they engaged in nonteleological action, “directed towards certain ends without being consciously directed to these ends, or determined by them.”39 Such action was intentional without being goal oriented, more the product of an intuitive feel for the game than a result of deliberate pursuit of conscious ends. Portraying social actors as neither rational calculators nor automatons, Bourdieu avoided the shortcomings of both intentionalist finalism and mechanicist causalism. He believed that, rational choice models of behavior notwithstanding, social actors hardly conduct themselves in the image of homo economicus ; rather, they are driven by self-­interest (in the narrower sense of that term) only in relatively rare or historically specific instances. That is, actors engage in calculation in the realm of discursive consciousness only when problematic circumstances arise that render iterational modes of response unfeasible. To assume otherwise is to be guilty of the scholastic fallacy discussed in chapter 2—­that is, to assume that all actors proceed in the same logical, explicit, deliberate fashion as do social scientists in their scholastic labors.40 Bourdieu recognized the close compatibility of his ideas with those of Dewey: “The theory of practical sense presents many similarities with theories, such as Dewey’s, that grant a central role to the notion of habit, understood as an active and creative relation to the world.”41 We shall have more to say in a later chapter about Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus. For the moment, we simply point out the usefulness of his insight that dispositions are the wellspring of action. Different formative

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experiences—­not only those discussed by Bourdieu in his own work, such as gender or class background, but also racial and ethnic origins—­shape the internalized schemas in terms of which actors think, perceive, feel, and act in particular worlds. They also shape those actors’ moral habits and dispositions (to return to the roots of the concept in ancient and medieval moral philosophy).42 This holds true not only of individuals but also of groups, although when speaking of racial group dispositions one must be wary of reifying. (Bourdieu always alluded to the dangers of carelessly invoking such general notions as class or group habitus.) In our earlier discussion of the field of blackness, we showed how emergent strategies on the part of a racial group always must be understood not as the self-­expressions of a singular actor but rather as compromise products of a dynamic of negotiation and contestation unfolding in that group understood as itself a field. There is no simple or unitary habitus, or complex of habitual practices, or set of dispositions toward action on the part of whites, African Americans, or any other racial group. All such groups are too internally heterogeneous for that to be possible, except perhaps in cases where processes of monopolistic closure, as analyzed by Weber, have bound them so tightly together as to render their ways of life (and dispositions) uniform, as in the case of first-­generation Hmong immigrants or Orthodox Jews. What is illuminating, at any rate, about the idea of a racial habitus is its suggestion that racial actors, complex and differentiated as they are, at times exhibit broad common tendencies in their habits. Contributors to whiteness studies have examined how some of these patterns operate in white America, often at such a low level of awareness that philosopher Charles Mills has spoken memorably of “an agreement to mis interpret the world, an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance.”43A wide range of other social thinkers, meanwhile, have charted the dispositional and habitual tendencies of African Americans and other racialized minorities. Bourdieu conceived of most action as habitual or dispositional in nature, as the expression of an immediate or unproblematic fit between habitus and field. Quoting Leibnitz with approval, he asserted: “ ‘We are empirical,’ . . . by which he [Leibnitz] meant practical, ‘in three quarters of our actions.’ ”44 For Bourdieu as for Dewey, “practical” did not connote a tendency toward rote, mechanical repetition but rather “the generative (if not creative) capacity inscribed in the system of dispositions as an art, in the strongest sense of practical mastery, and in particular as an ars inveniendi.”45 (It was in this latter sense that he endorsed Dewey’s depiction of habitual action as “active and creative.”) In many of his substantive writings, including ethnographies of Algeria and Béarn (his native region of France), he analyzed at great length

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the strategies of honor, fertility, education, matrimony, and so forth, that actors pursue, all involving a considerable degree of artfulness, invention, and innovation. In these inquiries, he generated insights that help today in illuminating contentious topics in the sociology of race, such as strategies of reproduction (in the double sense of that word) common among the urban poor or the lengths to which many young men of color go in upholding their masculine sense of honor.46 In certain circumstances, Bourdieu added, one even encounters dispositions to resist, as when members of the elite give expression to their privileged dispositions not by aiming to perpetuate the status quo but by striking out “in defense of the downtrodden.”47 But it is only when actors find themselves at a crossroads, in “times of crisis, in which the routine adjustment of subjective and objective structures is brutally disrupted,” that something like “rational choice” “takes over,” presumably filling out the remaining “quarter” of their actions.48 “Reflexive attention to action itself . . . occurs . . . almost invariably only when the automatisms have broken down.”49 This fundamental opposition of practical and rational action, the former comprising the vast majority of people’s actions and the other only action in exceptional and problematic circumstances, marked the outer limits of Bourdieu’s theoretical reasoning. Practical versus rational action remains perhaps the greatest of the dualisms unattended to (and unresolved) in his life’s work. Bourdieu’s insights, combined with those of Dewey and other students of habitual conduct, open up a wide range of habitual practices for theoretical reassessment. Rescued now from the shadows of neglect, fully recognized as agentic practices worthy of careful study, dispositional ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting emerge as highly complex modes of engagement with the social world. Consumption habits, for example, are conditioned by and help to reproduce the racial order.50 The brand of cigarettes one smokes, the kinds of alcohol one consumes, the tolerance one has for spices—­all project racial messages. When black urbanites smoke Newport 100s while white cowboys in Wyoming light up Marlboro Reds, they participate, as a matter of habit, in racial practices that uphold the structures and boundaries of the racial field, a fact, incidentally, that has not been lost on these brands’ marketing teams.51 The length and volume of a laugh, the way one disciplines one’s child, one’s treatment of animals, the way one stands against a wall, or the way one plays pickup soccer all combine to make racial sense, effortlessly reminding us of the racial order. But just as our eyes dart back to the clock the second its ticking stops, the racial order becomes most fully visible in those clumsy moments when racial habits clash, forcing agents to assume a

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more intentional orientation. A failed handshake between a black man and a new white acquaintance; a frustrating interaction between a harried Chinese waiter and his relaxed guests; the proverbial clutching of one’s purse: these are the kinds of racial misfires that remind us of the strictures of the racial field and of our own position—­and dispositions—­within it. r a c i a l p r o p e n s i t y, o r t h e i l l u s i o Racial fields clearly are spaces riven with tension—­and marked by mutually opposing strategies of action. The conflicts they encompass are ongoing and nearly universal. Racial fields, however, also have the invariant property that actors in them possess not only interests—­and corresponding strategies of action—­grounded in the discrete social positions they happen to occupy in a distribution of capitals, or in the locations they occupy in discursive and collective-­emotional spaces, but also shared commitments to those fields as a whole, “an objective complicity that underlies all the antagonisms.”52 If African Americans are united, for instance, and feel a sense of connectedness and belonging, it is not necessarily because of shared experiences or similar individual histories (a “history of . . . strife,” in Du Bois’s words53) but rather because they belong to the field of blackness—­itself  formed through a historical trajectory—­and are united in the struggle over the meaning of “black.” When studying racial fields, it is important always to examine these tacitly shared interests and concerns that constitute the admission fee, as it were, into those fields, an illusio (in Bourdieu’s terminology) that serves to guarantee that the dynamism constitutive of such spaces rarely ends in profound upheaval.54 The racial collusio binds racial groups together despite all the structural tensions that separate them. “A fight presupposes agreement between the antagonists about what it is that is worth fighting about; those points of agreement are held at the level of what ‘goes without saying.’ ”55 All involved in a racial field heavily are invested at the very least in the (implicit) idea that race is a reality, that it has meaning and consequences for people’s lives, that the game of race is not actually a game. This belief is the fundamental premise on which the entire racial order is based, power asymmetries and all. The very willingness or propensity of actors in the field to engage in struggles over racial capitals, symbols, and fantasies supports this shared framework of investments and commitments. As Bourdieu noted (and this applies to be sure to racial fields), small victories or “partial revolutions” that “constantly occur in fields do not call into question the very foundations of the game, its fundamental axioms, the bedrock of ultimate beliefs on which the whole game is based. . . . Those

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who take part in the struggle help to reproduce the game by helping—­more or less completely, depending on the field—­to produce belief in the value of the stakes.”56 To grasp fully the importance of propensity—­that is, of belief in the meaning and significance of the game—­one need only try to imagine a world in which all individuals, regardless of their skin color, facial features, or other such phenotypical characteristics, not to mention ancestry, deem race a laughable and absurd principle on which to build a hierarchical ordering of society. In this world, race is seen for what it is: an arbitrary set of dividing lines and boundaries with no basis in reason or biology. As its fictional quality becomes apparent, it ceases immediately to be an illusion. Why is race so very real? Because everyone continues to invest in its existence and salience and to orient social actions around it. On account of this shared complicity, racial difference becomes a fundamental law or nomos of the field and, as such, helps (in ways favorable to the dominants, needless to say) to constitute it as a relatively autonomous social universe. Both racial groups and institutions, racial structures and logics of action, are constituted in just such a way. “The collusion of agents in the illusio is the root of the competition which pits them against each other and which makes the game itself.”57 For that very reason, nearly all efforts to subvert racial domination become nothing more than attempts to shift location in a field or to change the rules of the game of that field to one’s own advantage. Take, for instance, the movement (and scholarly tendency) widely known as Afrocentricity, which, since the 1970s, has sought to raise the standing of blacks in the racial order while doing little to question the idea of, or belief in, race itself.58 Or take any number of other identity-­based movements—­from the Yellow Power student movements of the late 1960s to Chicanismo and other such ethnic national projects—­that aim an axe not at the roots of the tree but at its branches, seeking only to rearrange the dimensions of the racial field while leaving its foundations, the racial nomos, intact.59 Because their existence relies on a belief in racial differences, these identity-­based projects often promote their platforms by exaggerating such differences and depicting each racial group as Du Bois did in his early essay “The Conservation of Races,” namely, as a bounded collectivity possessing some unique constellation of talents and perspectives.60 The propensity to believe—­the opposite of which is indifference61—­ac­ cordingly is the price one pays to enter a racial field, the price of entry into the game. Required of any historical sociology of racial domination is a comprehensive examination of the mechanisms through which such illusio is generated, how the illusio is maintained in the face of contrary pressures, and

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how different racial orders elicit different illusios that sometimes come into conflict with one another. Such an analysis would move beyond texts that document the emergence of the idea of race—­for instance, classic works by Gossett and Jordan—­and examine precisely how this concept (a particular variant of it, at that) could have spread from the writings of philosophers and scientists to the habits and psyches of ordinary citizens. Ethnographers, too, could study the everyday labor involved in reproducing the racial nomos in society’s various institutions—­families, peer groups, schools, religious organizations, civic associations, workplaces, socializing spots, and government institutions—­while paying heed to the complex ways in which individuals accept or reject certain racial messages and classification schemes. Fine examples of such work already exist in ethnographies that analyze the microinteractions of the racial order and document the formation of a racial habitus and illusio.62 Together, these studies make clear that the racial illusio cannot be accepted uncritically by sociologists but must be treated as a curious something and submitted to serious scrutiny. As Brubaker has written, “Ethnic common sense . . . is a key part of what we want to explain, not what we want to explain things with; it belongs to our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit.”63 Just as Elias asked, in The Civilizing Process, “How did this transformation, this ‘civilizing’ of the West, actually happen?,” race scholars could ask: How did this transformation, this ‘racialization’ of the West, actually occur?64 How are we trained now to invest in the game of race? And how do people form habits of thought, feeling, perception, and action in just such a way as to make race an ever-­enduring and widely acknowledged reality?65 (Elias asked these very questions, too, in The Established and the Outsiders.66) An important element in the perpetuation of the illusio, the belief in the racial game, is the ritual practices described by Bourdieu as “rites of institution.” These serve to naturalize racial boundaries and to affirm exclusions. “One of the essential effects of [a rite],” wrote Bourdieu, “. . . [is] that of separating those who have undergone it, not from those who have not yet undergone it, [as in rites of passage,] but from those who will not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain. . . . To speak of rites of institution is to suggest that all rites tend to consecrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary, by fostering a misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the limit and encouraging a recognition of it as legitimate.”67 This idea in effect expands on Durkheim’s original theory of rites in the Elementary Forms, in particular his conception of the “negative cult,” or prohibitions on “unsanctioned mixture and contact” between the sacred and profane.68 Earlier, for instance, we spoke of the negative rite that, in Jim Crow times as portrayed

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by Ellison, prohibited profanized beings (blacks) even from touching those deemed sacred (whites). This rite was extended, as is well known, also to include looking. In Durkheim’s words, “The gaze is a means of establishing contact. This is why, in certain cases, the sight of sacred things is forbidden to the profane.”69 Bourdieu developed Durkheim’s insights into a broad political sociology of ritual practices, one applicable to all manner of racial interactions, those of everyday life as well as those one might consider more solemn and far reaching. These might include the iconic “Whites Only” sign that enacted a dividing line (and reenacted it repeatedly) between those allowed to enter the purified, sacred space—­a lunch counter, a swimming pool—­and those prevented from doing so and relegated forever to the polluted expanse without. One thinks also of the innumerable quotidian rituals from which blacks, not to mention other people of color, were barred (violations resulting in insult or violence at worst or awkwardness at best, as in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 70) and the more prolonged, extended ritual processes that precisely imposed, signified, or instituted an exalted essence and thereby also a deprivation, an unbridgeable gulf separating the two (enchanted years at an all-­white boarding school; membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution; residence in one of the “nicer” parts of town). “The act of institution,” in Bourdieu’s words, “is an act of social magic . . . [that] always manages to produce discontinuity out of continuity,” turning a continuous distribution or at least a complex, multidimensional reality into a simple division between the elect, those socially marked and consecrated, and all the rest.71 An ordinal scale becomes a nominal one, a gradational slope a set of all-­or-­nothing categories; and just as those who narrowly failed an entrance examination are thereupon excluded (and decisively so) from the club, so too the racially polluted, contaminated perhaps by a single drop of blood, are prevented access to the institutions, exalted and trivial alike, of a racially divided society. A valued credential confers a noble essence or social definition on those (racially) privileged enough to earn it, thereby “produc[ing] the element of inner conviction and inspired attachment [that is a] condition for entry into the tribe.”72 On the other side, a prison record (disproportionately stamped on poor black men) or an eviction record (disproportionately stamped on poor black women) relegates the impure and stigmatized to considerable and long-­lasting disadvantage.73 Of course, this does not exclude from possibility the occasional transgression, as with racial “exceptions” (such as those who “pass”) or the racially privileged who “slum it”: “The condescending and consecrated person [who] chooses deliberately to transgress the boundary . . . enjoys the privilege of privileges, that which consists of taking liberties with his privilege.”74 (Examples of these

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range from the youth on the plantation who sleeps with the black girl before taking a proper wife to the “white negro” so memorably described by Norman Mailer.75) All such transgressions provide some rare opportunities for cultural learning, but they rarely alter the underlying social processes of the racial order. Rites of institution add to the unquestioning belief and commitment of those to whom they confer their titles of nobility. They do so by impressing on the consecrated a sense not only of their racial identity but also of the kinds of behaviors necessitated by it. “ ‘Become what you are’: that is the principle behind the performative magic of all acts of institution. The essence assigned through naming and investiture is, literally, a fatum.”76 Having undergone a ritual assignation, “the person instituted feels obliged to comply with his definition, with the status of his function.”77 Now tied into the game, he is unable to leave it, to stop caring about its stakes and the game itself. Thus, a white kid who, as a preschooler, played with Latino and Asian children down the street now is transformed into an adult who, after innumerable calls to order, no longer associates with or feels commonality with them. The light-­skinned black resident of Bronzeville is “color-­struck,” so much so, in Drake and Cayton’s words, that “there are persistent rumors that certain formally organized voluntary associations, including one or two churches, are ‘blue-­vein’—­that is, will not accept any members whose skin is not light enough for the veins to show through.”78 And Latino gangs in Los Angeles, through their own street-­corner rituals, implant in their members a set of behaviors distinguishing them from blacks. Each racial field produces its own specific certificates of consecration.79 Each entails its own “positive cult,” to speak again with Durkheim: its own ways of “regulating and organizing” relations of communion with sacred forces.”80 This has important consequences, as Bourdieu saw clearly: “All social destinies, positive or negative, by consecration or stigma, are equally fatal—­by which [we] mean mortal—­because they enclose those whom they characterize within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognize.”81 The Projective Moment of Racial Agency Projectivity is that variant of the chordal triad of agency in which the future rings out as the most forceful tone. It entails the imaginative generation by racial actors of possible alternative trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought, feeling, perception, and action creatively are reconfigured in relation to actors’ hopes, fears, and desires for the future.

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Racial actors do not merely reiterate past routines but also invent new possibilities; imaginative engagement of the future is a central component of their effort. Responding to the challenges and uncertainties of racial life, they distance themselves (at least in partial and exploratory ways) from the habits and traditions that constrain them, reconsidering, challenging, and reformulating established schemas. Making use of their capacity for “distance experience,” to invoke Mead’s term, they reconstruct and innovate on those ingrained patterns of conduct in accordance with their evolving purposes.82 Important here is the hypothesization of experience, as racial actors seek to reconfigure received schemas by generating new responses to the problematic situations they confront. Immersed in a temporal flow, they move “beyond themselves” into the future and construct changing images of where they are going, where they want to go, and how they can get there from where they currently are. They conceive of such images in varying degrees of clarity and extend them with greater or lesser reach into the future, proposing interventions at diverse and intersecting levels of racial life.83 Projectivity is that aspect of racial agency that attempts to alter the shape of things and to bring something new into the world. Without it, racial life never could escape from the circularity of social reproduction and find its way toward different and novel futures—­for better or for worse. the concept of projectivity Early conceptions of projectivity come from the Hebraic tradition. In Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer offers a compelling interpretation of old biblical narratives and shows how visions by Jewish people of the future and their own relation to it—­ideas of the covenant, redemption, and the promised land—­later came to influence Christian narratives of redemption as well as the modern discourse of revolutionary politics.84 The appeal of these biblical narratives, including that of Exodus itself, to African Americans has been considerable as they have sought to make sense of their collective history of slavery and emancipation. In modern times, the Hegelian and Marxian socialist traditions presented a transfigured idea of collective transformation, one focused on the telos of history and the relation between objective interests and subjective liberation. Closer still to our own times, existentialist and phenomenological philosophers depicted social actors as “thrown” into historically evolving situations and as “projecting” themselves into their own possibilities of being. (One hears echoes of this in Sartre’s famous preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.85) Bringing these concerns into sociology,

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Alfred Schutz stressed “the project” as a fundamental unit of action, pointing out that “the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act.”86 For him, projects represent the completed act-­to-­be as imagined in the future perfect tense. Purposive action rarely is guided, in Schutz’s view, by the abstract objective analysis of means and ends or by the clear choice between alternatives, as rational choice theorists would have it (ironically, in common with Parsons’s teleological model of action).87 Not only is action limited and shaped by typifications from past experiences, but, more importantly, both means and ends always are temporally evolving, multiply inflected, and marked by high degrees of indeterminacy. Plans and purposes undergo a continual process of projective “phantasying” until choices finally detach themselves, “like overripe fruit,” from the subjective horizons of future actions.88 While these traditions of thought highlighted the centrality of projects for social life, they proved somewhat less helpful in showing what projects are good for—­that is, how our projective capacity is essential to problem solving in a community. Here, once again, we turn to the pragmatists, who, in addition to their interest in routine, were deeply attuned to the imaginative flexibility of actors’ deliberations about the future. Dewey characterized the experimental relation to the future as crucial: “Experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching forward into the unknown; connection with the future is its salient trait.”89 The very intelligence of human beings itself is based, in his view, on their capacity to “read future results in present on-­goings”; this projective capacity permits the kind of responsive choice and inventive manipulation of the physical and social worlds so essential to democratic participation.90 It works much as metaphor does in creating semantic innovation, taking apart elements of meaning in order to bring them back together again in new and unexpected (often problem-­solving) combinations. Actors insert themselves into a variety of possible trajectories and spin out alternative possible lines of conduct, expanding their flexible response to a field of possible intervention. In this play of scenarios, relatively free of practical constraints, they creatively reconfigure the given, a process encompassing both the intersubjective and purely individual dimensions. Mead especially stressed the former, intersubjective aspect of projectivity, arguing that one’s self-­concept is developed from a capacity to project oneself into the experiences of others. The imaginative capacity of the “I” to move between multiple situationally variable “me’s” is what constitutes freedom and maneuverability in relation to established roles, as well as making possible social coordination, joint problem solving, and collective projects of social reform.91 In the pragmatists’ view, projects are

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constituted not merely by people’s “thrownness” into an uncertain world, a condition that condemns them to freedom, but also by their practical exercise of that freedom along with others in pursuit of a common good. From James to Rorty, Du Bois to West, this pragmatist conceptualization of projectivity deeply informs our thinking about action and the possibility of bringing about a more just and progressive society.92 Bourdieu also spoke of actors’ projections of alternative imagined futures. During his early years, while conducting ethnographic researches in Algeria, he deeply immersed himself in Husserl’s writings.93 What most captured his imagination was Husserl’s dualist phenomenology of time-­consciousness, ac­ cording to which a sharp distinction is to be drawn between protension and projectivity, that is, between “pre-­perceptive anticipation,” in which subjects engage, as Bourdieu later would put it, in “a sort of practical induction based on previous experience,” and the project, seen as a “plan, as a design for the future in which the subject thinks of herself as positing a future and mobilizing all disposable means by reference to that future posited as such, as an end before explicitly being attained.”94 Inspired by this theoretical distinction, he set out in his own works to elaborate a radically temporalized theory of social life. Time was his great obsession; starting with his Algerian studies, he developed a host of theoretical dualisms all proceeding from Husserl’s fundamental dichotomy, dualisms such as implicit and explicit, concrete and abstract, habit and calculation, prudence and ambition, foresight and forecasting.95 All these dualisms made themselves felt in his later sociology as well, with echoes clearly audible in his masterworks of the 1970s through the 1990s. However, Bourdieu’s intellectual commitments also typically caused him to lay stress on the first of these two moments, on protension rather than projectivity. His sociology was most at home in the iterational dimension of agency. For this reason, as mentioned above, Bourdieu came to be accused of a reproductive or cycical bias, of underscoring how domination perpetuates itself rather than (also) of explaining how sometimes it is transformed. This critique, while in many respects a distortion—­Bourdieu’s life’s work, after all, always was concerned with grasping and exploiting possibilities for social transformation96—­does at least have some element of truth to it at the level of action theory. Ignorance of the full scope of his thought, or the selective and distorted appropriation of that thought, cannot fully account for why that particular charge has stuck so long or been argued so convincingly. Projectivity is an important idea in contemporary race scholarship. In Racial Formation in the United States, Omi and Winant propose an idea of “racial projects” that bears directly on the topic of this discussion. In many

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ways, it picks up precisely where the pragmatists left off. Projects, as Omi and Winant define them, are “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning.”97 Omi and Winant hold that racial projects can be found at the macroscopic level in both neoconservate initiatives (“ ‘color-­ blind’ racial politics and ‘hands off ’ policy orientation”) and liberal politics (“in which the significance of race is affirmed, leading to an egalitarian and ‘activist’ state policy”). Racial projects also can be found in the form of white supremacy; radical colorblindness (in which racial inequalities are more or less ignored); radical democracy (in which “notions of racial ‘difference’ [combine] with egalitarian politics and policy”); or various kinds of “nationalist” projects (including majority-­white separatist movements and black nationalism).98 More specific examples also include the initiative in the early twentieth century to send Native American children to boarding schools, where they were stripped of their Indianness and assimilated forcibly to Anglo-­American culture; the creative projects of the Harlem Renaissance, as proclaimed by Locke in his famous essay on “The New Negro”; the Mexican Repatriation Programs of the 1930s, in which roughly two million Mexicans were rounded up and sent back to Mexico because whites scapegoated them for the unemployment and economic insecurity of the Great Depression; and the federal government’s endorsement during the postwar era—­a time When Affirmative Action Was White, to borrow Ira Katznelson’s title—­when whites migrated to the suburbs largely thanks to loan programs administered by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration.99 Omi and Winant also point out that racial projects can be found at the microscopic level as well. Examples here might include young antiracists challenging bigoted parents over the family dinner table or realtors not returning the telephone calls of persons with African American–­ sounding names.100 As Omi and Winant have developed it, the concept of projectivity allows us considerable analytic leeway in analyzing instances of racial action, clearly an important advantage for any historically informed and reflexive sociology of the racial order. We learn from them—­Husserl and Bourdieu notwithstanding—­that projects not always are explicit, programmatic, or dis­ embedded, that they do not contrast with iteration as abstract Reason does with prudence. Rather, projectivity is located at a critical mediating juncture between the past and the present. It involves a first step toward the resolution

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(for better or for worse) of problems in the here and now, problems that cannot satisfactorily be addressed by habits inherited from the past and constitutive of the background structures of the racial world. While, in certain instances, projects might be detached from reality to the point of being hallucinatory, in others they entail grounded efforts to deal with incongruities for which iterational patterns are insufficient. We learn also from Omi and Winant that projects not always are morally superior engagements with problematic contexts. Projectivity encompasses not only meliorist efforts to create a better racial order but also concerted attempts to further or safeguard racial domination. (As satirically portrayed by Ellison in Invisible Man, the project of whiteness itself is one such effort. “Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints” announces a “huge electric sign . . . through the drifting strands of fog.” Its highly successful brand of “optic white” paint is so pure, “it’s the purest white that can be found.”101) A stunningly wide array of projects exists in racial life, some as benign as the initiative to begin an interracial relationship, others as admirable and ambitious as the Civil Rights Movement, still others as sweeping and destructive as the project to guarantee “segregation forever!” To romanticize racial projects is as misguided as it is to denigrate them, neither alternative holding up to careful scrutiny. p r o j e c t s o f c o n s e r vat i o n a n d s u b v e r s i o n The idea of projective, future-­oriented action leads us directly to the topic of racial conflict and cooperation. Fields not only are spaces of forces, as Bourdieu often emphasized; they also are spaces of struggles, in which all sources of power, whether social, cultural, or collective-­emotional (as discussed in chapter 3), function both as weapons and as stakes in unceasing struggles to gain ascendancy. That is, any racial field is both a structure or temporary state of power relations and also an ongoing struggle for domination, a struggle for successful monopolization “of the legitimate violence (specific authority) . . . characteristic of the field in question.”102 Analyses of racial spaces that incorporate this crucial insight have the benefit of acknowledging that the latter hardly are the inert structures a dualism of synchrony and diachrony would have us believe. Field analyses are synchronic in that they map out an array of social, cultural, and collective-­emotional positions, together with the occupants of those positions and the patterns of their relations with one another (a pattern shaped, in turn, by the overall distribution of assets within that space). Yet field analyses also are diachronic, making possible the specification of a number of strategies of action likely to be prominent in the field. Hence their divergence from the many approaches that take for

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granted severely limiting dualisms such as statics and dynamics or structure and history. Much of race studies, like the rest of social thought, is caught up in such dualisms, or in similar ones such as the much-­cherished opposition between reproduction and resistance. The field-­theoretic approach finds dynamic processes at the heart of all relational configurations.103 Built into their very logic, it avers, is a dynamism of potential innovation and a motor for ceaseless change: “What defines the structure of the field,” wrote Bourdieu, “. . . is also the principle of its dynamics.”104 Such a perspective—­one readily can grasp how it contrasts with modes of inquiry such as systems theory that minimize the role of power dynamics—­underscores the structural tension between dominants and dominated in any (racial) space. It requires, as we shall now explain, that any racial field be conceptualized as a terrain of contestation between occupants of positions differently endowed with the resources (powers) necessary for gaining and safeguarding an ascendant position therein. Two mutually opposed strategies of action are encountered in the racial field: a conservation strategy on the part of dominant racial actors, in which their overriding aim is to preserve the structure of power most favorable to them and to safeguard or even enhance their position in this structure; and a subversion strategy on the part of the dominated racial actors, in which their contrary aim is to transform the system of authority in the field, including potentially the very rules of the game according to which ordinarily it functions, to their own benefit. (Again, we are speaking not in terms of individual actors—­as if all whites engaged in a conservation strategy and all nonwhites in a subversion strategy—­but of the correspondence between racial dynamics or projects and one’s position within the racial order.) In analyzing any racial field, it is important to determine precisely how its constituent actors, differently positioned as they are in the field, perceive themselves, their competitors, and the field as a whole—­and how they gravitate toward one or another (conservative or subversive) of these strategies of action.105 In some historical cases, conservation strategies have proven highly effective: witness, for example, the plantation system of the age of slavery or the lynchings during Jim Crow (with white ethnic urban mobs in the North performing many of the same functions as lynch mobs in the South). In the post–­Civil Rights Era, Massey argues, two other institutions for maintaining racial inequality have worked with great efficacy: the housing market and the criminal justice system.106 Rarely, if ever, however, has the field of race relations not featured at least some contestation and struggle, however stable and tension-­ free it might have appeared at first glance. Even the racial dictatorships of

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slavery and Jim Crow manifested some overt conflict (not to mention dissent in more hidden forms): think, for instance, of the slave revolts of the former era and the urban uprisings of the latter. Total domination, as Bourdieu has pointed out, “is a limit never actually reached, even under the most repressive totalitarian regimes. . . . The dominated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force, inasmuch as belonging to a field means by definition that one is capable of producing effects in it.”107 The same basic principles apply even in the case of races-­as-­fields, as in the example we explored at length in the preceding chapter: blackness as a field. As was evident there (albeit implicitly, for we were more concerned to discuss the structures, not the dynamics, of the field), the dominants of the field of blackness typically base their claims to ascendancy on the worldly success and authority they enjoy, while the dominated tend to base their opposing claims on the assumption of a racial authenticity. The latter strategy is highly typical of dominated actors in a field. They often see themselves (and aim to be seen by others) as “returning to the sources, the origin, the spirit, the authentic essence of the game, in opposition to the banalization and degradation which it has suffered.”108 In the field of blackness, for example, this means often invoking an organic connection to the “hood,” a personal history of imprisonment, or an immersion in Afrocentric or black nationalist culture or politics. In the field of Native Americans, it entails often an analogous invocation of “Indianness,” a racial authenticity in stark contrast to the lifestyle of “selling out” and assimilating to white culture. Elsewhere in racial life, one encounters similar oppositions—­and similar projects of authenticity. For instance, in the field of rap music, one finds a tension between the commercially successful artists whose legitimacy derives from sales and those other “authentic” artists who claim superior “street credibility.” A similar tension is found in the field of country-­western music, where artists who cater to large audiences often are excluded from the field altogether by detractors who label them “pop,” especially if those artists attempt to blend country music with genres (like rap or dance) not rooted in the rural white working-­class experience, while those who play at smaller venues but stick closer to the script are admired for being “real country.” In brief, the strategies of conservation and subversion featured in the foregoing examples all have in common a concern to establish and legitimate the dominant principle of hierarchization in a field. Will the capital of worldly authority set the terms of the struggle and determine the rules of the game (as in quadrant 1 of our earlier structural mapping of the field of blackness), or will it be the capital of racial authenticity and credibility (as in quadrant 2; see

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figure 2 in chapter 3)? Will temporal success lead to recognition and privilege in the racial field, or will the decisive factor be a certain closeness to the roots, the streets, the gritty realities of racial deprivation? Following Bourdieu, who drew the distinction in a somewhat different context, one might call these the heteronomous and autonomous principles, respectively, of the racial field.109 The former looks to synchronize the inner dynamics of the field with the workings of the broader social space, while the latter aims to bring about the ascendancy of a framework of authority wholly unique or specific to the field itself. Thus, the struggle pivots around the degree to which the racial field is to be structured analogously to the social order as a whole—­that is, the degree to which it is to privilege the same qualities or assets associated with the dominant actors in society more generally. Those located between the two poles of the field are caught in this tension, feeling the pull, on the one hand, of the heteronomous principle (caught up, for example, in ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting characteristic of whiteness) and, on the other hand, of the autonomous principle (questioning whiteness and counter­ posing to it a more racially authentic lifestyle or politics). Bourdieu often described the field of cultural production as “the economic world turned upside down”; much the same applies to racial fields, which one might describe (in part) as whiteness turned upside down.110 Whether in racial fields or in races-­as-­fields, strategies of conservation and subversion come to a head in struggles over racial boundaries. These boundaries are, as a rule, determined through (power-­weighted) interactions on the part of (sometimes many) individuals and collectivities, for whom the boundaries frequently are a matter of utmost significance. Hardly self-­evident is how a racial field, or even a specific race, actually is to be defined. Consider the “white” race. Plessy v. Ferguson went to the US Supreme Court in 1896 because a man named Homer Plessy was labeled an octoroon—­one-­eighth black (i.e., black, under the one-­drop rule)—­and thereby excluded from the field of whiteness and its privileges, including that of riding in an all-­white railway car.111 More than half a century of struggle transpired before the last vestiges of this legal framework were wiped off the books. Similarly, Mexicans during the nineteenth century were excluded from the ranks of whiteness, classified as an inferior race, and denied citizenship rights. Or, to put it another way, with the construction of a political border separating the United States from Mexico came also the construction of a racial border, one separating whites from Mexicans. Citizenship rights finally were extended to US-­ born Mexicans in 1898, but Mexicans who immigrated to the United States still could not apply for citizenship until 1940, that right being extended only

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to “free white immigrants.” If Mexican immigrants wished to naturalize, they would have to prove they were white.112 Finally, even the “new immigrants” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom came from Southern and Eastern Europe, were caught between racial exclusion and inclusion, resulting in a kind of fracturing of American whiteness itself. Ethnic hierarchies were established within the white race, with landowning, native-­born Anglo-­Saxons occupying the highest positions and impoverished new immigrants demoted to the status of “low-­ranking members of the whiteness club.”113 The Irish—­“savages” of the Old World (sometimes referred to as “blacks turned inside-­out,” while blacks often were called “burnt Irish”)—­were understood as belonging to an inferior white race, the so-­called Celtic race.114 Eventually, however, as whiteness studies has shown, the white race expanded to let in these newcomers—­but only after decades of racial contestation—­while even now the story of light-­skinned Latinos and biracial blacks remains quite different.115 The boundaries of a racial field extend only so far as the power relations themselves constitutive of the field hold sway. Precisely how do strategies of conservation and subversion lead to projective reconfiguration of racial boundaries? Here it might be useful to revisit some of the recent work on boundary making discussed in chapter 2. Wimmer’s inventory of boundary processes includes what he calls “boundary shifting,” the expansion or contraction of “the domains of the included.”116 Boundary shifting mechanisms are illustrated by the historical cases mentioned above, in which a dominant “white” race was demarcated to the exclusion of blacks, mulattoes (including octoroons), persons of Mexican descent, and others, with new immigrants occupying a liminal category between acceptance and rejection. Boundaries eventually would expand to take in these white ethnics, while boundary expansion also would create (out of a multiplicity of smaller entities) corresponding minority categories such as the American Indian, the Hispanic, and the Asian American. Indeed, the African American, too—­descendant of a wide array of African peoples—­can be said to have been created through such “ethnogenesis.”117 Individuals and groups assigned to these minority entities, in turn, would go on to resist having such categories imposed on them, deploying what Wimmer calls contraction strategies such as “fission—­splitting the existing category in two—­or [the] shifting [of] emphasis to lower levels of differentiation in multitiered systems of ethnic classification.”118 For instance, some would disidentify as Native American and claim a particular tribal identity, or else draw a line between themselves as lighter-­skinned Hispanics and others with darker skin. Boundary strategies also include processes in which racial actors, particularly

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those in the dominated sector of the space, accept the existing lines but then aim, through mechanisms of “transvaluation,” to invert the status honor associated with them (“Black is beautiful”) or else to equalize their normative weighting (“color blindness”).119 In some other cases, a “boundary blurring” strategy is deployed to emphasize other, nonracial forms of belonging (based in locality, class, gender, religion, sexuality, perhaps even the species). And sometimes, too, racial actors undertake “positional moves” of “boundary crossing and repositioning,” as when individuals “pass” or assimilate or entire categories (white ethnics in the past; or perhaps Asians and light-­skinned Latinos today) “enter whiteness.”120 If one set of social mechanisms involved in conservation and subversion struggles concerns the definition of boundaries and the assignment of collective as well as individual actors to one or another side of the divide, another (closely related) set has to do with social closure and the (unequal) distribution of rights, resources, and privileges. Social closure not only can result in a shared sense of racial (or ethnic or national) “groupness,” as Brubaker has emphasized, but also it can facilitate the systematic advantaging and disadvantaging of different groups. Weber noted this long ago when he wrote: a relationship “is especially likely to be closed, for rational reasons, [when it] . . . may provide the parties to it with opportunities for the satisfaction of spiritual or material interests”—­opportunities that correspondingly will be denied to outside parties.121 (When this process is carried “through to the limit,” he added, a “closed caste” develops, an analytic insight inspiring the “caste and class school” prominent in American race studies throughout the mid-­ twentieth century.122) Under circumstances of social closure, discrimination occurs if racial dominants pursue “opportunity hoarding” (to invoke, again, Tilly’s term) to block or charge rents for access to a scarce good.123 “Opportunity hoarding often rests on ethnic categories, members of which reinforce their control over hoarded resources by means of their power to include or exclude other members with respect to language, kinship, courtship, marriage, housing, sociability, religion, ceremonial life, credit, and political patronage.”124 (One might add here education, organizational opportunities, and a whole host of other goods.) Opportunity hoarding can be deployed by subordinate racial actors, too, such as during chain migration or in immigrant enclaves, certainly to their benefit but also to the misfortune of other nonelite groups.125 When there is social closure and access to valuable goods is permitted “only in ways that exclude out-­groups from the full value added of their efforts,” as Elizabeth Anderson puts it, then instead one may speak of “exploitation.”126 “Examples include . . . white landowners imposing debt peonage and oppressive sharecropping arrangements on landless black and

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Chicano peasants, and the virtual enslavement of many undocumented immigrants today.”127 Opportunity hoarding and exploitation combine to produce many of the core features of racial domination, including segregation and ghettoization.128 All racial projects concerned with the establishment—­ and, in some instances, mitigation—­of race-­based inequality feature them.129 Perhaps the projective dimension of the chordal triad rings loudest during those special moments of upheaval when the racial field undergoes far-­ reaching transformation, including when the racial status quo is questioned and denaturalized (even if remaining intact) by so-­called “unsuccessful” movements. What before was invisible is rendered visible, and racial actors attempting to challenge or maintain the dominant order carefully evaluate the structure of the field and calculate how certain actions will reverberate across it. Indeed, the racially savvy often find a way to rise above the field by adopting a stance that allows them to cast their gaze across the entire space and to anticipate multiple reactions to different strategies. The influence of Nat Turner’s rebellion and John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry spread far beyond the locales of these two events precisely because Turner, Brown, and others like them understood that their actions would disseminate a spirit of fear across the South and further polarize the country around the “slavery question,” a development that, in turn, would help to push the nation toward civil war and bring about emancipation. Civil rights leaders encouraged Emmett Till’s mother to allow photographers to take pictures of her son’s tortured body because they (correctly) predicted that, once the rest of the nation was exposed to the white terrorism ravaging the South, citizens would be galvanized and energized around the movement for racial equality. And whites led a formidable backlash to the movement by successfully forecasting how certain behaviors and positions that on the surface appeared neutral or even beneficial could be used in the service of upholding the racial status quo. Nowhere was this more evident than in Kevin Phillips’s cunning plan for Republicans to help expand voting rights in the South, “not as a moral issue, but because such a stratagem would hasten the departure of Southern whites into the Republican Party.”130 Moments of crisis bring the projective dimension of racial agency more to the fore. This agentic dimension always is predominant among political elites and professional activists, most of whom pursue strategies of conservation or subversion on a daily basis. As these examples make clear, racial conservation and subversion projects often involve political mobilization, at times accompanied by racial violence. Political mobilization is crucial for repressive and emancipatory initiatives alike. It can be restricted to the arena of electoral politics or extend into mass protest and collective action. Racial violence—­which, as Wacquant points out,

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“rang[es] from interpersonal intimidation and aggression, to lynching, riots and pograms, and climax[es] with racial war and extermination”131—­often adds an element of force and coercion to political mobilization efforts, reinforcing or challenging boundaries and imposing new racial configurations. In the long history of American racism and antiracism, instances of racial violence include slavery; the complex of initiatives and projects (including conquest) whereby Mexicans were dispossessed of their lands; the forced migration and resettlement of American Indian peoples, as in the Trail of Tears; the racial terrorism of the KKK after the end of the Civil War; pogroms against Chinese and other Asian immigrants in California and other parts of the West during the nineteenth century; the forced placement of Native American children in boarding schools; the urban uprisings (by whites) that buttressed residential and other forms of segregation in Northern cities after the start of the Great Migration; the repatriation of thousands of Mexican families during the 1930s; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the various violent measures bolstering Jim Crow; and urban uprisings (by nonwhites) in inner cities during the Civil Rights Movement. Knowledge of (individual or collective) actors’ locations in a racial field allows one to predict with a high probability of success their likely projects and courses of action. It allows one to grasp causally what those actors are likely to do, and, retrospectively, what they actually did do. In this way, it enables one to transcend yet another of the great divides in social science, that between description and explanation. To map out a racial field is to know with considerable accuracy the likely contending strategies of action within it; to describe it is simultaneously to explain it. The very oppositions so much a part of scientific common sense are false oppositions that needlessly constrain theoretical reasoning. Race scholarship, in particular, can and must think beyond these divisions as it strives to make sense of the complexities of racial struggle. Other recent approaches in social thought already have made this move, including those classed under the rubric of exploratory data analysis (e.g., social network analysis, correspondence analysis) and those identified with the interactional turn in the social sciences (e.g., ethnomethodology, conversation analysis). These approaches, too, eschew the causalism of mid to late twentieth-­century mainstream sociology and think in new and insightful ways about, for example, how mapping a social network entails acquiring an explanatory purchase on the actions pursued within it, or how locating actors’ turns in a conversational sequence already means grasping the causal wellsprings of their action. The impasse between causalist and voluntarist approaches in race scholarship—­as epitomized by progressive analyses of racial structures, on the one hand, and neoconservative affirmations

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of self-­responsibility, on the other—­has had grave implications in recent decades for our ability to think systematically and deeply about racial issues.132 Importantly, these same lessons apply regardless of whether we speak (to return momentarily to the preceding chapter’s threefold analytic distinction) of actors’ locations in the social relations of a racial field, its cultural order, or its collective-­emotional domain. Dominant actors seek not only to conserve the assets attendant on their position in the social structures of a racial field but also to retain their proximity to the symbolic centers of that field and their ascendancy in its space of collective fantasies. (This is not to say that some whites will not also demonstrably perform antiracism in pursuit of liberal capital; fields are replete with such cross alignments, which only serve to indicate that the dominants themselves constitute an internally differentiated and contestatory field.) As Weber noted of status hierarchies more generally, the dominants possessed of high social honor and privilege, attributes they all too readily ascribe to their own superior essence or being, often do not relinquish them easily; in many instances, they seek to deploy mechanisms of social (and, we might add, symbolic as well as psychical) closure in defense of their ascendancy.133 Further research must be done on how these strategies of racial conservation are pursued within the cultural and collective-­emotional realms. In the meantime, the racially dominated, stigmatized and degraded as they are in the polluted and despised sectors of the racial field, conversely often aspire to subvert the structures—­again, not only social but cultural and collective-­emotional—­of that same field. They challenge established symbolic frameworks and aim to overturn entrenched orders of feeling, replacing shame with pride, indignity with honor, resentment with entitlement. Among the principal requirements for race studies today is the pursuit of more theoretically informed but empirical inquiries into these cultural and collective-­emotional struggles. Here the accent is on the active, dynamic, agentic side of the terms “discursive position-­takings” and “collective emotion-­takings.” Even the Civil Rights Movement, that very paradigm of conflict over the social structures of the racial order, encompassed as well a fierce contestation over racialized symbols and collective fantasies—­a notion repeatedly stressed by Aldon Morris.134 In what follows, we explore in greater detail the multidimensionality of such conflicts, using as our principal orienting concept the Bourdieuian idea of classification struggles. c l a s s i f i c at i o n s t r u g g l e s In Bourdieu’s sociology, the idea of a struggle over classification centers on conflicts in the symbolic order. (Presently we shall further complicate this

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picture by speaking of struggles in the space of collective emotions.) In the symbolic order, different discourses hold sway in different sectors of a racial field (i.e., in its dominant and dominated regions); each discourse features its own signifiers and narratives. Dominant discourses not only are prevalent among (and favored by) the field’s dominant actors; they also help to impose on the rest of the field those actors’ definitions of the racial terrain, promoting among the other actors a recognition and acceptance of the dominants’ construction of reality.135 At bottom, this construction includes the very demarcation of the groups populating the racial space, a definition of their attributes, and a delineation of the stakes over which they contend.136 The construction calls these groups into being—­it brings them into existence—­in the very act of naming, defining, and delineating them, and it thereby helps to produce, as Bourdieu liked to say, the very reality “it apparently describes or designates.”137 This performative process of group making is, in Brubaker’s words, a societal “project” led by “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” spokespersons authorized to speak on behalf of the racial dominants, and sedimented in the legitimate symbolic formations of the racial field.138 By directing attention to the magical power of discourse to help define racial reality, we are able to recognize that the very partitioning of a racial order, a system of symbolic classification reinforced by structures of the distribution of (racial and other forms of) capital, is through and through a social and cultural product. Indeed, if we have been speaking here of racial actors at all, it has been in this sense exclusively, for to do otherwise would be to confuse (to invoke Banton’s useful distinction) “folk categories” with “categories of analysis.”139 One of the most characteristic ways of imposing a construction of the racial terrain is through the racial categories employed by the state. These make evident, as Bourdieu writes, “the monopoly of the power” enjoyed by the state—­and by those racial groups that occupy dominant positions in state agencies—­“to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups.”140 (This is an idea also developed by Michel Foucault in his famous late work on “governmentality.”141) The current US racial taxonomy is imposed by nearly all institutions in the United States—­from political institutions like the US Bureau of the Census, which asks citizens to check one or more boxes next to racial categories, to educational institutions like universities, which carry out surveys to obtain the racial composition of their schools. Since 2000, the United States has allowed citizens to check multiple racial boxes on census forms—­the result of a movement for multiracialism that began in the 1980s142—­and thereby

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has encouraged (or at least officially permitted) multiracial identification. If the United States is becoming more and more a multiracial nation, this is not only because racial populations have moved across national borders (immigration) but also because racial borders have moved across populations (racial reclassification).143 Practices of racial classification and institution operate in the realm of psychical life as well as in that of culture. Indeed, it might be appropriate here to speak of collective-­emotional as well as of symbolic classification, for fantasies and passional investments often are shaped from above by racial dominants, who impose on those below a wide range of wishes, fears, and anxieties—­for example, feelings of reverence and unease before a refined accent or an established “white” way of speaking. Racial dynamics work as much through widely shared fantasies and emotions as they do through patterns of social relations or cultural discourses. Rites of institution, for their part, also confer on those they consecrate—­most especially on the privileged—­a special or heightened “emotional energy,” as Randall Collins would have it, an upliftedness or spiritedness that often lingers long after the specific rituals have passed: “The emotions that are ingredients of the [interaction ritual] are transient; the outcome however is a long-­term emotion. . . . One gets pumped up with emotional strength from participating in the group’s interaction.”144 Such positive energy is unequally distributed across the racial field. Exuberance and optimism go to the one, passivity and pessimism to the other. In just such a way is a vast and differentiated psychical terrain ongoingly reproduced, rites of institution (and thereby also of degradation, as Garfinkel noted long ago) inflicting on the racially dominated a thousand cuts and producing in them a cumulation of resentment and despair.145 “Ressentiment,” wrote Bourdieu, who typically ignored the emotional side of life, “is . . . the form par excellence of human misery; it is the worst thing that the dominant impose on the dominated (perhaps the major privilege of the dominant, in any social universe, is to be structurally freed from ressentiment).”146 To some extent, of course, every racial field exhibits ongoing struggles against impositions of symbolic and passional classification and inflictions (through ritual process) of degradation and stigmatization. Every racial field is the site not only of cultural and psychical processes but also of classification struggles that aim to defend or subvert definitions of the legitimate principles of division of that field—­that is, the power to impose or inflict categories and collective emotions. Some of this involves boundary work. Often those who wage classification struggles from below proceed through an immanent critique of established systems of categories and fantasies, attempting thereby

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to use the master’s tools to rebuild the master’s house. Against the efforts of dominant discourses to define the very terms of the struggle and, indeed, the racial identities of the contending actors, the racially dominated twist idioms, slogans, and sentiments cherished, say, by whites into alternative ways of portraying the world. When Fredrick Douglass addressed an audience of influential white politicians on the fifth of July, 1852, with these words, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” he was criticizing slavery according to the standards of freedom and governance established and revered by whites who upheld the peculiar institution.147 When Sojourner Truth asked the delegates of the Women’s Rights convention, “Ar’n’t I a woman?,” she was marshaling the ethic of universal womanhood, preached by the white suffrage movement, to draw attention to the symbolic and actual exclusion of women of color from that movement. And when Martin Luther King Jr. quoted from the Declaration of Independence or the words of Jesus, he was forcing whites to confront the incongruence between principles of justice they cherished and their imbalanced implementation of them. He also was appealing to the deep-­seated collective emotions of liberal universalism and to Christian sentiments of brotherly love. Indeed, as Alexander has noted in The Civil Sphere, the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in its discursive and collective-­emotional struggle precisely by aligning itself with the pure, sacred, and deeply cherished symbols and sentiments of American civil society.148 Pragmatist Richard Rorty endorsed similar means of pursuing meliorist social reform in his late work Achieving Our Country. Sometimes, also, classification struggles from below involve efforts to confront the racial capital conferred on whiteness with alternative pedigrees of capital associated with dominated regions within the racial field. (It might be possible, in fact, to speak of a “principle of external hierarchization” associated with temporally dominant regions of the field and of a “principle of internal hierarchization” associated with temporally dominated regions thereof.149) While subordinated to the racial capital of whiteness, the specific capital associated with nonwhiteness still is capital in the sense that it can be exchanged for political power, economic advancement, social honor, or cultural cachet—­although, of course, not nearly as easily as the racial dominants are able to make their own capitals work in their favor. For instance, subordinated racial capital can be marshaled to gain political capital through arguments about historical or contemporary victimization; and charges of racism brought by a well-­organized movement can cost a political candidate

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an election or force a police chief to submit his resignation. The structure of the racial field allows such charges to be levied (the politics of victimhood being most powerfully associated with the racially dominated) and in the right circumstances enables a denigrated racial status to be exchanged for political gain. To take another example, the racially dominated sometimes enjoy a certain degree of cultural admiration from the general public—­an appreciation for “ethnic” food or the bilingual abilities of immigrant children—­in large part because of their subordinated position within the racial field. And black urban youth find ways to convert their economic ghettoization and social marginalization into something “cool” that young people neither black nor urban long to emulate and own; have not the latter’s desires been satisfied by a multibillion-­dollar global hip-­hop industry? Power and resistance: these concepts are too ham-fisted for the subtleties of racial life. Better, perhaps, to speak of multiple forms of racial assets, some more highly valued than others, that behave differently depending on circumstances. Classification struggles bring intrinsic benefits to the holders of subordinated forms of capital. Near the beginning of this book, we spoke of the distinction between “race” and “racial domination.” By providing an alternative principle of internal hierarchization, the racial field offers even the dominated specifically racial sources of gratification, pleasure, and joy. But sometimes classification struggles unfold in unexpected ways. Recall Merton’s classic insight that social action often issues in unanticipated consequences.150 To take an example from postcolonial studies—­specifically, from Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture—­the goal (or perhaps the result) of colonial domination was to create a “mimic man” who was “almost the same [as the colonizer], but not quite”; was Anglicized but not entirely English, French, or Dutch; and was assimilated as far as possible but never completely. (One thinks here, for example, of the American Indians whom Eleazar Wheelock trained at his Charity School, later to become Dartmouth College.) However—­and for Bhabha this is the crucial point—­as the dominated subject learned to mimic, he learned also to menace. He learned how to communicate with his oppressors; he learned their ways, religion, and values; and he was able now to engage with them on their own terms. And once the oppressors recognized themselves in the language and practices of those they sought to dominate—­that is, once a shared humanity came into focus—­ the entire system of colonization was threatened.151 “The effect of mimicry is camouflage,” observes psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Camouflage is not worn to “harmonize with the background” but to lash out at the enemy, as in “human warfare.”152 In cinema, there perhaps is no starker example of colonial

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mimicry employed in the struggle against colonialism than the stirring scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s La Battaglia di Algeri, where three Algerian women, active participants in the National Liberation Front, trade their hijab for French garbone, even cutting and bleaching their hair, so they can slide past the military checkpoints and plant bombs in destinations that attract French tourists. But Bhabha’s concept of the mimic man—­or mimic woman—­also is generalizable well beyond colonial struggle. As Bourdieu remarked, “The [subversion] strategy par excellence is the ‘return to the sources’ which is the basis of all heretical subversion . . . , because it enables the insurgents to turn against the establishment the arms which they use to justify their domination.”153 As we already noted, successful antiracist movements, especially those that force the dominated to make good on their professed principles and fantasies, have well leveraged this dynamic to their own advantage. To be sure, the racially dominant do not simply lay down their weapons when attacked from below. Discursive countermobilizations also are possible. Once the dominated successfully have questioned the cultural and collective-­ emotional structures of the racial field, beating the dominant groups at their own game, the dominants often return the favor, pilfering the symbols, language, and collective emotions of the dominated and using them to their own benefit. Verisimilar terms such as “reverse discrimination” or “reverse racism” testify to a mode of discursive co-­optation often practiced by defenders of white supremacy, a move through which they seek a seemingly invincible linguistic reversal. Following the Civil Rights Era, politicians on the right took up the notion that racial discrimination used to uphold the white power structure was unjust and, through an act of abstraction that involved a good deal of historical amnesia, distorted it into a concept of “color blindness,” which we already discussed above: the notion that public policies addressing social problems created by centuries of racial domination are unjust.154 Those on the left, meanwhile, invoked the language of racial equality but refused to support bold programs that had a fighting shot at achieving that goal. Instead, they maintained that real change would come about only through universal policies—­“a rising tide lifts all boats,” President Kennedy declared—­and then, lowering their sights, advised nonwhites to stop fighting for systemic change and to start “fixing” their families instead.155 Indeed, since the end of the Civil Rights Era, King’s memory has been co-­opted by many racial groups. In American national memory, there is not one King but several, bits and pieces of him scattered across the racial landscape. It has become en vogue for left-­wing historians to criticize “King-­centric” approaches to the Civil Rights Movement and, in an exaggerated move in the opposite

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direction, to all but abandon his memory, choosing instead to write about the “ordinary people” of the movement. And opponents of affirmative action, for their part, often have summoned up King’s dictum that people should be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” all the while forgetting that King also believed that “America must seek its own ways of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens.”156 Just as he borrowed selectively from Thomas Jefferson (skimming over the president’s slave-­owning past), King himself selectively has been borrowed from, demonstrating once again that projectivity entails a great deal of selective appropriation (and counterappropriation) of established idioms and shared passions.157 When these cycles of appropriation and refashioning are reduced to their most elementary elements, one discovers that they often are unified around a shared end: to lay legitimate claim to the status of victim. If Bertrand Russell was correct in his observation that “life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim,” in the racial field the logic often is reversed: the victim precisely is what groups hope to be labeled.158 The victim demands; the victim deserves; the victim controls the politics of justice. And justice, along with reprieve and atonement, belongs to those who have suffered injustice. So it is with the “politics of recognition” (as opposed to the crude politics of domination).159 Every voice dolorous, each claim a claim to suffering, this cacophony results, as Joseph Amato noted in Victims and Values, in significant confusion and division.160 Not only do whites seek to lay claim to victimhood through neologisms such as “reverse discrimination”—­or by identifying with more oppressed immigrant groups (e.g., the Irish) rather than with the dominant ones (e.g., the British)161—­but nonwhites also engage one another in a kind of competition of suffering, resulting, for instance, in antagonism between Jews and blacks or, more recently, between blacks and Latinos; in an unspoken juxtaposing of the Indian Wars, slavery, and the Holocaust; or in the many fingers pointed at the involvement of Jews and America’s indigenous peoples in the slave trade.162 Other surprising twists and turns can be found as well. Think of the many ways in which racially dominated groups draw inspiration from each other to create new discourses, symbols, and fantasies. African Americans, for instance, seeing themselves linked to Jews by histories of suffering and by what Fredric Jameson called that “primary essence” of “fear of vulnerability,” have infused contemporary blackness with stories and symbols appropriated from Jewish culture.163 The significance of the Exodus to black Americans’ understanding of slavery and spirituality, struggle and liberation—­manifest, for example, in Hurston’s Moses, Man of

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the Mountain164—­cannot be underemphasized. And, in this case, yet another shift has occurred recently, as “blacks today,” in Gilroy’s words, have come to “identify far more readily with the glamorous pharaohs than with the abject plight of those they held in bondage,” a change that “betrays a profound transformation in the moral basis of black Atlantic political culture.”165 Before moving on to the next section, let us say a final word about another significant and vigorous classification struggle now being waged in the racial field—­namely, a conflict over the legitimate means of conferring on (or withholding from) action a racial explanation. In this conflict, embattled actors occupying different positions in the racial field struggle to affix racial logics to particular events or, in the opposite direction, to present those events as “neutral” and absolutely decoupled from the racial order. By and large, those occupying a dominant position in the field labor to deracialize behaviors and outcomes, while those clustered near the dominated pole strive to racialize them. The classification struggle then unfolds predictably enough. An event that could be explained by some racial logic garners attention—­in Sanford, Florida, a seventeen-­year-­old black high school student named Trayvon Martin is shot and killed by a twenty-­eight-­year-­old volunteer neighborhood watch coordinator and light-­skinned Hispanic named George Zimmerman—­and then the question arises: Was he shot because he was a threat or because he was black? Since only rarely is there a straightforward answer to such a query, and indeed because the antinomy constructed by it (raced vs. unraced) is a false one, the classification struggle intensifies, and, meanwhile, logical assessment of the event in question becomes less and less possible. Actors express their take on the matter not to provide a rational accounting but to assert their position in the field and to signal race loyalty. Soon enough, the dominant and the dominated alike call on their respective spokespersons—­Bill O’Reilly in one corner, Al Sharpton in the other—­to argue their positions. Those representing the dominants refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism, while their opponents refuse to accept the possibility that the act in question may not have been propelled by a racial dynamic. Each camp deploys its tried-­and-­true linguistic devices, with conservationists accusing their accusers of “playing the race card” and subversionists dubbing their rivals “racists,” until the matter is somewhat resolved (e.g., the jury acquits).166 And so it goes. Classification struggles, it bears repeating, never are concerned exclusively with the particular act in question, which is why even a single incident in a small town could garner national attention. They have to do instead with something more consequential: securing the authority to describe the very nature of racial domination itself and, by extension, the nature of modern society.

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The Practical Evaluative Moment of Racial Agency Playing in the racial field is not a matter simply of following rules. “A rule doesn’t [just] apply itself,” as philosopher Charles Taylor has pointed out. “It has to be applied, and this may involve difficult, finely tuned judgments. . . . There is, as it were, a crucial ‘phronetic’ gap between the formula and its enactment.”167 One has to have a feel for the racial game in order to play it well, a capacity to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action in response to the emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations. One has to be able, that is, effectively to respond to the contingencies of the present moment. Even relatively unreflective routine dispositions must be adjusted to the exigencies of changing situations; and newly imagined projects must be brought down to earth within real-­world circumstances. Moreover, judgments and choices often must be made in the face of considerable uncertainty and conflict, means and ends that sometimes contradict one another, and unintended consequences requiring changes in strategy and direction. The problematization of experience in response to emergent situations often calls for reflective and interpretive work on the part of racial actors. The exercise of situationally based judgment variously has been termed “practical wisdom,” “prudence,” “art,” “tact,” “discretion,” “application,” and “improvisation”; here we label it “practical evaluation.” The primary locus of this moment of racial agency, the tone of the chordal triad that corresponds most closely to a present (as opposed to past or future) orientation, lies in the contextualization of experience. Here again, we echo the pragmatists in stressing its communicative and transactional nature; through deliberation with others (or, sometimes, reflexively with themselves) about the pragmatic and normative exigencies of lived situations, racial actors gain in the capacity to make considered decisions that may challenge their received patterns of action. This communica­tive process is what distinguishes the “strong” situational moment of deliberative decision making from the “weak” situatedness—­one might call it “tacit maneuver”—­of iterational agency. By increasing their capacity for practical evaluation, moreover, actors strengthen their ability (at least potentially) to pursue their projects in ways that transform the situational contexts of action themselves.168 t h e c o n c e p t o f p r a c t i c a l e va l u at i o n Despite its importance, practical evaluation has received less sustained and systematic treatment in modern thought than it did in ancient times. In

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contemporary action theory and moral philosophy, it has been overshadowed by an emphasis on clear and explicit rules of conduct, rules that permit relatively little scope for the exercise of situationally based judgment. In social theory, modern conceptualizations of explicit decision procedures and a widespread “flight from ambiguity” and judgment have become evident in a host of analytic perspectives, dating back at least to Weber’s discussions of Zweck-­ and Wertrationalität.169 Even Durkheim saw morality, by definition, as a “system of commandments,” “an infinity of special rules [that are] fixed and specific.” “To the extent,” he wrote, “that the rule leaves us free [and] does not prescribe in detail what we ought to do, the action being left to our own judgment, to that extent there is no moral valuation.”170 Yet Kant, whose moral theory Durkheim otherwise followed closely, had spoken by contrast in The Metaphysics of Morals of a certain “play-­room (latitudo) for free choice in following (observing) the law.” As he had discerned (more clearly than later thinkers), when moral principles cannot strictly lead us down a par­ ticular path, our decisions must be made “according to rules of prudence (pragmatic rules).”171 If one pursues this lead from rules back to practical wisdom, one winds up with Aristotle, whose ethical writings include one of the earliest and most fully developed theories of prudence. In contrast to later rule-­based perspectives, as one commentator explains it, Aristotle held that “three features of ‘the matter of the practical’ . . . show why practical choices cannot be adequately and completely captured in a system of universal rules”: the mutability of the particular, its indeterminacy (complexity, contextual variety), and its inherent nonrepeatability. Aristotle also recognized that rules and principles themselves are plural and incommensurable; hence, a con­ cern for situated judgments must supplant any simple belief in the unproblematic application of universal norms or imperatives.172 Practical wisdom referred variously to means or to ends; it was either strategic and calculative or concerned with larger questions of the good. It also was inherently communicative in nature—that is, requiring deep involvement and participation in a community of discourse.173 Far from being purely individual or monological, it remained open to dialogue and persuasion and profoundly was implicated in debates over common values, interests, and purposes. Contemporary thought that fully embraces the critical and dialogical aspects of practical evaluation can be found in the pragmatist tradition. Indeed, it is the pragmatists—­and Dewey in particular—­who provide the most fully realized analyses of practical judgment. As we know, Dewey pointed out that judgments begin with a problematic experience, a fork in the road, which they attempt experimentally to resolve. The concrete situation at hand is in

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some way ambiguous, unsettled, or unresolved. In the case of projects, judgment entails an apprehension of present reality as in some degree resistant to their immediate and effortless realization, posing challenges for application or contextualization. In the case of iterational or habitual activity, there also is the problem that no new situation ever is precisely the same as the ones that came before; all routine activity faces new contingencies to which certain adjustments have to be made. Dewey referred to this problem as the objective “incompleteness” of situations: “Incompleteness is not psychical. Something is ‘there,’ but what is there does not constitute the entire objective situation. . . . The logical implication is that of a subject-­matter as yet unterminated, unfinished, or not wholly given.”174 Something must be done—­a practical judgment arrived at—­that will render the given situation unproblematic and settled. One must act rightly and effectively in the circumstances at hand. This means, as Dewey noted in The Quest for Certainty, “an exchange of reason for intelligence. . . . A man is intelligent . . . in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. In the large sense of the term, intelligence is as practical as reason is theoretical.”175 Or, as his student and fellow pragmatist, Sidney Hook, also put it, it means the deployment of a “method of intelligence.”176 For Dewey and the other pragmatists, intelligence in practical judgment was not the achievement of individuals acting in isolation. Rather, its intersubjective validity derived from assuming the standpoint of a sensus communis, “a whole of common interests and purposes.”177 There was an irreducible “sociality” (in Mead’s terminology) to action; individual judgment—­the methodological starting point for neoclassical economics and variable-­based sociology alike—­was not a sociological given but an emergent phenomenon.178 In describing how action unfolds, Dewey argued that, in certain cases, the judgment or resolution to act leads to a pursuit of clearly defined and explicit ends. This is in accord with the means-­ends framework so well known to economists and sociologists. In other cases, however, the pursuit of ends blends indiscriminately into an ongoing flow of practical activity and only is perceived clearly after the fact. In the latter cases, Dewey noted, conduct does not proceed along the lines of an unambiguous strategy; there are no clear and fixed objectives but only flexible “ends-­in-­view.”179 As he explained it, the ends of action belong not to the future but to the present. They are “means in present action,” not externally set goals that propel action: “Present action is not a means to a remote end.”180 After all, targets function primarily as means for channeling otherwise random, undirected movement. “A mariner does not sail towards the stars, but by noting the stars he is aided in conducting his

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present activity of sailing.” Nor does this interpenetration of means and ends cease once the target of activity is attained. Once the port is reached, “activity [does] not cease . . . , but merely the present direction of activity. The port is as truly the beginning of another mode of activity as it is the termination of the present one.”181 Thus, the commonsense division between means and ends—­ among the most taken-­for-­granted of prenotions—­is called into question, and along with it all teleological ways of modeling action. Means and ends are to be seen as analytic moments in an empirically continuous, improvisatory process. Action itself is highly indeterminate. Dewey’s follower, Anselm Strauss, summed it up this way: “Many courses have no clear-­cut goals. The actors begin without a clear goal or goals, and may not (or cannot) formulate them for some time. Indeed, sometimes they keep their goals purposely very general, even ambiguous, open-­ended. . . . Even when action is instituted with a specific goal projected, nevertheless over time something happens to this imagined goal. In some way it gets changed or modified. . . . Moreover, sometimes means lead to a more exciting venture than the original conceived end, becoming perhaps a major end itself. So our theory of actions . . . must take into account types of interaction that ordinarily the various means-­ends analytic schemes do not.”182 This makes practical evaluation all the more important as an element in action theory. Further development was given to certain of these themes in the early work of C. Wright Mills, as well as of Garfinkel, whose ethnomethodogical writings shared many insights with those of pragmatist thinkers.183 In “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motives,” Mills revised Dewey’s theory of action in a linguistic direction, pointing out that alternative courses of action contemplated reflectively in moments of problem solving themselves are social alternatives that “ ‘appear’ most often in lingual form,” while the anticipated consequences in terms of which actions are undertaken also are “named consequences.”184 Accordingly, it is necessary to consider the different socially and institutionally available “vocabularies of motive” by which actors not only give reasons for, or retrospectively justify, their past conduct, but also (here too a pragmatist touch on Mills’s part) influence others—­and themselves—­thereby opening up new avenues for action in the present and future.185 Indeed, Mills suggested, vocabularies of motives very well could serve as “significant determinants of conduct” and be “efficacious,” since, just as “acts will be abandoned if no reason can be found that others will accept,” so too, and conversely, acts may be undertaken if acceptable motives can be discovered for them.186 Mills’s argument, in short, was that “motives . . . do not denote any elements ‘in’ individuals. . . . There is no need to invoke ‘psychological’ terms like ‘desire’ or ‘wish’ as explanatory, since they themselves

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must be explained socially.”187 Analytic attention must be shifted from the realm of intrapsychic experience to that of societal situations—­the domain proper of sociology. One important implication here was that the reasons people give for their actions could be expected to be a moving target, for their rhetorical, persuasive, pragmatic purposes often made them unstable, inconsistent, incoherent, even contradictory.188 Social practices could not be derived from (internalized) rules or norms. Here Garfinkel, for his part, contended that norms can best be seen as features of settings and as parts of the very organization of conduct of those settings, not as causes of that organization in the first place. Norms are more a reference point in retrospective accounts of action than a determining factor therein.189 Actors use rules and norms to realize whatever organizational purposes they could be fitted to. Norms and rules primarily are significant “as a way, or set of ways, of causing activities to be seen as morally, repetitively, and constrainedly organized”; they are a constitutive part of the very activities they purportedly regulate.190 Hence they are important only insofar as they are invoked or used. A similar perspective was developed by still later sociologists ranging from Swidler, Tilly, and Lamont to Boltanski and Thevenot.191 All focused on practices and on the justificatory accounts or reasons given for them. In all cases, their arguments were pragmatist in nature. For instance, Boltanski and Thevenot took a page straight from classical pragmatism in their major work, On Justification, not to mention other writings, in arguing: “The starting situation is something like the following: People, involved in ordinary relationships, who are doing things together—­let us say, in politics, work, unionism—­and who have to coordinate their actions, realize that something is going wrong; that they cannot get along any more; that something has to change.” Expressing discontent and entering a dispute, they find themselves “subjected to an imperative of justification,” and the justifications they give “have to follow rules of acceptability.”192 While sidestepping deftly the challenging question as to underlying wellsprings or drivers of action—­it never was made clear, whether by Boltanski and Thevenot or by any of the other authors mentioned above, why actors pursue a given line of conduct even if the possibility is opened up for it by the anticipated availability of acceptable justifications—­they nevertheless did make the important point that means-­ ends ways of theorizing misleadingly prioritize rules and norms, that action is not straightforwardly teleological. What did this mean for race studies? With the exception perhaps of action in obeisance to explicit cultural mandates (e.g., purdah), the practices in which most racial actors engage and for which they provide—­as often required by institutions—­explicit accounts never are oriented toward rules or norms to begin with. It is not rules or

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norms that one learns as the price of entry to a racial world but practices, or, to be more specific, a practical knowledge or prudence (in the Aristotelian sense of the term), a racial phronesis. Aristotle once wrote that to respond “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this [is what] is characteristic of excellence.”193 It is such know-­how that one learns as a competent member of the racial order. In his work on the strategies of action arising from dispositions, Bourdieu also devoted close attention to the judgments actors deploy when facing new and unanticipated situations. It was this capacity for judgment that he had in mind when referring to the sense of the game of situated actors, their practical mastery and competence, the ars inveniendi characterizing their actions. The racial actor is the racial field made flesh, as he would have it. To be sure, Bourdieu subordinated this particular moment to that of iteration, depicting habitual or dispositional action as improvisational by fiat, rather than recognizing that such improvisational capacity is a variable—­not a constant—­feature of iteration. Even so, his grasp of strategies of conservation and domination was strengthened by his insight into how actors engage in practical innovation when confronting alters’ moves, always in some sense new, with new moves of their own. As he wrote in The Logic of Practice, social scientists would be much “less inclined to use the language of the mechanical [i.e., rule-­based] model if . . . they . . . thought . . . of the games they themselves play in social life, which are expressed in the language of tact, skill, dexterity, delicacy, or savoir-­faire, all names for practical sense; and if they . . . considered exchanges in which hermeneutic errors are paid for instantly, such as the exchange of blows, discussed by George H. Mead.”194 Bourdieu’s analyses of classification struggles also were enhanced by his keen appreciation of the role in such struggles of improvisatory manipulation of symbolic and psychical structures. Finally, his understanding of competence was deepened by his sense of how practical judgment works and of how, in the most competent actors, “freedom with the constraints of ritual logic . . . comes from perfect mastery of that logic.”195 Bourdieu saw clearly that competence resides in knowing how to play with the rules and in being an inventive and creative, not a mechanical or simply rule-­(or norm-­) following, actor. Bourdieu’s insights into practical judgment, along with Dewey’s, help us to carve out a new area of theorization in race studies. Practical evaluation is integral to many different practices and lines of conduct in racial life, although until now it has been little studied or analyzed. Contestation among and within racial groups requires it at every turn; in a diverse society such as ours, it also is crucial for negotiating and making one’s way amid a wide array

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of mundane racial interactions. Is it wise for a white person to ask someone of color for instruction in how racism works, or does that only add to the latter’s unwelcome burden? Ought a student of color to trust in a white professor’s gestures of support and encouragement, or are those merely the expression of an abstract liberal benevolence, beneath which lurks condescension? How ought a Latino or black professional to respond to a beggar on a street corner (someone of the same color) who asks her for a quarter, appealing to her sentiments of racial solidarity? Ought a second-­generation Korean American to pursue a non-­Korean love interest, or should she look exclusively within “her own community,” as her parents insist? Such quandaries—­and one faces many every day in American society—­often require on-­the-­spot judgments, typically in contexts of microscopic scale. On a larger stage, too, reasoned practical judgments often are inescapable. Some of the most vexing issues of today, such as law and order, affirmative action, and immigration reform, all of which are many sided and fraught with controversy, require careful problematization, decision, and execution. Where are blacks to stand on immigration reform? What are Asian Americans to think of affirmative action? What are Latinos to say about law and order? Unlike the Civil Rights Era, the present no longer is defined by a stirring and sharply drawn crusade for racial justice; rather, it increasingly features a multiplicity of complex, often murky issues and, accordingly, calls for new levels of improvisatory tact, skill, and deliberation. Whether on the left or the right—­and regardless, too, of color—­ racial actors today are forced, more than ever, to exercise their capacities for practical evaluation. And their judgments increasingly must be careful, deliberate, and reflexive. racial competence Earlier we mentioned that the illusio is one of the prices of entry into the racial order, one of the tickets one must purchase in order to be able to play the racial game. Another such ticket is competence, the minimal capacity to play that game and to understand its basic moves and the stakes involved, to tell black from white, as it were, or to make any of the other more subtle discriminations so critical to navigating the racial world. What is a black Latino, as opposed to an African American? What is an Indian American, as opposed to a Sri Lankan or Pakistani? What is pernil, dim sum, or pho? What is the significance of December 2, 1956, or of April 4, 1968? When should one describe someone as “Asian” instead of “Chinese,” as “Afro-­American” rather than “African American?” When does one stop talking black and begin speaking white? What are questions it is best to avoid in certain settings (e.g., asking

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a black woman about her hair, or a Native American about his “rituals”)? What is the significance of Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Burns Night? Who are Donny Hathaway, Selena, Odetta, Hank Williams, Patty Loveless? When should one make light of racial dynamics and when should one respond in a serious manner? Whom is one to take as a friend or neighbor—­and at what price? It often is necessary to be able to address intuitively and without hesitation questions such as these and seemingly endless others. When one thinks of it, a staggering amount of knowledge and practical know-­how must be acquired in order to be a competent racial actor in US society. The ticket is not cheap. On a microscopic level, racial competence is displayed in all aspects of the interaction order. It is so important to everyday interaction, in fact, that a person introduced to another whose racial makeup is not immediately evident often feels compelled to “figure out” the latter’s racial constitution, even resorting bluntly to asking about it. The so-­called “black head nod,” the glance of racial solidarity exchanged between white strangers when surrounded by racial Others, the smile tendered by one who recognizes herself in another with similar racial habitus: these and thousands of other nonverbal communications, so fundamental to everyday life, are guided by and incorporate racial competence. Think of how much is conveyed simply through greetings: the gruff handshake of white working-­class men, the cool or confident exchanges of barrio youth, the quick and familiar touch of Filipina grandmothers. In interracial dialogues, especially those designed specifically to promote cross-­cultural understanding (as on college campuses), whites often labor to appear as nonracist as possible, especially by keeping quiet, while nonwhites strive to avoid misrepresenting “their group.” As conversations grow more sophisticated, however, and as the discussants become more “enlightened,” participants grow accustomed to the code of race talk. Whites, for example, learn that confessing their racist faux pas and using words like “white privilege” and “blind spot” can earn them a kind of respect among peers; nonwhites, by contrast, gain capital by “calling others out” (i.e., by pointing to their unexamined prejudices) or by disclosing times they themselves were victimized by racism. Displays of familiarity with the code of race talk—­exactly when to display outrage, remorse, or contrition; when to nod and hum in agreement; when to chastise others—­allow one to exert and further accumulate racial competence in interracial settings, even if such displays may serve as a barrier to taking the view of the other and to unmasking the real nature of racial dynamics. What is reached, in other words, through such intermediate training is not interracial enlightenment so much as it is enlightenment in respect to rules of racial exchange.196

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When speaking of racial competence, one usually has in mind multiracial competence : the capacity to conduct oneself in an adept and confident fashion in different racial settings. Take, for instance, the Mexican American executive who excels in the majority-­white corporation but who speaks Spanish at home and makes tamales with her sisters at Christmas; or the Chinese American hostess who makes her white patrons feel at ease but who, during the Lunar New Year, hangs a head of lettuce under the door frame and invites the dragon in; or the college-­educated daughter of a poor white couple who objects to their prejudices but, careful not to go “too far above her raising,” does not try to convert them. These all are prototypes of skilled code-­ switchers who have learned to adjust their racial practices—­the inflections in their voices; the kinds of conversation topics they introduce; their dress, hairstyle, and attitudes—­in response to different racial settings. One thinks, too, of those exemplars of multiracial competence who are comfortable in an impressive array of racial situations and who display a firm grasp of a variety of ethnic and cultural traditions. In this category are the artist obsessed with the clash of cultures and with ethnic idiosyncrasies (e.g., Zadie Smith; Nikki Lee; Russell Peters), the hip white urbanite found at poetry slams, and all those multicultural entrepreneurs (e.g., diversity consultants, curators of multicultural education). There also is, however, another variant of racial competence—­monoracial competence—­which entails the ability to conform to and reinforce the dynamics of the racial or ethnic community to which one is said to belong. For those who possess a significant amount of such competence, what is most familiar, inviting, and warm—­in a word, home—­are those racially segregated spaces somehow cordoned off from the polluted (or simply unfamiliar) Other. The cacique who can skillfully provide spiritual guidance to the Pueblo de Cochiti of New Mexico; the ghetto dweller who has grown adept at surviving in the desolate inner city, full of knowledge of intimate relationships, social services, and proper responses to crises; the gray-­haired white grandfather who knows just what beer to order and just what joke to crack at the local Elks Lodge every Friday night: all display a kind of monoracial skill set not easily transferred to other racial settings. Indeed, this skill set is not designed to be easily transferrable, for its sole purpose is to signal belonging to a specific racial community, a setting in which to “be somebody.” The mostly down-­ and-­out African American men who fill the pages of A Place on the Corner are viewed by the surrounding white society as indistinguishable. “But within the peer group at Jelly’s,” Anderson writes of a neighborhood bar, “the men show themselves to be utterly unequal as they assert their individuality by drawing

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distinctions among others with whom they share the social space. . . . At Jelly’s people can be somebody—­and this is one of its main attractions.”197 Monoracial competence can be displayed through the smallest of gestures: the way a Dominican woman sucks her teeth upon seeing a police officer on the block; the synchronized groan of a pair of white men who spot a woman in a burka; the sugarcoated Southern-­style greeting of two black women who never had met before. All are subtle yet resounding reminders of the strictures of the racial field. (We might add that, while actors who have acquired a fair amount of multiracial competence also possess monoracial competence, the opposite is not true. Individuals who traffic only in monoracial competence grow fearful and confused when forced to operate in settings far different from their racial home, a dynamic that reveals effectively the links between multiracial competence and human freedom.198) Racial competence is necessary not only for actors in the racial order but also for analysts or students of that order. The specific respect in which this is so requires an added word of explanation. Since racial boundaries always have been determined by the actors at hand, actors invested in the game and highly knowledgeable in its ways, a racial field can be demarcated only in a realist but not nominalist fashion; the specification of its frontiers is a matter of empirical study and never of operationalist imposition on the part of the researcher.199 There never can be, in other words, an a priori answer to the question of boundaries, and the issue no more is decided by dictum on the part of the researcher than it is by decree on the part of (dominants within) the racial order. “Research discovers and reproduces uncertainties which are inherent in reality itself: struggles for the imposition of the principle of legitimate hierarchization do in fact cause the dividing-­line between those who belong and those who do not to be constantly discussed and disputed, therefore shifting and fluctuating, at every moment and above all according to the moment.”200 Here again, boundary drawing is the crucial issue. Another question remains, however: How can the field’s most pertinent indicators, properties, and principles of division be identified and its parameters ascertained? Bourdieu suggests that social inquiry be guided first by a basic sense of the field or space at hand—­that is, by a certain measure of field-­specific competence or mastery. Then, early intuitions about its principles of division can be put to the empirical test and gradually refined until they yield an objective space. Such a process of constructing the object relies more on a progressive questioning and refining of initial intuitions than it does on the amassing of empirical evidence. (In the vast majority of cases, of course, the process involves both types of operation to some degree.) The process of constructing a field is, therefore, as Bourdieu points out, perhaps among the

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most difficult and challenging of all phases of research. It is a process that obeys “principles that are less than a method (a route that one retraces after the fact) and more than a simple theoretical intuition.”201 The process hardly is to be accomplished in a single bold stroke; it is a “protracted and exacting task that is accomplished little by little,” in a series of choices that always must be guided by a sense of craft, an artisan’s knowledge—­or, as Bourdieu puts it, le métier.202 Conclusion In this chapter, we were concerned to present a tripartite theory of racial agency whose key moments or tones are the iterational, projective, and practical evaluative. Even iteration, we suggested, is a constituent element of racial agency. It, too, involves attention and effort, although of a largely unreflective and taken-­ for-­ granted kind. When racial actors encounter problematic situations requiring the exercise of imagination and judgment, they gain a reflective distance from received patterns of thought, perception, feeling, and action, a distance that may (in some contexts) allow for greater imagination, choice, and conscious purpose. A disaggregated idea of agency allows one to locate more precisely the interplay among these reproductive and transformative aspects of racial action and to explain how reflectivity can change in either direction, through the increasing routinization or the problematization of experience. Our concept of projectivity is yet another contribution of this chapter. It often has been remarked that race studies devote far too little attention to racial agency, by which is meant a transformative, forward-­looking agentic orientation. For our part, we have shown that projectivity is an ineliminable dimension of racial agency and that no account of racial dynamics can afford to ignore it. Finally, we demonstrated that yet another component of racial agency is practical judgment—­what we have termed practical evaluation. Whether applying routines or contextualizing projects in complex life circumstances, some degree of practical mastery, whether tacit or deliberate, individual or collective, is necessary. Race studies can ill afford to neglect this moment of discretion or intelligence, perhaps the least explored of all aspects of racial action. One implication of this temporal account of racial agency is that each of our three analytic dimensions itself can be said to possess its own internal chordal structure. That is, the three dimensions of agency do not correspond in any simple or exclusive way to past, present, and future as successive stages of action. Rather, empirical social action is constructed through ongoing temporal passage and thus through what Mead called emergent events, rather

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than through a sequentiality of discrete acts or stages of one act. Each of our dimensions of agency, in other words, has itself a simultaneous internal orientation toward past, future, and present, for all forms of agency are embedded in the flow of time. We only claim that, for each aspect of racial agency, one temporal orientation is the dominant tone, shaping the ways in which actors relate to the other two dimensions of time.203 Disaggregating the dimensions of agency—­and exploring which orientations are dominant in a given situation—­allows us to suggest that each primary orientation in the chordal triad encompasses (as subtones) the other two as well; it also allows us to show how this chordal composition itself can change as actors respond to the diverse and shifting environments around them.204 In routinized action, the future and the present are secondary tones in the chordal composition: the future as expectation, the memory-­sustained anticipation that past patterns of experience will repeat themselves in successive interactions, thereby allowing relationships to be sustained and reproduced over time; and the present as maneuver, the improvisational orientation toward habitual practices, largely tacit and unreflective, which takes place in an ongoing dialogue with situational contingencies. In projective action, one also finds secondary tones that orient actors to the other two dimensions of time: relationships to the past through a retrospective-­prospective process of identification, in which possible trajectories are located against a backdrop of prior typifications from experience; and relationships to the present through experimentation, in which alternative courses are tentatively enacted in response to currently emerging situations. Finally, in practical evaluation, one also can discern two secondary tones: the actor’s relation to the past is based on the characterization of a given situation against a backdrop of past patterns of experience; while the relation to the future is characterized by deliberation over possible trajectories of action, in which actors consider alternative hypothetical scenarios by critically evaluating the consequences of implementing these within real-­world situations. What does this mean, more specifically, for racial agency? The routinized practices of racial life involve more or less reliable knowledge as to what to predict in the future, expectations that provide a certain stability and continuity to action, the sense that “I can do it again,” as well as trust that others also will act in predictable ways.205 This is the aspect of iteration that corresponds most closely to projectivity. Routinized practices also involve selection from practical repertoires of habitual activity. These require a degree of maneuverability, assuring the appropriateness of the response to the situation at hand. Here the iterational dimension most closely resembles practical evaluation. As for the pursuit of racial projects, alternatives seldom are clearly or neatly

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presented, but neither is the future an open book. Understanding the limited yet flexible structure of future possibilities involves identifying patterns of possible developments in an often vague and indeterminate future horizon. As Schutz observed, such anticipatory work is done through a retrospective engagement with one’s prior “stock of knowledge,” as stored in typifications, repertoires, and narratives.206 In this way, it draws the past into the internal structure of projectivity. Once scenarios have been examined and solutions proposed, hypothetical resolutions are put to the test in tentative and exploratory interactions. This aspect of projectivity rests on the borderline between imagination and action—­hence between the future and the present. Finally, the present-­oriented dimension of racial agency requires that the problematic circumstances at hand be related to principles, schemas, or typifications from past experience by which they are characterized in some fashion. Does the situation in question call for the activation of a particular iterational or habitual activity? Does it call for the performance of a specific duty or present itself as a context in which the pursuit of a particular project of action is appropriate or even possible? It is this component that most deeply implicates the past in the moment of practical evaluation. Plausible choices also must be weighed in the light of practical perceptions and understandings and against the backdrop of broader fields of possibilities and aspirations. Deliberation involves more than an unreflective adjustment of habits to the concrete demands of the present; it also entails (at least potentially) a searching consideration of how best to respond to situational contingencies in the light of broader goals and projects. Here the element of projectivity enters into processes of practical evaluation. We now have devoted two successive chapters to issues of racial structure and racial agency, respectively. In each chapter, we alluded frequently to the core topic of the other—­but only implicitly and in subordinate fashion, as ground to figure (in the Gestalt theorists’ way of speaking). Before proceeding to explore still other issues, let us examine more clearly how these different problem areas fit together. First, our temporal perspective on racial agency applies as well to racial structures. If the key to grasping the dynamic possibilities of racial agency is to view it as composed of variable and changing orientations within the flow of time, then the key to understanding racial structures also is to regard them as inherently dynamic. That is, racial structures are best understood as themselves bundles of processes—­or, to invoke again the phrase of Harrison White, processes-­in-­relations—­rather than as inert substances or entities.207 To think of them in substantialist terms, as Dewey observed in Experience and Nature, is to evince “preference for the stable over the precarious and uncompleted. . . . Structures are arrangement[s]

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of changing events such that properties which change slowly . . . limit and di­ rect a series of quick changes and give them an order which they do not other­ wise possess.”208 Hence, “the isolation of structure from the changes whose stable ordering it is renders it mysterious—­something that is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of ghostly queerness.”209 From this theoretical perspective, the opposition of structure (seen as something lifeless) to agency (seen by contrast as its lifeblood) is false and misleading. To return one last time to Dewey: “Structure and process . . . are names given to various phases of their conjunction”—­and nothing more.210 This insight, seemingly so abstract and irrelevant to empirical concerns, has all-­important practical implications for racial life and scholarship. It shifts the object of racial problematization away from change toward permanence; that is, it leads us to ask why racial domination has persisted so long, what has made it so enduring. “By making change our constant,” writes Abbott, “we also exchange our explananda. It becomes necessary to explain reproduction, constancy, and entity-­ness, rather than development and change.”211 As we stated near the beginning of this book, the continuities in our racial life are every bit as significant as the discontinuities—and they need systematically to be questioned. A processual ontology has unsettling implications, accordingly, for both theory and practice. A second implication of our arguments has to do with the nature of agentic engagements. If racial structures not only are relational but processual, then, correspondingly, racial agency, the engagement (and disengagement) by actors of their structured yet flexible worlds, not only is processual but relational. Viewed internally, racial agency always entails agency toward something (just as consciousness always is consciousness of something); by means of it, racial actors enter into relation with surrounding persons, places, meanings, and events.212 Viewed externally, racial agency always entails trans­actions with the temporal-­relational contexts of action, in something much like an ongoing conversation. (This holds true even though the conversation hardly has been a racially democratic one.) Peirce expressed it in semiotic terms: “A sign . . . is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody.”213 In his view, the world of significations is indefinitely dialogical. (It is beyond the scope of this discussion to present a detailed exposition of Peirce’s complex theory of signs; see figure 5, however, for a visual representation.) Mikhail Bakhtin worked with similar ideas; “utterances” were his distinctive unit of analysis. He argued that words, concepts, and symbols derive their meaning only from their location in concrete utterances, adding, however, that these in turn only make sense in relation to other utterances within ongoing flows

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f i g u r e 5 . Peirce’s theory of signs Source: John Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 60.

of transactions: “The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones. . . . Each individual utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication.”214 Elias, too, made agentic engagements the defining insight of his sociology. His master concept of “figuration” connoted “the changing pattern created by the players as a whole[,] . . . the totality of their dealings in their relationships with each other.”215 Finally, Bourdieu insisted on a relational way of thinking about the connection between habitus and field. “It is only in the relation to certain structures,” he wrote, “that habitus produces certain discourses or practices. . . . We must think of [the habitus] as a sort of spring that needs a trigger.”216 Pursuing these ideas, one can conceptualize racial agency as a dialogical process in and through which actors immersed in temporal passage and the duree of lived experience engage with others in collectively orga­nized action contexts. Thinking in these terms opens up the possibility of a more dynamic mode of racial analysis, a relational pragmatics. One definitively can set to the side all reifying, substantialist understandings of racial actors. And in place of these faulty, misleading ways of thinking, one can regard racial actors’ positions, understandings, and even identities as constructed in relation

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to—­and often against—­those of others and of the structural contexts in which they find themselves. Finally, a few comments are in order regarding the theoretical distinction itself between (racial) structure and (racial) agency. A number of recent attempts to rethink the relation between these concepts have held that the Kantian dichotomy between ideal and material realms—­together with parallel distinctions between free will and necessity, voluntarism and determinism—­ must be replaced by an outlook that regards those elements as reciprocally constituting moments of a unified social process.217 This new way of thinking has been salutary and fruitful for sociological inquiry, facilitating empirical research that underscores both the causal significance of structure as the constraining and enabling conditions of action and of praxis as “an active constituting process, accomplished by, and consisting in, the doings of active subjects.”218 Yet this theoretical perspective also has brought in its train certain difficulties. Most importantly for our purposes, there has been a tendency toward what Margaret Archer has termed the “fallacy of central conflation,” in which structure is seen as so closely intertwined with agency that these “constituent components cannot be examined separately. . . . In the absence of any degree of autonomy, it becomes impossible to examine their interplay.”219 What is eclipsed, in other words, in the notion of the inseparability of structure and agency is the degree of changeability or mutability of different actual structures, as well as the variable (and changing) ways in which actors relate to them. In most central-­conflationist views, the constitutive relation between agency and structure is held analytically constant. “Simply clamped together in a conceptual vice,” agency and structure are not deemed to vary independently of one another, in denial of the fact, for instance, that racial structures can be engaged with agentically in highly dissimilar ways, while given modalities of racial agency can find themselves in engagement with very different types of structural configuration.220 By contrast, we argue that structure and agency never are fused together; each of these analytic elements can be examined apart from the other. This does not mean, however, that the temporal-­relational contexts of action do not influence and shape agency and feel its influences in turn; actors’ agentic orientations (along with their capacities for inventive or deliberative response) vary in dialogue with the different situational contexts to which (and by means of which) they respond. There is a double constitution of agency and structure, in which temporal-­relational contexts support particular agentic orientations, while these in turn constitute different structuring relations of actors toward their environments. Given these theoretical formulations, the empirical challenge is to specify how the contexts of racial action shape agentic orientations and how, in turn,

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the latter constitute different mediating relations of actors toward those contexts. Specifically, three lines of questioning present themselves. First, how do these different contexts support (or conduce to) particular agentic orientations on the part of racial actors? This suggests an inquiry in which agentic orientations are held steady in order to examine the formative influences on them of different kinds of situational contexts. The task is to locate what kinds of social-­structural, cultural, and collective-­emotional contexts are con­ ducive to developing the different modalities of racial agency we outlined in this chapter. How, for instance, do these structural contexts shape, different racial propensities, foster different racial projects, and help to form different ra­cial competencies? Second, how do changes in agentic orientation allow racial actors to exercise different forms of mediation over their contexts of action? This second question requires that we reverse our initial query in order to examine how changes in agentic orientation give racial actors varying capacities to influence the diverse contexts in which they act. As we stressed throughout the chapter, power asymmetries in racial life crucially can be affected by such shifts, ranging from the iterational preservation or reproduction of power relations to projective efforts to conserve or subvert power to practical-­evaluative negotiations of everyday problems one faces in a world of racial domination. Finally, how do racial actors reconstruct their agentic orientations and thereby alter their own agentic relations to the contexts of action? Most interesting here are the research questions opened up by the self-­reflexive aspect of agency—­that is, the capacity of racial actors reflexively to reconstruct their own temporal orientations toward action. In Mead’s terms, this capacity is owed to the ability of conscious beings to direct attention and intervention toward their own patterns of response: “Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism’s own responses enter into the objective field to which it reacts.”221 We can reformulate this as a final exploratory proposition: By subjecting their own agentic orientations to imaginative recomposition and critical judgment, racial actors have the capacity to loosen themselves from past patterns of interaction and to reframe their own relation to existing constraints. They are able to shift from complacency to contentiousness, from unthinking habits of racial acceptance to a mindful pursuit of racial reconstruction. Under what conditions might that occur?

5

Interactions, Institutions, and Interstices

In all our attempts thus far to provide useful analytic distinctions among the different types of structures and agentic orientations one encounters in racial life, we have had little to say, at least in an explicit theoretical vein, about patterns of racial interaction. We have not yet directed attention to what Erving Goffman termed the “interaction order,” that meso-­level of social life situated halfway between society and the individual.1 Sociological research since the 1960s has been concerned in considerable measure with this domain, and there is much to be learned from it about how racial domination—­and challenges thereto—­actually are accomplished through interactional processes. Nor have we discussed how social relations, symbols, and fantasies—­or, for that matter, iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation—­are related at the conceptual level to institutions and institutional complexes. To the extent that the latter have figured at all in our discussion, it has been in an ad hoc fashion rather than as ideas woven integrally into the fabric of our theory of racial structures and agency. Hence the abstractness, the distance from what seems most familiar in racial life, of much of the preceding. Institutional structures, too, whether of the state, economy, cultural production, or civil society, clearly are relevant to any theory of racial domination. Finally, we have not spoken at all of the relation, again at the theoretical level, between interactions, institutions, and the racial action that, as it were, unfolds within the interstices of racial life: the citizens’ initiatives, movements, and insurgencies that constitute public spheres and social movements. At most, we have spoken of the projective impulses that animate such action. In the present chapter, we take up each of these theoretical concerns in turn. In so doing, we hope better to understand how racial domination actually works, how it is confronted, and how, in certain instances, it is overturned.

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The point of departure for all our efforts is the analytic distinction between agency and structure, on the one hand, and concrete empirical action (and actors), on the other. While agentic orientations vary in their empirical manifestations, agency itself remains a dimension present in—­but conceptually distinct from—­all actual instances of action. Similarly, there are no empirical agents but only actors who engage agentically with their structuring environments—­and with one another. Agency (like structure, too, in this regard) is an analytic element, while action and actors alone are concrete and empirical. Alexander has offered a lucid formulation of this idea: “Identification of actor and agency renders one guilty of [the fallacy of] misplaced concreteness. . . . Actors per se are much more than, and [simultaneously] much less than, ‘agents’ [alone].”2 By implication, all racial action, too, is a concrete synthesis shaped and conditioned, on the one hand, by the temporal-­relational contexts of action and, on the other, by the ineliminable moment of racial agency itself. The latter guarantees that no analyses of racial issues can deprive the dominated of their capacities for efficacious and creative effort. No racial situation properly can be seen as marked by total domination. Accordingly, the dominated never in good faith can absolve themselves of responsibility for their actions. This theoretical perspective also affirms, on the other side, that there can be no hypothetical moment in which agency completely is freed of structure, in this respect unlike the transcendental will of Kant’s philosophy. Our view effectively dashes the hopes of all ethnic nationalists, not to mention white supremacists, who aspire to a separatist Kingdom of Ends insulated from racial difference. It also puts the lie to those for whom American society already is color blind, those who pin the blame for extant racial problems on the inadequate voluntarism of the dominated. As we already stressed, much of today’s racial debate revolves precisely around the false opposition between causal determination and free will, with many liberals holding on to the former position while conservatives insist on the latter.3 From the foregoing remarks about racial structure, agency, and action, it is but a short step to a systematic theorization of interactional practices; institutions and institutional complexes; and interstitial publicity and social movements, insofar as these bear on racial domination. All involve (in different ways) concrete empirical action. To begin with, interactional practices are those instances of concrete empirical action that constitute the most basic objects of sociological investigation. We define them here as discrete sequences of action involving the mutual engagement—­usually in physical or virtual copresence—­of two or more subjects (or “members,” as Garfinkel would have it4) in settings large and small, formal and informal, from the

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conduct of passersby on a busy street to interactions in the workplace or at an Internet dating service.5 For our purposes, racialized interactional patterns or practices—­racial interactions, in short—­are among the most revealing and consequential phenomena of the racial order. Tangible instantiations—­in microcosm, in everyday social life—­of larger patterns of racial domination and subversion, they serve as strategic vantage points from which to survey the internal workings of the racial field. They also constitute the core processes or sequences of action in institutions, in particular in institutionalized organizations, such as schools, firms, hospitals, and state agencies. In and through these sequences, race itself is produced or achieved as a social fact. The first section of this chapter concerns itself with racial interactions. It explores a terrain in which the following kinds of questions often are raised: When racial groups are in direct economic competition with one another, how are their perceptions of threat and vulnerability constructed discursively as well as psychically? How do stigmatization and reactions thereto unfold in different (locations in) racial fields? How is racial difference accomplished (the “doing” of race) in putatively color-­blind formal-­organizational settings such as universities, corporate workplaces, and government offices? What is the role of collective representations and fantasies in shaping face-­ to-­face encounters? And how is the “moral order” (to invoke Park’s term) of racially mixed and fraught interactional sites ongoingly negotiated using varying mixtures of social, discursive, and collective-­emotional resources?6 Institutions and institutional complexes are bundles (or bundles of bundles) of interactional processes largely, but not wholly, oriented toward the reproduction of past patterns of agentic engagement and structured in and through a combination of social, cultural, and collective-­emotional configurations. (We reserve the term “institutional complexes” for sectors of society that encompass relatively large numbers of singular, discrete insti­­ tutions.) Of particular salience to race studies are institutionalized organi­ zations—­one specific type of institution—­which we conceptualize below as organizations-­as-­fields. Racial structures and agency within such settings are among the most important topics of investigation for race scholarship because they are the means by which racism often is upheld or challenged in our society. (Witness the sheer power of the notion of institutional racism.) We discuss institutions and institutionalized organizations in the second section of this chapter. Beyond that set of topics, we also examine institutional complexes (themselves best understood as fields) and their significance to the racial order. Thus far, we have said little of a theoretical nature about such spheres of social life as the economy, the state, the field of cultural

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production, and the various fields of civil society. But in the second part of this chapter, we inquire into how our theory of the racial field can be complicated still further by situating it in relation to these spaces. In this way, we cover a terrain in which the following sorts of questions frequently are raised: How are particular institutions structured such that discrimination and institutional racism can occur within them? How does power operate in these institutions—­not only social-­structural but also discursive and psychical power—­and to the benefit or detriment of which racialized groups? What impact do specific complexes of institutions have on racial life? For instance, are economic forces really the determinant factors in perpetuating racial domination? What is the role of other major institutional spheres in our racial order? Finally, in this chapter we direct attention to what we call the interstitial phenomena of the racial order: specifically, publicity and social movements. Publics are configurations and streams of concrete empirical action through which individuals and groups undertake in concert to reflect critically on and perhaps transform the institutions and institutional complexes—­and, by extension, the interactional practices—­that affect them. They target any number of institutions, including those of the economy, the state, cultural production, or civil society (or any combination thereof). Publics also target and contend with one another; they are multiple and arrayed in a space both of powers and of struggles. Social movements are complexes and streams of action through which claims are made on specific institutions and institutional complexes, always through the medium of public performances and displays. Campaigns of claim making rely on a base of social movement organizations, networks, solidarities, and traditions. By focusing attention on publics and social movements, we traverse areas of inquiry where such questions as the following often are asked: What kinds of publics have provided a space in which racial dominants can formulate their agendas and engage in processes of collective will formation? What other kinds of subaltern or counterhegemonic publics have emerged in which the dominated of the racial order, perhaps together with antiracist allies among the dominants, can seek to develop their own critical perspectives? What networks of relations obtain among these various publics? What role do they play in different social movements of consequence to race relations? How have these movements, for their part, emerged, spread, and made a difference to racial life (including at the interactional level)? What has been these movements’ relation to more established institutions and institutional complexes? Addressing such questions in all their intricacy will help us better grasp how racial domination

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operates—­and how at least some actors pursue ways of questioning, contesting, and overturning it. Interactions We aim in this section to show how a pragmatism-­inspired approach to interaction might shed light on how racial domination actually works at the ground level. We focus on two major theoretical orientations: the Chicago School and its important offshoot, symbolic interactionism (this includes Goffman’s writings, although in some respects the latter cannot be made to fit squarely within that category); and ethnomethodology, together with conversation analysis (although many of the latter’s practitioners claim it to be a separate endeavor).7 Both sets of approaches carry forward into sociological research the classical pragmatist impulse to focus on the here and now, to engage with concrete experience, and to make actual lived practices the focus of investigation. Chicago-­style ethnography and symbolic interactionism do so under the (more or less) direct influence of pragmatist philosophy, while ethnomethodology and conversation analysis resonate with pragmatism only in an indirect fashion, taking their cues more from other philosophic sources.8 Before we discuss these approaches, we briefly assess the case against interactionist sociology. For the latter is ever under attack by proponents of more structurally oriented ways of thinking about society. Why even engage in the study of small-­scale interactions when there is so much to learn about larger-­scale structures of power? Will not the analysis of everyday interactional sequences divert our attention from more determinative features of social (including racial) life? These questions must be addressed if one is to clear the ground for a more confident assertion of the value of interactional inquiry. Study of how the racial order is reproduced through innumerable small greetings, exchanges, and other such transactions is potentially valuable. But it also is fraught with controversy and has been subjected to forceful critique. What has that critique been about, and what is one to make of it? w h y i n t e r ac t i o na l a na lys i s ? Even as the study of everyday lived experience rose to prominence in midcentury, in what has been described as the interactional turn in the social sciences, it often was dismissed or consigned to a marginalized status because of its relative lack of emphasis on social structures. (Little was said on either side about cultural or collective-­emotional structures. But by extension the same

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charges would apply to these other kinds of structures as well.) Perhaps the most incisive of the critiques directed against interactional analysis was presented by Bourdieu. He steadfastly maintained a sharp analytic distinction between the structure of the distribution of resources or capital in a field—­or, by the same token, the structure of its symbolic (or, we might add, psychical) formations—­and the interactions among actors in that field. That is, interaction was for him a “veil” keeping hidden the truth of underlying structures of power.9 The latter, he held, bear on all the actors, individual or collective, in a space, even if and when these actors do not interact with one another per se. Actors profoundly are determined in their mutual engagements even prior to and outside these engagements: “The truth of the interaction is not to be found in the interaction itself.”10 (The paradigm of this form of structural determination—­and here we offer our own example, not Bourdieu’s—­can be found in Marx’s Capital, where the structural compulsions of the capitalist system are seen as the key to labor’s exploitation by capital, regardless of what might be the actual treatment of workers by bosses in the workplace. In Bourdieu’s view, many sociologists fail to recognize the full force of such an analytic insight.) By observing and recording at face value and in their directly visible immediacy the encounters or transactions among actors, Bourdieu argued, one fails to grasp the structural forces that realize themselves through these transactions and that gain outward expression by means of them. A one-­sidedly interactionist perspective never can take us far enough. It cannot reveal the power relations that instantiate themselves in interactions—­and that help to frame them in the first place.11 For an example of the sort of difficulty Bourdieu had in mind, consider Fanon’s observation that “very often the Negro who becomes abnormal has never had any relations with whites. Has some remote experience been repressed in his unconscious? Did the little black child see his father beaten or lynched by a white man? Has there been a real traumatism? To all this we have to answer no. Well, then?”12 With these characteristically penetrating questions, Fanon reminds us that one does not have to have been personally offended or abused to feel the weight of racial domination, just as one does not have to have personally offended or abused to benefit from racial privilege. A lynching is meant to terrorize not the black victim but the entire black community, the tortured body a sacrificial vessel disseminating shock waves that reverberate throughout the racial field. One does not need to suffer personally the heat of the fire or the tightening of the noose in order to experience its effects. Or recall, too, the legal cynicism so pervasive in poor minority communities, even though most of their residents might not have had direct experience with the police.13 (By the same token, fear of crime among whites

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is higher in racially integrated neighborhoods even though most people there have not been victimized.14) Racial life as experienced, Bourdieu would have noted, is not reducible to experiences. Racial interaction is guided at each move by the organization and dynamics of racial structures. The “real,” understood as observed interactions or practices, is not really all there is. The difficulty with this stance, of course, is that, all too often, in polemical opposition to the interactionism of his day, Bourdieu insisted on the priority of structure over interaction, replacing the interactionist fallacy with, as it were, an equally problematic structuralist one. His critiques of interactionist sociology were problematic because structure and interaction actually stand in dialectical relation to, and presuppose, one another. The truth of each, in fact, is to be found in the other. Given this interrelation, they are, in principle, equally important to investigate. Bourdieu himself acknowledged as much at various points in his life’s work. In The Logic of Practice, he asserted the equal indispensability of objectivist and subjectivist modes of analysis.15 (Often he assimilated interactionism to subjectivism, itself a somewhat problematic stance.) And in The Social Structures of the Economy, after trying his own hand, surprisingly, at interactional analysis—­specifically, a close look at the interactions among salespersons and potential buyers in the housing market—­he concluded: “The action or interaction cannot be understood either as a mere mechanical effectuation of the structure . . . or as a communicative action that could be explained without taking account of the structural necessity expressed in it. . . . Far from being a mere ratification of the structure of the economic relation, the interaction is an actualization of that structure—­an always uncertain actualization, both in its course, which is full of suspense and surprises, and in its very existence.”16 While one-­sided analyses of structure or interaction—­investigations that address one or another of these in isolation—­inherently are limited, the study of interaction itself can be of great value; indeed, structuralist researches have much to gain from work that demonstrates in dialectical spirit how intergroup (or interpersonal) interactions instantiate large historical forces. One only can hope for structurally grounded studies that prominently incorporate the moment of interaction.17 With this hope, one regrettably must read Bourdieu against himself.18 Perhaps Goffman said it best when, in his 1982 American Sociological Association presidential address, “The Interaction Order,” he declared that the “face-­to-­face domain [is] an analytically viable one[,] . . . a substantive domain in its own right,” a legitimate and valuable object of sociological study. If social structures, he contended, are an important focus of inquiry, then so too is the interaction order, an analytically autonomous realm of social

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practices and rituals not directly constrained or determined by social structures. In Goffman’s view, there is only “a nonexclusive linkage—­a ‘loose coupling’—­between interactional practices and social structures, . . . a gearing as it were of various structures into interactional cogs.”19 Goffman stopped short of claiming that the interaction order is “any more real, any less of an arbitrary abstraction,” than “the more traditionally considered elements of social organization. . . . To speak of the relatively autonomous forms of life in the interaction order,” he asserted, “. . . is not to put forward these forms as somehow prior, fundamental, or constitutive of the shape of macroscopic phenomena.”20 Nonetheless, an area of sociology could be carved out for studies of microscopic “forms of life.” An equally strong case for interaction was made by White—­Goffman’s contemporary. Building, step by step, a comprehensive theory of social formations, he suggested in Identity and Control that interactions are the very bedrock of social life, the foundation on which large-­scale social structures rest, the elementary building blocks of the social order. “An identity emerges for each of us,” he wrote, “only out of efforts at control amid contingencies and contentions in interaction. . . . The world comes from identities attempting control within their relations to other identities.”21 (For White, control meant not efforts at domination but “finding footings among other identities.”22) For example, children at play would form into social clusters, spin off stories about themselves, and generate collective emotions that in turn would lend orderliness and control to the “real turbulence” of their playground. “Social processes and structure are thus traces from successions of control efforts,” noted White.23 Analytically, for him as for Goffman, interaction is of utmost significance as a sociological object. Finally, no less structurally oriented a sociologist than Tilly—­author, after all, of books with titles such as Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons 24—­himself confirmed the importance of interaction by shifting, in his later writings, from a lifelong study of instances of large-­scale political contention such as revolutions and social movements to the analysis of such practices as the giving of reasons and the assignment of credit and blame. In this more interaction-­centered research, he acknowledged, he was influenced not only by Goffman but also by the American pragmatism of Dewey, Mead, Burke, and Mills. Tilly began by announcing: “We might . . . define human beings as reason-­giving animals. Only humans start offering and demanding reasons while young, then continue through life looking for reasons why.” His own aim, he stated, was to explore “the social side of reason giving: how people share, communicate, contest, and collectively modify accepted reasons.”25 That this undertaking led Tilly to examine matters of obvious relevance to the study of race, such as reliance on conventional judgments about racial

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characteristics when hiring or not hiring, or the use of stories with a dramatic structure when speaking of the progress of one’s racial enlightenment (or its opposite, the hardening of one’s racial enmity), is of less importance than the move which took him straight into a domain of inquiry featuring the everyday and the smaller scale.26 Tilly also examined interactional practices less of explanation than of evaluation. This, too, led him to explore issues of relevance to race scholarship, such as processes whereby differently raced individuals are assessed worthy of promotion or reward, or “what happens,” as Tilly put it, “when a sharp boundary separates people who assign credit or blame from the objects of their judgments.”27 (Among the hallmarks of racial domination, as he pointed out, was disapprobation—­a judgment often responded to in kind.) What most matters here, once again, is not the specific issues broached but the very nature of the inquiry: its proposal, in Tilly’s words, to “treat interpersonal transactions as the basic elements of social processes.”28 Bourdieu’s admonitions notwithstanding, then—­ and perhaps in the spirit more of his research practices than of his theoretical preachings—­the study of interaction-­order phenomena claims for itself an increasingly valid and legitimate place in the social sciences. Even in France, at least in the years since Bourdieu’s passing, growing attention has been devoted to microsociological modes of inquiry.29 In the domain of race scholarship, too, one encounters an increasingly self-­conscious and theoretically nuanced concern with the workings of racial domination (and subversion) at the interactional level. Studies of interaction hold out, in fact, the promise of disclosing small-­scale processes and mechanisms that, until now, have remained partly hidden from the purview of empirical social science, subtleties that, at most, have been brought to light by cultural producers such as novelists and essayists who—­and this is not to criticize them—­lack the analytic tools necessary for undertaking systematic social inquiry. In our view as well, it is desirable carefully to investigate the interactional sequences of everyday life; these are the very stuff, the raw material, of which the racial order is made. In interactions, the structural and agentic components of racial fields come together—­ and in a most fundamental way. Typically iterational in agentic orientation (but not necessarily so), these sequences unfold within and across all three of the structural contexts surveyed in chapter 3. They are shaped and channeled, that is, not only by social but also by cultural and collective-­emotional influences. Yet, unlike the other kinds of action sequences we also discuss in this chapter, they are not necessarily institutionalized or interstitial and contentious in nature (although it also can be said that both the institutional and the interstitial moments in social life consist ultimately in interactions).

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What kinds of approaches exist for inquiring systematically into the interaction order? How might these approaches be appropriated for race studies? And how are we to evaluate their usefulness? In what follows, we discuss two such approaches, and we consider in each case their potential fruitfulness for race scholarship. racial interactions Perhaps the most important philosophic wellspring for interactionist sociology is the classical pragmatism of James, Dewey, and Mead. Among the hallmarks of this tradition, after all, is the call for a return to experience. James argued that experience—­practice—­supplies the impetus for all inquiry; it also reveals the meaning of ideas and provides the ultimate test of their truth. “The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it,” he wrote, “is its concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it.”30 The stage was set for the study of interactional practices. In his later writings, James supplemented these ideas with what he termed a doctrine of radical empiricism, according to which “there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed”—­again, “pure experience.”31 All the world consists in experience. As he conceived of it, this encompassed not only “the things themselves” but also “the relations between things.”32 A parallel endeavor was evident in Dewey’s work. In Experience and Nature, he agreed with James that pure experience is “double-­barrelled”: “It recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. ‘Thing’ and ‘thought’ . . . refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience.”33 (As we shall see, Garfinkel spoke in very similar tones of the tendency among present-­day sociologists to focus on concepts at the expense of the situated details of practices.) Dewey was critical of thinkers who remain caught up in such dualisms. What is required, he believed, for an adequate grasp of experience is a close examination of transactions and their (intended as well as unintended) consequences.34 In this respect, he diverged hardly at all from James’s radical empiricism. Although Dewey did not carry out such an inquiry himself, he certainly gestured toward it in many of his writings, including The Public and Its Problems, which focused squarely on “modes of associated behavior” and their “extensive and enduring consequences”—­the creative, voluntarist, and agentic moment in human affairs.35 Finally, interaction was central to Mead’s own pragmatist understanding of actors’ capacity—­through mind, thought, and what he termed “reflective intelligence”—­to control their responses and to adjust and redirect their

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experience. Indeed, mind itself, as he taught in Mind, Self, and Society, has to do with symbolically mediated interaction. In a familiar passage of that work, he addressed the question as to how a sequence of acts might become a human and meaningful experience. Drawing on Peirce’s earlier triadic theory of semiosis, he conceptualized meaning as a relation among three distinct phases of the social act: the gesture of one organism, the adjustive response of another organism, and then the completion of a given act. “This threefold relationship constitutes the matrix,” Mead wrote, “within which meaning arises,” adding that in this threefold relationship, any gesture or linguistic sign has an action component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a resultant collaborative social act: “The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has.”36 Mead’s insights were of great methodological import, for they opened the way to a new interactionist sociology. They also led to a developmental view of language, as encapsulated in Mead’s famous metaphors of play, the game, and the generalized other. And Mead developed as well a theory of “intelligent conduct,” using the term, much as Dewey did, to highlight delayed responses to signs in outward experience, pauses that made possible “the implicit initiation of a number of possible alternative responses . . . [and] the exercise of intelligent or reflective choice in the acceptance of that one . . . which is to be carried into overt effect.”37 Finally, Mead devoted attention, like Peirce and Dewey before him, to interactional processes in which actors take each other’s interests into account and, in light of those interests, collectively work out courses of action aimed at reconstructing their problematic life contexts.38 It was one thing, of course, insistently to call for a return to experience, as Dewey and his fellow classical pragmatists did. It was quite another to indicate how this might be accomplished. Classical pragmatism failed to demonstrate how one actually might “return” to the things of experience; it provided lessons in principle but did not indicate a method by which to proceed. It remained for Addams, Thomas, and the Chicago School ethnographers—­ and, after them, the symbolic interactionists—­to demonstrate precisely how social practices, including racial interactions, might be investigated. Addams inaugurated the tradition with a (now neglected) classic of early American sociology, The Hull-­House Maps and Papers, in which she and fellow residents at Hull-­House undertook a collaborative investigation of everyday lived experience in a slum district of Chicago.39 Thomas continued the tradition with a series of studies of African Americans, Jews, and other white immigrants.40 Influenced by the Deweyan theme of habitual conduct, he inquired into how

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dispositions are shaped in different historical circumstances, habit playing a major conceptual role in such writings as Source Book for Social Origins and The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the foundational text of Chicago sociology, in which he and Florian Znaniecki richly documented both the structures and dispositions extant in Polish rural society and the new community of Polish immigrants to the United States.41 After Thomas, Park and Burgess pursued this Chicago interest even further into the realm of racial interaction. Park, too, had been immersed in the study of racial and ethnic minorities, and he was influenced as well by Dewey, from whom he had derived ideas of public communication, creative problem solving, and democratic reformism. In his own work, and, especially, through his influence on his students, whose ethnographies he and Burgess supervised, he led the way to a rich investigation of the racial and ethnic life of his times. “What was produced by Park and his students was a mosaic of studies of metropolitan life full of first-­hand descriptions that were of almost literary quality.”42 A hallmark of Chicago-­style work was the recognition that its ethnographic subjects interact not only in their concreteness but also as occupants of positions in a structure of relations (and thereby as bearers of different habitus from within a space of dispositions, a topic to be addressed in chap­­ ter 6). In some cases, such as Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum, this awareness was built into the very design of the work; as indicated by Zorbaugh’s title, the two major sets of actors selected for observation happened to occupy positions in the dominant and dominated sectors of the field, respectively.43 In other cases, sites in the same subspace or sector were selected for comparison, as in Paul Cressey’s The Taxi-­Dance Hall, Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang, or Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto.44 (A masterpiece of that genre—­al­ though postdating the Chicago School proper by a decade and influenced by other intellectual perspectives as well—­was Drake and Cayton’s Black Metrop­ olis.45) Both modes of inquiry cast light on large structural forces, but they remained committed as well to fine-­grained, descriptively rich observation of peo­­ple immersed in their everyday life activities. In Duneier’s words, they “follow[ed] and show[ed] people in groups and networks, participating in their lives laterally and over time,” staying close to the ground and respecting the nuances and complexities of small-­scale interactions.46 The Chicago tradition further was developed by ethnographers studying the occupants of dominated positions in the racial order, such masters of the craft as Frazier and Johnson, lead author of a monumental report on race relations in Chicago leading up to the race riot of 1919, not to mention also Paul Siu, whose The Chinese Laundryman remains among the best, if least known, of the grand

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Chicago studies.47 The sensibility of these authors informs current sociological ethnography, which illuminates how certain sectors of racial fields (typically those of the least privileged) are organized and operate on a daily basis.48 Pragmatism also extended its influence deep into race studies—­in partic­ ular, into the study of racial interaction—­through symbolic interactionism, an intellectual heir to Mead’s theory of symbolically mediated communication. Everett Hughes made fundamental contributions to race scholarship through a range of important essays exploring different aspects of the race problem in the United States and elsewhere. Blumer, for his part, contributed a classic essay called “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position” in which he addressed “the collective process,” as he put it, “by which a racial group comes to define and redefine” itself and other racial groups.49 Eschewing individual-­ based understandings of race prejudice, he proceeded, as can be expected in work on symbolic interaction, from a concern with the interactive processes whereby actors bestow subjective meaning on themselves and others, “the formation of an image or a conception of one’s own racial group and of another racial group, inevitably in terms of the relationship of such groups.”50 He alluded throughout to the objective relations among racial groups, stressing, in Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutching’s words, “the relational or positional character of racial prejudice and the sense of threat”; he also concerned himself with the constraining and coercing quality of racial discourse itself, its sanctioning of any attempts to develop alternative viewpoints.51 Still, his insights ultimately were about the “running process” of “definition and re­ definition” taking place across “mutual interaction.”52 Blumer’s theoretical formulations found their complement—­and fulfillment—­in a variety of empirical inquiries. Inspired by his ideas, as well as by Strauss’s influential concept of a “social world” (not unlike that of “field”), Stanford Lyman produced historical and qualitative accounts of racial interaction and group formation in settings such as San Francisco’s Chinatown and Little Tokyo.53 And in a quantitative vein, Bobo produced a series of studies of racial perceptions, guided by, and aiming statistically to test, Blumer’s ideas.54 Finally, of course, there was Erving Goffman. Drawing on Durkheim as well as pragmatist thinkers such as Mead, and placing relational thinking at the very center of his work—­“Not, then, men and their moments,” as he once put it. “Rather moments and their men”55—­he made “interaction ritual” the privileged subject matter of a series of influential studies.56 To take but one example—­one especially relevant to our topic—­he analyzed the ritual processes whereby individuals become (racially) discredited, or “disqualified from full social acceptance”.57 In Stigma, his work most directly related to race studies, he observed that society is organized symbolically around cate­­

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gorial distinctions between the natural and the unnatural, the normal and the stigmatized (yet another Durkheimian insight), and that the boundaries separating those categories always are socially and historically variable. “A language of relationships,” Goffman wrote, “not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself.”58 The challenge was to understand the “mixed contacts” during which normals of a given symbolic order and the stigmatized of that order find themselves “in the same ‘social situation,’ that is, in one another’s immediate physical presence.” In such moments, Goffman noted, “there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology; for, in many cases, these moments will be the ones when the causes and effects of stigma must be directly confronted by both sides.”59 Especially noteworthy in his eyes were those “anxious unanchored interaction[s]” in which heretofore undisclosed differentness is somehow put at risk—­that is, when one can be found out.60 These interactions require engagement in often complex rituals of information management and control: “To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where.”61 So provocative were Goffman’s insights that even Wacquant turned back to the study of information games when trying to grasp, in Urban Outcasts, the dynamics of “group stigma and collective taint”—­in a phrase, social degradation—­closely associated with extreme urban marginality.62 In recent years, the importance of studying interactional sequences has been underscored by work that, drawing on the Chicago School tradition as well as on Goffman, shows in detail how racial boundaries are enacted and renegotiated in everyday situations. One instructive example is Anderson’s important analysis in The Cosmopolitan Canopy of so-­called “nigger moments”—­a term, as he points out, often used “in a light-­hearted manner and with an occasional chuckle” by black people to refer to those episodes in which African Americans are “powerfully reminded of [their] putative place as . . . black person[s].”63 In such moments—­Anderson provides here several poignant examples—­African Americans experience the humiliation and shock of learning that the “iconic ghetto,” an emblem of moral indecency and inferiority, never has ceased to be associated with them, that negative assumptions follow them even into the most apparently accepting and racially integrated of settings. The larger theme here, as he makes clear, is stigma: “Stig­ma underlies the ‘nigger moment’ for blacks under the canopy.”64 And stigma can be visited on many different categories of persons, not just African Americans. “Virtually anyone with provisional status may experience a ‘nigger moment’ at any time.”65 Virtually any such person can suddenly,

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peremptorily be submitted to insult and degradation. Anderson shows as well how victims of these moments can engage in effective counterattacks, accusing their abusers of being racist and thereby deploying “a potent epithet that can be irreparably damaging.”66 The potential use of such an accusation “makes many whites apprehensive about having closer relations with blacks. These concerns are at the heart of the anxiety and insecurity experienced on both sides of the color line.”67 Here, then, is a powerful demonstration of the potential of interactional inquiry to shed light on seemingly quotidian events that turn out to influence individual lives in profound ways and, indeed, help shape the broader contours of race relations. Everyday interactions can be immensely, devastatingly consequential. race as a practical accomplishment The Chicago School traditions of fieldwork-­based ethnography and symbolic interactionism have made substantial contributions to the study of small-­scale interactions. They have illuminated the microscopic aspects of racial life in particular and produced fine-­grained descriptions and interpretations of day-­to-­day racialized interactions. One other set of approaches, however, also has had a lot to say about the interaction order, and it is to these approaches that we now turn.68 Ethnomethodology and its closely related offshoot, conversation analysis, represent yet another family of methods concerned with the study of interactional processes, and together they hold out the promise of adding greatly to the understanding of race relations.69 Like Chicago-­style work, moreover, they, too, bear a distinct affinity to classical American pragmatism, although the lineage in this case is less direct, the connections more analytical rather than genealogical in nature. What makes ethnomethodology so deeply resonant with pragmatist ideas are three signature features: first, its call (as in Chicago-­style sociology) for a return to experience, a move that entails, among other things, a recovery of concrete practices, an emphasis on what Garfinkel described as the “just-­thisness” of everyday life as lived in situ; second, the idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem solving, that is, to concrete practices aimed at resolving difficulties and accomplishing, in real time, a revised or reconstructed social order; and third, its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-­solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. The classical pragmatists, philosophers engaged in relatively abstract and theoretical discourse, were unable to pursue these ideas deeply into the empirical domain. They provided lessons in principle

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but did not indicate a theoretically informed method by which to proceed. By contrast, ethnomethodology went far toward realizing pragmatism’s original promise; it attended, in a phrase, to pragmatism’s unfinished business. How did it do so? To begin with, Garfinkel acknowledged that actors themselves have a dualist or objectivist view of the world, that in their “mundane reasoning,” to invoke Melvin Pollner’s phrase, they conceive of the world before them as obdurately real. (For example, they take the racial order, including the very existence of races, as an unquestioned fact, much as “Agnes,” the famous subject of Garfinkel’s case study, herself took the gender order for granted.70) Garfinkel added, however, that actors produce this sense of objectivity by means of various procedures or methods and that they do so all the time, with no “time out.”71 Actors coordinate themselves, in other words, not by thinking alike but by actively achieving a sense of knowing things in common and of having the same perspective were they to change positions with one another. From an actor’s point of view, social facts are, indeed, objective, but paradoxically, that facticity is the result of actors’ ongoing concerted work. Objectivity is achieved. In a Durkheimian spirit—­but in a sense more radically than Durkheim—­Garfinkel went to the roots of the objectivity of social facts. He maintained that the procedures (or “members’ methods,” as he termed them) through which social order is produced themselves nearly always are lost sight of by the actors engaged in them. They are very much like the habitual, tacit, taken-­for-­granted practices highlighted by the pragmatists, practices that come under conscious reflective scrutiny only when blocked, thwarted, or rendered ineffectual. Actors consider the everyday world “objective” or “just out there”; they do not ask ethnomethodological questions. Indeed, asking such questions about their own procedures or otherwise attempting to “stabilize” them would prevent anything from getting accomplished and “multiply” the “anomic features” of settings.72 (Arguments could be made about moral rules and norms very similar to those made by Garfinkel and others about facticity.) Garfinkel took seriously the workings of practical action and interaction. Indeed, conceiving of the latter as comprising an array of actual methodic procedures, which in Deweyan terminology are “trans-­actional,” he moved beyond pragmatist thinking by speaking directly to the practices whereby social order actively is accomplished. Methodologically, Garfinkel also made a crucial contribution: he developed a program for doing ethnomethodology and for empirically identifying the aforementioned procedures for producing social order. (One might say here: racial order.) His achievement was to convert the Jamesian meta­ physics of radical empiricism into a highly elaborated research agenda. How did Garfinkel envision empirically exploring the world of concrete

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experience? Above all, he stressed that one must do, as a competent participant or member, what other members of a concrete setting are doing. (Recall our discussion in chapter 4 of racial competence.) Only in this way can one see what the practices are that make up a setting and that are features of it by being observable as features. For Garfinkel, generic (or “formal”) analysis—­for example, “the Latinos withdraw to their own table in the school cafeteria”—­was insufficient. How might one know that they were Latinos? How might one know that they were withdrawing? He warned: Do not say “sometimes” or “usually.” Do not seek to explain what others are doing as a collectivity. Do not speak in “generalities,” even when using terms from ethnomethodology.73 The meaning of an action is indexical to whatever else is going on in particular in that setting. If one has a schema in one’s head as to what certain actions mean, one is prevented from understanding how people do what they do. One needs to get down to the rich details and skill involved in practices—­and to go for the lively features. One needs to isolate features with prominence and then describe how they concretely get achieved as intersubjectively real for the participants themselves. Garfinkel urged, get hold of the specifics, not the generics. Much of this advice was reminiscent of the pragmatists’ sensibility. But whereas classical pragmatism had maintained, even in its most empirical moments, a certain distance from the concrete, Garfinkel moved beyond theoreticism. He produced a wide range of recommendations for getting at interactions otherwise difficult to analyze. He provided also, in this way, a useful method for studying the concrete practices whereby race is done or accomplished. The topic of Garfinkel’s methodological policies leads us directly to the second of the three pragmatist themes we earlier identified: problems and creative problem solving. In line with Schutzian phenomenology—­but also pragmatist thought—­Garfinkel proposed, in his seminal paper “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions,” that when actors do not (or cannot) continue to invest in their tacit and unreflective presumptions about the “perceived normality” of events, they experience profound difficulties in maintaining the social scene, difficulties that can be highly revealing. Asking “what can be done to make for trouble,” Garfinkel devised social-­scientific procedures (his famous “breaching experiments”) which brought about in participants of social scenes a state of disorientation—­or, to use again a term from Dewey’s and Addams’s vocabulary, perplexity.74 His procedures also yielded the unanticipated additional finding, one that might have surprised even the pragmatists, that the regular workings of taken-­for-­granted practices are experienced not only as a cognitive but also as a moral obligation—­hence the word “trust” in the title of

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Garfinkel’s paper. One might well imagine some breaching experiments elucidating the often hidden structures of the racial order in daily life, as well as some showing the irrelevance or incompleteness of widely held beliefs about racial affairs. In his later work Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel further pursued the task of uncovering and specifying ethnomethods. There he examined a real-­life situation—­that of an “intersexed” person in pursuit of a gender changing operation (the aforementioned “Agnes”)—­in which blockages to the ordinary unrecognized operation of everyday practices arose, not from experimental contrivances, but from features already built into, and “naturally” occurring in, the situation. Garfinkel showed how “Agnes,” who sought to “pass” as a woman despite “male” features to her anatomy and biography, was forced to act as a “practical methodologist,” experiencing the ordinary and taken-­for-­granted—­the dichotomous sex composition of the normative gender order—­as already and profoundly “breached” and thereby providing unique insights into how the visibility of gender status ongoingly is accomplished.75 Garfinkel’s mode of inquiry in that later work increasingly became prevalent in the ethnomethodological tradition, as investigators more and more eschewed inducing breaches in favor of examining obstructions arising spontaneously in social situations. Again, the possibilities for race scholarship are considerable, whether in studies of “passing,” or in work on the experiences of racially ambiguous or “mixed race” persons, or in work on everyday challenges facing mixed-­race couples, or in studies of any number of other everyday life contexts in which perplexities and blockages arise. The last of the three themes we highlighted earlier is language, or linguistically mediated problem solving. This, too, is a problem area to which the pragmatists (including and especially Mead) contributed much, although they also left unfinished business for ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to take up and complete. Garfinkel’s own interest in language cannot be said to have represented a first-­order attraction. Rather, to the extent that he pursued that interest, he did so fundamentally because of his preoccupation with “practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study,” as he expressed it in Studies.76 (One of his signal contributions was to draw attention to the phenomenon of “accounts” of everyday activities, or verbalizations of various kinds that locate, identify, describe, categorize, analyze, or otherwise provide for the sense of practical activities.77 In this regard, his work is reminiscent of that of Mills on vocabularies of motive.) It was Harvey Sacks who, around the same time as Studies, laid out much of the groundwork for present-­day conversation analysis. He did so by asking whether a “fully comprehensive, coherent linguistics” is even possible if one does not come to grips with actual, even

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singular, utterances in their contexts—­the particularities and specifics of utterances as participants actually use them in everyday affairs.78 The grammar of utterances was for Sacks deeply related to their occurrence in interaction-­ based sequences—­and therefore in a locally produced and locally determined social organization—­rather than reducible to abstract syntactic, semantic, or other cognitively based mechanisms or other elements (e.g., demographic factors) external to interaction as such.79 With such insights, Sacks helped to capture how participants in interaction actually talk—­and how they do so using interpretants and indexical utterances with an intrinsic organization they themselves achieve in real time. (In later years, Goffman also would contribute importantly to conversation analysis.80) An extensive set of methods and techniques now exists for studying conversational interaction. And on occasion, although not often, these tools are used in conjunction with close ethnographic observation.81 Conversation analysis and ethnomethodology have great potential to cast much-­needed light on the interactional subtleties of the racial order. They provide us with a way of inquiring into the concrete practices that constitute ordinary lived experience in a racialized world. By means of them, one can study how actors actually “do race” and creatively produce, in the face of challenges, problems, and perplexities, a social order marked by deep racial division. Although Bourdieu never ceased to proclaim that ethnomethodology fails to see that “the truth of interaction is never to be found in the interaction itself,” many of its practitioners have shown that there is, in fact, a good deal of truth to be revealed about the interactional workings of racial domination (and resistance thereto). Some promising steps have been taken. For instance, in perhaps the prototype for all these endeavors, Michael Moerman explored the situated accomplishment of ethnicity among a Southeast Asian tribe, suggesting that “someone is a Lue by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness.”82 “The Lue,” he observed elsewhere, “are concerned to demonstrate their ethnicity. . . . I consider the Lue to be an ethnic entity, a tribe, because they successfully present themselves as one.”83 In a classic article on “Doing Gender,” Candace West and Don Zimmerman deployed conversation analysis in ways that open up analogous possibilities for race, while West and Sarah Fenstermaker investigated how diversity is “done” more generally—­that is, how it can be seen as “an ongoing interactional accomplishment.”84 And Anne Rawls drew on a wide range of interactional thinkers, including Sacks, to develop the idea of a “clash” between mutually incomprehensible interaction orders, one black and the other white. Rawls found that conversational expectations regarding greetings and introductory sequences differ markedly between the two groups,

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whites seeking categorical information while blacks focus on the “here and now.” She also found that, while standard white greeting sequences sometimes intimidate blacks, the latter’s own interactional preference for “seeing an argument through”—­for example, in the workplace—­correspondingly often intimidates whites. “Interaction between these two social forms,” she concluded, “when members of the subordinate group are held simulta­ neously to both sets of conflicting Interaction Order practices, while members of the superordinate group are held only to one, will produce the experience of double consciousness that Du Bois wrote about [only] for members of the subordinate group.”85 Race studies clearly has much to gain from such research. Institutions We began the preceding section with Bourdieu’s forceful challenges to interactional analysis. Before we turn to our next set of considerations, it might be helpful to consider some remarks offered by a member of Bourdieu’s own school. Regarding institutions, Wacquant writes: “Fieldwork cannot for a single moment do without institutional analysis, and vice versa—­even if one or the other is sidelined or muted at certain moments of the research and its end-­product. It must be guided at every step by the methodical knowledge, itself constantly revised and enriched by the first-­person study of concrete situations, of the macrostructural determinants that, although ostensibly absent from the [setting], still govern the practices and representations of its [participants]. . . . For field observation, structural analysis, and theoretical construction advance in unison and mutually reinforce each other . . . rather than opposing one another in a sterile conflict of priority.”86 Much the same insight, one that stresses the importance of larger institutional forces in shaping social life, has been offered by Dorothy Smith, who speaks of a “level of social organization”—­specifically, that of institutions—­encompassing and structuring “the concretely and immediately known.”87 (An “institutional ethnography” is necessary, Smith adds, for taking both levels—­everyday life and “extended social relations”—­systematically into account.88) Wacquant’s and Smith’s insights open up a whole new set of questions: What are institutions? How do they relate to the interaction order? How might they be studied? And what is the importance to race studies of institutional analysis? Such questions come especially to mind when one considers that institutions do not exist alone but rather are bound together with other institutions in what might be called institutional complexes—­or in what, to extend the terminology we have been using, one might speak of as institutional fields.

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These latter spaces include such familiar terrains as the economy, the field of cultural production, the state, and civil society. How might all of these relate to interaction—­and to race, which, after all, itself is a field? Before engaging directly with the final question, we shall have to address the earlier ones step by step, examining each from both analytical and genealogical perspectives. race and institutions What are institutions? In terms of the theoretical vocabulary laid out in the preceding two chapters, we can define them as bounded sets of practices reproduced agentically in a mostly (albeit not exclusively) routinized fashion and constrained as well as enabled by overlapping social, cultural, and psychical formations.89 (In “How to Model an Institution,” White and his coauthor, John Mohr, arrive at a similar conceptualization by way of network-­analytic reasoning.90) One immediate implication is that the agentic modality most often to be discerned in institutions is iteration, although the other two tones of the chordal triad—­projectivity and practical evaluation—­also are present to a lesser degree; another is that institutions in their very definition incorporate not only social relations but also cultural discourses and collective emotions. Although a wide spectrum of social phenomena can be said to fall under our definitional rubric, including the confirming handshake at one end and kinship structures on the other, formal organizations are what most often come to mind when the term “institution” is used.91 Consider universities: They encompass practices both constrained and enabled by social structures (e.g., networks of ties among university administrators or other formal personnel, as well as more informal networks within and across divisions, departments, and levels of the university); cultural formations (e.g., symbolic frameworks used to generate and justify university codes, policies, or initiatives, as well as more informal templates for action: institutions “think,” as Douglas once so memorably put it92); and collective-­emotional configurations (e.g., patterns of psychical investments in organizational hierarchy or in divisional or departmental rivalries; cathexes, both positive and negative, on the figure of the university president; regimes of trust or mistrust among faculty, graduate students, staff, and administrators). These matrices are perpetuated or evolved agentically through some combination of routine, projectivity, and practical judgment, the first typically being the predominant modality (otherwise no university or institution of any kind, for that matter, could last very long). It is important to bear in mind that all institutionalized organizations subsume interactions. That is, when one peers down through the ceiling, as it were, of any university setting (or of any portion thereof,

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such as an academic department), one encounters a plethora of smaller-­ scale, face-­to-­face contacts and exchanges, of the sort analyzed by the likes of Goffman and Garfinkel. However, institutions of an organizational nature hardly are to be reduced analytically to the practices of which they consist. Rather, they are higher-­order phenomena that entail sometimes complex orderings or bundles of interactional processes. Just as Dewey was an early inspiration for interactional theorizing, so too can Durkheim be deemed a wellspring of institutional thought. Indeed, whenever Bourdieu points out some of the limitations in interactional inquiry, one could say it is the Durkheimian side of him putting the Deweyan side in its place. (Shortly, we shall add further shades of complication to this somewhat stylized contrast.93) From Durkheim’s perspective, sociology was nothing less than “the science of institutions.” Following Fauconnet and Mauss, he saw as its mission the study of how “several individuals at the very least [interact] together and [how] the resulting combination [gives] rise to some new production. As this synthesis occurs outside each one of us, . . . it has necessarily the effect of crystallizing, of instituting outside ourselves, certain modes of action and certain ways of judging which are independent of the particular individual will. . . . There is one word which . . . expresses moderately well this very special kind of existence; it is that of institution.”94 Notice that, for Durk­heim, institutions, like social facts more generally, entailed both externality and constraint. (Unlike “currents of opinion”—­another kind of social fact—­they happened also to be relatively fixed, rigid, and crystallized.95) Moreover, the institutional order presupposed, as it does for us as well, an underlying stratum of interactional practices. Durkheim held, in Alexander’s words, that “sociology must focus on the dialectic between institutions and the practices which produce them. In terms of the vocabulary of [his] later period, sociology is the study of sacred forms and the rituals upon which they are based.”96 Later thinkers in the Durkheimian tradition, including Parsons, continued to theorize in this vein. For Parsons, institutions were, “in a strict sense, moral phenomena,” systems of norms followed on account of their moral authority and, as forces external to individuals, “constitut[ing] a ‘form,’ a ‘mold’ into which . . . individual acts fit.”97 Most relevant to us, his AGIL schema allowed one to regard all institutions, including and especially institutionalized organizations, as complexes of multiply channeled and determined action, much as in our own tripartite model of social, cultural, and collective-­emotional structures. Institutional theory long has been influenced by Durkheim and his followers. For example, Philip Selznick’s TVA and the Grass Roots was deeply informed by Durkheimian ideas. Borrowing as well from Parsons, it conceived

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of institutionalized organizations as carriers or embodiments of sacred values.98 (However, in its concomitant emphasis on interests, power, and conflict, it also betrayed a considerable indebtedness to Weber and to Robert Michels.99) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, to cite the title of a widely read collection coedited by Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, also reached back to grand themes in Durkheimian sociology, including the centrality to institutions of myths and ceremonials (as in the work of John Meyer and associates) and the “logical consensus” achieved through sharing in categories of understanding (as in Douglas’s cultural anthropology).100 Along with this macroscopic orientation came a heightened interest in the microscopic practices of organizational life, a concern pursued with an ethnomethodological twist by Lynne Zucker in a founding article of the paradigm.101 However, traces of Deweyan pragmatism nonetheless also were evident in the earlier institutionalism. Despite having its own analytic starting point in the study of interaction, the Deweyan pragmatist tradition had gone a long way down the same road as Durkheimian institutionalism. (Bourdieu was by no means the only sociologist to miss this crucial point.) Whether one thinks of the institutional economics of Thorstein Veblen, Wesley Mitchell, or John Commons (whose own relational or transactional way of thinking entirely was of a piece with that of Dewey and Bentley); or of Cooley’s work; or of the Chicago School tradition of Thomas, Park, and their successor, Hughes, the pragmatist institutionalists (as Abbott dubbed them) had arrived at insights highly convergent with those of the current paradigm.102 For their hallmark was a focus on activity, on processes of organization, disorganization, and reorganization continually unfolding in institutions. “[Pragmatist] institutionalism, as befitted an institutionalism conceived within a theory of change, was founded on process, on relation, on interaction, on events.”103 Thus, Hughes spoke of institutions as dynamic “going concerns,” as “experiments in doing, changing, and organizing people and things.”104 And Strauss wrote of “negotiated orders” continually being reconstituted—­often tenuously and always in power-­weighted fashion.105 Our own theoretical approach, as laid out in earlier chapters, originates and seeks to move forward from this point of convergence. It aims to combine the new institutionalism’s emphasis on the cultural order (principles of vision and di-­vision) with the earlier pragmatist institutionalism’s focus on power relations and negotiation. It also seeks to incorporate collective emotions into the framework of institutional analysis. How might this be done in the context of racial domination and struggle? We begin with the notion that institutionalized organizations are crucial sites for the perpetuation of racial oppression. On the principle of what White once termed

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“self-­similarity across levels,” institutionalized organizations may be considered organizations-­as-­fields.106 (Or, as Bourdieu put it, “if we enter the ‘black box’ that is the [organization], we find not individuals, but, once again, a structure—­that of the [organization] as a field.”107) In the organization, as in the social world beyond, the analysis of interactions alone (e.g., among individuals) never suffices to reveal the larger framework of power relations that expresses itself in and through such interactions—­and that helps to frame them in the first place. To determine the structure of a field—­in this case, of the organization-­as-­field—­one needs to specify the key figures (or categories of people) in the organization and to assess the kinds of privileges they possess and that appear at stake in their interactions. And one needs to take care (to some extent in the spirit of older students of organizations such as Selznick) to mark the distinction between official organizational posts, with their formally decreed powers, and the specific assets actually enjoyed by occupants of different positions. Studies of face-­to-­face interaction never can supply this sort of structural analysis. Once this is done, one can see that race, at least in many organizational settings, plays a crucial role. Consider, for instance, the middle-­class workplace, site of the “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status” of which Hughes spoke many years ago.108 Entrenched barriers of white male privilege have proven resilient there. Even nonwhites who have ascended to positions of authority often serve as low-­ level supervisors overseeing other nonwhites and, relative to whites, are cut off from social ties and communication channels that otherwise might link them to opportunities, resources, and influential bosses. Perhaps this recurrent pattern is a product of mechanisms Tilly termed “emulation” and “adaptation.” In “emulation,” organizations copy organizational frameworks, models, or patterns originating elsewhere in other settings. “For example,” as one author glosses it, focusing in this instance on gender instead of race, “the division of labor in a factory may assign women to jobs on the assembly line, and men to the higher-­paying job of ‘machine operator’ (shutting down the line when a problem arises). Other firms follow suit, assigning women into the inferior job and men to the less tedious, better-­paying job.”109 In “adaptation,” “groups that interact according to norms expressing their unequal positions in one domain acquire habits that spread to new domains. For example, when women enter a workplace they may be expected to replicate the domestic services for male workers that they traditionally perform for their husbands at home. They may be expected to pour the coffee for others at a meeting, take their bosses’ shirts to the laundry, look pretty, and put up with men’s sexual advances.”110 In any case, standing out against other (mostly white male) supervisors, nonwhites in positions of power, especially those

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placed there as racial tokens, find themselves subjected to intense monitoring and scrutiny. Cut off from other nonwhite workers because of their superiority and from other superiors because of their race, many feel weighted down by performance pressures as well as isolated. Not only do they command inferior assets in terms of social relations inside the organization, but also they are symbolically classified as inferior (“affirmative action beneficiary”) and consigned to a sector of the organizational space marked off by collective emotions of resentment, degradation, and anxiety.111 Consider as well the dilemmas faced by professors of color working in majority-­white universities. A nonwhite professor who is the only person of color on her faculty often faces unique pressures from the student body, her colleagues, her administration, and members of the surrounding community. On the one hand, she often is sought out by students of color who ask her for guidance and advice on a whole host of matters, some related to their studies, some not. Although the faculty member primarily was hired to conduct and publish research, these requests are difficult to ignore, especially when her university administration actively encourages her to mentor students of color and to serve on “diversity committees” or to consult with the admissions board. (One scholar has described the extra responsibilities often given to nonwhite faculty on account of their racial identity as “cultural taxation.”112) Her racial identity, which often has nothing to do with her scholarly pursuits, is given heightened visibility not only by students of color and the university administration, who demand her time, but also by white students who, challenging her authority, demand her credentials.113 Her colleagues take some of these pressures into consideration when evaluating her progress. On the other hand, there is only so much they are willing to give (tenure demands publications); and the young professor might notice, as the years go by, that her well-­intentioned colleagues interrupt her a bit more often, touch her on the shoulder with more regularity, and criticize her work with more astringency. Should she aspire to teach courses that have to do with race and ethnicity, she finds herself pressured (or required) by her board of regents or state legislators to augment her syllabus or even to cancel her class altogether. For example, relying on a report by the conservative group National Association of Scholars, one that claimed that history courses at the University of Texas and Texas A&M place “too much emphasis on race, class, and gender and not enough on political, diplomatic, and military matters,” state legislators have proposed that “only courses providing ‘a comprehensive survey’ of American or Texas history would count toward the state-­ mandated six history credits.”114 How does this institutionalized racial domination contrast with racism at

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the interpersonal—­that is, interactional—­level? Institutional and interpersonal racism are not altogether distinct phenomena, however useful it may be to distinguish them analytically. When Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton first brought the concepts into race studies in their 1967 classic, Black Power, they acknowledged that “institutional racism relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-­black attitudes and practices”; that is, they affirmed that those who “would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies”—­and who would do so “deliberately”—­are driven as much by racism as are the perpetrators of interpersonal acts of insult and humiliation.115 For instance, the judge who sentences a person of color to a prison term longer than a white person would receive enacts institutional racism yet also engages (in an indirect and mediated way) in an interpersonal interaction. Likewise, cemetery owners who put out a sign forbidding the consumption of food on their premises also interact, after a fashion, with visitors of color, whose ritual practices they specifically are targeting—­some nonwhite groups consider bringing food to a cemetery a longstanding cultural practice—­even as these authorities also lay down their impersonal organizational rules in the isolation of their executive offices. Carmichael and Hamilton easily could have made the inverse point as well—­namely, that every act of interpersonal racism also carries with it the force of institutional racism. Not only do institutions shape the perpetrator through past practices of socialization, but institutions also authorize her or his racist actions in the present. Institutional and interpersonal racism interpenetrate and support one another: whenever one comes to light, the other’s shadow is to be found beside it. Their common source is a social psychology of racial animus, dispositions and habits of thought, perception, feeling, and action that lead one to denigrate the racial Other, whether in face-­to-­face interaction or in more regularized practices that establish the rules and policies of an institution. This especially is important to note in light of the tendency to invoke institutional racism in ways that absolve racial dominants of their culpability. As originally conceived, it may have been useful for finding ways to talk about the historical legacy of racial inequality. Yet it also allows agentic responsibility to be neutralized. After all, someone did lay down those prison sentences; someone did write up those cemetery rules and procedures. race and institutional complexes Institutions, including institutionalized organizations, are important for race studies not only in their singularity but also as parts of institutional complexes or sectors, which themselves also can be understood in field-­theoretic

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terms. Institutional complexes, too, comprise social, cultural, and collective-­ emotional configurations and include the full range of modalities of agentic engagement, in particular the iterational or dispositional. They also encompass (no less than do singular institutions) a rich array of interactional practices. Among these institutional complexes are the state and political field; the economic field; the fields of cultural production; and the fields constituting civil society, including voluntary associations, education, and the family.116 Much like the racial field itself (which, however, occupies a different analytic plane, since, like gender or class, it cuts across all these institutional domains), the different spheres are set up and operate according to their own inner logics. Indeed, the hallmark of the modern age is precisely the progressive autonomization and differentiation of a multiplicity of such institutional complexes or life orders, as Weber termed them in his Zwischenbetrachtung, each exhibiting its own “internal and lawful autonomy.”117 Institutional fields vary in their autonomy, which is not a given but a historical conquest; dedifferentiation and the gradual loss of autonomy always are possible and pose a challenge. As Weber saw clearly, complexes of institutions all vary in their causal influence; none necessarily is more determinative than the others, even though, in certain historical instances, the economic or the political field, the state, or perhaps even the religious field enjoys empirical primacy. In contrast to Dewey, who tended to conceptualize the modern social order in totalistic, class-­centered terms, and in contrast as well to Durkheim, perhaps the consummate holistic thinker, Weber held that neither the class-­structured economy nor any other domain of life provides the key to understanding the social world as a whole. Bourdieu picked up precisely on these Weberian insights in his field-­analytic studies of modernity and of its historical genesis and development.118 For many race scholars, the theoretical and empirical linkages between racial domination and the various institutional complexes of modern society are the crucial and overriding issue in race studies. How do the ever-­ evolving structures and dynamics of the capitalist economic order shape race relations? What is the significance of an expanding Latino middle class for electoral politics? How do specific state policies exacerbate or alleviate racial oppression? What role does residential segregation play in the perpetuation of racial inequality? What impact do different kinds of family arrangements have on racial groups’ educational attainment? These and a myriad other such questions stand at the core of racial inquiry. A fundamental theoretical problem arises here, however: that of conceptualizing the mutual interrelations among these spaces or fields—­in particular, between the racial field and the different institutional sectors of modern society. Bourdieu had a

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compelling solution to this problem: in a word, refraction. Although fields always function according to their own internal logics, he pointed out, such that each configuration, like a Weberian life sphere, stands as a microcosm unto itself—­that is, as its own relatively autonomous universe, exhibiting always its unique stakes and distinctive struggles—­its stability or transformation over time at least is partly determined by external forces and developments refracted through the prism of its specific structures. “The only way external determinations are exercised is through the intermediary of specific forces and forms of the field, that is, after having undergone a restructuration, and this restructuration is all the more major the more autonomous the field and the more capable it is of imposing its specific logic.”119 To be sure, he also conceded that the “mechanical metaphor” of refraction, which appears frequently in his work, only was partly satisfactory. However, Bourdieu added that this metaphor had at least the merit of “banish[ing] from the mind the even more inappropriate model of reflection.”120 If one denies to fields of practice this capacity for refraction of external influences, one runs the risk of committing the “short-­circuit fallacy” of “passing directly from what is produced in [one field] to what is produced in the [other].”121 If one applies this principle of the mutual refraction of influences to the racial field in its relations with the major institutional complexes of modern society, one arrives at conclusions sometimes at odds with those of major tendencies in race scholarship. Consider, in particular, the crucial question of race and the economic field. No one doubts that economic tensions prominent in society as a whole have considerable salience for the racial field. Bourdieu’s own later writings include, in fact, many wide-­ranging critiques of neoliberalism, among them an ethnography of the social suffering caused by the retrenchment of the welfare state.122 However, it is a far cry from this insight into the importance of economic determinants to the notion that the economic realm a priori enjoys causal primacy. Du Bois attributed it primacy in at least some of his writings, particularly from his later Marxian phase.123 And in the mid-­twentieth century, Cox formalized an economistic Marxist approach to race studies in Caste, Class, and Race. Rejecting the view that racist ideas, beliefs, and attitudes are at the root of American racial oppression, he argued: “Probably it may be said rather conclusively that the Negro problem cannot be solved ‘in principle’ because it is not basically an ideological problem.”124 Rather, the “Negro problem” is rooted in modern capitalism, in “the real interest of the ruling class and how it sets race against race to accomplish its exploitative purpose. . . . Racial antagonism is in fact a political-­ class antagonism and . . . race prejudice is initiated and maintained by labor exploiters.”125 Later race scholars have backed away from this “short-­circuit”

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approach in favor of a more mediated perspective. Some, such as Edna Bonacich, have argued that racial divisions facilitate market divisions, as in the black/white split labor market that undermined the organizing capabilities of all workers between World War I and the New Deal.126 Others, most notably Wilson, have shown how racial and class dynamics work together to perpetuate urban poverty. Often, however, these approaches explicitly or implicitly have assumed that either race or class somehow is “more fundamental.” That which is deemed the cornerstone of the problem is presented in the present tense, while the slightly less significant matter is assigned the past tense. For instance, Wilson writes in the present tense of the current spatial mismatch between an inner-­city labor pool and low-­skill jobs but in the past tense of “historical discrimination” against blacks.127 It is important always to remind ourselves of race’s analytic autonomy and enduring influence. If economic-­determinist theories rivet race to the capitalist experience, political-­determinist theories root race in the colonial experience. Presuming that what made for good politics—­as with Garvey’s black nationalism or Harold Cruse’s call for “Cultural Revolution”128—­also made for good social theory, many scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century came to understand the racial order strictly in nationalistic terms, thereby reducing racial structures and dynamics to second-­order phenomena reflecting state conflict. In American sociology, the most prominent nationalist approach to race was Robert Blauner’s “internal colonialism” perspective; his book Racial Oppression in America viewed the racially dominated as colonial subjects and national states as the primary actors in the racial order.129 By arguing that struggles over “national oppression and liberation” should be seen as more elemental or “real” than racial struggles, this approach neglected, as Omi and Winant pointed out, “the specificity of race as an autonomous field of social conflict.”130 Recognizing this shortcoming, analysts have acknowledged that the distinctive influence of the state and other political institutions is mediated by the internal logic of the racial field. Consider, for example, the development and dissemination of racial categories, perhaps the state’s most important and enduring contributions to the racial order. In developing racial taxonomies—­and defending them through the force of law131—­states assert their “ability to impose and inculcate in a universal manner, within a given territorial expanse, a nomos, a shared principle of vision and di-­vision, identical or similar cognitive and evaluative structures.”132 Nation-­states invented racial categories, some have argued, “to justify the conquest and exploitation of various peoples”133 or to account and control for “otherness.”134 But racial categories imposed from above, as it were, are not universally adopted without alteration by racial actors.135 When refracted through the

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autonomous structures of the racial field, official classification systems often are ignored in favor of provincial categories (compare the dozens of racial categories used every day in Rio de Janeiro alongside the Brazilian state’s rigid and truncated taxonomy), circumvented (as with passing), rejected for symbolic classifications generated within the racial field itself (as when racial actors demand to be referred to as, say, “Latinos”), or completely reinvented (as when Americans identifying as multiracial pressured the state to allow them to “check multiple boxes” on official forms). Consider as well how the field of artistic institutions affects racial life—­ but again in mediated fashion. It is beyond dispute that artists of color and artworks that challenge racial domination now make frequent appearances in major art museums. But it also is beyond dispute that such museums are bastions of Eurocentrism. In most museums, white European and American artists are the ones most prominently displayed. Museums that wish to provide visitors with a thoroughly non-­Eurocentric art education must get by on decidedly less impressive budgets, which is why we find such museums often tucked away in small, unremarkable buildings and staffed by a cadre of committed volunteers. These museums tell a different story, but their voice is far softer than the one that booms from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago.136 This marginalization from the art world’s mainstream of aesthetic forms, producers, and products distant from whiteness helps to bolster the marginalization of nonwhites within the racial order. Sometimes, too, there can be subtle changes in the complex relations between art and the racial field. Take, for instance, the ever-­shifting ways in which artistic styles or products are racialized. Since aesthetic choices can be used to signal and enforce social differences—­to divide “us” from “them”—­ the shifting nature of artistic tastes across racial boundaries often is propelled by identity struggles and power relations. Speaking of the role fashion plays in signaling class divisions, German sociologist Georg Simmel observed, “Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.”137 Simmel’s point is not exclusive to fashion or to economic divisions. It can be applied as well to racially driven aesthetic choices. When blacks “invade” a traditionally white art form, many whites abandon it for something new. The reverse also is true: Many blacks turn their backs on a traditionally black art form when it is taken up by many whites.138 Jazz itself, once seen as the quintessentially black art form, came to have predominantly white audiences as blacks moved on to rock, soul, funk, and now hip-­hop,

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with important ramifications for the entire space of aesthetic position-­takings and for the institutions specializing in the different art forms. Finally, we might consider the institutional sectors or domains comprising what many social analysts designate as civil society or the civil sphere. We follow Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato in defining civil society as an ensemble of institutional spheres revolving around the principles of solidarity and associationalism; these include the fields of voluntary association, education, and domestic life.139 The inclusion of the family is significant here: “if conceived of in egalitarian terms”—­and we recognize that we are quite a ways off from this realization, which is to say, this is a very big “if ”—­“[the family provides] an experience of horizontal solidarity, collective identity, and equal participation to the autonomous individuals comprising it,” an experience that is “fundamental for the other associations of civil society and for the ultimate development of civic virtue and responsibility with respect to the polity.”140 Racial structures and dynamics are important here: they deeply affect the nature of that domestic experience. What is most at stake is what many privileged and protected families always have taken for granted, the right to be recognized as a family and to be treated accordingly. And this recognition, and the security that comes with it, often has eluded families located near the dominated pole of the racial field. Consider the practice of removing Native American children from their biological parents and placing them with Anglo families, a practice so widespread that Congress had to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 to condemn these removals. Or consider incentives affixed to welfare programs designed to limit so-­called “kin dependence”—­ mothers received higher stipends if they lived alone or with strangers than if they lived with kin—­that undermined kin networks of the urban poor. Or consider how families comprising some undocumented immigrants can be separated in an instant by deportation. When it comes to the legitimacy, indeed the very definition, of the “family,” “what is problematic is the fact that the established order is not problematic.”141 And clearly that established order is one marked by racial domination. Taken together, the aforementioned examples provide some basic pointers for how to think about race in relation to the major institutional complexes of modern society. We can organize these observations into three key principles. First, the influence of any institutional complex over the racial field always is filtered and processed through the latter’s autonomous logic; any institutional language, whether it be of markets, bureaucracy, artistry, or intimacy, always has to be translated into the language of racial domination. Second, this translation process, in turn, necessarily alters the structure and dynamics of the racial field. If the racial field mediates, say, the influence

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of state policies (as in one of our previous examples) by directing state resources to certain groups as opposed to others, then, precisely because of that channeling process, racial divisions are exacerbated and possibly given new form. Third, there is no base or fundamental institution, no root cause, be it economic, political, social, or cultural. Our approach breaks from others that lend a priori primacy to a single institutional complex thought to trump all others. Sociology’s eternal search for the first order, for that which deserves the highest place of honor in some ontological hierarchy, is misguided, for the question of “what matters more” always is contingent on specific questions and historical contexts. What ultimately is fundamental is the complexity of the social order itself, the recognition of which foils reduction. Interstices Institutions and institutional complexes constitute the central terrain of racial life. Most race scholarship, accordingly, is concerned with their analysis. The economy and the state, cultural production, and civil society all capture with good reason the lion’s share of empirical attention. Yet, as sociologist Michael Mann cogently has argued, the matter cannot end there. Institutions as bounded sets of practices never are “sufficiently institutionalized to prevent interstitial emergence. Human beings do not create unitary [institutions] but a diversity of intersecting networks of social interaction. The most important of these networks form relatively stably. . . . But underneath, human beings [always] are tunneling ahead to achieve their goals, forming new networks, extending old ones, and emerging most clearly into our view with rival configurations.”142 It is to these interstitial configurations that we now turn. In this section, we discuss what we term fields of publicity, a relational rendering of the idea of a public sphere, as well as one additional topic under the rubric of contentious politics—­namely, social movements.143 We do not seek to draw an absolute contrast between these two types of objects. At first glance, publics are relatively constrained and established forms of interstitial emergence, while social movements are a potentially sweeping and transformative swirl of transactions in which the very frameworks of society can be (and sometimes are) called into question. However, publicity itself can be highly consequential, while social movements, for their part, can result only in modest change. Nor are publicity and social movements entirely separable objects, the former situated here and the latter there. Typically, they closely interwine with one another and depend on each other for their sustenance and flourishing. Nor, finally, are publicity and contentious politics to be distinguished normatively. Neither can be deemed morally preferable or

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superior to the other. The two concepts, then, cannot easily be contrasted. Yet they remain analytically distinct, and each has different theoretical as well as empirical implications for race studies. In what follows, we attend to these implications and seek to determine what each concept has to offer the systematic study of the racial order. race, p ower, and publicity Before introducing formally our idea of publicity, let us briefly consider a rather different notion—­namely, Bourdieu’s concept of the field of power. This connotes a space in which societal dominants—­the preeminent holders of a society’s major assets or varieties of capital—­are arrayed and pitted against one another in a ceaseless struggle for ascendancy. (This space also is where elite-­driven change occurs, most typically behind closed doors, as in roundtable discussions.) Crucial here is the contestation between dominants in the field of cultural production and dominants in the field of the capitalist economy. “The field of power,” as Bourdieu explains it, “. . . is a space of the relations of force between the different kinds of capital . . . whose struggles intensify whenever the relative value of [these capitals] is questioned (for example, the exchange rate between cultural capital and economic capital).”144 Despite this ongoing contestation, the dominants in their respective fields also share in a certain complicity in, or commitment to, the field of power, resulting in what Bourdieu has termed, in a memorable phrase, an “organic solidarity in the division of the labor of domination.”145 Underlying their mutual opposition is a common investment in the perpetuation of a social order of which they are the structural beneficiaries. Thus, key state officials, leading lawyers and jurists, top bankers, financiers, and corporate executives, as well as prestigious literary, artistic, or scientific figures all are structurally likely to favor strategies of conservation of the social order, even as they seek also to undermine one another’s legitimacy. It is here, in their contestations, that the contours and dynamics of society as a whole most decisively are determined. (Since the field concept is meant to apply at all scales, from the most expansive to the most circumscribed, each of the more delimited social microcosms, too—­down to singular institutionalized organizations—­also features something like a field of power.146) Bourdieu’s theoretical schema, while highly suggestive and illuminating, retains traces of its origins in the Marxian theory of the ruling class. It is economistic (i.e., relative to the other forms of capital, economic capital is deemed first among equals); it is reductionistic (i.e., it pays less attention to the cultural and collective-­emotional dimensions of the space than it does to social relations); and it says little

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about the possibility of alternative fields in which societal or institutional power might be contested (i.e., it downplays the possibility of an oppositional public sphere).147 We see considerable value in the idea of a field of power, especially for race scholarship, with the latter’s overriding interest in how racial domination is perpetuated or subverted. Even so, we also believe this concept must be modified and supplemented. While not downplaying the importance of economic capital, we would not accord it the same preeminence it enjoys in Bourdieu’s thinking. Nor would we neglect the power held by those occupying privileged nodes in discursive and collective-­emotional configurations. Most importantly, we would posit, as a complement to the field of power, a field of publicity in which actors in civil society strive to extend their sway over and across the major institutional sectors of social life, including that of civil society itself.148 Not Bourdieu but Dewey has influenced our thinking in this regard.149 In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey defined publics as “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”150 Wherever new modes of association emerge, which in turn generate new indirect consequences, new publics correspondingly arise. Similar ideas about publicity have animated the life’s work of such pragmatists as Addams, Mead, Locke, and Du Bois.151 Habermas, too, was influenced by pragmatist philosophy. In his classic work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he conceptualized publicity as a form of rational-­critical argumentation and collective will-­formation. “By the “public sphere,” he wrote, we mean “above all . . . the sphere of private people come together as a public . . . to engage [public authorities] in a debate over the general rules governing [social] relations. . . . The medium of this political confrontation [is] . . . people’s public use of their reason.”152 (Elaborating on this idea, Habermas asserted elsewhere: “The public first of all [is] a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. . . . Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion . . . about matters of general interest.”153) Publicity entailed for him a moment of open communication through which alternative di­ rections for social life collectively could be reflected on and adjudicated. Two other more recent theoretical perspectives add further dimensions to our understanding of publicity. The first posits that actors communicate in different ways depending on their race, class, or gender.154 The capacity for rational-­critical debate is a kind of linguistic capital not equally available to all participants in a discursive field. As Fraser has observed, “In stratified societies unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued

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cultural styles. The result is the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups both in everyday contexts and in official public spheres.”155 For this reason, performative theories of publicity emphasize the corporeality of speaking, the symbolic aspects of communication, and a broader spectrum of types of communicative action: dramaturgical, artistic, expressive.156 For instance, as Gilroy has pointed out, “dramaturgy, enunciation, and gesture—­the pre-­ and anti-­discursive constituents of black metacommunication”—­are major elements in the creation of black counterdiscourses.157 Performative theories also highlight the “dispersal of the agon,” or multiple locations or moments of public debate, thereby providing links with historical analyses of working-­class and nonliterate publics whose symbol-­laden festivals, rowdy demonstrations, and irreverent word-­play largely are overlooked in rational-­ critical understandings of public claim making.158 A second alternative conceptualization of publicity also multiplies the locales of embodied public interaction, while downplaying as well the normative overtones of Habermas’s analysis. White defines publics as “interstitial social spaces which ease transitions between specific domains. . . . All publics are alike,” he writes, “in decoupling actors from the pattern of specific relations and understandings embedded with[in] any particular domain and network.”159 As liminal moments of transition between more stable “network-­domains,” a kind of “anti-­ structure,” they provide mechanisms for switching in and out of established modalities of sociocultural interaction.160 White reinforces the notion that publics are interstitial, widely varying in scope, size, and timing, and, above all, dynamic, rather than singular, reified entities.161 They not only permit collective direction setting and problem solving in civil society and other institutional spheres but also serve crucial bridging functions between distinct networks configured over wide spatial as well as temporal spectrums.162 Our own perspective derives elements from each of these approaches. We define publics as structures and practices of open-­ended communication enabling socially distant interlocutors to bridge social-­network positions, formulate collective orientations, and generate psychical “working alliances” in pursuit of influence over issues of common concern.163 As webs of critical discourse and cooperative decision making, publics provide actors with a vehicle for making a difference in, and if necessary reconstructing, the more established institutions and institutional sectors of their society. Notice here that publics and civil society, as Craig Calhoun trenchantly has observed, “are not precisely equivalent concepts.”164 The former connotes a somewhat narrower, more interstitial mode of association than the latter. Publics arise from within the interstices of institutionalized social life (including civil society)

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and stand in a dynamic and dialectical relation to it. Nor are publics simply “spaces” or “worlds” where politics is discussed, as the public sphere idea sug­ gests. Rather, they are interstitial microcosms of individuals and groups act­ing as citizens: while institutions are bounded and stable, publicity is emergent. Institutional practices of publicity transpire in locales ranging from the agora to the salon, street, or cyberspace. Hardly “a space in any topographical . . . sense,” they emerge in “a private dining room in which people gather to hear a ‘samizdat’ or in which dissidents meet with foreigners. . . . A field or a forest can also become public space if it is the object and location of an action in concert, of a demonstration to stop the construction of a highway or a military air base.”165 In some instances, publicity also can be relatively institutionalized; that is, it can arise in such settings as councils, town halls, and, in the historical examples given by Habermas, salons, coffee houses, and table societies. One theorist even has dubbed publics “extra-­institutional institutions.”166 Relevant here is what has been called time-­space distanciation.167 Publics exercise a variable reach across time and space, with some operating on a face-­to-­face basis, others extending access to unknown outsiders or strangers, and still others, the most far reaching (and long lasting) of all, using print or symbolic communication to disseminate information not only through spatially extensive networks but also over lengthy periods of time. Modern publicity has been deeply influenced, in fact, by the rise of new technologies, sites, and media of communicative interaction. Publics analytically can be distinguished according to the different institutional complexes toward which they primarily are oriented: the state (political publics); the economic field (economic publics); the fields of cultural production (cultural publics); and the various institutional domains of civil society (civil publics). (Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato make a similar, albeit more limited, point by way of their concepts of “political” and “economic society.”168) The interactional practices and institutions encompassed by these four types of publics are diverse. In the case of political publicity, they include anything from informal gatherings on a Harlem street corner to the “strong publics,” in Fraser’s terminology, of parliaments and congressional hearings. The latter are to be found, as Cohen and Arato aptly have put it, “in the belly of the whale” of the state itself (one thinks here also of Durkheim’s political sociology, with its view of the state as itself incorporating a moment of publicity through which it “elevates” the ideals and beliefs of the prereflective masses).169 Economic publics more directly are concerned with justice and fairness in economic affairs; they can be found in workplaces, unions (which one author has described in Tocquevillean terms as “schools of democracy”), and tribal meetings on Indian reservations.170 Cultural publics include

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Internet-­based forums of scholars of color, an independent press, and insti­ tutions of art criticism. Finally, civil publics entail the communicative networks through which members of families, voluntary associations, and educational organizations reflect back on these institutions, make decisions about them, and seek to reshape them in concert with others, including through the development of new genres of association and communication.171 Ideally (from our normative perspective), although not in all instances, they aspire to a “communicative opening-­up,” as Cohen and Arato would have it, “of the sacred core of traditions, norms, and authority [in civil society and elsewhere in the established institutions of society] to processes of questioning and the replacement of conventionally based normative consensus by one that is ‘communicatively’ grounded.”172 If one is to find Deweyan democracy anywhere, it is here. Examples range widely, from multicultural publics to conservative talk radio forums and anti-­immigrant rallies. In the messy and complicated transactions of public life, of course, actors typically target multiple complexes of institutions simultaneously, or else enter into coalitions with others whose goals are distinct from their own. Forms of collective action aimed at expanded inclusion in the polity, enhancement of economic or political benefits, or a wider or more balanced representation in cultural institutions and their products often may be found in tandem empirically with modes of civil publicity concerned more with questioning established social roles and identities within civil society itself. “The goal of the civil rights movement,” for example, not only was “acquiring civil rights but also modernizing civil society in the sense of undoing traditional structures of domination, exclusion, and inequality rooted in social institutions, norms, collective identities, and cultural values based on racial and class prejudice.”173 One important implication here is that political, economic, cultural, and civil publics interpenetrate and always have done so to some extent. Even in the early nineteenth century, for example—­at the height of prototype movements for political inclusion in Europe and America—­one “saw an efflorescence of . . . social movements that challenged the public/ private distinction and brought identity politics into the forefront of the public sphere: utopian socialism, abolitionism, religious revival.”174 As events unfolded, publicity surged ahead through multiple publics. That is, political publics sought state democratization; economic publics promoted new principles of economic association, cooperation, and collective ownership; cultural publics strove to alter popular representations and discourses; and civil publics sought to transform domestic arrangements, expand access to education, or democratize voluntary associations. Campaigns such as abolitionism targeted all four institutional settings, while also forging ahead in the

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development of new techniques of public communication that would bridge the spatial and temporal divides between far-­flung Atlantic empires and their many colonies. The Harlem Renaissance addressed multiple targets as well, taking aim through artworks and journalism at white supremacy not only in the cultural or aesthetic sphere but also in political, economic, and civil life. In all historical instances, publics manifest power asymmetries based in political dominance, class, status, or gender hierarchies, or, most importantly for our purposes, racial division; they also are multiple, unequal, and contested. As Fraser makes clear, accordingly, a “post-­bourgeois” model of publicity requires a plurality of competing “subaltern counterpublics,” which she defines as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” Fraser writes: “However limited a public may be in its empirical manifestation at any given time, its members understand themselves as part of a potentially wider public, . . . ‘the public at large.’ . . . On the one hand, [subaltern counterpublics] function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides.”175 In light of these insights, a key challenge is to formulate a new political sociology of publicity based in historical research on power asymmetries not only within but also between the various microcosms of publicity (a brief mention of “plebeian publics” even appears in the preface to Habermas’s work).176 Such research would take into account not only working-­class participation in public spheres but also (importantly) struggles involving groups such as African Americans; along these lines, one high-­profile volume has addressed the topic of “the black public sphere.”177 New perspectives on Asian and Latino publics also are called for, as well as on women-of-color publics or even antiracist publics embracing a wide variety of differently raced individuals. These publics, it should be added, need not be racially progressive in orientation. The “public at large” long has included subaltern and oppositional spaces where racism is rampant or lurking just beneath the surface. And in other cases, racist and antiracist elements have mixed together in complex and ambiguous ways. The “ideal speech situation” so dear to Habermasian theory simply does not exist—­and never did.178 All the publics in society together constitute what we have termed the field of publicity. As we have taken pains to emphasize, this is a highly complex and variegated space, one in which, among other things, race figures prominently. Divided sharply along racial lines, it includes such elements as black churches and Native American tribal councils at one end and white

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supremacist forums at the other. Publics occupying different locations in the field all contend with one another just as much as they contend with the institutional complexes they happen to target. Which is the most legitimate public? Which is the most oppositional? Which represents the general interest most authentically? The field of publicity as a whole also stands in opposition to the field of power. While specific individuals from the latter may take part in the former, the two fields exhibit inverse logics, with the field of power’s basic commitment to the conservation of legitimate authority always at odds with the field of publicity’s abiding concern with its subversion. (Even white supremacist publics aspire to change a society they fear has become hopelessly impure.) The field of publicity also continually is in transaction with the institutional spheres of society, whose structures and dynamics exert on it an often powerful—­but always mediated—­effect. Since publicity has its own internal logic and organization and is structured in complex ways not only socially but also culturally and psychically, all external forces impinging on it make themselves felt in an indirect fashion. For any given historical period, it is necessary to understand how the social structures (networks of publicity) of the field are configured and what capitals operate therein; what the important and contending codes and narratives are that inform the symbolic life of that field; and what sorts of collective emotions hold it together—­or divide it from within. It is necessary as well to understand what sorts of action orientations (in particular, projectivity) animate its members. Since so much of racial life unfolds in the public sphere, these questions especially are salient for race scholarship. Consider, for example, just one specific aspect of this complex whole: namely, the collective emotions of public life (first singular publics, then fields of multiple publics).179 Within the former, bonds of identification are important for providing the foundational matrices of mutual attachment and trust without which no public dialogue long can persist, certainly not without devolving into unbridled conflict. Psychoanalytic theory sheds some light on the matter; as Freud put it, “Social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-­toned tie in the nature of an identification.”180 One can, in fact, adapt to the study of publics the Freudian notion of a “working alliance” (W. R. Bion used the term “work group”), a constellation of actors held together by a common commitment to the con­structive engagement and solving of problems, despite grave differences requiring ongoing dialogue and disputation.181 One also can analyze the mechanisms of displacement and projection through which psychical ambivalences and aggressions within publics are shifted onto alternative publics, the exclusionary processes that make inclusion possible.182 Relevant here are

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leader-­follower dynamics. Bion analyzed such dynamics in large-­scale institutions such as armies, but the list easily could be expanded to include publics as well, for leaders (e.g., ministers in black churches) often assume important psychical functions in these formations.183 Normative theorists’ focus on the rational-­critical aspects of public communication ought not to erase from view the prevalence of such unconscious processes in publics of all kinds. Freudian theory, however, is only partly useful here. Despite its insights, its tendency ultimately has been to depict bonds of identification as regressive and deindividuating (witness Freud’s own marked elitism in politics). More useful, perhaps, is recent research on the topic of trust.184 By virtue of their interstitial character, publics often exhibit high degrees of internal tension, insecurity, and dispute and also may come under intense pressure from other publics, as well as from the better established social institutions—­political, economic, cultural, or civil—­they aim to transform. (This especially is true of counterpublics.) Hence, their very survival typically requires the existence of baseline sentiments of mutuality and solidarity—­ultimately, psychical bonds—­among their members. Many recent studies of trust highlight the role played by such sentiments as sympathy, empathy, and altruism in holding societal formations together even in the face of powerful tendencies of a centripetal nature.185 Collective emotions also are important in configurations of multiple publics. They allow us better to understand, for example, the psychical formations that help to tie arrays of publics closer together. Bonds of mutual identification, however weak in Mark Granovetter’s sense, can overcome (at times) even divisions in the social-­structural or cultural contexts of action and help to establish clusters of publics that otherwise would not have formed.186 What Freud once said of the civilizing process in general applies to multiple publics in particular: “The love which founded the family continues to operate in civilization . . . in its modified form as aim-­inhibited affection. [As such], it continues to carry on its function of binding together considerable numbers of people, and it does so in a more intensive fashion than can be effected through the interest of work in common.”187 One also can turn to the literature on trust for an alternative grounding for this idea of a working alliance among publics. For structures of trust help to coordinate divergent publics and to provide the matrices through which their heterogeneous interests and identities can be funneled into a common commitment; they do much to facilitate the extension of networks of publicity across both time and space.188 Psychical, nonrational forces also can help to keep various publics—­political, economic, cultural, and civil—­sharply separated from one another and even in conflict, despite the presence of social-­structural and

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cultural formations that otherwise might allow their coming together. Ethnic and racial differences, in particular, often create profound rifts between otherwise compatible networks of publicity—­as Cox did much to underscore.189 Collective paranoia and aggression can drive publics apart; “what mobilizes conflict—­the energy of mobilized groups—­[is] emotions.”190 Positive affects can split apart from negative ones, with the latter rechanneled onto external, collective objects now deemed hateful and aggressive. “It becomes necessary . . . periodically to purge the body politic of those elements which pollute it”—­for example, through appeals for public order and unity.191 What is striking and unexplainable in terms of social-­structural or cultural structures alone is precisely this gratuitous and surplus aggression (even cruelty) among publics, or, for that matter, between publics and more established institutional settings and complexes. race and so cial movements Publics often have been closely linked to contentious politics, as in the paradigmatic example of the black church, so integral to the Civil Rights Movement. In turn, social movements often have served as crucial contexts for the emergence of publicity. In Contentious Politics, Tilly and his coauthor, Sidney Tarrow, offer a definition of social movements that makes clear just how such intertwining can occur. A social movement, they assert, is a “sustained campaign of claim making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities.”192 Claim making, then, always takes place in a public way. It entails public performances such as “marches, rallies, demonstrations, creation of specialized associations, public meetings, public statements, petitions, letter writing, and lobbying”—­many of the interactional practices in which public spheres also engage. It involves as well “repeated public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment by such means as wearing colors, marching in disciplined ranks, sporting badges that advertise the cause, displaying signs, chanting slogans, and picketing public buildings.”193 Finally, the social movement bases (e.g., organizations) that sustain these activities—­as opposed to the social movement campaigns in which claim making unfolds—­often encompass the same institutions that qualified as publics in our previous discussion. So publics and social movements do have a good deal in common. However, by no means are they the same thing. Publics can exist well outside social movements, as in the case of the town hall assemblies so vividly evoked by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.194 Conversely, social movements can involve relatively

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little public debate, discussion, or collective will formation. There is nothing in Tilly and Tarrow’s definition, in fact—­with its focus on claim making, performances, and displays—­that necessarily indicates publicity in the same sense in which we have used that term here. Empirically interdependent yet analytically distinct, publics and social movements represent two different ways for interstitial emergence to occur.195 Since the early nineteenth century, social movements, including ethnic mobilizations, have been an integral part of the American racial order. They have included—­to name just a few of the most prominent—­the anti–­Irish Catholic nativist campaigns of the 1840s; the abolitionist movement; the post–­Civil War white supremacist movement that spawned the Ku Klux Klan; the Ghost Dance movement of the Nevada Paiute that spread throughout western Indian Country; the anti-­immigrant campaigns of the early twentieth century; the pan-­Africanist movement; the great liberation movements of the 1950s–­1970s, including the African American Civil Rights Movement, black nationalism, the American Indian movement, and the Chicano movement; the white backlash movement that began in the late 1960s and that helped spell the end of the Civil Rights Era; women-­of-­color feminism; and the new anti-­immigration movement of the 1990s and beyond. All have made claims on various institutions and institutional complexes, including and especially the state. Sometimes, this has been done quite directly, as in efforts to alter specific laws and policies, while, in other instances, the overriding aim has been to change institutions and interactional practices outside the state, as in workplace relations or family life. Women-­of-­color feminism, to take just one example, has spanned both types of endeavor, aspiring, on the one hand, to redress sentencing disparities for men who rape black as opposed to Latina or white women while, on the other hand, also combating degrading images of black women in popular culture. These social movements also have involved public displays that highlight their own worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. And all have launched campaigns from a social movement base that has included a host of public interest associations, lobbying groups, and formal social movement organizations. We have not even listed any of the numerous additional movements that have arisen within the interstices of singular institutions, movements such as small-­scale campus mobilizations and workplace revolts. These, too, in many instances, have been concerned with issues of race and diversity, and not all have been integrally connected to larger, more encompassing movements. We can use the black Civil Rights Movement—­America’s paradigmatic movement for racial justice—­to illustrate some analytic points about movements in general. We also can use it to bring together other important analytic

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insights offered earlier in this chapter. First, social movements, too—­no less than the interactions, institutions, and publics already reviewed—­are triply structured. The Civil Rights Movement arose primarily from the organizational efforts of black activists and the infrastructure they built through such institutions as the church, the NAACP, SCLC, CORE, SNCC, and what Morris, in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, termed “movement halfway houses.”196 New and highly elaborated social structures were forged by means of which the movement sustained itself, mobilized and distributed resources, and brought in and educated fresh recruits. These social structures were organized in field-­like fashion, with temporally powerful and well-­established organizations such as SCLC at the dominant pole of the space and more upstart, “grassroots,” or “authentic” organizations, including SNCC, at the dominated pole. The Civil Rights Movement also witnessed the production of new discursive formations. As Alexander showed at length in The Civil Sphere, these aligned protesters with the sacred symbols of American religious and political culture, classifying their motives, social relations, and institutions as pure and those of their opponents as polluted. The many publics encompassed by the movement were crucial in elaborating these new cultural formations.197 Multiple alternative discourses also marked the space of position-­takings within the movement from early on: for example, integrationism (King) on the one side and black nationalism (Malcolm X) on the other. Finally, collective emotions figured prominently in the unfolding of the movement. Hope, fear, a sense of injustice, and hatred toward white supremacy not only were common reactions on the part of individual protesters but also formed the basis of collective structures of psychical investment—­shared configurations of passion—­that helped to bond protesters to one another. Solidarity and trust also were built across the protest movement through revival-­like church meetings and other such emotionally charged events and gatherings. Activists and leaders, too, were caught up in the very configurations they sought to manipulate and control. These various structures—­social, cultural, and psychical—­all contributed to constraining and enabling the claim making, public performances, and public displays of the Civil Rights Movement. They gave form to both the institutions and institutionalized organizations at the base of the movement and the various interactional practices in which they engaged, not only internally but also in their transactions with external parties, including opponents and potential allies. Tilly explored in depth the various analytic dimensions of social movements, in ways highly reminiscent of our own tripartite framework. He did so, however, with a decidedly more agentic emphasis, highlighting different categories of causal mechanisms and processes. Indeed, he was important in

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bringing an emphasis on causal mechanisms to the fore in social movement research. In pragmatist terms, causal mechanisms can be understood, as one analyst has pointed out, as “chains or aggregations of actors confronting problem situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses.”198 In our own terms, they can be conceptualized as bundled sequences of iterational agency. In highlighting them, Tilly drew on Merton’s essay on middle-­range theorizing, which spoke also of the importance of specifying “processes having designated effects for designated parts of the social structure.”199 Less visible in social science during the golden age of statistical, variable-­based analysis, since the latter had been more attentive (despite Merton’s strictures) to statistical associations than to generative causal processes, the concept of mechanisms returned to prominence in the late twentieth century, with Tilly a central participant in that resurgence. (Bourdieu also was an important contributor to this development, although in his case the program of mechanism-­based social science was propounded less explicitly and insistently. One rightly can say that his writings fairly are brimming with mechanisms of different sorts, including universalization, neutralization, vulgarization, and euphemization; sociological inquiry, as he practiced it, generalizes from the particular to the general by invoking an array of field-­specific, often field-­spanning, causal processes.200) In Tilly’s view, it was crucial that researchers generalize by invoking “recurrent causes” which, singly or in concatenation, produce variable but explicable effects. The proper aim of explanation, he wrote, was “to get the main connections right.”201 In different “combinations, circumstances, and sequences,” “deep causes” would provide the keys to explanation, the point being to build up an inventory of causal mechanisms, to specify their operations “with reflective care and multiple examples,” and to invoke them as warranted, much as a hydrologist would invoke mechanisms of water flow to analyze specific instances of flooding.202 We already have seen the impact this way of thinking has had on recent scholars of boundary making and unmaking, concerned as they are to join in the search for “recurring, general mechanisms.”203 Among the mechanisms Tilly underscored were what he termed relational (social) and cognitive (cultural) mechanisms. The former, he wrote, “alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks; words like ‘ally,’ ‘attack,’ ‘subordinate,’ and ‘appease’ give a sense of relational mechanisms.” The latter, for their part, “operate through alterations of individual and collective perception; words like ‘recognize,’ ‘understand,’ ‘reinterpret,’ and ‘classify’ characterize such mechanisms.”204 (Note Tilly’s use of strong verbs in these quotations, further evidence of his keen interest in the agentic moment.) Relational mechanisms such as brokerage, defection, and diffusion

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played an important role in movement mobilization and in the rise of new forms of social coordination.205 By means of them, professional organizers and lay activists could span divides among socially distant spaces. Also significant were cognitive mechanisms such as attribution of similarity, symbolic boundary formation, and boundary shift, not to mention the activation of shared stories that frame participants’ collective identities and channel their interactions with opponents and with targeted parties and institutions.206 Creation of a new political agenda, a new principle of vision and di-­vision, had the potential to impose a much-­needed intellectual coherence on a social struggle. Professional manipulators of public opinion often wielded great influence in this regard.207 But so too did laypersons possessed, as Durkheim would have it, of “the demon of oratorical inspiration.”208 Both “relational” and “cognitive” lines of analysis resonated well with established political process and culturalist approaches to social movements. In some of his later work, Tilly also ventured into a brief discussion of collective-­emotional mechanisms, although he did not label them as such. For example, he noted, “Worthiness . . . can easily involve public succumbing to strong emotion, although in some public settings somber decorum fits worthiness codes better. Unity entails at least a minimum of coordination and discipline, even if the emotion expressed is anger or despair. Numbers likewise imply some degree of orderly relationship among participants. Commitment, finally, singles out emotions such as indignation and anger rather than, say, fear, shame, or despair. How social movement activists respond to conflicting demands on their emotions, then, constitutes yet another problem for close examination.”209 Tilly’s work has the virtue of reminding us that, while much of the empirical action in social movements is routinized (in our terms, iterational), and while much of it also is clearly future oriented (projective), it also can be highly experimental (practical evaluative). Indeed, this is so in several ways. First, as Tilly saw clearly, there is “the clustered, learned, yet improvisational character of people’s interactions as they make and receive each other’s claims. Claim making,” he observed, “usually resembles jazz and street theater rather than ritual reading of scripture.”210 Social movement participants use techniques of protest often in very open-­ended ways, as when they draw modes of claim making from the prevailing “repertoire of contention” or when they elaborate new techniques, as in the case of sit-­ins during the Civil Rights Era.211 Second, movement participants can innovate in their deployment of deliberately transgressive acts. As Bourdieu pointed out in Homo Academicus, his study of the “critical moment” of May 1968, “paradoxical acts and discourses,” or “what Goffman calls discrediting events, [are] liable to shake the doxa on which the normal order relies.” Such acts can include “dramatic and

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theatrical questionings of the beliefs and views which ordinary agents have of the ordinary world, such as the symbolic depositions and destitutions of the symbols of . . . power or, at the other extreme, all forms of magical negation of real social relations, with various ceremonies of symbolic fraternization.”212 Third (and relatedly), social performance is an integral feature of protest movements, and, as Alexander did much to highlight, also involves a high degree of improvisation. “Civil rights activists,” Alexander noted, “felt themselves to be participating in an utterly serious morality play, and they tried as hard as they could to ensure that the drama would be presented to the surrounding civil audience in a manner that would evoke sympathy, generate identification, and extend solidarity.”213 The great events of the Civil Rights Movement all were chapters in this “national dramaturgy,” and King himself a master of performance, a “uniquely powerful director of civic dramas.”214 When these dramas provoked cultural and psychological trauma in their intended audience and when Northern whites, including journalists in the communicative realm, were inspired to terror and pity, outrage and shame, the ingredients were in place for movement success.215 All of this, needless to say, accords well with the pragmatist insight that social action inherently and irreducibly is creative. During the period following the decline of pragmatist influence around midcentury, many social movement analysts, including Tilly himself, did not take seriously this insight into the creativity of action. Instead, they pursued, as Joas has pointed out, one of two alternative approaches to the study of collective action.216 One was a rationalist approach concerned with either (1) the so-­called collective action problem enunciated by Mancur Olson—­ that of determining how collective action is possible given the assumption of an individual rational actor—­or (2) the processes of resource mobilization, “where the organizations rather than the individuals are regarded as the rational actors.”217 In the historical sociology of social movements, the latter concern by far was the most important, yielding, along with a successor paradigm dubbed the “political process model,” widely cited investigations of the Civil Rights Movement and other instances of collective mobilization and protest.218 Tilly himself started out as a proponent of this mode of social movement analysis. The second major alternative in the literature was a normativist approach on the model of Parsonian theory. Exemplified by the work of Neil Smelser, it redirected analytic attention to collective action driven not by rational interests but by predetermined norms or values.219 Among its drawbacks (which it shared with the rationalist model) was the problem that, in Joas’s words, “the definitions of situations and the norms which arise out of the process, and indeed even the goals of the whole process

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and the choice of means to attain them, are usually unclear and unknown to the people involved; they are only elucidated as the process itself unfolds.”220 New meanings, norms, and goals are formulated as movement actors engage with unanticipated situations and develop new and creative solutions. The pragmatist tradition, with its emphasis on the interpenetration of means and ends, serves as a useful alternative inspiration, and over time not only Tilly and others in the political process camp but also Alexander, who by virtue of his earlier Parsonian commitments might well have been expected to retain a more normativist stance, began to move in its direction. No fully satisfactory pragmatist theory of social movements, however, actually existed to be directly appropriated—­neither in the Chicago School tradition nor in symbolic interactionism, nor even among pragmatist fellow travelers such as Du Bois and Mills—­and, to this day, no such theory has been well worked out, although some notable steps have been taken toward that end.221 Let us offer now a final set of theoretical remarks concerning social movements. These have to do not with movements taken on their own but with how they engage dynamically with their institutional surroundings. First, movements profoundly are shaped in their goals, strategies, and identities by the nature of the institutions and institutional complexes (in particular, the state) which they target and against which they construct themselves. In true relational fashion, changes in the one bring about changes in the other. Second, movements depend for their success or failure on the configuration of political arrangements (e.g., lines of fracture in the field of power; availability of elite allies; willingness of the state to use force) with which they are faced. To grasp their trajectories and outcomes, one must situate them in a space of possibles, or what Tilly and others have termed a “political opportunity structure.”222 Third, social movements often engage in extended transactions with parallel movements, countermovements, electoral campaigns, political parties, and publics (sympathetic or otherwise). Rarely, if ever, do they stand alone, which means that, once again, one needs consistently to approach them in field-­theoretic terms. (One analyst even has spoken of movements as unfolding in a “field of protest.”223) Finally, and relatedly, success or failure also depend on the possibility of challengers joining forces with the dominated in other social spaces. That is, despite the relative autonomy of fields, the movements that emerge within them largely depend for their outcome on convergences with homologous struggles in external fields. That is, they require a coming together of the strategies of action of dominated actors in their given space with the strategies of similarly dominated actors, whether individual or collective, in other spaces. These can include the social microcosms of other racialized groups; the spaces of class or gender relations; or, in

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some instances, spaces at a more encompassing, even global, level. Bourdieu offered the following observation regarding such conjunctures: “The probability that the structural factors which underlie critical tension in a particular field will come to engender a situation of crisis . . . reaches a maximum when a coincidence is achieved between the effects of several latent crises. . . . The crisis as conjuncture, that is to say as conjunction of independent causal series, supposes the existence of worlds which are separate but which participate in the same universe.”224 These analytic observations can be illustrated once again by reference to the Civil Rights Movement. Often it has been pointed out that, in its nonviolent approach to protest, the movement at least partly was emboldened by the relatively liberal regulatory order of the federal government, liberal certainly in comparison to that of the Jim Crow regime of the South. The legal and political structures of the former allowed protesters to struggle against the lat­ter through the courts and through peaceful demonstrations and direct action rather than by means of a violent insurgency. The movement also was, by the same token, empowered by support from white liberal allies in the North, not only in the government but also in the media, the arts, and universities. A deeply riven national field of power allowed it to gain and to make effective use of these invaluable resources. Support also came to the Civil Rights Movement from elsewhere in contentious politics—­and from the field of publicity. The New Left, the student movement, and mainline Protestant churches were among the social movements and sites of public communication that lent much-­needed recognition and material aid to the black protesters. So too was the Democratic Party. And it was in progressive labor unions that the Civil Rights Movement also found allies from homologously dominated white workers in the field of classes. The 1963 March on Washington, in fact—­a milestone event in the movement’s trajectory—­was organized in considerable part with the assistance and support of labor organizations.225 While it is true that blacks struggling for civil and political rights often virulently were opposed by the white working and lower-­middle classes, and while it also is true that other dominated racial groups were not integrally involved in the movement—­their own liberation movements would emerge slightly later than the black Civil Rights Movement—­the help of progressive labor was an invaluable, if not often remarked upon, factor in its success. Conclusion Let us summarize in a few bold strokes what we have accomplished in this chapter. We have offered an analytic framework within which to think about

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the most frequently encountered and consequential types of empirical social action in the racial field. As pointed out at the outset, all sequences of action are concrete syntheses of different types of structures and different modalities of agentic engagement. At their most basic level, these sequences comprise small-­scale interactional practices, as analyzed by the Chicago School and by scholars in the ethnomethodological tradition. But concrete social action also is to be found in more bounded form in singular institutions such as institutionalized organizations and in large-­scale institutional complexes or sectors. That is, it unfolds within specific institutional contexts such as workplaces, schools, or churches and in more encompassing settings such as the economy, state, civil society, or the sphere of cultural production. Finally, action sequences also are to be found in various instances of interstitial emergence, such as publics and social movements. These arise from within and around the edges, as it were, of established institutions and aim in some way—­for better or for ill, depending on one’s perspective—­to transform them (or, what is much the same thing, to alter some of the interactional practices occurring within them). The racial order is a tangled and ramifying skein of such interactions, institutions, and interstitial processes. Each is an integral and ineliminable aspect of racial life. And none can be said to be more important than the others. Nothing could be more fundamental than the face-­to-­face interactions through which race actually is accomplished or produced on an everyday basis. Nothing could be more significant than the institutionalized bundles in which racialized practices often are organized. And nothing could be more consequential than the publics and social movements through which established patterns of racial domination are preserved or challenged. Despite the obvious difficulties involved in prioritizing any one of these, race scholarship has devoted unequal amounts of attention to interactions, institutions, and interstitial emergence. It arguably has been most attentive to race as an institutionalized dimension of social life. This is not surprising, given the profound impact on the racial order, all throughout its history, of such causal determinants as state policies, economic disparities, housing segregation, discrimination in the legal system, and institutional racism in formal organizational settings of all conceivable kinds. However, a good deal also has been lost by the lesser degree of attention paid, at least in systematic social inquiry, to racialized interactions on a smaller scale, the “cell form,” in Marx’s words, of the racial order.226 This judgment obviously is highly relative. But, to take just one example, is not the ethnomethodological and conversation-­analytic study of race still very much in its infancy? And is not sociological ethnography, too, for all its accomplishments in this area, still

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less than fully developed, especially as it pertains to the study of microscopic racial practices? As for the interstitial phenomena of the racial order, all the great social movements—­both progressive and regressive—­of American racial history have been thoroughly analyzed. But publics, for their part, have been less well attended to, despite their immense importance for race politics, past and present. Among the crucial venues for collective will formation, they have failed to receive the careful consideration given elsewhere either to established politics or to the public performances and displays of social insurgencies. Accordingly, some of the most salient ways in which public opinion regarding racial difference is constituted and contested have been overlooked. It is our hope that this chapter will help to redress some of these shortcomings and omissions in race scholarship. It also is our hope that it will foster a greater interest in exploring how the three different kinds of objects we have demarcated—­interactions, institutions, and instances of interstitial emergence—­actually interpenetrate in racial experience. It makes no sense for race scholars to say that “institutions are over here and interactions over there” or to assert that “publics are over here and social movements over there,” much less to imagine that “publics and social movements are over here and the interaction order and institutional complexes over there.” Such compartmentalized thinking precisely is what we wish to avoid, rather than to encourage, through our analytic distinctions. One final hope for this chapter is that, if we think of these objects of study in terms of the tripartite schema elaborated in chapter 3, together with the temporal theory of agency presented in chapter 4, we can open up new lines of inquiry that, in turn, further illuminate how race actually works in our society. Especially promising, we believe—­because comparatively fresh and novel—would be the study of how racialized collective emotions work to structure the interaction order, institutions, and interstitial phenomena alike. What can be a more passional and psychically fraught domain of life than race itself? And potentially re­ vealing as well—­for similar reasons—would be inquiry into how action in and across these types of objects orients itself agentically toward the future or the present. Projectivity—­the imagination of alternative possibles—­has not been stressed nearly enough in race scholarship, nor has practical evaluation, the creative and at times ingenious transposition of future imaginings (or, for that matter, past routinized patterns) into the concrete circumstances of the moment. These are just a few of the inquiries we hope our discussions will help stimulate.

6

The Social Psychology of the Racial Order

It may come as a surprise that, having discussed at length how agentic en­ gagements are a constitutive element in the interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena of the racial order, we also have set aside a chapter for the social psychology of racial domination. Was the self not already dis­ cussed in our earlier chapter on racial agency? Have we not already ventured onto individual terrain? In what follows, we distinguish analytically between agentic engagement and the self (or individual). Agency is a mode of engage­ ment with structures, an analytic moment in empirical action. The self and social psychology belong to a different level of analysis altogether. Theoreti­ cally speaking, just as structures and agentic engagements, to which we have devoted the last few chapters, are concepts that pertain to the level of col­ lective life, so too are they relevant at the individual level. In fact, it is highly useful to posit as moments in social psychology both intrapsychic structures (Freud’s model of the self, after all, is known as the structural model) and modes of agentic engagement (lest we be inwardly determined in all our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and actions).1 In this chapter, we focus on this lower level of analysis, one step down, so to speak, from the collective processes of the racial field. We acknowledge that what must be distinguished theoretically cannot be split apart empirically. No discussion of the racial order is possible without racialized selves. We seek only to examine how ra­ cialized selves are constituted—­how larger social and historical forces make them what they are—­and how they, in turn, influence the constitution of the racial order of which they are a part. C. Wright Mills famously remarked that sociology is concerned most vitally with the intersection of biography and history.2 What he did not observe, at least in that formulation, was that social and historical forces also intersect in individuals’ biographies (i.e., in the very

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ordering of their intrapsychic lives): objectivity subjectified. Here, by con­ trast, we seek to understand how this might happen—­and how individuals, in turn, might respond to the racial order according to principles they have internalized, thereby contributing to its ongoing reproduction, and also, at times, its transformation. In addressing these issues, we take our cues, once again, from the pragma­ tist tradition, which developed a highly ambitious theory of the self, as well as from the social psychologies of Durkheim and Bourdieu. Central to each was the concept of habitus, with which we already are familar from chapter 4. (Both Durkheim and Bourdieu deployed that term, the latter to great effect, while Dewey, Mead, and other pragmatists spoke relatedly of dispositions and habit.) The habitus concept was developed further by Bourdieu in the direction of an account of symbolic violence, by which he meant patterns of thought, feeling, perception, and action which, unintentionally to be sure, serve to perpetuate the subject’s own subordination. The pragmatists focused on yet another potentiality of the self, which they termed intelligence, a con­ cept largely unfamiliar to Durkheim and Bourdieu. As we have noted, the pragmatists had in mind a capacity for sound problem solving in contexts where old habits have ceased to be appropriate. Intelligence was, for them, the opposite of what Bourdieu deemed symbolic violence. In this chapter, we present all three of these topics as necessary elements in a social psychology of racial domination. In the first section of the chapter, we direct attention to the idea of a racial habitus, contrasting it with approaches that focus in­ stead on racial attitudes and prejudices. We further specify the racial habitus concept by exploring its cognitive, moral, and aesthetic dimensions. In the second section of the chapter, we elaborate the idea of habitus specific to different locations in the racial order. First we discuss the white habitus, in­ quiring into its inner workings and intrapsychic dimensions, with examples taken not only from empirical social thought but also from the arts. Then we move to the topic of symbolic violence on the part of the racially domi­ nated, outlining some strategies of analysis that avoid the theoretical as well as empirical errors of past work. In the third section of the chapter, we turn briefly to the topic of racial intelligence. This helps us better grasp the pos­ sibilities for a project of emancipatory antiracism, a topic also covered in chapter 7. The three organizing ideas of the present chapter might seem to corre­ spond closely to the three moments of agency set forth in chapter 4. And to a certain extent they do. Our opening discussion of the habitus certainly does connect with our earlier remarks on iteration, while the idea of whiteness in its expansive and appropriative aspects has to do with projectivity (and

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symbolic violence with the distortion, mutilation, and negation of projec­ tivity); for its part, intelligence, as we develop the idea, surely is linked to practical evaluation. We also direct attention to the shaping of racial actors by the social, cultural, and collective-­emotional structures discussed in chap­ ter 3. However, even as we extend these theoretical lines of inquiry into the present discussion and speak in terms not only of (intrapsychic) structures but also of modes of agentic engagement, we are interested more in other kinds of problems, issues we deem of greater and more direct relevance to the so­cial psychology of racial domination. Our organizational format thus is as much a topical as a theoretical one. Students of racial domination wish to know how selves are constituted as different kinds of racial habitus. They wish to think more systematically about how symbolic violence works in the racial order, cutting off possibilities for growth and dooming individuals to self-­defeating modes of life. And they wish to explore how racial actors de­ velop capacities for intelligence in action, capacities that, as we saw in chapter 4, are becoming more crucial to the negotiation of our complex racial quan­ daries. It is these pressing concerns that we seek to address in what follows. A more systematic social psychology of race must be left for others to elaborate, a task, it should be pointed out, that would be highly salutary, since theoreti­ cally it could help integrate hitherto distinct realms of racial scholarship. One of our chief aims in this work, after all, has been to overcome the persistent and counterproductive division of intellectual labor in race studies, includ­ ing but not limited to the separation between individual microprocesses and collective macrostructures. One final note: Research questions often addressed in the social psychol­ ogy of race, issues such as the determinants of racial prejudice, in-­group/ out-­group comparisons, and so forth, do not receive close attention here. This does not mean that they are unimportant. Much of this work is highly resonant, in fact, with the perspective outlined above regarding structures of symbolic classification and collective emotions. Are not in-­group/out-­group comparisons deeply informed by the symbolic division between groups at the sacred pole of the symbolic space and those at the profanized pole? Are they not imbued as well with contrasting positive and negative emotions? Our own theoretical strategy proceeds from a different starting point than that of the conventional social psychology of race. Specifically, if there is any theoretical approach that informs our thinking in this chapter, it is Freudian psychoanalysis, a perspective long out of fashion in social psychology and in most of race scholarship. Psychoanalysis has much to say about the intrapsy­ chic structures and processes of the racial habitus, about symbolic violence, and even about intelligence in racial life. We accordingly draw theoretical

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inspiration from it. However, what we say is not incongruent with the cur­ rently influential trend of cognitivist theorizing and research, and at certain moments we allude to that approach as well. Both earlier (psychoanalytic) and more recent (cognitivist) forms of psychology help us to move theoreti­ cally beyond the scholastic mode of reasoning discussed in chapter 2, with all its intellectualist and rationalist biases. To truly understand how race works at the social-­psychological level, we will need theoretical approaches that probe (in the language of Anthony Giddens) beneath the realm of discursive con­ sciousness into that of practical consciousness itself and the unconscious as well, perhaps the most significant (because the least accessible) of all levels at which racial domination exerts its grievous effects. Racial Dispositions Different racial habitus channel judgments and practices in different ways, reproducing from below a differentiated racial order whose structures and dynamics we already have had occasion to observe, and to analyze, from above. In this section, we consider what might be meant by a racial habitus—­ some early usages of the concept as well as its present meaning—­and discuss such supplementary notions as the distinction between primary and second­ ary habitus; the coherence of habitus across different domains of social life; and the idea of a split or divided habitus. We survey as well the theoretical relation between the habitus concept and more cognitivist or attitudinal no­ tions such as prejudice and stereotyping. We also explore the complex ways in which habitus and field interact, leading to the generation of different (edu­ cational, marital, reproductive, etc.) strategies of action. After this, we turn to an extended consideration of the racialized body, a topic whose importance to race studies cannot be underestimated. It is precisely among the virtues of the approach we are propounding that it moves beyond conventional di­ visions of mind and body, mental and physical, and cognitive and somatic to examine how the racial order is implanted, as it were, in the corporeal bedrock of racial selves. A product of history, both collective (phylogenesis) and individual (ontogenesis), the racial actor incorporates race into her very bones and inhabits the racial order not only cognitively but also through her moral dispositions and expressive styles. Racial embodiment is fertile ground for social inquiry. In this section, we hope to show, in fact, that a corporeally oriented, habitus-­based approach is a necessary and indispensable addition to the social psychology of race. For race is lived in the marrow of the racial habitus; without the latter, the former (a matter not of biological inheritance but of the dynamics of a field) would cease to be.

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the concept of habitus The concept of habitus was, as we observed in chapter 4, a familiar one to the sociologists of the classical generation. An inheritance not only of an­ cient and medieval scholastic thought but also of Enlightenment philosophy, it played a significant role in the sociological writings of both Weber and Durkheim, a role subsequently forgotten as sociologists embraced a more purposive, means-­ends conceptualization of action.3 In Suicide, Durkheim highlighted a wide variety of dispositional types implicated in the “general contemporary maladjustment [of] European societies,” and even his pro­ gram for a future system of occupational corporations revolved around the hope that those institutions might one day socialize workers into better hab­ its of group attachment and moral discipline.4 His lectures on the history of secondary education spoke of the different moral and intellectual habitus cultivated by different regimes of instruction in France since medieval times, and his lectures on moral education placed great stress on the inculcation of moral habits necessary for a modern secular morality. Throughout, Durk­ heim emphasized the importance of deep-­seated and even unconscious dis­ positions. “In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday,” he asserted, “and indeed in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate. . . . It is just that we do not directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves.”5 Weber, too, explored the dispositional foundations of life in premodern as well as modern societies, whether in agricultural labor, factory work, or bureaucratic employment; his writings also were replete with analyses of traditionalism in the economic, religious, and political spheres of life. Most significantly, We­ ber’s discussion of Calvinism and the spirit of capitalism revolved specifically around the notion of an entrepreneurial, rationalistic habitus. “In this sense, modern rational action itself rest[ed], for Weber, on a foundation of habit.”6 Similar ideas were developed in succeeding generations by European sociolo­ gists; Elias, for example, used the concept of habitus both in his magisterial study of the civilizing process, in which habitus formation was studied histor­ ically and given a Freudian inflection, and in his later work on the Germans (among other writings).7 Yet the declining resonance of the habitus idea in midcentury meant that this aspect of Elias’s work would continue to elude systematic theoretical notice. Nowhere were the changing fortunes of the concept of habitus more ap­ parent than in the American context, where it fell from a position of central­ ity in early, pragmatism-­based social science (especially the sociology of the

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Chicago School) to the degraded status of a residual category. We reviewed earlier the contributions of the classical pragmatists and Chicago School so­ ciologists to the theorizing and empirical investigation of habits and disposi­ tions. Here it will suffice only to consider one further example. In The Ghetto, Louis Wirth turned his analytic gaze on the conditions of life of European Jews in the Middle Ages. Neither heredity nor even religious beliefs, he ar­ gued, but rather the ecological context of the European ghetto was respon­ sible for the formation of the Jew as a distinct social type. (Although he did not speak in such terms, one can discern in his account a close attention to the social, cultural, as well as collective-­emotional aspects of Jewish life in the ghetto.) Wirth devoted a large portion of his work to exploring how centu­ ries of shared experience inside ghetto walls produced the deeply ingrained habits of thought and feeling of European Jewry.8 His work emblematized early sociology’s concern with the shaping of dispositions and the formation of habitus. After the Chicago School’s decline in the 1930s and 1940s, this style of work became less common. Symbolic interactionism, an inheritor to pragmatism, gave up the search for built-­in dispositions, highlighting instead subjective orientations in a move already presaged by Thomas in his focus on definitions of the situation. The early Parsons, too, worked hard, even before the publication of The Structure of Social Action, to retheorize action, suggest­ ing that, between “ultimate ends” and “ultimate conditions,” there stretched an “intermediate sector” of social life comprising “means-­ends chains” in which the constituent elements were “ends when looked at from ‘below,’ e.g., from means to ends; [and] means when looked at from ‘above,’ from end to means.”9 Habit did not fit easily into such a schema. Homans—­a theoretical alter ego and nemesis to Parsons—­eventually reduced action even further to the level of pure self-­interested behavior; later, rational-­choice theory, itself built on means-­ends reasoning, completed the triumph of Cartesian subjec­ tivism in sociological inquiry by proposing that “what explains the action is the person’s desires together with his beliefs about the opportunities” before him.10 Although the concept of habitus continued to be deployed by sociologists—­ for instance, Elias still was making use of it as late as the 1980s—­it was not thoroughly resuscitated until Bourdieu brought it back to the center of so­ ciological attention in the final third of the twentieth century. To this day, it remains most closely associated with—­and is another signature concept of—­his life’s work. Bourdieu meant by it a system of dispositions—­deeply ingrained modes of perception, emotional response, and action within the world, but also manners and bearing, ways of speaking, forms of dress, and personal hygiene—­which become like second nature as a result either of

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childhood socialization (“primary habitus”) or, later in life, of more specific mechanisms (“specific habitus”).11 Like the institutions whence it came, the habitus was nothing if not drenched in history: history embodied and incor­ porated. And while relatively enduring, as memorably captured by Freud in his notion of the “adhesiveness of the libido” (the stickiness of certain pat­ terns of engagement and response) or as summarized by Bourdieu in his ob­ servation that “the active presence of the whole past in us . . . is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present,” making the individual habitus “a world within the world,” the habitus also could be modified to a greater or lesser degree later in life.12 Hence it was durable but not fixed and unchanging; dispositions could be transformed through encounters with circumstances different from those of the family or early schooling. Bourdieu further developed and radi­ calized Dewey’s idea that experience fundamentally is about eventfulness and process rather than about fixity, stability, or permanence. The plasticity of the habitus was not the fluidity or malleability some symbolic interactionists spoke of; nor was it provisional and easily refashioned, in the Rortyan post­ modern sense.13 Yet, for all that, it could be changed. Himself invoking Freud, Bourdieu wrote: “It is only through a whole series of imperceptible trans­ actions, half-­conscious compromises and psychological operations (projec­ tion, identification, transference, sublimation, etc.), socially encouraged, supported, channelled, and even organized, that [primary] dispositions are little by little transformed into specific dispositions, after all the infinitesimal adjustments needed in order either to ‘rise to the challenge’ or to ‘back down,’ which accompany the infinitesimal or abrupt redirections of a social trajec­ tory. . . . The process of transformation through which one becomes a miner, a farmer, a priest, a musician, a teacher, or an employer is long, continuous, and imperceptible.” One could describe it, he concluded, “as a kind of ‘com­ promise formation’ (in Freud’s sense).”14 Bourdieu’s concepts of the primary and specific habitus, not to mention the stress he placed on the modifiability of dispositions, opened up new pos­ sibilities for racial analysis, not only of the shaping of originary habitus (the white habitus; the Puerto Rican habitus, etc.) but also of the formation subse­ quently of more institutionally delimited dispositions such as those associated with particular walks of life. One additional feature of his approach, one that contributes still more nuance to the understanding of dispositions in all their complexity, is his emphasis on the coherence (and sometimes, crucially, the incoherence) of the habitus. Bourdieu defined the habitus as a system of dis­ positions and not as so many singular habits; this was because the habitus was, in his view, something encompassing and generalized, whereby inclinations

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in the different sides of life and different arenas of practice synchronized to create a more or less unified ensemble. Dispositions were transposable across “various domains of practice, which explains the coherence that obtains, for instance, across different realms of consumption—­in music, sports, food and furniture, but also in marital and political choices—­within and amongst in­ dividuals of the same class [or, one might add: race,] ground[ing] their dis­ tinctive life styles.”15 Sometimes, however, the habitus was not so internally coherent. Precisely because each individual habitus (especially in complex, modern societies) was formed under a unique set of circumstances, along a more or less unique life trajectory, each system of dispositions could be ex­ pected to exhibit certain aspects common to many habitus and certain others shared only by a few (or none). Each was a sedimentation of a different set of life experiences. In social worlds themselves exhibiting a high degree of inco­ herence (one thinks, for example, of the rapidly changing worlds of Indian reservations), or in personal trajectories involving passage between radically discordant and incompatible fields of life (the rural Southern black heading to Princeton on an academic fellowship), there was a considerable probabil­ ity that the dispositions formed also would be unstable and contradictory, divided against themselves, and prone to incoherent modes of engagement. Given the complexity and incoherence of our racial order—­and of modern society more generally—­are such fractured habitus really so uncommon? Some of Bourdieu’s earliest studies—­his ethnological investigations of rural Algerians undergoing the wrenching and forced transition to modern capitalist, urban conditions of life during the Algerian War—­focused pre­ cisely on the formation of internally divided (or, as he called them, “cleft” or “tormented”) habitus.16 So did later research he conducted on Béarnese peas­ ants in France.17 If habitus developed through internalization of “immanent regularities and tendencies of the world,” as he put it, and if irregularity and rapid change were important features of that world, then would not a self-­ contradictory, ruptured habitus always result?18 Yet the split habitus could have a different origin as well, not rapid change and dislocation but the ex­ perience of living in a durable and structured double bind: Abel’s experience, for instance, between Indian reservation and the mainstream white world in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, or the experience of British men and women in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion who “sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.”19 This stable yet disunified ex­ perience is an inescapable feature of life for many persons of color in white-­ dominated society. In the early twentieth century, Du Bois coined the term “double consciousness” to describe the fractured dispositions associated with such experience. In his famous definition, double consciousness entailed a

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“sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-­ness—­an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”20 Despite the mentalist quality of Du Bois’s language, with its outright allusion to con­ sciousness, it spoke just as much to infraconscious structures and dynamics as to modes of thinking at the more conscious and reflective level. To be the bearer of double consciousness was to embody a self-­contradictory way of being in the world, one extending to all phases and levels of psychical as well as bodily existence. A student of James, Du Bois imported a certain latent subjectivism into this portion of his racial analysis. Yet the relevance of his celebrated concept to that of habitus is self-­evident. The theoretical relation between these terms leads to a broader question. What is one to think of such intellectualist staples of racial inquiry as atti­ tudes, stereotypes, and prejudices? How are they to inform a dispositionally oriented social psychology of race? We can begin by pointing out that research on subjective orientations served (and continues to serve) a crucial purpose. Especially timely during the era of Jim Crow, when prejudiced attitudes and beliefs explicitly were championed and authorized, this research under­ scored the often overt, undisguised nature of white bigotry in that period. “American civilization,” wrote Myrdal in 1944, “is permeated by animosities and prejudices . . . commonly advanced in defense of various discrimina­ tions.”21 Gordon Allport gave the theorizing of such ethnic hostility its most influential formulation. In a landmark work titled The Nature of Prejudice, he defined “ethnic prejudice” as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization”—­and explored its relation to other mental processes such as in-­group and out-­group categorization, stereotyping, and scapegoating, thereby opening up a sweeping research agenda that would captivate social psychologists for a generation and anticipate the cognitivist turn of the late twentieth century.22 Allport’s fundamentally individualistic vision, however, came to hold less sway in sociologically oriented race studies. One reason (among several) was that, as the era of legalized segregation passed, and with it the toleration of expressions of bigotry—­and as these were replaced with more ambiguous forms of racism—­the study of prejudice appeared less sa­ lient. Another reason was the serious intellectual damage done to Allport’s subjectivist perspective by Blumer in his famous article “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position.” Blumer set forth there the view that “the body of feelings which scholars today are so inclined to regard as constituting the sub­ stance of race prejudice is actually a resultant of the way in which given racial

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groups conceive of themselves and of others. A basic understanding of race prejudice must be sought in the process by which racial groups form images of themselves and of others. This process . . . is fundamentally a collective pro­ cess.”23 Of course, as Bobo has observed, Blumer’s own theoretical approach, which continued to speak in terms of prejudices, attitudes, and stereotypes, itself shared a lot of common ground with Allport’s.24 This continuity was not surprising, given the deep subjectivist tendencies we already have noted in symbolic interactionism.25 In light of this continuity, we once again must ask if the study of racial categorization and of cognitive processes involved in racial division is not incompatible with a habitus-­based approach. If not the arguments advanced by Allport, then what? Recall that Bourdieu himself often asserted that the habitus incorporates certain principles of vision and di-­vision. But what are these principles if not forms of classification, categorization, and schemati­ zation? In recent years, the cognitivist revolution in psychology has brought just such concepts to the fore. As Brubaker and his coauthors have pointed out, “the [racially] categorized are themselves chronic categorizers,” and the schemas they deploy, “automatically [and] outside of conscious awareness,” are among the most crucial means for engaging with the social world. “In this respect they are congruent with, and indeed the means of specifying further, sociological constructs such as Bourdieu’s notion of sens pratique, the ‘regulated improvisation’ of practical action governed by the habitus.”26 These schemas, moreover, cannot be said to be purely subjective because they are shared or collective—­not individual—­structures. “The promise of cogni­ tive approaches is precisely that they may help connect our analyses of what goes on in people’s heads with our analyses of what goes on in public. . . . Cognitive construction, in short, is social construction.”27 Hence, cognitive sociology—­a term associated with Zerubavel’s work on “social mindscapes” but applicable to all research on schema-­based ways of seeing28—­has impor­ tant implications for the study of racial habitus. It helps us to grasp how the cognitive mechanisms through which we make sense of the social world, including the racial order, are part of our dispositional makeup. And it allows us to see how they orient us, just as Allport earlier had imagined, to the pur­ suit of particular strategies of racial action.29 The habitus, a repository of collective forces inside the individual, indeed is a force that guides or orients action in the world; an “internalization of externality,” it also is an “externalization of internality.”30 Shaped above all by economic and cultural conditions, it is a mechanism linking individual ac­ tion and the macrostructural settings in which future action occurs. It also is a way of linking past fields to present fields through the individual actors who

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move from one to the next. The continuity with pragmatism here is striking: in Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey similarly defined habits as “human ac­ tivity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of action; [and] which is projective, dynamic in quality, [and] ready for overt manifestation.”31 Systems of dispositions are a generative principle for action, a potentiality, “a desire to be” (now again in Bourdieu’s words), which “seeks to create the conditions of its fulfillment, and therefore to create the condi­ tions most favorable to what it is. . . . The conditions of its formation are also the conditions of its realization.”32 This does not mean that the habitus is a bundle of concrete, specific practices, rolled out in exactly the same way in each given instance. Dewey and Bourdieu shared the insight that dispositions are best understood as inclinations. “They suggest something latent, poten­ tial,” wrote Dewey, “something which requires a positive stimulus outside themselves to become active, . . . [as in a] readiness to act overtly in a specific fashion whenever opportunity is presented[,] . . . the disposition waiting as it were to spring through an opened door.”33 Bourdieu used a similar imag­ ery of spring and trigger: “It is only in the relation to certain structures that habitus produces given discourses or practices. . . . We must think of it as a sort of spring that needs a trigger and, depending upon the stimuli and struc­ ture of the field, the very same habitus will generate different, even opposite, outcomes.”34 If it requires in some cases only a minimal impetus from the field to elicit large reactions from the individual, this often is because of the “immense preliminary labor”—­no less sweeping for having been invisible, gradual, even insidious—­required to prepare the habitus as an ensemble of virtualities poised to be actualized.35 With actualization, of course, one enters into a new realm: that of performativity. This is not to say that persons cannot conduct themselves in ways that from the perspective of intentionalist theories of action seem eminently ra­ tional and purposive. It only is to suggest that individualistic finalism—­and the means-­ends reasoning associated with it—­is a “well-­founded illusion,” in which the strategies of habitus “naturally” and immediately adjusted to their respective fields present themselves misleadingly under the appearance of “aiming at” explicitly formulated goals. The actions they entail always are proper and well-­timed—­one acts spontaneously as one “should,” like a fish in water—­while lines of action objectively incompatible with the conditions at hand are excluded as unthinkable.36 It should come as no surprise that rational action theory is best viewed, as Bourdieu liked to say, as a secondary or derivative case of the general theory of fields, rather than the other way around. Take the case of the student of color from a poor, disadvantaged

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background, none of whose family members graduated from college. Upon arriving in graduate school, she calculates what will lead to professional suc­ cess, and, thereafter, every move she makes is executed in a deliberate, strate­ gic, purposive-­rational fashion. Her competitor for the best jobs at the end of graduate school turns out to be a white woman raised in a privileged, upper-­ middle class family by highly successful university professors. She says of this white woman: “She glided to success simply by doing what came naturally to her. Meanwhile, I had to figure out everything on my own, as if I were teaching myself how to walk.” Was her competitor’s professional success not also a matter of calculation and purposive rationality? Surely it was to some extent. But to subsume both cases under the rubric of individualistic finalism is completely to miss the point. The young scholar of color explicitly had to “teach herself how to walk” because her habitus was misaligned with the field in which she was seeking recognition, while her counterpart, the privileged white woman, had only (or rather, largely—­not completely) to follow the im­ plicit inclinations of her dispositional “second nature.” (That said, we might add that the young scholar’s unique trajectory to and through her academic field eventually could result in a return on her steep investment, for once she gained a certain degree of mastery over her field, she could bring to her work a unique perspective and foresight, calling into question what others long had left undisturbed, pursuing lines of inquiry others had overlooked, precisely because of the discomfort she always had felt in her discipline. “It never oc­ curred to me,” writes Zadie Smith, “that I was leaving the London [working-­ class] district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. . . . I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.”37) the racialized body The inseparability of mind and body is among the cardinal principles of any habitus-­based social psychology. It marks a clear departure from the cogni­ tivism pervading that field of inquiry (especially in race studies) and, more broadly, from the scholastic illusion that, strongly if implicitly, favors disem­ bodied, mentalist forms of analysis. Enunciated by the classical pragmatists (one thinks here, again, of Dewey’s “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”), this challenge to mentalism also was anticipated by Durkheim, whose em­ phasis on the body “as a critical medium through which the symbolic order of society, or the social body, is constructed” only now is receiving atten­ tion after decades of neglect.38 Even more seminal in this regard, however,

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was Mauss’s celebrated essay “Techniques of the Body,” which explicitly de­ ployed the term “habitus” to highlight, in Mauss’s words, “the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies.”39 “Each society has its own special habits,” he wrote, ranging from swimming techniques to ways of digging and marching, walking, running, squatting, sleeping, danc­ ing, eating, and love making.40 In these “techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason,” Mauss discerned the paramount influence of society: “In all these elements of the art of using the human body, the facts of education [are] dominant.”41 Techniques of the body are social and histori­ cal products; “education in composure,” for example—­the learning of self-­ control or discipline—­is necessary for gaining a capacity for “co-­ordinated response of co-­ordinated movements setting off in the direction of a chosen goal.”42 Mauss’s insights later were taken up and elaborated by Bourdieu—­ here again, the inheritor of a French Durkheimian tradition—­in his work on the “bodily knowledge” of the habitus.43 For Bourdieu, the habitus was “in­ scribed in . . . bodies by past experiences” and (building on Mauss) varied not only by society but also by standing in a field (or space of dispositions).44 In addition, the habitus incorporated a number of different forms or modalities of knowledge, which can be distinguished as cognitive, moral, emotional, and aesthetic.45 One learns a great deal about the habitus in general and the racial habitus in particular by inquiring further into each of these different forms of embodied practical reason. Bodily cognition entails a kind of foreknowledge or anticipation of the immanent regularities of a field. “To be able to use a tool (or do a job), and to do it ‘comfortably’—­with a comfort that is both subjective and objective, and characterized as much by the efficiency and ease of the action as by the satis­ faction and felicity of the agent—­one has to have ‘grown into it’ through long use, sometimes methodical training. . . . . It is on that condition that one can attain the dexterity that Hegel referred to, the knack that hits on the right re­ sult without having to calculate, doing exactly what needs to be done, as and when it needs to be done, without superfluous movements.”46 This bodily know-­how, made possible by the fact, no less arbitrary for being unintended, that the principles of construction by which one apprehends the world are so many instruments constructed by that world, is less than explicitly codifiable or logical. More akin to the implicit, unreflective “feel for the game,” or “art” in Durkheim’s sense, of one already immersed in the flow, it can be brought to the order of discourse—­to that of scholastic thought—­only at the cost of a considerable distortion.47 (One is tempted to say brought “up” to such an order, so unconciously authoritative is the Platonic hierarchy of thought over action.) What role does bodily cognition play in everyday life, particularly in

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a racialized world? Everything we considered in chapter 4 under the rubric of racial competence presupposes it; all the interactional sequences we dis­ cussed in chapter 5 require it. Everyday rituals of racial life assume it, a tacit mastery built into the muscles and the senses. To have a race at all means to possess this corporeal knowledge, for without it one could not successfully swim the waters of racial practice. One could not comprehend the world in a raced way, make properly raced judgments and discriminations in respect to it, and know how to move within it as the racialized being one is. Just as there is bodily cognition, so too is there a bodily morality. This is not the abstract, disembodied morality of Kantian deontology but something more like the state (hexis) of character central to Aristotelian ethics, a prod­ uct of habituation (ethismos) so prolonged and repetitious it becomes almost like a second nature. In Aristotle, ethics primarily is a matter of the habitus, deeply implanted and incorporated. (It also is a matter partly of practical intelligence, as we shall see below.) “Virtues are dispositions,” as one contem­ porary Aristotelian notes, “not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.”48 The body thus is an object of moral training; it has built into it a deep-­seated sense, not only of right and wrong, but also (more broadly) of how properly and virtuously to act in different circumstances. Both Durk­ heim and Dewey, with their keen interest in the practices of (moral) edu­ cation, did more than Bourdieu to investigate this side of dispositional life. Yet even Bourdieu, when exploring the class-­specific nature of the habitus, offered analytic insights useful to our purposes, helping us to see that bodily morality, too, is a crucial way in which racial groups can perpetuate them­ selves, precisely by consecrating and profanizing their own and others’ moral ways of being. Andrew Sayer has offered up this summation: “Evaluative be­ haviour is not reducible to mere primitive responses like those to heat and cold, for we also develop an evaluative feel for the game, indeed a feel for the evaluative game, and become practised in forms of judgement which have particular logics or structures, albeit unnoticed ones. . . . These are not merely conceptual structures but embodied psychological dispositions which may be activated by certain events.”49 Ethnographers further have developed these insights by empirically investigating how morality is expressed through small bodily acts, thousands of which occur each day. Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, for example, have observed how homeless heroin addicts con­ form their hustling techniques to the moral (and racial) expectations of a wider public: white addicts learn to “hang a sign” while looking as disheveled and dirty as possible, while black addicts earn more tips if they clean up a bit

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and perform menial tasks, like washing car windows.50 For many stigmatized groups, dignity is promoted and conveyed first through the body: through how one holds one’s head and hands, through posture and walking styles, through hygiene, and through the sharpness of one’s dress.51 Bodily dispositions encompass not only cognitive and moral but also ex­ pressive aspects; the latter in turn can be further subdivided into emotional and aesthetic dimensions. Habitus are passional; they entail various kinds of affectual dispositions—­that is, different ingrained ways of engaging emo­ tionally with others and with the social world. “It is because the body is (to unequal degrees) exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering, sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is more serious than emotion, which touches the depths of our organic being) that it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very structures of the so­ cial world of which they are the incorporated form.”52 Some of the most sen­ sitive works of literature—­one thinks here, for instance, of Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy—­explore the formation early in life of racially specific dispositions involving bodily emotion. Often they depict the acquisition of emotions such as shame, anger, envy, anxiety, and resignation. Wright writes of becoming “silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable . . . I went to bed tired and got up tired, though I was having no physical exercise. During the day I overreacted to each event, my banked emotions spilling around it. I refused to talk to anyone about my affairs, because I knew that I would only hear a justification of the ways of the white folks. . . . I became forgetful.”53 From an ethnography by Bowen Paulle, one also learns about a more specific socialization to bodily emotion, a for­ mation of habitus later in life. Paulle conducted participant-­observation re­ search in one of the toughest, most crime-­ridden schools in the South Bronx during the 1990s. The effects of school violence, he observed, did not easily fade away once the outward violence was gone. “The anxiety related to threats and episodic outbursts of brutal violence was always both ‘out there,’ in the educational settings, and ‘in there,’ beneath the flesh of the exposed.”54 The violence got under students’ skins, into their very bones, and remained there as a depository of fear, insecurity, and intimidation, long outlasting the fights and the stabbings, the shouting and the gunshots. Epidemiologists studying “toxic stress” have affirmed through medical research what urban ethnog­ raphers long have suspected: that exposure to violence at very young ages, even in the womb, can have durable and long-­lasting effects on children’s well-­being.55

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Finally, there is bodily aesthetics, yet another aspect of embodied, practical know-­how.56 Different racialized groups are widely associated with different aesthetics of the body, and so they construct themselves. Some bodily aesthet­ ics have to do with the very look, manner, and bearing of the body. Certain body types are esteemed to a high degree in certain groups—­and accordingly cultivated in one’s children and in oneself. Later in life, distinct racial worlds foster more specific aesthetic dispositions. Nikki Lee, a young, Korean-­born artist based in New York, has demonstrated this in a unique way, embed­ ding herself in American subcultures, adopting their dress, postures, and behaviors, and then having herself photographed—­in ways that render dif­ ferent forms of bodily aesthetics denaturalized and uncanny. For her “Yuppie Project,” she immersed herself in the fast-­paced, white-­dominated world of Wall Street professionals and emerged with photographs that rendered their whiteness visible. In these images, whiteness was represented not as a norm but as a curious form of bodily knowledge to be objectified and set against its social conditions of possibility. Lee also has portrayed Latinas, blacks, and Asian Americans.57 Other examples of bodily aesthetics include racially and ethnically specific ways of walking (recall the strut of young Italian American Tony Manero, as portrayed by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever); gestur­ ing (think of the hand and shoulder motions favored by young black hip-­ hop fans); adorning the body (whites’ tanning); and even dancing (different dance styles of rural whites, urban blacks, or Hispanics).58 Ethnographer Black Hawk Hancock has added an interesting twist to the latter comparison. While undertaking field research for a study of the Lindy Hop craze of the 1990s, he witnessed a white dance instructor advising her students to exag­ gerate their hip motions while dancing, so as to mimic African Americans. Quite apart from caricaturing and minstrelsy—­themes Hancock certainly underscored—­the episode also demonstrated the difficulty of teaching and acquiring certain kinds of bodily knowledge after the fact, a venture which was “to the learning of a game very much as the acquisition of the mother tongue is to the learning of a foreign language.”59 Dispositions of the Racially Dominant and Dominated If habitus is a social-­psychological category, then how can it also be an emblem for entire categories of people, as in the phrase, “white habitus”? The very scope of that term suggests a potential for essentialism and reification. Even so, habitus, an internalization of collective structures, does link the individual, the racialized subject, to a broader historical and collective experience. Itself

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an incarnation of history—­collective history—­in persons’s bodies, which of course have their own history, it serves as a way for “history [to] commu­ nicate . . . in a sense to itself, [to] give . . . back to itself its own reflection. . . . Habitus understood as an individual or a socialized biological body, or as the social, biologically individuated through incarnation in a body, is collective, or transindividual—­and so it is possible to construct classes of habitus, which can be statistically characterized.”60 In the pages that follow, we consider how the idea of a collective habitus might further race scholarship. We begin with the white habitus, our discussion here meant as a pendant of sorts to our treat­ ment of blackness in chapter 3. Consideration of the white habitus is impor­ tant not only because whites are ascendant in the racial field but also because all other racial habitus are constructed against them. Much as one cannot ad­ equately grasp a single element in a field or space in isolation from all other elements, so too, one cannot study a racialized habitus without also consider­ ing its location in a more encompassing space of dispositions, which include whiteness. Whiteness also is an important starting point for understanding how racism works today. We see in the contemporary white habitus a more subtle, tacit, and invisible way of asserting privilege than often was found in the era of Jim Crow. After discussing the white habitus, we turn to the topic of symbolic violence, or intrapsychic mechanisms whereby racial domination perpetuates itself through the active complicity of the dominated. Symbolic violence would make no sense without a concept such as that of collective ra­ cial habitus. With that discussion, we complete our trajectory across the racial space, having spanned its most as well as its least privileged sectors. It should be remembered, however, that symbolic violence is operative in the lives of white people too—­not only poor whites, who comprise the majority of the disadvantaged, but also the privileged—­and that whiteness, too, for its part, infiltrates the social psychology of nonwhites (which only adds to and bolsters its sense of its own naturalness). It always is important to think relationally. Below we present at best a highly stylized depiction of what is in fact a com­ plex reality. the white habitus There is a field of whiteness just as there is a field of blackness, and, cor­ respondingly, there is a field of white dispositions or habitus. Whites of ru­ ral, working-­class origin have dispositions markedly different from those of wealthy white professionals, and each has dispositions quite different from those of white ethnics. Northern whiteness is distinct from Southern white­ ness, and so forth, just as American whiteness constructs itself against Italian

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or Russian whiteness. Each collective habitus is constructed in opposition to all the others. The meaning of whiteness, moreover, varies by relational con­ text: hardly is it the same everywhere. Nor has it been the same at all historical moments: its meanings and boundaries continually have been fought over and redefined. How, then, might one speak in seemingly unitary and static terms of a white habitus? As discussed in chapter 3, each space (in this case, of dispositions) is marked, not only by active oppositions and negations, but also by an underlying complicity, a collusio or shared investment, which serves to unify and define it in contrast to other spaces. Whiteness thus constructs itself against blackness—­or, for that matter, Indianness, and so forth—­just as the latter, for their part, construct themselves against the former (and one an­ other). Seen synchonically and not diachronically, the racial order is a space of mutually opposing dispositions. What is crucial about whiteness is that it informs the collective habitus of those occupying the privileged sector of that racial space. As such, it possesses distinctive properties, many of which have been alluded to in earlier chapters. In its contemporary incarnation, the white habitus normalizes and renders invisible the very fact of racial domination itself. Its bodily habits and modes of perception and understanding, its cogni­ tive, moral, and expressive dispositions, all presuppose racial privilege (much as the bourgeois habitus in Distinction presupposes a “freedom from neces­ sity”); yet they do not recognize that privilege or its basis in racial dominance. (Similarly, the bourgeois habitus naturalizes its own freedom from material constraint, as in its embrace of aestheticized modes of food consumption that seem to deny the very fact of hunger itself, preferring instead tiny portions beautifully and artistically presented.61) Charles Mills’s indispensable formu­ lation is well worth repeating here: whiteness entails “an inverted epistemol­ ogy, an epistemology of ignorance, . . . producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”62 To deny there is anything at all to such ideas regarding the white habitus is akin to denying the validity of Bourdieu’s portrayals, in Distinction, of class habitus (bourgeois, petit-­bourgeois, and working class). Why can one speak of class habitus but not also of racial habitus? Denial of the notion of a white habitus also amounts to rejecting whiteness theory tout court on the grounds (true in themselves) that there are substantial variations in white­ ness by region and class, among other markers of social differentiation. Above all, the white habitus is characterized by a mode of being that (mis) represents itself as unraced and universal, even as it marks other collective habitus in the space (the habitus of people of color) as raced and particular. In its refusal or, more to the point, its dispositional disinclination to speak its own name, it presents itself as normal. (Hence the paradox of whiteness:

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It has to it an undeniable element of will—­“White,” asserted Baldwin, is “ab­ solutely a moral choice [for there are no white people]”63—­and yet also it is unconscious.) Whites often take their whiteness for granted. Their white­ ness inclines retailers, for example, to shelve food in their supermarkets in “food” versus “ethnic food” aisles, museum curators to divide their collec­ tions into “modernist” versus “Latin American” art, educators to distinguish between “good grammar” and “Ebonics,” and urban planners to demarcate “the suburbs” from “Chinatown” and the “Mexican barrio.” Whiteness is “the unmarked norm against which other identities are marked and racialized, the seemingly un-­raced center of a racialized world. . . . [As such,] it is predicated on an unknowing and unseeing white racial subject.”64 And what of the racial Other? Often it is is marked off, by contrast, as alluring or repellent—­in either case as abnormal. Historically, the white erotic habitus often has found the racialized body powerfully seductive (and been drawn to it); mysterious (and fetishized it); perhaps threatening (and shied away from it); or loathsome, of­ fensive, or repugnant (and been disgusted by it). “As for the Negroes,” Fanon noted ironically, “they have tremendous sexual powers. . . . Projecting his own desires onto the Negro, the white man behaves ‘as if ’ the Negro really had them.”65 The white habitus also has inclined toward ways of being and acting it deemed “rational,” “disembodied,” “impersonal,” “logical,” or “dispassion­ ate,” contrasting these with the putative ways of the Latino (“emotional”), the African American (“primitive”), the American Indian (“mystical”), and the Asian American (“inscrutable”). Even the exceptions here—­the temper of the Irish; the hot-­bloodedness of the Italian—­prove the rule, for to enter into whiteness precisely is to assume a habitus for which these putative char­ acteristics are elective or incidental rather than constitutive, as in the “ethnic options” so cogently analyzed by Waters.66 In all these ways, whiteness plays the role assigned by James to habit: “The enormous fly-­wheel of society, its most precious conservative influence. It alone . . . keeps different social strata from mixing.”67 Often it has been remarked that whites are caught off guard by being gazed at, analyzed, and criticized by racial Others who, thereby, and at a sin­ gle stroke, undo all their labors of normalization. In the ordinary course of racial life, whites benefit from what Goffman termed in Stigma the “good-­ adjustment line.” This unspoken arrangement in favor of the unstigmatized “normals” means, he noted, “that the unfairness and pain of having to carry a stigma will never be presented to them; it means that normals will not have to admit to themselves how limited their tactfulness and tolerance is; and it means that normals can remain relatively uncontaminated by intimate con­ tact with the stigmatized, relatively unthreatened in their identity beliefs.”68

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But consider a black comedian’s spotlighting of a technique of the white body so taken for granted by whites that otherwise they might not question its nor­ mality: their standard white English way of speaking. (Some whites do not exhibit this tendency, of course, depending on their social class or region of origin; but it is normative and even somewhat close to average.) In a famous sketch, Dave Chappelle performs a racial critique by imitating (and, in so doing, denaturalizing) the linguistic dispositions of white speakers. Mimick­ ing them, he highlights and exposes their linguistic particularity.69 Here the white habitus is a linguistic habitus, a way of pronouncing words (“rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place”70), of crafting sen­ tences, of constructing utterances, “as well as a competence to speak defined inseparably as the linguistic ability to engender an infinite array of discourses that are grammatially conforming, and as the social ability to adequately uti­ lize this competence in a given situation.”71 While the comedy routine merely elicits laughter (albeit perhaps of a nervous sort), at other times such expo­ sure can lead, as in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, to anxiety, disorienta­ tion, and even rage. The anthropologist John Hartigan Jr. has documented instances in which white working-­class residents of Detroit—­who, as resi­ dents of a majority-­black city, would be expected to be quite aware of their whiteness—­became distressed when racially typed as white. In one example, a black woman confessed to a white woman (they were friendly neighbors at the time) that her black friends and relatives often teased her about talk­ ing “to that white pregnant bitch.” The comment stung the white woman so much that “she could no longer even speak to the black woman who had related the name-­calling to her.” Remembering the interaction, the white woman would recall: “All of a sudden, I’m like this white woman. I’m just this white woman.”72 Despite this vulnerability to criticism—­made possible by its untenable pretentions to (raceless) normality—­the white habitus exhibits a relentless disposition to expand and appropriate, a projective impulse to exert privi­ lege over the racial space. “As ontologically expansive,” notes one observer, “white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—­whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—­are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish.”73 Historically, this has meant expansiveness in the quite literal sense of colonizing large re­ gions of the world; or, in more recent times, it has meant ventures in urban gentrification (often pursued with a sense of respect toward people of color). It also has involved minstrelsy, or white control over the representation of blackness in particular and over nonwhiteness in general. It has meant the mainstream women’s movement claiming to speak on behalf of all women

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and ignoring the unique struggles of women of color. Often, it has meant cultural appropriation, when members of one racial group adopt a cultural product associated with another. Racist modes of such appropriation—­as opposed to nonracist modes—­occur when there is strategic amnesia (re­ fusing to credit the racial group responsible for the appropriated art form, or seeking to detach that group from its creations); or denial to nonwhite groups of the ability to profit from those creations; or denial to these groups of control over the art form or, by extension, how it is represented (resulting in a kind of modern-­day minstrelsy, where nonwhite culture is represented by and for the white gaze). At times, effective barriers are put up to such ontological expansiveness. When that happens, the white habitus pulls back, as when white schoolchildren avoid cafeteria tables inhabited by persons of color. But especially striking nonetheless is the resentment on whites’ part when those places are closed off to them. The expansionary drive immanent in their habitus being thwarted, they react with anger and frustration toward the racial Other’s putative separatism and, perhaps (or so whites often say), its reverse racism. (This anger often is the moment in which “disillusioned” liberalism turns into racial backlash.) “Unlike black people, white people are seen . . . as having the right or authority to enter freely any public space they wish. That they cannot do so comfortably in, for example, prominently black neighborhoods [or cafeteria tables] tends to be seen as a violation of the ‘nat­ ural’ order of things, as an ‘unjust’ limitation. White people do not tend to see similar limitations on black existence as unjust or as violating any sort of ‘natural’ order.”74 One almost indefinitely could go on with such traits or tendencies of the white habitus. It is at once the most familiar and the least known (or at least understudied) of topics in race literature.75 Rather than explore systemati­ cally its inner structures and workings, its outward manifestations (that is, its gait, bearing, artistic tastes, consumption preferences, ways of apprehending the world, moral tendencies, and so forth), or the changes it has undergone over time, race scholarship often restricts itself to analyzing survey responses. Hence the richest and most vivid depictions often are left to practitioners of cultural studies, or else to filmmakers, novelists, or stage actors. While much can be gleaned from surveys, ethnographies also are needed to gain a greater purchase on how the white habitus is constituted and how (to revert to the spring-­and-­trigger metaphor) it conduces to different modes of thought, feeling, perception, and action in different societal contexts. This last con­ sideration is highly salient. In an epoch in which explicit assertions of white supremacy have been superceded by implicit invocations of white privilege (combined with color blindness), an era in which most public settings punish

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racist conduct and reward color-­blind multiculturalism, it is particularly im­ portant to investigate how the white habitus has come to engage with altered circumstances. Bourdieu’s work on bishops provides an example: “The sons of nobles who, in the 1930s, would have been bishops in Meaux, and would have asked the worshipers of their parish to kiss their ring in a quasi-­feudal aristocratic tradition, are today ‘red bishops’ in Saint Denis, that is, radical clergymen active in the defense of the downtrodden. The same aristocratic habitus of highness, distance, and separation from the ‘middle,’ the ‘petty,’ the average, i.e., from the middle classes and the petty bourgeois, and thereby from the banal, the trivial, the commonplace, can produce diametrically op­ posed conducts due to the transformation of the situation in which they op­ erate.”76 Is the white habitus as it is known today entirely new? Far better would be to think of it as similar in many respects to its older version(s) but responding to new historical contexts in strikingly new ways. Better still would be to investigate carefully and systematically both the changes in its responses and the continuities in its core dispositions. how symbolic violence works In Masculine Domination and other works, Bourdieu spoke of the seemingly inexplicable fact that “the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates itself so easily,” including at the racial level, “and that the most intolerable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natu­ ral.”77 How was this outcome (the “paradox of doxa”) possible? Bourdieu’s answer was symbolic violence. Racial domination persists because the domi­ nants are able to impose (on fields in which they enjoy privilege) certain cate­ gories, classifications, and structures of affect that ensure their continued ascendancy; they are able to produce (in those fields) subordinate actors pre­ disposed to think, perceive, feel, and act in ways that consolidate the relations of domination. Whenever the dominated come to respond in ways already shaped by domination to the structures and processes that dominate them—­ that is, whenever the order of things seems to them natural and self-­evident—­ conditions are in place for domination to subsist without challenge.78 Indeed, even those who are the most degraded, sickened, and otherwise damaged (in­ cluding psychically) by their experiences in an order of domination can turn out actively (if unintentionally) to contribute to its perpetuation.79 Theirs are, in fact, the habitus least well suited to the contestations occurring within the field, the habitus of an aborted projectivity, the habitus of those who have lost hope and are without projects. Not only do legal and economic forces help

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to ensure the dominants’ ascendancy but also these more subtle, insidious, invisible mechanisms of internalized oppression. Weber’s political sociology of domination was right to assert that force never is enough to ensure ascen­ dancy; domination must be legitimized—­and its principles of legitimation implanted into the social psychology of the least advantaged. In sociologist Ann Mische’s words, if “ ‘hope is a rope’ . . . and yet ‘it holds,’” providing “the emotional substratum, so to speak, of the dialectic between the old and the new, between the reproduction and the transformation of social structures as these figure in thinking and acting individuals,” then symbolic violence is that which cuts off the rope and nullifies all dreams.80 Of course, when speaking of symbolic violence there always is the dan­ ger—­let us not deny it—­of shifting the focus of attention unhelpfully (and perhaps harmfully) from objective circumstances to subjective ills. We dealt at length in earlier chapters with how the objective structures and processes of racial life might best be investigated. But here, let us simply invoke an ob­ servation by bell hooks, one that generalizes across dominated groups: “When we study the psychohistory of African Americans it becomes apparent that the foundation of the shaky self-­esteem that assaults our sensibilities is rooted in the experience of traumatic violence. Whether it is the emotional violence caused by the pain of abandonment or the violence that is a consequence of domination . . . , it is the normalization of violence in our lives as black people that creates the foundation for ongoing trauma reenactment.”81 The impact of this “prolonged psychological trauma” must be carefully analyzed. The dominated—­and those who would speak in respect to them—­effectively “collude . . . with the dominant culture in refusing to document in a substan­ tive way the ongoing psychological impact of traumatic violence.”82 It does no one any good, in other words, to brush these matters under the rug, so long as—­and this is the crucial point—­we also never forget that the principles of thought, feeling, perception, and action that guide the dominated (and some­ times also the dominant), deeply internalized and embodied as they are, are not of their own making, an insight Bourdieu himself tirelessly underscored. To understand better how symbolic violence works, we need to step back and consider another important property of the relation between fields and habitus. Whether individual or collective, and depending on its loca­ tion in a field, each habitus engages differently with the array of potential field-­specific actions, stances, and strategies confronting it. This array, itself to be conceived of as a space (specifically, a space of possibles), “define[s] and delimit[s] the universe of the thinkable and the unthinkable, that is to say, both the finite universe of potentialities capable of being thought and realized at a given moment—­freedom—­and the system of constraints inside

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which is determined what is to be done and to be thought—­necessity. A veri­ table ars obligatoria, as the Scholastics put it, it acts like a grammar in defining the space of what is possible or conceivable within the limits of a certain field, constituting each of the ‘choices’ taken as a grammatically consistent option (in contrast to choices which lead one to say the [actor] ‘will do anything’); but it is also an ars inveniendi which allows the invention of a diversity of acceptable solutions within the limits of grammaticality.”83 Different habi­ tus vary in the possibilities they see before them in this space. Some discern a set of “objective potentialities, things ‘to be done,’ adversaries to combat, established position-­takings to be ‘overtaken,’” that is, openings or windows of opportunity for innovative action.84 These are the habitus described by Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods as products of a privileged (class) background and upbringing. Others in the same space, however, see only im-­ possibles—­that is, constraints on innovation, which delimit what conceivably can be attempted or assayed. Lareau speaks here, too, of less privileged habi­ tus accustomed to being told “no” and taught their limits.85 New strategies become possible in racial fields only for certain actors under circumscribed conditions. Actors can have an impact on the fields in which they are located, seizing on opportunities (lacunae) in the extant space of possibles and intro­ ducing key innovations in those spaces. Field-­transformative events involve and build on such moments of creativity. However, the forces of domination also can be reinforced and bolstered by mechanisms of self-­limitation. Neither the pragmatist idea of a dispositional self nor, for that matter, the Bourdieuian idea of the habitus can in truth plumb the depths of the intrapsychic mechanisms that constrain certain actors while leaving others relatively free to exploit objective possibilities, to say of them: “These open­ ings are for me.” Nothing less is required for such a task than a psychoanalytic perspective that recognizes that symbolic violence is a matter not merely of cognitions and categories but also of emotional tensions reaching down into the unconscious. (And not only symbolic violence: In his early essay “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” whose deployment of Freudian mechanisms often was overlooked by those who read it as a work of satire, Frazier depicted “rationalizations and other forms of defense mechanisms,” including projec­ tion, also as the psychical motor of white bigotry.86) Freud always insisted on the analytic autonomy of the fantasy life—­“Psychical reality,” he asserted, “is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality”87—­and he elaborated what perhaps is the most complete theory of how that psychi­ cal reality is constructed, of how socialization occurs. This account of the multidimensional, often conflictual, always ambivalent processes whereby intersubjective relations are transformed or refracted into intrasubjective

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ones (processes of internalization, introjection, identification, idealization, projection, and the like) remains unsurpassed for its theoretical subtlety and sophistication.88 Parsons relied heavily on that account when developing his own theory of socialization in the years after The Structure of Social Action. But being influenced as he was by ego psychology, then the dominant psycho­ analytic approach in the English-­speaking world, he effectively flattened out Freud’s own emphases on unconscious conflict and ambivalence in favor of a more functionalist understanding of ego development, one whose keywords were “adaptation” and “integration”: so well made for one another were ego psychology and structural functionalism.89 Bourdieu avoided the tendency to downplay unconscious conflict and ambivalence but was, for all that, unable to say much about the internal psychical processes of habitus formation. And the pragmatist tradition, too, despite its own interest in “unconscious habits” (harkening back to Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct), had little to of­ fer regarding unconscious defense mechanisms and their role in symbolic violence.90 Of course, if Freudian theory is to be deployed, it must itself be thor­ oughly reconstructed. Habermas defines reconstruction as “taking a theory apart and putting it back together again in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal it has set for itself. This is the normal way,” he writes, “of dealing with a theory that needs revision in many respects but whose potential for stimulation has still not been exhausted.”91 Carrying out such a reconstruction of psychoanalysis is a challenge for all who might wish to see its return to race scholarship. For many of the critiques long directed against Freud—­critiques of his individualism, patriarchalism, and limited historical or social applicability—­retain their old force. In addition, if Freudianism is to be reconstructed, then, just as with the revival of pragmatism, about which Fraser so famously asked, “Which pragmatism?,” one also must ask, “Which Freudianism?” Nobody really believes anymore in the ego psychology of midcentury. Lacanian theory has its advocates, many in cultural studies, but its usefulness for sociological and historical studies of race seems limited.92 Highly promising, by contrast, is relational psychoanalysis, of which Stephen Mitchell was the leading exponent and to which Hans Loewald also contrib­ uted importantly. Relational psychoanalysis creatively synthesizes the inter­ personal, object-­relations, and feminist schools of psychoanalytic theorizing, situating the individual in a complex matrix of internal as well as external worlds.93 “During the past several decades in psychoanalysis,” notes Mitchell, “we have witnessed what might be considered a ‘relational turn,’ in which mind has increasingly been understood most fundamentally and directly in terms of self-­other configurations, intrapsychically and interpersonally,

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present and past, in actuality and in fantasy”; relational psychoanalysis pur­ sues this turn in ways presaging an opening to sociology and history.94 Much of the dynamism of the return of Freud to race studies will involve a vigorous dialogue between the Lacanian and relational approaches. We can express only a general preference for the latter, given its underlying theoretical conti­ nuities with our own relational perspective. (Our usage of psychoanalytic in­ sights in chapter 3 is thoroughly consistent with a relational approach.) How this integration of relational theories—­sociological and psychoanalytic—­is to be effected is beyond the scope of the present study. But at least it should be noted that retaining a Freudian sensibility allows one to see that intrapsy­ chic structures and processes perform a refractive and mediating role vis-­à-­ vis the social. The inner life is rich and meaningful, and its relation with social experience dialogical not monological. In any case, consider this useful formulation by a psychoanalytic soci­ ologist: “Inner worlds and intrapsychic conflicts are imposed upon and give meaning to external situations. They affect the kinds of situations in which people put themselves, [as well as] their behavior and feelings within them. . . . All people are partly preoccupied with internal experience and mental life, partly live their past in the present. This preoccupation . . . can either enrich interpersonal relations (and work), or [it] can distort and even destroy them.”95 The inner world of the habitus can confer certain psychical advantages; it can be an asset. Or, alternatively, it can be a liability, putting those with tendencies toward internalized destructiveness at a severe disad­ vantage. As Du Bois noted of African Americans in The Souls of Black Folk, their debasement “could not but bring the inevitable self-­questioning, self-­ disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.”96 And later in his career, Du Bois himself would turn to Freud for ways of comprehending these processes: “I now began to realize,” he wrote in Dusk of Dawn, “that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determina­ tion of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age-­long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.”97 It was not Du Bois, however, but Fanon who explored these dynamics most deeply. In Black Skin, White Masks, he outlined a number of intrapsychic mechanisms that turn ex­ ternal domination into internal self-­negation. Speaking of identification with the aggressor, for example, he showed how “the young Negro,” even as a child consuming comic books, “subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude [and] invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression,” a violent self-­ rejection “on the plane of imagination.”98 As an adult, that individual comes to see in the white world all he lacks in himself: “If his psychic structure is

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weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other alone can give him worth.”99 For Fanon, “One is a Negro to the degree to which one is wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual. Everything that is the opposite of these Negro modes of behavior is white. . . . Black = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. In other words, he is Negro who is immoral. . . . In order to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence a Negro is forever in com­ bat with his own image.”100 In a word, the black man “enslaves himself.”101 One can produce endless such examples of self-­hatred and self-­negation in racial life. Consider the silence of a Native American schoolchild in an otherwise all-­white classroom, her self-­defeating, self-­denying withdrawal a product of lifelong feelings of being second class. Consider the African Amer­ ican youth of whom Wright remarked in Black Boy: “I began to marvel at how smoothly the[y] acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew that in some period of their growing up—­a period that they had no doubt forgotten—­there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotion from all that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals.”102 Symbolic violence entails self-­destruction and exclusion, a sense (at least at the tacit level) of not being in one’s proper place. It thereby re­ inforces social closure (to speak with Weber) and allows disparities in sta­ tus honor and dishonor to go unremarked and unchallenged. As Bourdieu observed in one of his own most psychoanalytic-­sounding passages: “The practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwittingly, con­ tribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on them, often takes the form of bodily emotion (shame, timidity, anxiety, guilt), often associated with the impression of regressing towards ar­ chaic relationships, those of childhood and the family. It is betrayed in visible manifestations, such as blushing, inarticulacy, clumsiness, trembling, all ways of submitting, however reluctantly, to the dominant judgment, sometimes in internal conflict and ‘self-­division,’ the subterranean complicity that a body slipping away from the directives of consciousness and will maintains with the violence of the censures inherent in the social structures.”103 Nowhere is the internal conflictedness and self-­negation of the domi­ nated more poignantly evidenced than in the case of nonwhites embracing

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conventional white standards of beauty. Recall from Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye the character Pecola, whose most fervent wish was to be white with blue eyes.104 From a young age, nonwhites learn that to be white is to be pretty and desirable; as psychologists long have shown, this is why, upon being given a choice of a white doll or a black one, black preschool and el­ ementary school children are much more likely to choose the white one. Or when asked to choose a color matching that of their own skin to fill in a person’s outline, they often do not select an accurate match but rather a crayon one or two shades lighter than their skin tone.105 One finds further evidence of symbolic violence in the dating preferences of males and females of different racial groups. Some black men prefer to date and later to marry nonblack, especially white, women. And a study of online personals found that, not only were black women excluded from dating preferences by all groups with the partial exception of black men, but also, Asian males were highly excluded by all groups, including Asian women.106 Such internalized processes of symbolic violence do not necessarily fade away with age. Ethnic plastic surgery frequently is performed in the United States, with “nose jobs” favored by blacks and double-­eyelid procedures (meant to make the eyes look rounder) by Asian Americans.107 In all these examples, psychical reality is as consequential as material reality, and Freudian mechanisms seem to play an important role. As Goffman observed in Stigma, “Given that the stigmatized individual . . . acquires identity standards which he applies to himself in spite of failing to conform to them, it is inevitable that he will feel some ambiva­ lence about his own self.”108 Symbolic violence also has significant effects in the educational sphere. Consider the social-­psychological phenomenon labeled “stereotype threat.” Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson have shown that the “risk of confirming, as self-­characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group”—­as when black students undertaking an intellectual task face the threat of confirming demean­ ing stereotypes about the intellectual capabilities of African Americans—­can interfere with intellectual performance.109 “Making African-­American par­ ticipants vulnerable to judgments by negative stereotypes about their group’s intellectual ability depressed their standardized test performance relative to White participants, while conditions designed to alleviate their threat im­ proved their performance, equating the two groups.”110 Similar findings have been produced relative to other groups besides African Americans.111 Racial domination infects the unconscious such that nonwhites end up reproducing racial inequality even without knowing it. Falling short of white standards need not be a matter of conscious decision, as in the choice to resist “acting white.” Much as racist attitudes easily “slip from the conscious mind deep

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into the muscles,” as Lillian Smith observed in Killers of the Dream, so too do anxieties and fears caused by racism become part of the unconscious—­and end up sabotaging efforts to succeed.112 Not only is symbolic violence an important dynamic in educational life, but also it leads to self-­destructiveness in other sites of everyday interaction. Inside the home, anger, frustration, and anguish, accumulated over years of discrimination, police harassment, working but not getting ahead, send­ ing children to rundown schools, everyday cuts because of one’s skin color, a slight here, a denied opportunity there, are displaced onto spouses and children (and oneself)—­yet another Freudian mechanism—­and result in a whole host of domestic maladies and, ultimately, broken families. Poverty by itself wreaks great havoc in marital lives, as with the young men studied by Liebow in Tally’s Corner, whose inability to confront “day in and day out” their own failures to live up to patriarchal male standards only added to their own (and their loved ones’) misery.113 Everyday interactions, too, are settings for self-­depreciation and self-­defeat. Consider Bigger Thomas’s submissive­ ness, in Native Son, during his interactions with his wealthy white employers, Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, one of whom (Mr. Dalton) also happens to be his slum­ lord. Here we see a tendency to revert back (or regress) to developmentally early modes of interaction.114 Or consider the tendency to internalize rage and torment. Racist cuts experienced on a daily basis result not only in out­ ward anger but also sometimes in inward, silent aggression. “Many African Americans feel uncontrollable rage,” notes hooks, “when we encounter white supremacist aggression. That rage is not pathological. It is an appropriate response to injustice. However, if not processed constructively, it can lead to pathological behavior.”115 (Bourdieu liked to speak of a “law of the conserva­ tion of violence.”116) Recent ethnographic work also has found that behavior used by some to survive or cope with poverty only exacerbates the problem. For instance, poor families often rely on strangers or “disposable ties” to sur­ vive conditions of economic deprivation. Doing so allows those caught in a desperate situation to make it from one day to the next, and yet those bonds are brittle and fleeting, lasting only for short intervals. Hence the survival strategy is both a response to and a cause of social instability: it can breed isolation and foster misgivings among peers.117 To adapt to the extreme structural disadvantage found in the reservation and the ghetto, many also develop dispositions and attitudes that promote addiction. Many social scientists view drug and alcohol abuse among vulner­ able populations as a kind of self-­medication in response to social suffer­ ing. Asked why Native Americans have dramatically high rates of alcoholism, Duster traces it to the displacement of American Indians from their native

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soil: “Their diets were dramatically changed, social organizations and econ­ omies destroyed, family structures disrupted, circumstances of work fun­ damentally altered or obliterated.” This, coupled with easy access to cheap alcohol, “might drive some to drink!”118 But drinking, in turn, often brings about or intensifies economic and social marginalization. Consider also the self-­negating and unconstructive tendency toward violent crime. According to Elijah Anderson, black youth living in poor inner-­city neighborhoods op­ erate under a “code of the street,” which requires them to present themselves as aggressive, hard menaces who are not to be trifled with and who, at a sec­ ond’s notice, will “act a fool” and resort to violence.119 Disrespected, in the fullest sense of the term, by mainstream white society, these poor black youth create their own ways of allocating respect and honor; but these only serve to damage bodies and souls and to reproduce the conditions of the youth’s domination.120 Among the most common cases of self-­destructive behavior is inner-­city violence committed by poor nonwhites against one another. One historian observes that “anger and frustration explode in gang warfare, homi­ cide, and random killing in drive-­by shootings. But civil violence . . . aimed largely at symbols and agents of exclusion and exploitation remain part of urban history, not lived possibilities of the urban present.”121 This raises another issue. Symbolic violence among poor minority pop­ ulations is not completely reducible to self-­destructive behavior, for also it encompasses the absence of productive political behavior aimed at social ad­ vancement: whether it be participation in an organized social movement or engagement in civil disobedience. If the Civil Rights Movement was a direct challenge to racial subjugation, its absence is evidence of a submission to the established order. The depoliticization of the urban poor and other vulner­ able populations may be the clearest example of a stigmatized group accept­ ing the lousy terms society has handed them. Why do we not see people up in arms about mass incarceration, exploitation within the low-­income housing market, income inequality, or awful living conditions on Indian reservations? “Given the obdurate persistence of racism in American culture,” writes Janet Abu-­Lughod, “and the widening divides in the racial/ethnic/class system over the past three decades[,] . . . one might have expected more collective re­ sponses, especially in the major cities of the nation, where their effects are felt most profoundly.”122 The historian Michael Katz is more succinct: “A num­ ber of the conditions thought to have precipitated the eruption of the civil violence in the 1960s either [have] persisted or [have grown] worse. . . . Why did no one light a match?”123 Katz attributes this undeserved political calm to changes in urban space (white flight), the growth of the black middle class, and the hyperpolicing of poor minority communities. Others have pointed

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to the proliferation of the nonprofit sector: “The citizen retreats. The client advances.”124 Yet neither explanation speaks directly to the social psychology of potential match lighters. King recognized that the Civil Rights Movement must be fought first in minds and hearts before it can be fought in the streets. And his criticism of those who stood in its path, the “well-­meaning and the ill-­meaning,” spoke to the symbolic violence on which both racist and gradu­ alist positions rely. “There is a terrible parallel,” he wrote in 1963, “between the outstretched and greedy hand of a slave trafficker who sold a Negro his own person, and the uplifted and admonishing finger of people who say to­ day: ‘What more will the Negro expect if he gains such rights as integrated schools, public facilities, voting rights, and progress in housing? Will he, like Oliver Twist, demand more?’ What is implied here is the amazing assumption that society has the right to bargain with the Negro for this freedom which inherently belongs to him.”125 Symbolic violence entails misrecognizing one­ self as something less than a full individual—­as something less than a person entitled to dignities, protections, and rights—­and thus resigning oneself to a kind of partial and unfulfilled humanity. The concept of symbolic violence helps us to move beyond the often fruit­ less culture-­of-­poverty debates that, beginning a half century ago, have con­ tinued in altered but recognizable form to this very day. It does so because, whenever lay commentators as well as scholars have spoken of a culture of poverty (something by its nature collective and transpersonal), they actually have done so using examples of symbolic violence at the individual level—­ that is, self-­destructive habits and dispositions in the domain of individual experience. Since the two levels of analysis—­one cultural, the other social-­ psychological—­have not been systematically distinguished from one another, the result has been a theoretical muddle that discourages constructive de­ bate and theory building. The very questions the culture-­of-­poverty idea was meant to underscore have been left underexamined.126 A great deal of ink has been spilled, sharply polarizing scholarly as well as political debate. No con­ cept has been so widely reviled in the recent history of racial analysis. We even owe the disparaging term “blaming the victim” to a critique once directed at the culture-­of-­poverty thesis.127 Analysts of race in the United States, liberal and conservative alike, heatedly have disputed whether there is a culture of poverty to begin with, what it might mean, what causes it, and what is to be done about it. Little light has been shed on the problem of how deep-­seated tendencies associated with poverty and racism might be conceptualized. The idea of symbolic violence allows us better to understand these tendencies. So too does the relational insight that symbolic violence cannot be understood without also studying the structural constraints imposed by the racial order.

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Thus, replacing the culture-­of-­poverty concept with clearer understandings of racial fields and agency, on the one hand, and of social psychology (in particular, symbolic violence), on the other, can lead us to a more satisfactory reformulation of the issue. In our view, the renewal of the culture-­of-­poverty debate in altered, transfigured form represents a salutary move toward the recovery of indis­ pensable old questions and concerns. As Patterson correctly has observed, “Socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power.”128 However, what this literature also needs is a deeper engagement with social psychology. The opening salvos only brush the surface—­ “culture matters”—­ while offer­ ing basic analytic lessons on how to study it: “focus on the scripts, codes, discourses, and so on.” How is one to understand how culture matters in ghettos, barrios, reservations, or trailer parks without also understanding the unconscious habits and tendencies through which actors engage with their institutional settings? Wilson was right to intuit that much of what passes as culture really is social psychology. In the terminology we have been deploy­ ing, it is symbolic violence. Consider, for example, mental health problems among vulnerable populations, including extremely high rates of depression and anxiety disorders. One study finds that American Indians who com­ monly are misrecognized racially (as perhaps Italian or Mexican) have higher rates of psychological distress than those who are not.129 Not only is social structure important to such a story but also culture and even collective emo­ tions. Crucial as well is how all these come together in interactions and in­ stitutions. But so too is the habitus important—­a cleft, tormented habitus prone to self-­negation and self-­denial. In the end, is not this story of mental health problems as much about how racism affects the psyche—­and about how the psyche, in turn, affects the racial order—­as it is about culture and social structure? The early pragmatism-­inspired sociologists rightly insisted that social psychology—­a matter of personal disorganization and reorganization—­be decoupled from transpersonal structures and dynamics. To a degree, systems of dispositions do have a life of their own. Again, in the language of psycho­ analysis, unconscious habits and tendencies manifest a certain adhesiveness and compulsion to repeat. Since often in the lives of the racially dominated these are the habits and tendencies of symbolic violence, a key feature of pragmatist sociology becomes less persuasive—­namely, its optimism re­ garding the prospects for personal reconstruction. (On the other end of the theoretical spectrum, those who, in a determinist spirit, shift analytic atten­ tion from culture and social psychology to the social-­structural aspects of political economy similarly point in unpromising directions.) It is important

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to retain, by contrast, a processual orientation that stresses the potential for continual reorganization even in the midst of disorganization and disarray. Here the new sociologists of poverty do have a good deal to offer, for among their most prominent concerns is the sheer multifacetedness, complexity, and dynamism of ghetto life.130 Not all the experiences of the racially dominated involve symbolic violence. Nor do those experiences all serve to reproduce poverty and despair. The trajectory of social policy since the end of the Civil Rights Era has not moved entirely in a hopeful or promising direction. How­ ever, this makes all the more urgent the task of investigating by alternative means what used to be called, misleadingly, the culture of poverty. In other words, the causes and effects of symbolic violence are more than legitimate objects of analysis, and the importance of “culture” to the reproduction of social inequality ultimately is a matter that can be settled only empirically. In the meantime, let us not fail to recognize that those at the upper ech­ elons of the societal (and racial) hierarchy also engage in—­and are afflicted by—­symbolic violence. In the mid-­twentieth century, as we have seen, Frazier described in stark terms the “marks of oppression” exhibited by the black bourgeoisie. In quasi-­Freudian terminology, he observed that “the repressed hostilities of middle-­class Negroes to whites are . . . directed . . . inward toward themselves. This results in self-­hatred, which may appear from their behav­ ior to be directed towards the Negro masses but which in reality is directed against themselves. While pretending to be proud of being a Negro, they ridi­ cule Negroid characteristics or efface them as much as possible. Within their own groups they constantly proclaim that ‘niggers’ make them sick. The very use of the term ‘nigger,’ which they claim to resent, indicates that they want to disassociate themselves from the Negro masses.”131 The black bourgeoisie, in Frazier’s view, “suffered spiritually not only because they were affected by ideas concerning the Negro’s inferiority, but perhaps even more because they had adopted the white man’s values and patterns of behavior. Consequently, they [had] developed an intense inferiority complex.”132 An empty, status-­ seeking lifestyle was the outward symptom of this spiritual suffering. So too was hostility directed against other dominated groups.133 In the more recent era of affirmative action, ostentatious living and scapegoating have been, if not replaced, at least supplemented in new professional strata by other forms of symbolic violence. Rising up the corporate ladder and standing out against other (mostly white) supervisors, nonwhites in positions of power, especially those placed there as racial tokens, often feel isolated and weighted down by performance pressures. Rather than react angrily to the double standards afflicting them, they internalize and somatize their resentments, resulting fre­ quently in hypertension and other physical ailments—­as well as in various

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forms of addiction and depression. “To perpetuate and maintain white su­ premacy,” concludes hooks, her words applying to all racially dominated groups (not only blacks), “white folks have colonized black Americans, and a part of that colonizing process has been teaching us to repress our rage, to never make them the targets of any anger we feel about racism. . . . By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimi­ late, . . . white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit. . . . All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”134 Hence the title of a recent bestseller: Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting.135 Earlier we observed that symbolic violence can be found, too, in the dom­ inant sector of the racial order. It is important that we conclude our discus­ sion by returning to this important insight, for among the most grievous harms that can be inflicted, quite unintentionally, on the dominated is to suggest that symbolic violence and self-­negation entirely are their concern. Whites, too, evince self-­negation in many of their actions. As one scholar expresses it, attempting to capture a popular sentiment, “To be outside white­ ness is to be outside the cold and instrumental realm of modernity.”136 White­ ness is seen as lifeless and dull—­sexless, oppressive, and painfully normal. Nonwhiteness, by contrast, is regarded as cool and liberated, sexy and inter­ esting. It is, in the minds of many, more fully human. As an American teacher once told Fanon, “The presence of Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little hu­ man sustenance.”137 Some whites take brief vacations from their whiteness, as in the case of those who travel to Mexico to participate in mock border-­ crossing expeditions, a growing tourist industry that promises participants the thrill and danger hundreds of real Mexican migrants experience every year.138 Others—­especially adolescents—­attempt to break with their white­ ness in more mundane but also enduring ways, taking on another (nonwhite) racial or ethnic identity. In an ethnography of white students in a majority black school in Texas, Edward Morris discovered that whites often shed their whiteness for what they perceive to be “blackness.” They wear their hair in cornrows, sag their jeans, tilt their caps, wear gold chains, and speak “black English.” Some white students are so skilled at passing as nonwhites that, at the beginning of his study, Morris had a hard time distinguishing the white students from their light-­skinned nonwhite peers.139 Amy Wilkins discovered similar patterns in her study of a multiracial school in Massachusetts, where some white girls turn themselves into “Puerto Rican wannabes.” “The typi­ cal Puerto Rican wannabe,” she observed, “rejects white middle-­class cultural

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style, adopting an urban presentation of self associated with people of color. She wears hip-­hop clothes and Puerto Rican hairstyles, drinks malt liquor and smokes Newports. She adopts an attitude, acting tough and engaging in verbal and physical fights. And perhaps most important, she dates and has sex with Black and Puerto Rican men.”140 In none of these cases, significantly, are the benefits and privileges so closely associated with whiteness foregone. Across all these examples, the concept of symbolic violence neither grants everything to structural causation nor blames the hapless victim. Rather, it shifts analytic attention to the domain of internalized dispositions. “The effect of symbolic domination . . . is exerted not in the pure logic of knowing con­ sciousnesses but through the schemes of perception, appreciation, and action that are constitutive of habitus and which, below the level of the decisions of consciousness and the controls of the will, set up a cognitive relationship that is profoundly obscure to itself.”141 In other words, the stark division be­ tween analyses in terms of causes and analyses in terms of reasons—­so much a constant in race theory—­must be overcome in favor of analyses in terms of unconscious habits and repressed internal workings of the habitus. So long a commonplace of racial inquiry at the descriptive level, symbolic violence needs now to become a mainstay of systematic racial explanation. This in turn can have important implications for societal reconstruction, as we shall see in the next chapter, for it underscores that what is required is thoroughgo­ ing transformation of the social conditions of production of (self-­negating) racial habitus. The only way to bring about far-­reaching change that entails more than merely replacing one modality of racial domination with another is to address specifically, and to undo the mechanisms of, primary as well as secondary socialization (in the family, schools, churches, workplace, and so forth), which shapes and molds habitus prone to symbolic violence. Here is one respect in which Bourdieuian socioanalysis and Freudian psychoanalysis can work together, in the Enlightenment spirit they so much have in com­ mon, to enhance knowledge of the interpenetration of collective and intra­ psychic processes in racial life—­and thereby to foster greater possibilities for human fulfillment, or at least the alleviation of internalized suffering. Racial Intelligence We conclude with a section on the social psychology of intelligent engage­ ment with the complex challenges of our racial order. In what follows, we consider habits of constructive negotiation with, or even circumvention of, racial domination, pondering where these habits come from, what they en­ tail, and how they might be fostered. Inspired by a Freudian concern with

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love and aggression, we examine how anger and compassion can be subli­ mated (to speak in Freudian language) into effective ways of addressing circumstances of racial ambiguity and injustice, circumstances that call for reflective engagement and, at times, even practical wisdom.142 Our discussion necessarily is brief because the subject matter itself is both theoretically ill charted and empirically circumscribed. Theoretically, much as Freud himself wrote less about sublimation than he did about patterns of unconscious self-­ negation and conflict, so too have race analysts written less about healthy and harmonious systems of dispositions than they have about the dispositions of racial self-­centering (as in whiteness studies) or racial self-­subordination (as in studies of symbolic violence and the culture of poverty).143 Empirically, the terrain of possible investigation also has been delimited. There is considerable evidence that many Americans are beginning to appreciate the inherent value and dignity of all persons, regardless of their origins or skin color. This is especially true of the youth, who, in terms of their racial and ethnic attitudes, probably are the most open-­minded and tolerant generation in the nation’s history. And yet the empirical phenomenon of the racial democratic habitus is less than fully established—­it remains more the exception than the rule—­ and seems to belong more to the realm of normative reflection than to that of empirically realized fact. Even those developments that seem most vividly to exemplify racial democratic dispositions and strategies of action reveal, when scrutinized, the persistence of racial domination. For instance, even though interracial relationships can be seen in each instance as a small assault on racial division in intimate life, many such relationships are propelled by racial aversion (a variant of symbolic violence applied to prospective lov­ ers of the same race) or by racial fetishism (a kind of racial tourism with an erotic twist).144 All this notwithstanding, however, it is will be crucial to de­ vote attention not only to the negative and self-­denying aspects of racialized psyches but also to their more positive potentialities. The topic of intelligent racial habitus is an increasingly important one. To think otherwise would be to deny the possibility of racial progress itself at the social-­psychological level—­and to accept that all there is, and all there will be, is internalized racial oppression. the intelligence of anger In an earlier chapter, we defined intelligence as consisting, in Dewey’s words, in a “capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accor­ dance with [that] estimate.”145 It is a capacity, we pointed out, closely linked to practical evaluation, a crucial element in our chordal triad of racial agency.

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Understood in this way, intelligence is to be found even in the most mundane of our everyday practices; it infuses the most unselfconscious and taken-­ for-­granted of our habits and dispositions. Habits themselves can be intel­ ligent; it is possible to speak as well of habits of intelligence. That is, habits can evince a tendency to respond flexibly and in an appropriate, constructive, and problem-­solving spirit to the circumstances at hand. As Dewey once said, intelligence “subject[s] habit-­forming in a particular case to the habit of rec­ ognizing that new modes of association will exact a new use of it. Thus habit is formed in view of possible future changes and does not harden so easily.”146 Or, as Peirce put it, “The highest quality of mind involves greatest readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them.”147 In our racial order, this “readiness” means open and supple response to the racial Other, sound practi­ cal judgment in navigating the often perilous currents of racial condescension and prejudice, and self-­affirmation or self-­acceptance instead of internalized hatred and self-­destructiveness. These too are (or ought to be) key features of a social psychology of racial life. Many of the social-­psychological tendencies and mechanisms we have discussed seem to work against the formation of intelligent habits. Among the dominants of our racial order, whiteness of­ ten precludes the development of intelligent modalities of response because many whites have a deep-­seated tendency to see themselves as unraced and normal. By presenting themselves as the unmarked norm, they preclude any genuine possibility of relating in a dialogical, as opposed to a monological, manner (in the language of Bakhtin) to the racial Other.148 Correspond­ ingly, the symbolic violence inflicted on the dominated—­of course, it is a self-­infliction too—­prevents the latter from cultivating habits of effective, creative problem solving in respect to the challenges both of external and internal reality. A tormented, inwardly conflicted psyche most likely cannot be an effective problem solver. Yet, despite these less hopeful trends, habits of intelligence also (and ever) are in incipient formation—­to think again in processual terms. Psychical reality is a world of multitudinous tendencies and countertendencies. Without some degree of intelligence, how could one be­ gin to engage all the complexities that mark our racial order? Of course, it easily could be said in reply that intelligent response to hos­ tile and discriminatory situations, at least so far as the racially dominated are concerned, never is possible because one only can respond to such situations with rage. The only possible mode of engagement is anger, which by its na­ ture is unintelligent. Such a reply is inadequate for two closely related reasons. First, as Aristotle held in his doctrine of the mean (which frequently has been misinterpreted), excellence of character is not to be defined always by mod­ erately emotional responses, such as tepid irritation when a great injustice

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has been perpetrated. Rather, it means, as he expressed it, that one becomes angry only “in the manner that reason instructs, and at those people and for that length of time.”149 Or, as one commentator has glossed it, one “feel[s] and manifest[s] each emotion [such as anger] at such times, on such matters, toward such people, for such reasons, and in such ways as are proper. . . . It must be wrong . . . that we should decide how to act on particular occasions by working in from the extremes.”150 Cold rationality in the face of injustice often is an inappropriate moral and expressive response.151 How then does one act on particular occasions? Practical judgment determines just what emotion or action (and in what degree, and so forth) is best. Even when cir­ cumstances might seem to elicit unthinking passion, there is an ineliminable function for intelligence to serve. Second, as many philosophers have taken to arguing in recent years, emotions themselves can be (more or less) intel­ ligent. To respond to an unjust racial situation with resignation or self-­doubt is, while perfectly understandable from the point of view of socioanalysis (or psychoanalysis), nonetheless also a form of emotional engagement lacking in appropriate or sound judgment. As Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, “Emotions are not simply blind surges of affect. . . . They have an important cognitive element: they embody ways of interpreting the world. The feelings that go with the experience of emotion are hooked up with and rest upon be­ liefs or judgments that are their basis or ground, in such a way that the emo­ tion as a whole can appropriately be evaluated as true and false, and also as rational or irrational, according to our evaluation of the grounding belief.”152 Hence it simply cannot be true, even in the most extreme of cases, that intel­ ligence has no significant role to play in racial life. Consider a prosaic, quotidian example from the present day: the anger that many people of color experience when suffering one of the “thousand cuts” so familiar to them from their everyday lives at work, school, and public settings. Nonwhites who have gained a certain degree of economic security cannot escape these sometimes daily reminders of the order of things. In his controversial essay “On Being Black and Middle Class,” Shelby Steele wonders whether black professionals’ use of the label “the black middle class” to refer to themselves is only “an exercise in self-­flattery, a pathetic pretension, to give meaning to such a distinction. . . . After all, since when ha[s] white America taken note of anything but color when it [comes] to blacks? [There is] an old Malcolm X line that had been popular in the sixties. Question: What is a black man with a Ph.D.? Answer: A nigger.”153 In Killing Rage, hooks also observes: “Indeed, if black people have not learned our place as second-­class citizens through educational institutions, we learn it by the daily assaults perpetrated by white offenders on our bodies and beings that we feel but rarely publicly

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protest or name. . . . A black person unashamed of her rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-­ actualization, ha[s] no real place in the existing social structure.”154 Yet blacks, like other occupants of the dominated sectors of the racial space, frequently do reflect in critical fashion on the causes and sources of their anger and direct it thereupon at the appropriate targets, in the appropriate ways, and at the appropriate moments. (Steele reflects on a time when he berated a white English professor for a racist act: “Like Cross Damon in [Richard Wright’s] Outsider who kills in perfectly righteous anger, I tried to annihilate the man. I punished him not according to the measure of his crime but according to the measure of my vulnerability, a measure set by the cumulative tension of years of repressed terror.”155) Sometimes anger even becomes a habit of intel­ ligent response to the unintelligent mistreatment and outrages daily experi­ enced: in a phrase, a habitus of righteous indignation. Racial dominants often fail to understand the rage exhibited by this habitus and misinterpret it as sullenness or as a “difficult” disposition. On a larger scale, consider also the case of abolitionist John Brown, who, as we saw earlier, organized armed insurrections against slavery in the years just before the Civil War and eventually was executed. Derided in his own time, and for many years thereafter, as an out-­of-­control, violent terrorist and fanatic, he now is widely regarded as a paragon of moral righteousness, a man who (in Du Bois’s ringing words) “pointed the way to liberty and real­ ized that the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression.”156 Paintings of him by Jacob Lawrence portray him as a deeply pensive, reflective moral thinker.157 Moral perception and reflection, even if inflected with rage at ra­ cial injustice, are core aspects of a social psychology of intelligent practical judgment. Consider also Geronimo, reviled by whites in his day as “the worst Indian who ever lived” but today recognized for his just struggle to defend Apache tribal lands.158 Or consider the black foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. Rooted in the church and other organizational settings devoted to the cause of fighting Jim Crow, they engaged in highly deliberate—­yet, for all that, passional—­deliberation, choice making, and action in response to the forces arrayed against them. Not all blacks at the time were so inclined. In 1966, when King tried to organize African Americans in South and West Chicago to fight ghettoization, he was flabbergasted at their apparent apathy, telling an SCLC staff member, “You ain’t never seen no Negroes like this, have you, Dorothy? . . . Boy, if we could crack these Chicago Negroes we can crack anything.”159 Hosea Williams, another SCLC activist, put it like this: “The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than I’ve ever seen. . . . They are beaten down psychologically. We are used to working with

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people who want to be free.”160 But as Lewis also pointed out, “when the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations” or oth­ erwise “organized into political movements that seek fundamental revolu­ tionary changes,” they shed the “despair, apathy, and hopelessless” associated with symbolic violence.161 Certainly, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement exemplifed habits of racial intelligence. King, Williams, and so many others at the forefront of its struggles for racial justice—­think also of Fannie Lou Hamer, Cesar Chavez, or Jack Macnamara, the white priest who led the fight against racist property speculators in Chicago—­all were ordinary (in a few cases, extraordinary) persons who broke out of conditions of powerlessness with remarkable practical wisdom and guts. What was true of earlier struggles does not necessarily apply, however, to the present day. How is one to respond when racial domination has ren­ dered the situation highly opaque and contradictory, such that confusion reigns and the way forward is not clear? What habits of intelligence can rise to meet that challenge? Moral habits can be taxed to the limit by situations such as those depicted in the Academy Award–­winning movie Crash, which grapples with racial (as well as class-­based) tensions in Los Angeles.162 Tem­ pers flare between a racist white police officer and black citizens, a wealthy white woman and her Hispanic maid, an Iranian storeowner and a tattooed Hispanic family man, and so the movie goes. The difficulty is that the film be­ rates viewers with one jarringly racist exchange and insult after another and, in the end, conveys the impression that virtually everybody is a racist and that racism is violent and visible and quite conscious, an ensemble of mean atti­ tudes and opinions possessed by whites and nonwhites alike. Little mention is made of historical and institutional racism, while racism is represented as affecting all people equally. But even so, many of the movie’s failures in reflexivity and clearheadedness reflect a genuine and widespread lack of clar­ ity as to the sources as well as the nature of our racial problems. Its inability to discern a way forward is a failure felt by many today, white and nonwhite alike. An even more complex depiction of perplexity is to be found in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, whose climactic scene includes a black charac­ ter’s death caused by police brutality, the ensuing riot, and a juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory constructions (by King and Malcolm X) of the wise response.163 Here the short-­term task of determining how appropriately to think and act takes on a tragic hue. For as Sidney Hook observed in his clas­ sic essay “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life,” when good is set against good, when good opposes right, or when right conflicts with right, the path is fraught with uncertainty, and creative intelligence is hard put to respond.164 Is destroying retail businesses run by nonblacks (one an Italian American

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pizzeria, the other a Korean grocery store) a sound response to the killing of a black youth in the ghetto? Is it a misguided expression of rage against racial oppression? Should the way forward be nonviolent, or is violence permissible “when it’s self-­defense”? (In that event, as Malcolm X declares in a statement shown at the end of the film, “I call it intelligence.”165) In a historical period in which racial domination—­and what to do about it—­are less than fully trans­ parent, such dilemmas are emblematic of the challenges facing racial actors. t h e i n t e l l i g e n c e o f c o m pa s s i o n We turn now to a rather different set of racial habits and tendencies—­namely, those that respond to problematic racial situations not so much with anger or righteous indignation as with compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and love. These habits of racial intelligence, too, must figure prominently in the so­ cial psychology of race.166 Let us begin with racially homogeneous settings with largely unquestioned racial boundaries—­and, again, with Aristotle, whose ethical theory was written with just such settings in mind. No clearcut principle exists, he pointed out, for adjudicating among different alternative responses to challenging situations, the mean or appropriate response be­ ing “determined [instead] by . . . that principle by which the man of practi­ cal wisdom (phronimos) would determine it.”167 How would the person of practical wisdom respond? How would she or he interpret the situation, en­ gage with it passionally and intellectually, and act in respect to it? Aristotle’s perspective—­or something much like it—­long has been embraced in certain communities of color, where the Aristotelian phronimos is embodied in such figures as the medicine man (in some American Indian traditions) or the old head (in the black ghetto). As Anderson has noted, “Traditionally, the ‘old head’ was a man of stable means who believed in hard work, family life, and the church[,] . . . [and whose] acknowledged role was to teach, support, encourage, and in effect socialize young men to meet their responsibilities regarding work, family, the law, and common decency. The young boy . . . had confidence in the old head’s ability to impart useful wisdom and practical advice about life.”168 In self-­contained settings of ethical life like the ghetto, the old head not only would impose (in good Durkheimian fashion) moral discipline and constraint but also would foster a spirit of caring: a monoracial habitus of compassion.169 Whether by loaning a young boy money “to get some underwear and toiletries so he can get ready to leave for the army,” or otherwise by lending a helping hand to community youth afflicted by behavioral illness, abuse, homelessness, or prolonged joblessness, he would

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personify (and teach) a practical wisdom of mutual kindness and obligation. “Often the old head acted as surrogate father to those who needed attention, care, and moral support.”170 Far more important even than the virtues of hard work, steady employment, and the like, this ghetto phronimos embodied, and cultivated in others, an important type of racial intelligence.171 Of course, the scope of applicability of the old head’s practical wisdom largely was restricted to the black ghetto, as was the medicine man’s to the Na­ tive American community to which he belonged. These social worlds, much like Aristotle’s polis, are relatively circumscribed and do not pose the sorts of problems one often encounters in settings marked by diversity (although one also should bear in mind that many of the social ills endemic to those smaller worlds can be traced back to racial domination). Let us next consider, then, how the intelligence of compassion engages with the challenges more typi­ cally to be found in complex, racially diverse situations. We can begin with the multiracial habitus, which accepts and affirms dominant racial bound­ aries, and the racial categories that result from them, but tries to fit itself between those categories. This is not the white ethnic habitus moving fluidly, in Waters’s depiction, among generic white and white-­ethnic identifications (“part Irish” in one setting; “part Italian” in another). Rather, it is the “mixed-­ race” habitus that, as Kimberly DaCosta has argued in Making Multiracials, is “made of ‘racial stuff ’” even as it seeks to “challeng[e] the principle of racial classification itself. . . . The logic of mixed race stems from the same underly­ ing logic that preceded it—­that individuals have race, and when they com­ bine sexually we get ‘racial mixture.’ Both ideas assume there is race.”172 The multiracial habitus subjectively experiences the anxieties and uncertainties that come with occupying a liminal position (to speak in the Durkheimian language of Douglas and Turner173) in the racial scheme of things, feelings of racial inauthenticity that stem from its not possessing “the appropriate dispositions and cultural knowledge.”174 Its affirmation and validation of its own dispositions toward boundary crossing (a virtue born of necessity) thus constitute an intelligent solution to the problems, internal as well as external, facing it. As DaCosta shows, there is creativity here—­and self-­determination. There is liberation. But there also is compassion. Not only does the multi­ racial habitus approach its own self with a newfound spirit of kindness and caring; it also gains a compassionate concern toward others. “Walking down the street,” says one of DaCosta’s respondents, “I can’t look at someone and immediately conclude that I’m not related to them in some way[;] maybe not immediately but somewhere back in history we probably had some common ancestors. . . . How can you discriminate against someone if you acknowledge

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that they’re related to you? You can’t discriminate against your brother or sis­ ter. . . . We are talking about the whole idea of one common humanity, . . . and I think that’s a part of multiracial identity.”175 The intelligence of compassion figures prominently in yet another type of racial habitus. The cosmopolitan habitus (unlike that of mixed-­race per­ sons) rejects all dominant racial categories—­it disputes the very reality of race itself—­and constructs itself in ways not at all dependent on race. Ac­ cepting the notion, as we do as well in chapter 2, that race is an arbitrary yet well-­founded fiction, this habitus—­as much a creature of treatises in philosophy and political theory as it is an empirically realized, identifiable object—­approaches all projects of ethnic identification with suspicion. It presumes, with Appiah, that “ethnoracial identities . . . risk becoming the ob­ sessive focus, the be-­all and end-­all, of the lives of those who identify with them[;] [that they] lead people to forget that their individual identities are complex and multifarious[;] . . . [and that they] lead them, in obliterating the identities they share with people outside their race or ethnicity, away from the possibility of identification with Others.”176 For the cosmopolitan habitus, ethnoracial identification is inadequate not only in its monoracial form (which, like the dispositions of Aristotle’s citizen, fails to recognize one’s positive attachments to humanity beyond the boundaries of the polis) but also in its more differentiated form, as in multiracialism (which for all its expansiveness remains caught up in racialized ways of thinking). The cos­ mopolitan understands herself in universalistic terms as a kosmou polites or citizen of the world. As Marcus Aurelius declared in his Meditations, “My city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world.”177 The cosmopolitan also believes, to invoke a modern thinker, John Stuart Mill, in something much like a “Religion of Humanity,” which Mill described in “The Utility of Religion” as that “sense of unity with man­ kind, and a deep feeling for the general good, . . . cultivated into a sentiment and a principle capable of fulfilling every important function of religion and itself justly entitled to the name.”178 Mead referred to this same spirit as a disposition toward “universal neighborliness.”179 And while invested in family, community, and racial group—­the smallest of the concentric circles spoken of by Hierocles, in perhaps the founding image of all cosmopolitan thinking—­its categories of perception and judgment regard as most valuable the universal community (the widest circle) of global citizenship. This disposition to see oneself and others as citizens of the world inti­ mately is connected with intelligent compassion and with what Appiah calls, in a resonant phrase, “kindness to strangers.”180 More than respect for others—­

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Kant’s categorical imperative—­it implies an acknowledgment of their vulner­ abilities, an identification with their concerns, and a disposition to see their good as bound up with one’s own. (“It is the task of the well-­tempered man,” advised Hierocles, “. . . to draw the circles together somehow towards the cen­ ter and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones.”181) Of course, it is easier to treat with compassion those who are most familiar to us, those who resemble us (in racial and other re­ spects), those with whom we share a way of life. And racial cruelty often is accompanied by a disavowal of one’s commonalities with the Other. Many in philosophy and the social sciences therefore have argued that being exposed to racial Others means becoming favorably disposed toward them. Tocqueville offered a twist on this idea when observing that, although the “three races” on American soil were destined to remain strangers to one another and even antagonistic, the range of empathy in society was generally increasing, since democracy eliminates the formal distinctions among categories of people: “In democratic ages men . . . show a general compassion for all the human race.”182 Dewey, for his part, pointed out optimistically that racial prejudice is nothing other than an “unconscious habit” of “spontaneous aversion,” an “instinctive aversion of mankind to what is new and unusual, to whatever is different from what we are used to, and which thus shocks our customary habits.”183 Not specifically racial in any case but a universal human trait, this aversion would vanish once interaction created familiarity with the racial Other.184 Ideas simi­ lar to Dewey’s also informed the pragmatist sociology of the Chicago School, where Thomas’s theory of the “psychology of race-­prejudice” essentially reca­ pitulated Dewey’s arguments and Park and Burgess recast the basic theme in natural-­history form.185 And in psychology, these ideas were formalized (in the form of the “contact hypothesis”) by Allport.186 Clearly, the ideas of racial in­ teraction and familiarity have earned far-­reaching support. Where they come up short, however, is in not discerning that cosmopolitanism entails as well a spirit of caring and concern for those we do not know. Kindness to strangers extends precisely to strangers, and compassion must embrace the unfamiliar as well as the better known. In chapter 7, we shall have more to say about cosmopolitanism as a pos­ sible end of racial reconstruction. We also shall explore the notion that, just as righteous indignation and compassion negate symbolic violence, so too does the cosmopolitan’s disposition toward kindness to strangers negate the drive of white privilege (as discussed above) to appropriate and expand. In addition, we shall discuss arguments for racial justice that go beyond even the call for kindness to strangers. But for the moment, let us instead take the

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argument in a different direction by focusing on the following three themes: racial intelligence includes a willingness to dedicate onself to cultural labor, or “doing the work”; it embraces the challenge of approaching the racial Other in a spirit of caring forgiveness; and it involves a disposition to love. To begin with, then, what does “doing the work” entail? It proceeds from the notion that racial contact and familiarity simply are not enough for attaining racial justice. At a bare minimum, there also must be a willingness to broaden one’s cultural competence, to step out of one’s comfort zone and try as far as possi­ ble to adopt the Other’s perspective on the world. It includes as well a certain curiosity about the racial Other and his or her plight. As Addams expressed it, “We learn . . . that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burden.”187 Doing the work in this way applies to any meaningful relationship that traverses racial boundaries—­not only romances and marriages but also friendships and professional associations. It applies as well to being a citizen in a diverse and multiracial polity. And in certain instances, it leads to active resistance and a willingness to sacrifice. It even can lead to a questioning and reversal of the drive toward ontological expansiveness, which, as mentioned earlier, is most evident in racial dominants. Racial intelligence entails as well a disposition to forgive. While Aristotle affirmed that the virtuous person “is not given to revenge but is inclined to be forgiving,” and Kant held in his Metaphysics of Morals that the austere requirements of moral duty are supported and enhanced by a disposition toward sympathy, it was Hannah Arendt—­herself no stranger either to the philosophy of antiquity or to modern ethics—­who highlighted an important truth when she pointed out, in The Human Condition, that neither the an­ cients nor the moderns but Jesus of Nazareth was the true “discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.” Arendt added: “The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense.”188 Jesus’s doctrine of forgiveness was (and is) essential to racial action. Inward destructiveness and symbolic violence depend not only on a lack of compas­ sion for oneself, as suggested earlier, but also on the very absence of self-­ forgiveness. Although, in Arendt’s view, one cannot forgive oneself (we need others to do that), many others persuasively have argued that racial healing requires an inward disposition of mercy. One cannot heal inwardly without self-­absolution and acceptance. Outwardly, too, as Arendt also noted, forgive­ ness is crucial for healing otherwise perpetually open wounds. “Forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-­acting against

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an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. . . . Forgiving is the only reaction which does not merely re-­act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’s teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relent­ less automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.”189 There is much indeed to be forgiven in the past and present of our racial order. And there are many in fact who would exclaim, “Less forgiving, more apologizing!” Yet, lest one remain caught up forevermore in a spirit of corrosive vengefulness, it is the part of practical wisdom to bear a forgiving disposition toward others, a disposition as distinct from vindictiveness and the impulse to retaliate as freedom is from necessity and the miracle of natal­ ity from mechanical repetition. Arendt concluded that “only love has the power to forgive.”190 In the face of so much racial domination, so much racial injustice, will love prevail? In Do the Right Thing, the character Radio Raheem brandishes two sets of brass knuckles, one of which spells H-­A-­T-­E and the other L-­O-­V-­E. “When the left hand hate is kicking much ass,” he declares, “and it looks like the right hand love is finished,” love comes roaring back. “Wham. Wham. Left hand hate KO’ed by love.”191 What sort of love might that be? A most peculiar sort, one that the Greeks, and Christian theologians, called agape. Racial intelli­ gence animated by it “brings closure to disputes,” observes Boltanski, who has written a major study on it, by choosing “neither [to] hold onto things nor [to] expect things. . . . [Agape] does not so much insist that trespasses must be forgiven as that they must be dismissed, in order to allow ‘life to go on,’ in Arendt’s apt phrase. It is the letting-­go, the release—­in short, the capacity to forget—­that characterizes agape’s relation to past offenses.”192 In place of racial hatred, the bearer of agape offers a gift of love but asks for nothing in return—­no reciprocity, no countergifts, not even an apology. He or she is moved not at all by expectations of justice, the weighting of values, or considerations of merit. And he or she approaches the objects of such love not in an abstract embrace of humanity but with a loving and concrete ac­ ceptance of singular, unique persons. Boltanski quotes in this regard one of the few modern philosophers to have written at length on love: “The object of agape, according to Søren Kierkegaard, is ‘the person one sees’: ‘to love is to love precisely the person one sees. The emphasis is not on loving the per­ fections one sees in a person, but . . . on loving the person one sees, whether

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one sees perfections or imperfections in this person.’ ”193 Difficult as it may be to achieve such a loving disposition in real life, especially in the midst of persistent wrongdoing, only through its realization, not only among the dominants but also the dominated, can the otherwise interminable claims and counterclaims of justice be brought to an end. While perhaps the most challenging of personal capacities to develop, love in the sense of agape may be the most promising and hopeful. Conclusion Near the start of this chapter, we observed that, to maintain a strict analytic continuity with the preceding three chapters, we would have to speak here (in threefold fashion) of the structures, agentic modalities, and concrete actions of individuals as opposed to collectivities. We did not pursue such a tack, although certainly it would have been possible to construct our arguments in those terms (our organizational format for the chapter already invokes, albeit in somewhat loose fashion, the concepts that informed our analysis of racial agency—­and we have spoken as well, on occasion, of internal psychi­ cal structures, not to mention also of the trajectories of action toward which intrapsychic dynamics point). More urgent, it seemed to us, was to focus in­ stead on a small number of substantive topics and issues. The first had to do with the importance of racial dispositions as opposed to mere attitudes or prejudices, the latter having been the stock-­in-­trade of social psycholo­ gists of race throughout much of the preceding century. We presented the concept of racial habitus and of unconscious racial habits and tendencies; we also extended the discussion into an overview of the racialized body in all its cognitive, moral, and expressive dimensions. The second of the top­ ics we examined was the dispositions of the racial dominants (whiteness) and the dominated (symbolic violence). This middle section of the chapter was perforce the longest, since, not surprisingly, the bulk of the literature on individual-­level racial tendencies has concerned these unconscious hab­ its and dispositions that contribute most to perpetuating racial domination. Our final section was about the capacities of racial intelligence—­including righteous indignation and compassion—­that conduce to the overcoming of racial injustice both outwardly and inwardly. Here we emphasized the habits of practically wise engagement with challenging situations, dispositions that allow racial actors to break out of old patterns and to work constructively to build a more just and caring community. With this discussion of intelligent racial habits and the habits of racial intelligence, we opened the doors leading from part 2 of this work (“Rela­

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tionality”) to part 3 (“Reconstruction”). An inquiry into what reconstruction of our racial order might look like and how it might be undertaken is where now we wish to go. Whether the racial actors of whom we speak pass through that gate—­from the world they know to a world yet to be made—­with dis­ positions of intelligence and practical wisdom rather than of blindness and self-­defeat is a question our collective experience all too often has answered in the negative. Especially after so much discussion of ancient thought in earlier pages, we are reminded here of Virgil’s Aeneas passing from the un­ derworld into the setting where he is to fulfill his destiny. Virgil gives him a choice between two alternative portals: “The one, they say, / Is horn: true shades go out there easily; / The other—­shining, white, well-­crafted ivory—­/ Lets spirits send false dreams up toward the sky.”194 As Virgil tells it, Aeneas goes out “through the ivory”—­that is, through the gate of false dreams—­ bringing with him torments and illusions into the world above. “As the hero proceeds . . . ,” glosses one commentator, “to set out on the treacherous road of living, he embodies an aspect of falsity that comes from the inability, finally, . . . to acquire wisdom.”195 From socioanalysis, we know full well that historical conditions of racial life are what make the acquisition of practical wisdom and intelligence—­for dominants and the dominated alike—­so very difficult and unlikely. Virgil too recognized the importance of external deter­ mination, attributing outward as well as inward causation to the gods and to fate. As Virgil depicted it, Aeneas’s choice hardly was effected through an act of pure will alone. Yet it also is true that we retain some freedom of choice in our actions, if not in our first move then at least in the second one.196 This is what guarantees whatever small measure of hope and optimism we are entitled to preserve. So long as there are possibilities somehow for racial intel­ ligence, there remains the chance that racial domination and injustice will be overturned. Just how this might happen—­and with what end result—­will be our concern in the final part of this work.

pa r t i i i

Reconstruction

7

Race and Reconstruction

Since knowledge is inseparable from life—­that is, from practical affairs and the struggle to change them for the better—­this final substantive chapter follows directly from those that came before. It completes an arc that began with our efforts to think in reflexive and critical ways about race and that continued with our examination of the relational structures and processes (transpersonal as well as intrapsychic) of racial life. In this chapter, we explore how settings of racial domination intelligently can be reconstructed—­ that is, how knowledge acquired about racial domination can be deployed in concerted efforts to overturn it. This transformative work can be carried on through different methods and in diverse settings, from the family dinner table to the corridors of power in the nation’s capital. It is a comprehensive endeavor, encompassing both small-­scale interactions and large-­scale societal structures. The arc we have been following cannot be concluded without serious examination of both the ends and means involved in this work of reconstruction—­that is, without envisioning what the racial order would look like without racial domination (perhaps it no longer would exist as such) and how we might act to bring about such a world. What ends should inform our actions? And by what means should we seek to make those ends a lived reality? Reflecting on these questions involves spanning the divide—­indeed, questioning it to begin with—­between the analytic and the normative, the explanatory and the prescriptive, the investigation of facts and the critical assessment of values. It requires stepping over the line that too often inhibits scholars of racial injustice from pondering how best to go about seeking racial justice or from reflecting methodically on what a racial democracy might entail. Like so many other epistemological couplets long pervasive in social

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thought, the fact-­value distinction needs deliberately to be set aside as an obstacle to critical inquiry. That is what the present chapter seeks to do. The three social thinkers who most have inspired us in this book—­Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu—­all spoke, implicitly or explicitly, of reconstruction. Dewey’s reflections, however, were the most probing and systematic; for that reason, he is a touchstone for the present chapter, just as Durkheim and Bourdieu were key inspirations for our opening “bookend” chapter on reflexivity.1 Important to Dewey was the notion that one cannot ever hope to know with absolute certainty the proper ends and, accordingly, the appropriate means of (personal as well as societal) reconstruction. In his view, it was important to eschew the “quest for certainty” and to reject calls for truths “grounded,” as Toulmin put it, “on abstract, universal, timeless concepts.”2 The ends we seek are not antecedent to, or outside of, experience itself. Dewey’s antifoundationalism, as it is called today, raises the following question: If no secure guideposts can be found for orienting our conduct, is there any point to having value judgments, programs, or plans of action? Dewey’s response was that, indeed, ideals can serve an important function. Rather than provide a supreme, transcendent criterion for evaluation, they can serve, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has summarized it, as “tools for enabling the satisfactory redirection of conduct when habit no longer suffices to direct it. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally, in terms of their success in guiding conduct. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory—­whether they solve the problems they were designed to solve, whether we find their consequences acceptable, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with [them] yields more satisfactory results. We achieve moral progress and maturity to the extent that we adopt habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of living them out. This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct.”3 For Dewey, there is no radical disjuncture between the empirical testing of hypotheses in modern science and the sort of inquiry that goes on, at least ideally, in social and moral life.4 In each case, claims are assessed in open-­ended, experimentalist fashion and revised when they fail to live up to the pragmatic test. This applies even to sweeping collective ideals such as racial integration and multiculturalism. These, too, can be assessed not in terms of their accordance with abstract moral principles, religious truths, or laws of nature but by their capacity to provide effective solutions to the problems of our racial order.

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Dewey saw knowledge, then, not as a bundle of facts but as a tool to be deployed in addressing the urgent issues of the day. Knowledge proves its mettle not in the cataloguing of data or the fabrication of abstract theories but in its effectiveness in dealing with practical affairs and problematic life circumstances. What was required was knowledge relevant to reorganizing experience, to making our lives more just, democratic, and enriching, in the fullest sense of those words. “Life,” Dewey wrote, “is interruptions and re­ coveries,” a never-­ending sequence of challenges and responses, problems and solutions. The question is whether the changes we effect, in ourselves or others, embody critical reflection and enlarge rather than inhibit our capacity to grow.5 For Dewey, growth was the crucial term. Speaking of a “principle of continuity of experience,” he asserted: “Just as no man lives or dies to himself, so no experience lives and dies to itself. Wholly independent of desire or intent, every experience lives on in further experiences. Hence the central problem . . . is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.”6 Dewey acknowledged that growth could mean many things, some quite objectionable. For instance, one could become more proficient at lying. One could become more proficient at burglary. Was this not also growth? Dewey responded: “ ‘Growth’ is not enough; we must also specify the direction in which growth takes place, the end towards which it tends. . . . The question is whether growth in [a given] direction promotes or retards growth in general. Does this form of growth create conditions for further growth, or does it set up conditions that shut off the person from the occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continuing growth in new directions?”7 With this more carefully specified criterion in mind, Dewey suggested, one could assess different and competing substantive ends for personal development, along with the means for attaining them; in principle, one also could apply this criterion of continuing growth to the evaluation of collective ends or purposes. Dewey’s ideas led sociologists in the pragmatist tradition to think systematically about the practical and reconstructive effects of thought and inquiry. Cooley spoke extensively of the usefulness of knowledge to societal renovation, and, at the individual level, laid great stress on fostering a spirit of openness toward self-­criticism, careful inquiry, and constructive problem solving.8 We already noted how preoccupied his contemporary Thomas was with themes of societal and personal disorganization, the obverse of this being his equally insistent focus on reorganization, which he and Znaniecki defined as “a production of new schemes of behavior and new institutions better adapted to . . . changed demands.”9 The Chicago School of the post–­World

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War I period continued the emphasis on serving urgent human needs, even as it embraced, with Park and Burgess, a more professionalizing orientation; meanwhile, Mead and Addams, not to mention race scholars such as Locke and Du Bois, remained directly oriented toward societal reform, as well as toward the reconstitution of individual dispositions and the development of new habits of intelligence, not only cognitive but also moral and even affectual. As late as 1939, the pragmatist temper was leading scholars both inside and outside the Chicago orbit to stress, as Robert Lynd did in his influential tract Knowledge for What?, the significance of social thought for “coping with areas of strain and uncertainty in culture.”10 In more recent times, the discussion has been carried forward by social thinkers such as Fraser, West, and Ro­bert Bellah, for whom “what creates coherence and continuity in social science is not consensus around a theoretical paradigm but concern for practical problems in the world,” while philosophers such as Habermas, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Bernstein have directed their critical gaze at underlying problems in the fact-­value distinction.11 If Dewey and the pragmatist tradition were (and are) particularly valuable for reflecting on the ends and means of reconstruction, what then of our other two guiding thinkers? They too were vitally concerned with spanning the divide between what is and what ought to be. Durkheim devoted important sections of The Rules of Sociological Method to spelling out the differences between “normal” and “pathological” social facts and to portraying sociologists themselves as physicians of the social, capable of diagnosing and treating its underlying ills. He also envisioned a public life in which rational reflection, perhaps guided and supplemented by social science, could point the way to a better society; in his view, inchoate, vaguely formulated popular judgments could be subjected inside the State proper—­the “organ of social thought”—­to a rigorous critique.12 “The State is a special organ whose respon­sibility it is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity. These representations are distinguished from the other collective representations by their higher degree of consciousness and reflection.”13 (By extension, racial ideals, too, could be scrutinized and ultimately raised to a higher level of reflection.) In this latter respect, Durkheim’s ideas were not unlike those of Dewey on the systematic testing and revision of value judgments. Finally, Durkheim saw a crucial role for moral education in reconstructing the individual habitus, freeing it from convention and instilling in it a greater capacity for autonomous moral judgment. Bourdieu, for his part, was even more unequivocal in his rejection of what he called the “illusion of foundations,” saying in Pascalian Meditations that philosophy and the social sciences properly are “sciences without a

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foundation.”14 In politics as well, the appeal to foundations was to be firmly rejected. Bourdieu further argued, by contrast to Durkheim, that the gap between is and ought only could be bridged through institutionalized practices, in science and politics alike, that take for granted the competitive, dominance-­seeking side of human nature. Universalistic values could become more firmly entrenched in factual orders not through a selfless pursuit of truth (or of the general interest) but by means of interest-­driven action, in which efforts by contending persons or groups continually to trump one another’s particularistic concerns in the name of a broader, more comprehensive ideal unintentionally would lead to an advance of the universal. (Bourdieu developed similar arguments in respect to law.15) Accompanying this advance, moreover, would be the development of individual habitus marked by what Bourdieu called a “reflexivity reflex,” a disposition continually to correct for one’s unreflective blind spots. A reconstructed habitus would enjoy greater control over the unacknowledged forces otherwise working behind its back and gain, at least to some degree, freedom from determination—­a crucial prerequisite for continued personal growth. Finally, intellectuals ideally would work together at least in one crucial respect: educating publics on issues requiring social-­scientific illumination. Invoking Ernst Bloch’s The Philosophy of Hope, Bourdieu called for a “rational utopianism” in which “intellectuals, and all who are genuinely concerned with human happiness, [would] restore a utopian thought that is scientifically sound, both compatible with objective tendencies in its goals, and with means that are also scientifically tested. They [would] work collectively on analyses able to serve as the basis for realistic projects and actions, closely tuned to the objective processes of the order that they aim to transform.”16 Common to all three social thinkers was a predilection, in present-­day terminology, toward nonideal theorizing. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls distinguished between what he called ideal theory, or conceptions (as in Plato’s Republic) of “what a perfectly just society would be like,” “a just society that we are to achieve if we can,” and nonideal theory, which “studies the prin­ ciples that govern how we are to deal with injustice,” that is, the “pressing and urgent matters” of the day.17 “The reason for beginning with ideal theory,” contended Rawls, “is that it provides . . . the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems. . . . Nonideal theory . . . is worked out after an ideal conception of justice has been chosen; only then do the parties ask which principles to adopt under less happy conditions.”18 Rawls identified his own project in A Theory of Justice with ideal theorizing. By contrast, Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu were more closely aligned with nonideal theorizing; they saw normative inquiry as beginning with diagnoses of current societal

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maladies and as seeking to understand how best to remedy those problems. Ideals or ends would guide reconstructive action but always be put to the test of experience. We already have seen how Dewey argued explicitly in favor of nonideal theorizing (but without labeling it as such). Durkheim is a more difficult case, given the predominance of Kantian themes in his moral and sociological thinking, but even he refrained from speculating about ideal models of society—­or from seeking to establish the proper ends of political or social action prior to experience itself—­and grounded his normative reflections in an assessment of emergent trends in the modern world. And Bourdieu deliberately eschewed ideal theorizing, which he associateed with skholè, and instead urged a rigorous “confrontation with experience”—­of the sort, he added, to which scholasticism “does not spontaneously lend itself.”19 Pursuing for our part a nonideal approach to theorizing racial reconstruction, we consider a range of important proposals for changing our racial lives for the better, weighing in each case the likely consequences of adopting those proposals and of seeking to realize them in the actual world. Specifically, in what follows we examine different agendas for reconstructing the racial order, and along with it, the racial habitus. In the first half of the chapter, we focus on issues of racial inclusion and diversity, critically assessing along the way various programs for racial progress. In addition, we ponder the implications of these different ideals for personal reconstruction. Toward what end ought racial dispositions to be shaped? And how ought cognitions to be transformed? In the second half of the chapter, we turn from questions of ends to considerations of means. We ask by what methods racial reconstruction ought to be pursued if we are to bring about a more racially democratic society and, correspondingly, if we are to produce a more racially democratic type of individual. These issues of ends and means hardly are separate. As we saw in chapter 4, ends and means interpenetrate, as they are nothing but analytically distinct phases of the selfsame activity. Not only must one ask what consequences flow from the pursuit of specific ends—­ what are the practical implications, for instance, of adopting color blindness or multiculturalism as one’s racial ideal. One also must ask what implications flow from the choice of this or that means. “There are means,” Dewey observed, “which are constituent parts of the consequences they bring into being, as tones are integral constituents of music as well as means to its production.”20 Publics that practice an internally just and multiracial politics, to take but one example, not only help to bring about a racial democracy but already are organic elements of racial democracy itself. The means are part of the end, and the end is built into the means. We survey different means at various levels of analysis and show how each potentially contributes to racial

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reconstruction. The pursuit of racial democracy, we suggest, cannot rely on change at any one of these levels alone. The Ends of Racial Reconstruction Two opposing perspectives mark the polar extremes of normative reasoning in regard to race: white supremacy and the eradication of race. The former perspective seeks to preserve racial classification and domination but in such a way as to crush all opposition to white power. In its limit case, it envisions a racial order closer to what Bourdieu has termed an “apparatus” than to an actual, contestational field of race relations.21 The latter, by contrast, imagines a world entirely devoid of racial structures and dynamics, one in which appeals to racial identification are met with ataraxia, or sheer indifference. Race no longer feels like a stake worth struggling for; the racial order itself ceases to be. Between these two possibilities, several alternative ideals pre­ sent themselves as guides to racial reconstruction. One is color blindness, the favored ideal of mainstream racial discourse. Another is multiculturalism, or, in a more philosophically elaborated version, cosmopolitanism. And a third is racial democracy—­in our view, the most compelling. In what follows, we focus on these three intermediate ideals, leaving to a side the white supremacist agenda on the grounds that it represents the problem to be solved rather than a serious response to that problem, and the eradication of race on the grounds that, even if desired, it is too remote a possibility to merit serious consideration, except perhaps in an ideal theory. (But here we are con­cerned not with ideal but with nonideal theorizing.) To a greater or lesser degree, color blindness, multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism, and racial democracy all have been proposed as plausible ways of overcoming our racial problems. What results likely would flow from seeking to realize these ideals? What racial projects would result from adopting one or another of them? Our discussion concerns agendas for collective reconstruction. However, complementary ideals for individual reconstruction also will be considered, for each racial ideal traverses the societal and the personal, offering guidance for reshaping the habitus even as it presents a vision for changing racial life at the transpersonal level. Considerations of means—­that is, of how to make our ends actual—­we take up in the latter half of this chapter.22 color blindness and racial liberalism Color-­blind thinking is central to (mostly white) American racial discourse today, toward the right as well as the center of the political spectrum, and it

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presents itself as the genuine inheritor of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, it sees itself as capturing the very essence and spirit of that movement, which was (or so it holds) an effort primarily to defend the dignity and autonomy of the individual rather than to advance a group agenda or to engage in a divisive politics of recognition. The discourse of color blindness envisions a world in which race no longer serves as the basis for social stigmatization, discrimination, inequality, or injustice. It aspires to a society in which all are judged, in King’s words, “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”23 The individual ought to be placed front and center, not the racialized group. Proponents of color blindness, as some observers have noted, “want race to disappear. For them, color-­blindness is not simply a legal standard; it is a particular kind of social order, one where racial identity is irrelevant. [These proponents] believe a color-­blind society can uncouple individual behavior from group identification, allowing genuine inclusion of all people. . . . Were this allowed to happen, individuals who refused to follow common moral standards would be stigmatized as individuals, not as members of a particular group.”24 Racial prejudice is condemned here in the strongest of terms, but so too are color-­conscious policies, even progressive ones, on behalf of a fairer and more just society, for to continue to think and act on the basis of race is seen as perpetuating racial division—­indeed, as endorsing reverse discrimination. Those who continue to “see” race at all are the real racists. In Amy Gutmann’s apt summary, the color-­blind ideal holds that “our society must be bound by the same morality that would be suitable to a just society. That morality . . . is fundamentally color blind, and to diverge from color blindness is to make the mistake of thinking that two wrongs make a right.”25 One particularly vivid illustration of the ideal of color blindness is to be found in a book that never mentions race at all: Rawls’s aforementioned work, A Theory of Justice, which was published in 1971, only a few years after the end of the Civil Rights Era.26 Famously, this work begins with a delineation of a hypothetical situation called the “original position,” an imaginary context meant to generalize and reconceptualize at a high level of abstraction the “state of nature” posited by traditional theories of the social contract. Within this original position, Rawls writes, “rational men,” “free and rational persons,” can come to an agreement regarding what are to be the “principles of justice for the basic structure of society.”27 For us, it is of little relevance what those principles of justice might be; the point to consider is how Rawls depicts the original situation. “Among the essential features of this situation,” he stipulates, “is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural

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assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.”28 These parties, then, reside behind a “veil of ignorance.” (So little is Rawls concerned with race here that he does not even mention it as one of the things one might know or not know behind the veil. He does so only in a later book, Political Liberalism.29) Rawls holds that the imaginary “circumstances” behind the veil “are fair” and that the persons living therein are “free and equal persons whose relations with respect to one another [themselves are] fair.”30 These circumstances, however, are not those of any existing society, much less of a “primitive condition of culture.”31 Over and over, Rawls stresses that they serve only as an “expository device,” a hypothetical state of affairs, a thought experiment.32 (In passing, he acknowledges, too, the Kantian spirit of this construction, its close kinship with The Critique of Practical Reason: “The notion of the veil of ignorance is implicit . . . in Kant’s ethics.”33) Yet Rawls’s vision of the original position also uncannily resembles that of the color-­blind society so often invoked in post–­Civil Rights Era discourse, an image in which racialized individuals, too, also coexist as if behind a veil of ignorance, ignorant as to their own or others’ skin color, seeing nothing whatsoever except what is essentially human.34 The ideal of color blindness extends its sway today in legal considerations, in discussions of social policy, and in everyday social discourse. Justice John Harlan introduced the term to American constitutional discourse in his celebrated dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson: “In view of the Constitution,” he wrote, “in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-­blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”35 In recent times, color blindness has become the ascendant ideal in constitutional law, as evidenced by Supreme Court rulings in landmark cases such as Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), which invalidated a color-­conscious admissions policy at the University of Michigan aimed at boosting the prospects of student-­of-­color applicants; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which prohibited the assignment of students to public schools solely for the purpose of enhancing racial integration; and Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), which invalidated a color-­conscious decision in a promotion case involving Connecticut firefighters. The common theme in these rulings has been a repudiation of efforts, however well-­meaning, to take race into account in matters of law or public policy. In social and political life as well, the ideal of color blindness has pushed its way to the center of debate. The 1980s and 1990s saw an efflorescence of conservative racial commentary featuring a backlash

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against the “reverse discrimination” brought about by race-­conscious strategies.36 Even liberal authors bemoaned the “twilight of common dreams,” for in their view the fight for civil and political rights had given way to short-­ sighted, wrongheaded struggles over identity.37 In 2004, Obama rode to political prominence by declaring at the Democratic National Convention that “there is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—­there is the United States of America.”38 James once wrote that “the pragmatic method . . . is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?”39 In that spirit, we might ask what concrete implications flow from the ideal of color blindness. How effective is it in helping us to address problems that arise in the racial order? We already have seen that, in the legal and public policy domains, color blindness demands that severe constraints be imposed on color-­conscious approaches to fighting racial inequality. Affirmative action, for example, sharply is opposed by this ideal, at least insofar as it is understood to involve racial quotas. (At least some contemporary left-­liberals pursue a color-­blind approach to rethinking the policy, basing it on class rather than on race; we revisit this point later when discussing Wilson’s “hidden agenda.”40) Affirmative action putatively based on racial quotas is portrayed, at best, as an affront to individuality, since it subsumes all beneficiaries under a single racial characterization, “treating them as if all members of the same race were alike in some intrinsic characteristic. This is an expressive harm, an offense to people’s dignity, even apart from whether the content of the stereotype is stigmatizing.”41 At worst, affirmative action is portrayed as reverse discrimination: it subjects racial dominants to the very same kinds of discrimination they themselves imposed on the racially dominated. (Hence again, two wrongs cannot make a right.) In place of color-­ conscious strategies, the ideal of color blindness favors strictly race-­neutral approaches: in particular, more stringent enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. As Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in his majority opinion in Parents Involved, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”42 This solution turns out to be highly ineffective. Even the most vigorous attempts to enforce antidiscrimination laws fail, as Anderson has shown, to redress “many [other] types of conduct causing systematic race-­based disadvantage.”43 “Color-­blind policy,” she observes in a useful overview, “is far from sufficient to achieve the color-­blind ideal. It does nothing to dismantle entrenched patterns of racial segregation, undermine unconscious racial stigmatization and discrimination, challenge informal practices of racial avoidance such as white flight, end coded racial

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appeals in politics, avoid negligence of disadvantaged racial groups in public policy, or prevent race-­neutral policies with differential racial impact from being based on racially stigmatizing ideas.”44 Beyond these various sources of disadvantage, all of which evade race-­ neutral strategies such as stricter enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, there also are everyday forms of racism that cannot be addressed from within a color-­blind framework, modes of racist thought and action that themselves, ironically, are facilitated by color-­blind discourse. In Racism without Racists, Bonilla-­Silva catalogues these new forms of “color-­blind racism.” The ideal of color blindness, he finds, provides protective cover for whites’ justifying their ascendancy in the racial order while not seeming (to themselves or others) to be racist. By invoking classical liberal ideals of individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism, for example—­all of which are race-­neutral and thus color-­blind—­white Americans “can appear ‘reasonable’ and even ‘moral,’ while opposing almost all practical approaches to deal with de facto racial inequality.”45 Moreover, by suggesting that racial phenomena are natural occurrences and that “they (racial minorities) do it too,” whites can justify their racially motivated preferences and actions as nonracial. By offering culturalist arguments to explain away racial inequality, they can depict the racial world as devoid of racists. And by asserting that racial discrimination no longer is a central dynamic in American life, they can “eliminate . . . the bulk of [racist] actions by individual whites and institutions by fiat.”46 Bonilla-­ Silva documents the “linguistic manners and rhetorical strategies” of color blindness (“how to talk nasty about minorities without sounding racist”47) as well as its most typical “stories” and “testimonials” (how to provide evidence for one’s nonracialism). And he shows how the substantive realities of racial domination are rendered opaque by the formal ideology of a raceless (and racism-­free) world: Mills’s epistemology of ignorance. One could direct much the same critique, it appears, against the ideal of color blindness that Marx directed against formal democracy in “On the Jewish Question.”48 In the end, how helpful is color blindness as an orientation toward action? What are we to make of it as a guide to racial reconstruction? If color blindness is widespread and deeply rooted in American life today, this is because it entails an ideal response to skin differences in a world without race. Because many of us are taught from childhood that concentrating on racial difference is wrong and meaningless, we tend to transpose that morality onto the public sphere, claiming that a politics that concentrates on racial differences also must be wrong and meaningless. Through an abracadabric act that transforms ethics into ontology (a way to live into how life is), color blindness demands an instant good society, one without history, where things are right

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and nothing is in need of restoration. As Gutmann has put it, “The principles that most of us learn, from childhood to maturity, are . . . color blind not because color blindness is the right response to racial injustice but rather because color blindness is the ideal morality (for an ideal society).”49 In the terminology introduced earlier, it is an ideal theory for an ideal world. In a perfect society—­one without a history of colonization, slavery, and systematic degradation; a world without present-­day racial inequalities and institutional and interpersonal racism—­color blindness would be the appropriate ethical code. But we have not inherited such a world. Hence color blindness is an inappropriate way of thinking about our world, an ineffective mode of response to a world itself not color-­blind. As a nonideal theory, it does not pass the pragmatic test. In Morrison’s words, “The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.”50 The jurist, politician, or scholar who boasts of a color-­blind society boasts of a world yet to arrive. This person is like the man who stands on his front porch and waves off firefighters as his house ignites behind him: “No need for water here, my friends. Everything is fine.” This response would be normal and acceptable if his house were not on fire; but since things stand otherwise, the response is wrongheaded and dangerous. The same is true of color blindness: “No need for policies designed to combat racial inequalities! Everything is fine.” A house on fire will collapse if the owner, refusing to recognize the smoke and flames, turns off the water hose. And the foundations of “the house that race built”—­American democracy—­will be threatened if its caretakers do not recognize and remedy the racial domination in their midst.51 To borrow one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite sayings, “If we turn our backs on the fire and burn our behinds, we will just have to sit on our blisters.” m u lt i c u lt u r a l i s m a n d c o s m o p o l i ta n i s m Much like color blindness, multiculturalism—­to be sure, a contested concept with widely varying meanings—­aspires, in the version we delineate here, to a world in which all persons’ inherent dignity as human beings is recognized. But in contrast to color blindness, which hopes to abolish race as a relevant criterion in law, public policy, and everyday social practices, it envisions a society in which racial diversity fully is taken into account and valued for its own sake. Its ideal society is one of multicultural incorporation resting on two key principles: first, that, drawn shoulder to shoulder in a common humanity with others, we have a civic responsibility to all people; and, second, that we all must respect one another’s differences.52 Appiah (who, as we have mentioned, prefers the term “cosmopolitanism”) put it this way: “There are

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two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from those differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.”53 Multiculturalism, then, promotes the norm of equal inclusion, which, in a racially just world, would become a core component of modern democracies. There are no “second-­class citizens,” and groups rendered invisible by political elites receive their due recognition. To Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who also has written extensively on multiculturalism, failing to recognize fully or to value nonwhites and other dominated groups “shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-­hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.”54 If one of the primary techniques of those championing racial and colonial domination was to convince those they sought to dominate that whiteness and the “white way of life” are superior to all other lifestyles, then the aim of the multicultural project—­and it, too, is a racial project—­is to banish all such ideas of white supremacy and cultural superiority. Multiculturalism recently has been given a sociological inflection—­with vivid and concrete examples from everyday life—­by Elijah Anderson. In The Cosmopolitan Canopy, he affirms the multicultural ideal in normative terms. “Exposure to others’ humanity,” he writes, “generates empathy; fears dissipate, and grounds for mutual appreciation appear.” Multiculturalism should be seen “not as [a] ‘time out’ from normal life but as a model for what social relationships could become.”55 But Anderson also demonstrates, using illustrations from Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market and Rittenhouse Square, among other sites, that cosmopolitan interactions already have become a social reality in many pockets or “islands” of contemporary racial life.56 Cosmopolitan canopies, he writes, are “pluralistic spaces where people engage one another in a spirit of civility or even comity and goodwill. Through personal observation, [they] come casually to appreciate one another’s differences and empathize with the other in a spirit of shared humanity. . . . In such settings city dwellers are encouraged to express their cosmopolitan sides while keeping their ethnocentric feelings in check.”57 Trust is established; symmetrical relations form; the notion is embraced that “the space [belongs] to all kinds

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of people”; strangers make “human contact” across the racial divide.58 People learn about, and become familiar with, one another, “stretch[ing] themselves mentally, emotionally, and socially.”59 The cosmopolitan canopy can be “a profoundly humanizing experience.”60 Even the modern workplace can become a canopy.61 Anderson adds that race relations there can be fraught nonetheless with hidden tensions, as “the black employee knows that on any given day he will encounter numerous white people, many of whom he is sure are racist to some degree—­but to what degree, and how must this reality figure into his relationship with them?”62 Frequently, the black employee suffers “little humiliations”—­“little cuts” and “indignities”—­that go unmentioned under the canopy.63 On occasion, the canopy even is pierced by eruptions of racism—­the “nigger moments” of which we spoke in chap­ ter 5—­when the fabric of trust and comity is rended and the black person shockingly is reminded of a racial divide that all along was there.64 But despite these affronts, some subtle and others brutal, the cosmopolitan canopy survives. It is an “ongoing concern,” notes Anderson, evoking a phrase from Hughes, its hallmark “a certain resilience and change as it goes about meeting the exigencies of its everyday environment.”65 Cosmopolitanism is not without its critics, many from the perspective of color blindness. Does cosmopolitanism not erode our national culture, they ask, by encouraging us to focus not on what unites us but rather on what separates us? To this, cosmopolitans respond that obsessing over our differences weakens our democratic potential and breeds animosity. We must not dwell on our differences but rather acknowledge and respect those differences as potential sources of wisdom and good. Cosmopolitanism seeks to draw us nearer, not to push us apart. It does not threaten civic community but, rather, nourishes its potential. It seeks to strengthen American civil society, making it freer and fuller, wider and warmer. To deny that goal, suggest multiculturalists, is to deny the very essence of America itself. America always has been multicultural, although only in recent years has cosmopolitanism been valued and pursued as a normative ideal. The United States, asserted Senator Carl Schurz in 1859, was “a great colony of free humanity which has not old England but the world for its mother country.”66 It took an enormous labor to convince Americans otherwise; it took a movement of great exertion and coercion, mystification and trickery to present America as a white nation. In America, multiculturalism is the norm; it is racism that is its perverse, unnatural substitute—­which is why Appiah makes perfect sense when he observes, “Cosmopolitanism isn’t hard work; repudiating it is.”67 Du Bois once asked his white readers, “Your country? How came it yours? Before the

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Pilgrims landed we were here. . . . Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—­we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-­brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? . . . Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung.”68 That hope, that lonely lit candle surrounded by moonless night, passed from calloused hand to calloused hand throughout American history, is the hope of complete inclusion, recognition, and respect. That, in a word, is the hope of multiculturalism. To be sure, as some cosmopolitan thinkers have acknowledged, it is easy to have compassion and good will for those most like ourselves.69 It is easy to include, recognize, and respect members of our own community. But this unhappy feature of human nature only makes the multicultural ideal more deeply relevant. It also underscores that we all, particularly the racial dominants, are obligated to cultivate a reflexive and critical attitude toward the workings of our own social unconscious. Consider here the example of Kant, a supreme source of philosophic inspiration for color blindness and multiculturalism alike, who was jarringly and disturbingly un-­self-­critical when it came to the racist assumptions behind his own moral and political thought. Kant spoke inspiringly of a “Kingdom of Ends” in which all are treated with equal respect, and he held up for special admiration “ ‘the friend of humanity’ who treats all persons (‘that is, the whole race’) with equality,” whatever their status—­or, one would hope, their skin color.70 Yet this paragon of modern liberalism also was a founder of modern racism, “the founder of the first theory of race worthy of the name.”71 As has been suggested in a recent revisionist study, “Kant’s lectures and writings on anthropology and physical geography (usually ignored by philosophers) provide a detailed account of a racialized human nature classified into four categories—­white Europeans, yellow Asians, black Africans, red Amerindians—­who are related to one another in a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors.”72 It is by no means clear that nonwhites merit in this account the same moral status of personhood as white Europeans. Perhaps “when Kant talks about the importance of treating all persons with respect,” suggests Charles Mills, “when he outlines the responsibilities of the state, when he maps his inspiring cosmopolitan vision, he is not making race-­neutral and racially-­inclusive pronouncements; he is really talking about the white population.”73 Race-­neutral interpretations of Kant miss this essential, even constitutive, feature of his thought. Similarly,

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as multiculturalists would point out, race-­neutral, color-­blind perspectives in general, by refusing to “see” or recognize race at all, fail to address the realities of racial domination; indeed, they only exacerbate them. Beyond urging us to pursue a deeper and more searching reflexivity, however, and to recognize that race still matters in a world others prematurely would pronounce color-­blind, multiculturalism also calls upon us to recognize and accord respect to cultures other than our own. It envisions a world in which all cultures are judged intrinsically worthy; in its strong versions, it calls for all cultures to be regarded as of equal value. Regrettably, this is where nonideal theorizing in a multicultural mode begins to run into theoretical problems. At least in its strong versions, it demands for certain cultures a level of respect they might not deserve—­cultures that are white supremacist, ethnocentric, or hostile to feminism or gay rights.74 As Taylor puts it, “It makes sense to demand as a matter of right that we approach the study of certain cultures with a presumption of their value. . . . But it can’t make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgment that their value is great, or equal to others’. That is, if the judgment of value is to register something independent of our own wills and desires, it cannot be dictated by a principle of ethics.”75 Moreover, multiculturalism often portrays cultures themselves in reified fashion. Will Kymlicka’s work, for instance, suffers from a tendency to conceive of cultures as monolithic entities. Taylor’s own work does as well, as when he speaks of multiculturalists’ “presumption” that “all human cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human beings”—­a formulation that, as he goes on to state explicitly, “exclude[s] partial cultural milieux within a society.”76 As we illustrated in chapter 3, it is important to conceive of social groups and their cultures in nonsubstantialist terms—­for instance, to speak not of “black people” or of “the African American community” but instead of a complex, differentiated, contestatory field of blackness. As Fraser has pointed out, “in reifying group identity,” multiculturalism, at least in these variants, “ends by obscuring the politics of cultural identification, the struggles within the group for the authority—­and the power—­to represent it.”77 But there is a deeper, more vexing problem still. Multiculturalism enjoins on us an abiding effort to educate ourselves to the distinctive contributions and achievements of other cultures, to be “open,” in Taylor’s words, “to comparative cultural study of the kind that must displace our horizons in the resulting fusions.”78 It asks not only that we be reflexive and respectful but also that we willingly learn from others.79 At its best, this vision partly is reminiscent of the Deweyan ideal of democracy. Much like the scientific method,

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democracy in this view provides a way to pursue effective solutions, to engage collaboratively—­through an application of creative intelligence—­in societal problem solving. Coming to understand and appreciate one another’s cultural lives is an integral part of that democratic ideal. But the flaw in multiculturalism is that democracy is not simply about recognizing others’ diversity. It is not merely about engaging others’ humanity. Reflexivity, respect, and a broadening of horizons, important as they may be, are inadequate to the task of taking on racial domination. As components of a nonideal theory for racial reconstruction, they fall short, much as does color blindness itself. For democracy also is about coming to a full awareness of one another’s problems—­of how people are treated unfairly despite the promise of full and equal inclusion—­and it is about responding to these problems with just remedies. To get at others’ full humanity, one has to recognize and seek to rectify past injustices. Otherwise there will be only superficial engagement and surface agreement, as in fusion food and what Daniel Bell liked to call the “syncretism” of modern culture.80 Color blindness and multiculturalism both fail to appreciate this crucial insight. As one critic has observed, “Multiculturalism, diversity, and colorblindness are not as different as they initially seem. . . . The rhetoric of multiculturalism and diversity generally acknowledges only apolitical, non-­contentious differences between people. . . . Like colorblindness, [it] eschews difficult discussions of institutional racism, of economic, material, and educational inequalities across racial divides, of restitution and reparation for past injustices committed against people of color, and so on. Multicultural diversity and colorblindness work hand in hand to both see and not see racial differences, a contradictory vision that has the ultimate effect of blinding people to issues of racial (in)justice.”81 racial demo cracy To have a better idea of what racial justice entails, one might be prompted, in a Platonic spirit, to ask what justice is. Such an inquiry easily could encompass the full span of Western philosophy, including not only Plato himself but also modern philosophers such as Kant and Rawls. In Dewey’s work, one finds the following formulation, aiming to capture, in his words, “the thread of common significance” in the diverse meanings justice has assumed: “The rational good means a comprehensive or complete end, in which are harmoniously included a variety of special aims and values. The just man is the man who takes in the whole of a situation and reacts to it in its wholeness, not being misled by undue respect to some particular factor. Since the general or inclusive good is a common or social good, reconciling and combining

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the ends of a multitude of private or particular persons, justice is the preeminently social virtue: that which maintains the due order of individuals in the interest of the comprehensive or social unity.”82 By Dewey’s definition, racial justice entails a “reconciliation” of particular racial ends, such that a “comprehensive” unity or harmony among racialized groups or individuals is maintained and no single racial actor benefits “unduly.” Under conditions of racial justice, all draw returns on societal resources commensurate with the value they themselves have added to them, and all are recognized in their full humanity as contributors of “aims and values” belonging to the societal whole. From this Deweyan perspective, the ideal of racial justice looks very much like that of democracy. It too entails a way of life, a “mode of associated living,”83 in which all are moved, as Dewey writes in “Creative Democracy,” by “a generous belief in [others’] possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment.” It too involves a “democratic faith in human equality.”84 Racial justice is a crucial, even ineliminable, part of what we term here racial democracy. However, as we shall see, by itself it is but a part of racial democracy, not the whole. In our racial order, “undue respect to some particular factor,” specifically to racial difference, often prevents the “general or inclusive good” from being realized. Racism and racial domination, to put it simply, breed injustice. Hence efforts at racial reconstruction must take into account the real conditions of life (to borrow a Marxian phrase) in which racial dominants exploit and subjugate others. This does not mean these efforts must foresake the ideals of color blindness and multiculturalism—­namely, respect for all human beings and a generous embrace of plurality and difference. It means only that they must begin from actual experience and not from an imaginary, idealized world outside experience. Again we are reminded of the contrast between ideal and nonideal theorizing, where the former constructs the image of a society of perfect justice while the latter begins with a society marked by injustice and asks what justice would require under existing circumstances.85 Nonideal theorizing often focuses on issues such as distributive justice, where one finds “recognition of the whole,” in Dewey’s words, “[carrying] over into the question of right distribution and apportionment among its parts.”86 It asks how different kinds of social goods—­economic assets and political power, to be sure, but also societal membership, claims to social provisions (such as health care or old-­age insurance), educational opportunities, and markers of public honor, among many other kinds of goods—­are apportioned and according to which principles. It also asks, as did Walzer in Spheres of Justice, what distributive principles and practices are demanded within and

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across the relatively autonomous spheres of social life.87 It inquires into matters such as affirmative action, which altogether fall outside the scope of ideal theorizing. But nonideal theorizing also steps back from normative considerations and aims to grasp the structures and dynamics of domination (here, racial domination) that detach members of certain groups (racial groups) from societal benefits, opportunities, and privileges rightfully due them. It aspires to know the sources of the injustices it would remedy. It aims to be rooted in a knowledge of the real world. Often racial injustice is perpetrated in plain sight but rendered invisible by failings in social, disciplinary, and scholastic reflexivity and forgotten altogether in discourses of racial renovation. Take, for instance, everyday practices of exploitation—­and racial injustice—­in housing and residence, practices with a long history in the United States. During its rapid period of urbanization, America imported a model of slum exploitation originally perfected in Europe. As more and more people flocked to cities like New York and Philadelphia throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, urban land values soared, and landlords began subdividing their properties to make room for more renters. Cellars, attics, and storage sheds became single room apartments, and poor families proved a profitable market even through the Panic of 1837.88 Rents continued to rise as housing conditions deteriorated. Soon, many families, even those living in unsanitary and dangerous conditions, could not make rent. In the shadowy regions of the city, landlords quite purposefully created slums to maximize their rate of return. “Instead of being penalized for this anti-­social exploitation of land,” as Lewis Mumford has observed, “the slum landlord, on capitalist principles, was handsomely rewarded: for the values of his decayed properties, so far from being written off because of their age and disrepair, became embedded in the structure of land values and taxes.”89 The institutionalization of the black ghetto at the beginning of the twentieth century increased the exploitative possibilities of landed capital. As the black population in Northern cities grew, real estate developers saw an opportunity to make enormous profits by buying up properties on the edges of the ghetto and slicing them up into flats. By law, custom, and poverty, the vast majority of blacks were excluded from purchasing their own homes, and the rise of the dual housing market allowed landlords to charge blacks higher rents for worse housing. As late as 1960, the median monthly rent in some cities was higher for blacks than for whites.90 Who could argue today that the urban poor are not just as exploited as in generations past? Witness not only the extractive capabilities of the private rental market, which in recent years has seen a surge in rents, but also the proliferation of pawn shops, the number of which doubled in the

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1990s; the emergence of the payday lending industry, boasting of more stores across the United States than McDonalds restaurants and netting upward of $7 billion annually in fees; and, of course, the colossal expansion of the subprime lending industry, which was generating upward of $100 billion in annual revenues at the peak of the mid-­2000s housing bubble.91 The slum never has been a by-­product of the modern city, a sad accident of industrialization and urbanization. Rather, it always has been a central and intentional project of landed capital, a prime moneymaker for those who see in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation ripe opportunity. But if exploitation long has helped to create the slum and its inhabitants, if it has been a clear, direct, and systematic cause of poverty and social suffering, why has this ugly word—­“exploitation”—­been erased from theories of urban poverty? By and large, urban poverty research today pivots on the concept of lack.92 Structuralist accounts emphasize the inner city’s lack of jobs, social services, or organizations. Culturalist accounts emphasize the inner city’s lack of role models, custodial fathers, and middle-­class values. Although usually pitted against one another, these structuralist and culturalist approaches share a common outlook: that the inner city is a void, a needy thing, and that its problems can be solved, much as supplies are lowered into a leper colony, by filling the void with more stuff: for example, more jobs, more education, more social services. Such proposed approaches to poverty amelioration assume that destitute families would be the primary ben­ eficiaries of the policy; that if the minimum wage or welfare benefits were raised, for example, the extra money would stay in the pockets of the poor. In a world of exploitation, such an assumption is naive. When the American labor movement rose up in the 1830s to demand higher wages, landed capital did not lock arms with industrial capital but instead rooted for the workers, since higher wages would allow landlords to collect higher rents.93 Today, when government aid to low-­income college students increases, many universities respond by inflating student charges, recovering as much as a third of the aid.94 In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack, sociologists have neglected to notice the powerful ways in which exploitation contributes to the reproduction of urban poverty. Hence it is not surprising that discourses of racial reconstruction so often avoid confronting the unhappy realities of racial injustice. Earlier we emphasized the deep connection between racial justice and democracy. But now it is important to begin modifying this claim in subtle ways. On the one hand, interstitial phenomena such as antiracist movements—­one thinks here, in light of our example above, of tenants’ rights movements—­ certainly do aspire to render democracy more of a living, as opposed to an

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abstract, ideal. Established institutional complexes such as the legal system also aim, at least ideally, to further democratic purposes, whether through lofty principles enunciated in constitutional law or in everyday legal regulations. As one legal historian has noted, “Spheres of human life, once havens of immunity from law and legal process, [progressively are] invaded and (to some degree) conquered [so that] justice is, or ought to be, available in all settings: in hospitals and prisons, in schools, on the job, in apartment buildings, on the streets, within the family. It is a pervasive expectation of fairness.”95 Finally, in interactional settings, claims to fair and just treatment also are pressed, with the result that the “conjoint communicated experience” Dewey saw as essential to democracy becomes more vital and expansive.96 Racial justice in the intimate sphere, for instance—­in interracial couples and families—­furthers the “democratising of personal life” of which Giddens spoke in The Transformation of Intimacy.97 But on the other hand, also as suggested above, racial justice is not the whole of democracy. To rest content, as Dewey liked to point out, with a formal standard of justice—­Fiat justitia, ruat coelum (“Let justice be done, though it bring down the heavens in ruin”)—­ means to forget that the consequences of action in pursuit of justice also are important; sometimes too rigorous an application leads, in perverse fashion, to unjust outcomes. “Justice as an end in itself is a case of making an idol out of a means at the expense of the end which the means serves.”98 Later in this chapter, we discuss in greater detail the means of racial reconstruction. Here it is sufficient to point out that the sternness of justice ideally is “tempered,” as Dewey would have it (in an admittedly Christian formulation), “with mercy,” “the severity of law with grace.”99 (It is important to recall here, in a reflexive spirit, that Christian polemics against Judaism always have, in invidious fashion, associated it with the disfavored term in their binary oppositions, even if implicitly and, as in this specific case, unintentionally.) In his celebrated “Postscript on Love,” Bourdieu, too, spoke of a “suspension of power relations which seems constitutive of the experience of love or friendship.”100 This “seemingly miraculous truce” in which the contending parties choose to look beyond issues of harm and punishment, fairness, or desert is not unlike the mercy or grace that transcends justice. Added Bourdieu: “It is probably found only rarely in its most fully realized form. . . . But it exists sufficiently, despite everything, . . . to be instituted as a norm, or as a practical ideal.”101 Most important of all, however, democracy, at least in its expansive, Deweyan sense, comprises not only justice, or even justice tempered by mercy and grace, but also self-­realization, flourishing, and growth. It allows individuals and groups to pursue opportunities to enrich their life experience and fully to develop their own powers and capacities. It entails a “belief in

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[persons’ inherent] possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment.”102 There must be a “discovery and promotion of those activities and active relationships in which the capacities of all concerned are effectively evoked, exercised, and put to the test.”103 Such “activities and active relationships” that conduce to human flourishing can be identified through free inquiry on the part of all involved, an inquiry (conceptualized on the model of experimental science) in which practical intelligence pursues collaborative problem solving and progressively eliminates “those external arrangements of status, birth, wealth, sex, etc., which restrict the opportunity of each individual for full development of himself.”104 Participation in public life, in publics of various kinds, can be an effective way of pursuing such in­ quiry and problem solving. It also can be a way of expanding the bounds of (racial) identity by encouraging each actor to learn how “to enter into the attitude of other people,” as Mead once put it.105 To these considerations, the later Dewey added a further twist, speaking, in Art as Experience, of what he called the “consummatory aesthetic experience,” an idea that provides criteria for evaluating not only aesthetic phenomena but also other modes of experience in social (including racial) life. In the consummatory experience, “every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues.” Dewey remarked of it that “there is no sacrifice of the self-­ identity of the parts. . . . As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went on before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.”106 Other sides of life, too, ideally can be seen, as one commentator has put it, as “an organic unity of competing forces like that characteristic of great art. . . . Democracy was [for Dewey] the social ideal not only because it nurtured individual growth but because it envisioned a growing community that would itself be a complex, organic work of art.”107 From this viewpoint, democracy clearly can be said to involve more than justice. But justice still is crucial for ensuring that a genuine, vibrant community takes shape and grows and for allowing the unique consummatory experience that is democracy to flourish in sustained fashion. We can conclude by asking: What might a racial democracy look like? What kind of guiding ideal might it provide for endeavors in racial reconstruction? To be sure, racial democracy is built on, and is inconceivable without, racial justice. How can racial actors flourish and grow under conditions of pervasive racism, discrimination, and race-­based exploitation? However, racial democracy also means the equal possibility for members of racial groups to assume an active role in directing the social affairs in which they

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take part, a role that entails full collaboration—­sometimes contestatory but never oppression based—­with members of other racial groups, including whites. Through such participation and the resulting formation of meaningful, trusting, solidaristic connections across racial boundaries, racial actors are enabled—­one might say liberated—­to develop their potentials and capacities. As Dewey put it, “Human nature is developed only when its elements take part in directing things which are common, things for the sake of which men and women form groups—­families, industrial companies, governments, churches, scientific associations and so on.”108 Indeed, not only are racial actors’ lives enriched, but also they gain in the ability to direct their lives in common in ever more constructive, satisfying, and fulfilling ways. Dewey defined education in similar fashion: “It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.”109 This ideal can have unanticipated consequences. For instance, it can mean that racial cultures—­or particular aspects thereof—­may not be preserved in their given form. (Again, racial democracy diverges from the multicultural ideal.) Under conditions of dynamic interchange, the very ties, meanings, and sentiments associated with racial cultures may evolve. They may be required to pass the pragmatic test, to answer the question as to whether, as West would have it, they “promote the valuing of certain insights, illuminations, capacities and abilities in order honestly to confront and effectively to cope with the inevitable vicissitudes and unavoidable limit situations in life.”110 Are they “existentially enabling”?111 Do they allow one to “sustain and support, define and develop oneself ”? Racial democracy entails self-­scrutiny of individuals and groups and not merely a cosmopolitan respect for, or openness to, modes of racial life other than one’s own. the ends of individual reconstruction At the beginning of this section, we suggested that ideals of racial reconstruction have both a collective and an individual dimension. Much of the foregoing has been about the kinds of societal ends envisioned by proponents of color blindness, multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism, and racial democracy. We turn now to the individual ends associated with these ideals. What kinds of personal dispositions, capacities, and competences ideally are to be cultivated in racial actors? Each of the agendas for racial renovation discussed above carries a different answer to this question. Each offers its own inflection on the social-­psychological themes developed earlier in chapter 6. In the case of racial democracy, it is not too difficult to craft a rough portrayal of the sort

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of individual actor corresponding to this ideal, since many of the key features of a democratic habitus already have been laid out in Dewey’s political and educational writings and elaborated by later thinkers in the pragmatist, radical democratic tradition. But in the case of the other two racial ideals, the task is somewhat more challenging. What might be the distinguishing characteristics of a color-­blind individual, one living behind a veil of ignorance and failing to recognize (or not wishing to acknowledge) skin color? And what might be the hallmarks of a cosmopolitan individual thriving in the midst of racial diversity and difference? The sources to consult, whether in philosophy or race scholarship, are not quite so self-­evident. Despite the greater difficulties involved, however, it still is possible to construct rough-­ and-­ready characterizations of these ideal individuals and to imagine how they might dwell within, and help to reproduce, their respective racial worlds. In what follows, we present each of these ideal constructions in turn, in the same order as in our previous discussion of collective ideals. But we dwell longest on the ideal of the racial democratic actor, for arguably it is the type of individual best suited to meeting the challenges of the racial order today. Themes from Kantian philosophy, with its veneration for universalistic morality, long have been at the center of the color blindness ideal. And it was in a Kantian spirit that, in “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” Durkheim spoke of a “cult of man,” a fundamental respect for the sacredness, dignity, and autonomy of the individual. The object of this cult, he argued, would not embody any specific culture but rather would be the stripped-­down essence of our common humanity: “We make our way, little by little, toward a state, nearly achieved as of now, where the members of a single social group will have nothing in common among themselves except their humanity, except the constitutive attributes of the human person in general. This idea of the human person . . . is therefore the only idea which would be retained, unalterable and impersonal, above the changing torrent of individual opinions. And the feelings it awakens would be the only ones which could be found in almost every heart.”112 All modern individuals would be marked by a basic reverence for others (and for themselves) fundamentally as human beings. They would hold each other in an almost religious regard, cherishing one another’s humanity in abstraction from all specific attributes. And they would uphold their “natural duties” to one another, duties stipulated by Rawls to “hold between persons irrespective of their institutional relationships; [to] obtain between all as equal moral persons.”113 (“In this sense,” added Rawls, “the natural duties”—­among which is mutual respect—­“are owed not only to definite individuals . . . but to persons generally.”114) From Kant’s moral philosophy to Durkheim’s image of a “cult of man,” from these in turn to

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Rawls’s conception of discussion partners behind a veil of ignorance and of our “natural duties” toward one another, and from these to the contemporary notion of color blindness, surely many lines of intellectual affinity can be traced. But with one important caveat: the distinctive epistemology of the color-­blind individual is not, as we have noted, the restrictive epistemology of the individual behind a veil of ignorance but the inverted epistemology, the epistemology of ignorance, of the person blinded to how the racial order actually works. For among the constitutive attributes of the color-­blind individual is precisely that he or she apprehends the racial order in an inverted fashion, systematically mistaking raced individuals for unraced essences and racial domination for an already realized postracial order. He or she proceeds as if a participant in a cult of man, but, in so doing, helps only to reproduce a racial order that denies the racially dominated their fundamental humanity. The multicultural/cosmopolitan individual, by contrast, recognizes and affirms the realities of racial difference. He or she is reflexive and self-­critical, unrestricted by ethnoracial constraints on thought or action, respectful of other cultures, and compassionate toward the plight of others. He or she also is adept at moving around in different racial worlds. Sometimes as well, the cosmopolitan individual inclines toward a certain playfulness and engages in what Mill called “experiments in living,” actively pursuing a broadening of horizons, sensibilities, and sympathies.115 While not exemplifying all these criteria in equal measure, perhaps the prototype of the multicultural/cosmopolitan individual, not in philosophy or social and political thought but in American literature, is the character Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-­ Dick. Over the course of several chapters, Ishmael shifts from an attitude of dread and fear toward his assigned bedfellow at the Spouter-­Inn (his future shipmate on the Pequod), the “dark complexioned,” “savage” Queequeg, to an unexpected appreciation of Queequeg’s “civility and consideration.”116 “His countenance,” he remarks, “yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart.”117 Other positive features, too, he begins to notice in Queequeg, soon enough realizing that “I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. . . . I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I.”118 The two characters become “bosom friends,” and after some reflexive soul-­searching Ishmael even joins Queequeg in a pagan ritual.119 When the two check out of the Spouter-­Inn and make their way through town together, “the people stare . . . at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.”120 Later in the novel, Ishmael binds himself to Queequeg

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by a “monkey rope” so that Queequeg can descend the side of the Pequod to strip out blubber from a killed whale: the bound fates of the racial dominants and dominated. “I seemed distinctly to perceive,” says Ishmael, “that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound.”121 In Subversive Genealogy, political theorist Michael Rogin argued for a close parallelism between Melville and his great European contemporary, Marx; each, he suggested, was the foremost interpreter and critic of his respective social world.122 But Rogin did not recognize that, in his depiction of Ishmael, Melville constructed a normative profile without close parallel in Marx’s writings. That profile was the image of a multicultural individual. Ishmael fully anticipates the modern cosmopolitan’s willingness to cross boundaries, to be open to new modes of experience, and to participate meaningfully in others’ racial life (although he is not yet the suave world traveler of recent cosmopolitan theorizing). It is only in not seriously questioning the exploitative racial hierarchy aboard the Pequod that he reveals the limits of his fellow feeling. Many of the constitutive features of the racial democratic individual already were delineated in Dewey’s writings. “Democracy,” he suggested, “sig­ nifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life.”123 These “attitudes” include a basic faith in one another’s democratic possibilities, a “faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas,” and a “faith in the possibility of conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.”124 Having such a faith in “amicable cooperation” means being driven by an abiding concern for justice, a passion to eliminate exploitation and subjugation so that all can take part in a genuinely collaborative and mutually enriching way of life.125 While too inclined for his part to embrace a color-­blind race politics, Dewey highlighted through this portrayal a key feature of the racial democratic individual—­namely, his or her unwillingness to look aside while others are treated unfairly. But for Dewey an attitude of forgiveness also was important, for his democratic personality above all was intent on solving problems, on looking ahead rather than behind, on pragmatically anticipating consequences rather than dwelling on antecedents. By extension, racial animus and vengefulness also give way in the racial democratic individual to a progressive and forward-­looking spirit. Racial healing is valued over hatred, an openness to reconciliation over the impulse to condemn. In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey even borrowed from Freud the

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concept of sublimation in speaking of the hopeful possibility that impulses that stunt growth and self-­development instead would become “contributory factor[s] in some more inclusive and complex activity,” factors “coordinated intelligently with other [factors] in a continuing course of action.”126 “A gust of anger,” he added by way of example, “may . . . be converted”—­that is, sublimated—­“into an abiding conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution.”127 The racial democratic individual also is characterized by an openness to be mistaken, the recognition that his or her own ways of thinking about the (racial) world might well be proven false. Such an individual “realize[s],” observes pragmatist philosopher Richard Bernstein, “that although we must begin any inquiry with prejudgments and can never call everything into ques­tion at once, nevertheless there is no belief or thesis—­no matter how fundamental—­that is not open to further interpretation and criticism.”128 Fallibilism was a centerpiece of classical American pragmatism, which regarded it as one of the key features of the experimental cast of mind, and it long has been deemed among the hallmarks of the pragmatist temper. It would be difficult to conceive of a racial democracy, at least one informed by pragmatist thought, without it—­that is, without individuals capable of admitting they can be wrong. Bernstein himself calls for “an engaged fallibilistic pluralism” in which we “[take] our own fallibility seriously—­resolving that however much we are committed to our own styles of thinking, we are willing to listen to others without denying or suppressing the otherness of the other. [Engaged fallibilistic pluralism] means being vigilant against the dual temptations of simply dismissing what others are saying by falling back on one of those standard defensive ploys where we condemn it as obscure, woolly, or trivial, or thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies.”129 Above all, it means embracing a stance of epistemological humility in regard to one’s capacity to discern the truth and to know best how to proceed. The end on which Dewey was focused was the enlargement and flourish­ ing of the self. “The end,” he asserted, “is growth itself.”130 As we saw in chap­ter 6, the greatest impediments to growth in racial life—­internalized impediments both—­are the dispositions of whiteness and the internal, corrosive workings of symbolic violence. The former entail ontological expansiveness and epistemological inversion, the latter self-­negation. The ideal individual of racial democracy moves beyond these impediments—­the ghosts of racial domination, lodged deep within the psyche—­and deploys its creative intelligence toward the end of fashioning a more enriching experience for itself and others. “Those who know ghosts,” psychoanalyst Hans Loewald once observed,

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“tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life. . . . In the daylight of analysis”—­one might say here critical, intelligent reflection—­“the ghosts of the [racial] unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life.”131 The racial self is reorganized, an inner reconciliation effected, one that mirrors, perhaps even helps to bring into being, the outward overcoming of racial division. “Alienating differentiation is . . . reversed in such a way that a fresh unity is created by an act of uniting.”132 This is the work of what Freud termed Eros, or the love-­instinct, an affirmative impulse aimed always at binding together what once self-­destructively was split apart, “so that life may be . . . brought to higher development.”133 Racially democratic individuals look ahead and are open to continued growth, not because they have forgotten or denied the ghosts within, but rather because they have grappled with and embraced them—­in a spirit of moving constructively forward. They have reappropriated the past into an open-­ended, ever-­expansive present self. The Means of Racial Reconstruction The first part of this chapter addressed the question: What is to be achieved? It settled on an answer: Racial democracy. The second part now addresses the question: How is racial democracy to be achieved? Here a pessimist might reply: “It cannot be achieved. Racial domination is unchangeable. All efforts at change will come to naught.” But to this the response is clear: All experience already is change. “Becoming is an inescapable feature of life.”134 One cannot help but change the course of events, even if at times unwittingly or with limited foresight—­or, as Dewey would have put it, in a way lacking in intelligence. It is not a question of if we change racial life but how we change it—­for better or for worse. And more concretely, “in almost all areas of life, progress—­sometimes quite dramatic—­has been made in surmounting the ingrained and institutional evils of racism and oppression.”135 What, then, might be the ideal means of effecting racial reconstruction? How might racial democracy be attained? Dewey noted that “democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness.”136 It is by critical reflection and experimentation that efforts in racial reconstruction most effectively and intelligently will be directed. In what follows, we review four analytically distinct (but, as always in such matters, empirically interpenetrating137) levels at which

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change can be, and, as experience has shown, already has been, successfully pursued: those of the individual habitus, everyday interactions, established institutions, and interstitial collaborative efforts. We survey possible means of racial reconstruction at each level—­some of the most potentially helpful means, but by no account an exhaustive list—­and ponder their strengths and limitations. The reader should bear in mind that each set of means is interdependent with the others, and effective change in one or another alone cannot bring about the desired ends. As Tocqueville pointed out in respect to democratic liberty, not even ideal societal circumstances (he spoke of laws and institutions) can sustain a life of freedom for long in the absence of citizens imbued with public-­spiritedness and a love of the common good; nor can the best “habits of the heart,” as he termed them, preserve a democratic republic in the absence of the right kinds of laws and institutions.138 So too, in a racial democracy, one ideally must establish a self-­reinforcing dynamic, a virtuous cycle, extending across and subsuming all the different levels. One cannot ever say that one set of means is more important than all the rest.139 c h a n g e at t h e i n d i v i d u a l l e v e l At first glance, it might seem difficult to effect meaningful change at the individual level, for as we saw in chapter 6, the habitus is resistant to innovation. Not only is it sustained from within by a great many unconscious defense mechanisms, but also it gravitates toward external circumstances and situations that happen to agree with, confirm, or reinforce its own premises; it constructs precisely the sorts of experiences that preconstructed it. In this way, it shields itself from experiences to which it is ill adapted. Encrusted habits go all the way down, and, as Dewey noted in Human Nature and Conduct, wish and effort cannot easily change them.140 And Bourdieu, for his part, also observed that deeply embedded, corporealized ways of being at best can be transformed slowly and laboriously; a sudden conversion of the will is unfeasible. However, for all that, Bourdieu also showed that dispositions indeed are plastic and malleable: “Habitus is not the fate that some people read into it. Being the product of history, it is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. It is durable but not eternal!”141 We can, in other words, shed our least desirable habits, including long-­established ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting that help to reproduce racial domination. If consumed with bigotry, we can cultivate in ourselves more accepting dispositions toward other racial groups. If limited in our (self-­)perceptions and strategies of action by long-­entrenched habits

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of whiteness, we can develop capacities for deeper and more genuine mutuality. If prone to symbolic violence, we can negate this tendency toward self-­negation and form more satisfying and fulfilling habits, ways of being conducive to self-­development and growth. And finally, if we embody the attributes of a racial democratic individual, this too can be altered in the direction of greater mistrust and enmity—­although why would we wish to do that? Change at the personal level is possible because, as Judith Butler has said of the heterosexual self, the habitus is “compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity. [Hence] this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat . . . ?”142 The habitus lives in and through its reenactments—­it is not a thing-­like substance—­and it can be altered through them as well. Bourdieu showed in his ethnological studies that mismatches often occur between habitus and field, particularly in circumstances of rapid societal change. The fact that a habitus can “misfire” when incapable of generating practices—­reenactments—­conforming to its milieu is a major spring not only of social innovation but also of individual transformation.143 Two potential means of change, and of racial reconstruction, then come into view.144 The first is indirect. Racial actors can change the settings they inhabit with the deliberate aim of putting themselves in contexts more conducive to growth and enriched experience. It is the relation between habit and habitat that matters: by altering the one, they can establish conditions for transforming the other. We already have spoken of cultural la­ bor, of doing the cultural work, necessary for building bridges across racial divides and proactively fashioning more meaningful connections.145 But one also can insert oneself from the outset into growth-­conducive contexts where cultural labor is necessary: for instance, by entering into meaningful interactions with neighbors of ethnic backgrounds other than one’s own, or by joining interracial, even antiracist, associations or movements. The second means of personal change is deliberate reflection. Misfires between habitus and field produce “critical moments” of disalignment and perplexity, which in turn can lead to (self-­)critical thought.146 As Mead observed, it is in those moments that one pauses and reconsiders one’s previous modes of response to a situation in hopes of arriving at a more intelligent way forward.147 Potentially this involves reconstructing one’s ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting—­for instance, in racial life, questioning one’s sense of ethnic superiority; one’s erotic fantasies toward the racial Other; one’s fears of con­ firming demeaning stereotypes; or one’s tendencies toward self-­exclusion, the self-­denying verdict that “this is not for the likes of me.” At times it also involves rethinking dispositions toward racial hatred or vindictiveness. Such

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self-­questioning, too, can result in self-­enlargement and growth—­and perhaps bring closer to realization the type of individual personality corresponding to the racial democratic ideal. Several aspects of deliberate reflection merit close attention here. One is the antecedent choice even to engage in such reflection at all, the moment (in both senses of the word) of elemental racial agency. Another important aspect of deliberate reflection, one required of dominants and the domi­ nated alike, is the sheer perseverence it requires. There is no conversion moment, no glorious awakening, in which, once and for all, one emerges out of darkness into light. One never can stop asking: How do I know my racial assumptions are true? How do I know the world actually works this way? How might my upbringing and racial identity be influencing my thinking? The apt metaphor here is one of training, in which day by day one disciplines one’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions so they are not dictated without one’s consent by the forces of domination. This is no simple task, and one can take comfort in St. Augustine’s frustrated vent: “Whence is this monstrosity? And why is it? . . . The mind commands the body, and is obeyed instantly; the mind commands itself and is resisted?”148 Yet another aspect of deliberate reflection is the degree to which necessarily it involves infraconscious, indeed often bodily, layers of the racial habitus. As we have seen, racial dispositions are not merely cognitive in nature; they are deeply incorporated, even corporealized, modes of response for which a transformational strategy built on consciousness raising is inadequate. How does one react when a large black man steps inside the elevator? When one spots an Arab American man in the airport security line? When one notices a white woman dressed in professional clothes, briefcase in tow? When an Asian American student raises his hand in class? These are “instinctive” responses that appear to come from “second nature,” and indeed, they are closely “bound to the body,” to borrow a phrase from Bourdieu, and “durably inscribed” at a level beneath that of “injunctions and condemnations.”149 Deliberate reflection has to notice, monitor, and aim at changing these highly undeliberate, unreflective modes of engagement: again, no easy task. questioning rarely can bring about meaningful individual-­ level Self-­ change without the critical, often uncomfortable intervention of others. As we pointed out in chapter 2 when speaking of race scholarship, reflexivity seldom is effective when undertaken solus, on the model of Descartes “shut up alone in a stove-­heated room.”150 Yet this is the model most commonly followed in our racial culture. In our post–­Civil Rights moment, pursuit of individual transformation often involves asking oneself if one is racist (a common preoccupation among liberal whites) or if one is reverse racist.

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We put ourselves on trial—­Wacquant speaks of a “logic of the trial”151—­and probe deep within for signs of guilt. To speak in alternative, religious terms, we aspire to cleanse ourselves of sin. Here the means of (self-­)reconstruction resemble the ones laid out above, but typically expiators do not go nearly far enough in making use of them. They fail to place themselves in new circumstances conducive to inner growth and change, and they do not extend their self-­reflections beyond the narrow bounds of nebulous confessionalism and self-­reproach. Their most important endeavors in self-­cleansing take place in private, in the solitude of their own hearts. The result all too often is a disingenuous reflexivity that errs in one of two opposite directions. If one does not conclude that one is free of all prejudices—­“I do not have a racist bone in my body”—­then one finds oneself completely, irremediably racist. The former kind of exaggeration looks inside and discovers an angel, seemingly immune to the seducements of racial domination; the latter finds a demon that welcomes racial domination without resistance. Both forms of self-­searching are dishonest; both fail to specify and alter the actual ways in which racial domination is perpetuated. Deliberate reflection only produces significant change when it takes place in a dialogic context in which internal thought processes are articulated and carried forward into action and some sort of response thereupon is received from the external environment. Friends, lovers, fellow participants in a social movement: these are the sources of response that can help, in the manner of an ongoing experiment, to let one know if one’s self-­ questioning is on target. Often such response can be challenging and painful. But just as often, it can be invaluable. We shall have more to say in the pages that follow about the importance of interracial dialogue. Individual-­level change is at its most far reaching when it becomes a self-­ reinforcing process, establishing new dispositions that themselves embrace, and serve as a means toward, continued reflexivity, self-­development, and growth. These are the dispositions Bourdieu termed a “reflexivity reflex” and that Dewey once described as not merely intelligent habits but also habits of intelligence. They have to do less with deliberate reasoning and problem solving than with an attitude of openness toward experience. The reflexivity reflex leads one always and proactively to seek out honest, searching, and dialogical ways of probing one’s racial blind spots. And habits of intelligence reach even further down, so to speak, into the depths of one’s intrapsychic life, into layers where the most destructive passions of racial life are to be found: spite, vengefulness, shame, and self-­loathing. These self-­reinforcing habits of change lead one away from such destructive passions and in the direction of empathy and love. Racial healing becomes possible when individuals choose potentially enriching modes of engagement over their own deeply

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ingrained tendencies toward fear, closure, hardness, and denial. Forgiving the thousand cuts and wounds of racial oppression—­not only once but as an ongoing, dispositional way of being in the world—­is a necessary means and motor of personal development. Forgiving oneself—­when self-­hatred has been inculcated across a lifetime of racial subordination—­is all the more indispensable. And finding love toward the racial Other—­again, as a way of living and a regular practice—­can help to facilitate continued growth; indeed, meaningful growth is difficult to imagine without it. When these dynamics become habitual and self-­reinforcing, one can enjoy the finest prospects for individual-­level transformation. For then the entire process continually and ongoingly is generated from within. What are the limits of personal development? How much can it be expected to achieve? Efforts at racial reconstruction often place too much of an emphasis on individual-­level change. As we noted in the preceding chapter, conservative race scholars and commentators long have spoken of the need for nonwhites, especially ghetto blacks, to develop self-­responsibility. Underscoring the putative tendency of the ghetto habitus toward indolence, self-­indulgence, and a reckless disregard for others, they have called on blacks self-­consciously to alter their habits and dispositions.152 Such moral paternalism ignores the role of unjust social arrangements in bringing about and perpetuating urban pathologies. For their part, liberal thinkers also have exhorted whites to engage in personal upgrade, specifically an extirpation of their inner racism.153 This too has been a flawed and one-­dimensional approach, at least for racial reconstruction, since there is a great deal more to racial domination than racial prejudice. Surely, there are limits to what can be expected of individual-­level transformation in the striving for a racially democratic society. Yet, as philosopher Tommie Shelby also has pointed out, it is morally legitimate at least to expect the ghetto poor, like anyone else, to live by certain baseline standards of personal conduct. “Expecting the ghetto poor to honor their natural duties . . . does not blame the victims. The ghetto poor should not be held responsible for the appalling social conditions that have been imposed on them because of the workings of an unjust social structure, but they should be held accountable for how they choose to respond to these conditions. Demanding this basic level of moral responsibility treats them as full moral persons and as political agents in their own right.” In particular, as Shelby notes, “It is reasonable to expect the ghetto poor . . . to not take courses of action that would clearly exacerbate the injustices of the system or that would increase the burdens of injustice on those in ghetto communities similarly situated. . . . Nor should they do things that would clearly make a just society more difficult to achieve.”154 Whites, too, for their

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part, should be expected to adhere to basic requirements of racial justice and to renounce as far as possible the privileges of their own whiteness. In short, personal transformation does matter, and the more one sets one’s sights on a fully realized racial democracy, the more seriously one should take the project of individual-­level change. c h a n g e at t h e i n t e r a c t i o n a l l e v e l Racial reconstruction also can be pursued at the interactional level. A diversity of means are available for making interactions, including interracial interactions, more racially democratic. Some involve taking others’ prejudices seriously, asking them questions, and seeking to engage them in rational discussion rather than in a debate in the sense of a verbal sparring match. Others aim to make the most of so-­called “teachable moments.” But another, more confrontational approach is laid out in the so-­called “race traitor” literature, which calls in eyebrow-­raising fashion for the “abolition” of the white race.155 By this is meant, as a closer look reveals, nothing other than the elimination of white privilege—­hardly a novel goal—­although the means proposed for doing so are provocative. In the spirit of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, what is called for here is “disrupting” the ordinary workings of a racist order whenever and wherever they occur, even if at the cost of considerable acrimony and discomfort.156 The guiding orientation is not educative but contestational, and the key idea is to disturb and obstruct the otherwise smooth, unthinking operation of racial domination, to throw a wrench in the works. Such an approach would be most effective when undertaken among racially privileged whites—­in moments, for example, when one offers a racist comment and another challenges it forthrightly and without hesitation, forcing the initial speaker to realize that such comments will not go unchallenged, even among white interlocutors themselves. The race traitor approach also can be carried over, however, into interactions among nonwhites. For interactions within and across nonwhite racial or ethnic boundaries—­for instance, among fellow American Indians, or between a Puerto Rican and a Dominican—­also can involve an expression of racist sentiments, whether of racial animus against whites or of racism against members of other nonwhite groups. When interlocutors explicitly refuse or deny complicity with racism, thereby severing the psychical ties of trust and fellow feeling among interaction partners—­the bonds of sympathy holding them together—­the interactional power of racist speakers is reduced, and the interaction order stands a greater chance of reconstituting itself on an antiracist basis. Intimidation may well occur; defensiveness is a likely result. But far from being unintended

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consequences of the disavowal of racist complicity, these are the very point of it, the very means of effecting change. What is one to think of efforts to bring about racial reconstruction at the interactional level? What are its possibilities and limitations? Yet again, one is reminded of the Bourdieuian dictum that the truth of interaction is not to be found in the interaction itself—­but in the structure. While we disputed this assertion in chapter 5, it remains the case that interaction-­level change (by itself, at least) is too narrow in scope to overturn racial domination. One cannot bring about racial democracy solely by converting minds through dialogue or even by making the operations of racial domination more arduous and conflictual. What happens, for instance, when whites interact not with other whites, or nonwhites with other nonwhites, but across the color line? Whenever Americans with different racial identities meet, a whole history of murder and slavery, colonialism and dehumanization, stands between them.157 Seeing another person as black, American Indian, or white is nothing short of seeing hundreds of years of history, ugly and shamefaced, unfurled before one. Interracial dialogue means engaging with this thing looming in one’s presence. But the “thing” in question is a historically constituted relation of power that cannot be confronted solely at the dialogical level. Hence the challenges that face well-­meaning whites who insist on regarding the antiracist project as basically one of face-­to-­face interaction. “White people who are attempting to transform their habits of white privilege should accept as fitting,” notes one astute observer—­perhaps a better word might have been “understandable”—­“and not as ‘reverse discrimination,’ the angry reactions and stares that they might receive when they have entered into non-­white spaces.”158 This said, interaction still is important, and much is to be gained from effecting change at that level. It is impossible to imagine a racial democracy in which people do not engage in mutually enriching and creative interaction. Seeking to bring about such interaction is a crucial element in the effort to reconstruct our racial order. We would be remiss here if we did not conclude this discussion of the means of interaction-­level change with a few comments on a closely related and important topic: diversity training. Diversity management programs can be found in many workplaces across America, and they are among the most significant attempts in recent years to alter the character and tenor of interracial interactions. What are their origins? Diversity management is a fairly new development, one with roots in affirmative action legislation. During the early 1970s, employers woke up to the fact that they could be subjected to costly lawsuits if they discriminated against women and people of color. To decrease their risk of litigation, they established affirmative action

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and antidiscrimination offices. But in the 1980s, affirmative action policies were weakened by President Reagan and the Supreme Court, a development which forced affirmative action specialists—­whose livelihoods depended on antidiscrimination efforts—­to repackage their services. These specialists did so by filing back the teeth of affirmative action, in particular by doing away with more positive and proactive steps to enlarge the representation of women and people of color in the workplace. They also spun the resultant (softer) antidiscrimination programs in a different way than before, rationalizing them not on ethical grounds—­as a judicious response to centuries of racial and masculine domination—­but because they made good business sense. A diverse workforce, it was reasoned, would increase a company’s effectiveness and competitiveness and would expand its reach to new consumer pools. Many companies were convinced and implemented mandatory “diversity training” initiatives. Affirmative action thus became diversity management.159 Was this new perspective, which came to be widely accepted, an effective solution to the problems of racial domination? Or was it widely accepted precisely because it was ineffective?160 Many researchers have found diversity management insufficient for dismantling racial domination. First, diversity training seems to do nothing to bust through glass ceilings. Studies have shown that such programs leave unaltered the racial and gender mix of companies’ supervisory positions.161 Second, diversity has come to mean many things: diversity of political leanings, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, age, and so forth. As the meaning of diversity expands to incorporate more aspects of our lives, the term comes to signal human variation—­not the undoing of historical and structural modes of domination. “Is diversity management really just [a matter of] talking about respecting all individual differences?” asks one observer. “If so, this is problematic and cannot in its present form lead to inclusive organizations. There is a real danger in seeing differences as benign variation among people. It overlooks the role of conflict, power, dominance, and the history of how organizations are fundamentally structured by race, gender, and class.”162 Another concern is that diversity management might reify race in fallacious ways, inflating cultural differences or describing racial differences where none exist. For instance, one antidiscrimination training manual describes Latino workers as “family oriented” (versus work oriented) and suggests that blacks “react quickly to changing situations.”163 Overarching statements such as these encourage stereotypical thinking. Finally, one might ask, how could a training session that lasts less than a day—­the length of half of such training sessions164—­have any impact on a phenomenon centuries old? The point is not that diversity management programs are useless. Some research

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suggests they can encourage tolerance in the workplace, and companies that have taken more serious measures—­for instance, placing a permanent person or staff of people in charge of antidiscrimination programs—­have created a more integrated workforce.165 The point is that, when critically analyzed, these programs are revealed as poor substitutes for aggressive antiracist initiatives. They are but one step in the right direction, and a small step at that. As means of interaction-­level change, they can only go so far.166 c h a n g e at t h e i n s t i t u t i o n a l l e v e l It will take much more than a single conversation or diversity training session adequately to address racism. And despite one’s best efforts, one will not always succeed. Some people will go to their graves with their racism. After trying and trying, sometimes the only thing left to do would be to move on and expend one’s energies elsewhere, like fighting for racial democracy at the institutional level. Why are societal institutions—­and institutional complexes—­so very important? As Bourdieu noted, “A relation of domination that functions only through the complicity of dispositions depends profoundly, for its perpetuation or transformation, on the perpetuation or transformation of the structures of which those dispositions are the product.” To break that complicity, accordingly, it is important to effect a “radical transformation of the social conditions of production of the dispositions.”167 Interactions, too, profoundly are shaped by larger institutional structures. It is difficult to imagine changing patterns of racial interaction in any far-­reaching way without also reconstructing the institutional frameworks within which they unfold. Among these institutional frameworks are the economy (or, at a more microscopic level, the workplace), the state (including courts, policing, and prisons), institutions of cultural production (including the arts and the media), and the fields constituting civil society (including schooling, housing, and the family). Rather than discuss in detail the various substantive changes required for these institutional domains to become more racially just and democratic—­for instance, implementation of universal health care, or the provision of more federal resources for public housing—­we focus here as elsewhere on domain-­transcending means of effecting change. At the institutional level, these include devices such as antidiscrimination laws; affirmative action; a “hidden agenda” of targeting racial groups for state aid under the aegis of nonracialist policies; efforts to change the very ways in which racial categorization, classification, and hierarchy are inscribed in institutions; and institution-­specific, sometimes institutional complex–­specific, attempts at moral (re)regulation.

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Antidiscrimination laws are among the most important measures at the institutional level for reconstructing the racial order. They address discrimination in education, housing, and the workplace in particular: key pressure points of racial domination.168 Epitomized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations, but including as well a whole host of other legislative achievements, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, they seek to realize across the institutional landscape the ideal of equal opportunity for all citizens. For example, antidiscrimination measures are the first line of defense against racial exploitation and injustice in relations between landlords and tenants. The Fair Housing Act (FHA), passed by Congress in 1968, prevents discrimination by all housing providers, from landlords to lenders. Although the FHA forbids discrimination toward a number of protected groups—­women, religious minorities, people with disabilities—­the majority of violations involve discrimination on the basis of race. Because many people do not even realize they are being discriminated against in the housing sector—­landlords may claim that available units no longer are available; real estate brokers might show a Dominican family only houses in certain areas of town—­federal, state, and local institutions have taken steps to root out “hidden discrimination” by, for instance, sending testers, virtually identical in all respects save for race, to pose as potential buyers or renters. Since 1992, the Department of Justice has brought nearly one hundred discrimination cases against housing providers based on evidence gleaned from these testers, recovering more than $12 million in damages.169 Local fair housing groups also have relied on the FHA to hold discriminating landlords accountable for, say, charging Hispanics higher rent or for turning Asian American families away. Between 1990 and 1997, local fair housing groups filed over one thousand fair housing lawsuits and received more than $95 million in damages.170 Still, cases alleging discrimination are far outpaced by acts of discrimination in the housing sector. The National Fair Housing Alliance estimates that each year roughly four million instances of discrimination take place against racial minorities, but only a small fraction are reported and an even smaller fraction tried. In 2007, the Department of Housing and Urban Development received 2,449 complaints of discrimination but charged only 31 of them.171 Affirmative action is another important means of racial reconstruction. It encompasses all those policies and practices designed to offer people of color more opportunities “in mainstream institutions, either through ‘outreach’ (targeting the group for publicity and invitations to participate) or ‘preference’ (using group membership as criteria for selecting participants).”172 A

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mainstay of antiracist policy since the end of the Civil Rights Era, it typically is ignored by political philosophers, whose ideal theorizing, as we have noted, pertains to a society in “strict compliance” with the principles of justice (to speak with Rawls) rather than one marked by the “less happy conditions” of “partial compliance,” those precisely of the sort that render affirmative action necessary.173 (Rawls, for one, never devoted a single word to affirmative action in his entire life’s work.174) One prominent exception is Elizabeth Anderson, who, in The Imperative of Integration, a work avowedly concerned with non­ ideal theorizing, considers at length the different philosophic justifications for affirmative action. The most compelling of these, she argues, is the integrative model. “Instead of waiting for injustice to happen and compensating afterward, or merely blocking discriminatory mechanisms that retain their force, [this model] . . . aims to dismantle the continuing causes of race-­based injustice by practicing integration, which is an essential tool for undoing segregation and stigmatization.”175 The integrative model has wider scope, too, than other alternatives that stress instead the potential contributions of affirmative action to institutional diversity of ideas and viewpoints; “integration,” she writes, “plays multiple roles, in addition to epistemic ones, in a just and democratic society.”176 The integrative model depicts the beneficiaries of affirmative action in a nonstigmatizing way, as “partners with the practitioners of affirmative action in breaking down the barriers that block segregated groups’ access to mainstream opportunities.”177 It recognizes that these partners may be among the more privileged of the underprivileged, although such a limitation it deems necessary because “successful functioning” in institutions is a requirement of “successful integration,” and those who succeed are better positioned to help their less privileged peers down the line.178 The integrative model also directly targets race as “the object of moral and instrumental concern. . . . If the problem is racial segregation, then the most direct way to remedy this problem is to practice racial integration.”179 Ultimately, affirmative action under the integrative model is concerned with advancing a racial democratic project, in which institutions truly are just and conducive to the flourishing of racial groups and individuals only insofar as they allow meritorious persons of all racial origins an equal opportunity for inclusion and meaningful participation.180 A different means of institutional reconstruction is the so-­called “hidden agenda” promoted by Wilson in response to the growing realization that neither antidiscrimination laws nor affirmative action have succeeded in improving the life chances of the least well-­off in society. Antidiscrimination laws are inadequate for overturning cumulative inequalities that exist at the time when racial barriers are lifted and that severely hinder the most

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disadvantaged members of racial minorities. And affirmative action leaves virtually unaffected a large proportion of nonwhites lacking qualifications such as educational capital, job training, and network connections. “If minority members from the most advantaged families profit disproportionately from policies based on the principle of individual opportunity,” writes Wilson, “they also reap disproportionate benefits from policies of affirmative action based solely on their group membership. . . . [Hence] problems of the truly disadvantaged may require nonracial solutions.”181 These comprise economic policies aimed at enhancing job opportunities among the least advantaged, new job training programs, and an expansion of public assistance—­all measures that, unlike antidiscrimination and affirmative action efforts, benefit the general public rather than only racial minorities. Some even have argued for replacing race-­based affirmative action with class-­based affir­ mative action because the latter not only would effectively benefit the truly disadvantaged but also is more politically viable.182 “The hidden agenda for liberal policymakers,” Wilson sums up, “is to improve the life chances of truly disadvantaged groups such as the ghetto underclass by emphasizing programs to which the more advantaged groups of all races and class backgrounds can positively relate.”183 Here institutional reconstruction centers on the state and economic life, its agenda aiming to benefit the underprivileged in indirect, unspoken ways, much as some models of affirmative action stress its potential to add not to the economic or educational well-­being of racial minorities but to the diversity of perspectives. Wilson’s approach has important implications for racial democracy because its goal is to redress problems of racial injustice that cannot easily be remedied by race-­specific policies. Ironically, however—­perhaps because it recognizes the continued vehemence of racism (it speaks of a hidden agenda)—­its distinctive approach is color-­ blind, a certain incongruency of means and end. An approach more fully synchronous with racial democracy explicitly would be race conscious and racial justice oriented. Yet another means of racial renovation at the institutional level is symbolic reclassification. It builds on the insight that institutions embody a symbolic order, a framework of rules, categories, and boundaries, whose very structure helps to shape the workings of racial domination. For instance, the state imposes on society a wide array of symbolic schemas, from the racial categories of the census to the quota systems of immigration law, from the delineation of “English-­Only” zones to the racial designations on a birth certificate. Thanks to these codifications, as Bourdieu has observed, “the state has the ability to impose and inculcate in a universal manner, within a given territorial expanse, a nomos, a shared principle of vision and di-­vision,

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identical or similar cognitive and evaluative structures. . . . [It becomes] the foundation of a ‘logical conformism’ and of a ‘moral conformism’ (these are Durkheim’s expressions), of a tacit, prereflexive agreement over the meaning of the world which itself lies at the basis of the experience of the world as ‘commonsense world.’ ”184 Nor is the state the only institution whose symbolic classifications matter for racial life. When universities distinguish between legacies and affirmative action applicants, when schools track students in ways that overlap with racial distinctions, when the National Basketball Association imposes a dress code banning “hip-­hop” modes of dress—­as Elijah Anderson would have it, the “iconic ghetto”185—­while endorsing con­ ventional white fashion choices, a great deal is done, in racial life, to demarcate the sacred from the profane. It is this dual work of consecration and denigration—­which of course has incalculable consequences—­that is negated by efforts at symbolic reclassification. “Commonplaces and classificatory systems,” notes Bourdieu, “are . . . the stake of struggles between the groups they characterize and counterpose, who fight over them while striving to turn them to their own advantage.”186 But classification struggles also can be waged, not for racial groups’ discrete advantage, but on behalf of a more just and harmonious racial order. A final important means of racial reconstruction is moral regulation, or, more properly speaking, moral reregulation—­that is, the hammering out of new structures of moral expectations and constraints (regarding race relations) at the institutional level. In his lectures on Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, Durkheim suggested that the occupational group likely would assume many of the moral functions once carried out by the family, imposing an all-­encompassing system of moral rules and obligations and providing an important focal point for group attachments. In so doing, it would help to remedy the anomie—­the normlessness and malaise—­afflicting modern societies. “It is not possible for a social function to exist,” Durkheim asserted, “without moral discipline. . . . A state of order or peace amongst men cannot follow of itself from any entirely material causes, from any blind mechanism. . . . It is a moral task.”187 “In occupational groups, each institutional actor, whether an authority or a subordinate, is to be curbed in his impulses, situated within legitimate, democratically agreed-­upon moral limits, and told what his relations with his associates should be, where illicit encroachments begin, and what he must pay in current dues towards the maintenance of the community.”188 This arrangement is not to be repressive. Not only is it to be worked out democratically, but also it is to be fully compatible with individual freedom: “Liberty is the fruit of regulation” was Durkheim’s motto.189 In the present day, no institutions of the sort envisioned by Durkheim actually

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exist. But it is possible at least to produce a few examples of institutions with racially progressive structures of moral regulation, even if those structures have not been determined in fully democratic fashion. The military is among the most racially integrated of American institutions. Its internal policies exhaustively spell out for all parties, from the highest-­level officers to the lowliest personnel, their respective rights and duties as members of a just racial order, and they do so, just as Durkheim stipulated, “not vaguely in general terms but in precise detail, having in view the most ordinary day-­to-­day occurrences.”190 The National Football League—­an institutionalized organization central to American life—­also has a racial policy extending from the league office down to franchise management, players, trainers, coaching staffs, and game officials. Hirings, promotions, and even matters such as “stacking,” the assignment of whites to “skilled” positions such as quarterback, carefully are monitored for racial equity.191 These examples demonstrate that moral reregulation can be a valuable means of transforming racial life. It can do more to reorganize race relations—­on a stable, enduring basis, with clearly defined normative arrangements—­than many of the other measures discussed above. Nothing less than a new moral universe can be created for race relations at the institutional level. c h a n g e at t h e i n t e r s t i t i a l l e v e l Given the importance of Dewey’s democratic theory for many of the arguments in this chapter, perhaps it is fitting that several of our examples of racial change at the interstices of social life should come from the Chicago pragmatist tradition. The first of these is social settlements, as epitomized by Addams’s famous experiment in Chicago’s Near West Side and discussed in her important works such as Twenty Years at Hull-­House.192 The Near West Side was among the poorest immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago, and during her many years of living there, Addams sought along with fellow residents to assist the poor, the staff serving “as visiting nurses, educators, childcare providers, and advocates.” According to one description, “The settlement house space was also available for use by people in the neighborhood. In addition, the settlement was a research center; residents gathered data on social problems with the goal of bringing about social change, earning them the label ‘spearheads for reform.’ Many of the reforms they initiated were geared toward improving the lives of working-­class immigrants”193 The pragmatist aspect of Hull-­House lay in its open-­ended experimentalism and problem-­ solving orientation. What is more, its very approach to change embodied the democratic spirit—­one might say a racial democratic spirit, despite most

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of its residents being privileged and white—­since it sought self-­consciously to involve immigrant neighbors in collaborative deliberation and decision making. As Mead, a friend and supporter of Addams, put it, “It is the privilege of the social settlement to be a part of its own immediate community, to approach its conditions with no preconceptions, to be the exponents of no dogma or fixed rules of conduct, but to find out what the problems of this community are and as a part of it to help toward their solution.”194 Although social settlements on the model of Hull-­House no longer are in their heyday, there do exist contemporary variations on many of the same themes and principles. For instance, in recent years an “urban monastery” movement has arisen out of New Christian Evangelicalism, challenging the Christian Right’s individualistic focus by stressing that social justice “is no less important to God than sharing the gospel with individuals.”195 Intentionally set in urban neighborhoods that are poor, racially diverse, and wracked with social problems, urban monasteries aim to become part of the local scene and to fulfill their religious mission by contributing in a respectful way to the betterment of their communities. (Of course, the question always is: How do those neighborhoods feel in turn about them?) At present, several dozen of these initiatives operate across the country. Publics are another significant means of racial reconstruction. As we noted in chapter 5, they arise in interstitial spaces—­whether in the street, cyberspace, and social movement gatherings or in relatively more institutionalized settings such as clubs, town halls, and churchs—­and seek to influence and reshape the different institutions and institutional complexes of social life. First-­generation Chicago pragmatists not only were important for theorizing publics (Dewey) but also, as historical studies have made known, participated in them extensively (Addams, Mead, Small, Henderson). Chicago sociologist Charles Henderson, for instance, was a highly visible figure in a vast array of “loosely but strongly connected” “little publics” in Chicago—­a veritable “archipelago of publics”—­speaking out on a wide range of social reform issues that included prisons, poverty, and social welfare.196 But so, too, were large numbers of nonwhites deeply engaged in publicity, from prominent leaders (Washington, the Grimké sisters, Du Bois) to ordinary folk whose names do not appear in the archival records. Throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day, across many decades of civil rights struggle and beyond, publics of all sorts—­including counterpublics, where the dominated find refuge—­have served as a crucial means of fighting for racial democracy. In some cases, they also have been sites of racial democracy themselves, settings of mutuality, participation, and growth on different sides of the racial divide, as, for instance, when Christians from segregated churches have joined

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together under the banner of  “racial reconciliation,” a growing movement (especially among evangelicals) that has resulted in churches engaging with one another, sharing resources, and even founding multiethnic congregations.197 Yet another means of interstitial change is the community activism approach of Saul Alinsky, a student of Park and Burgess during the 1920s and 1930s. Alinsky first did extensive work in a local community—­in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, made famous by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle—­while conducting research at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Juvenile Research, then directed by Clifford Shaw.198 But soon enough, his concerns shifted from juvenile delinquency to the challenges of local organizing, and he began to devote himself to building neighborhood support for a union battle against the meatpacking industry. For the rest of his career, he developed the Deweyan pragmatist impulse in creative new directions, seeking by disruptive, confrontational means to renew local democracy and aspiring tirelessly to forge a broad network of neighborhood organizations to join up with unions in a nationwide progressive movement. Eventually, his efforts would put him in contact with the migrant farmworkers’ movement in California (he influenced Cesar Chavez) and with community organizing initiatives against racial discrimination in Northern cities. For Alinsky, pragmatism meant having an optimistic, resilient outlook, engaging in creative experimentation, and never losing faith in the capacity of ordinary people to effect change and realize social justice. Efforts to build racial democracy might benefit from returning to his discussions, especially in works like Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, of practical, nuts-­and-­bolts methods of local organizing.199 As with social settlements and urban monasteries, there is the difficulty here that neighborhood-­based initiatives, even if brought together in a far-­reaching coalition, never prove adequate to the challenges of racial domination on a national scale. But Alinsky at least recognized that “you have to start where you’re at,” as the common expression goes. Like the Chicago pragmatists and reformers before him, he followed Dewey (and Tocqueville, whom he cited often) in affirming that the problems of a democratic republic—­indeed, also of a racial democracy—­always are, at least in part, local problems. As history attests, of course, bold reform and transformative social change also are brought about (perhaps most consequentially) through public protest: through strikes, sustained boycotts, public demonstrations, civil disobedience, and racial uprisings—­the mechanisms of what Alexander calls “civil repair.”200 Democracy entered the world not only by means of local initiatives and publics but through a revolution, and it is a revolution that Americans celebrate on the Fourth of July. Slavery was abolished because abolitionists

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employed revolutionary methods while agitating for slaves’ freedom—­and because, as Du Bois pointed out, black slaves themselves rose up in rebellion; union strikes in the first half of the twentieth century helped boost thousands of workers, including people of color, from poverty into the middle class; and segregation folded because antiracist social movements forced its hand. In 1984, Chavez reflected on a lifetime leading the farm workers’ movement. “The UFW [United Farm Workers of America],” he wrote, “was the beginning! We attacked that historical source of shame and infamy that our people in this country lived with. We attacked that injustice, not by complaining; not by seeking hand-­outs; not by becoming soldiers in the War on Poverty. We organized! Farm workers acknowledged we had allowed ourselves to become victims in a democratic society—­a society where majority rule and collective bargaining are supposed to be more than academic theories or political rhetoric. And by addressing this historical problem, we created confidence and pride and hope in an entire people’s ability to create the future.”201 To participate in collective political action—­to employ the time-­honored methods of public protest—­is to engage as fully and completely as possible in civil society and to refuse to “become victims in a democratic society.” It is to address the challenges of racial domination on the widest scale and in the most ambitious fashion, certainly as was the case with the various racial and ethnic movements of the Civil Rights Era. Even Dewey, who began by underappreciating political struggle, came to recognize its importance. As his intellectual biographer Robert Westbrook has noted, “Dewey’s longtime defense of ‘organized intelligence,’ his previous neglect of political action, and his critique of violence led such hard-­boiled critics as Reinhold Niebuhr to the conclusion in the thirties that he neglected or repudiated politics and a struggle for power in favor of an ‘appeal to reason.’ But by the onset of the Depression, Dewey had come to conceive of politics as among the most significant forms of organized intelligence, one in which social ends were articulated and analyzed and forceful action was taken to secure these ends. Political activity in a democracy was in the broadest sense an educational enterprise, but this function did not rule out the exercise of power.”202 To be sure, different forms of public protest have their respective strengths and weaknesses. Urban uprisings and other such spontaneous rebellions may be necessary, as Shelby has pointed out, “for the ghetto poor to maintain their self-­respect. If nothing else, such actions can be cathartic and can help the oppressed to keep from turning on each other as they seek an outlet for their justified anger.”203 Urban conflagrations also can call attention to societal maladies all too easily ignored or dismissed by mainstream America. (Race riot reports are an important, and all too often necessary, genre of racial

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inquiry, and some have had significant impact.204) But there is no denying that these acts of rage and defiance often are self-­destructive and short-­lived. For Shelby, more organized, durable movements that claim an ethnocultural basis also are unsatisfactory, including, perhaps most famously, the Black Power movement. They reify the racial group and proceed as if it were a real, substance-­like entity rather than (as we noted in chapter 3) an internally differentiated, contestatory, dynamic ensemble of processes-­in-­relations. “The basis of black political unity,” writes Shelby (although one can generalize here from blacks to all racial groups), “should not be a shared black identity, regardless of whether we understand this identity as a matter of racial essence, ethnicity, culture, or nationality.”205 It should be a common experience of racial oppression, of being stigmatized and denied the advantages racial dominants enjoy. “An oppression-­centered black identity is not a matter of being anti-­white or, for that matter, pro-­black, but of abhorring racial injustice.”206 It is a matter, too, of individuals who have been treated unfairly due to their social classification as persons of color sharing in a concern to overturn racial injustice and to establish a more harmonious and equitable racial order. Influenced by Rawls, Shelby lends this view a liberal inflection: “This group solidarity would be understood, not as an end in itself, but as a collective strategy for bringing about a social order in which individuals can autonomously define and pursue their conception of the good life without their ‘blackness’ posing any limitation or burden.”207 Perhaps most conducive to the goal of a racial democracy, however, are not even the kinds of protest movements championed by Shelby but rather a multiracial form of political contention, one embodying the very ends it hopes to realize. (Shelby, it should be noted, does not criticize the ideal of forming political alliances across racial lines; rather, he observes correctly that “there is no principled reason why [people of color] must give up their solidaristic commitment to each other to do so. The two forms of solidarity are not mutually exclusive. There is room for nested and overlapping forms of antiracist solidarity.”208) Multiracial movements have a long history in the United States, perhaps longer than many Americans imagine. To take but one set of examples, interracial alliances long have been crucial to workers’ efforts to win rights through union mobilization. Asian American and Mexican American farm workers, along with documented and undocumented immigrants, joined together to fight for more rights and helped to energize a movement that eventually would result in the thoroughly multiracial UFW. Chicago’s white and black packinghouse workers, whom the business elite pitted against one another to drive down the price of labor, overcame racial and ethnic antagonisms to form the powerful United Packinghouse Workers

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of America; in 1946, this interracial union went on strike to increase workers’ wages—­and won. (Alinsky’s career-­making efforts to organize the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council came about a decade earlier and were undertaken in alliance with the union’s predecessor organization.) And Hawaii’s racially diverse working-­class movement united Native Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers, winning better pay and the institutionalization of antidiscrimination guidelines.209 These efforts by interracial labor movements provide a compelling model today for those who would struggle for change in our racial order. “Working in multiracial coalitions of equal members,” Frank Wu has written, “united by shared principles, we can create communities that are diverse and just. Together, we can reinvent the civil rights movement.”210 Perhaps, too—­this might be even better—­we can invent a new kind of racial justice movement altogether for the new times in which we live. Conclusion Several conclusions follow from the foregoing discussion. First, the most normatively persuasive and compelling of the various possible ends of racial reconstruction is racial democracy. It folds in the very best that color blindness and multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism have to offer—­a concern that all be treated fairly and with fundamental respect; and an openness to, and embrace of, diversity—­while also placing racial justice at the forefront. Moreover, it envisions a racial order in which all are allowed equal opportunities to participate in democratic self-­rule and thereby to flourish and grow. Second, racial democracy is a continually evolving and moving target. It involves “the faith,” as Dewey once put it, that “the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences.”211 Finally, the means of pursuing racial reconstruction are manifold and cannot be prioritized. They are to be found at many distinct levels—­individual, interactional, institutional, and interstitial—­and relate to one another as in a complex unity, each offering its own unique and valuable contribution. In today’s racial discourse, conservative race politics gravitate toward one end of that array; progressive race politics, the other. But racial democracy cannot be realized without effecting

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changes at all these various levels, and by all these different means, together. It is doubtful that any one of these alone could meet with much success. Racial reconstruction is a many-­sided effort, much as racial democracy itself lives on in people’s hearts, in face-­to-­face encounters, in established structures and practices, and in less ordinary moments of racial life, all at the same time. A practically wise and intelligent race politics must come to terms with this and pursue its goals simultaneously on many fronts.

8

Summary and Implications for Race Scholarship

It is difficult and challenging to study racial life, for the racial order itself is complex and many sided. Our aim in highlighting its multidimensionality, and thereby, along the way, in pointing out at least implicitly the limitations of approaches that do not take in its many aspects, has not been to criticize those approaches as empirically or theoretically valueless. Our rationale in outlining so comprehensive a view as that presented in this book, a vision of the whole as opposed to its various parts, precisely has been to prevent the larger picture from being neglected while one-­sided lines of inquiry are pursued. Simmel offered in this regard a valuable observation: “Every synthesis,” he remarked, “needs the analytical principle which it nevertheless negates, for without this principle it would not be a synthesis of different elements but an absolute unity; conversely, every analysis requires a synthesis which it dissolves, for analysis still needs a certain interconnectedness, without which it would be mere unrelatedness.”1 Simmel articulated here an important insight: analytic and synthetic reasoning form a dialectical unity, neither fully making sense in abstraction from the other.2 Synthesis remains useless and empty so long as the constituent elements of a complex unity have not been examined in single-­minded fashion, while analysis, for its own part, remains chaotic and fragmentary (tending toward a “mere unrelatedness”) unless set against the backdrop of a unitary framework to which implicitly or explicitly it makes reference. Today it is clear that many race scholars, like social thinkers more generally, have lost sight of the wisdom in Simmel’s insights, opting instead for the absolute priority of analysis over synthesis. In practice, this has meant a preference for approaches to the study of race that isolate its various dimensions for careful, selective study while leaving to a side their complex interrelation. It is important that there be a common frame of reference for

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all these endeavors. It is important that the moment of synthesis not be lost. It is that very moment, at least in respect to the structures and processes of the racial field, that we have sought to highlight—­and to elucidate—­in this work. Summary of the Argument Let us begin by summarizing, chapter by chapter, our most important theoretical arguments. In chapter 1, we observed that theory building in race studies long has been outpaced by developments in empirical research, resulting in a yawning gap that bodes ill for racial inquiry. We underscored the need to close that gap. All too often, scholarship has focused less on analyzing how race works than on establishing its continued salience; it has produced empirical findings in discrete areas of research but few insights that apply more generally to racial life; and it has split apart the racial order into separate and bounded entities (racial groups) instead of exploring group-­making processes and the dynamic engagements of racial actors with one another. What theoretical efforts it has pursued largely have been in the domain of empirical theory; it has set aside the task of elaborating a more fundamental approach to racial investigation. The result has been a narrowing of analytic ambitions and a diminishing concern to ask bold questions—­an unfortunate trend in light of the growing complexity and ambiguity of race relations in the post–­Civil Rights Era. Our own endeavor has been concerned to redress the balance between theoretical innovation and empirical inquiry. Building on a wide array of social-­theoretical, literary, and philosophical sources, but drawing in particular on Deweyan pragmatism, Durkheimian sociology, and the writings of Bourdieu, we have sought to develop a theoretical approach that is universalizing but not grand theoretical; deeply grounded in substantive research on race but not itself explanatory; and attentive to the analytic autonomy of different orders of racial phenomena but in a synthetic, not eclectic, way. Recognizing the sometimes sharp tensions among our original sources of theoretical inspiration, not to mention also internal variations in the currents of thought they represent, our theoretical approach has emphasized a common base in relational thinking. It is this relational perspective, whose promise has yet to be fully realized in race studies, which most deeply has informed our theoretical labors in the core chapters of this work. In the three major parts of this study, we have addressed in turn the fundamental issues and challenges of reflexivity, relationality, and reconstuction. In chapter 2, we stressed the importance of attending in reflexive fashion to the unspoken, often unrecognized assumptions that influence

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race scholarship and to reflexively addressing as well some common pitfalls in the construction of scientific objects. Race scholars deeply are affected in their ways of thinking by their location in specific social universes; their ap­­ proaches and even the questions they ask or fail to ask often are predetermined by their location in particular disciplinary universes; and their perspectives on the objects of their study often are preshaped by their location in scholastic universes marked by a distance from necessity. If race studies are to produce truly warranted scientific knowledge, it is crucial that structures and dynamics of reflexive scrutiny be implemented at the institutional level and that dispositions toward reflexivity—­a reflexivity reflex—­be cultivated at the personal level. Epistemological obstacles also lurk in the construction of objects of racial investigation. When systematic efforts to delineate an object of inquiry are not undertaken, presuppositions from the realms of lay or scholarly common sense often seep into the definition of one’s research agenda; hence careful, methodical exercises in crafting working definitions have a key role to play. Our own definition of race has been provided as a case in point. Presentist ways of thinking, which by dehistoricizing race discourage or prevent its denaturalization, also constitute a significant epistemological obstacle, as do parochial approaches that take for granted, rather than calling into question, conventional systems of racial classification and categorization, which far from being natural vary by societal context. Reflexivity in race studies extends, then, to thinking in temporally and spatially situated ways about objects of inquiry and about the concepts one deploys in making sense of them. Finally, epistemological barriers lurk in the tendency to ignore—­in the name of objectivist social inquiry—­the primary experience that, after all, is an integral part of the racial object one investigates. Reflexivity exposes the implicit elitism in theoretical approaches that, as it were, impose categories from above just as much as it uncovers the scientific shortcomings of perspectives that fail to question common sense. These various lessons of reflexivity all have proven important in the core chapters of the present study. Whether thinking in field-­theoretic terms about racial objects, critically scrutinizing determinist or rationalist approaches to racial dynamics, or probing the social psychology of whiteness (to mention but a few examples), our study has sought to put all these reflexive insights to effective use. In chapters 3–­6—­the heart and soul of this work—­we have attempted to analyze race in relational terms; our discussions have extended from the macro-­to the microlevels, starting with chapters on the structure and dynamics of the racial field, moving into excursions on interactions, institutions, and what we call interstitional phenomena, and ending with a chapter

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on social psychology. In chapter 3, we focused on the social, cultural, and collective-­emotional structures that shape racial life. The social structures of race are relational configurations—­spaces of positions—­organized in terms of the distribution of different kinds of capitals or assets, not only economic, cultural, and symbolic but also racial, all of which together confer on occu­ pants of different positions in the structure of their distribution powers and capacities, of various sorts and degrees, to influence the racial field. We developed, by way of example, the idea of a field of blackness with differently situated (collective as well as individual) actors possessed of varying capital profiles. The cultural structures of race also are relational configurations—­ spaces of position-­takings—­organized in terms of location within symbolic formations. Power accrues to those occupying positions identified in prevailing codes and narratives with the qualities of dignity, purity, and sacrality, while power ebbs from those in positions symbolically identified with indignity, pollution, and the profane. The collective-­emotional structures of race, too, are relational configurations, albeit configurations of passion. Like social and cultural structures, they are transpersonal and intersubjective in nature, rather than located merely in the heads of individual racial actors; they also have their own inner logic and organization. Structures of collective emotions—­spaces of emotion-­takings—­distribute power according to where actors are located within matrices of psychical investments; different locations in these structures are associated with different kinds of sentiments, such as trust or mistrust, desire or revulsion, security or peril, pride or shame. We have argued that power is a fundamental feature of each of these three kinds of racial structures, although in each case power is organized according to a different logic. Moreover, we have suggested that all these racial structures are mutually constitutive, even as they also are relatively autonomous. Galois lattice analysis provides useful imageries for capturing this notion of discrete orders of social phenomena structured in and through their interrelations with one another. In chapter 4, we shifted our analytic focus from statics to dynamics, synchony to diachrony, structure to agency. Conceptualizing racial agency in temporal terms, we spoke of iterational modalities in which past patterns of thought, perception, feeling, and action hold particular sway; projective modalities in which an orientation toward the future selectively is accentuated; and practical-­evaluative modalities in which habits or dispositions from the past, as well as projects for the future, are contextualized in the concrete circumstances of the present. Iteration is the analytic category to which racial propensity belongs, a deep-­seated, unselfconscious tendency to act as if race were something real, a disposition to carry on in tacit acceptance of the racial

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game and its stakes. Rites of institution help to reenergize racial propensities, naturalizing racial boundaries and bolstering the collective belief, or collusio, of all those included or excluded by them. Projectivity is an analytic category subsuming all strategies of racial conservation and subversion—­that is, projects to preserve or to transform the racial order to one’s own benefit, including through racial boundary work. Under its rubric fall racial classification struggles, countermobilizations on the part of racial dominants, and conflicts over whether a given situation is to be deemed “racial.” Finally, practical evaluation is the analytic category encompassing various forms of racial competence, the capacity to engage in the racial game and to understand its basic moves and stakes. A matter of practical judgment and know-­how, it entails skill at making racial discriminations (figuratively and literally) and at negotiating complex and ambiguous racial situations. Stressing these modalities has allowed us to place racial agency at the center of all analyses of racial life. Whether looking at small-­scale interactions or large-­scale societal processes, established or interstitial dynamics, routinized action sequences or transformational initiatives, one is able to find in them agentic engagements of one sort or other. In addition, putting together our analyses of racial agency with those of racial structures has provided a better understanding of each. Racial structures not only are relational but also temporal, for they encompass processes-­in-­relations, while racial agency not only is temporal but also relational, being always toward something, a mode of dynamic engagement with temporal-­relational contexts. Racial structures and racial agency are analytic elements in racial action—­ but racial action and racial actors alone are concrete. Our previous discussions were preparatory, then, in the sense that analytically they isolated or highlighted different moments in empirical action but did not discuss how these come together in actual sequences or bundles of action. In chapter 5, we turned, accordingly, to a consideration of concrete interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena insofar as these bear on racial inquiry and racial life. Interactions, we argued, are the most basic instances of empirical action. Channeled or shaped by different structures and featuring all the different modalities of agentic engagement we outlined earlier (although usually the routine or iterational), interactional processes reveal a great deal about how the racial order works, how race is produced or accomplished as a social fact, and how racial domination is perpetuated or subverted. They also constitute the core sequences of action to be found in institutions and in interstitial configurations. Institutions are bundles of interactional processes oriented (in most instances) toward the reproduction of past patterns of agentic engagement and structured in and through a combination

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of social, cultural, and collective-­emotional configurations. Much of race scholarship centers on their analysis precisely because they are the settings in which racial domination most often is carried out or challenged. Instances of interstitial emergence include publicity and social movements. Publicity comprises configurations and streams of concrete empirical action through which individuals and groups undertake in concert to reflect critically on and perhaps transform the institutions—­and, by extension, the interactional practices—­that affect them. Relatedly, social movements are complexes and streams of action through which claims are made on specific institutions, al­ ways through the medium of public performances and displays. Both types of interstitial emergence long have been prominent on the racial scene. Altogether, as we have shown, these bundles or sequences of empirical action—­ interactional, institutional, and interstitial—­constitute the core and essence of racial life. Race scholarship must theorize them carefully if it is to shed much light on the complexities of racial domination and racial progress. In the chapters summarized thus far, we have dwelt mostly at the collective as opposed to the individual level. Most instances of concrete empirical action we discussed in chapter 5 were transpersonal in nature. Any truly adequate endeavor in race theorizing, however, also needs a social psychology, for no system of racial domination sustains itself through force alone (it requires certain habits, tendencies, and even techniques of the body to help maintain it), and no system of racial domination successfully can be challenged through force alone (this, too, requires particular kinds of dispositions and forms of intelligence). In chapter 6, we probed these issues in systematic fashion. We began by introducing the idea of a racial habitus and by exploring analytic linkages between the dispositional theory at its base and more cognitivist approaches (now popular among race scholars) to studying racial representations. We also showed how the habitus incorporates a number of modalities of bodily knowledge: cognitive, moral, emotional, and aesthetic. Our focus of attention then shifted to two crucial topics in any social psychology of race: namely, the dispositions of whiteness and the unconscious mechanisms of symbolic violence. This discussion allowed us to examine social-­psychological themes pertinent at both the most and the least privileged sectors of the racial field. Finally, we turned to a discussion of the social psychology of intelligent engagement with racial problems and challenges. We examined how anger, on the one hand, and compassion, forgiveness, and love, on the other, can contribute in constructive ways to the struggle against racial injustice. Our three topical areas in this chapter corresponded loosely to the threefold distinction in chapter 4 between iteration, projectivity, and practical evaluation. Habitus is a source and generator of iterational

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engagement; whiteness itself is a project and symbolic violence the negation of projects (among, in most cases, the racially dominated); and racial intelligence is a capacity to make wise and effective judgments in difficult racial situations. Earlier we mentioned that reconstruction is another of the major themes we take up in this work. By this we meant, of course, the challenge of racial progress, the transformation of our racial order in the direction of greater justice and equity. In chapter 7, we dealt with this important theme, exploring how settings marked by racial domination intelligently can be reconfigured and how knowledge about racial domination can be used in efforts to oppose and end it. Our discussion spanned both the ends and the means of racial reconstruction. First we took up three alternative guiding ideals for reconstructing racial life: color blindness, multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism, and racial democracy. We concluded that racial democracy, which in our rendering encompasses both racial justice and the possibility for racial actors to flourish and grow through active engagement and collaboration with one another, is the most compelling end; we also showed how it subsumes the most appealing features of color blindness and cosmopolitanism alike without sharing in their weaknesses. Relatedly, we examined racial ends at the personal level, pondering what the ideal individual might look like in the color-­blind, multicultural/cosmopolitan, and racial democratic agendas. Again, we found that the ideal of justice, growth, and mutual enrichment pursued by racial democracy is the most promising guide to racial reconstruction. Second, we took up an array of possible alternative means of achieving racial democracy, moving from the individual to the interactional, institutional, and, finally, interstitial levels. We argued that each set of means is interdependent with the rest and that racial democracy cannot be brought about by pursuing one avenue alone. For a racial democracy to be realized, one needs to pursue progress at all the different levels together; none has priority. It is important to extend reflexivity from the realm of race scholarship into all the different levels and terrains of racial struggle. All stand in a dynamic relation with one another and contribute in their own way to making the cycle of racial transformation virtuous or vicious. No privileged way exists for achieving a normatively desirable racial order. Analogues and Intersections Many of the theoretical arguments in this book, as summarized in the preceding section, are generalizable to other important domains of social life. Although developed specifically with the racial order in mind, they generatively

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can be extended to societal orders quite distinct from that of race. The wellspring of our theoretical efforts, after all, is Weber’s insight that modern societies consist of a multiplicity of relatively autonomous and differentiated life orders, an idea elaborated by Bourdieu as well in his general theory of fields of practice. Deep analytic principles pertaining to any one of these realms or domains (e.g., the racial order) can be applied also to the others. It is well worth adding that at least two broad categories of societal orders typically are discussed in social theory. On the one hand, there are the classic Weberian life orders—­political, economic, aesthetic, and the like—­all of which are substantive and institutional in nature. On the other hand, there are the kinds of orders most famously studied by Marx in Capital or by Bourdieu in Distinction and Masculine Domination (alluded to as well by Weber in his discussions of class and status hierarchies)—­namely, stratification orders such as those of social class, gender, and ethnicity.3 Our analysis of the racial order clearly fits into the latter category. Each type of societal order is capable of subsuming the others. When focusing on stratification orders, one typically subsumes under them the substantive life orders of modern society; Marx, for instance, includes morality, art, the law, and politics within the broad compass of class-­structured capitalist social formations, while Bourdieu includes the fields of cultural production and the state in very specific locations in his field of social classes. But it also is possible to do things the other way around. When beginning with substantive domains, one can proceed to analyze them in terms of the race, class, and gender orders (as well as those of ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth) which they encompass. The important point is that the analytic program we have elaborated can be applied not only to other stratification orders but also to the various substantive realms of modern society. One can investigate, for instance, the political domain in terms of the analytic categories we have presented here, focusing on its structural and processual aspects; its institutions, interactions, and interstices; and the social psychology of its citizens, just as one can examine the racial order in terms of those same analytic categories. The same applies (to take another example) to what Weber in his Zwischenbetrachtung called the erotic sphere.4 When making use of our theoretical insights, one need not confine oneself to the study of racial life alone. All these considerations notwithstanding, however, since the racial order is most easily comparable to those of social class, gender, and ethnicity, it will be especially illuminating to use the latter as examples of how theoretical ideas in this book might be generalized. Let us begin with the space of social classes. There is a rich tradition of American-­style research on social stratification, one that goes back to Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan’s The

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American Occupational Structure, published only a few years before Distinction.5 But unlike Blau and Duncan’s perspective, ours in this book is thoroughly relational—­it directs attention, on the model of Marx’s Capital, to the mutual constitution and relations of opposition between dominant and dominated social classes—­and also it stresses power, rather than the mere layering (in a gradational sense) of the better-­and the worse-­off. Unlike stratification research, again, it explores how both social and cultural structures shape action in the order of social classes, and unlike even Bourdieuian sociology, it takes seriously as well the structuring effects of collective emotions. Our perspective also points toward investigations of how social class dynamically is enacted and achieved. Rather than one-­sidedly emphasize how unconscious dispositions drive action or how rational-­instrumental end seek­­ ing is the key to social-­class processes, it considers as well the in situ, real-time performance and accomplishment of class structure. In this way, it opens up not only the institutional and organizational levels so often stressed by both of the above approaches; it also directs attention to the interactional order, as in Goffman’s studies of the dramaturgy of social-­class hierarchy, and to the interstitial publics and movements in which social stratification is thematized and contested, often in ways quite different from Marxian revolutionary struggle, Bourdieuian processes of sacralization and vulgarization, or Blau and Duncan–­style individual striving for upward mobility. Finally, although Bourdieu and American-­style stratification research (especially in the latter’s Wisconsin School incarnation) both have a social psychology, ours is considerably more differentiated, particularly in how it seeks to highlight the blind spots in both dominant and dominated habitus and to uncover the intrapsychic processes of symbolic violence. It also is possible to extend the theoretical agenda outlined in this work to the order of gender relations. Bourdieu took on that object of study—­albeit without devoting nearly as much attention to it as he had to the space of social classes—­in his later work Masculine Domination, while gender studies more conventionally have centered on a (not dissimilar) program of structural analysis, as laid out perhaps most compellingly by Connell in Gender and Power.6 Our own approach conceptualizes the gender order in relational terms as a space in which each gender category is constructed against the other and in which power assumes the form (preeminently, although not exclusively) of masculine domination. It understands this gender order as comprising, as in a tripartite lattice, not only social and cultural structures but also configurations of collective emotions—­that is, complex sets of shared sentiments, desires, and fantasies, often of an eroticized nature, invested (or cathected, as Connell would have it) in masculine authority

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and feminine subordination. These structures are reproduced and sometimes challenged in and through sequences of action in which iterational, projective, or practical-­evaluative modalities of agency all can play a primary role. As social thinkers from Garfinkel to Butler have noted, gender always is an accomplishment, not an inert or passive system; it is performatively enacted, achieved, or “done.” Our approach also asks how interactions are gendered, how institutions themselves—­ranging from the state to the family, from schools to workplaces—­not only exhibit gender patterns but also serve to reproduce gender relations of power (even as they sometimes subvert them as well), and how gender figures importantly at the interstices of social life. Needless to say, our perspective also directs attention to social-­psychological questions such as how different kinds of masculine and feminine habitus are constituted, how masculine self-­centering (and the kind of psychical orienta­ tion that normalizes patriarchy while denigrating feminine dependency) operates, and how tendencies toward self-­negation become permanently lodged in the unconscious of gendered actors. Finally, there is the vexed question of the implications of our race-­ theoretic framework for the study of ethnicity (and, with few modifications, one also might speak here of nation), a topic we discussed at length in chap­­ ter 2. Race and ethnicity are intimately related. Ethnic groups enter into, and sometimes, as in the United States, play an important role in, the racial field much as entities like the state (itself a field of bureaucratic powers) also fig­­ ure importantly in nonstate fields. Organizational fields of various kinds are but one example. The economic field is another. But it also is possible to speak of distinct ethnic fields, or fields of ethnicity, in which relational dynamics can be discerned, struggles over power and resources identified, different habitus found operative, and the like. In many locales around the world, such ethnic fields, relatively untouched by race, are of paramount concern, whether the focus be on Vietnam (Kihn, Hmong, etc.), Spain (Catalans, Basques, Galicians), Ukraine (Russians and Ukrainians), or any number of other cases. The analytic insights we have been presenting can be put to good use when studying these ethnic fields as well. This precisely is the idea of a general theory of fields. Each field is unlike all others in some respects, like certain others in certain respects, and like all others in still other respects. There is no reason why a theoretical emphasis (such as ours) on the specifically racial field should preclude the application of certain of its generalizable insights to similar ethnic (as well as national) objects of study—­and vice versa. In recent years, the struggle to unify scholarship around a unitary agenda encompassing ethnicity, nation, and race has been inspired by the undesirable and counterproductive fact of academic overspecialization and compartmentalization.

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But this effort has led unwisely to a certain flattening out of the terrain—­and unnecessarily so, given that the theoretical unification, so avidly sought after, already can be achieved under the aegis of field theory. Two additional features of the theoretical agenda presented in this work also can be extended or generalized to societal orders other than that of race. The first is a close attention to problems of reflexivity. Our approach stresses the importance of uncovering how various forces located in investigators’ social, disciplinary, and scholastic unconscious impede their critical thinking or research in respect to questions of domination based on social class, gender, or ethnicity. How does one’s socially privileged, upper-­middle class background, one’s disciplinary formation in, for instance, family demography or organization studies as opposed to political sociology, or one’s location in an elite scholastic setting influence, perhaps in unmarked or implicit fashion, one’s approach to the study of how the social-­class, gender, or ethnicity orders are set up and operate? Our perspective also emphasizes the potential usefulness for reflexive inquiry of such analytic moves as deploying carefully wrought analytic definitions, contextualizing one’s object in time and space, and taking the moment of primary experience seriously (as well as incorporating it into one’s analytic framework). The second feature of our theoretical agenda that also could help in the study of other orders of phenomena is an explicit and abiding concern with reconstruction. Our approach highlights the different possible ends as well as means of social change and assesses the likely practical consequences of pursuing them, thereby deploying James’s pragmatist insight that the meaning of an ideal always resides in the effects that implementing it has in the world of experience. Even if speculative in nature, each ideal is an orientation toward action and a hypothesis to be tested. The present work, then, despite its title and subject matter, is not about the racial order alone. It also is meant as a model for how one might think about other kinds of orders in social life. One even might add here (to the substantive and stratification orders already discussed) other possible objects that could be constructed by zooming in or out at different levels of magnification: for instance, orders on a global scale (e.g., the geopolitical domain) or on a sub-­or infrasocietal scale (e.g., gender relations in the American academy). Principles of analysis developed in the present study might well be extended to these other spaces as well, yielding not necessarily an identical set of findings or results (although presumably one could add from them to a general fund or stock of knowledge regarding how orders of practice work) but at least some insights that, in turn, could highlight what makes racial structures and dynamics unique and sui generis. It is time to break through the disciplinary compartmentalization that, for far too long,

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has set the study of the racial order to one side and the study of other societal configurations to the other. Attempts at overcoming such overspecialization have been gaining ground. For example, Lamont and her collaborators, not to mention many others also working in a similar vein, have sought ambitiously to bring together large provinces of scholarship, whether on race or science, the professions or national groupings, under the auspices of a single intellec­ tual project—­the study of boundary work—­and as part of the selfsame theoretical and substantive research agenda. In our own way, even as we have focused intently on the racial order, we too have aimed to contribute to this larger, more boundary-­spanning enterprise. But if this book is not about the racial order alone, a critic might wonder, was it ever really about race at all? That is, if our approach can be applied with so little modification to the study of other social orders, from religion to gender, from nationality to class, have we actually produced a comprehensive and systematic theory of race? The question, it must be pointed out, is rooted in intellectual division and disciplinary convention much more than it is in the nature of social reality. In social science today, one finds “specialists” on this or that social order—­sociologists of gender, Marxist theorists of class, anthropologists of religion—­who form their own associations, found their own journals, study deeply one single vector of inequality, and in so doing often come to believe that there is something special about their scholarly terrain, that race is qualitatively different as an object of analysis from gender, which itself is qualitatively different from class, and so forth. But at the highest levels of analysis, there is nothing so special or unique about race, and believing otherwise only reifies and calcifies that which, like class or gender, is but a well-­founded fiction. This is not to say that certain social orders, like race, do not have their own autonomous structure and logic as well as their own social psychology. Nor is it to imply that, at lower levels of analysis, one cannot find social dynamics or arrangements in one field that have no analogy in another. (Cities are divided by race and class, for example, but there virtually is no gendered segregation of urban space, at least not on a city-­wide scale.7) But even when focusing on lower levels of analysis, one finds more similarities than differences across social orders, whether when examining general trends (social, symbolic, and psychical divisions; preserving or challenging the established order) or specific topics (honor, violence). According to one historian, “These aggregations [e.g., race, class, gender, ethnicity], constructed and pitted against one another, and often accompanied by extravagant claims as to their primacy and significance, need to be treated with healthier skepticism than they all too often receive. . . . Conversations across these allegedly unbridgeable divides . . . make up a substantial, perhaps even preponderant,

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part of the whole human experience.”8 Social thinkers as diverse as White and Dorothy Smith, Parsons and Bourdieu have spoken of elemental correspondences across fields. Every language has its unique grammar and pronunciation, but beneath the surface level of particularity lies a deep structure of syntax.9 That our approach can be applied to other spheres without flattening all that makes race “race” is more virtue than liability; we have attempted not only to better grasp the intricacies of the racial order but also to develop a theory that gestures toward “that missing large idea of human association.”10 We also might ask: Is all this exclusively applicable to orders in the American context and in the present day? Our study has been centered on racial life in the contemporary United States, after all, and not on contexts elsewhere or in other historical moments. How might its insights and illustrations generalize to contexts differently situated in time and space, with racial dynamics and histories profoundly different from our own? Certainly it is true that a US-­centric bias has infected the study of race and ethnicity in other settings. But this in itself is no reason to refrain from focusing substantively on the American racial order. The key is generatively to extend to other cases the analytic method pursued here, always with an eye to highlighting what makes the various cases different but also what makes them similar. The racial order in the United States may be the empirical object of this study, but the theoretical object always has been to understand how race works more generally in modern societies. “It is possible to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions.”11 How might racial life be different today than in the past? How does it work in today’s Latin America as opposed to Western Europe, South Africa, or Australia? Such comparative questions are investigated more tellingly if one has at one’s disposal a strategy of analysis worked out through close inquiry into a singular case (e.g., the contemporary United States) but also applicable to other cases in a generalizing, theory-­building mode. As suggested in chap­ ter 1, this was the guiding insight of Bourdieu’s Distinction, a work ostensibly concerned solely with French social classes in the mid-­twentieth century. Thus far we have spoken only of the analogical relations between the racial order and other spheres of social life. But what of the related problem of how other orders—­in particular, stratification orders such as those of class, gender, and ethnicity—­intersect with that of race relations? How is one to conceptualize the mutual, reciprocal relations and conjunctures among multiple stratification orders or domains of practice? Even a sweeping work such as Distinction, which concerns itself with the order of social classes, can attempt only a singular cut into this complex, many-­layered cloth. The present work, too, has focused primarily on race and set aside the many difficulties and

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subtleties entailed by its intersections with other societal orders. Yet surely the racial order and those of class, gender, or ethnicity do not exist separately in concrete reality, each a microcosm entirely unto itself. Racial domination does not operate inside a vacuum, cordoned off from other modes of domination. On the contrary, it intersects with them in myriad ways. There is no ignoring the issue here of intersectionality, for a great deal of racial life—­ perhaps all of it—­is lived at the points of conjuncture of multiple fields. To be sure, this is not sufficient cause for abandoning a primary focus on analytically isolated orders of practice: there remain good theoretical as well as empirical reasons for placing race in the theoretical foreground. Understanding the inner workings of the racial order is an important goal in its own right. One cannot talk about intersections without also having talked about the structures and processes that intersect. Yet there also must be rigorous consideration of how other principles of division conjoin with that of race—­and of how the conjunctures are experienced by particular categories of actors. This is by no means a simple matter, and the issue never has been dealt with satisfactorily at the theoretical level. Among the classical sociologists, Marx and Engels addressed it only in a reductive fashion, as in Engels’s well-­known subordination of gender inequality to the logic of capitalist property relations.12 Durkheim hardly engaged with the problem at all, at least on a theoretical plane. And Weber spoke of it only obliquely, focusing on how conflicting va­lue imperatives are experienced (as when actors in the economic sphere seek in part to live by an ethic of religious brotherly love) or discussing those who occupy particularly ambiguous locations in stratification orders (such as the nouveau riche, who, although rich in economic capital, are denied full recognition in hierarchies of status honor).13 In Distinction, Bourdieu also addressed the challenge of intersectionality. But his approach was more systematic and theoretical. Distinguishing analytically between the primary and secondary properties of actors in a field, he wrote: “The individuals grouped in a class that is constructed in a particular respect . . . always bring with them, in addition to the pertinent properties by which they are classified, secondary properties which are thus smuggled into the explanatory model.”14 For purposes of an investigation of the field of social classes, the distribution of economic assets was to be regarded as primary: “It goes without saying that the factors constituting the constructed class do not all depend on one another to the same extent, and that the structure of the system they constitute is determined by those which have the greatest functional weight. Thus, the volume and composition of (economic) capital give specific form and value to the determinations which the other

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factors (age, sex, place of residence, etc.) impose on practices.”15 However, the secondary properties of a set of actors also lent a certain added inflection to these determinations.16 Presumably, in a different kind of study—­for instance, one on gender relations, or, for that matter, on race—­the respective weights accorded these various properties would be altered. But the basic principle would remain the same—­namely, that different structures of relations between properties, primary as well as secondary, lend different “specific value[s] to each . . . and to the effects they exert on practices.”17 Here then was an eminently relational way of thinking about intersectionality, at least in an objectivistic mode—­that is, as an aid to conceptualizing and mapping out fields of practice. It points toward analyses that would allow one, on the one hand, to construct a field emphasizing one specific element (in our case, race) yet also, on the other hand, to see how that field is defined in part by other elements (in our case, for example, gender, class, or ethnicity). It also opens up possibilities for investigating the subjective experiences of actors embodying different configurations of (primary and secondary) properties. Elsewhere, Bourdieu pursued such inquiries. For instance, in writing about the field of cultural production, where his principal concern was the intersections not of two (or more) stratification orders but rather of the substantive orders of art and commerce, each structured by its own principle of hierarchization, he paid especially close attention to art dealers, who embody almost in equal measure the primary and secondary properties of aesthetic and commercial orientation, respectively. These dealers, he showed, experience most keenly—­in the depths of their social being—­the conflicting tugs and antagonisms of the fields intersecting within them.18 In recent decades, the theme of intersectionality also has been taken up by scholars of race and gender relations. Their insights are indebted to a long tradition of activism and social thought on the part of women of color, one dating back, as Patricia Hill Collins forcefully has pointed out, to a time contemporaneous with the classical generation of sociologists.19 In that period one finds the intimate ties between masculine and racial domination addressed by Anna Julia Cooper, whose A Voice from the South spoke of “the col­ oured woman of today . . . confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and . . . as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both,”20 and by Ida B. Wells-­Barnett, whose writings on lynching, including “Southern Horrors,” emphasized the conjoint workings of race, class, and gender.21 Du Bois also anticipated intersectional analysis in “The Damnation of Women,” which spoke to the daily oppressions undergone by black women.22 And after the 1960s, activist intellectuals began to criticize the feminist movement and

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Civil Rights Movement for ignoring the unique struggles of women of color, producing such important texts as the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement”;23 Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class; bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman?;24 the anthologies The Black Woman, This Bridge Called My Back, and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave ;25 and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands 26—­a remarkable efflorescence of political analysis and sociological theory building in which women of color called into question the very notion of a monolithic black, Latino, or women’s experience.27 When we fail to account for internal variations in these experiences, they suggested, we create silences in our narratives of the social world and fail to explain how overlapping systems of advantages and disadvantages affect opportunity structures, lifestyles, and social hardships—­especially, in this case, those of women of color. As the Combahee River Collective put it, “We . . . find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”28 There is no separating here (as in Bourdieu) the primary and secondary properties of social actors. As more and more women and minorities, including women of color, entered the academy after the 1980s, the question as to how intersectional modes of domination would be conceptualized became a pressing concern. Critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term itself in two seminal articles in 1989 and 1991, imagining society as divided every which way by multiple forms of inequality.29 In her view, the social world resembled an intricate system of crisscrossing roads, each representing a different social identity (e.g., race, gender, class, ethnicity). One’s unique social position (or structural location) could be identified by listing all the attributes of one’s social identity and then pinpointing the nexus (or intersection) at which those attributes converged.30 For many years, this conception of intersectionality remained the dominant one, leading scholars to understand overlapping modes of oppression as a kind of “matrix of domination,” to invoke the phrase most identified with Collins’s also influential study, Black Feminist Thought.31 Sti­mulated by these contributions, intersectional analysis became a leading mode of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities, to the point where now it is regarded by some as a new paradigm.32 Several features of the new literature are worth noting. Theoretically, it has replaced the earlier tendency of intersectional analysis to think in additive terms—­one often would hear of “double jeopardy” or “triple oppression”33—­with a more promising tendency to theorize the “multiplicative” relations among structures of inequality.34 Moreover, increasingly discontent with Crenshaw’s static

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vision of a grid of structural positions, it has moved toward reconceptualizing intersectionality itself as a dynamic, interactional process.35 Substantively, it has shifted beyond speaking merely in terms of race and gender toward a more generalizing approach that theorizes the complex intersections of race and gender with class, ethnicity, and still other forms of domination. In this way, it greatly has expanded the analytic scope and power of intersectional inquiry, moving beyond a content-­specific emphasis on women of color toward a focus potentially on any category.36 Methodologically, the new scholarship has aimed to find creative ways of supplementing fieldwork-­and interview-­ based research with conventional, statistical modes of inquiry. It has brought in its train, that is, a new methodological ecumenism.37 And finally, normatively, as Collins has observed, “as the structural contours of social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s receded into the past, intersectionality’s incorporation into the academy in the 1990s and 2000s seemingly [has] uncoupled this knowledge project from politics.”38 Scholarly advances, then, have come (unnecessarily) at a moral-­practical cost. Our own approach to analyzing intersecting modes of oppression aligns with all but the last of these developments. As we emphasized in the previous chapter, race scholarship—­and surely this includes intersectional inquiry—­ must be understood as part of a larger enterprise that aims not only to comprehend but also to transform the racial order. But as for the remaining issues on which we concur with the new scholarship, most encouraging in our view is its growing recognition that a relational approach is necessary, one that conceives of intersectionality not as a set of crisscrossing roads but as a web of relations within which struggles over opportunities, power, and privilege take place. In this perspective, systems of domination often are mutually reinforcing, even if they do not hang together altogether seamlessly, as in versions of left functionalism that leave no room for social contradictions which provide for potential sources of emancipatory change. To flourish, each system of domination at least potentially can rely on the logic and ramifications of the rest. Each can be implicated in the others’ perpetuation. And despite having its own autonomy as a discrete order of social phenomena, each also can relate to the others through a logic of co-­constitution. This is what one recent analyst of intersectionality had in mind when noting that “all the processes [e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, and class] that systematically organize families, economies and nations are co-­constructed,” while (to focus on the cultural dimension) “understandings of both gender equality and other forms of inequality [themselves] are mutually stretched and bent as they encounter each other.”39 Dissecting the details of this dialogic process—­uncovering, for

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example, precisely how racial domination constitutes and is constituted by masculine domination—­is crucial to developing effective strategies that com­­ bat various kinds of social suffering. So too is understanding that no system of domination is determinative of all the rest. Marxian formulations of determination “in the last instance” grant class a certain analytic primacy by fiat, but neither class nor any other mode of oppression is foremost, overarching, or more oppressive than the others. Why are sociologists forever asking if certain individual actions or demographic patterns “really have more to do with” class or with race? This theoretical binary perhaps is a product of (largely political) debates about the black urban poor in which one finds arguments about “class trumping race” or “the continuing significance of race.”40 But it is a curious obsession, this intellectual habit of inquiring into which source of division matters the most, especially since verifying empirically the explanatory primacy of race or class (or of gender, region, or what have you) often is impossible, social action being so deeply influenced by position in overlapping and mutually constituting fields. It may be more useful analytically to distinguish how the structures and dynamics of a given field guide and inform social action, not so as to uncover the “fundamental source” of that action but to evaluate how beliefs and practices are predicated primarily on the field to which the actor is oriented. A Mexican American stock trader may be strongly oriented to the field of Latinos when ordering food with relatives at a local taqueria or attending his niece’s Quinceañera, to the field of high finance when at work, and to the field of masculinities while at the gym. But this does not imply that his ethnicity “matters more” at the taqueria and that his class “matters more” at work; his class may matter a great deal at the taqueria and his ethnicity a great deal at work. Rather, it implies that how one performs in certain scenarios partly is conditioned on which aspect of one’s habitus specifically has been activated.41 To abandon the search for a primary determination is a crucial prerequisite for any effort to orient societal analysis in truly fruitful directions. Broader Implications for Theory and Research Let us now discuss some of the theoretical implications of this study. Clearly, its conceptual framework comprises a wealth of (sometimes overlapping) an­­ alytic distinctions. What is one to do with all this complexity? One point to bear in mind is that our study is no different in its concern for drawing distinctions than most other works of sociology. For instance, it now is commonplace to distinguish between social relations and culture, as we ourselves do in chapter 3. Perhaps we offer a larger number of analytic distinctions

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than do many others—­we speak, for instance, not only of social relations and culture but also of collective emotions—­but also we expend a great deal of care on showing how the different elements in the whole relate to one an­­ other. As Hegel once remarked, “The true is the whole.”42 For instance, we show how structures of social, symbolic, and psychical relations, on the one hand, and modes of agentic engagement, on the other, come together in the interactions, institutions, and interstitial phenomena of racial life. We demonstrate how these various elements coexist theoretically in a differentiated unity, one in which each element is enriched by its associations with the others, even if at the cost, as Freud said of the expansive but fraught work of his love-­instinct, or Eros, of “fresh tensions.”43 (Its task of “uniting and binding” requires it to assimilate into the expanding unity ever more elements originally set apart from it.44) One other point to consider is that the framework we have set forth here is not a mere checklist of analytic points to consider or a set of conceptual pigeonholes to fill—­a box here for institutions, another there for collective emotions. We do not envision researchers mechanically crossing off, as they proceed, the various theoretical topics we have introduced: asking, for instance, “Do I have enough here on culture?” or “Have I talked enough there about interaction?” Theoretical studies never lead in such a direct and unmediated fashion to concrete ways of doing empirical research. At least ideally, all they do is enrich researchers’ theoretical imagination and add to investigators’ theoretical culture—­an insight now gaining traction in the growing literature on Peirce’s method of abduction.45 Questions such as “What am I supposed to do with this?” are misplaced, for works of this kind emphatically do not tell researchers “what to do.” Specific directions for research may in some cases be indicated—­for instance, in our discussions of the field of blackness in chapter 3 or in our comments on symbolic violence in chapter 6—­but typically, studies of this kind are at most part of a continuing conversation, a many-­sided discussion, which helps the sociological enterprise jaggedly and irregularly to move forward by indirectly informing research and being indirectly informed by it in turn. In between are other layers of mediating theorization—­what one might call, for lack of a better term, empirical theorizing. Across its various dimensions, however, this study nevertheless also aims to reinforce a certain cast of mind, a sensibility or internally consistent way of thinking: that of relational inquiry. As we have noted, from this perspective, relations between terms or units are conceptualized as dynamic, unfolding processes or transactions rather than as static ties among inert substances. “Previously constituted actors,” writes Abbott, “enter [transactions] but have no ability to traverse [them] inviolable. They ford [them] with difficulty

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and in [them] many disappear. What comes out are new actors, new entities, new relations among old parts.”46 The imageries most often employed in relational thought have to do with complex conjoint activity, in which it makes no sense to envision constituent elements apart from the transactional flows of which they are a part (and vice versa). Dewey, for example, stated in Experience and Nature that “the import of . . . essences is the consequence of social interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direction and concerted action in fighting, festivity, and work.”47 In Social Organization, Cooley supplied a vivid analogy to “joint music-­making.” These thinkers might just as well have spoken of negotiations or conversations. Indeed, Bakhtin, himself an eminently relational thinker, conceived of transactions explicitly in dialogical terms: “Dialogic encounter[s],” he noted, “. . . [do] not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched.”48 This study has attempted to develop an approach to race studies that makes full use of such insights. In every chapter, we explored the implications of relational thinking. Research on specific objects, we have found—­for instance, on racial groups—­always must take into account, both theoretically and empirically, the constitutive effects on those objects of belonging to determinate relational configurations; it must avoid the substantialist error of attributing to preconstituted entities (or sets of entities) viewed in isolation—­entities such as “the black race”—­properties adequately understood only in relational (or field-­theoretic) terms. It is telling that, until recently, sociology of race textbooks were organized one racial group at a time: a chapter on Native Americans here, a chapter on Latinos there.49 Relational thinking would rule out formats of this sort; it also would criticize research monographs that purport to tell the story of this or that racial phenomenon in disregard of the broader framework of race relations in which it might be embedded. This work also has implications for a range of other issues of concern to race scholars, issues we might classify (once again) as substantive, methodological, and moral-­practical. Let us turn now to substantive issues. As Dewey observed, “Men do not, in their natural estate, think when they have no troubles to cope with, no difficulties to overcome.”50 Thought begins only when one encounters roadblocks to unreflective habitual conduct. Nowhere is critical reflection—­and the exercise of intelligence—­more sorely needed than in the confusing, stressful, complicated post–­Civil Rights world in which we find ourselves. How is one intelligently to define oneself in, and make one’s way through, a racial scene marked not only by racial intolerance but also by growing possibilities for racial democratic self-­projects? What kinds of habitus most intelligently adjust themselves to the chronic perplexities of such

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a world? What social-­psychological end state, as it were, can rise to meet its challenges? And beyond the individual level, how are we to confront not only bigotry but also color-­blind racism? How are we to highlight and overturn forms of racial injustice that fall outside the purview of prejudice and discrimination? How might we understand and cope with the seemingly race-­ neutral ways in which racial domination is perpetuated? These are some of the substantive challenges we have considered in this study—­and sought to provide tools for understanding. To be sure, we have identified discontinuities between today’s racial difficulties and the ones that marked the pre–­Civil Rights Era. But we also have stressed continuities between yesterday and to­ day—­the structures and processes that persist, not only in collectivities but also in individuals, not only in established institutions but also in durable features of the inner life (i.e., in deeply entrenched modes of self-­negation and symbolic violence). Racial domination relies heavily on forgetting—­a collective as well as individual amnesia—­and on what Bourdieu called an ongoing “historical labor of dehistoricization,” one that proceeds at the levels both of societal and personal histories.51 We have specified ways of rendering that labor visible and thereby of negating it. The task is not simple. Our aim throughout, in fact, has been to underscore its formidable complexity. Efforts at scholarly comprehension, not to mention also practical reconstruction, are ill served by simplistic, one-­ dimensional solutions which, despite their considerable appeal, leave racial domination largely intact by underestimating its obduracy and by failing to recognize its subtlety. Granted, there is nothing subtle about discrimination, economic and sexual exploitation, political disenfranchisement, or legal unfairness. When problems of racial injustice are straightforward, they must be treated as such—­and combated directly. (King liked to quote the line, “When you are right, you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”52) Yet racial domination also has a way of eluding the grasp of reductionistic approaches, whether those be centered on capitalism, interpersonal racism, or discriminatory conduct. It resists all efforts—­theoretical and practical alike—­to address it from a monocausal viewpoint, one that highlights a single factor or element at the expense of others. The contemporary racial scene in the United States—­and elsewhere, for that matter, across the globe—­cannot be reduced to one aspect alone. This does not mean one must renounce the aspiration to develop a coherent or self-­consistent theoretical framework. Complexity need not mean confusion. But it does require an abiding concern with issues of mutual constitution, codetermination, and multiple causation, among others, not to mention a practical agenda that prioritizes change at many levels simultaneously—­intrapsychic as well as

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institutional; structural as well as interactional—­in contrast to efforts toward one or another of these alone. There never was a time when the racial challenges facing us were reducible to the nexus of white and black Americans, or to outward as opposed to inward forms of oppression, or to social relations (much less the social relations of capitalism) rather than also to symbolic formations and collective emotions. There never was a time when racial injustice could be understood and addressed solely at the level of small-­ scale, face-­to-­face encounters, or through social movements rather than also through prosaic institutional efforts, or through collective transformation to the exclusion of individual self-­scrutiny, learning, and growth. Surely the present era, during which it is difficult even to put one’s finger on what a racist thought or action might be or to say how racial injustice ought to be confronted, is not the time to reach for easy answers. These, then, are some of the important substantive implications of our study. What are its implications for methodology and research design? To begin with, the present work points to a wide range of methodological choices and styles of empirical inquiry. It is not a brief, in other words, for a qualitative, antistatistical sociology. The very concept of “qualitative sociology” is an artifact of the mid-­twentieth-­century disciplinary context, at least in the United States, in which quantitative research, or what C. Wright Mills then labeled “abstracted empiricism,” very much was in the ascendancy.53 In the face of an onslaught of regression analysis, scholars of the pragmatist and Chicago School persuasion—­one thinks here in particular of Strauss—­invented the notion of qualitative sociology as a way of retaining the relevance and via­ bility of older, increasingly threatened ways of doing sociology.54 Ironically, however, their project accepted many of the positivistic assumptions of its alter ego and failed to establish itself as more than a pale mirror image. Only toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-­first did sociology finally begin to shed its scientistic pretentions—­the signs of its early immaturity—­and to move beyond the stale debate between quantitative and qualitative research. This not only meant a concern with mixed methods but also, perhaps more importantly, the realization that there exist exciting possibilities for formalization not necessarily tied to the general linear paradigm. Abbott’s influential essays on theorizing time and space have been crucial to this awakening.55 But so too has been the emergent understanding that relational thinking informs many different kinds of social-­scientific methods, from social network analysis and conversation analysis to fieldwork-­based ethnography and historical and comparative inquiry.56 One can imagine here a space of formal methods, in which statistical data analysis occupies the dominant pole and a variety of less hegemonic relational methods occupy

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the dominated one. The theoretical ideas of the present study have the closest affinity with those relational styles of research, gesturing as they do toward pattern-­finding inquiry. But in the end, quantitative statistical research, too, can help in furthering the goal of understanding how the racial order is set up and operates. Indeed, it is impossible and undesirable to conceive of racial inquiry without it. No methodological approach should be ruled out in advance as researchers tack back and forth between construction of the object and production and analysis of data bearing on that object. The time has come to put behind us the methodological disputes that defined earlier phases in sociology’s disciplinary evolution. To be sure, race researchers also must be careful to avoid the shortcuts in statistical reasoning highlighted by recent critics such as Tukufu Zuberi in Thicker than Blood.57 Zuberi has shown that statistical investigators often treat race as if it were the cause of societal outcomes. For instance, some researchers concerned with neighborhood disadvantage include in their measures the percentage of black households in a neighborhood, a decision that suggests that certain neighborhood racial compositions themselves are a kind of disadvantage akin to crime rate and concentrated poverty. As Zuberi has pointed out, by contrast, it is racially classified actors who, in their transactions and mutual responses, generate effects. To think otherwise is to mistake statistical models for reality. “Unless we start with prior knowledge about the causal relationship, the calculation of the regression equation refers to a regression model and its system of equations, not to the ‘real’ world that the model cannot purport to define empirically.”58 (Decades ago, in Notes on Social Measurement, Otis Dudley Duncan warned against just such tendencies, which he termed “statisticism.”59 Recalling our discussion of reflexivity in chapter 2, we also might call them a version of scholasticism.) Zuberi’s critique can be rephrased in a strong or a weak version. In the former, racial statistics inherently are racist. But in the latter, a line of argument differing hardly at all from what many critics of standard regression models have been saying for years, racial statistics are misguided only when they imply that variables (such as a person’s race) and not actors (in dynamic relations with one another) do the acting and produce effects.60 In this weak version, Zuberi’s critique is compelling—­and, indeed, has inspired innovative work that aims precisely to avoid racial reification.61 There is a broader difficulty, however, beyond even such pitfalls: namely, the tendency of quantitative researchers sometimes to focus so intently on the statistical indicators of racial domination that they fail to grasp its lived essence. All too easily, for instance, ghetto poverty is spoken of as a matter of income levels, reducing a complex, multidimensional experience to a set of numerical values. Statistical tables

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hardly allow one to grasp what it means to be poor in America. Poverty, especially black inner-­city poverty, is a kind of existence, a bundle of impossible choices, the clustering of disadvantages and hardships along multiple dimensions.62 (“To be a poor man is hard,” Du Bois observed in Souls, “but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”63) Duncan described the sort of work that reduces poverty to an income level as an “egregious manifestation . . . of statisticism.”64 It leads not to greater clarity but precisely to a failure to understand what might be the most relevant features of the phenomenon at hand. Ethnographers and other qualitative sociologists have sought to record the lived experience of racial subjugation and social marginality, but they, too, must practice a heightened degree of reflexivity when conducting research and writing up their observations. To recall our discussion in chapter 2, it is important to engage in a kind of “participant objectivation,” in which one focuses reflexively not on one’s lived experience but rather on “the social conditions of possibility . . . of that experience and, more precisely, of the act of objectification itself. . . . What needs to be objectivized . . . is not the anthropologist performing the anthropological analysis of a foreign world but the social world that has made both the anthropologist and the conscious or unconscious anthropology that she (or he) engages in [in] her anthropological practice.”65 Those who neglect this task end up producing about the racialized Other reports that conform to dominant tropes. Is it any coincidence that ethnographic depictions of black men from the 1960s and 1970s virtually mirror those on television and in the cinema of that same era? Urban ethnographers and movie directors alike focused on the persona of the low-­income black man in public, specifically his collection of be­haviors, dissemblances (often misrecognized as straightforward “data”), and styles housed under the term “soul.” While the former were writing books with titles such as Soul (Lee Rainwater) and Soulside (Ulf Hannerz), the latter were producing movies with titles such as The Mack and Superfly.66 As Robin Kelley has suggested, most ethnographers of black life in the 1960s and 1970s were liberal white men who seemed to believe “they knew what ‘authentic Negro culture’ was before they entered the field. The ‘real Negroes’ were the young jobless men hanging out on the corner passing the bottle, the brothers with the nastiest verbal repertoire, [or] the pimps and hustlers. . . . Of course, there were other characters, like the men and women who went to work every day in the foundries, hospitals, nursing homes, [and] private homes, . . . but they rarely found their way into the ethnographic text.”67 Thankfully, things have changed: since the 1990s, ethnographers have written about many other

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facets of black life, including the black middle and upper class. But a heavy dose of participant objectivation still is needed, for at the same time that urban ethnography increasingly focuses on street violence in the postindustrial ghetto, so too does Hollywood.68 One other methodological opposition beyond which our work seeks to advance is the old dualism of description and explanation. In an earlier chapter, we had occasion to speak of Tilly’s emphasis on causal mechanisms, a theme since taken up and highlighted by the so-­called school of “analytical sociology.”69 Bourdieu’s own field analyses also explored at length the different ways in which actors, both dominant and dominated, pursue their respective strategies of conservation and subversion. Is this explanation? To be sure—­for to have identified and explored the causal mechanisms already is to have produced an explanation. But is it also description? Yes, again—­ for descriptively rich studies center on the specification of causal processes. Ethnographic, network-­based, and a whole host of other approaches, even ones that rely heavily on statistical methods, all can perform this dual role. If all are capable of combining interpretive depth with causal insight, this is because the explanation of social action is built-­in to its description. “The difference between Why and What,” John Levi Martin observes, “between explanation and description (if one insists), is not a scientific one, but a social one—­a difference between the problematic and unproblematic, . . . [for] we do not know What until we know Why.”70 In other words, although description often is thought to be the first move and explanation the second, it is in fact the other way around: description of some behavior (a man shouting at a screen) only is fully possible after an explanation has presented itself (stock trading). Once this explanation sets in, explanation becomes description (a man is trading stock), which then may require further explanation, and so on, down the line—­description and explanation folding in on one another as the analysis deepens. Although explanation often is set apart from (and elevated above) description, the two are inseparable and, in terms of scientific value, on an equal plane. Owing to the breathtaking complexity of the social world, there is nothing “mere” about concrete, accurate, big-­spirited description. As for research design, how might substantive research informed or in­ fluenced by our theoretical framework be set up? For instance, would it be limited to singular case studies? Would it be restricted on account of its analytic emphasis on field-­specific events and processes to particularistic as opposed to generalizing and universalizing modes of inquiry? Earlier, we spoke to precisely this point, and now we come back to it again. The false divide between particularity and universality needs decisively to be rejected: a mere

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accumulation of cases never will lay bare the inner logic and significance of sociological phenomena. Often one must probe instead into one or a small number of cases and study them intently and with an eye to uncovering their hidden dynamics. Instructive here is a passage from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: “Both authorized and anecdotal literature,” writes Fanon, “have created too many stories about Negroes to be suppressed. But putting them all together does not help us in our real task, which is to disclose their mechanics. What matters for us is not to collect facts and behavior, but to find their meaning.”71 Fanon quotes in this regard phenomenologist Karl Jaspers: “Comprehension in depth of a single instance will often enable us . . . to apply this understanding in general to innumerable cases. Often what one has once grasped is soon met again. What is important . . . is less the study of a large number of instances than the intuitive and deep understanding of a few individual cases.”72 In later years, it was Bourdieu who, deriving much the same lesson from another phenomenologist, namely Husserl, noted that “constructing the particular case as such obliges us in practice to bypass [the false alternative of] pitting the uncertain and hollow generalities of a discourse proceeding by the unconscious and uncontrolled universalization of a singular case against the infinite minutiae of an erroneously exhaustive study of a particular case which, for lack of being apprehended as such, cannot deliver either what it has of the singular or what it has of the universal.”73 For Bourdieu, the key to social science research lay “at once and without contradiction” in particularizing one’s object (i.e., in immersing oneself in its specificities and understanding it as a particular case) and simultaneously in generalizing or universalizing it (i.e., in discovering, “through the application of general questions, the invariant properties that it conceals under the appearance of singularity”).74 For race studies, the implications of such an approach are considerable. Whether studying Vietnamese enclaves or multiracial competence, Hispanic family structures or the criminal justice system, one always is adding to a cumulative theory that spans the enterprise. All these considerations lead to a final major implication of this study, one having to do with the connections between race scholarship and moral-­ practical concerns. In the early twentieth century, a primordial diremption emerged in American sociology between, on the one hand, Addams–­inspired social inquiry, whose reformist, public-­minded orientation also informed the work of the Chicago School’s founding generation prior to World War I, and, on the other hand, the more discipline-­building, professionalizing orientation of Franklin Henry Giddings and (a generation later) of Park and Burgess. This divide, with close analogues outside the bounds of American

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sociology, was in part a gendered one.75 But it also was a raced one, for in contradistinction to the white disciplinary mainstream, Du Bois and other scholars of color also were trying to show at that time (to little avail) how one might pursue both empirical investigation and practical inquiry.76 With deep roots in early modern epistemology, with its division between thought and action, the division between scholarship and social engagement persists even today in a bifurcation between the positivist and normativist moments of social inquiry. After more than a century of structuring not only sociological thought in terms of it but also the social organization of the discipline, this is an opposition we ought finally to overcome. The way forward requires affirming, as Addams and Du Bois sought to do from the outset, and as Bourdieu has done in recent times, that reflections on the kind of society and racial order one wants to have—­and considerations as to how it might be brought about—­do not have to be relegated to the realm of arbitrary speculation. These moral-­practical inquiries also can be reasoned, systematic, and open to empirical testing in much the same way as substantive knowledge about the racial world. Race scholarship is wide enough to include not only efforts to ascertain the facts about the racial order but also attempts carefully to reflect on, and put to the pragmatic test, ideals and programs of action aimed at changing that order for the better.

* At the beginning of this study, we observed that there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race. In this work, we hope to have pro­­ vided one. While primarily abstract, our reflections have made constant reference to empirical studies of race in America and elsewhere; we also have drawn on writings in philosophy, literature, cultural commentary, and a host of other settings in which observers seek to make sense of the complexities of racial life. If we have been successful in our synthetic and theory-­building labors, new and ambitious efforts will be undertaken to theorize race. Fresh analytic insights will be produced, and down the road still more compelling and encompassing syntheses will be attempted. The yawning gap—­to which we alluded in the opening chapter—­between theory and empirical research will be narrowed. And perhaps even outside the ivory tower, with the unfolding of the scholarly conversation, public discourse will be enriched and a new language elaborated for thinking and talking about our racial challenges. Scholarly work can make a significant difference by drawing the relevant distinctions, establishing the important connections, and providing useful concepts for illuminating social reality. Understanding better the complexities

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and problems of our racial order—­and being better able to think and talk about them—­can be a crucial step toward addressing them in an intelligent and effective fashion. To invoke Ellison’s dictum again, as we did at the outset (but this time in reverse), “If the word has the power to blind, imprison, and destroy, it has also the potency to revive and make us free.”77

Acknowledgments

A quarter century in the making, the theoretical framework presented in this book was constructed in close collaboration and dialogue with a wide range of scholars who also are close personal friends. To them we are deeply indebted. Jeff Goodwin deserves special mention; two rewarding coauthorships with him, one of which began while he and the first author still were in graduate school, mark the starting point of this project. We also are profoundly grateful to Ann Mische. It was in collaboration with her that some of our core analytic insights were developed; this work would not have been possible without her. We also owe heartfelt thanks to Mimi Sheller, Chad Alan Goldberg, Eva Williams, Erik Schneiderhan, Victoria Johnson, Douglas Maynard, and Bowen Paulle for all they contributed to this endeavor over so many years. The opportunity to work with them—­and to learn from them—­has been a wonderful blessing. As a contribution to race scholarship, this book was conceived and written in tandem with Race in America, a “nontextbook textbook”; the two works closely are aligned in terms of theoretical inspiration, conceptual innovation, and structural organization. We thank Sherith Pankratz for helping us move down that dual path, Black Hawk Hancock for his early partnership in that project, and Karl Bakeman for his courage and vision. Portions of chapter 2 were published in Ethnic and Racial Studies (vol. 35, no. 4 [2012]: 574–­99) alongside thoughtful and stimulating commentaries by Kimberly McClain DaCosta, John L. Jackson Jr., Wendy Leo Moore, Mary Pattillo, Stephen Steinberg, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Howard Winant. We are indebted to them all, as well as to Martin Bulmer, the journal editor. Raewyn Connell put to us some challenging queries in Perspectives, the newsletter of

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the American Sociological Association Theory Section. Many thanks to her as well—­and to Claire Decoteau, the newsletter editor. Several colleagues read our manuscript in part or in full and offered us helpful, incisive comments. We thank Rogers Brubaker, Chad Alan Goldberg, Michèle Lamont, Mara Loveman, Bowen Paulle, Jasmin Sandelson, and Christopher Winship. For their insights and support along the way, we thank Jeffrey Alexander, Javier Auyero, Lawrence Bobo, Megan Comfort, Deborah de Laurell, Mitchell Duneier, Marion Fourcade, Philip Gorski, Kaisa Ketokivi, Shamus Khan, Kate Manne, John Levi Martin, Maura Josephine Smyth, Donald Tibbs, Ruth López Turley, Andrea Voyer, Loïc Wacquant, Mary Waters, Harrison White, and William Julius Wilson. We also thank the late Charles Tilly for all he did for us as a mentor and as a formative influence on our thought. For their friendship and stimulating ideas that also helped shape this work, we thank Mirangela Buggs, Alexander Dressler, Joseph Ewoodzie, Katherine Frank, Elizabeth Keeney, Annie Menzel, and Daniel Suarez. For institutional support, we thank the Harvard Society of Fellows. The University of Chicago Press long has demonstrated a strong commitment to bringing rigorous social science to bear on the enduring problems of racial strife and injustice in America. It is an honor now to be part of that tradition. At the press, we thank Douglas Mitchell for championing this project in full force and Tim McGovern for steering the ship into harbor. Last, for all the encouragement and wisdom they offered us as we labored so many years on this book, we thank Matthew Desmond’s family: Tessa Lowinske Desmond as well as Nick, Shavon, Michelle, Maegan, Sterling, and Walter Desmond; we also thank Mustafa Emirbayer’s family: his wife, Amy; his sister, Tamara; and his mother, Meryem, to whom this work is dedicated with gratitude and love.

Notes

Chapter One 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 [1899]); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994 [1903]); W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Dover, 1999 [1920]). 2. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday, 1948). 3. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Complete Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1964 [1944]). 4. See, e.g., Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950); E. Franklin Frazier, E. Franklin Frazier: On Race Relations, ed. G. Franklin Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 [1955]). 5. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also Howard Winant, “Race and Race Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 169–­85. 6. Exceptionally impressive essay-­length efforts at race theorizing also have been produced, ranging from Herbert Blumer’s classic paper, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958): 3–­7, to more recent works such as Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 465–­80; and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 221–­34. It hardly seems fair to ask of these papers, each of which (on average) is less than ten pages in length, to deliver the sort of encompassing, analytically rigorous theory of race we are speaking of here. Nor has any of them been succeeded by such a theoretical synthesis. Yet when we speak later in the book of a paucity of important theoretical ventures in the field, these essays certainly do stand as significant and heartening exceptions to the trend. 7. Since these literatures are vast and it would be cumbersome to list all the relevant titles, we refer the reader to specific endnotes in later chapters, in which bibliographic citations are given at the first appearance of each topic. 8. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927 [1918–­1920]); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1945]); Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Douglas

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Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City? African-­Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1978]); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 9. See, e.g., Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Vincent L. Hutchings and Nicholas A. Valentino, “The Centrality of Race in American Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 383–­ 408; Michael Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David Oppenheimer, Marjorie Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-­Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Ashley “Woody” Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York: Routledge, 2003); Joe R. Feagin, “The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 101–­16. There are, of course, a great many other examples one could offer. We do not wish here to criticize undeniably important works that demonstrate “the continuing significance of race”; we wish only to point out a severe imbalance in the field, one perhaps driven by sociological responses to conservative political discourse. Studies of racism’s persistence still vastly outnumber those that explore its complex nature and dynamics. 10. See, e.g., Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Joe R. Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000); Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-­Civil Rights Era (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001); Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). This is not to deny the many important and original theoretical insights in these studies—­a work of scholarship can be theoretically sophisticated without seeking to elaborate a comprehensive new theoretical framework—­nor is it to deny that there are generative or theory-­building dimensions in each, sometimes localized in a single chapter (e.g., Feagin, Racist America, chap. 1) but at other times spread out across an entire work (e.g., Steinberg, Turning Back). 11. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 32. 12. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 6. The distinction between substantialist and relational ways of thinking comes from Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (New York: Dover, 1953 [1910]); it also receives extensive elaboration in Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2002 [1938]). 13. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, vol. 1: Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim (New York: Free Press, 1937), 10, 10n1. 14. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973 [1966]), 88. In their original context, Geertz’s remarks were directed at anthropological work on religion. 15. John Dewey, Journal Articles, Book Reviews, Miscellany in the 1910–­1911 Period, and “How We Think,” vol. 6 of The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 148–­49.

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16. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 1:9. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-­Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-­Claude Passeron, The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991 [1968]), 28. 18. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 19. Orlando Patterson, “The Mechanisms of Cultural Reproduction: Explaining the Puzzle of Persistence,” in Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-­Cheng Lo (London: Routledge, 2010), 139–­51. In this essay, it should be noted, Patterson devotes attention more to cultural than to social reproduction; racial domination, for its part, entails both—­and more. 20. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 [1998]), 82–­83, viii; italics in original. 21. See our companion volume, Race in America (New York: Norton, 2015), for a comprehensive survey of these and related historical developments. This work is the second edition of Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2010). 22. Howard Winant, “The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 569, 571. 23. Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knobl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [2004]), x. 24. Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1906]); see also Williard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View: Logico-­Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 20–­46. On the idea of middle-­range theory, see Robert K. Merton, “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968 [1949]), 39–­72. As George Steinmetz has pointed out, Merton equivocated in his description of middle-­range theories, at first suggesting they were about causal mechanisms and then reducing them (in a later formulation in the same essay) to the status of “clearly formulated, verifiable statements of relationships between specified variables.” Merton, “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range,” 52; emphasis omitted. See George Steinmetz, “Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-­Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U.S. Sociology since 1945,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 321n68. 25. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 204–­5. 26. Dewey, How We Think, 152, 153. 27. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 88. 28. For the purposes at hand, the most important and relevant works of these pragmatist thinkers are the following (please note, however, that this is by no means an exhaustive list; we invoke other works in later chapters): Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 1867–­1893, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 1893–­1913, ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); William James, The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); William James, William James: Writings, 1878–­1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992); William James, William James: Writings, 1902–­1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987); John Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, vol. 5 of The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916, vol. 9 of The

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Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); John Dewey, Essays, Miscellany, and “Reconstruction in Philosophy,” 1920, vol. 12 of The Middle Works, 1899–­ 1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 1922, vol. 14 of The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 1925, vol. 1 of The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); John Dewey, Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and “The Public and Its Problems,” 1925–­1927, vol. 2 of The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929, vol. 4 of The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); John Dewey, “Ethics” (Revised Edition), 1932, vol. 7 of The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002 [1902]); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-­House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1910]); Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ; Du Bois, Darkwater ; Alain LeRoy Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992 [1916]). 29. On the pragmatist revival, see Richard J. Bernstein, “The Resurgence of Pragmatism,” Social Research 59 (1992): 813–­40; Richard J. Bernstein, “The New Pragmatists,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (2007): 3–­38; Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Neil Gross, “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-­Century American Sociology,” in Calhoun, Sociology in America, 183–­224. 30. John Dewey, “Racial Prejudice and Friction,” in The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 [1922]), 13:242–­54. For a summary and critique of Dewey’s topical writings on race, see Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 33–­44. 31. On Du Bois and pragmatism, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 138–­50; Ross Posnock, “Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its Lineage,” in Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism, 176–­89. On Locke and pragmatism, see Nancy Fraser, “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture,” in Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism, 157–­75. On the relation of classical American pragmatism to race studies, see Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch, eds., Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 32. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921); Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”; Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 33. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–­1880 (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1965 [1935]); Sidney Hook, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (Chicago: Open Court, 1927); Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York: John Day, 1933); C. Wright

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Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966 [1943]); C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (London: Oxford University Press, 1963 [1943]). See also Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” For examplary works of the pragmatist revival, see Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); West, The American Evasion of Philosophy ; Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–­1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1992]); Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 34. For the purposes at hand, the most important and relevant works of the Durkheimian tradition are the following (please note, however, that this is by no means an exhaustive list; we invoke other works in later chapters): Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method (New York: Free Press, 1982 [1895]); Émile Durk­ heim, Suicide (New York: Free Press, 1951 [1897]); Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963 [1903]); Émile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France (London: Routledge, 1977 [1938]); Émile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002 [1925]); Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]); Émile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1914]); Celestin Bougle, Essays on the Caste System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971 [1899]); Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge, 1972 [1902]); Maurice Halbwachs, The Psychology of Social Class (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958 [1955]); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark, 1985 [1966]); Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Jeffrey C. Alexander, ed., Durkheimian Cultural Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast, eds., Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 35. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), 232. The chapter on Durkheim (in “imaginary conversation” with Du Bois) was written by Karen Fields. Durkheim discusses totemic essence in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 262. On Durkheim’s relation to anti-­Semitism, see also Chad A. Goldberg’s introduction to and translation of Émile Durkheim’s “Antisémitisme et crise sociale,” Sociological Theory 26 (2008): 299–­323; Chad A. Goldberg, “The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-­Semitism and Durkheim’s Sociology,” Sociological Theory 29 (2011): 248–­7 1. For a biographical perspective that highlights the impact on Durkheim of anti-­Semitism in Épinal (his childhood home), see Marcel Fournier, Émile Durkheim: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2013 [2007]), 21–­22. 36. Others have found the theoretical inspiration for this endeavor more in Weber than in Durkheim. See, e.g., Max Weber, “Ethnic Groups,” in Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1922]), 1:385–­98; Fredrik Barth, introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 9–­38; Brubaker, Ethnicity without

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Groups; Mara Loveman, “Comment: Is ‘Race’ Essential?,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 891–­98; Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Much of this literature draws on Weber’s idea of monopolistic closure; see, e.g., Max Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” in Economy and Society, 1:43–­46. 37. See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; Émile Durkheim, “Individual and Collective Representations,” in Sociology and Philosophy, ed. D. F. Pocock (New York: Free Press, 1974 [1898]), 1–­34. 38. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, chap. 2. 39. Durkheim, Suicide, 41; Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 21–­44. In the next chapter, we provide other examples from the Durkheimian tradition and speak more generally of the importance of provisional definitions. 40. For the purposes at hand, the most important and relevant works by Bourdieu are the following (note that this is by no means an exhaustive list; we invoke other works in later chapters): The Craft of Sociology ; Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972]); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]); The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990 [1980]); Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1984]); The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 [1989]); The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996 [1992]); An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology ; The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (with others; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1993]); Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1994]); Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” (with Loïc J. D. Wacquant) Theory, Culture, and Society 16 (1999): 41–­58; Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1997]); Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: New Press, 1998); Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 (New York: New Press, 2003 [2001]); Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [2001]); The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005 [2000]); Sketch for a Self-­Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [2004]). See also Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004 [1999]); Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination”; Loïc Wacquant, ed., Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 41. See Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983); Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, The Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 42. Julian Go, “Decolonizing Bourdieu: Colonial and Postcolonial Theory in Pierre Bourdieu’s Early Work,” Sociological Theory 31 (2013): 49–­74; see esp. p. 55. 43. Among the key texts are Michèle Lamont and Virag Molnar, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–­95; Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination”; Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups; Loveman, “Is ‘Race’ Essential?”; and Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making. 44. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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1957); Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race; Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Wilson, When Work Disappears. See also the comprehensive survey in Massey, Categorically Unequal, chap. 3. 45. These works clearly are too numerous to cite here in a single note. 46. See, e.g., Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994 [1953]); Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage International, 1995 [1986]); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963 [1961]); James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993 [1963]); James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1949–­1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992). 47. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006 [1991]); Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011 [2009]). 48. See Aldon Morris, Origins of American Sociology: The Untold Story of W. E. B. Du Bois (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). On the relation between Park and Washington and its implications for Chicago School theorizing on race, see also Stephen Steinberg, Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). It is interesting to ponder the racial and intellectual crosscurrents besetting black scholars of the time, such as E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson. Park’s own deep sympathies with Washington’s race politics clearly show through in his (far from critical-­minded) theorization of the race relations cycle. 49. Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–­196. 50. Michael Burawoy, “Two Methods in Search of Science: Skocpol versus Trotsky,” Theory and Society 18 (1989): 761; italics in original. 51. The term “total sociology” is drawn from Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology,” in Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 26. 52. See, e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 226. 53. On social network analysis, see the standard reference work by Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On Galois lattice analysis, see the useful explication and application in John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne, “The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888–­1917,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 305–­56. On relational ethnography, see Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 547–­79; see also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Ann Mische, Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 54. It was literary theorist Gayatri Spivack who coined the term “strategic essentialism.” See “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988), 197–­221. Statistical analyses need not always take for granted the existence of “racial groups” to investigate inequalities or the dynamics of the racial order. Recent works by Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner show through quantitative analyses both the fluidity of racial identity and the constructionist character of race as well as the reproduction

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of racial stereotypes. See Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner, “Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 676–­727. 55. In this respect, it is unlike such works as Feagin, Racist America; and Eduardo Bonilla-­ Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-­Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 56. The literature on the history of race in the modern West is vast. We cite some of the major works when returning to this issue in chapter 2. 57. This largely has been true throughout the (more than century-­long) history of American race studies. For a contemporary example, see Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 58. See, e.g., Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson, eds., Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005). Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva has been a particularly important contributor to this trend in scholarship; see, e.g., Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, “From Bi-­Racial to Tri-­ Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (2004): 931–­50. 59. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1500–­1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1965); see also Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 60. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?,” in Practical Reason, 75–­91. See also Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, chaps. 2–­3; Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity. Elsewhere in his life’s work, Bourdieu offers similar observations in respect to the love of art. 61. George C. Homans, “Bringing Men Back In,” American Sociological Review 29 (1964): 809–­18; George C. Homans, The Nature of Social Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967). 62. Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman, “What Is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay,” in The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, ed. Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. See also Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Analytical sociology’s acknowledged debt is more to Merton than to Homans. 63. Dewey, How We Think, 189; italics in original. 64. Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology, 38, 79. 65. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 50, 74. 66. Ibid., 74. 67. Eugene Fleischmann characterizes Weber’s approach as yet another instance of “philosophic eclecticism.” See Eugene Fleischmann,“De Weber à Nietzsche,” European Journal of Sociology 5 (1964): 190–­238. 68. Seneca, Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 [63–­65 CE]), Letter #12, p. 25. 69. Cicero, Academica 2.43.134; quoted in John Glucker, “Cicero’s Philosophical Affiliations,” in The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed. John M. Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 64. 70. Pierre Bourdieu, “On the Possibility of a Field of  World Sociology,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James C. Coleman (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 378.

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71. Epicurus, On Nature 29, quoted in Donini, “The History of the Concept of Eclecticism,” in Dillon and Long, The Question of ‘Eclecticism,’ 17. 72. Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 26–­27. 73. C. Wright Mills, “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” in Power, Politics, and People (London: Oxford University Press, 1963 [1943]), 536. 74. See, e.g., Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1997 [1975]); Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (London: Routledge, 1998 [1979]); Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norris, eds., Critical Realism: Essential Readings (London: Routledge, 1998). 75. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1807]), 11. 76. John Stuart Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 [1838, 1840]), 65. 77. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995 [1925]), 9. 78. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 120. 79. Pierre Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” in Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993), 72. 80. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 48. 81. Merton, “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range,” 45ff. 82. An important reason for the success of Merton’s arguments (this does not apply to those of Mills) is that they were deeply compatible and resonant with the program of positivistic sociology, so much in the ascendancy, of course, at that time. Mills was on the Columbia faculty with Merton (he had been hired there with Merton’s help) but eventually separated himself from his colleague and even attacked him obliquely in a passage in The Sociological Imagination (p. 110). For insights into the evolving relationship between Mills and Merton, see Geary, Radical Ambition. Prominent exceptions to American sociology’s withdrawal from universalistic theorizing include Jeffrey Alexander and Harrison White, both of whose work has greatly influenced our own endeavors. 83. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 55, 74. 84. Robert K. Merton, introduction to Social Organization Under Stress: A Sociological Review of Disaster Studies, ed. Allen H. Barton (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences/ National Research Council, 1963), xxiv, quoted in Peter Hedstrom and Lars Udehn, “Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range,” in Hedstrom and Bearman, The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, 32. 85. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966 [1918]), 351. 86. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 18. 87. See Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 281–­317. 88. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 24. 89. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, vol. 12 of The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 111. Dewey stressed that, insofar as indeterminacy refers to a subjective state of mind at all, it signifies an orientation that, far from arbitrary, responds to elements actually to be found in one’s objective circumstances. 90. See Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-­House with Autobiographical Notes. See also Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction to the Illinois

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Edition,” in Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, ix–­xxxviii; Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 91. Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers by Kurt Lewin (London, Tavistock, 1952), 169. Chapter Two 1. These critical surveys include Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977); Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Howard Winant, “Race and Race Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 169–­85; and Steinberg, Turning Back. 2. France Winddance Twine, “Racial Ideologies and Racial Methodologies,” in Racing Research/Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies, ed. France Winddance Twine and Jonathan Warren (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 1–­34. 3. We have in mind measures such as the number of PhD degrees awarded each year; influence on public debate; and the number of prestigious awards conferred on their practitioners. See Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Great Britain, and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 4. James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Hayden White, Metahisotry: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). 5. E.g., Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–­47. 6. This is true not only of sociology; one thinks, for example, of the “legitimation crisis” in English literature and the postmodern stranglehold on anthropology. 7. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 23. 8. John Dewey, Journal Articles, Book Reviews, Miscellany in the 1910–­1911 Period, and “How We Think,” vol. 6 of The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 184. 9. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 32. 10. As Dewey correctly noted, this leisured class has figured prominently in Western thought ever since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Its ascendancy has continued well into the modern age. Was Martin Heidegger not the very herald of yet another leisured class of philosophers? Even Adam Smith, that most practical minded of thinkers, found a place for the leisured class in his vision of the social division of labor. In the famous opening passage of The Wealth of Nations, he alluded not only to detail laborers in pin factories but also to “those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything. . . . In the progress of society, philosophy or speculation becomes, like every other employment, the principal or sole trade and occupation of a particular class of citizens.” (Much later in the same work, Smith further commented that occupations in the modern world “present an almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”) Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1986

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[1776]), 1:115; 2:370. One could assemble a great many other such examples from the history of modern social thought, so prevalent is this idea of a leisured class of contemplative intellectuals and scholars. 11. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 725. 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 [1898]), 78). 13. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Atlanta Conferences,” in Green and Driver, W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, 57. 14. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2002 [1938]). 15. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 62. 16. Ibid., 73. 17. Whether Durkheim satisfactorily followed his own guidelines is a different matter. Certainly, he failed to scrutinize how the anthropology of “primitive societies,” a tradition of research on which he relied heavily in the Elementary Forms, was (mis)informed by its colonial project and by white supremacist modes of classification. Like other thinkers of the classical generation, he championed the benefits of reflexive thought while remaining less than unambiguously reflexive when it came to matters of racial inequality and cultural difference. 18. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936 [1929]). For a work of Western Marxism bearing on issues of reflexivity, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). For the Chicago School, see Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950); Everett C. Hughes, The Sociological Eye (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1971), part 2. 19. Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action, 1st ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21. 20. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 136. 21. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 124. 22. We do not contend that the influence of one’s racial identity on one’s thinking somehow requires more vigilance than the influence of, say, one’s family background or sexuality. In fact, the widespread habit of applying reflexivity narrowly to the “holy trinity” of race, class, and gender is a limiting practice itself in need of reflexive consideration. Can it be doubted that, for some intellectual pursuits, religion (or religious aversion to religion), cosmopolitanism (or lack thereof), age, or politics hold considerably more sway than racial identity, gender, or class? If we have chosen here to apply our ideas about reflexivity exclusively to race scholarship, it is because, first, many recent contributions to reflexivity have been advanced by race scholars, and, second, we see in this area of study a particularly pressing need to reconsider the most basic imperatives of reflexivity, given the eclipse of identity politics in scholarly writing (if not in the political sphere). 23. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 10. 24. Ibid., 10. 25. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 69. 26. Ibid., 10. 27. Of course, as some philosophers of race have observed, the putatively simple act of identifying one’s location, of knowing “who one is,” often in actuality is exceedingly complex, contentious, and unceasing. See, e.g., Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity:

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Misunderstood Connections,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30–­105. 28. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 3. 29. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1931]). 30. Mills, “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists.” 31. On white privilege, see, e.g., Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1997); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Massey, Categorically Unequal. Although the ensuing paragraphs focus on white privilege in American scholarship about race, the ideas presented therein are generalizable to other national and intellectual contexts. They help us understand, for instance, why Rwandan scholars exploring the origins of their country’s racial categories (at least before 1994) usually advanced arguments depending on their positions within the racial order: Tutsi scholars (and those advocating Tutsi power) tended to claim that what appear to be racial differences actually are class differences, while Hutu scholars (and those advocating Hutu power) tended to claim that distinct differences of a racial sort exist between Hutus and Tutsis, differences originating in divergent migration patterns to the African Great Lakes region. See Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 32. Cited in Kenneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, Conversations with Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 99. 33. For reflexive critiques of how racialized presuppositions have influenced modern philosophy, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993); and Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 34. Mary Pattillo, “Black Middle-­Class Neighborhoods,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 322. 35. Gertrude Fraser, “Race, Class, and Difference in Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South,” Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1991): 403–­16. 36. Margaret L. Andersen has advanced a simlar critique. See Margaret L. Andersen, “Whitewashing Race: A Critical Perspective on Whiteness,” in Doane and Bonilla-­Silva, White Out, 21–­34. 37. David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998), 44; for this example, we are indebted to Ruth Frankenberg, “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene Nexica, and Matt Wray (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 77–­81. 38. Additionally, social-­scientific questions and intellectual interests often are influenced by forces beyond the scientific field, especially those emanating from the political field. In some instances, questions follow the money, as lines of inquiry—­even entire subfields—­are built up or abandoned in accordance with federal funding priorities. Thus, Haveman shows how grants distributed after the War on Poverty helped to create and legitimatize the field of poverty research. Robert H. Haveman, Poverty Policy and Poverty Research: The Great Society and the Social Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). In other cases, scientific questions are molded by the zeitgeist of the times. Stephen Jay Gould has demonstrated as much in observing that “resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment

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and destruction of social generosity.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 28. 39. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, 17. 40. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 396. 41. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 228–­29. 42. bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 165. 43. Euripides, The Medea, in Euripides I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 73 (lines 424–­27). 44. As the university in general, and social science in particular, grows racially more diverse—­that is, as the academy continues to take steps to incorporate those members of society it previously had excluded—­the nomos of race scholarship (and, indeed, of sociology) may be replaced to a certain degree by a different (racial) nomos: we hope by one more thoroughly racially democratic in nature. 45. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 15. 46. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 17–­18. 47. James Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984, 84, 81; italics in original. 48. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 91. 49. Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” 80; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Roediger, Black on White; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-­Century America (London: Verso, 1990); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1996). We would be remiss not to mention the recent, energetic, and constructive debate that has emerged over the historical construction of whiteness in America—­its genesis, development, and boundaries—­a debate centered on the question of whether certain European immigrants initially were considered “white on arrival” or only eventually came to be included under this privileged racial rubric. See Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-­Class History 60 (2001): 3–­32; Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–­1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Many inquiries into how Jews, Italians, Irish, and other European immigrants “became white” in the twentieth century give off the false impression that this process is relatively recent, whereas historians have shown that it dates back at least to the early fifteenth century, when the “Age of Discovery,” to employ that old euphemism, commenced and travelers’ accounts began trickling back to Europe, narratives in the great tradition of The Travels of Marco Polo, which described peoples of the Orient and Africa as otherworldly, bestial, and utterly Other. See Edward Said, Orientalism, 25th anniv. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1978]); Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). Even in the American context, Irish immigrants, to take the ex­treme case, were admitted (at least in part) to the white race not during the middle of the twentieth century but back in the seventeenth, when the “savage Irish” were set apart from the “savage Indians” and especially the Africans, who would descend into chattel slavery.

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See David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Sharon Salinger, To Serve Well and Faithfully: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania (New York: Heritage, 1987); Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vols. 1–­2 (London: Verso, 1994, 1997). 50. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1996); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000). 51. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xii, 5; Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Muu Wong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1977). 52. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 53. Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, John Hartigan Jr., Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Amanda Lewis, Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). See also Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974). In his tribute essay to Carol Stack (as well as Elliot Liebow), Mitchell Duneier points out that “Stack’s book was a precursor to a lot of contemporary developments surrounding reflexivity in sociological and anthropological ethnography. . . . She pulled off a powerful self-­reflexivity about her own white privilege and her own place in the lives of the poor black women whom she got to know.” Mitchell Duneier, “On the Legacy of Elliot Liebow and Carol Stack: Context-­Driven Fieldwork and the Need for Continuous Ethnography,” Focus 25 (Spring/Summer 2007), 37. 54. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed. (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983 [1981]); Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Audre Lorde, Sister/Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–­80; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991). 55. Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 291. 56. One white scholar reflects on his earlier work this way: “While many scholars of color have valued this article, and while I continue to think it is a valuable contribution, at the same time, I now consider it an example of white racism. By myself—­as a white scholar—­I assume that I could represent well the racial ‘other.’ Given the deadly history of the representation of people of color by white scholars and given the fact that I too continue to embody white racism, acting alone as a white scholar like this is much too dangerous.” James Joseph Scheurich, ed., Anti-­Racist Scholarship: An Advocacy (Albany: Suny Press, 2002), 17. In another instance, this author reflects: “Am I living the egoism of the white racist, transcendental signifier? Yes, I am. It is in and of me. The way that I talk to others, the way that I see myself, the effects of my white skin privilege are inside me, deeply a part of me.” James Joseph Scheurich, “The Destructive Desire for Depoliticized Ethnographic Methodology: Response to Harry L. Wolcott,” in Ethnography and Schools: Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education, ed. Enrique T. Trueba (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, 49–­54), 53.

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57. C. Wright Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American Sociological Review 5 (1940): 937; italics in original. 58. “Sociologists,” he also remarked, “are no more ready than other men to cast a cold eye on their own doings. . . . Professional courtesy stifles intellectual curiosity; guild interests frown upon the washing of dirty linen in public; the teeth of piety bite the tongue of truth.” Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 488–­89. 59. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Washington Square Press, 1973 [1955]); Stack, All Our Kin. 60. See Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”; Frankenberg, “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness”; and Andersen, “Whitewashing Race.” See also Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–­99; Andrea Doucet, “ ‘From Her Side of the Gossamer Wall(s)’: Reflexivity and Relational Knowledge,” Qualitative Sociology 31 (2008): 73–­87. 61. Robert K. Merton, “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1972): 15. 62. Jane Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes,’ ” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 628–­57; Robert Blauner and David Wellman, “Toward the Decolonization of Social Research,” in The Death of White Sociology, ed. Joyce Ladner (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1973), 310–­30; Twine, “Racial Ideologies and Racial Methodologies,” 6–­14; Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 [1969]); P. J. Rhodes, “Race-­of-­Interview Effects: A Brief Comment,” Sociology 28 (1994): 547–­58; Brenda J. Allen, “Feminist Standpoint Theory: A Black Woman’s (Re)view of Organizational Socialization,” Communication Studies 47 (1996): 257–­62. It was from this perspective that Elliot Liebow could assume that the unemployed black men he studied see, “first of all, a white man . . . , [which] irrevocably and absolutely relegate[s] me to the status of outsider.” Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 248. For a review of debates about “voice” in critical race legal scholarship, see Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory. 63. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “ ‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1991, 26. 64. Cf. Stephanie Wildman, Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America (New York: New York University Press, 1996). The “insider doctrine” also is (at least indirectly) responsible for the rise of whiteness studies. The doctrine became so established with the rise of identity politics that white analysts who wished to study race and ethnicity felt they had to emulate their nonwhite peers by “studying their own community.” (Indeed, in many cases, they were instructed to do so in so many words by nonwhite thinkers.) Because the insider doctrine permits one to speak on behalf of a group only on condition that one actually belongs to that group, white scholars were forced to establish whites as a legitimate racial group that could be analyzed. This is part of the reason why virtually all “whiteness scholars” themselves are white. 65. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 105. 66. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991 [1988]), 70. 67. Thus, in sociology—­and, we contend, precisely because of the structures of that dis­ cipline—­one finds a kind of inversion of the correspondence between one’s (racial) attitudes and one’s position in the field of racial domination in the wider society, where some nonwhite scholars are thought to hold “moderate” or “conservative” positions on race (e.g., Wilson,

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Patterson) while some white scholars are thought to hold “radical” or “critical” views (Fegan, Steinberg). 68. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 248. This is quoted also in chapter 5. 69. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 94. 70. Cf. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 235. 71. Recent examples include Bonilla-­Silva vs. Loveman; Steinberg vs. Wilson; Alba and Nee vs. Portes and Zhou; Mincy vs. Patterson; Wacquant vs. Anderson, Duneier, and Newman; and Small, Harding, and Lamont vs. Steinberg. See Bonilla-­Silva, “Rethinking Racism”; Loveman, “Comment: Is ‘Race’ Essential?”; Stephen Steinberg, “The Liberal Retreat from Race during the Post-­Civil Rights Era,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 13–­47; Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race; Richard Alba and Victor Nee, “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration,” International Migration Review 31 (1997): 826–­74; Alejandro Portes, “Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities,” International Migration Review 31: 799–­ 825; Min Zhou, “Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation,” International Migration Review 31 (1997): 975–­1008; Ronald Mincy, Black Males Left Behind (New York: Urban Institute, 2006); Orlando Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind,” New York Times, March 26, 2006; Loïc Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1468–­1532; Elijah Anderson, “The Ideologically Driven Critique,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1533–­50; Michell Duneier, “What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology?,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1551–­76; Katherine Newman, “No Shame: The View from the Left Bank,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1577–­99; Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 16 (May 2010): 6–­27; Stephen Steinberg, “Culture Still Doesn’t Explain Poverty.” Boston Review, January 13, 2011. 72. It is remarkable how often the study of race has been marred by a tendency falsely to universalize racial concepts, a tendency traceable, as Loïc Wacquant repeatedly has emphasized, to the failure reflexively to grasp the nationally specific and hence highly particular—­and parochial—­nature of racial thinking. US-­based scholars of race seem especially prone to such an error, although the “worldwide export of U.S. scholarly categories” has, in recent years, threatened to make the problem one of global scope. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 232n8. 73. For example, on structuralism, see Bonilla-­Silva, “Rethinking Racism.” On cognitivist stances, see Rogers Brubaker, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition,” Theory and Society 33 (2004): 31–­64. On theories of group position and threat, see Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”; Lawrence Bobo and Vincent L. Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer’s Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 951–­72. On Marxism, see Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 37 (1972): 547–­59. On cosmopolitanism, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006). On psychoanalysis, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). On racial formation, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. On rational choice, see Michael Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On ethnomethodology,

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see Michael Moerman, “Accomplishing Ethnicity,” in Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, ed. Roy Turner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Education, 1974), 54–­68. Minor debates in certain frameworks of thought or specialty areas command much more of the scholar’s attention and hold much more sway over her scientific thought and endeavors than substantive struggles waged among those occupying drastically different positions in their respective disciplinary fields. One thinks, for instance, of competing theories of immigration: e.g., Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants among Post­1965 Immigrant Youth,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–­98; Alba and Nee, “Rethinking Assimilation Theory”; Zhou, “Segmented Assimilation.” One also thinks of debates on racialized urban poverty: see, e.g., Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race; Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Lincoln Quillian, “Migratory Patterns and the Growth of High-­Poverty Neighborhoods,” American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999): 1–­37. 74. Margaret R. Somers, “Where Is Sociology after the Historic Turn? Knowledge Cultures, Narrativity, and Historical Epistemologies” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 72–­73. Fortunately, excellent historical accounts of sociological race studies already exist to guide scholars in such an endeavor, Omi and Winant’s being among them. These accounts typically begin with the biologistic paradigm of Du Bois’s time, then proceed to the pragmatism-­inspired currents of thought that replaced it: Du Bois’s own work (and that of Alain Locke); the Chicago School of urban ethnography, including Thomas and Znaniecki, Park and Burgess, and Drake and Cayton; and the ethnic pluralist school inaugurated by Horace Kallen. They also direct attention to the structural-­functionalist and ethnicity paradigms of midcentury, the age of landmark contributions such as those of Gunnar Myrdal, E. Franklin Frazier, and Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Taking sociological methods seriously, they examine the rise of new statistical approaches in this same era; they also take note of theoretical developments such as the espousal of middle-­range sociology by Merton. After discussing the breakdown of the Parsonian synthesis and of ethnicity theory, they highlight the emergence of conflict-­theoretic and political economy approaches, from Oliver Cromwell Cox to Bob Blauner, Edna Bonacich, and William Julius Wilson; the brief efflorescence of black and Chicano nationalisms; and the coming thereafter of a “cultural turn” in the social sciences that led to more constructionist approaches. Today’s space of possibles revolves around two poles: conventional (typically quantitative) studies in stratification and demography; and heterodox work (typically qualitative) on identity theory, intersectional analysis, and racial formation. Critical surveys—­among them, Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Steinberg, Turning Back; Winant, “Race and Race Theory”—­assess these current perspectives as well, although still lacking are rigorous analyses, both for the present and for earlier historical periods, which encompass the social-­ organizational and other dimensions of the problem in all their complex interrelations. 75. See Milton Gordon, Assimilation in Everyday Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—­San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965); John Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-­Cultural Perspective (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1978). 76. Mark Regnerus, “How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-­ Sex Relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” Social Science Research 41 (2012): 752–­70.

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77. Christian Smith, “An Academic Auto-­da-­Fé,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012. 78. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (“Of Experience”), in Complete Works (New York: Everyman Library, 2003 [1588]), 995. 79. For histories of racial categories, see Gossett, Race; Hannaford, Race. 80. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 45. 81. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 49. 82. Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, chaps. 15–­22. 83. Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification. 84. Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-­Analysis, 23. Or, as Bourdieu expressed it elsewhere, “If the link between the scholastic mode of thought and the mode of existence which is the condition of its acquisition and implementation escapes attention, this is not only because those who might grasp it are like fish in water in the situation of which their dispositions are the product, but also because the essential part of what is transmitted in and by that situation is a hidden effect of the situation itself.” Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 12, 14. Of course, if the point of this discussion is to warn against false universalization, then also one must bear in mind the danger that, in highlighting it, Bourdieu himself falsely universalizes what, in fact, is a privileged condition enjoyed only by a few. Even in the United States, many academics do not produce under circumstances of leisure; for instance, critical race theory in considerable part was the creation of legal scholars of color whose everyday racial realities stood in sharp tension with the exigencies of their professional and academic lives. Elsewhere, the intelligentsia are even less detached from practical need, often moonlighting at other jobs (not always scholarly) to make ends meet. Bourdieu’s ideas about skholè thus tell us more, arguably, about his own situation—­and that of other elites in the academy—­than they do about the majority of knowledge producers. However, it also might be pointed out that many of the knowledge producers whose ideas most deeply have influenced and shaped race scholarship—­and hence have come under our purview here—­do work (and have worked) in scholastic contexts precisely of the sort described by Bourdieu. 85. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 49. 86. Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). See also chapter 8. 87. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 50. 88. Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition. For a substantive work in this vein, see, e.g., Mincy, Black Males Left Behind; Terry Williams, The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring (New York: Perseus, 1989). William Brustein, The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–­1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 89. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 123. 90. On the other side of the ledger, authors such as Sharon Hayes and Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have sought to think through the political implications of different ways of portraying disadvantaged actors, stressing how these approaches have shaped their academic writing. See, e.g., Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 91. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 65. 92. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 65. In Bourdieu’s words, “Abstract universalism generally serves to justify the established order, the prevailing distribution of powers and privileges—­the domination of the bourgeois, white, Euro-­American heterosexual male—­in the name of the formal requirements of an abstract universal (democracy, human rights, etc.) dissociated from

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the economic and social conditions of its historical realization, or, worse, in the name of an ostentatiously universalist condemnation of any claim for rights for a particular group and, consequently, of all ‘communities’ based on a stigmatized particularity (women, gays, blacks, etc.)” (71). 93. See Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Action: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977); Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Prudence Carter, Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Glazer partially renounced his earlier views on affirmative action in a later work. See Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 94. See Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (New York: Viking, 1997); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995). 95. See, e.g., Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1990). Several thinkers have harvested the low-­hanging fruit of decrying racial classification; sorely needed, however, are rigorous empirical investigations of the genesis, development, and dynamics of racial taxonomies, investigations such as Brubaker and colleagues’ analysis of “everyday ethnicity” in Transylvania, Zaheer Baber’s study of the process of racialization in India, Frank De Zwart’s comparative study of reclassificying ethnic groups in India and Nigeria, Edward Telles’s investigation of racial classification in Brazil, and Moon-­Kie Jung’s review of Hawaii’s shifting racial boundaries. See Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvania Town (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Zaheer Baber, “ ‘Race,’ Religion and Riots: The ‘Racialization’ of Communal Identity and Conflict in India,” Sociology 38 (2004): 701–­18; Frank De Zwart, “The Dilemma of Recognition: Administrative Categories and Cultural Diversity,” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 137–­69; Edward Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Moon-­Kie Jung, “Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii’s Working Class,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 373–­400. 96. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 75. 97. Everett Hughes, “Principle and Rationalization in Race Relations,” in The Sociological Eye, 216. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races” [1897], in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 20–­27. 98. Of course, oftentimes members of disadvantaged groups hesitate to draw attention to internecine problems, not out of a kind of ethnic chauvinism, but because they are aware that doing so may result in negative consequences: the group may be denigrated, the documentation of internecine problems may be employed as evidence of harmful public policies (e.g., harsher sentencing), and initiatives designed to alleviate the problems may have the opposite effect. See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 99. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 76. 100. Nonwhite scholars sometimes bemoan these less favorable tendencies in their own cultures: Cornel West laments the deep “nihilistic threat” plaguing black America and the “crisis of black leadership,” while Gloria Anzaldúa admits, “Though I’ll defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non-­mexicanos, conozco el malestar de mi cultura, I abhor some of my culture’s ways.” Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 43; see Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 2001).

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101. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 107. 102. Ibid., 109. 103. Bourdieu, “Thinking about Limits,” Theory, Culture, and Society 9 (1992): 47. 104. Ibid., 40. 105. Pierre Bourdieu, “For a Scholarship with Commitment,” in Firing Back, 24; italics in original. 106. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 113; italics in original. 107. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 83. 108. See Peirce’s “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), “Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley” (1871), and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), all in The Essential Peirce, 1:28–55, 83–105, 124–41, respectively. 109. Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 49. 110. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 109. 111. Dewey, The Logic of Inquiry. Dewey was not the first—­not even among the pragmatists—­to insist on fallibilism; Peirce’s writings hold preeminence here. For a useful overview of the latter, see Joseph A. Margolis, “Peirce’s Fallibilism,” Transactions of the J. S. Peirce Society 34 (1998): 535–­69. 112. Bourdieu, The Craft of Sociology, 38–­39. 113. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 220–­21; italics in original. 114. Durkheim had classical predecessors in this regard: “Bringing to the surface of what may be hidden, each item being clearly revealed, is definition.” Cicero, On Moral Ends [De Finibus] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [45 BCE]), 27. 115. See Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 76–­77. 116. Durkheim, Suicide, 41. 117. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 21–­22. 118. Marcel Mauss, On Prayer (New York: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2003 [1909]), 38, 37. 119. Florian Znaniecki, The Method of Sociology (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), 240. 120. He went on:  “Some allow the immediate troubles of which ordinary men in their everyday milieux are aware to set the problems upon which they work; others accept as their points of orientation the issues defined officially or unofficially by authorities and interests.” Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 128. 121. Bourdieu, The Craft of Sociology, 14. 122. Ibid., 13, 14 fn. 1. 123. Barth, introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. 124. Norbert Wiley, “The Chicago School: A Political Interpretation,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 36 (2011): 39; Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55. 125. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 243; see also Lamont and Molnar, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences”; Mark A. Pachucki, Sabrina Pendergrass, and Michèle Lamont, “Boundary Processes: Recent Theoretical Developments and New Contributions,” Poetics 35 (2007): 331–­51. 126. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power; Bourdieu, Practical Reason. 127. See Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mary Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and

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American Realities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 128. Weber, “Ethnic Groups,” 1:385. On physical differences, see, e.g., Richard Schaefer, Racial and Ethnic Groups, 13th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2008), 7. On different types of human bodies, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55. 129. Michael Banton, “Analytical and Folk Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1979): 130. 130. Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,” Science 307 (2005): 1051. But Duster contends that the misplaced concreteness that actually creates (or reifies) racial differences, mistaking genetic variation that would be documented after any arbitrary population comparison for variation that is explicitly racial in nature, cannot be rectified by a hasty dismissal of race as a meaningless concept. Instead, he argues, we must work to cultivate a constructive (not antagonistic) relationship between the social and biological sciences by documenting the “feedback loops” that connect the cultural and social with the biological. “By heading toward an unnecessarily binary, socially constructed fork in the road,” writes Duster, “by forcing ourselves to think that we must choose between ‘race as biological’ (now out of favor) and ‘race as merely a social construction,’ we fall into an avoidable trap. . . . It is not an either/or proposition. In some cases, we must conduct systematic investigations, guided by a body of theory, into the role of race . . . as an organizing force in social relations and as a stratifying practice. In other cases, we must conduct systematic investigations, guided by theory, into the role of the interaction of race . . . with feedback loops into the biological functioning of the human body, and then again to medical practice.” Troy Duster, “Buried Alive: The Concept of Race in Science,” in Genetic Nation/ Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two-­Culture Divide, ed. Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 272–­73; italics in original. 131. See, e.g., Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­ Hall, 1967); Melvin Pollner, Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1987]). 132. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State,” in Practical Reason, 56; italics in original. 133. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 228. 134. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 45. 135. Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town; see also Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups. 136. Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth; Massey, Categorically Unequal; Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Lawrence Bobo, “Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, ed. Neil Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 262–­99. 137. Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30 (2005): 1773, 1784–­85. 138. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 7. 139. Ibid., 7–­8. 140. Of course, the extent to which Ukrainians, Russians, Hutus, or Tutsis attain to bounded groupness itself is a matter to be investigated; see Rogers Brubaker, “Beyond ‘Identity,’ ” in Ethnicity without Groups, 53–­54.

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141. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 67–­68. 142. Ibid., 11; for a fuller development of these ideas, see chapter 3 of that book. In chapter 4, Wimmer “outline[s] a theoretical framework designed to explain why the process of ethnic group formation produces . . . different outcomes,” understood in terms of “degree of social closure, political salience, cultural differentiation, and historical stability” (79, 12). 143. This is not to say that the scholars to be mentioned in this discussion—­Wimmer, Wacquant, Loveman, and Brubaker—­are the first or only social thinkers to have subsumed race under ethnicity. It is only to suggest that they are the first to combine that assertion with a strong program for research centering on boundary making and unmaking. Especially important in this regard is Wacquant’s “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” arguably the analytic inspiration for this entire recent line of theorizing. For other works subsuming race under ethnicity, see, e.g., Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition; Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Fantasies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1997), 173. 144. In stressing the importance of delineating and exploring the workings of causal mechanisms, this approach continues a fruitful line of investigation first called for by Homans and Merton and then picked up, with renewed vigor, half a century later by Charles Tilly. (We discuss Tilly’s own work on causal mechanisms in chapter 5.) As is apparent in the coming paragraphs, however, we seek to combine this emphasis on causal mechanisms with a broader, more encompassing field-­theoretic perspective. 145. Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 137. 146. But at least some classicists hold that a kind of “protoracism,” in the sense of attributions to certain groups of people of inferior qualities deemed unalterable because of their being determined by external factors or heredity, existed as early as ancient Greece and Rome. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 37–­38. For a similar argument about the late Middle Ages, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 147. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 26. Loveman criticizes Wacquant precisely on this score in “Comment: Is ‘Race’ Essential?,” 897. 148. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 8. 149. Ibid.; italics in original. 150. Ibid. 151. Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 903. 152. See, e.g., Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1998). 153. Bourdieu and Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.”. 154. Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla 1 (2000): 533. 155. Bonilla-­Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” 902. 156. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 19, 20; italics in original. 157. This vast set of literatures encompasses such topics as the history of European “discovery” of the non-­Western world, the historical rise of Europeans’ conception of themselves

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as the “West,” the history of European encounters with native peoples, the history of European colonialism, the history of global capitalism, the history of modern slavery, the history of European sexual fantasties and practices involving native peoples, the history of European racialized thinking both in popular culture and in intellectual life, and a good many other topics. Many specific works already have been cited in this chapter or the preceding one. For a brief historical overview that brings together relevant themes, see Desmond and Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress, chap. 2. 158. Max Weber, “Author’s Introduction,” in Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge, 1992 [1930]), xxxvii, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv. 159. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 24. 160. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 8; see also Jordan, White over Black. 161. Mills, The Racial Contract, 11, 12, 20–­21; italics in original. 162. The difficulty with this analogy, of course, is that plate tectonics involve no human agency, whereas the rise of the racial order most certainly did. 163. Bonilla-­Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” 903. 164. See, e.g., Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Cambridge: Polity, 2013 [2011]); Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-­Whiting, and Tyler Stovall, eds., Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). For a more critical perspective on this emerging literature, see, e.g., Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 224; Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 136–­38. 165. Bonilla-­Silva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race,” 904; the quote is from Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (London: Sage, 1991), 28. 166. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 21. 167. Our appropriation of Bourdieuian ideas primarily differs from that of the revisionists in its heavy emphasis on racial fields—­a concept the revisionists seem not to find very useful. 168. John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 171, 188. 169. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 170. See Ian Haney-­Lopez, The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); see also Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 9. 171. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. 172. Ibid., 7–­8. 173. Margaret R. Somers, “What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation,” Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 113–­44. 174. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 211. 175. Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, 7. 176. Ibid., 15. 177. Ibid., 9. 178. Ibid., 126. It is a pity that Durkheim did not go further in developing a systematic historical sociology of the categories of (pedagogical or other forms of) understanding. He stopped just short of enunciating a full-­blown reflexive sociology of the sort called for by Somers above—­and by Bourdieu.

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179. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 913. 180. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 10–­11. 181. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, viii. 182. Additionally, in some cases it means to reracialize phenomena that over time have become detached from their ethnic or racial origins. Many American recreational activities, for example, first were introduced by German immigrants, and the American ideal of family life undoubtedly was influenced by the intimate bonds forged within first-­generation Italian and Irish families. See Alba and Nee, “Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration.” 183. Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 336, 342. Ultimately, race scholarship must recognize that, at a level deeper than that of any specific assumption, the very idea of race itself is a historical invention—­but one that is forgetful of its past. See, e.g., Hall, “The West and the Rest”; Hannaford, Race; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1999). 184. Sociologists would do well to remember, with historians, that every recording of a happening remains unsettled, that every historical statement is the result of a struggle, that all historical texts are, to employ Hayden White’s term, “poetic acts” culturally constituted by those who record them. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Consider, for example, those who have written about the spadeworkers of the Civil Rights Movement—­ordinary men and women who fought against legalized racial domination—­and who accordingly have written against top-­down, King-­centric normative accounts of the movement, such as those associated with David Garrow and Taylor Branch. See, e.g., Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Harper, 1999); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). One always must examine competing versions of historical happenings, noting how different moral lessons and political implications correspond to different accounts, paying attention to how differently positioned actors’ interests are threatened or bolstered by the ascension of one narrative over another, and explaining why certain interpretations widely are accepted while others are marginalized. 185. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Gossett, Race; Jordan, White over Black; Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines; and Ngai, Impossible Subjects. 186. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2006). 187. Thomas Stephens, Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989); Telles, Race in Another America. 188. Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 338. 189. Mary Searle-­Chatterjee and Ursula Sharma, Contextualising Caste: Post-­Dumontian Approaches (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); S. N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 190. Patrick Sharkey and Felix Elwert, “The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability,” American Journal of Sociology 116: 1934–­81 (quotation is from p. 1970).

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191. See Tukufu Zuberi, Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 192. The trajectory of research in Israeli scholarship on inequalities between Ashkenazi Jews (primarily of Eastern European origin) and Mizrahi Jews (primarily of Middle Eastern and North African origin) provides a fine example of how quantitative scholars can direct reflexive analysis on their own categories of analysis. At first, researchers treated the two categories of Jews as innocent descriptors and explained Mizrahim’s disadvantage by pointing to their low levels of cultural, educational, and economic capital. However, by the early 1980s, critical scholars had begun explaining these ethnic differences, not by concentrating on the individual traits of the Mizrahim, but by investigating the numerous and established techniques of social closure and social exclusion practiced by the Ashkenazim in the economic, educational, legal, political, and housing spheres. This vein of scholarship directly connected Mizrahi disadvantage with Ashkenazi advantage and eventually challenged this antipodal ethnic pairing itself, as well as the more fundamental dichotomy (between East and West) in which it was rooted. No longer could Israeli social scientists accept the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi divide as a neutral reflection of the world, as a variable, harmless and unexceptional. Instead, they had to treat it as a conceptual coupling whose origins essentially were colonial and Eurocentric in nature, whose usage upheld patterns of ethnic inequality, and for whose creation, popularity, and normalization they, as intellectuals, were responsible. See Yossi Shavit, “Arab and Jewish Minorities in Israeli Education,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 115–­26; Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Point of View of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Texts 7 (1996): 1–­36; Aziza Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 481–­510. 193. Wolf, Europe and the People without a History, 7, 4. 194. There is another and equally troubling consequence of American sociology’s insatiable cataloguing of racial difference: the substitution of questions concerned with comparing whites to blacks to Hispanics along seemingly every conceivable dimension for questions directly concerned with poverty and injustice. See Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–­1335. 195. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 250–­51; italics in original. 196. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 191; emphasis in original. 197. Ibid., 189. 198. See Cox, Caste, Class, and Race; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” in Darkwater. 199. William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1909]), 281–­82. 200. Aristotle, Topics, 100b20. 201. Aristotle believed the endoxic method to be relevant to matters of theoretical science, poetics, and rhetoric as well as to moral and political concerns. 202. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 189. 203. Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street,” 1470. 204. Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London: Sage, 1977), 64; see chap 5 of that book (“Categorization and Power”) for a useful discussion of primary socialization and ethnicity. 205. Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: Commission on Race Relations, 1922); Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United States

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(New York: Collier Books, 1962 [1957]); Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; Liebow, Tally’s Corner; Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Study of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008); Ana Ramos-­Zayas, Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: Norton, 1999); Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). 206. Another genre of scholarship also capable of shedding considerable light on the primary experience of racial life is ethnomethodology. Deeply reminiscent of pragmatism in its call for a return to experience, this style of work, inspired by the writings of Harold Garfinkel, examines the so-­called “ethnomethods” or practices whereby racial division—­like so many other features of our society—­ongoingly is “done” or accomplished. We discuss ethnomethodology in considerable detail in chapter 5. See Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology; Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker, “Doing Difference,” Gender and Society 9 (1995): 8–­37; Anne Warfield Rawls, “ ‘Race’ as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Double Consciousness’ Thesis Revisited,” Sociological Theory 18 (2000): 241–­74. 207. Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage International, 1986), 276. 208. Matthew Desmond, “Relational Ethnography,” 549. See also Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street,” 1523, 1524. 209. Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 47. 210. Matthew Desmond, “Appendix: Between Native and Alien,” in On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 289; see also Edward Evans-­Prichard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1937]). 211. We might add here that ethnography often places the field-­worker in a variety of situations that provoke reflexive thought. “Full-­immersion fieldwork—­the demanding method that requires investigators to become, as deeply and completely as possible, what they wish to understand—­not only allows one to grasp the imponderabilia of actual life, the unscripted, unrepeatable, and often unutterable stuff of existence beyond the grasp of interview-­based inquests, it also presents the embedded ethnographer with reflexivity-­inducing situations, conceptual crises that raze underdeveloped ideas and replace them with new ways of understanding.” Matthew Desmond, “Appendix: Between Native and Alien,” 288; italics in original. 212. Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State,” 36. 213. We use these categories in a slightly different way here than above, where they were deployed to discuss the three distinctive forms of the scholastic fallacy. Here, they summarize some of the key implications of our analysis as a whole. 214. Others have pointed out the philosophic shortcomings of viewing racism as an individual moral vice, as a matter “of the heart.” For the original formulation, see J. L. A. Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1996): 5–­45. For critiques, see Tommie Shelby, “Is Racism in the ‘Heart’?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002): 411–­20; Charles W. Mills, “ ‘Heart’ Attack: A Critique of Jorge Garcia’s Volitional Conception of Racism,” Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 29–­62; Lawrence Blum, “Racial Virtues,” in Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and

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Contemporary Moral Problems, ed. Rebecca L. Walker and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 225–­49. 215. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 9. 216. Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques; Jean Briggs in Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). Consider what Geertz said of Lévi-­Strauss: “Were he any more self-­conscious, he would transport to another plane. In the whole of anthropology there are no works more self-­referential—­works that point as often to themselves as artifacts, and deliberately, as they do to what they are ostensibly about—­as Tristes Tropiques.” Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 28. 217. Thus, it is a mistake to conceive of reflexivity as a kind of sudden conversion experience. It is, rather, best understood as a sustained process—­and a thoroughly collective one at that. Similarly, it is erroneous to divide (in legalistic fashion) social scientists into two camps—­the “reflexive” and the “unreflexive”—­just as it is erroneous to separate the general population into “racists” and “nonracists.” 218. On regulated struggle, see Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 62. On the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 219. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 89; italics in original. Chapter Three 1. See Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” Margaret R. Somers made important contributions to relational thinking in sociology; see, e.g., “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 587–­620. For a more recent, book-­length discussion, see Nick Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2011). For a critical overview of recent trends in relational thinking, see Mustafa Emirbayer, “Relational Sociology as Fighting Words,” in Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, ed. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 209–­12. 2. Harrison C. White, “Can Mathematics Be Social? Flexible Representations for Interaction Process and Its Sociocultural Constructions,” Sociological Forum 12 (1997): 60. 3. Karl Marx, “The Grundrisse,” in The Marx-­Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978 [1857–­1858]), 247. 4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage, 1977 [1867]), 1:932. 5. Georg Simmel, “Exchange,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1907]), 69. 6. Durkheim, “Individual and Collective Representations,” 29n30. 7. James, The Meaning of Truth, 173. 8. See Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. 9. John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Essays, Typescripts, and “Knowing and the Known,” 1949–­1952, vol. 16 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 [1949]), 108. 10. Dewey and Bentley distinguished the perspective of trans-­action from those of self-­ action and inter-­action. The perspective of self-­action conceived of “things . . . as acting under their own powers,” independently of other substances. It was, for Dewey and Bentley, the point of view most characteristic of ancient and medieval philosophy, although it lives on in various

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doctrines of “the will” and in liberal political theory (since Hobbes, Locke, and Kant), while in the social sciences it retains surprising vigor in the form of methodological individualism. The perspective of inter-­action, for its part, posited “thing [as] balanced against thing in causal interconnection,” where entities no longer generate their own action, but rather, the relevant action takes place among the entities themselves. Entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such interaction, each independent of the existence of the others, much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtonian mechanics. Indeed, it was Sir Isaac Netwton who gave the inter-­actional perspective its most elaborated expression. Dewey and Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 108. 11. Ibid., 112. 12. Ibid., 133; italics in original. 13. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 36. 14. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press, 2002 [1938]). 15. On ecological context, see Robert E. Park, “Human Ecology,” American Journal of Sociology 42 (1936): 1–­15; Andrew Abbott, “Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School,” Social Forces 75 (1997): 1149–­82. On social networks, see Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science; White, Identity and Control, 1st ed. On figurations, see Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 16. See Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 323–­59. 17. On “the social space as a whole,” see Bourdieu, Distinction. On the legal field, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 814–­53. On the economic field, see Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy. On the field of cultural production (itself encompassing still more delimited spaces, such as the literary, artistic, and scientific fields), see, e.g., Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production; Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Bourdieu, Homo Academicus; and Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity. On the state (or what Bourdieu called a field of bureaucratic powers), see Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State.” 18. Pierre Bourdieu, “Appendix: The Family Spirit,” in Practical Reason, 64–­74. 19. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination. 20. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 [1963]); Pierre Bourdieu, “Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region,” in Language and Symbolic Power; Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World. See also Go, “Decolonizing Bourdieu.” 21. Indeed, in Distinction, Bourdieu distinguishes between the properties of class position and what he terms “secondary properties” (or “secondary variables”) such as gender and age (he might well have said race) (102, 103). He asserts that “economic and social condition, as identified by occupation, gives a specific form to all the properties of sex and age” (106). “There are as many ways of realizing femininity as there are classes and class fractions, and the division of labor between the sexes takes quite different forms, both in practices and in representations, in the different social classes” (107–­8). We return to the topic of intersectionality in chapter 8. See also Eliott B. Weininger, “Class and Causation in Bourdieu,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 21 (2002): 49–­114; Elliott B. Weininger, “Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Class Analysis,” in Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Erik Olin Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 4.

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22. Abbott, “Of Time and Space,” 1151. 23. This perhaps is most clearly manifest in the long list of articles that ask, for this or that outcome, “Does race matter?” See, e.g., Vijay Bhandari, Frances Wang, Andrew Bindman, and Dean Schillinger, “Quality of Anticoagulation Control: Do Race and Language Matter?” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 19 (2008): 41–­55; Michael O. Emerson, Karen J. Chai and George Yancey, “Does Race Matter in Residential Segregation? Exploring the Preference of White Americans,” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 922–­35; Jack Citrin, Donald Philip Green, and David O Sears, “White Reactions to Black Candidates: When Does Race Matter?” Public Opinion Quarterly 54 (1990): 74–­96. 24. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 250. 25. We related the history of race to the history of Western modernity in chapter 2. 26. See, e.g., Telles, Race in Another America; Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Winant, The World Is a Ghetto. 27. Much of this section—­and sections to come—­draw on two previously published articles: Mustafa Emirbayer and Eva M. Williams, “Bourdieu and Social Work,” Social Service Review 79 (2005): 689–­724; Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson, “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis,” Theory and Society 37 (2008): 1–­44. 28. Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” 72. 29. The term “node” is used here (and was conceptualized by Bourdieu) in much the same way as it commonly appears in social network analysis—­namely, as a point within a relational configuration. 30. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. 31. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 214. 32. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 132. 33. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 106–­7. 34. Ibid., 98; italics in original. 35. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 146. 36. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Distinction, chap. 5. 37. For useful discussions of the concepts of human and social capital, see James Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” in “Organizations and Institutions: Sociological and Economic Approaches to the Analysis of Social Structure,” supplement American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–­S120; Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 1–­24. 38. See, e.g., Buffy Smith, “Demystifying the Higher Education System: Rethinking Academic Cultural Capital, Social Capital, and the Academic Mentoring Process” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–­Madison, 2004); Eric Margolis, Michael Soldatenko, Sandra Acker, and Marina Gair, “Peekaboo: Hiding and Outing the Curriculum,” in The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education, ed. Eric Margolis (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–­19; Vincent Roscigno and James Ainsworth-­Darnell, “Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources: Persistent Inequalities and Achievement Returns,” Sociology of Education 72 (1999): 158–­79; Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968). 39. The literature on this topic is vast; for a comprehensive overview with citations, see Desmond and Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress, chap. 7. 40. But see Matthijs Kalmijn and Gerbert Kraaykamp, “Race, Cultural Capital, and Schooling: An Analysis of Trends in the United States,” Sociology of Education 69 (1996): 22–­34; Paul

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DiMaggio and Francie Ostrower, “Participation in the Arts by Black and White Americans,” Social Forces 68 (1990): 753–­78; Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital and School Success: The Impact on Status Culture Participation on the Grades of U.S. High School Students,” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189–­201. 41. William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). If one thinks of whiteness in the same field-­ theoretic terms as we think of blackness in this chapter, the denigration of so-­called “white trash” ways of speaking also becomes easier to understand. As always, race intersects here with class (while not being reducible to it). 42. Max Weber, “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party,” in Economy and Society, 2:932–­38. 43. See Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 44. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 [1924]). 45. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1952), 114–­15. 46. Yet another way of gaining symbolic authority is by means of simple longevity in the field; symbolic capital often is attached to the most venerable groups or individuals rather than to newcomers, challengers, or upstarts. This route to sacredness highlights the importance not only of the volume and composition of a racial group’s capital in the present state of the field but also of its trajectory in the field across time. We discuss this further in chapter 6. 47. Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State,” 42. 48. In fact, Picasso lifted the remark from T. S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1972 [1920]), 125. See also Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Maurice Berger, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, exhibition at the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, October 9, 2003–­January10, 2004; Johnson, Appropriating Blackness. 49. As noted in chapter 1, commentators have been moved by the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States (and, to a lesser degree, by the growth of the Asian American population) to speak of the coming of a new racial order. These types of observations are nothing new, yet the elemental structures of the American racial order, especially the black-­white binary, have proven resilient and stable over generations. Predictions of a new racial order are more declared than demonstrated. Large-­scale demographic changes and widespread institutional changes (e.g., the prison boom, reverse migration to the South, immigration reform) undoubtedly will influence the racial field. We are much more doubtful about the possibility of such transformation to restructure the centuries-­old foundations of the field. 50. As is well known, certain Asian American groups are comparatively poor and certain others are comparatively well-­off. Mapping of a “field of Asian Americans” would help elucidate these differences. In the larger field of American race relations, Asian Americans generally are positioned closer to the dominant pole of the field, especially with respect to economic and political capital. However, because Asian Americans continue to be “raced” in ways that European Americans are not, they remain symbolically disadvantaged (e.g., often typed as outsiders or somehow as “less American”). 51. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race, 22; italics in original. 52. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 101, 108. 53. Mary Pattillo, “Black Middle-­Class Neighborhoods,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 305–­29, 322.

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54. On the idea of “real classes” and “classes on paper,” see Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Space,” in Practical Reason, 10–­13; see also Bourdieu, Distinction, 483. 55. See White, Identity and Control, 1st ed. 56. See, e.g., Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields”; Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. 57. Matthew Desmond, “The Field of Blackness” (unpublished manuscript, 2006). 58. See “Preface to the American Edition” of Bourdieu’s Distinction. 59. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 60. For a field-­theoretic perspective on sporting practices, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Programme for a Sociology of Sport,” in In Other Words, 156–­67; see also Pierre Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sportsman?,” in Sociology in Question, 117–­31. 61. On the concept of a field of power, see Bourdieu, “Appendix: Social Space and Field of Power,” in Practical Reason, 31–­34. For an empirical investigation of the field of power in France, see Bourdieu, The State Nobility. 62. See Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La noblesse d’Etat,” Theory, Culture, and Society 10 (1993): 19–­44. 63. Bourdieu sometimes used the terms “temporal” and “spiritual” power in this regard because they allowed him to draw a “deep analogy,” as Arthur Stinchcombe would have it, between economic and cultural capital holders in the present day (the major antagonistic powers of contemporary society) and the bellators and oratores (warriors and priests) of medieval Europe—­and hence to gesture at a possible transhistorical invariance among all fields of power. On the concept of deep analogies, see Arthur L. Stinchbombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (Orlando: Academic Press, 1978). 64. Thus, Prudence Carter speaks of “dominant” and “nondominant cultural capital,” defining the latter as “a set of tastes, appreciations, and understandings, such as preferences for particular linguistic, musical, and dress styles, and physical gestures used by lower status group members to gain ‘authentic’ cultural status positions in their respective communities.” Carter, Keepin’ It Real, 50. See also Natasha Warikoo, Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 65. Pattillo, “Black Middle-­Class Neighborhoods”; Sabiyha Prince, Constructing Belongingness: Class, Race, and Harlem’s Professional Workers (New York: Routledge, 2004); Monique Taylor, Harlem between Heaven and Hell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 66. We discuss the interrelations among these fields in chapter 5. 67. J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Jackson, Harlemworld; Carter, Keepin’ It Real. 68. See Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the ‘Burden of Acting White,’ ” Urban Review 18 (1986): 176–­206. 69. Duneier, Sidewalk. See also Elijah Anderson, “The Social Situation of the Black Executive: Black and White Identities in the Corporate World,” in The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, ed. Michèle Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 3–­29. 70. Patricia Williams, “The Pantomime of Race,” in Seeing a Colorblind Future: The Paradox of Race, ed. Patricia Williams (New York: Noonday Press, 1997, 17–­30), 27. 71. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, chap. 18 72. James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (New York: Random House, 1974).

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73. Gwendolyn Bennett, “To a Dark Girl” [1923], in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 474; Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 [1929]). 74. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 7. See Barbara Summers, Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed the Fashion Industry (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); David Thomas and Naomi Campbell, eds., Soul Style: Black Women Redefining the Color of Fashion (New York: Universe Publishing, 2000). 75. In recent years, black women with straight hair often have been deemed more “black,” while locks have meant less “black,” or, at the very least, more “cosmo/bohemian.” 76. Correspondence analysis is a technique long associated with the French school of data analysis inaugurated by statistician Jean-­Paul Benzecri. It permits the plotting of a two-­ dimensional representation of the interrelations among multiple sets of elements (e.g., objective positions in a racial field and modes of interaction, or perhaps social positions and cultural position-­takings). The advantage of this method, one similar to that of Galois lattice analysis (which we mention toward the end of this chapter), is that both sets of relations can be mapped simultaneously onto the same space, thereby showing how each set of elements is positioned by means of its association with the other. This visual device allows one to grasp intuitively, in other words—­in terms of spatial distribution on a map—­the formal patterns of relations among elements of a particular order (e.g., positions), while simultaneously seeing how these are arrayed relative to similar patternings on the other order of social phenomena (e.g., specific cultural figures and symbols). Bourdieu made frequent use of correspondence analysis in his empirical studies of fields; it was especially useful to him in highlighting the intimate relation between the social and the cultural orders, that is, in illustrating the principle of duality (which we also allude to below). 77. This shift proves the mercurial nature of the field and the ever-­changing standards of what constitutes “race loyalty.” 78. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 45. 79. This might even be true of African Americans who, having been born well-­off, do not need to climb the rungs of the ladder. But it certainly is true of those born with fewer resources. 80. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 228. 81. Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn M. Neckerman, “ ‘We’d Love to Hire Them But . . .’: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), 203–­34; Paulette M. Caldwell, “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender,” Duke Law Journal 1991 (1991): 365–­96. 82. See, e.g., Favor, Authentic Blackness. 83. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 344. 84. Drake and Clayton, Black Metropolis; Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. 85. Marvin Lynn, “Race, Culture, and the Education of African Americans,” Educational Theory 56 (2006): 107–­19; John Ogbu, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003); Claude Steele, “Race and the Schooling of Black Americans,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1993; Laura Inez Luster, “Schooling, Survival, and Struggles: Black Women and the GED” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1992); Labov, Language in the Inner City. 86. Charles Becknell, Blacks in the Work-­Force: A Black Manager’s Perspective (Albuquerque, NM: Horizon Communications, 1987), 36.

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87. Waters, Black Identities, 1999. 88. The point of the foregoing analysis of the field of blackness has not been to get every detail right but rather to illustrate a way of thinking. If we have failed sufficiently to take into account the limitations imposed on us by our social, disciplinary, or scholastic unconscious, it is crucial that the regulated contestation ideally occurring in the field of race scholarship draw attention to those limitations and produce a better mapping or delineation of the field. In so doing, it will further validate—­not subvert—­our arguments about reflexivity in chapter 2. 89. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998), ix. 90. For historical surveys that make just this point, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Durkheimian Sociology and Cultural Studies Today,” in Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–­21; Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics,” in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology, by Jeffrey C. Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11–­26. See also Philip Smith, Cultural Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 91. The first coauthor of the present work committed this error himself in his earliest publications; see Mustafa Emirbayer, “The Shaping of a Virtuous Citizenry: Educational Reform in Massachusetts, 1830–­1860,” Studies in American Political Development 6 (1992): 391–­419; Mustafa Emirbayer, “Beyond Structuralism and Voluntarism: The Politics and Discourse of Progressive School Reform, 1890–­1930,” Theory and Society 21 (1992): 621–­64. 92. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1978]). 93. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 531. 94. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 73. 95. See, e.g., Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum. 96. See Andrew Abbott, “Of Time and Space,” 1149–­82. 97. Cf. Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. 98. Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectuals and the Internationalization of Ideas: An Interview with M’Hammed Sabour,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 33 (1996): 242. 99. Pierre Bourdieu, “Fieldwork in Philosophy,” in In Other Words, 18. 100. Pierre Bourdieu, “Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness,” in Language and Symbolic Power, 128. 101. Bourdieu, Distinction, 481. 102. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 178; italics in original. 103. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; see also Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 104. He declared, for example, that “in a situation of equilibrium, the space of positions tends to command the space of position-­takings.” Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 105; italics in original. 105. Bourdieu, Distinction, 2. 106. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 137–­38; italics in original. Other passages in the book make the same point: “We can only assume that some changes have indeed occurred and that they are likely to be responses to broader changes in the society. This is not to ignore the import of normative or cultural explanations, rather it is to underline the well-­founded sociological generalization that group variations in behavior, norms, and values often reflect variations in group access to channels of privilege and influence” (p. 75). “Of course, some advocates of self-­help subscribe to the thesis that problems in the inner city are ultimately the product of

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ghetto-­specific culture and that it is the cultural values and norms in the inner city that must be addressed as part of a comprehensive self-­help program. However, cultural values emerge from specific circumstances and life chances and reflect an individual’s position in the class structure. They therefore do not ultimately determine behavior” (p. 158). 107. William Julius Wilson, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: Norton, 2009), 15; see also pp. 17, 18, 23, 133–­34. Wilson also sounded these themes in “Culture and Social Structure in the Study of the Inner City” (jointly sponsored colloquium, Race and Ethnicity Brownbag and theory@madison, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin–­Madison, May 5, 2008). 108. Wilson, More Than Just Race, 147–­48. 109. Michèle Lamont and Mario Luis Small, “How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding of Poverty,” in The Color of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Exist, ed. David Harris and Ann Lin (New York: Sage Roundation, 2009), 76–­102. 110. Wilson, More Than Just Race, 21, 152. 111. Ibid., 152; see also p. 133. 112. See, e.g., Jorge J. E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), esp. chaps. 1–­3. 113. Loïc Wacquant, “Pointers on Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics,” in Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics, 21. 114. With this critique of logocentrism, we do not wish to deny that words—­labels—­do also help to create the very things they “identify” or describe. Words do matter in social life. We aim merely to suggest that to become heavily, one-­sidedly, invested in words is self-­defeating. More important is to reach through the words to a deeper engagement with the thing itself: the complex system of race. 115. In what follows, we focus once again on the US context, although much of what we say about race and culture is generalizable to other settings. Indeed, those who set themselves the task of analyzing the cultural architecture of transatlantic racial fields or of fields set in non-­Western contexts would do well to remember that “culture”—­the idea itself—­has unique racial (and Western) underpinnings. As Marshall Sahlins effectively has shown, the concept of culture, a key organizing principle derived from the Western anthropological tradition, has been exported around the globe such that, today, tribesmen in the Amazon and the Asante now speak of “their own culture.” “The cultural self-­consciousness developing among imperialism’s erstwhile victims,” observes Sahlins, “is one of the more remarkable phenomena of world history in the later twentieth century.” Marshall Sahlins, “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History,” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 1–­25 (quote at pp. 3–­4); see also Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 119. 116. See Talcott Parsons, The Social System; see also the more elaborate discussions of the “AGIL” schema in Talcott Parsons, “An Outline of the Social System,” in Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, ed. Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts (New York: Free Press, 1961), 1:30–­79; Talcott Parsons, “A Paradigm of the Human Condition,” in Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York: Free Press, 1978), 352–­433. 117. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. See, in the same volume, chap. 4 (“Religion as a Cultural System”) and chap. 8 (“Ideology as a Cultural System”). See also Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chap. 4 (“Common Sense as a Cultural System”) and chap. 5 (“Art as a Cultural System”).

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118. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 93. Cultural systems, suggested Geertz, are both “models of reality” and “models for reality.” That is, they involve both the “manipulation of symbol structures so as to bring them, more or less closely, into parallel with the pre-­establshed nonsymbolic system[s]” and the “manipulation of the nonsymbolic systems in terms of the relationships expressed in the symbolic” (ibid.). 119. William H. Sewell Jr., “History, Synchrony, and Culture,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1997]), 182. 120. Alexander and Smith, “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology,” 13–­14. 121. Philip S. Gorski, “Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis: Maps, Mechanisms, and Methods,” in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. Philip S. Gorski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 327–­66. 122. Ibid., 334. 123. Ibid., 334–­35. 124. In suggesting that one encounters a multiplicity of discourses in the racial order, we affirm a position staked out in classic fashion by Theda Skocpol in criticizing William H. Sewell Jr.’s more “anthropological” view that a single encompassing discursive formation is to be found in each society. Both Sewell’s original paper and Skocpol’s rejoinder to it are reprinted in Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chaps. 7–­8. 125. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–­74; Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious; Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 107–­148; Appiah, The Ethics of Identity; Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. 126. Laura Desfor Edles, “Race and Representation,” in Cultural Sociology in Practice (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 97. 127. John Higham, “Cultural Responses to Immigration,” in Diversity and Its Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary American Society, ed. Neil Smelser and Jeffrey Alexander (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 39–­62; Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 3. 128. Dutch Flat Chronicles, August 30, 1877. See Susie Lan Cassel, ed., The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2002); Gary Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 129. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 2003 [1970]), 43, xxxii. 130. Gorski, “Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis,” 336. 131. For Durkheim’s clearest statement of this idea, see “Individual and Collective Representations,” 23–­26. 132. Alexander, “Durkheimian Sociology and Cultural Studies Today,” 16n6. Caillois offered this inflection in Man and the Sacred (New York: Free Press, 1959 [1939]). 133. Celestin Bougle, Essays on the Caste System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971 [1908]), 126. Our reference later in this sentence is to the “caste and class” school of race

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studies, organized around W. Lloyd Warner. For a programmatic statement, see W. Lloyd Warner, “American Caste and Class,” American Journal of Sociology 42 (1936): 234–­37. 134. See Douglas, Purity and Danger; Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life; Alexander, The Civil Sphere. Several of Alexander’s students, including Laura Desfor Edles, Ronald Jacobs, Anne Kane, Agnes Ku, and Philip Smith, now have produced work along these lines; for a survey, including citations, see Mustafa Emirbayer, “The Alexander School of Cultural Sociology,” Thesis Eleven 79 (2004): 5–­15. For a comprehensive survey of the cultural sociology of race, see Edles, “Race and Representation.” 135. The fallout after September 11, 2001, led the United States to revisit that old bipolar discursive frame separating the West from the rest. In the code associating America with rationality, peace, and freedom, and “the Arab world” with irrationality, violence, and slavery, Arab Americans, in a very real sense, were rendered invisible. One hears much of Americans and much of Arabs, but very little of the nation’s three million Arab American citizens. Because of this—­and because racial identities are so powerful, they often trump other identities such as those based on nationality—­Arab Americans are stripped of their “Americanness” and associated with the Arab/terrorist side of the bipolar discursive frame. See Jeffrey Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and ‘September 11,’ ” Sociological Theory 22 (2004): 88–­105. 136. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 52, 5. 137. Edles, “Race and Representation,” 135n31. For a discussion of the symbolic oppositions mentioned just before this quotation, see ibid., 106–­14, 119. 138. Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Anderson, Code of the Street. 139. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 116. 140. Hubert Blalock Jr., Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations (New York: John Wiley, 1967). 141. After the Civil War, a Baton Rouge newspaper compared Chinese immigrants to blacks, claiming the former “were more obedient and industrious than the negro, work as well without an overseer, and at the same time are more cleanly in their habits.” And a New York Times editorial derided Irish immigrants by declaring, “ ‘John Chinaman’ was a better addition to [American] society than was ‘Paddy.’ ” This model minority image was reborn after the Civil Rights Movement, when in 1966 William Peterson published an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine entitled “Success Story, Japanese American Style.” “By any criterion of citizenship that we choose,” he wrote, “the Japanese-­Americans are better than any group in our society, including native-­born whites.” By contrast, Peterson referred to African Americans and Hispanic Americans as “problem minorities.” The article was widely read and circulated, and, since then, Asian Americans have been depicted in the popular press as America’s most successful nonwhite group. Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 68; William Peterson, “Success Story, Japanese American Style,” New York Times, January 9, 1966. 142. Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review 38 (1973): 583–­94. 143. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995), 210. 144. Wu, Yellow, 68. 145. Edward Kantowicz, Polish-­American Politics in Chicago, 1880–­1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

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146. See, e.g., Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity, esp. chaps. 1–­3. 147. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 127. 148. This is not to say that the discourse of individuality is not widely adopted, regardless of one’s position in the racial field. It may be found even among occupants of temporally dominant sectors of nonwhite racial groups-­as-­fields. However, the accrual of white privilege is highly facilitative of this discourse, especially in relation to anti–­affirmative action rhetoric. 149. See, e.g., Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 10:173–­220. 150. Gorski, “Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis,” 344. 151. See, e.g., Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Telles, Race in Another America; Marx, Making Race and Nation. 152. Gorski, “Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis,” 345. 153. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 42–­43. 154. Psalms 137:6. 155. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness. 156. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1968), 101–­2. 157. Orlando Patterson, “The New Black Nativism,” Time, February 8, 2007. 158. Jack Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-­Black Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 159. James Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture, ed. James Clifford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 160. Anne Merline McCulloch and David Wilkins, “Constructing Nations within States: The Quest for Federal Recognition by the Catawaba and Lumbee Tribes,” American Indian Quarterly 19 (1995): 361–­388, 369. Similarly, Appiah draws attention to the fact that ideas of “cultural ownership” sprout directly from Western concepts of intellectual-­property law originally designed to benefit the interests of corporate owners at the expense of consumers. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 128–­30. 161. Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 78. 162. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977), 126. 163. Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 254–­64), 255. 164. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown, 1993); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). 165. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 145. 166. Cooley, Social Process, 357. 167. Herbert Blumer, “Social Attitudes and Nonsymbolic Interaction,” Journal of Educational Sociology 9 (1936): 522, 523. 168. Bourdieu’s comments about the habitus and emotions are scattered throughout his oeuvre. For a tentative development of the idea of collective emotions, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Chad Goldberg, “Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics,” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 469–­518. Much of this section draws heavily on this article. 169. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 19–­21.

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170. In what follows, we use words like “emotion,” “feeling,” “sentiment,” and “passion” more or less interchangeably, although we do acknowledge that relevant distinctions can be drawn between them for various purposes. 171. In earlier publications, the first author of this work misleadingly used (for want of a more accessible term) that very phrase, “social psychology,” to refer to the analytic domain of collective emotions. See Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1411–­54; Mustafa Emirbayer and Mimi Sheller, “Publics in History,” Theory and Society 28 (1999): 145–­97. In his paper of 2005, he spoke of “collective psychology”; see Emirbayer and Goldberg, “Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and Collective Emotions in Contentious Politics.” 172. For critiques of individual-­based approaches in cultural sociology, see Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273–­86; Ann Swidler, “Cultural Power and Social Movements,” in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 25–­40; Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life. 173. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 292; italics in original. 174. Alexander, “Cultural Sociology or Sociology of Culture?” Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association 10 (Spring/Summer 1996): 3. 175. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1966 [1917]), 458; italics in original. 176. See Philip Slater, “On Social Regression,” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 339–­ 64; Jeff Goodwin, “The Libidinal Constitution of a High-­Risk Social Movement: Affectual Ties and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion, 1946 to 1954,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 53–­69. 177. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Norton, 1959 [1922]), 61. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961 [1930]); Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Norton, 1967 [1939]. 178. Compare to the sociograms in Jacob L. Moreno’s pioneering work, Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations (Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental Disease); see also Jacob L. Moreno, Sociometry and the Science of Man (New York: Beacon House, 1951). 179. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 40–­41. Object relations theory, a tradition of thought associated with such figures as Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott in midcentury—­and with Otto Kernberg in more recent decades—­has its origins in Freud’s early writings, especially Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000 [1905]). See the valuable review of this literature in Jay Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 180. Recent work in the sociology of emotions includes Martin Albrow, Do Organizations Have Feelings? (London: Routledge, 1997); J. M. Barbalet, Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jack Barbalet, ed., Emotions and Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Craig Calhoun, “Putting Emotions in Their Place,” in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 45–­57; Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jack Katz, How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Thomas J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Thomas J. Scheff, Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole

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Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mabel Berezin, “Political Belonging: Emotion, Nation, and Identity in Fascist Italy,” in State/Culture: State-­Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 355–­77; Mabel Berezin, “Emotions and Political Identity: Mobilizing Affection for the Polity,” in Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, Passionate Politics, 83–­98; R. W. Connell, “The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal,” Theory and Society 19 (1990): 507–­44; Goodwin, “The Libidinal Constitution of a High-­Risk Social Movement”; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For an overview, see Peggy A. Thoits, “The Sociology of the Emotions,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 317–­42. For related work in philosophy and anthropology, see Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Alison M. Jagger, “Love and Knowledge: Emotions in Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowledge, ed. Alison M. Jagger and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 145–­7 1; Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1984]); Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). An interesting question for the historical sociology of ideas is why there has been this upsurge of interest in the emotions in so many different fields simultaneously. 181. See Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Stephen A. Mitchell, Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2000). 182. Thomas J. Scheff, “Emotions and Identity,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 282. 183. On the concept of “narcissism of minor differences,” see Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 41–­43; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 72. On anti-­Semitism, see Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 114–­17, 176. 184. See, e.g., Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Many of bell hooks’s writings are devoted to such topics as well; see, e.g., Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992). 185. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1950 [1913]). See also Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 102ff; 152–­53. 186. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children (New York: Collier, 1963 [1908]), 41–­45; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 187. Patterson, Rituals of Blood. 188. See, e.g., Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940); Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; bell hooks, Black Looks. 189. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 190. See, e.g., ibid.; Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of  Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-­Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Meyer Weinberg, Because They Were Jews: A

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History of Anti-­Semitism (New York: Greenwood, 1986); Spencer Blakeslee, The Death of American Antisemitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). 191. See, e.g., Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men; Pierrette Hondagneu-­Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Richard Alba, Ruben Rumbaut, and Karen Marotz, “A Distorted Nation: Perceptions of Racial/Ethnic Groups Sizes and Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Other Minorities,” Social Forces 84 (2005): 901–­19. 192. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 186. See also William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” RES 13 (1987): 23–­45. 193. Marx, “Capital, Volume One,” in Tucker, The Marx-­Engels Reader, 321. The same remark is found in a slightly different translation; see Marx, Capital, 165. 194. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 184; italics ours. 195. Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994 [1984]), 131. 196. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980]). 197. Said, Orientalism, 49. 198. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 22–­23. 199. Patterson, Rituals of Blood. 200. See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Classic Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 201. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 3, 4. 202. Lisa Spanierman, V. Paul Poteat, Amanda Beer, and Patrick Ian Armstrong, “Psychological Costs of Racism to Whites: Exploring Patterns through Cluster Analysis,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 53 (2006): 434–­41. 203. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116, 139. 204. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–­1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985 [1960], 209. 205. See Michèle Lamont, Jessica Welburn, and Crystal Fleming, “Responses to Discrimination and Social Resilience under Neoliberalism: The United States Compared,” in Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, ed. Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 129–­157; Tey Meadow and Kristen Schilt, “The Pleasure of Gender: A Sociological Analysis,” (working paper, Harvard University, 2014). 206. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 41–­42; italics in original. 207. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 45. 208. Of course, the blues impulse, a term we borrow from Craig Werner, travels across the racial field, sometimes in genuine ways (think of Bob Dylan) and sometimes less so. However, in all cases, the collective-­emotional contradictions from which the blues sprang are the result of a long and weary history of racism. “When the Stones called out for satisfaction, they meant yesterday,” Werner observes. “When Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin covered the song, their responses carried the weight of hundreds of years.” See Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998), 89. 209. Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” 1:40–­41; italics in original. 210. Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997, 3–­12), 12.

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211. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 40. 212. Dan Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1966–­1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 48. 213. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage 1984 [1929]), 105; italics in original. 214. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (New York: Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 112. 215. Johnson, Tree of Smoke; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). 216. Patrick Langan, Lawrence Greenfield, Steven Smith, Matthew Durose, and David Levine, Contacts between Police and the Public: Findings from the 1999 National Survey (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 2001). 217. See, e.g., Liebow, Tally’s Corner; Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Anderson, Code of the Street; Karin Brewster and Irene Padavic, “No More Kin Care? Change in Black Mothers’ Reliance on Relatives for Child Care, 1977–­1994,” Gender and Society 16 (2002): 546–­63. 218. Susan Sandra Smith, Long Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 54–­55. 219. See Matthew Desmond and Andrew Papachristos, “Police Brutality and Legal Cynicism: The Beating of Frank Jude” (unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2013). 220. John Jackson Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008), 1. As the nation grows more multiracial, one might observe a shift in, or at least an expansion of, institutional distrust, such that middle-­class whites, too, come to look on “the system” with suspicion. The growing trend in home schooling, the resurgence of white militia groups, the popularization of alternative media, and the countercultural rhetoric of white conservative Christianity all foreshadow this impending realignment. 221. Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 1. 222. E. Franklin Frazier, “The New Negro Middle Class,” in E. Franklin Frazier: On Race Relations, 261, 263, 265. 223. Ibid., 262. 224. Ibid., 262, 265. 225. See the review of recent literature in Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 1. 226. Pattillo, Black Picket Fences; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977). 227. Touré, “The Magical Negro Falls to Earth,” Time, September 26, 2012. 228. The enterprise of cultural studies, too, has taken the lead in examining such topics, although here, one might note that the term itself is a misnomer: what often is most interesting and unique about cultural studies is its study not of cultural but of collective-­emotional structures. 229. Sigmund Freud, “ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books, 1963 [1919]), 107–­32. See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorry: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of

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Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983); Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Joane Nagel, “Ethnicity and Sexuality,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 107–­33; Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861], in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: Norton, 2004), 279–­314. 230. Cited in Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2008), 204. 231. Ellison, Invisible Man, 14, 573; italics in original. 232. Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also bell hooks’s “love trilogy”: All about Love: New Visions (New York: New York: William Morrow; 2000); Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: William Morrow, 2001); Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: William Morrow, 2002). For a related perspective, see Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-­Travelling, and Loving Perception,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), 390–­402. 233. Marriage pool opportunity structures certainly are part of the story—­a majority group will have lower intermarriage rates simply by virtue of the fact that it is larger—­but they are not the whole story. This becomes evident when trying to understand wide variation in intermarriage rates between minority groups that account for similar shares of the overall population. New research in sociology and psychology has demonstrated the salience of ethnic preferences in the dating and marriage market, preferences that work to disadvantage black women and Asian American men in particular. See Kevin Lewis, “The Limits of Racial Prejudice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 110 (2013): 18814–­19; Ken-­Hou Lin and Jennifer Lundquist, “Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education,” American Journal of Sociology 119 (2013): 183–­215. On interracial marriage rates and dynamics, see Zhenchao Qian and Daniel Lichter, “Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 68–­94; Rosalind Berkowitz King and Jenifer Bratter, “A Path Toward Interracial Marriage: Women’s First Partners and Husbands across Racial Lines,” Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007): 343–­69; Christine Batson, Zhenchao Qian, and Daniel Lichter, “Interracial and Intraracial Patterns of Mate Selections among America’s Diverse Black Population,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 68 (2006): 658–­72; Tavia Simmons and Martin O’Connell, Married-­Couple and Unmarried-­ Partner Households, 2000 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 2003); Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 234. Mathew Desmond and Ruth López Turley, “The Role of Familism in Explaining the Hispanic-­White College Application Gap,” Social Problems 56 (2009): 311–­34; Daphna Oyserman, Heather Coon, and Markus Kemmelmeier, “Rethinking Individualism and Collectivism: Evaluation of Theoretical Assumptions and Meta-­Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 128 (2002): 3–­72. 235. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 236. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structure of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 114. 237. David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2005), 118, 33, 153. 238. Park, “Human Ecology.” See also Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City: Suggestions for Investigation

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of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, ed. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 1–­46. 239. In chapter 5, moreover, we examine the interactional dimension of analysis in much greater detail. 240. Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology?, 131. 241. See, e.g., W. Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). 242. J. D. Lewis and A. J. Weigert, “Social Atomism, Holism, and Trust,” Sociological Quarterly 26 (1985): 459. 243. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951); Talcott Parsons, in collaboration with Robert F. Bales and Edward A. Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (New York: Free Press, 1955); Jeffrey C. Alexander, Action and Its Environments: Toward a New Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). A similar way of thinking informs Alexander’s (coedited) festschrift on behalf of Neil Smelser: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Gary T. Marx, and Christine L. Williams, eds., Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs: Explorations in Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). The theoretical frameworks of Pitirim Sorokin, Bernard Barber, and Jürgen Habermas are also similar in this regard; see, e.g., Pitirim A. Sorokin, Society, Culture, and Personality: Their Structure and Dynamics, A System of General Sociology (New York: Cooper Square, 1969); Bernard Barber, “Neofunctionalism and the Theory of the Social System,” in The Dynamics of Social Systems, ed. Paul Columy (London: Sage, 1984), 36–­55; Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1–­2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987). For an early formulation of our own tripartite framework, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Symbols, Positions, Objects: Toward a New Theory of Revolutions and Collective Action,” History and Theory 35 (1996): 358–­ 74. On the idea of analytic autonomy, see Anne Kane, “Cultural Analysis in Historical Sociology: The Analytical and Concrete Forms of the Autonomy of Culture,” Sociological Theory 9 (1991): 53–­69. For an illuminating discussion of conflation—­that is, the denial of analytic autonomy—­ see Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), part 1. 244. Alexander and Smith, “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology,” 14. 245. In a related vein, Wasserman and Faust usefully distinguished between one-­mode and multimode social network data. Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 246. See Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations (New York: Free Press, 1955 [1922]), 150; Ronald L. Breiger, “The Duality of Persons and Groups,” Social Forces 53 (1974): 181–­90; Thomas J. Fararo and Patrick Doreian, “Tripartite Structural Analysis,” Social Networks 6 (1984): 141–­76. 247. Ann Mische and Philippa Pattison, “Composing a Civic Arena,” Poetics 27 (2000): 163–­ 94. For an illuminating explication and application of Galois lattice analysis, see John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne, “The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888–­1917,” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 305–­56. Chapter Four 1. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 83, 63. 2. Eugene Rochberg-­Halton, Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 46.

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3. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, 1. See also Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1979 [1929]). 4. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 211–­14. See also Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, in which there is an extensive discussion of institutional change during times of collective effervescence, such as the French Renaissance. 5. See, e.g., Turner, The Ritual Process; Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). 6. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-­to-­Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon, 1982 [1967]). 7. For the definitive overview of performance studies, see Philip Auslander, “General Introduction,” in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1:1–­22. For two other useful overviews, see Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast, “Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice: The Cultural Pragmatics of Symbolic Action,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–­28; Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, Social Performance, 29–­90. 8. Alexander and Mast, “Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice,” 2, 5. 9. Myrdal, An American Dilemma. 10. See Orlando Patterson, “The Moral Crisis of Conservative ‘Racial’ Advocacy,” in The Ordeal of Integration, chap. 3. 11. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. 12. Boltanski, On Critique, 27. 13. Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-­Analysis, 7. 14. Such reflexively oriented racial action may or may not be informed by the critical and reflexive social science of which we spoke in chapter 2. In the present context, we focus not on race scholars per se but on all racial actors, within and without the intellectual sphere. 15. Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1998): 962–­1023. 16. Our usage of the term “chordal triad of agency” is analogous to Patterson’s discussion of a “chordal triad of freedom.” See Orlando Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic, 1991). 17. For a rewarding discussion of how field theory reorients scholarly thinking about the past’s effects on the present, see John Levi Martin, “What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology 109 (2003): 1–­49, esp. p. 18. 18. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 19. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, 18. 20. See especially Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I–­II. There is a vast secondary literature on the use of “habit” in Aristotle, but for useful introductions to the topic, see M. F. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 69–­92; Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 21. See Loïc Wacquant, “Habitus,” in International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, ed. Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovsky (London: Routledge, 2004), 315–­16.

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22. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). For a review of the usage of “habit” in modern social thought, see Charles Camic, “The Matter of Habit,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1986): 1039–­87. 23. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:114. 24. Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:129; italics in original. 25. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in The Early Works, 1882–­1898 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972 [1896]), 5:97. 26. Ibid., 104. 27. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 15. 28. Ibid., 32; italics in original. 29. Ibid., 26, 40–­41. 30. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 148. 31. Ibid., 158. 32. William I. Thomas, “The Psychology of Race Prejudice,” American Journal of Sociology 9 (1904): 600. 33. Hans Joas, “Pragmatism in American Sociology,” in Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 29–­30. 34. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 1:64. 35. The concept of “definition of the situation” first appeared in W. I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923). 36. Robert Ezra Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups: With Particular Reference to the Negro,” in Race and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1950 [1913]), 214. 37. Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and the Slum, 134–­35n1; Suttles, Social Order of the Slum, 67. 38. For a fuller discussion of Durkheim’s and Weber’s uses of the habit concept, see Camic, “The Matter of Habit,” 1050–­57, 1057–­66, respectively. 39. Pierre Bourdieu, “Fieldwork in Philosophy,” 10. 40. For a parallel line of argument, see Stephen Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-­ Process Model of Culture in Action,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (2009): 1680–­82. 41. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 122. 42. See Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 2. 43. Mills, The Racial Contract, 19; italics in original. 44. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 131. 45. Ibid., 122; italics in original. 46. The phrase, “tangle of pathology,” comes from Moynihan, The Negro Family. 47. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 135; see also p. 81 of that book. 48. Ibid., 131. 49. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 91. 50. Needless to say, dispositions informed by other principles of division, such as gender or class, also inform consumption patterns, as do simple economic constraints: the poor in any racial category refrain from purchasing expensive items not only because their tastes might not incline in that direction (a case of rendering a virtue out of necessity) but also because they are unable to afford them.

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51. Here and in other places, we suspect many readers will wonder: Is this more about class or race? We will have more to say about this question later in the book. For now, suffice it to say that bodily habits and tastes reflect one’s position in multiple overlapping fields, including the field of American race relations. Expressions of one’s position in the economic field are refracted through the prism of race; and expressions of one’s position in racial fields are refracted through the prism of class. We resist the reductionist’s penchant for “boiling it all down to class.” After all, one would be hard pressed to find a yoga studio or organic coffee shop in the poor and rural communities of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or in the majority-­white hardscrabble trailer park where one of us (Desmond) conducted ethnographic fieldwork. One almost equally would be hard pressed to find these things in middle-­class black neighborhoods or in fairly affluent immigrant enclaves. If we must speak of the primacy of a single field, the orientation of actors to specific fields across multiple situations dictates which aspect of one’s identity “in the first instance” is keyed up or suppressed. 52. Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” 73. 53. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2. 54. This concept was used frequently by Bourdieu; see, e.g., “The Interest of the Sociologist,” in In Other Words, 87–­93. 55. Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” 73. 56. Ibid., 74. 57. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 228; italics in original. 58. See Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity, new rev. ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988). 59. Such programs also have nourished in nonwhites a kind of racial pride, an embrace of their destiny (amor fati), thereby transforming a stigmatized identity believed unalterable into a virtue and source of esteem. When those positioned in the dominated regions of the racial field are presented with programs propelled by an opposite logic—­antigroupist approaches that seek to dissolve racial categories and to challenge the very existence of  “race”—­they realize that the destiny to which they so completely resigned themselves may not be a destiny after all: an unsettling and ultimately unacceptable proposition. They develop a distaste for antigroupist paradigms and, given the choice, would rather accept the terms of racial domination than eliminate them at the expense of their own racial identity. 60. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races.” 61. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 116. 62. See, e.g., Robert Courtney Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Jackson, Harlemworld; Robin E. Sheriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 63. Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” in Ethnicity without Groups, 9; italics in original. 64. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Malden: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]), ix. 65. Of particular relevance to an understanding of how the racial collusio develops are studies of how children are introduced to racial domination, including Debra Van Ausdale and Joe Feagin’s The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and Jennifer Ritterhouse’s Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Numerous works of child psychology also address this issue.

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66. Norbert Elias, “A Theoretical Essay on Established and Outsider Relations,” in The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1994 [1965]); xv–­lii. 67. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rites of Institution,” in Language and Symbolic Power, 117, 118; italics in original. 68. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 303. 69. Ibid., 308. 70. Stanley Kramer, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Columbia Pictures, 1967). 71. Bourdieu, “Rites of Institution,” 120. 72. Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-­Analysis, 4. 73. Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–­133. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 74. Bourdieu, “Rites of Institution,” 124. The term “strategies of condescension” also appears on this page. 75. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1959]), 337–­58. The essay was first published in Dissent (fall 1957). 76. Bourdieu, “Rites of Institution,” 122. 77. Ibid., 121. 78. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 496–­97. 79. Each specific racial locale features its own inflections. For instance, in the Bronx, one might well find, in the Bloods gang, not only blacks but also Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. 80. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 375. 81. Bourdieu, “Rites of Institution,” 122; italics in original. 82. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present. 83. Here one must take care to avoid misinterpreting what we call the future-­oriented aspect of imagination. The desirous imagination certainly is directed toward the past as well as the future; the reconstructive dimension of memory has been well documented by research in this area. Such research takes as its point of departure the classic work of Maurice Halbwachs, an original member of the Durkheim School; see On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1925]). Mead himself made this point about memory when insisting that “the past (or the meaningful structure of the past) is as hypothetical as the future.” He also stressed, however, that the reason why actors engage in such imaginative reconstruction of past experience is that they confront emergent situations involving new future horizons; that is, the reconstruction of the past is carried out with (more or less explicit) reference to future desires, concerns, and possibilities. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, 12. We can make the even stronger claim that, as action in a given context becomes more self-­reflective, the future dimension gains in salience; this is implied, as Joas pointed out, by Mead’s insistence that all self-­reflective activity, regardless of the richness with which it engages the past, is “essentially referred to the future. . . . It directs itself to the organisms’s present attitudes that have been formed by the past, becomes aware of their implicit reference to the future, and thereby becomes capable of experimentally testing alternative future possibilities in the present and then deliberately to construct the plan of its own action.” Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-­Examination of His Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 192. 84. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

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85. Jean-­Paul Sartre, preface to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 86. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 61. In the original, this statement is italicized. 87. See Alfred Schutz, The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons, ed. Richard Grathoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); see also Joas, The Creativity of Action. 88. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 67–­68. See also Alfred Schutz, “Choosing among Projects of Action,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962 [1951]), 67–­96. 89. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61. 90. Ibid., 69. 91. See Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. 92. For examples of these thinkers’ projective imagination at work, see William James, “The Will to Believe (1896),” in William James: Writings, 1878–­1899, 457–­79; Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-­Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom” [1944], in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, 610–­18; Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-­American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1982). 93. See Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-­Analysis, 40–­41; see also Pierre Bourdieu, “Algerian Landing,” Ethnography 5 (2004): 419; Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity. Bourdieu also was deeply familiar with Heidegger’s work, another important influence on his thinking about time. 94. Bourdieu, “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?,” 80–­81; italics in original. 95. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Algeria 1960; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time,” in Mediterranean Countrymen: Essays in the Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean, ed. Julian Pitt-­Rivers (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 55–­72. 96. See Wacquant, Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. 97. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 56; italics in original. Unlike the authors, we have not italicized the initial sentence in this quotation. 98. Ibid., 58–­59. 99. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone, 1992 [1925]), 3–­18; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-­Century America (New York: Norton, 2005). 100. For a summary of empirical research into this phenomenon, see Massey, Categorically Unequal, chap. 3. 101. Ellison, Invisible Man, 196, 202. 102. Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” 73. 103. In this respect, Norbert Elias’s theory of figurations perhaps conveys better what we are after. See, e.g., Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978 [1970]). 104. Pierre Bourdieu, “Haute Couture and Haute Culture,” in Sociology in Question, 135. 105. See Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields.” 106. Massey, Categorically Unequal, 110. 107. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 80. The first part of this statement is italicized in the original. In the same work, Bourdieu termed a societal context lacking in struggle an “apparatus”: “When the dominant[s] manage to crush and annul the

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resistance and the reactions of the dominated, when all movements go exclusively from the top down, the effects of domination are such that the struggle and the dialectic constitutive of the field cease. . . . Thus apparatuses represent a limit case, what we might consider a pathological state of fields” (102). 108. Bourdieu, “Some Properties of Fields,” 74. 109. For a discussion of this distinction between autonomous and heteronomous principles, see, e.g., Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. 110. See, e.g., Bourdieu, The Rules of Art; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 111. See Davis, Who Is Black?; Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, rev. and updated 10th anniv. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2006 [1996]). 112. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Jocelyn Bowden, Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in the Chihuahua Acquisition (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1971). 113. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. 114. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 115. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 16. On the Latin Americanization of race relations in the United States, see Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, “From Bi-­Racial to Tri-­Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (2004): 931–­50. 116. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 49. 117. Ibid., 52–­55. 118. Ibid., 55. 119. Ibid., 57–­58. 120. Ibid., 61–­63. 121. Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” 1:43. 122. Weber, “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party,” 2:933. For important works in the caste and class tradition, see, e.g., W. Lloyd Warner, “American Caste and Class,” American Journal of Sociology 42 (1936): 234–­37; John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937); W. Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, Mary R. Gardner, and W. Lloyd Warner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Myrdal, An American Dilemma. For the classic critique, see Cox, Caste, Class, and Race. 123. Tilly, Durable Inequality, esp. chap. 5. 124. Ibid., 154. 125. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 8. 126. Ibid. See also Tilly, Durable Inequality, esp. chap. 4. 127. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 8. 128. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 230. 129. Tilly also speaks of two other important mechanisms—­emulation and adaptation—­ whereby categorical differences are spread to other domains. “Exploitation and opportunity hoarding,” he writes, “favor the installation of categorical inequality, while emulation and adaptation generalize its influence.” Tilly, Durable Inequality, 10. We discuss these processes in later chapters.

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130. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 43. 131. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 230. 132. See Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration, chaps. 2–­3. 133. Weber, “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community.” 134. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. 135. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes,’ ” in Language and Symbolic Power, 229–­51; Pierre Bourdieu, “Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field,” in Language and Symbolic Power, 177–­202; Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Space,” 1–­13; Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” in In Other Words, 123–­39. 136. Bourdieu, “Identity and Representation,” 220. 137. Ibid., 220. We have altered the translation from plural to singular. 138. Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups.” 139. Banton, “Analytical and Folk Concepts of Race and Ethnicity.” 140. Bourdieu, “Identity and Representation,” 221; italics in original. 141. See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. chap. 4. 142. Kimberly McClain DeCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford, CA: Stanford Universityt Press, 2007). 143. Cf. Mara Loveman and Jeronimo Muniz, “How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Inter-­Census Racial Reclassification,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 915–­39. 144. Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 108. 145. Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” American Journal of Sociology 61 (1956): 420–­24. 146. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 212. 147. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: Norton, 2004), 468, 470. 148. See Alexander, The Civil Sphere, chaps. 11–­14. The same holds true of post–­Civil Rights movements. For example, when American Indian activists occupied Alcatraz Island for nineteen months, they were pressuring the United States to make good on its own treaty, signed in 1868, stating that all abandoned federal land once Sioux would be given back to the Sioux. See Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Today, when Mexican immigrants compare their experiences and struggles with those of European immigrants of previous generations, they also transport themselves (at least rhetorically) from the margins to the very center of American society, asking whites to see in them traces of their ancestors from the Old World. 149. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 217. 150. Robert K. Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review 1 (1936): 894–­904. 151. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 152. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-­Analysis, 1977), 99. 153. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, 84.

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154. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 155. Steinberg, “The Liberal Retreat.” 156. Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Mentor, 1963), 135. Earlier in this sentence, we quoted from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given in Washington, DC, Au­ gust 28, 1963. 157. It goes without saying that all those linguistic maneuvers and intentional silences that make up the coded language of race contribute as much to the discursive structure of racial fields as do more forthright utterances. Here one thinks of the partisan realignment helped along by Nixon’s (now well-­documented) subtle appeal to racial stereotypes and fears and solidified by Reagan, who announced himself as the “candidate for white segregationists,” as one journalist put it, by choosing to open his campaign for the presidency with a speech in—­of all places—­ Philadelphia, Mississippi, the small town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in one of the most infamous episodes of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the ascendancy of the new conservatism, with its overt appeals to moral values and law and order, was made possible by linguistic winks and word associations that covertly pandered to the white majority at the expense of racial justice. As political scientist Tali Mendelberg has observed, “The power of implicitly racial appeals today is due to the coexistence of two contradictory elements in American politics: powerful egalitarian norms about race, and a party system based on the cleavage of race. Politicians convey racial messages implicitly when two contradictory conditions hold: (1) they wish to avoid violating the norm of racial equality, and (2) they face incentives to mobilize racially resentful white voters.” Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategies, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6–­7. See also Juan Williams, “Reagan, the South, and Civil Rights,” NPR.org., June 10, 2004; Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich. For an overview, see Ian Lopez-­Haney, Dog Whistle Politics: How Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 158. Bertrand Russell, “To Ottoline Morrell, 17 December 1920,” in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914–­1970, ed. Nicholas Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2001), 215. 159. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” 160. Joseph Amato, Victims and Values: A History and Theory of Suffering (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990). 161. Michael Hout and Joshua Goldstein, “How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Came to Be 41 Million Irish Americans: Demographic, Social, and Subjective Components of the Ethnic Composition of the White Population of the United States,” American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 64–­82. 162. Indeed, Eviatar Zerubavel speaks of a Zionist tendency to confine the entire history of European Jews to a history of “persecution and victimhood.” See his Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 5. See also Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 213–­23. 163. Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 143–­52. 164. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperCollins, 1991[1939]). 165. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 207. 166. See, e.g., Mendelberg, Race Card.

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167. Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule . . . ,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 57. 168. One might add that, given the contingency and uncertainty of interactions, the consequences of actors’ actions cannot be controlled and often will feed back in ways necessitating new agentic interventions. 169. See Donald N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” 1:24–­26. 170. Durkheim, Moral Education, 31, 26, 23–­24. 171. Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964 [1797]), 49 [390], 97–­98 [433n]. 172. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 303–­4. 173. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book VI. 174. John Dewey, “The Logic of Judgments of Practice,” in The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985 [1915]), 8:15; italics in original. 175. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 169–­70. 176. Sidney Hook, “The Democratic Way of Life,” in Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom: The Essential Essays, ed. Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002 [1938]), 286. 177. Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, 286. 178. See especially Joas, Creativity of Action. 179. See, e.g., Dewey, Experience and Nature. 180. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 156; italics in original. 181. Ibid., 156; italics in original. 182. Anselm L. Strauss, Continual Permutations of Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 35–­36. 183. For an overview of the relation between pragmatism and ethnomethodology, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Douglas W. Maynard, “Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 221–­61. Much of the paragraph that follows draws on this paper. 184. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” 905–­6; italics in original. 185. Ibid., 907. 186. Ibid., 908. 187. Ibid., 905, 906. 188. See Vaisey, “Motivation and Justification,” 1680. 189. See Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology; see also Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism, ed. Anne Warfield Rawls (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), chap. 5. Philosopher Kenneth Burke also developed such ideas—­and influenced both Mills and Goffman. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969 [1945]). On Burke’s relation to pragmatism, see David L. Hildegrand, “Was Kenneth Burke a Pragmatist?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31 (1995): 632–­58. 190. D. Lawrence Wieder, Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1974), 175. See also Don H. Zimmerman, “The Practicalities of Rule Use,” in Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge, ed. Jack D. Douglas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 221–­38.

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191. See, e.g., Swidler, “Culture in Action”; Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Charles Tilly, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Charles Tilly, Credit and Blame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-­Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006 [1991]). 192. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity,” European Journal of Social Theory 2 (1999): 359–­60. 193. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1106b20–­23. 194. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 80. 195. Ibid., 267. 196. Cf. D. L. Wieder, Language and Social Reality (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1976). 197. Anderson, A Place on the Corner, 37, 29. 198. Cf. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 166. 199. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 100, 104. Social network analysis, at least since its early elaboration by the Manchester school of social anthropology, has recognized with great clarity this issue regarding the demarcation of boundaries. 200. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 77. 201. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 232. 202. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 228. 203. An especially fruitful research project would be one that carefully analyzes those jarring moments when an actor’s primary temporal orientation is replaced by another such orientation. Those include not only racial crises ranging from the mundane (e.g., a racial slip in conversation) to the extraordinary (e.g., racial uprising) but also code-­switching in everyday life, when actors, hoping to navigate successfully through the racial field, adjust and readjust their temporal orientations while considering different agentic possibilities. 204. Lest we fall into the analytic nightmare of “subtones” within “subtones,” we wish to stress that the notion of an internal chordal structure is a heuristic device that allows one to analyze variation and change in the composition of agentic orientations; clearly, actors do not dissect experience this way while in the flow of temporal passage. We also should note that what we call chordal structures are not necessarily harmonious; the subtones may be dissonant with one another, creating internal tensions that may spur the recomposition of temporal orientations. 205. See Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World; Harold Garfinkel, “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Concerted Stable Action,” in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. O. J. Harvey (New York: Ronald Press, 1963), 187–­238; Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. 206. See Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. 207. White, “Can Mathematics Be Social?” 208. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 64. 209. Ibid., 64–­65. 210. Ibid., 67. 211. Abbott continues: “It is possible to explain reproduction as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual change; it is not possible to explain change as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual stasis.” Andrew Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997): 98.

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212. See, e.g., the essays in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 [1912]); Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960 [1931]). 213. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–­1958), 2:228. 214. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986 [1979]), 92, 91. 215. Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology?, 130. See also Bowen Paulle, Bart van Heerikhuizen, and Mustafa Emirbayer, “Elias and Bourdieu,” Journal of Classical Sociology 12 (2012): 69–­93. 216. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 135; italics in original. See also Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations. 217. See, e.g., Giddens, The Constitution of Society. 218. Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 121. 219. Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 77, 80, italics in original. See also Margaret S. Archer, “Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action,” British Journal of Sociology 33 (1982): 455–­83. 220. Archer, Culture and Agency, 87. 221. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, 72. Chapter Five 1. Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 2. 2. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Some Remarks on ‘Agency’ in Recent Sociological Theory,” Perspectives (Theory Section newsletter, American Sociological Association) 15 (1992): 1–­2. 3. “For any sensible account of our world, a deterministic approach is necessary. But to explain our world in sensible terms is not to make it morally intelligible or to justify it in any way. Conservatives too often neglect the first part of this Kantian dictum, while Afro-­American leaders and others seeking change for the disadvantaged are often too ready to neglect the second.” Patterson, “The Moral Crisis of Conservative ‘Racial’ Advocacy,” in The Ordeal of Integration, 113. See also Orlando Patterson, “The Moral and Intellectual Crisis of Liberal Afro-­American Advocacy,” in ibid., chap. 2. 4. See Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. 5. We say “usually” here to take into account not only space but also time distanciation, to borrow a term made popular in sociology by Giddens. See, e.g., Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1, Power, Property, and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), chap. 4. Interaction can take place over extended periods, as in written or electronic correspondence. 6. See, e.g., Park, “Human Ecology”; Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum. 7. Another interactionist tradition of thought in sociology is rational choice theory. It remains to be seen, however, how significantly it will contribute to race scholarship. For an example, see Banton, Racial and Ethnic Competition. 8. These include phenomenology and, to a lesser degree, the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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9. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 33. Elsewhere in that same work, Bourdieu writes: “If Sentimental Education . . . may be read as a history, it is because the structure which organizes the fiction, and which grounds the illusion of reality it produces, is hidden, as in reality, beneath the interactions of people, which are structured by it. And since the most intense of these interactions are sentimental relations, foregrounded in advance for attention by the author himself, one understands how they have completely obscured the basis of their own intelligibility from the eyes of commentators whose ‘literary sense’ hardly inclines them to look for the key to sentiments in social structures” (14). 10. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 148. 11. To take just one example, Bourdieu largely avoided the networks approach—­it almost might be fair to say he rejected it tout court—­because he deemed it to commit the interactionist fallacy of privileging the investigation of concrete ties over the modeling of network positions. One must be careful not to follow him too closely in impugning network studies with this interactionist critique. Not only have many classic writings in that tradition inferred objective power relations precisely from data on concrete network ties—­indeed, social network analysis perhaps is the most promising relational method extant for mapping social structures of racial domination—­but it provides crucial insights as well into how these structures actually work in everyday life. 12. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 145; italics in original. 13. Desmond and Papachristos, “Police Brutality and Legal Cynicism.” 14. Lincoln Qillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001): 717–­67. 15. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, preface; introduction; chaps. 1–­3. 16. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 175. 17. For a fine example, see Andrew V. Papachristos, “Murder by Structure: Dominance Relations and the Social Structure of Gang Homicide,” American Journal of Sociology 115 (2009): 74–­128. 18. One can read some of the work of Bourdieu’s own students and followers—­Wacquant comes readily to mind—­as attempting to explore that very juncture where structure meets interaction. As Alexander has pointed out, theoretical strains in a master’s life’s work often “inspire covert revision in the works of the students that form the theorist’s school. In the name of defending and clarifying the work of their fathers, the best students will offer revisions to better defend themselves against their own intellectual peers.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 2 The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 300. 19. Goffman, “The Interaction Order,” 11. Goffman added: “Or, if you will, a set of transformation rules, or a membrane selecting how various externally relevant social distinctions will be managed within the interaction.” 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, 2nd ed. (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1, 2. 22. Ibid., 1. 23. Ibid., 7. 24. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

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25. Tilly, Why?, 8, 9. 26. It should be pointed out that, although he spoke mostly of reason giving in face-­to-­ face interactions, Tilly also included occasional examples of reason giving on a much larger scale, as when blue-­ribbon panels or commissions seek to explain why national calamities have occurred. While we restrict our focus to the interpersonal level, Tilly himself did not always do so. 27. Charles Tilly, Credit or Blame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 53–­54. 28. Charles Tilly, preface to Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), xiii. 29. “While you were discovering Bourdieu, through Lamont, Wuthnow, or DiMaggio, Calhoun and Wacquant, and while Jeffrey Alexander was building his concept of ‘culture structures,’ in France, we were learning the rudiments of Erving Goffman, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, pragmatics and ethnography of communication, in order to describe meaning making activities. We were leaving aside Marxism and structuralism and trying not to start, by any means, our analysis with macro-­structures.” Daniel Cefai, “Looking (Desperately?) for Cultural Sociology in France,” Culture (2009), http://www.ibiblio.org/culture/?q=node/21; italics in original. See also François Dosse, The Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1995]). 30. James, The Meaning of Truth, 281–­82. 31. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 2. 32. Accordingly, James argued, conceptual dualisms such as those between subject and object, theory and practice, mind and nature, or ideal and material should be avoided as pernicious and misleading. In so inveighing against the tendency to posit false divisions inside a seamless pure experience, he sought to move beyond the fruitless abstractions so deeply ingrained in the philosophy of his day. 33. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 18–­19. 34. Dewey expressed this perhaps most eloquently in Experience and Nature: “When the varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hateful, receive the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable, and true, then philosophy may conceivably dispense with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, like experience, to remind us that the world which is lived, suffered, and enjoyed as well as logically thought of, has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises” (372). 35. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 252. 36. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 77–­78. 37. Ibid., 98. 38. Ibid., 388. 39. Residents of Hull-­House, a Social Settlement, Hull-­House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Commens and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007 [1895]). See also Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–­1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988). 40. William I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins: Ethnological Materials, Psychological Standpoint, Classified and Annotated Bibliographies for the Interpretation of Savage Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909); Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. See also, e.g., William I. Thomas, “The Psychology of Race-­Prejudice,” American Journal of Sociology 9 (1904): 593–­611; William Isaac Thomas, with Robert Ezra Park and Herbert

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Adolphus Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1921); Marvin Bressler, “Selected Family Patterns in W. I. Thomas’ Unfinished Study of the Bintl Brief, ” American Sociological Review 17 (1952): 563–­7 1. 41. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America; see also Joas, “Pragmatism in American Sociology”; Gross, “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-­Century American Sociology.” 42. Joas, “Pragmatism in American Sociology,” 36. 43. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum. 44. Paul Goalby Cressey, The Taxi-­Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998 [1928]). 45. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis. Comparisons were drawn between the different major institutions (newspaper, church, black-­owned business enterprises, and “policy racket”) and the different social classes within Bronzeville. 46. Duneier, “On the Legacy of Elliot Liebow and Carol Stack,” 37. 47. Frazier, E. Franklin Frazier: On Race Relations; Johnson, The Negro in Chicago; Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation (New York: New York University Press, 1987 [1953]). One also might mention yet again in this context such other classics of the Chicago tradition as Cressey’s The Taxi-­Dance Hall, Thrasher’s The Gang, and Wirth’s The Ghetto. 48. Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–­1335; Duneier, Sidewalk; Terry Williams, Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line (New York: Addison-­Wesley, 1992); Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Anderson, A Place on the Corner. 49. Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” 3. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Bobo and Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition,” 956. 52. Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” 5. 53. Stanford M. Lyman, Chinatown and Little Tokyo: Power, Conflict, and Community among Chinese and Japanese Immigrants in America (New York: Associated Faculty Press, Inc., 1986). 54. Bobo and Hutchings, “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition,” 951–­72; Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam Jr., “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 377–­93; Lawrence Bobo, “Whites’ Opposition to Busing: Symbolic Racism or Realistic Group Conflict?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (1983): 1196–­1210. 55. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 3. 56. Cf., Goffman, Interaction Ritual. 57. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), n.p. (the quotation comes from the preface). For overviews of Goffman’s work, see Gary Alan Fine and Gregory W. H. Smith, eds., Erving Goffman, 4 vols. (London: Sage, 2000). 58. Goffman, Stigma, 3. 59. Ibid., 12, 13. 60. Ibid., 18. 61. Ibid., 42.

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62. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 11. 63. Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 2011), 253. 64. Ibid., 271. 65. Ibid., 272. 66. Ibid., 269. 67. Ibid. 68. Much of the discussion that follows is drawn from Emirbayer and Maynard, “Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology.” 69. For a classic early overview of the ethnomethodological tradition, see John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). For more recent overviews, see Douglas W. Maynard and Steven E. Clayman, “The Diversity of Ethnomethodology,” Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991): 385–­418; Douglas W. Maynard and Steven E. Clayman, “Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis,” in The Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism, ed. Larry T. Reynolds and Nancy J. Herman-­Kinney (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003), 173–­202. 70. Harold Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part 1,” in Studies in Ethnomethodology, chap. 5. 71. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. See also Melvin Pollner, Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 72. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 7, 270. Garfinkel further observed: “In the conduct of his everyday affairs[,] in order for the person to treat rationally the one-­tenth of [his] situation that, like an iceberg appears above the water, he must be able to treat the nine-­tenths that lies below as an unquestioned and, perhaps even more interestingly, as an unquestionable background of matters . . . which appear without even being noticed.” Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 173. 73. Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism, Anne Warfield Rawls, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 203. 74. Harold Garfinkel, “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions,” in Motivation and Social Interaction, ed. O. J. Harvey (New York: Ronald Press, 1963), 187. 75. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, 180. 76. Ibid., 1. 77. Ibid., 1–­2. 78. Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation (1964–­1972), (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995 [1992]), 623. 79. This analytic orientation was evident in Sacks’s famous coauthored paper on turn-­taking, in which he and his colleagues specified the practices or methods whereby actors solve the problem of how to accomplish the feature of interaction that only one person talks at a time. (Their answer: through the achieved orderliness of turn-­taking in conversational interactions.) Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-­Taking for Conversation,” Language 50 (1974): 696–­735; see especially pp. 699–­700. 80. See, e.g., Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). 81. See, e.g., Douglas W. Maynard, Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 82. Michael Moerman, “Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization: Who Are the Lue?” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1222. Quoted in Melvin Pollner and Robert M. Emerson,

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“Ethnomethodology and Ethnography,” in Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland (London: Sage, 2001), 125. 83. Moerman, “Accomplishing Ethnicity,” 62; italics in original. Quoted in Pollner and Emerson, “Ethnomethodology and Ethnography,” 125. Additional important work on the enactment of ethnicity has been done by Rogers Brubaker and his colleagues in Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, chap. 7 (see also appendix A for a conversation analytic study of how ethnic nationalism emerges through interaction). 84. West and Fenstermaker, “Doing Difference,” 9. 85. Rawls, “ ‘Race’ as an Interaction Order Phenomenon,” 248. 86. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 9–­10. 87. Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 133. 88. Ibid., chap. 4; see also Dorothy E. Smith, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 89. In a valuable discussion, Ronald Jepperson spoke of institutions in roughly similar fashion, as “those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-­activating social processes.” He continued: “Their persistence is not dependent, notably, upon recurrent collective mobilization, mobilization repetitively reengineered and reactivated in order to secure the reproduction of a pattern. . . . Routine reproductive procedures support and sustain [the preexisting institutional] pattern, furthering its reproduction—­unless collective action blocks . . . the reproductive process.” Jepperson added that “institutionalization is a relative property: we decide whether to consider an object to be an institution depending upon analytical context.” For example, “within any system having multiple levels or orders of organization, . . . primary levels of organization can operate as institutions relative to secondary levels of organization. . . . [Thus,] practices of formal organization [may sometimes appear] institutional relative to unorganized social practices.” Ronald L. Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 145–­46. 90. John W. Mohr and Harrison C. White, “How to Model an Institution,” Theory and Society 37 (2008): 485–­512. 91. Robert Bellah et al.’s strictures, however, must be borne in mind: Institutions ought not to be confused with specific concrete organizations. Fundamental problems (such as institutionalized racism) only can be solved by reforming the former, not by improving the latter. “If we confuse organizations and institutions, then when we believe we are being treated unfairly we may retreat into private life or flee from one organization to another—­a different company [for example]—­hoping that the next one will treat us better. But changes in how organizations are conceived, changes in [how] they operate—­institutional changes—­are the only way to get at the source of our difficulties.” Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 11. 92. Douglas, How Institutions Think. It can be noted that, in that work, Douglas is like a Durkheimian strongly pulled in the direction of pragmatism by her interest in why institutions adapt the scripts they do, picking and choosing among the different analogies, classifications, and so forth, that are available. We thank Christopher Winship for this insight. 93. Obviously, this is an oversimplification in more ways than one. Not only does it focus predominantly on central tendencies, but also it neglects Weber and (in the pragmatist tradition) John R. Commons, Thorstein Veblen, and many others. We have more to say later in the

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chapter about pragmatist institutionalism; for Weber’s theory of institutions, see, e.g., Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in Economy and Society, vol. 2, chap. 11. 94. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 45. See also La Grande Encyclopedie (1901), s.v. “Sociologie,” by Paul Fauconnet and Marcel Mauss, 30:165–­76. 95. On the distinction between “currents of opinion” and relatively stable institutions, see Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 52–­55. 96. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, 2:260. For another useful study of Durkheim’s theory of institutions, see Gianfranco Poggi, Images of Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx, and Durkheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), chap. 8. 97. Talcott Parsons, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 326, 327; italics in original. For an extended discussion by Parsons of Durk­ heim’s theory of institutions, see Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 1:399–­408. 98. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949). For Parsons’s theory of institutionalized organizations, see, e.g., Talcott Parsons, “Suggestions for a Sociological Approach to the Theory of Organizations, Parts I and II” Administrative Sci­ ence Quarterly I (1956): 63–­85, 225–­39; Talcott Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Societies (New York: Free Press, 1960), 16–­58 (“A Sociological Approach to the Theory of Organizations”) and 59–­96 (“Some Ingredients of a General Theory of Formal Organizations”). For a review, see W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas and Interests, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 20–­25. 99. See, e.g., Weber, Economy and Society; Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962 [1911]). 100. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Douglas has contributed a Durkheimian in­ flection to institutional analysis by focusing not on the moral but on the cognitive dimension. The phrase “logical consensus” comes from Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 16. 101. Lynne G. Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence,” in Powell and DiMaggio, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, 83–­107; For a comparison of the old and new institutionalisms, see Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, introduction to The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Powell and DiMaggio, 1–­38; Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “On the Virtues of the Old Institutionalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 1–­18. 102. On institutional economics, see Thorstein B. Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (New York: Huebsch, 1919); Wesley Mitchell, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1934; authorship for this work is listed as President’s Research Committee on Social Trends); John R. Commons, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924). For overviews, see Joseph Dorfman, ed., Institutional Economics: Veblen, Commons, and Mitchell Reconsidered (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Scott, Institutions and Organizations, 2–­4. On the Chicago School approach to organizations, see Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization (New York: Schocken, 1962 [1909]); Hughes, The Sociological Eye, 5–­13 (“The Ecological Aspect of Institutions” [1936]) and 14–­20 (“The Study of Institutions” [1942]); Anselm L. Strauss, Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-­Bass, 1978). For overviews, see Andrew Abbott, “Organizations and the Chicago School,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies, ed. Paul Adler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 399–­420; Andrew Abbott, “An Old Institutionalist Reads the New Institutionalism,” Contemporary Sociology 21 (1992): 754–­56; Scott, Institutions and Organizations, 9–­11. Many of the Chicago School sociologists we have discussed elsewhere, such as W. I. Thomas and Robert E. Park, also contributed to organization theory.

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103. Abbott, “An Old Institutionalist Reads the New Institutionalism,” 756. 104. Everett C. Hughes, “Going Concerns: The Study of American Institutions,” in The Sociological Eye, 54, 55. 105. Anselm Strauss, Leonard Schatzman, Danuta Ehrlich, Rue Bucher, and Melvin Sabshin, “The Hospital and Its Negotiated Order,” in The Hospital in Modern Society, ed. Eliot Freidson (New York: Free Press, 1963), 147–­69. 106. White, Identity and Control, 1st ed., 5. 107. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 205. 108. Everett C. Hughes, “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status” [1945], in The Sociological Eye, 141–­50. 109. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 8. See Tilly, Durable Inequality, esp. chap. 6. 110. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 9. See Tilly, Durable Inequality, esp. chap. 6. 111. For a review of relevant literature, see Ryan Smith, “Race, Gender, and Authority in the Workplace: Theory and Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 509–­42; see also Desmond and Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress, 186–­87. 112. Amado Padilla, “Ethnic Minority Scholars, Research, and Mentoring: Current and Future Issues,” Educational Researcher 23 (1994): 24–­27. See also Tiffany Joseph and Laura Hirshfield, “ ‘Why Don’t You Get Somebody New to Do It?’ Race and Cultural Taxation in the Academy,” Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (2010): 121–­41. 113. E.g., Allan Gold, “Dartmouth Punishes Four as Harassers of Professor,” New York Times, March 11, 1988. 114. Ralph Haurwitz, “Pulitzer Winner Quits UT for NYU,” Austin American-­Statesman, April 6, 2013, B4. 115. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), 5, 22. 116. Our thinking here is similar to that of Bourdieu in Distinction, The State Nobility, and elsewhere, in that we regard the fields of cultural production, economic life, and the state as primary terrains of struggle among the dominants of the social order. (Later, we speak directly to this in our discussion of the concept of a field of power.) Our thinking also is close to that of theorists of civil society, who posit three great institutional complexes in modern society—­namely, the state, economy, and civil society itself. However, in mapping onto each other the Bourdieuian model and that of many civil society theorists, we make two theoretical modifications: (1) we add the field of cultural production to those of the state and economy as yet another of the institutional complexes outside civil society; and (2) we identify civil society with much of the terrain located “below,” as it were, the field of power in Bourdieu’s model (for an example of how Bourdieu liked to diagram the social space, see, e.g., Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 38). 117. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” 328. This essay originally was part of Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion; for an insightful interpretation, see Robert N. Bellah, “Max Weber and World-­Denying Love: A Look at the Historical Sociology of Religion” (Humanities Center and Burke Lectureship on Religion and Society, University of California at San Diego, October 30, 1997). See also Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: Essays on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (New York: HarperCollins, 1984). 118. For other elaborations on Weber’s thesis of multiple life spheres, see, e.g., Parsons, “An Outline of the Social System”; Daniel Bell, “Foreword: 1978,” in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), xi–­xxix; Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems

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(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1984]); Bellah et al., The Good Society; Boltanski and Thevenot, On Justification; Alexander, The Civil Sphere. 119. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 232; italics in original. 120. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 220. 121. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 248. This is quoted also in chapter 2. 122. See Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World. 123. One easily can discern a shift toward Marxism in Du Bois’s writings of the 1920s and 1930s, in the aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and during the Great Depression; see, e.g., Darkwater and Black Reconstruction in America. Highly significant, however, is the skepticism Du Bois expressed, even in the midst of his engagement with Marx, regarding class reductionism. Class analysis alone, he wrote, could not account for the “Negro problem”: “Nevertheless, th[e] black proletariat is not a part of the white proletariat. . . . The lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. . . . Colored labor has no common ground with white labor. . . . We can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century despite some of its logical difficulties. But it must be modified in the United States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem” [1933], in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, 541, 542, 543. For biographical discussion, see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–­1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). 124. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 210. 125. Ibid., 222, 235; italics in original. Cox also noted: “[Jim Crow] race relations in the South have developed out of the immediate need of the white exploiting class to restore as far as possible the complete control over its labor supply, which it enjoyed during slavery. . . . The ruling class propagates [anti-­Negro attitudes] among the white masses” (164–­65). Even more explicitly, Cox observed: “In the United States the race problem developed out of the need of the planter class, the ruling class, to keep the freed Negro exploitable. To do this, the ruling class had to do what every ruling class must do; that is, develop mass support for its policy. Race prejudice was and is the convenient vehicle. . . . Race prejudice in the United States is the socio-­attitudinal matrix supporting a calculated and determined effort of a white ruling class to keep some people or peoples of color and their resources exploitable. . . . Thus race prejudice may be thought of as having its genesis in the propagandistic and legal contrivances of the white ruling class for securing mass support of its interest” (170). Finally, Cox asserted: “The observed overt competitive antagonism is a condition produced and carefully maintained by the exploiters of both the poor whites and the Negroes” (220). 126. Edna Bonacich, “Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 41 (1976): 34–­51. 127. In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argued that historical discrimination was “far more important than contemporary discrimination in explaining the plight of the ghetto underclass” (pp. 32–­33). 128. E. U. Essien-­Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967); Alfonso Pinkney, Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 129. Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

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130. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 49, 48. 131. López, White by Law. 132. Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State,” in Practical Reason, 53. This is quoted also in chapter 7. 133. Bonilla-­Silva, “Rethinking Racism,” 471. 134. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 23. 135. Loveman, “Is ‘Race’ Essential?,” pp. 891–­93. 136. Institute of Museum and Library Services, African American History and Culture in Museums: Strategic Crossroads and New Opportunities (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2004). 137. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1904]), 299. 138. Annette Lynch and Mitchell Strauss, Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Meaning (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). 139. Cohen and Arato define civil society in terms of  “(1) Plurality: families, informal groups, and voluntary associations whose plurality and autonomy allow for a variety of forms of life; (2) Publicity: institutions of culture and communication; (3) Privacy: a domain of individual self-­development and moral choice; and (4) Legality: structures of general laws and basic rights needed to demarcate plurality, privacy, and publicity from at least the state and, tendentially, the economy.” Jean L. Cohen and Andres Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 346. Alexander’s view is more delimited, excluding from civil society such institutions as the family, schooling, and residential life. He criticizes Cohen and Arato, among others (including Emirbayer and Sheller), for adhering to a “diffuse” and “umbrella-­like” definition of the concept. Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 29–­31, 557. 140. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 631n48. 141. Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 56. 142. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16. 143. Both publicity and social movements can be subsumed under this broad rubric of contentious politics, which Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow defined as “interactions in which actors make claims bearing on someone else’s interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests of programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties.” Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 4. 144. Bourdieu, “Appendix: Social Space and Field of Power,” 34. 145. This idea comes up frequently in Bourdieu’s writings; see, e.g., Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 386. 146. While we cannot specify an instance in which Bourdieu deploys the concept of a “field of power” at the meso-­level of organizational fields, he does analyze the field of institutions of higher education in France in terms of a division between grande porte and petite porte. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 142–­52. In discussing even more circumscribed fields such as specific business firms, he writes: “We can . . . speak of the logic of the struggle within the field of power in the firm, that is to say, the competition between those holding one of the relevant powers. Everything [takes] place as if the structure of the field of power was organized at every moment in terms of different oppositions which, particularly in moments of crisis, could crystallize into strategic alliances among the holders of the various different forms of power.” Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 218.

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147. In fairness to Bourdieu, it must be noted that he always insisted on the historical specificity of any claims he made on behalf of the primacy of a given type of asset. For instance, when speaking of Soviet-­style societies, he suggested that the most important principle of differentiation there was political and not economic capital. Pierre Bourdieu, “The ‘Soviet’ Variant and Political Capital,” in Practical Reason, 14–­18. However, when speaking of most other societies, at least in the present day, Bourdieu too easily resorted to formulations of a somewhat economistic nature. For a powerful critique along these lines, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu,” in Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (New York: Verso, 1995), chap. 4. 148. Much of the discussion that follows is drawn from Emirbayer and Sheller, “Publics in History.” 149. This tradition extends back to Aristotle and includes Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, as well as important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson. In the twentieth century, another significant contributor to it was Hannah Arendt. 150. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 245–­46. 151. These figures all were dedicated to working in the public realm on behalf of progressive social and cultural causes of their day. 152. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]), 27. 153. Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” New German Critique 3 (1974): 49. 154. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–­42. 155. Ibid., 120. Bourdieu similarly observed that speakers “lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence.” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language,” in Language and Symbolic Power, 55. 156. See, e.g., Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power (London: Verso, 1988); Miriam Hansen, “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 179–­212; Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 56–­76. 157. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 75. 158. Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215–­235. See, e.g., E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 259–­88. 159. Harrison C. White, “Where Do Languages Come From? I,” (working paper, Pre-­Print Series, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 1995), 4. 160. Turner, The Ritual Process. 161. According to White, different types of publics include rally, “wherein existing networks and co-­texts are . . . re-­spliced in strategic efforts by actors”; salon, “a sophisticated mode/setting of discourse not tied to ongoing pragmatic concerns or identities”; and subway, a “public of minimal presence, minimal interchange, and maximal decoupling from ‘co-­text’ and

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network—­the street public.” Harrison C. White, “Network Switchings and Bayesian Forks,” Social Research 62 (1996): 1055. 162. One other important sociologist who ventured onto the terrain of public sphere theorizing, albeit without ever speaking of a “public sphere,” was Talcott Parsons. See, e.g., “On the Concept of Influence,” in Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1967), 355–­82. 163. We define the term “working alliances” later in this chapter. 164. Craig Calhoun, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 269. 165. Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 78. 166. Moishe Postone, “Political Theory and Historical Analysis,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 166. 167. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 168. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory. Margaret Somers, too, pointed out that popular public spheres must “mediate between civil society and the towering forces of nation-­states and national markets.” Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere,” 589. 169. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 479–­80. A similar idea is to be found in Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 209, 231–­32. As for Durkheim, in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals he portrayed the state as an “organ of social thought.” Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge, 1957 [1950]), 50. As Bellah has noted, this amounted to “a communication theory of politics that seems quite contemporary.” Robert N. Bellah, introduction to Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), xxxiv. 170. Clayton Sinyai, Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2006). See also Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (New York: Sentry, 1965 [1902]); Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962); Lourdes Beneria and Martha Roldan, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In respect to elite economic publics, relevant work includes Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Clifford Kono, Donald Palmer, Roger Friedland, and Matthew Zafonte, “Lost in Space: The Geography of Corporate Interlocking Directorates” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1988): 863–­911. 171. Both performance-­centered studies of identity and embodiment and analyses of symbolic classification struggles are relevant to the study of civil publics. On the former, see, e.g., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); on the latter, see, e.g., Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Relevant as well is the literature on popular cultures of resistance; see, e.g., Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Also relevant is the literature on new social movements; see, e.g., Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, John Keane and Paul Mier, eds. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

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172. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 435. All three types of publicity feature some combination or other of strategic and communicative action (in Habermas’s terminology). 173. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, 508. 174. Calhoun, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” 275; see also Craig Calhoun, “ ‘New Social Movements’ of the Early Nineteenth Century,” Social Science History 17 (1993): 385–­427. 175. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123, 124. 176. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, xviii. See also Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; see also the useful foreword by Miriam Hansen); Gunther Lottes, Politische Aufklarung und plebejisches Publikum: Zur Theorie und Praxis des englischen Radikalismus im Spaten 18 Jahrhundert (Munich, 1979); Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 289–­339. Eley stresses that “Habermas’s concentration on Offentlichkeit as a specifically bourgeois category subsumes forms of popular democratic mobilization that were always already present as contending and subversive alternatives to the classical liberal organization of civil society in which Habermas’s ideal of the public sphere is confined.” Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures,” 330–­31. 177. The Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); see especially Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” pp. 111–­50 of that edited volume. See also Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). 178. This phrase is closely associated with Habermasian theory. See, e.g., Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1–­2. 179. For extensive discussions of social relations, culture, and agency in relation to publics—­ both singular and multiple—­see Emirbayer and Sheller, “Publics in History,” 747–­56, 761–­64. 180. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 67. 181. W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (London: Routledge, 1961). 182. Freud spoke of these processes as issuing from a “narcissism of minor differences”; see Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 41–­43; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 72. 183. Bion, Experiences in Groups; see also Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. In some cases, leaders psychically are “split apart” according to their different attributes, such “that one member may become the fearful leader, another the enraged leader, still another the desiring leader, and so forth.” C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 53. A further complication is that leaders need not belong to publics themselves to influence the structuring of psychical relations within those publics. To take a classic example, political publics during the French Revolution were structured in large part by their shared unconcious relations with the “absent” king. As Lynn Hunt showed in The Family Romance of the French Revolution, the killing of the king and the unconscious attempt to set in his place a “new family romance of fraternity” influenced the internal workings of a variety of publics—­and ultimately shaped the course of the Great Revolution itself. Analogies might be drawn here to relations between white leaders and publics comprising people of color.

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184. See Barbara A. Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Adam Seligman, The Problem of Trust (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1997); see also Adam Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Some of this work fits into a “moral sympathy” tradition extending back to early modern British moral philosophy; see Allan Silver, “ ‘Trust’ in Social and Political Theory,” in The Challenge of Social Control, ed. Gerald D. Suttles and Mayer N. Zald (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), 52–­67; Allan Silver, “Friendship and Trust as Moral Ideals,” European Journal of Sociology 30 (1989): 274–­97; Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990): 1474–­1504. 185. Supplementary devices, which Freudian theory does help to illuminate, also contribute to holding publics together. Trust, for example, often is reinforced and stabilized by defense mechanisms such as repression and reaction formation, mechanisms that serve to “mobilize . . . positive feelings within the members to counter the rivalrous ones.” Leon Balter, “Leaderless Groups,” International Review of Psycho-­Analysis 5 (1978): 332. Still other control mechanisms also may come into play when regressive tendencies other than aggression (e.g., tendencies toward narcissistic withdrawal or resexualization of group ties) threaten to destabilize publics as effective working alliances. 186. Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360–­80. 187. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 57. 188. Some promising leads in this regard, especially relevant to the study of publics in social movements, are to be found in Mario Diani, “Social Movements and Social Capital: A Network Perspective on Movement Outcomes,” Mobilization 2 (1997): 129–­47. Still other work, including studies by James Coleman, Ronald Burt and Marc Knez, and others, indicates how configurations or systems of trust can be mapped out in ways analogous to the mapping of social and cultural networks; see, e.g., James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chaps. 5, 8; Ronald S. Burt and Marc Knez, “Kinds of Third-­Party Effects on Trust,” Rationality and Society 7 (1995): 255–­292. This latter approach, however, belongs to an individualistic “interest paradigm” that stands opposed, at least in its basic assumptions, to much of the other work we have cited on trust. On “interest paradigms,” see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 189. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race. As Mary Ryan demonstrated, for example, nineteenth-­ century “civic culture” was at times profoundly “driven by contest, struggle, loss, and gain, and it remained riddled with inequities and productive of violent disagreements,” often verging on “civic wars.” Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 228. 190. Randall Collins, “Stratification, Emotional Energy, and the Transient Emotions,” in Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions, ed. Theodore D. Kemper (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 27–­28. 191. Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 18. 192. Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 111. 193. Ibid., 8. 194. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Perennial, 1988 [1835–­1840]), 62–­70. 195. Tilly subsumed numerous forms of activity other than social movements under the rubric of streams of political contention. But we focus on social movements alone because they,

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more than rebellions, coups, and so forth, are what has been crucial throughout American race history, with the one major exception, of course, of the Civil War. 196. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, chap. 7. Morris defined a movement halfway house as “an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society. . . . What is distinctive about movement halfway houses,” he went on, “is their relative isolation from the larger society and the absence of a mass base. This generally means that such groups are unable to bring about wide-­scale change or disseminate their views to large audiences. Nevertheless, in their pursuit of change movement halfway houses develop a battery of social change resources such as skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society. What they lack is broad support and a visible platform” (139–­40). Examples from the Civil Rights Era include the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the Highlander Folk School. 197. Alexander, The Civil Sphere, chaps. 11–­14. 198. Neil Gross, “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 368. 199. Merton, “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range,” 43. Perhaps the works in which Tilly most forcefully presented his mechanisms agenda were Tilly, Durable Inequality; Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics; and Charles Tilly, “Mechanisms of the Middle Range,” in Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science, ed. Craig Calhoun (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 54–­62. See also Mustafa Emirbayer, “Tilly and Bourdieu,” American Sociologist 41 (2010): 400–­22, esp. 407. 200. We owe our point regarding universalization and neutralization to Joseph A. Conti, Between Law and Diplomacy: The Social Contexts of Disputing at the World Trade Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 10. Bourdieu made extensive use of these terms in his essay “The Force of Law.” As for the other two mechanisms, Bourdieu specified and explored carefully the workings of vulgarization whereby privileged actors maintain a certain social as well as cultural distance from the dominated. This was one of the key analytic contributions of Distinction. In addition, he investigated the subtle and little understood processes of “euphemization,” that is, of negation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) and sublimation, so skillfully used by philosopher Martin Heidegger to give expression to his contempt for the masses and for social welfare. This “imposition of form” was, for Bourdieu, emblematic of how any cultural producer gives voice to a political stance without seeming to do so. See Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. When one interpreter of Bourdieu underscored the close association between his work and critical realism, a school of thought in the philosophy of science that posits the reality of underlying causal structures and mechanisms, Bourdieu fully acknowledged the affinity. Frederic Vandenberghe, “ ‘The Real Is Relational’: An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu’s Generative Structuralism,” Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 62. Much the same linkage with critical realism, by the way, also has been highlighted in the case of Tilly’s later writings. See George Steinmetz, “Charles Tilly, German Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science,” American Sociologist 41 (2010): 312–­36. Like Tilly himself, Bourdieu came (late in life) to realize the hidden similarities in this respect between his sociology and that of Merton, at least in intent, pointing out in a favorable light Merton’s abiding concern to “reject . . . both concept-­less empiricism and data-­less theoreticism.” Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 13.

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201. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–­1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 36. 202. Charles Tilly, “To Explain Political Processes,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995): 1602. As a further example drawn from a very different setting, Tilly also might have mentioned here the defense mechanisms invoked by psychoanalysts in explaining specific instances of neurotic behavior. 203. Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 7. 204. Charles Tilly, “Mechanisms in Political Processes,” in Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties, 26–­27. 205. Tilly and Tarrow defined brokerage as “production of a new connection between previously unconnected or weakly connected sites”; defection as “exit of a political actor from a previously effective coalition and/or coordinated action”; and diffusion as “spread of a contentious performance, issue, or interpretive frame from one site to another.” Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 215. 206. Tilly and Tarrow defined attribution of similarity as “identification of another political actor as falling within the same category as your own”; symbolic boundary formation as “creation of an us-­them distinction between two political actors”; boundary shift as “change in the persons or identities on one side or the other of an existing boundary”; and the activation of shared stories as “increase (decrease) in the salience of the us-­them distinction separating two political actors.” Ibid. 207. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 191. 208. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 212 209. Charles Tilly, “Emotions and Strategies” (paper delivered at the “Conference on Emotions and Social Movements,” New York University, February 20, 1999), 8. The core arguments of this paper, which remains unpublished, were devoted to distinguishing between three “bundles of causal processes involving emotions”: phenomenological processes of an intrapsychic nature (having to do with “how, within an individual, cognition, emotion, and action affect each other”), rhetorical processes (involving “how the speech and action of one actor influence the emotions [hence the cognitions and actions] of a second actor”), and reputational processes (involving “how the emotional self-­representation of an actor affects that actor’s public standing”) (1). 210. Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 16. See also Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 211. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 181, 185. 212. Ibid., 181, 181–­82; italics in original. 213. Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 305. 214. Ibid., 372, 376. 215. For a critique of Alexander’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement, see Aldon Morris, “Naked Power and The Civil Sphere,” Sociological Quarterly 48 (2007): 615–­28. 216. Of course, as Joas himself acknowledges, there are many principles of classification one could adopt for differentiating among different types of social movement approaches. The principle used here is that of their action-­theoretic assumptions. See Joas, The Creativity of Action, 199–­201. 217. Ibid., 203. On the collective action problem, see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On resource mobilization, see John D. McCarthy and

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Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212–­41. 218. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–­1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); for analytic overviews, see Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, “Opportunities, Mobilizing Structure, and Framing Processes—­toward a Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framing, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–­20. 219. “The basic components of social action . . . are: (a) values, or general sources of legitimacy; (b) norms, or regulatory standards for interaction; (c) mobilization of individual motivation for organized action in roles and collectivities; (d) situational facilities, or information, skills, tools, and obstacles in the pursuit of concrete goals.” We shall derive our typology of collective behavior from these components. The basic principle is that each type of collective behavior is oriented toward a distinct component of social action. Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 9. 220. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 206. 221. For early formulations in the Chicago tradition, see Robert E. Park, “Human Nature and Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 32 (1927): 733–­41; Herbert Blumer, “Collective Behavior,” in An Outline of the Principles of Sociology, ed. Robert E. Park (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1939), 219–­88. For an influential later contribution, see Ralph H Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1957). For a historical overview, see David A. Snow and Phillip W. Davis, “The Chicago Approach to Collective Behavior,” in A Second Chicago School? The Development of a Postwar American Sociology, ed. Gary Alan Fine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 188–­220. For an assessment and critique of the Chicago tradition, see Joas, The Creativity of Action, 207–­8. For an important social movements study that stresses the creativity of action (but without ever invoking pragmatism or the Chicago tradition), see Craig Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 222. See, e.g., Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-­Wesley, 1978); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency; Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–­1975 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). For overviews, see David S. Meyer, “Protest and Political Opportunities,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 125–­45; David S. Meyer and Debra Minkoff, “Conceptualizing Political Opportunity,” Social Forces 82 (2004): 1457–­92. 223. Raka Ray, Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Ray defined fields of protest as “critical or oppositional subfields” (within the political field) that “consist of groups and networks that oppose those who have the power in the formal political arena and may or may not share the logic of politics in the larger political field, although they may be constrained by it. Thus social movements that are oppositional to the state or the present government are embedded in a protest field, which is in turn embedded in the wider political field” (8). 224. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 161–­62, 174; italics in original. This insight was among Bourdieu’s most important contributions to historical analysis. He devoted considerable attention to it in the final chapter of Homo Academicus, where he also observed: “The independence of the causal series which ‘develop in parallel’, as Cournot says, supposes the relative autonomy

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of the fields; the meeting of these series supposes their relative dependence as regards the fundamental structures . . . which determine the logics of the different fields.” (The ellipsis in this sentence replaces the phrase “especially the economic ones,” yet another sign of Bourdieu’s economism.) Bourdieu also remarked: “In establishing an objective or, in other words, a historical time, that is a time transcending the specific time-­scales of each different field, the situation of general crisis renders practically contemporary, for a shorter or longer period, agents who, although theoretically contemporaneous, evolved in more or less completely separate social times, each field having its own specific time-­scale and history, with its specific dates, events, crises, or revolutions, and rhythms of development. Moreover, it renders contemporary to themselves agents whose biography is answerable to as many systems of periodization as there are fields in whose different rhythms they share” (180; italics in original). Elsewhere, too, Bourdieu asserted: “A regional crisis can extend to other regions of social space and thus become transformed into a general crisis, a historical event, when, through the effect of acceleration which it produces, it is able to bring about the coincidence of events which, given the different tempo which each field adopts in its relative autonomy, should normally start or finish in dispersed order or, in other words, succeed each other without necessarily organizing themselves into a unified causal series. . . . It follows that the position of the different fields in the general crisis and the behavior of the corresponding agents will depend, to a considerable extent, on the relation between the social time-­scales germane to each of these fields, that is to say between the[ir] rhythms.” (173; italics in original). It is worthwhile to note that, although coming at the problem from an entirely different theoretical perspective, Theda Skocpol reached a similar conclusion when she cautioned, in States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), that social analysts always must “give sufficient analytic weight to the conjunctural, unfolding interactions of originally separately determined processes” (320n16). 225. See Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 786–­811. 226. Marx, Capital, 1:90. Chapter Six 1. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1960 [1923]); Sigmund Freud, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1965 [1933]), chap. 31. Freud’s structural model (also sometimes termed his “second topography”) centers on the three major elements of the psychical apparatus—­the id, ego, and superego—­and is to be distinguished from his earlier topographical model, which divides internal reality into three terrains: those of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious life. Freud’s shift to a structural model was occasioned, among other things, by his realization that “large portions of the ego and superego [themselves] can remain unconscious and are normally unconscious,” as with the (unconscious) operation of mechanisms of defense, which are grounded in the ego and superego. Freud, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” 62. Freud deemed the two models of the psyche theoretically reconcilable, as evidenced by the diagrams he drew to illustrate his ideas (they encompass both); see ibid., 70; and Freud, The Ego and the Id, 14. 2. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 6. 3. Camic, “The Matter of Habit.” The remainder of this paragraph draws extensively on this paper. 4. Durkheim, Suicide, 37; Émile Durkheim, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1984 [1893]), xxxi–­lix.

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5. Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, 11. 6. Camic, “The Matter of Habit,” 1064. 7. See, e.g., Elias, The Civilizing Process; Norbert Elias, The Germans (New York: Polity, 1996 [1989]). 8. Wirth, The Ghetto, esp. chap. 6. 9. Talcott Parsons, “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory,” in Talcott Parsons: The Early Essays, ed. Charles Camic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1935]), 240. 10. Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20; italics in original. 11. On the concept of a specific habitus, see Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 164. 12. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 55; also quoted in Wacquant, “Habitus,” 317. On Freud’s concept of the adhesiveness of the libido, see Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 108; see also Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, chap. 5; Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Therapy and Technique (New York: Collier Books, 1963 [1937]), 233–­7 1. The same idea also appears under the rubric of “susceptibility to fixation” and the “pertinacity” and “viscosity” of the libido. 13. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chap. 2. For a version of symbolic interactionism open to postmodern thinking, see Norman Denzin, Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992). 14. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 165; punctuation slightly altered. 15. Wacquant, “Habitus,” 316–­17. 16. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, “The Disenchantment of the World,” in Algeria 1960, 1–­93; Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, “Colonial Rule and Cultural Sabir,” Ethnography 5 (2004): 445–­86; excerpted and adapted from Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, “Paysans deracines, bouleversements morphologiques et changements culturels en Algerie,” Etudes rurales 12 (January–­March 1964): 59–­94. Bourdieu’s close associate of many years, Abdelmalek Sayad, develops similar themes in The Suffering of the Immigrant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004 [1999]). 17. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, The Bachelors’ Ball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [2002]). 18. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 138. 19. George Bernard Shaw, “Preface to Pygmalion,” in Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (New York: Fine Creative Media, 2004 [1909]), 365. 20. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2. 21. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 52. Myrdal defined “race prejudice” as “the whole complex of valuations and beliefs which are behind discriminatory behavior on the part of the majority group (or, sometimes, also on the part of the minority group) and which are contrary to the equalitarian ideals in the American Creed.” Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 52 fn. a. 22. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Basic Books, 1979 [1954]), 9. Allport added: “It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group” (9). As this allusion to the “faculty of generalization” suggests, Allport considered categorization an ordinary, everyday cognitive process. Prejudice was the outgrowth not of aberrant or pathological personality structures (e.g., the “authoritarian personality”) but of the normal functioning of the cognitive apparatus. (Allport entitled chapter 2 of his book “The Normality of Prejudgment.”) For a contrast, see Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-­Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton, 1950).

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23. Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” 3; italics in original; punctuation slightly altered. But see also Herbert Blumer, “Attitudes and the Social Act,” in Symbolic Interactionism, chap. 4. 24. Lawrence D. Bobo, “Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations,” Journal of Social Issues 55 (1999): 445–­72, esp. 447. 25. For a general critique of sociologies of race that focus on “the sin of ‘racism,’ ” see Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination.” 26. Rogers Brubaker, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition,” in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 75. See also Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977); Roy G. D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 27. Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov, “Ethnicity as Cognition,” 79; italics in original. 28. See, e.g., Eviatar Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 29. It was precisely such a cognitive apparatus that ego psychologists sought to add to the Freudian model of the mind, albeit with little success. We shall have more to say about the psychoanalytic perspective a bit later in the chapter. 30. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72. 31. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 31; italics ours. 32. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 150. 33. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 31, 32. 34. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 135; italics in original. See also the illuminating discussion of this point in Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 148–­49. 35. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 38. 36. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 125. 37. Zadie Smith, “Speaking in Tongues,” New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/speaking-­in-­tongues-­2/?insrc=toc. 38. Chris Shilling, “Embodiment, Emotions, and the Foundations of Social Order: Durk­ heim’s Enduring Contribution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 213. 39. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973 [1934]), 70. 40. Ibid., 71–­72. 41. Ibid., 73; italics in original. 42. Ibid., 86. 43. An important mediating figure we do not discuss here is Maurice Merleau-­Ponty; see, e.g., Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2013 [1945]). 44. It is true that Mauss at least partly was aware of this: “ ‘habits,’ ” he wrote, vary “between . . . prestiges.” Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” 73. Moreover, he devoted a good deal of attention to the differences between men and women of the selfsame society. However, most of his analytic attention (not to mention illustrative examples) was directed at the differences among societies overall. 45. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 138. 46. Ibid., 143; italics in original. A useful source on this point is Nick Crossley, “The Phenomenological Habitus and Its Construction,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 81–­120.

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47. On the notion of a “feel for the game,” see, e.g., Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 66. On the notion of “art”—­defined by Durkheim as “pure practice without theory”—­see Émile Durkheim, “The Nature and Method of Pedagogy,” in Education and Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1956 [1911]), 101. 48. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 140. 49. Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class, 45. 50. Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), chap. 5. 51. E.g., Anderson, A Place on the Corner; Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” 52. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 140–­41. 53. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Perennial Classics, 1944), 164, 194, 195. 54. Bowen Paulle, Toxic Schools: High Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 100. 55. Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care, and Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Jack P. Shonkoff, Benjamin S. Siegel, Mary I. Dobbins, Marian F. Earls, Andrew S. Garner, Laura McGuinn, John Pascoe, and David L. Wood, “Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Role of the Pediatrician: Translating Developmental Science into Lifelong Health,” Pediatrics 129 (2012): 224–­31; Jack P. Shonkoff, Andrew S. Garner, and Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care, and Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, “The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress,” Pediatrics 129 (2012): 32–­46. 56. On this general topic, Richard Shusterman’s works are helpful; see, e.g., Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 57. See, e.g., Nikki Lee, Projects (Ostfildern, DE: Hatje Cantz, 2001); see also Maurice Berger, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project—­Photography,” Art Journal 60 (2001): 54–­57. 58. John Badham, Saturday Night Fever (Paramount Pictures, 1977). 59. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 67. These examples also underscore the importance of thinking intersectionally about race in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality, among a host of other principles of division. See also Black Hawk Hancock, American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 60. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 152, 157. 61. Bourdieu, Distinction, chap. 5. 62. Mills, The Racial Contract, 18. 63. James Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984, 3; italics in original. Sigmund Freud once noted in analogous spirit that we all are morally responsible for what we dream. 64. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, introduction to The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexica, and Wray (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 10. 65. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 157, 165. 66. Waters, Ethnic Options. 67. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Cosimo, 2007 [1890]), 1:121; quoted in Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 37.

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68. Goffman, Stigma, 121. 69. Dave Chappelle, “Dave Chappelle about His White Friend Chip,” accessed October 13, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3dk6KAvQM. 70. Smith, “Speaking in Tongues.” 71. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 145. 72. Hartingan, Racial Situations, 162. 73. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 10. 74. Ibid., 149. 75. Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, Carla Goar, and David G. Embrick, “When Whites Flock Together: The Social Psychology of White Habitus,” Critical Sociology 32 (2006): 229–­53. 76. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 135. 77. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 1. 78. “In the particular (and particularly frequent) case in which the habitus is the product of objective conditions similar to those under which it operates, it generates behaviors that are particularly well suited to these conditions without being the product of a conscious, intentional search for adaptation.” Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 213–­14. 79. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 100. 80. Ann Mische, “Projects and Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action,” Sociological Forum 24 (2009): 694; the internal quotation is from Henri Desroche, The Sociology of Hope (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 3. 81. bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-­Esteem (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 21. 82. Ibid., 23. 83. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 236; italics in original. 84. Ibid., 235. 85. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Although the subtitle of the book speaks of race, and racially specific experiences are compared throughout, the primary analytic emphasis of the work remains on class. 86. Edward Franklin Frazier, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” Forum 77 (1927): 859. 87. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1965 [1900]), 625; italics in original. 88. Allport had much to say about projection and its role in racial life in The Nature of Prejudice, chap. 24. In general, Allport was (like many social thinkers of his time) influenced by Freudian ideas. 89. Every so often, something like a recognition of symbolic violence would shine through in Parsons’s writings, as in this passage: “The process of socialization . . . focuses need-­dispositions in such a way that the degree of incompatibility of the active aspirations and claims for social and nonsocial objects is reduced, in ‘normal conditions,’ to the usually executable task of making allocations among sectors of the population, most of whose claims will not too greatly exceed what they are receiving.” Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, “Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,” in Towards a General Theory of Action, ed. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 197; quoted in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 63. 90. See Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness. 91. Jürgen Habermas, “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979 [1976]), 95.

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92. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 2005 [1966]). See also Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993); Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2009 [1997]); George Steinmetz, “Bourdieu’s Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of ‘Habitus’ and ‘Symbolic Capital,’ ” Constellations 13 (2006): 445–­64. 93. See Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Jay Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Stephen A. Mitchell, Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2000). 94. Mitchell, Relationality, xiii. 95. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 51. 96. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 6. 97. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1970 [1930]), 296; quoted in Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 21. 98. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 147, 149. 99. Ibid., 154; italics in original. 100. Ibid., 192, 194. 101. Ibid., 192. 102. Wright, Black Boy, 197. 103. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 169–­70; italics in original. See a similar passage in Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 38–­39. 104. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Penguin, 1970). 105. See, e.g., Ann duCille, “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” in The Black Studies Reader, ed. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), 265–­80; classic early studies include Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Skin Color as a Factor in Racial Identification of Negro Preschool Children,” Journal of Social Psychology 11 (1940): 159–­69; Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Journal of Negro Education 19 (1950): 341–­50. 106. Belinda Robnett and Cynthia Feliciano, “Patterns of Racial-­Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters,” Social Forces 89 (2011): 807–­28. 107. See, e.g., Bonnie Berry, Beauty Bias: Discrimination and Social Power (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007); Kathy Davis, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery (Lanham, MD: Rosman and Littlefield, 2003). 108. Goffman, Stigma, 106. Goffman’s analyses of what we are calling symbolic violence rank among the most compelling and moving in his life’s work. 109. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995): 797. 110. Ibid., 808. 111. See, e.g., Toni Schmader and Michael Johns, “Converging Evidence That Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 440–­52; Jean-­Claude Croizet and Theresa Claire, “Extending the Concept of Stereotype Threat to Social Class: The Intellectual Underperformance of Students from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24 (1998): 588–­94. 112. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1961 [1949]), 96. 113. As Liebow explained it, “By itself, the plain fact of supporting one’s wife and children defines the principal obligation of a husband [for these men]. . . . Few married men, however, do in fact support their families over sustained periods of time. Money is chronically in short

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supply and chronically a source of dissension in the home. . . . Thus, marriage is an occasion of failure. To stay married is to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out. It is to live in a world whose standards of manliness are forever beyond one’s reach, where one is continuously tested and challenged and continuously found wanting.” Liebow, Tally’s Corner, 131, 135–­36. 114. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005 [1940]), “Part One: Fear.” 115. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 26. 116. See, e.g., Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 233; the terms appears in several places in his later writings. 117. Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” 118. Troy Duster, “Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations: Taking on the Newly Configured Reductionist Challenge to Sociology,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 1–­15, 3. 119. Anderson, Code of the Street. 120. See, e.g., Eric A. Stewart, Christopher J. Schreck, and Ronald L. Simons, “ ‘I Ain’t Gonna Let No One Disrespect Me’: Does the Code of the Street Reduce or Increase Violent Victimization among African American Adolescents?” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43 (2006): 427–­58. 121. Michael Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 78. 122. Janet Abu-­Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 269. 123. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?, 79–­80, 83. 124. John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 105–­6; italics in original. 125. King, Why We Can’t Wait, 117. 126. For Appiah, the notion of “culture” has “attained ubiquity [but] at a cost of conceptual purchase.” See Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 120. 127. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage, 1971). 128. Patterson, “A Poverty of the Mind.” 129. Mary E. Campbell and Lisa Troyer, “The Implications of Racial Misclassification by Observers,” American Sociological Review 72 (October 2007): 750–­65. 130. Small, Harding, and Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” 6–­27. 131. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 186. 132. Ibid., 124. 133. See ibid., 186. Frazier’s arguments are succinctly summarized in Frazier, “The New Negro Middle Class.” 134. bell hooks, Killing Rage, 14, 16, 19. 135. Terrie M. Williams, Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting (New York: Scribner, 2008). 136. Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Essex, UK: Prentice Hall, 2000), 78. 137. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 129. 138. Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy, “Run! Hide! The Illegal Border Crossing Experience,” New York Times, February 4, 2007. 139. Edward Morris, An Unexpected Minority: White Kids in an Urban School (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 112. See also Dalton Conley, Honky (Berkeley:

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University of California Press). This does not mean that white students lost their white privilege. Morris points out that black teachers viewed whites as good and responsible students. These teachers also were reluctant to discipline white students, although they did not hesitate to punish the latter’s black and Hispanic peers. 140. Amy Wilkins, “Puerto Rican Wannabes: Sexual Spectacle and the Marking of Race, Class, and Gender Boundaries,” Gender and Society 18 (2004): 104. See also Amy Wilkins, Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 141. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 37. 142. On Freud’s dualism of love and aggression, see, e.g., Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. 143. For the most important psychoanalytic discussion of sublimation, see Hans W. Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 144. See Desmond and Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress, 462–­66. 145. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 169–­70. 146. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 214. 147. Ibid.; Charles Sanders Peirce, “Reply to the Necessitarians: Rejoinder to Dr. Carus,” Monist 3 (1893): 567; quoted in Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 38. 148. See, e.g., M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1975]). 149. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1125b35–­1126a1. 150. J. O. Urmson, “Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean,” in Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 161. In chapter 4, we quoted directly the formulation (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) glossed in this passage. 151. On the concept of cold rationality, see Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 152. Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions,” in The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 369. 153. Shelby Steele, “On Being Black and Middle Class,” Commentary 85 (1988): 42–­47, 42. 154. hooks, Killing Rage, 15, 16. 155. Steele, “On Being Black and Middle Class,” 404. 156. W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: Modern Library, 2001 [1909]), 5. 157. Jacob Lawrence, The Legend of John Brown (a series of 22 narrative screenprints; Washington State Art Collection, 1977). 158. Paul I. Wellman, Death in the Desert: The Fifty Years’ War for the Great Southwest (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987 [1935]), 233. 159. Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 188. 160. Quoted in ibid. 161. Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Trans-­action 1 (1963): 17; Lewis, La Vida, xlix. 162. Paul Haggis, Crash (Lions Gate Films, 2005).

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163. Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1989). 164. Sidney Hook, “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life,” in Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974 [1959–­60]), 3–­25. 165. Lee, Do the Right Thing. 166. For general considerations on “habits of compassion,” see Terrance MacMullan, Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), chap. 10. 167. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1006b36. 168. Anderson, Streetwise, 3. 169. The phrase “ethical life” in this sentence is meant to refer indirectly to arguments about concrete ethical community, or Sittlichkeit, in G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1821 [1957]), esp. “Third Part.” 170. Anderson, Streetwise, 3. Anderson speaks briefly as well of female old heads, although he points out that the term usually refers to males (73–­76). 171. Anderson adds that “today, as meaningful employment has become increasingly scarce for young blacks and as crime and drugs have become a way of life for many, the old head is losing his prestige and authority” (ibid., 3). 172. DaCosta, Making Multiracials, 184, 183. 173. See, e.g., Douglas, Purity and Danger; Turner, The Ritual Process. 174. DaCosta, Making Multiracials, 44. 175. Ibid., 188. 176. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 103. 177. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VI.44. 178. John Stuart Mill, “The Utility of Religion,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 10, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006 [1874]), 422. 179. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 274. 180. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, chap. 10. 181. Hierocles’s fragment on concentric circles is included in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 349–­50. Hierocles continued: “Although the greater distance in blood will remove some affection, we must still try to assimilate them. The right point will be reached if, through our own initiative, we reduce the distance of the relationship with each person. The main procedure for this has been stated. But we should do more, in the terms of address we use, calling cousins brothers, and uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers. . . . For this mode of address would be no slight mark of our affection for them all, and it would also stimulate and intensify the indicated contraction of the circles.” 182. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 564. 183. John Dewey, “Racial Prejudice and Friction,” in The Middle Works, 1899–­1924 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 [1922]), 13:243. 184. Dewey neglected that nonwhites from the beginning have been intimately familiar with whites, while, for their part, whites have persisted in their racism even when in close contact with persons of color. 185. W. I. Thomas, “The Psychology of Race-­Prejudice,” American Journal of Sociology 9 (1904): 593–­611; Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology. 186. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice; Thomas F. Pettigrew, “The Ultimate Attribution Error: Extending Allport’s Cognitive Analysis of Prejudice,” Personality and Social Psychology Bul­le­ tin 5 (1979): 461–­76.

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187. Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 7. 188. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 238. The Aristotle quotation is from the Nicomachean Ethics, 1126a1–­3. Seneca also spoke of mercy or clementia. See Seneca, On Mercy, in Moral and Political Essays, ed. J. F. Procope and John M. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 117–­64. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes: “We have an indirect duty to cultivate the sympathetic natural (aesthetic) feelings in us and to use them as so many means to participating from moral principles and from the feeling appropriate to these principles.—­Thus, it is our duty: not to avoid places where we shall find the poor who lack the most basic essentials, but rather seek them out; not to shun sick-­rooms or debtors’ prisons in order to avoid the painful sympathetic feelings that we cannot guard against. For this is still one of the impulses which nature has implanted in us so that we may do what the thought of duty alone would not accomplish.” Kant, Doctrine of Virtue, 126 [457]. 189. Arendt, The Human Condition, 240–­41. 190. Ibid., 242. A kind of forgiveness is to be found even in the darkest moments. “Our first act as free men,” Elie Wiesel writes of being released from Buchenwald, “was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. . . . And even when we were no longer hungry, there was still no one who thought of revenge. On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimer to get some potatoes and clothes—­and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.” Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), 109. 191. Lee, Do the Right Thing. 192. Luc Boltanski, Love and Justice as Competences: Three Essays on the Sociology of Action (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012 [1990]), 114, 115. Quotation is from Arendt, The Human Condition, 240. 193. Boltanski, Love and Justice as Competences, 116. Quotation is from Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995 [1847]), 173. 194. Virgil, The Aeneid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 143 (Book VI, lines 893–­96). 195. Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 192. 196. This refers to a line from Pierre Bourdieu quoted in chapter 1; see Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 136. Chapter Seven 1. Much of the discussion in this chapter of Dewey and Bourdieu draws from Mustafa Emirbayer and Erik Schneiderhan, “Dewey and Bourdieu on Democracy,” in Bourdieu and Historical Analysis, ed. by Philip S. Gorski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 131–­57. 2. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 75. 3. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Dewey’s Moral Philosophy,” by Elizabeth Anderson, accessed fall 2012, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/dewey-­moral/. 4. But what constitutes a “problem”—­and for whom? In Dewey’s ideal, the determination of problems for inquiry is settled in no less democratic a fashion than any other aspect of inquiry—­obviously a large assumption, given the power-­weighted fashion in which certain aspects of reality tend to be problematized while others are not. 5. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 125.

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6. John Dewey, Experience and Education, in The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 [1938]), 13:13. 7. Ibid., 13:19. 8. Cooley, Social Process, part 7. 9. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2:1129. 10. Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986 [1939]), 115. 11. Robert N. Bellah, “The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry,” in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 377. 12. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, 51. 13. Ibid., 50. 14. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 115. 15. Bourdieu, “The Force of Law.” 16. Pierre Bourdieu, “Neoliberalism as Conservative Revolution,” in Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action (London: Verso, 2008 [1998]), 291; italics in original. 17. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 8, 246, 8. 18. Ibid., 8–­9, 245–­46. 19. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 66. The comment specifically concerns Habermas, not Rawls, but their positions are characterized only a few pages later (p. 79) as “very close” and criticized, now together, on similar grounds of unreality and distance from concrete experience. 20. Dewey, “Ethics” (Revised Edition), 1932, 249. 21. See Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 102. 22. In what follows, we draw on Desmond and Emirbayer, Racial Domination, Racial Progress, chap. 11; and Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, “To Imagine and Pursue Racial Justice,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 15 (2012): 259–­89. Our theoretical arguments have slightly changed, however, insofar as we now distinguish analytically between multiculturalism and racial democracy. 23. King, “I Have a Dream,” Washington, DC, August 28, 1963. 24. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race, 7–­8. 25. Amy Gutmann, “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious, 108–­9. 26. There has been much discussion among political philosophers as to the relevance of this work, and of Rawls’s writings more generally, to race scholarship. See, e.g., Tommie Shelby, “Race and Ethnicity, Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations,” Fordham Law Review 72 (2004): 1697–­1714; Charles W. Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (2009): 161–­84. 27. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 12, 11. 28. Ibid., 12. 29. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 24–­25. 30. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 13. 31. Ibid., 12. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Ibid., 140–­41. 34. Rawls’s theories have generated extensive scholarly debate, but one of the best critiques (one that aligns closely with our own) remains Michael J. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of

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Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a more substantive statement of his views, see also Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America’s Search for a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Sandel does not devote extensive discussion in this work to issues of race. 35. Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). 36. See, e.g., Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995); Stephen Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 37. Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams; see also Sleeper, Liberal Racism. 38. Barack Obama, “Keynote Address,” Democratic National Convention, Boston, Massachusetts, July 27, 2004. 39. William James, Pragmatism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981 [1907]), 26. 40. See Richard Kahlenberg, A Better Affirmative Action: State Universities that Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences (Washington, DC: Century Foundation, 2012). 41. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 165. 42. Chief Justice John Roberts, majority opinion to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007). 43. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 172. 44. Ibid., 113; italics in original. Specifically, as Anderson observes, color-­blind policy fails to take into account forms of racial discrimination exempted in loopholes (as when racial discrimination is practiced by private clubs), evaluative discrimination (as “when the qualities at stake are ‘soft’ and subjectively assessed”), ostensibly nonracial discrimination that takes for granted human capital differences brought about by prior racial discrimination (e.g., in on-­ the-­job training), unconscious and unintended racial discrimination (as in juror bias against nonwhite defendants), aversive racism under the cover of formally race-­neutral policies (as in voter suppression efforts), “race-­neutral policies supported by voters out of ethnocentric motives” (e.g., “white support for cuts in school funding to avoid transferring resources from white taxpayers to black and Latino schoolchildren”), second-­order discrimination (as when crack cocaine offenders, who largely are black, are sentenced to harsher prison terms than powder cocaine offenders, who largely are white), and discrimination in contact (i.e., “in people’s choices of friends, acquaintances, associates, and neighbors,” as when communities take steps to ensure that their schools will remain racially segregated) (172–­75). 45. Bonilla-­Silva, Racism without Racists, 28. 46. Ibid., 30. 47. Ibid., chap. 3; quotations are from p. 53. 48. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” [1843], in Tucker, The Marx-­Engels Reader, 26–­46. 49. Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious, 109. 50. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 46. 51. Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon, 1997). 52. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 53. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xv.

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54. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25–­74. 55. Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, 280–­81. 56. Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, 271. 57. Ibid., xiv–­xv, xvii. 58. Ibid., 3, 38. 59. Ibid., 277. 60. Ibid., 276. 61. Ibid., chap. 5. 62. Ibid., 177. 63. Ibid., 263, 264, 168. 64. Ibid., chap. 8. 65. Ibid., 273. 66. Lawrence Fuchs, “Thinking about Ethnicity in the United States,” in Immigration in Two Democracies: French and American Experience, ed. Donald Horowitz and Gerard Noiriel (New York: New York University Press, 1992, 39–­65), 45. We leave aside the irony of this statement being offered several years before the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. 67. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xx. 68. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 162–­63. 69. See, e.g., Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 316–­20. 70. Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 234; the internal quotations are from Kant, Doctrine of Virtue, 144–­45 [472–­73]. 71. Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 14; see also Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Eze (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 103–­31. In his seminal paper, Eze writes: “Strictly speaking, Kant’s anthropology and geography offer the strongest, if not the only, sufficiently articulated theoretical philosophical justification of the superior/inferior classication of ‘races of men’ of any European writer up to his time.” Eze, “The Color of Reason,” 129. 72. Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?,” 14. 73. Charles W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen” (University of North Carolina Colloquium Series working paper, 2002), italics in original. The paper was published in slightly abridged form in Andrew Valls, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 169–­93. 74. See Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” British Journal of Sociology 59 (2008): 1–­23. 75. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 68–­69. 76. Ibid., 66; Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. 77. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (May June 2000), 112; italics in original. No doubt the major reason for Kymlicka’s and Taylor’s shared tendency toward reification is their greater concern to ponder issues relevant to multinational societies such as Canada than to deal with issues relevant to a society such as the United States, which, as Walzer put it, has the character more of a “nation of nationalities.” Michael Walzer, “Comment,” in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 101. 78. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 73.

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79. The phrase is not Taylor’s but Gadamer’s. See Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975 [1960]). 80. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. 81. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 193. 82. Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, 372. 83. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 93. 84. John Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” in The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 [1939]), 14:226. 85. Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123 (2008): 1384–­85. 86. Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, 372. This is not to suggest that ideal theorizing does not consider issues of distributive justice. A Theory of Justice, after all, is vitally concerned with precisely such issues. 87. Walzer, Spheres of Justice. 88. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–­1850 (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1989). 89. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: MJF Books, 1961), 418. 90. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 54. 91. Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: How the Working Poor Became Big Business (New York: Harper, 2010). 92. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 93. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 237–­38. 94. Bridget Long, “How Have College Decisions Changed over Time? An Application of the Conditional Logistic Choice Model,” Journal of Econometrics 131 (2004): 271–­96. 95. Lawrence M. Friedman, Total Justice (New York: Russell Sage, 1994), 42–­43; quoted in Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 154. 96. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 93. 97. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), chap. 10. 98. Dewey, “Ethics” (Revised Edition), 1932, 249. 99. Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, 373. 100. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 110. 101. Ibid., 111. 102. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 14:226. 103. Dewey, “Ethics” (First Edition), 1908, 275. 104. Dewey, “Ethics” (Revised Edition), 1932, 349. Quoted in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 415. 105. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, 327. 106. John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works, 1925–­1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989 [1934]), 10:43. 107. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 415–­16. 108. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 199–­200. 109. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 82. 110. Cornel West, “A Philosophical View of Easter,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 417.

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111. Cornel West, “The Making of an American Radical Democrat of African Descent,” in The Cornel West Reader, 14. 112. Émile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1898]), 51–­52. 113. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 115. 114. Ibid.. We owe this point regarding natural duties, including that of mutual respect, to Tommie Shelby; see his essay “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2007): 151ff. 115. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Norton, 1975 [1859]), 54. 116. Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick, or The Whale (New York: Penguin, 1992 [1851]), 16, 24, 30. 117. Ibid., 55. 118. Ibid., 57. 119. Ibid., 57, 58. 120. Ibid., 64. 121. Ibid., 349. 122. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); see esp. chap. 4. 123. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 14:226. 124. Ibid., 227. 125. Ibid., 228. 126. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 98, 108. 127. Ibid., 108. 128. Richard J. Bernstein, “Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical-­Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 327. 129. Ibid., 336. 130. Dewey, “Ethics” (Revised Edition), 1932, 307; italics in original. 131. Hans W. Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980 [1960]), 249. 132. Loewald, Sublimation, 24. 133. Sigmund Freud, “The Libido Theory,” in General Psychological Theory (New York: Collier Books, 1963 [1923]), 184; see also Freud, The Ego and the Id, chap. 4. 134. Jason D. Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 14. Quoted in Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 30. 135. Patterson, Ordeal of Integration, 1. 136. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 14:229. 137. Michèle Lamont and Nissim Mizrachi, Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2012). 138. Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 139. Jeff Weintraub, “Virtue, Community, and the Sociology of Liberty” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1979). 140. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, chap. 2. 141. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 133; italics in original. 142. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.

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143. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 159ff. 144. For a broad consideration of how the white habitus might be reconstructed, see MacMullan, Habits of Whiteness. 145. Lamont and Mizrachi, Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective. 146. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 162. 147. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. 148. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, chap. 9. Quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 93. 149. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 181, 180, 180. 150. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1637]), 1:116. 151. Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination,” 225–­27. Wacquant speaks not specifically of individuals, however, but of sociohistorical investigators—­and the objects on trial to which he refers, again, are not individuals but societies, institutions, or groups. 152. In addition to the sources cited in chapter 7, see, e.g., Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-­End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—­ and What We Can Do about It (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). 153. In addition to the sources cited in chapter 7, see, e.g., Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 154. Shelby, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” 154. 155. See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996). 156. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979 [1977]). 157. Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 228–­29. 158. Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness, 165. 159. Erin Kelly and Frank Dobbin, “How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management: Employer Response to Antidiscrimination Law, 1961 to 1996,” American Behavioral Scientist 41 (1988): 960–­84. 160. Elizabeth Lasch-­Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Norton, 2001). 161. Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly, “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 589–­617. 162. Stella M. Nkomo, “Much to Do about Diversity: The Muting of Race, Gender, and Class in Managing Diversity Practice” (conference paper, “International Cross-­Cultural Perspectives on Workforce Diversity: The Inclusive Workplace,” Bellagio, Italy, July 2001), 9. Cited in John Wrench, “Diversity Management Can Be Bad for You,” Race and Class 46 (2003): 80. 163. M. Bendick Jr., M. L. Egan, and S. Lofhjelm, The Documentation and Evaluation of Anti-­ Discrimination Training in the United States (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1998). Cited in Wrench, “Diversity Management Can Be Bad for You,” 77. 164. Sara L. Rynes and Benson Rosen, “What Makes Diversity Programs Work?” HR Magazine 39 (1994): 67. Cited in Kelly and Dobbin, “How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management,” 980. 165. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, “Employee Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” Time, April 26, 2007; Jacqueline Hood, Helen Muller, and Patricia Seitz, “Attitudes of Hispanics and Anglos

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Surrounding a Workforce Diversity Intervention,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 23 (2001): 444–­58. 166. See Joyce Bell and Douglass Hartmann, “Diversity in Everyday Discourse: The Cultural Ambiguities and Consequences of ‘Happy Talk,’ ” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 895–­914. For an ethnographic account, see Andrea M. Voyer, Strangers and Neighbors: Multiculturalism, Conflict, and Community in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 4. 167. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 42; italics in original. 168. We set aside here other concerns of antidiscrimination law, such as sexual discrimination. Given the intersectionality of modes of domination, these too are important for racial life—­but not as directly relevant to our purposes as laws (or aspects of laws) targeting racial discrimination. 169. US Department of Justice, Fair Housing Testing Program (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 2013). 170. John Yinger, “Sustaining the Fair Housing Act,” Cityscape 4 (1999): 93–­106. 171. National Fair Housing Alliance, Dr. King’s Dream Denied: Forty Years of Failed Federal Enforcement (Washington, DC: NFHA, 2008). 172. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 135. Affirmative action also is practiced in government contracting. 173. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 8, 246, 8. 174. Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” 169–­70. 175. Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 154. 176. Ibid., 149. 177. Ibid., 150. 178. Ibid., 151. 179. Ibid. 180. The least compelling of the alternative models, Anderson argues, is the compensatory model, which legitimates affirmative action primarily as a way of compensating people for the effects of past discrimination. Its shortcomings precisely are that it is “backward-­looking: it aims to restore justice by undoing wrongs done in the past” rather than to acknowledge wrongs that continue to be done in the present; it contradicts itself by benefiting only the most privileged of the underprivileged; and it casts its beneficiaries as “passive victims of injustice” rather than as potentially active contributors to institutions (ibid., 135). A second model—­the diversity model—­avoids these problems by focusing, in a present-­and future-­minded way, on the ideas and viewpoints that (admittedly privileged) members of racial groups actively would contribute. However, it is restricted in its application to educational affirmative action; it does not explain why race should be weighted more heavily than other factors as a contributor of diversity; it misrepresents racial groups as monolithic, reified sources of diversity; it does not ask why diversity of ideas and viewpoints cannot be selected for directly rather than through the medium of race; and it makes institutional goals, not racial justice, the legitimator of antiracist policy. A third model, by contrast—­the discrimination-­blocking model—­portrays affirmative action as a necessary supplement to antidiscrimination laws that, on account of continued resistance and entrenched, often unconscious, habits, fail to stop discrimination. While avoiding all the fore­ going flaws, it does not aim high enough in actually dismantling, rather than counterposing, discrimination, and it focuses too much on discrimination today rather than on the accumulated effects of past discrimination. 181. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 147; italics in original.

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182. Kahlenberg, A Better Affirmative Action. 183. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 155. 184. Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State,” 53. This is quoted also in chapter 5. See also David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Mara Loveman, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,” American Journal of Sociology 110 (2005): 1651–­83; Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The scholarly literature on various forms of racial classification is vast. 185. Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy. 186. Bourdieu, Distinction, 477. 187. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, 10–­11, 11–­12. 188. Ibid., 14–­15. 189. Durkheim, Moral Education, 54. 190. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, 13. 191. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, “The 2012 Racial and Gender Report Card: National Football League,” September 13, 2012, http://www.tidesport.org/RGRC/2012 /2012_NFL_RGRC.pdf. This is not to say that the racial scorecard of the NFL is exemplary: ownership is 97 percent white, while 26 out of 32 head coaches also are white. 192. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-­House. See also Jane Addams, “A Function of the Social Settlement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 13 (1899): 323–­45. 193. Erik Schneiderhan, “Help for Help’s Sake: Jane Addams and the Rise and Fall of Pragmatist Social Provision at Hull-­House” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–­Madison, 2009), 99. 194. George Herbert Mead, “The Social Settlement: Its Basis and Function,” University of Chicago Record 12 (1907): 110. Quoted in Schneiderhan, “Help for Help’s Sake,” 122. See also Dmitri N. Shalin, “G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (1988): 913–­51. 195. Wes Markofski, New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21. 196. Andrew Abbott, “Pragmatic Sociology and the Public Sphere: The Case of Charles Richmond Henderson,” Social Science History 34 (2010): 337–­7 1. 197. Michael Emerson, People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 198. Lawrence J. Engel, “Saul Alinsky and the Chicago School,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16 (2002): 60. 199. Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1946); Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1971). 200. Alexander, The Civil Sphere. 201. Cesar Chavez, “Address to the Commonwealth Club of California, 1984,” in Freedom in America, ed. Kenneth Bridges (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2008 [1979]), 426. 202. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 442. We thank Chad Goldberg for this point about Dewey. 203. Shelby, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” 156. 204. Classics of the genre include Johnson, The Negro in Chicago; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1968); and The Kerner Report: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968). See also Anthony Platt, ed., The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917–­1970 (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

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205. Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005), 244. 206. Ibid., 248. 207. Ibid., 249. 208. Ibid., 240. 209. John Brueggemann and Terry Boswell, “Realizing Solidarity: Sources of Interracial Unionism during the Great Depression,” Work and Occupations 25 (1998): 436–­482; Rich Hal­ pern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996); James Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–­1922 (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Moon-­Kie Jung, “Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii’s Working Class,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 373–­400. 210. Wu, Yellow, 325. 211. Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 14:229. Chapter Eight 1. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1978 [1900; 2nd exp. ed. 1907]), 85. 2. Dewey made much the same point in Reconstruction in Philosophy: “The modern world has suffered because in so many matters philosophy has offered it only an arbitrary choice between hard and fast opposites: Disintegrating analysis or rigid synthesis; . . . a resolution of experience into atomic elements . . . or a clamping down of all experience by fixed categories and necessary concepts.” Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 136–­37; italics in original. 3. One might object that Weber’s economic sphere is a stratification order no less than is Marx’s capitalist system. However, Marx’s capitalism includes structures of class relations—­ indeed, these are its central feature—­whereas Weber’s economic sphere is more about the market, the cash nexus, and the profit motive. 4. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” 343–­50. On recent Bourdieu-­inspired attempts to theorize the “sexual field,” see, e.g., John Levi Martin and Matt George, “Theories of Sexual Stratification: Toward an Analytics of the Sexual Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital,” Sociological Theory 24 (2006): 107–­32; Adam Isaiah Green, “The Social Organization of Desire: The Sexual Fields Approach,” Sociological Theory 26 (2008): 25–­50; Adam Isaiah Green, “Erotic Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Desire,” Theory and Society 37 (2008): 597–­ 626; Adam Isaiah Green, ed., Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 5. Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York: Free Press, 1967). For a collection of important works in the social stratification literature, see David B. Grusky, ed., Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2008). 6. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 7. To be sure, men may control, to a greater degree than women, certain urban locales such as street corners, but this is a different point than the one we are making. 8. David Cannadine, Undivided Past: Humanity beyond Our Differences (New York: Knopf, 2013), 259, 260. 9. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

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10. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (New York: Penguin, 1990), 395. 11. Bourdieu, Distinction, xi. 12. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942). 13. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions”; Weber, “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party,” 2:932–­38. 14. Bourdieu, Distinction, 102. 15. Ibid., 107. 16. “Sexual properties are as inseparable from class properties as the yellowness of a lemon is from its acidity: a class is defined in an essential respect by the place and value it gives to the two sexes and to their socially constituted dispositions” (ibid.). 17. Ibid., 106. Any model of a substantive order that stipulates a priori that class relations are the “fundamental determinants” of that space while gender and race are “secondary properties” moderating class effects would contradict Bourdieu’s best insights into the multiplicity and intersectionality of fields. In each case, the question remains open as to what are the basic structuring principles of a space (as well as its most salient or specific capitals). 18. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, part 1; see also Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 19. Patricia Hill Collins, “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (2009): 88–­112. 20. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1892]), 134. 21. Ida B. Wells-­Barnett, On Lynchings (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002 [1892]), 25–­54. 22. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women,” in Darkwater, 171–­91. Our historical survey would not be complete without mentioning Sojourner Truth’s address “Ain’t I a Woman?” (speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 29, 1851). 23. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: Feminist Press, 1982 [1980]), 13–­22. 24. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). 25. Hull, Scott, and Smith, All the Women Are White ; Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back; Toni Cade Bambara, ed., The Black Woman (New York: Signet, 1970). See also Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1990). 26. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 27. We use the term “sociological” in a generic sense here; much of this creative theorizing was interdisciplinary or took place outside the bounds of the academy altogether. 28. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 16. 29. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–­67; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”. 30. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 149. 31. Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 32. Collins, “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle.” Important contributions after Crenshaw and Collins include Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-­Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race,

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Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-­Racist Struggle (New York: Routledge, 1992); M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997); Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30 (2005): 1771–­1800; Nira Yuval-­Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (2006): 193–­209; Ange-­Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (2007): 63–­79. Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities,” Sociological Theory 28 (2010): 129–­49. 33. Frances Beal, “Double Jeopardy,” in Bambara, The Black Woman, 90–­100. 34. Deborah King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14 (1988): 42–­72. 35. Sylvia Walby, “Complexity Theory, Systems Theory, and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (2007): 449–­70; Choo and Ferree, “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research”; see also Glenn, Unequal Freedom; McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality”; Yuval-­Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” 36. Yuval-­Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics”; Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition.” 37. See, e.g., McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality”; Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition.” Collins underscores some difficulties attendant upon such a move: “Within traditional sociological research, when both race and gender appear in any given study, the purpose often is to study either race or gender and control for the other statistically through regression. . . . Yet the purpose for controlling for either race or gender neglects how they intersect and, in effect, can ensure that they do not intersect.” Patricia Hill Collins, “Pushing the Boundaries or Business as Usual? Race, Class, and Gender Studies and Sociological Inquiry,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of University Press, 2007), 601; italics in original. 38. Collins, “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle,” 94. See also Nikol Alexander-­Floyd, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post-­Black Feminist Era,” Feminist Formations 24 (2012): 1–­25. 39. Myra Marx Ferree, “Inequality, Intersectionality and the Politics of Discourse: Framing Feminist Alliances,” in The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending, and Policy-­Making, ed. Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Maier, and Mieke Verloo (New York: Routledge, 2009), 87, 88. 40. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; Faegin, “The Continuing Significance of Race.” 41. Concerns about reification are much stronger when dealing with race than with, say, class or religion. Sociologists use the phrase “middle-­class values” with little hesitation, but one would pause indeed at “Latino values” or “white ways of life.” This imbalance is an important consideration when reflexively approaching the study of inequality. One wonders if concerns over reification are one reason why much more work has been devoted to articulating how class rather than race works on a daily basis. 42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 11. 43. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 37. 44. Ibid., 35.

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45. Peirce conceptualized abduction as “a process of forming an explanatory hypothesis.” Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism [1903], in The Essential Peirce, 2:216. The philosophic literature on abduction is extensive; in the social sciences, see Richard Swedberg, “On Charles S. Peirce’s Lecture ‘How to Theorize,’ ” Sociologica 2 (2012): 1–­27; Stefan Timmermans and Iddo Tavory, “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research: From Grounded Theory to Abductive Analysis,” Sociological Theory 30 (2012): 167–­86. Timmermans and Tavory have said of abduction that it “depends on the researcher’s cultivated position. . . . Abductive analysis . . . rests for a large part on the scope and sophistication of the theoretical background a researcher brings to research. . . . If our aim is to enrich the abductive possibilities of research, theoretical breadth is encouraged” (ibid., 173). 46. Andrew Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” Social Research 62 (1996): 863. 47. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 142. 48. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” in Emerson and Holquist, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 7. 49. A prominent example is Schaefer, Racial and Ethnic Groups. Now in its thirteenth edition, this work long has been a bestseller in the field. 50. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 160. 51. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination viii; italics deleted. 52. King, Why We Can’t Wait, 123. 53. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, chap. 3. 54. Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 1967). 55. Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 56. See, e.g., Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” 57. Zuberi, Thicker than Blood; see also Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-­Silva, eds., White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 58. Zuberi, Thicker than Blood, 124. 59. Otis Dudley Duncan, Notes on Social Measurement: Historical and Critical (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), 226. 60. See, e.g., Andrew Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?,” chap. 4 in Time Matters. 61. See, e.g., Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. Penner, “Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 676–­727; Quincy Thomas Stewart, “Swimming Upstream: Theory and Methodology in Race Research,” in Zuberi and Bonilla-­Silva, White Logic, White Methods, 111–­26. 62. Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor”; Goffman, On the Run. 63. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 5. 64. Duncan, Notes on Social Measurement, 227. 65. Pierre Bourdieu, “Participant Objectivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute 9 (2003): 281–­94, 282, 283. 66. Anthony Brown, “Racialised Subjectivities: A Critical Examination of Ethnography on Black Males in the USA, 1960s to early 2000s,” Ethnography and Education 6 (2011): 45–­60. 67. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 20–­21. 68. Brown, “Racialised Subjectivities,” 51. See also Alford Young Jr., “White Ethnographers on the Experiences of African American Men: Then and Now,” in Zuberi and Bonilla-­Silva, White Logic, White Methods, 179–­200.

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69. See, e.g., Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Hedstrom and Bearman, The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. 70. John Levi Martin, The Explanation of Social Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 332–­33. 71. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 168–­69. 72. Karl Jaspers quoted in ibid., 168–­69. 73. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 183–­84. In The State Nobility, Bourdieu does provide illustrations of how “structural histories” of specific organizations can be produced while still remaining within a broader field-­theoretic framework, thereby transcending the usual dichotomy between particularizing and generalizing strategies; see his extended discussions of the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales and of the École Nationale d’Administration on pp. 197–­214 of that work. 74. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 234. 75. Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. 76. Morris, Origins of American Sociology. 77. For the original remark, see Ellison, Shadow and Act, 24.

Index

Abbott, Andrew, 180, 206, 351–­52, 354, 415n211 abduction, 351, 454n45 Abu-­Lughod, Janet, 263 academia, 208, 244–­45, 342–­45 action theory, 133 Addams, Jane: Chicago School and, 358–­59; on cultural labor, 278; gender in sociological profession and, 358–­59; Hull-­House and, 194, 326–­27; perplexity and, 25, 200; pragmatism and, 8; publics and publicity and, 217, 327, 426n151; societal reform and, 288 affirmative action: anti-­affirmative action rhetoric and, 399n148; authentication of Indianness and, 111–­12; class-­based, 324; color blindness and, 294; compensatory model of, 449n180; discrimination-­blocking model of, 449n180; distributive justice and, 303; diversity model and, 449n180; diversity training and, 319–­21; institutional-­level change and, 321, 322–­23; integrative model of, 323; limited effectiveness of, 323–­24, 449n180; nonideal theorizing and, 303; as reverse discrimination, 164, 165, 293–­94; stigmatization and, 208; Supreme Court decisions against, 293, 294, 320; symbolic violence and, 266–­67; tokenism and, 266 African Americans. See blacks and blackness agency: versus actors and instances of action, 185; in authors’ argument, 336–­37; boundaries between races and, 155–­56; classification struggles and, 160; conservation strategies and, 152–­59, 172; contingency and, 414n168; elemental racial agency and, 315; emulation and adaptation and, 411n129; habits and habitus and, 136–­38, 169, 235–­36; iterational modality of, 135–­46, 169, 177–­79, 192, 204, 227, 336–­37, 407n50; means

and ends and, 169–­70; political mobilization and, 157–­58; power asymmetries and, 183; practical evaluative modality of, 135, 167–­73, 177–­79, 204, 269–­70, 337; projective modality of, 135, 146–­51, 157, 165, 177–­79, 204, 337, 409n83; as promising field for race scholarship, 233; racial structures and, 180, 182, 185; racial violence and, 157–­58; rational choice models of behavior and, 139, 141; reflective intelligence and, 134–­35; rules and norms and, 167, 168, 171–­72; schematization of racial experience and, 136; sequences of action and, 232; in social movements, 228; versus social psychology, 234; structural context and, 134, 135; subversion strategies and, 152–­59; temporal orientations and, 177–­79, 337, 415nn203–­4; terms associated with, 134; tripartite analytic model for, 135, 177–­ 79, 204, 235–­36, 336–­39, 406n16, 415n204 Alcatraz Island occupation, 412n148 Alexander, Jeffrey: on actors versus agency, 185; on civil repair, 328–­29; on Civil Rights Movement, 162, 226, 229; on civil society, 425n139; cultural pragmatics and, 131; cultural sociology and, 98, 104, 106, 115, 128–­29, 398n134; on definition of sociology, 205; Durkheimian tradition and, 9, 131; multiple environments of action and, 128; normativist approach to study of collective action and, 230; on the profane, 13; on students’ revisions of masters’ work, 417n18; universalizing theories and, 371n82 Ali, Muhammad, 95, 97 Alinsky, Saul, 328, 330–­31 Allport, Gordon, 242–­43, 277, 434n22, 437n88 Almaguer, Tomás, 65 Amato, Joseph, 165

458 American Indians. See Native Americans Anderson, Elijah: on code of the street, 263; on cosmopolitan canopies, 297–­98; ethnography and primary experience and, 71; on iconic ghetto, 325; on men on the corner, 175–­76; on “nigger moments,” 197–­98; on practical wisdom in black communities, 274–­75, 441nn170–­71 Anderson, Elizabeth: affirmative action and, 323, 449n180; on antidiscrimination laws, 294; on color-­blind policy, 294–­95, 444n44; nonideal theorizing and, 323; on social closure, 156; on values, 286 anger: blacks’ suffering and, 121; comedy and, 253; costs of whiteness and, 120; intelligence of, 269–­74; internalized, 262, 266–­67; in literature, 125, 248; nonwhites’ “failures” and, 110; repression of, 267; segregationist politics and, 120; social movements and, 228, 338; sublimation of, into effective action, 269, 311; symbolic violence and, 262–­63; thwarting of white expansionary drive and, 254; urban uprisings and, 329–­30; whites’ perceptions of blacks and, 117 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 348, 381n100 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 105, 276–­77, 296–­98, 399n160 Aquinas, Thomas, 136 Arab world, 138n135 Arato, Andrew, 214, 219–­20, 425n139 Archer, Margaret, 182 Arendt, Hannah, 278–­79, 426n149 Aristotle: endoxic method and, 69–­70, 387n201; on excellence of character, 270–­7 1; on forgiveness, 278; habit and, 136, 247; humanity beyond the polis and, 276; on practical wisdom, 274, 275; on prudence, 168; publics and civil society and, 426n149 Aronson, Joshua, 261 arts and literature, 88, 96, 101, 356, 392n48 Asian Americans: creation of minority category for, 155; diversity among, 392n50; familism and, 126; internment of Japanese Americans and, 158; as model minority, 67, 107–­8, 398n141; passing into whiteness and, 156; pogroms against, 158; preferences in dating and marriage market and, 261, 404n233; proximity to whiteness and, 88, 392nn49–­50; Yellow Power and, 143 Augustine, 315 authenticity, 93–­97, 111–­12, 153, 275, 394n75 Baber, Zaheer, 381n93 Bachelard, Gaston, 31, 75, 81 Baker, Ella, 95 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 180–­81, 270, 352 Baldwin, James: on black hatred of white institutions, 121; in field of blackness, 95; homosexuality of, 111; on jazz and blues, 121; as seminal

index analyst of whiteness, 36; on skin tone among blacks, 93; on whiteness as moral choice, 252 Banton, Michael, 44–­45, 53, 160 Barth, Fredrik, 51 Battaglia di Algeri, La (film), 164 Beach Boys, 121 Becknell, Charles, 96–­97 Bell, Daniel, 301 Bellah, Robert, 288, 421n91, 427n169 Benjamin, Walter, 112 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 93 Bentham, Jeremy, 20 Bentley, Arthur F., 206, 389–­90n10 Benzecri, Jean-­Paul, 394n76 Bernstein, Richard J., 288, 311 Berry, Chuck, 121 Bhabha, Homi, 163–­64 Bion, W. R., 222, 223 Black Power movement, 330 blacks and blackness: acting white and, 93, 96–­97; Afrocentricity and, 143; appropriation of Jewish symbols by, 165; authentic blackness and, 93–­94, 95–­97, 153, 394n75; beliefs and subjugation among, 100; biblical narratives and, 147, 166; black agency and, 132; black bourgeoisie and, 266; black capital and, 92–­98, 111; black identity and, 330; Black is Beautiful and, 156; black metacommunication and, 218; black middle class and, 124, 271; black nativism and, 111; Black Power and, 209; black public sphere and, 221; black rage and, 121, 262, 271–­72; in black-­white binary, 106–­7; code of the street and, 263; collective-­emotional reactions to whites and, 117; criminalization of, 123; double consciousness and, 203, 241–­42; employers’ mistrust of, 123; ethnogenesis of African Americans and, 155; exclusion from fields and, 145; field of blackness and, 90–­98, 111, 140, 142, 153, 395n88; in film and literature, 356; Gemeinschaft among, 122; ghetto and, 303–­4, 317; greeting sequences and, 202–­3; hairstyles and, 94, 394n75; hustling techniques of, 247–­48; minstrel shows and blackface and, 95, 98, 119; music and, 121; “nigger moments” and, 197–­98, 298; in 1960s Chicago, 272–­73; poverty and, 356; practical wisdom among, 274–­75, 441nn170–­7 1; preferences in dating and marriage market and, 261, 404n233; as problem minority, 398n141; psychic effects of racism and, 259–­60; race loyalty and, 394n77; Sambo figure and, 95, 98, 119; sexualized black body and, 118, 119–­20; skin tone and, 93–­94, 146; striving toward whiteness and, 95, 394n79; West Indians and African Americans and, 97–­ 98; whiteness as constructed against, 251 Blalock, Hubert, 107 Blau, Peter, 340–­41

index Blauner, Bob, 212, 379n74 Bloch, Ernst, 289 Bloch, Marc, 87 Blumer, Herbert, 9, 114, 196, 242–­43, 363n6 Bobo, Lawrence, 196, 243 bodily aesthetics, 249 bodily cognition, 246–­47, 436n47 bodily emotion, 248, 260 bodily morality, 247–­48 Boltanski, Luc, 9, 12, 132, 171, 279 Bonacich, Edna, 212, 379n74 Bonilla-­Silva, Eduardo, 57, 58, 60–­61, 295, 363n6 Bougle, Celestin, 106 Bourdieu, Pierre, and Bourdieuian thought: on abstract universalism, 380–­81n92; Algerian studies of, 82, 149, 241; apparatus versus field and, 291; in authors’ argument, 13–­14, 16, 334; on bodily emotion of the dominated, 260; characterization of racial actors and, 133; class and, 82, 341, 390n21; classification struggles and, 159–­60, 172; on classification systems, 324–­ 25; on collusio in racial struggle, 132; consecration and, 86; conservation strategies and, 172; on constructing a field, 176–­77; correspondence analysis and, 394n76; on crisis as conjuncture, 231, 432–­33n224; definition of fields and, 84–­85; definition of objects of inquiry and, 51; on dehistoricization, 353; description and explanation and, 357; dissemination of work of, 7; on division of scientific labor, 3–­4; doubt and, 72; Durkheimian tradition and, 9; economism of, 426n147, 432–­33n224; on emotions as objects of inquiry, 114, 399n168; epistemic races and, 89; faulty approach to cultural analysis and, 101–­2; on field of power, 91, 216–­17, 423n116, 425n146; on fields as spaces of forces, 151–­52; field-­theoretic approach and, 81–­82, 98, 210; gender and, 82, 341; on gratifications within structure of inequality, 17; habitus and, 139–­41, 181, 235, 239–­41, 243–­44, 246–­47, 251, 257–­58, 289, 313–­14, 437n78; heteronomous and auton­ omous principles and, 154; on historical so­ ciology, 65; illusio and, 23, 142; influences on, 12, 81, 101, 149, 410n93; institutionalism and, 206; institutional-­level change and, 321; on interactional analysis, 189, 202, 203; interactional inquiry and, 205; internalized oppression and, 256; intersectionality and, 345, 346–­47, 348, 452n17; on language and power, 426n155; law of conservation of violence and, 262; life orders and, 340; on love and friendship, 305; love as antidote to racial domination and, 126; on love of art, 370n60; mechanism-­based social science and, 227, 430n200; moral-­practical issues and, 359; neglect of projectivity and action and, 134; nonideal theorizing and, 289–­90;

459 on objectification and primary experience, 68–­69; organizations-­as-­fields and, 207; on paradoxical acts and discourses, 228; on partial revolutions in fields, 142–­43; particularity versus universality and, 358; on persistence of racial domination, 6; philosophical nature of writings of, 22; on questions in sociology, 5; race versus ethnicity and nationality and, 56; racial fields and, 385n167; racial projects and, 150; racial reconstruction and, 268, 286; racial romanticism and, 46; on radical doubt, 47; rational choice models of behavior and, 139, 141; reactions of, to criticism, 251; reflexivity and, 11–­13, 30, 32–­34, 36, 49, 74, 289, 316, 385n178; on refraction, 210–­11; rejection of networks approach by, 417n11; relational mode of thinking and, 19; on ressentiment, 161; on rites of institution, 144–­45; on scholastic privilege and epistemocentrism, 43–­44, 103, 380n84; scope of thought of, 149; on short-­circuit fallacy, 39; on social destinies, 146; societal reconstruction and, 288–­89; on society without struggle, 410–­11n107; on space of possibles, 40; on state’s power to make and unmake groups, 160; structural histories of organizations and, 455n73; structure versus interaction and, 190, 192, 319, 416–­17n9, 417n18; on subversion strategies, 164; on symbolic violence, 235, 255; on temporal and spiritual power, 393n63; on total domination, 153; universalizing theory of, 21 Bourgois, Philippe, 247–­48 Branch, Taylor, 386n184 Brazil, 60, 66 breaching experiments, 200–­201, 253. See also ethnomethodology; Garfinkel, Harold Briggs, Jean, 73 Brown, John, 126, 157, 272 Brubaker, Rogers: on analytical groupism, 42–­43, 55; on ethnicity, 55, 144, 381n93; on groups, 54, 156, 160; overreach by, 57; race versus ethnicity and, 384n143; on racial categorization, 243; universalizing approach of, 61 Burgess, Ernest: Saul Alinsky and, 328; historical accounts of sociological race studies and, 379n74; lack of systematic theory of race and, 2; professionalization and, 288; psychology of racial prejudice and, 277; racial interaction and, 195 Burke, Kenneth, 191 Burt, Ronald, 429n188 Butler, Judith, 314 Caillois, Roger, 106 Calhoun, Craig, 218–­19 capital: authority versus authenticity as, 153; black, 92–­98; capitalist dominants versus cultural

460 capital (cont.) dominants and, 216; consecration and, 87; conversion of one type to another, 92; cultural, 85–­86, 91–­93, 108, 393nn63–­64, 399n160; distribution of, in racial field, 89, 91; economic and political, 91–­92, 94–­98; genesis of capitalism and, 58; human and social, 86; linguistic, 217; racial, 87–­88, 108–­13, 162–­63, 174–­76; racial fields and, 85, 90; as social relation, 79, 89; structure of distribution of, 189; symbolic, 86–­ 87, 392n46; time required to acquire, 86 Carmichael, Stokely, 209 Carter, Prudence, 93, 393n64 Cartesian thought. See Descartes, René, and Cartesian thought Cassirer, Ernst, 80–­81 caste system, 106 Cayton, Horace: Black Metropolis as masterwork and, 72, 195; on blue-­vein organizations, 146; comparisons drawn by, 419n45; empirical studies of race and, 2; ethnography and primary experience and, 70; on skin tone among blacks, 93; sociological race studies and, 379n74; on visibility of whiteness, 35 census. See US Bureau of the Census Chappelle, Dave, 253 Charles, Ray, 121 Chavez, Cesar, 273, 328, 329 Chicago School: declining resonance of habitus and, 238–­39; Du Bois and, 13; ecological context and, 81; emergence and evolution of, 32; emphasis on human needs and, 287–­88; ethnographic tradition and, 194–­96; foundations of, 358–­59; habit and, 138; influence of, 197; institutionalism and, 206; interstitial-­level change and, 326–­27; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1–­2; mutual dependence of groups and, 100; pragmatism and, 9, 188; psychology of racial prejudice and, 277; qualitative sociology and, 354; sequences of action and, 232; small-­ scale interactions and, 198; sociological race studies and, 379n74; symbolic classification systems and, 51–­52; symbolic interactionism and, 188; urban ethnography and, 71 China, societal taxonomies in, 66 Christianity, 238, 305, 327–­28 Cicero, 19 Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, 322 Civil Rights Movement: color blindness and, 292; conservation strategies during, 157; versus depoliticization of subjugated communities, 263; field of publicity and, 231; focus of historical accounts of, 386n184; halfway houses of, 226, 430n196; hearts and minds in, 264; infrastructure of, 226; interstitial-­level change and, 329; as morality play, 229; multiple discourses of,

index 226; national support for, 231; new techniques of resistance in, 228; nonviolence in, 231; passionate deliberation in, 272; Philadelphia, Mississippi, murders and, 413n157; publics and contentious politics and, 220, 224; as racial project, 151; subversion strategies during, 157; urban uprisings during, 158; use of symbols in, 159, 162; women in, 348 civil society, 214, 218–­19, 425n139, 426n149, 427n168 Clark, William, 113 class and poverty: addiction and, 262–­63; apathy and, 273; black inner city and, 356; black middle class and, 271; blaming the victim and, 264; Bourdieu on, 82; bourgeois habitus and, 251; caste and class school and, 156, 397–­98n133; causal primacy of economics and, 211–­12; class-­based affirmative action and, 324; class character of scholastic reasoning and, 30–­31, 372–­73n10; class reductionism and, 424n123; culture-­of-­poverty debates and, 264–­66, 269, 304, 396–­97n106; depoliticization of subjugated group and, 263–­64; dispositional patterns and, 407–­8nn50–­51; economic determinism and, 212; effects of, on family life, 262; exclusion from fields and, 145; fashion and, 213; financial exploitation and, 303–­4; funding sources for poverty research and, 374–­75n38; habitus and, 251, 257; intersectionality and, 347, 452nn16–­17; limited explanatory power of, 265; qualitative and quantitative study of, 355–­56; race and, 356; race and union organizing and, 212; racism as vehicle for exploitation and, 424n125; real classes and, 89; reification of, 453n41; research tradition on, 304, 340–­41; “white trash” and, 392n41 classification struggles, 159–­66, 172, 325, 337, 427n171. See also racial classification Cleaver, Eldridge, 111 Clifford, James, 30, 111 Cloward, Richard, 318 cognitive processes: bodily dispositions and, 248, 280; categorization and, 434n22; cognitive approaches to race scholarship and, 54; cognitive as realm of social thought and, 44; cognitive turn in race studies and, 242, 245, 338; distrust and, 123; emotions and, 271; evaluative structures and, 212, 325; perplexity and, 25; psychoanalytic versus cognitive forms of psychology and, 237, 243, 435n29; racial habitus and, 235, 237, 243, 246, 268, 315; relational versus cognitive mechanisms and, 227–­28; schematization of racial experience and, 136 Cohen, Jean, 214, 219–­20, 425n139 Coleman, James, 429n188 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20 collective action. See social movements

index collective-­emotional realm: in authors’ argument, 336; belonging and, 122; bipolar organization of, 119–­20; Civil Rights Movement and, 162, 226; collective catharsis and, 113; collective emotions-­takings and, 159; conservation and subversion strategies and, 159; contradictory emotions among dominated people, 121; cultural studies and, 403n228; curses as literary theme and, 124; distribution of power and, 127–­28; distrust and, 123–­24, 403n220; field of publicity and, 222; in-­group members in need and, 124–­25; institutions and, 204, 206; interactional sequences and, 192; love and familism and, 126; mapping of, 116–­17; the marvelous and, 119, 120; multiple publics and, 223–­24; music and, 121, 402n208; as promising field for race scholarship, 233; racial paranoia and, 123–­ 24; repugnance and, 122–­23; rites of institution and, 161; scope of, 114–­15; social movements and, 228, 431n209; social psychology and, versus collective psychology and, 400n171; structuring of, 117–­26; terminology for, 400n170; themes evoked in, 117–­18; in triadic relation with social structures and cultural realms, 129; white entitlement, rage, and guilt and, 120–­21 Collins, Patricia Hill, 347, 348–­49, 453n37 Collins, Randall, 161 colonialism, 59, 89, 119, 163–­64, 212, 384–­85n157 color blindness: antigroupist approaches and, 408n59; attributes of color-­blind individuals and, 308–­9; in authors’ argument, 339; blame on the dominated and, 185; blindness to racial injustice and, 301; boundary blurring and, 156; Civil Rights Movement and, 292; color-­blind racism and, 295; conservative racial commentary and, 293–­94; countermobilization against resisters of racism and, 164, 165; Dewey and, 310; Durkheim and, 308–­9; epistemology of ignorance and, 309; hidden agenda approaches and, 324; as ideal theory for ideal world, 296; implications of, 290, 294–­95; Kant and, 299–­300, 308; limitations of, 294–­95, 444n44; Marx and, 295; moral universalism and, 44, 45; multiculturalism and, 255, 299–­300; Barack Obama and, 294; origin of term, 44; versus racial democracy, 302; racial prejudice and, 292; as racial project, 150; John Rawls and, 308–­9; reconstruction and, 291–­96, 308–­9; rhetorical strategies of, 295; society without history and, 296; sociodicies and mythologies and, 105; Supreme Court decisions and, 293; veil of ignorance and, 292–­93; white privilege and, 254–­55 Columbus, Christopher, 119 Combahee River Collective, 348 Commons, John R., 206

461 community of inquiry, 48 community organizing, 328 compassion, 269, 274–­80, 299, 309 Connell, R. W., 341–­42 conversation analysis, 188, 198, 201–­3, 232, 420n79 Cooley, Charles Horton, 13, 22, 114, 206, 287–­88, 352 Cooper, Anna Julia, 347 correspondence analysis, 394n76 Cosby, Bill, 95, 96 cosmopolitanism, 276–­78, 291, 296–­301, 309–­10. See also multiculturalism and multiracialism Cox, Oliver Cromwell: on beliefs and subjugation, 100; class versus race and, 424n125; on collective emotions, 224; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1; Marxist approach of, 211; objectivism and, 69; on proletarianizing a race, 96; sociological race studies and, 379n74 Crash (film), 273 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 348–­49 Cressey, Paul, 195 critical realism, 430n200 Cruse, Harold, 212 culture of poverty, 265–­66, 269, 304, 396–­97n106 cultural realm: authenticity and, 356; civic culture and, 429n189; classification struggles and, 160; collective-­emotional realm and, 125, 127; con­ flation of race and culture and, 34–­37, 43–­44, 46, 54–­55, 67, 94, 97, 117, 153–­54, 300, 336; conservation and subversion strategies and, 159; correspondence analysis and, 394n76; criticism of one’s own culture and, 381n100; cultural anthropology and, 206; cultural appropriation and, 88, 97, 253–­54, 392n48; cultural capital and, 85–­86, 91–­93, 108–­13, 162–­63, 216, 393nn63–­64, 399n160; cultural distance from the dominated and, 430n200; cultural dominants versus eco­ nomic dominants and, 216; cultural fetishes and, 118; cultural learning and, 146; cultural publics and, 219–­24, 226; cultural sociology and, 98, 104, 106, 115, 398n134; cultural structures and, 98–­99, 418n29; cultural studies and, 403n228; cultural taxation and, 208; cultural turn in race studies and, 7, 41, 51–­52, 131, 159, 228, 379n74; cultural work and, 278, 314; culture of poverty and, 265–­66, 269, 304, 396–­97n106; cultures as monolithic entities and, 300; diver­ sity management and, 320; empirical understanding of importance of, 266; ethnicity and, 62–­63, 98; fields of cultural production and, 33; habitus and, 243; imperialism and, 51–­52, 396n115; as institutional complex, 423n116; interactional sequences and, 192; intersectionality and, 347; literature and, 192; power and, 128; racial capital and, 17; racial discourses and, 99–­108; racial inequality and, 295, 373n17; reflexivity and, 72; scholastic unconscious and,

462 cultural realm (cont.) 43, 45–­46, 49; social movements and, 228–­29, 386n184, 429n188; versus social psychology, 265; social structural realm and, 18, 99, 103–­4, 113, 116, 128–­29, 161, 204, 265, 340–­42, 350–­51; symbolic dimensions of race and, 9–­10; unequally valued cultural styles and, 217–­18, 426n55; as Western idea, 396n115. See also multiculturalism and multiracialism DaCosta, Kimberly, 275–­76 Dartmouth College, 163 Denton, Nancy, 2 Descartes, René, and Cartesian thought, 12, 239, 315 determinism, 44–­45, 185, 189, 416n3 Dewey, John, and Deweyan thought: on analysis versus synthesis, 451n2; in authors’ argument, 13–­14, 334; characterization of racial actors and, 133; on class character of scholastic reasoning, 30–­31, 372–­73n10; on collaboration, 307; color blindness and, 310; Deweyan democracy and, 220, 300–­302, 305–­6, 308, 310–­12, 326, 331; on emotion, 115; on empirical inference, 4; on eventfulness of experience, 240; on experimental relation to the future, 148; on fallibilism, 48, 382n110; on forgiveness, 310; on habits, 136–­41, 244, 258, 313, 316; on indeterminate situations, 18, 25, 371n89; influence of, 194–­95; on intelligence, 269–­70; interactional theorizing and, 205; knowledge as tool for growth and, 287; on law of association, 83; on local problems of democracy, 328; on means and ends, 169–­70, 290, 305; nonideal theorizing and, 289–­90; on opening up of inquiry, 32; perplexity and, 200; political struggle and, 329; on practical judgment, 168–­69, 172; practices of education and, 247; pragmatism and, 8, 9, 12–­13, 191, 193–­94, 206; problems for inquiry and, 442n4; publics and, 217, 327; on pure experience, 193, 418n34; on racial prejudice, 277, 441n184; racial reconstruction and, 286; on reason, 44; on reflex arc concept, 245; reflexivity and, 33–­34; relational mode of thinking and, 19, 206, 352; self-­action and inter-­action and, 389–­90n10; on social life, 130; on structure and process, 180; theoretical reflection and, 7, 21, 22; totalistic, class-­centered analysis and, 210; trans-­action and, 80, 199, 389–­90n10; on truth and warranted assertibility, 48 Diaz, Junot, 124 Dikötter, Frank, 66 DiMaggio, Paul, 206 diversity training, 319–­21 Do the Right Thing (film), 273–­74, 279 Douglas, Mary: cultural systems and, 104; on danger in transitional states, 107; Durkheimian

index tradition and, 9, 131, 206, 422n100; on genesis of Jewish capital, 110; on institutional scripts, 421n92; liminality and, 275; on patterns of symbols, 106 Douglass, Frederick, 162 Drake, St. Clair: Black Metropolis as masterwork and, 72, 195; on blue-­vein organizations, 146; comparisons drawn by, 419n45; empirical studies of race and, 2; ethnography and primary experience and, 70; on skin tone among blacks, 93; sociological race studies and, 379n74; on visibility of whiteness, 35 Du Bois, W. E. B.: black agency and, 132; on John Brown, 272; causal primacy of economics and, 211; Chicago School of sociology and, 13; on class reductionism, 424n123; on conservation of races, 143; on double consciousness, 203, 241–­42; empirical studies of race and, 2; in field of blackness, 95; foundations of whiteness theory and, 36; intersectionality and, 347; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1; as light-­ skinned, 93; Marxism and, 424n123; objectivism and, 69; on poverty and race, 356; pragmatism and, 8–­9; projectivity and, 149; on psychic effects of prejudice, 259; publicity and, 217, 327, 426n151; race in sociological profession and, 359; racial romanticism and, 46; racial terminology and, 103; on reflexivity, 31, 33, 34; on shared history of strife, 142; on slaves’ role in abolition, 329; societal reform and, 288; sociological race studies and, 379n74; on two-­ness, 121; on United States as white nation, 298–­99; on visibility of whiteness, 35; on whiteness versus color, 59 Duby, Georges, 99 Duhem, Pierre, 7, 21 Duncan, Otis Dudley, 340–­41, 355, 356 Duneier, Mitchell, 71, 93, 95–­96, 195, 376n53 Durkheim, Émile, and Durkheimian tradition: on art, 246, 436n47; in authors’ argument, 13–­14, 334; background of, 9; binary nature of collective representations and, 106, 107; Bourdieu and, 101; characterization of racial actors and, 133; color blindness and, 308–­9; on crossroads situations, 18; cult of man and, 308–­9; on cults, 146; definition of objects of inquiry and, 49–­51, 382n114; emotional nature of social life and, 114; emphasis on the body and, 245–­46; epistemological breaks and, 31–­32, 34, 373n17; on habitus, 139, 238; historical sociology and, 64–­65, 385n178; as holistic thinker, 210; institutional thought and, 205–­6, 422n100; intersectionality and, 346; landmarks in cultural analysis and, 98; liminality and, 275; moral discipline and, 274; on morality, 168; on moral regulation, 325–­26; nonideal theorizing and, 289–­90; objectification and, 69; objectivity and, 199; on oratorical inspiration,

index 228; political sociology and, 219; practices of education and, 247; pragmatism and, 12, 421n92; on prenotions, 100; racial reconstruction and, 286, 288; reflexivity and, 11, 22, 30, 373n17; relational thinking and, 79–­80, 196; on religion as fiction, 54; on sacred and profane, 87, 106, 145; on social and mental structures, 43; social psychology and, 235; on source of prenotions, 74; stigma and, 196–­97; structuralism and, 32, 131; symbolic structures and, 104; theory of politics and, 427n169; theory of rights and, 144 Duster, Troy, 53, 262–­63, 383n130 Dylan, Bob, 402n208 economics. See class and poverty Edin, Kathryn, 380n90 Edles, Laura Desfor, 398n134 education and schools: affirmative action and, 449n180; cost of college education and, 304; cultural capital and, 86; lunch table segregation and, 254; sociology of race textbooks and, 352; symbolic violence and, 260, 261–­62; white/ black performance differential and, 261–­62; whites in multiracial settings and, 267–­68, 439–­40n139 Eley, Geoff, 428n176 Elias, Norbert: on agentic engagements, 180–­81; on civilizing process, 144; on concept of power, 127; figurations and, 81, 410n103; on habitus, 238 Eliot, T. S., 392n48 Ellison, Ralph: collective emotions and, 125–­26; on language and segregation, 25; on power of the word, 360; rites of Jim Crow and, 144–­45; on sociology of Harlem, 71; symbolic capital and, 87; whiteness as racial project and, 151 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 134, 395n91, 425n139 emotion. See collective-­emotional realm Engels, Friedrich, 346 ethnicity: accomplishment of, 202; Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi Jews and, 387n192; definition of, 55, 57; ethnic common sense and, 144; ethnic taxonomies and, 62; ethnogenesis and, 155; extension of authors’ theoretical agenda to, 342; in immigration restrictions, 63–­64; making of ethnic boundaries and, 56, 383n140, 384n142; model minorities and, 107–­8; optimal vantage point and, 68; performance of, 63; versus race and nationality, 55–­64; racialization of, 15, 56–­57; rifts among publics and, 223–­24; social closure and, 156 ethnography: construction of ethnographic object and, 49, 71–­72; description and explanation in, 357; institutional, 203; methodological issues in sociology and, 354; observational write-­ups in, 356–­57; primary experience and, 70–­7 1, 194–­95; reflexivity and, 37–­38, 388n211; small-­scale in-

463 teractions and, 198; as underdeveloped in study of race, 232–­33. See also ethnomethodology ethnomethodology: bodily morality and, 247; breaching experiments and, 200–­201; conservation analysis and, 188; institutions and, 206; interactional subtleties of racial order and, 202; linguistically mediated problem solving and, 201; methods of, 199–­200; as new kind of study of race, 232; philosophic sources of, 188, 416n8; pragmatism and, 170, 188, 198–­99, 388n206; sequences of action and, 232. See also ethnography eugenics, 67 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 445n71 Fairbairn, Ronald, 400n179 Fair Housing Act, 322 family, 214 Fanon, Frantz: on blacks striving toward whiteness, 95; on collective catharsis, 113; on collective-­emotional themes, 117; on communal effects of racial domination, 189; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1; particularity versus universality and, 358; projectivity and, 147; on psychic effects of racism, 259–­60; on white beliefs about blacks’ sexuality, 252; on white guilt, 121; on whites and black music, 121 Farrakhan, Louis, 111, 123–­24 Fauconnet, Paul, 205 Faulkner, William, 122, 124 Favor, J. Martin, 93 Feagin, Joe, 408n65 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 150 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 430n196 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 202 Ferguson, Adam, 426n149 FHA (Federal Housing Administration). See Federal Housing Administration (FHA) fields: in authors’ argument, 335–­36; autonomy of, 214, 432–­33n224; bipolar structure of, 88, 106–­8; of blackness, 90–­98, 111, 140, 142, 153, 395n88; boundaries between races and, 155–­56, 176, 415n199; capital and, 85–­88; conservation and subversion strategies in, 152; construction of, 176–­77; conversion of, in social movements, 230–­31; definition of, 84–­85, 154; ethnicity and, 342; in ethnographic tradition, 195–­96; exchange of racial capital in, 162–­63; external and internal hierarchization and, 162, 163; field of whiteness and, 250–­51; habitus and, 256–­57, 314; horizontal and vertical applications and, 90, 94; illusio and, 142–­46; of Indianness, 111–­12; intersectionality and, 347, 350; linguistic codes and, 413n157; location in field probability of success and, 158; metrics of valuation in, 110; multiple and overlapping, 408n51; museums

464 fields (cont.) and the structuring of, 112–­13; organizations-­as-­ fields and, 186, 206–­7; of power, 85, 91–­92, 216–­ 17, 423n116, 425n146; of protest, 230, 432n223; of publicity, 215, 217, 221–­22; race as situated in, 83–­84; racial actor as racial field and, 172; racial collusio and, 142, 143, 251; racial groups-­as-­fields and, 109, 111, 140, 142, 153, 154, 399n148; racial pride and, 143, 408n59; racial propensity and, 142–­46; rational action theory and, 244–­45; refraction and, 211, 212–­13; versus reified group identity, 300; rites of institution into, 144, 145–­ 46; rules of, 167; sacredness and, 392n46; short-­ circuit fallacy and, 211; as spaces of forces and struggles, 130, 151–­52, 161; state policies’ effect on, 93; without struggle, 410–­11n107; theoretical unification and, 343; transformation of, 157 Fields, Karen, 9 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 20 forgiveness, 278–­79, 310, 317, 442n190 Foucault, Michel, 160 Frankenberg, Ruth, 35 Franklin, Aretha, 402n208 Fraser, Nancy: on devalued cultural styles, 217–­18; pragmatism and, 9, 258; purpose of knowledge and, 288; on reification of group identity, 300; on strong publics, 219; on subaltern counterpublics, 221 Frazier, E. Franklin: authentic blackness and, 97; on black bourgeoisie, 266; on black middle class, 124; Chicago School and, 195; crosscurrents affecting black scholars and, 369n48; ethnography and primary experience and, 70; on nonwhites’ spiritual suffering, 85; on pathology of race prejudice, 257; sociological race studies and, 379n74 French Revolution, 428n183 Freud, Sigmund, and Freudian theory: on anti-­ Semitism, 117; archaic passional experience and, 117; bonds of identification and, 223; on civilizing process, 223; cognitive apparatus and, 435n29; cohesion of publics and, 429n185; compromise formation and, 39; dating preferences and, 261; displacement and, 262; effects of symbolic violence and, 257–­58; elitism of, 223; enduring nature of habit and, 240; Eros and, 312, 351; on fetishism, 118; habitus and, 238; influence of, 437n88; Lacanian theory and, 258; love and aggression in, 268–­69; mapping of collective emotions and, 116, 128; on moral responsibility for dreams, 436n63; on narcissism, 117, 428n182; nature of objects and, 116–­17; negation and, 430n200; object relations theory and, 400n179; in race scholarship, 236–­37; reconstruction of, 258–­59; relational psychoanalysis and, 258–­59; on social feeling, 222; in societal reconstruction,

index 268; structural model of self and, 234, 433n1; sublimation and, 269, 310–­11; on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 125; on working alliances, 222 Galois lattice analysis, 129, 336, 394n76 Galton, Francis, 67 Garfinkel, Harold: on actors’ belief in their own objectivity, 199; breaching experiments and, 200–­201, 253; concepts versus situated details and, 193; ethnomethodology and, 170, 199–­200, 388n206; gender and, 201, 342; on just-­thisness of life, 198; on norms, 171; on rites of degradation, 161; subjects and members and, 185 Garroutte, Eva Marie, 112 Garrow, David, 386n184 Garvey, Marcus, 111, 212 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 38 Geertz, Clifford, 4, 8, 104, 389n216, 397n118 gender: antidiscrimination law and, 449n168; emulation and adaptation and, 207; extension of authors’ theoretical agenda to, 341–­42; intersectionality and, 347–­50, 452nn16–­17, 453n37; intersex people and, 201; in public space, 344, 451n7; in sociological profession, 358–­59; women-­of-­color feminism and, 225, 347–­49 Gérôme, Jean-­Léon, 119, 120 Geronimo, 272 Gestalt theory, 179 Giddens, Anthony, 136, 237 Giddings, Franklin Henry, 358 Gilroy, Paul, 91, 166, 218 Glazer, Nathan, 379n74, 381n93 Goffman, Erving: conversation analysis and, 202; on discrediting events, 228; on good-­ adjustment line, 252; on interaction order, 184, 190–­91, 417n19; pragmatism and, 191; relational thinking and, 196–­97; research tradition on class and, 341; on ritual, 131; on stigma, 196–­97; symbolic interactionism and, 188; on unachievable identity standards, 261 Goldhagen, Daniel, 117 Gordon, Milton, 41 Gorski, Philip, 104–­5, 110 Gossett, Thomas, 16, 65, 144 Gould, Stephen Jay, 374–­75n38 Gouldner, Alvin, 37, 377n58 Gratz v. Bollinger, 293 Great Bath at Bursa (Gérôme), 119, 120 Greek Americans, 108 Greenblatt, Stephen, 119 Grimké sisters, 327 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (film), 145 Gutmann, Amy, 105, 292, 296 Habermas, Jürgen: fact-­value distinction and, 288; on ideal speech situation, 221; ideal theorizing

index and, 443n19; multiculturalism and, 105; normative overtones in work of, 218; publics and publicity and, 217, 219, 221, 428n172, 428n176; on reconstruction of theories, 258 habit and habitus: in authors’ argument, 338; bodily aesthetics and, 249; bodily cognition and, 246–­47; bodily emotion and, 248, 260; bodily morality and, 247–­48; Chicago School and, 138–­39; clash of racial habits and, 141–­42; class and, 251, 257, 341; compassion and, 274–­75; concept of habitus and, 238–­45; conservative influence of, 252; contingencies and, 169; cosmopolitan, 276–­78; danger of reification and, 140; declining resonance of, 238–­39; definition of, 239–­41; democratic, 307–­12; of the dominated, 255–­56; ethnicity and, 342; in ethnography, 194–­95; feel for the game and, 246, 247, 436n47; fields and, 181, 314; as focus of societal reconstruction, 268; fractured, 241–­42; ghetto habitus and, 317; habitat and, 314; of the heart, 313; historical endurance and plasticity of, 240; individual, 313–­18; individual and collective processes and, 243–­44; of intelligence, 270, 316–­17; intelligent and democratic, 269; intersectionality and, 436n59; language and, 253; mental health and, 265; multiracial, 275–­76; versus orientation toward alternate future, 133–­34; in philosophy, 136–­37; prejudice as unconscious habit and, 277; primary versus specific, 239–­40; as product of objective conditions, 437n78; psychic advantages and disadvantages of, 259; reflexivity and, 289; of righteous indignation, 272; symbolic violence and, 235, 258; white habitus and, 250–­55, 313–­14 Halbwachs, Maurice, 409n83 Hall, Stuart, 65 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 273 Hamilton, Charles, 209 Hancock, Black Hawk, 249 Handlin, Oscar, 105, 113 Hannerz, Ulf, 356 Harlan, John Marshall, 44, 293 Harlem Renaissance, 150, 221 Hartigan, John, Jr., 253 Haveman, Robert, 374–­75n38 Hayes, Sharon, 380n90 Hegel, G. W. F., and Hegelian tradition, 20, 147, 246, 351, 441n169 Heidegger, Martin, 372–­73n10, 410n93, 430n200 Hemingway, Ernest, 107 Henderson, Charles, 327 Hierocles, 276, 277, 441n181 Higham, John, 105 Highlander Folk School, 430n196 hip-­hop, NBA dress code and, 325 Hispanics. See Latinos

465 history, 64–­65, 385n178, 386n184 Hobbes, Thomas, 105, 389–­90n10 Homans, George, 17–­18, 239, 370n62, 384n144 Hook, Sidney, 9, 169, 273 hooks, bell: on collective-­emotional themes, 117; feminism and, 348; on internalized oppression, 256; on rage, 262, 267, 271–­72; on visibility of whiteness, 36 Hughes, Everett, 196, 206, 207, 298 Hume, David, 54 Hunt, Lynn, 428n183 Hurston, Zora Neale, 94, 95, 165–­66 Husserl, Edmund, 34, 149, 150, 358 Hutching, Vincent, 196 identity: black identity and, 330; reflexivity and, 38–­39; self-­objectification and, 34, 373–­74n27 illusio, 132, 142–­45, 173 imagination and future orientation, 148, 409n83 immigration and immigrants: in American national identity, 105; Asian Americans as model minority and, 67; bleaching of history and, 113; construction of whiteness and, 375–­76n49; employers’ trust of, 123; habits and, 138; from margins to center of society, 412n148; Mexican repatriation programs and, 150; movements against, 105–­6; multiracial political contention and, 330–­31; need for Gemeinschaft among, 122; opportunity hoarding and, 5; race of European immigrants and, 155; racial classification and, 52–­53, 63, 161; racial paranoia and, 124; restrictions on, 63–­64, 154–­55; symbolic categories and, 52; undocumented, 157, 214; United States as multiracial nation and, 161; West Indians and African Americans and, 97–­98 Indian Americans, 108 Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), 214 Indians. See Native Americans Institute of Juvenile Research (University of Chicago), 328 institutions and institutional complexes: artistic, 213–­14; as bundles of interactional processes, 186; civil society and, 214, 423n116; versus currents of opinion, 205, 422n95; definition of, 204, 421n89; emphasis on, in race scholarship, 232; emulation and adaptation in, 207; examples of, 210; institutional analysis and, 203–­4; institutional economics and, 206; institutionalized racism and, 186–­87, 421n91; interactions within, 204–­5, 209; interstices of, 215–­16; language of racial domination in, 214; leader-­follower dynamics in, 223; as moral phenomena, 205; pragmatism and, 206, 421–­22n93; publics and, 219; scripts of, 421n92; social movements and, 230–­32; in sociology, 205–­6; versus specific organizations, 421n91

466 integration and segregation: integration as goal and, 89; normative whiteness and, 35; opportunity hoarding and exploitation and, 157; racial proj­ects and, 150, 151; urban uprisings and, 158; vio­lent defense against racial integration and, 120 interactional analysis: in authors’ argument, 337–­ 38; case for, 188–­93, 417–­18n26; criticism of, 202, 203; within institutions, 204–­5, 209; neglect of, in race scholarship, 232–­33 interracial interactions. See interactional analysis; interracial romantic unions interracial romantic unions: breaching experiments and, 201; Eldridge Cleaver on, 111; color preferences in, 261; cultural labor and, 278; fetishism and, 118; marriage pool opportunity structures and, 404n233; in political campaign ads, 122; preferences in dating and marriage market and, 404n233; racial aversion and fetishism and, 269; racial justice and, 305; as racial project, 151; rates of, 126; whites in multiracial schools and, 268 intersectionality, 345–­50, 449n168, 452n17 interstices: agency and, 337; change at the level of, 326–­31; ethnic and racial studies and, 2; gender in, 342; interactional sequences and, 192–­93; interracial marriage and, 126; interstitial emergence and, 215–­16, 225, 232–­33, 338; publics and, 187–­88, 218–­19, 223, 341; racial action within, 184; social movements and, 187–­88, 225, 233, 304, 313, 341 Invisible Man (Ellison). See Ellison, Ralph Irish Americans, 398n141 Islam, 124 Italian Americans, 108 Jackson, John, Jr., 62–­63, 93 Jackson, Samuel L., 95 Jacobs, Ronald, 398n134 James, William: on conceptual dualisms, 418n32; on concreteness, 69; on habit, 252; influence of, 242; pragmatism and, 8, 12–­13, 193, 294, 343; projectivity and, 149; radical empiricism and, 193, 199; relational thinking and, 80 Jameson, Fredric, 165 Japan, 66 Jaspers, Karl, 358 Jay-­Z, 95, 97 jazz, 213–­14 Jefferson, Thomas, 165 Jenkins, Richard, 70 Jepperson, Ronald, 421n89 Jesus of Nazareth, 278 Jews and Jewish Americans: anti-­Semitism and, 117, 118; Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi Jews and, 387n192; blacks’ appropriation of Jewish

index symbols and, 165; Christianity and, 305; genesis of racial capital and, 110–­11; as model minority, 108; roots of projectivity and, 147; victimization and, 413n162 Jim Crow: assertion of white privilege in, 250; Civil Rights Movement and, 231; collective-­ emotional themes and, 117; conservation strategies in, 152; interpenetration of sacred and social and, 106; prejudice during, 242; rites of, 144–­45; subversion strategies and, 153; symbolic capital and, 86–­87; violence and, 158 Joas, Hans, 9, 137–­38, 229–­30, 409n83, 431n216 Johnson, Charles S., 70, 195, 369n48 Johnson, Denis, 123 Johnson-­Reed Act (1924), 63 Jordan, Michael, 107 Jordan, Winthrop, 16, 59, 65, 144 Jung, Moon-­Kie, 381n93 Kallen, Horace, 379n74 Kane, Anne, 398n134 Kant, Immanuel, and Kantian thought: categorical imperative of, 276–­77; color blindness and, 299–­300, 308; determinism versus free will and, 416n3; disembodied morality and, 247; dualism and, 12; as a founder of modern racism, 299–­300, 445n71; on free choice, 168; ideal and material realms in, 182; influence of, on Durkheim, 290; moral universalism and, 44, 45; multiculturalism/cosmopolitanism and, 299–­300; racial theory and, 59; self-­action and inter-­action and, 389–­90n10; sympathy and, 278, 442n188; transcendental will and, 185; veil of ignorance and, 293 Katz, Michael, 263 Katznelson, Ira, 150 Kefalas, Maria, 380n90 Kelley, Robin, 356 Kennedy, John F., 164 Kernberg, Otto, 400n179 Kierkegaard, Søren, 279–­80 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: Chicago movement and, 272; color blindness and, 292; co-­optation of memory of, 164–­65; as director of civic dramas, 229; discourses of Civil Rights Movement and, 226; Do the Right Thing (film) and, 273; in field of blackness, 95, 97; hearts and minds strategy of, 264; incongruence between whites’ beliefs and actions and, 162; versus Malcolm X, 107; as ordinary person, 273; on radicalism and conservatism, 353 Klein, Melanie, 400n179 Knez, Mark, 429n188 Know-­Nothing Party, 105 Ku, Agnes, 398n134 Kymlicka, Will, 300, 445n77

index Labov, William, 46 Lacan, Jacques, and Lacanian theory, 163, 258 Lamont, Michèle, 52, 102, 171, 344 language: importance of, 25; language habitus and, 253; racial explanations of events and, 166; standard English and, 108, 253; vocabularies of motive and, 170–­7 1 Lareau, Annette, 257, 437n85 Latinos: Chicanismo and, 143; collective-­emotional reactions to, 118; creation of minority category for, 155; debates over ascription and, 109; fami­ lism and, 126; from margins to center of society, 412n148; Mexican dispossession of land and, 158; Mexican repatriation programs and, 150, 158; Mexicans as nonwhite race and, 154–­ 55; passing into whiteness and, 156; as problem minority, 398n141; proximity to whiteness and, 88, 392n49; skin tone and, 155; street gangs and, 146, 409n79 Lawrence, Jacob, 272 Lee, Nikki, 175, 249 Lee, Spike, 273 legitimation: of domination, 256; funding sources and, 374–­75n38; insider doctrine and, 38, 377n64; mechanisms of, 34; normative whiteness and, 35; racial romanticism and, 46; self-­effacing self-­disclosure and, 37 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von, 140 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude: confessionalism and, 73, 389n216; cultural systems and, 104; Durkheimian tradition and, 9, 131; unreflexive reasoning and, 37 Lewin, Kurt, 25, 81 Lewis, Meriwether, 113 Lewis, Oscar, 41–­42, 102, 103, 273 Liebow, Elliot, 70, 262, 377n62 Lincoln, Abraham, 113, 296 Lind, Michael, 107–­8 Locke, Alain: historical accounts of sociological race studies and, 379n74; historical explanation for race inequalities and, 65; pragmatism and, 8–­9; publicity and, 217, 426n151; on social prac­ tices of ruling groups, 30; societal reform and, 288 Locke, John, 389–­90n10 Loewald, Hans, 311–­12 looting. See vandalism and looting love: aggression and, 268–­69; as antidote to racial domination, 126; of art, 370n60; racial healing and, 317; racial intelligence and, 278, 279–­80 Loveman, Mara, 60–­61, 384n143 Lyman, Stanford, 196 lynching, as terrorism, 189 Lynd, Robert, 288 Machiavelli, Noccolò, 426n149 Macnamara, Jack, 273

467 Mailer, Norman, 146 Malcolm X: on black man with a Ph.D., 271; dis­ courses of Civil Rights Movement and, 226; Do the Right Thing (film) and, 273, 274; in field of blackness, 95, 97; versus Martin Luther King Jr., 107 Manchester School, 415n199 Mann, Michael, 215 Mannheim, Karl, 32 Marcus, George, 30 Marcus Aurelius, 276 Marshall, Alfred, 4 Marshall, Thurgood, 95, 97 Martin, John Levi, 357 Martin, Trayvon, 166 Marx, Karl, and Marxian theory: Bourdieu and, 82, 101; capital as social relation and, 79, 89; cell form of racial order and, 232; collective transformation and, 147; color blindness and, 295; Cox and, 424n123; determinism and, 350; Du Bois and, 424n123; emergence and evolution of, 32; epistemological breaks and, 31; on fetishism of commodities, 118; field of power and, 91; intersectionality and, 346; life orders and, 340, 451n3; Melville and, 310; objectivism and, 69; in race scholarship, 100; real conditions of life and, 302; relational point of view and, 79; research tradition on class and, 341; ruling class and, 216; structural determinism and, 189; as universalizing theory, 21 Massey, Douglas, 2, 152 Mauss, Marcel: definition of objects of inquiry and, 50; Durkheimian tradition and, 9; on habitus, 246, 435n44; mission of sociology and, 205; on social and mental structures, 43; on techniques of the body, 246 McCall, Leslie, 55 McClintock, Anne, 118 Mead, George Herbert: critical moments of disalignment and, 314; on distance experience, 147; on emergent events, 177–­78; on exchange of blows, 172; on existence, 130–­31; on meaning as phases of the social act, 194; on memory, 409n83; on participation in public life, 306; on past and present, 136; pragmatism and, 8, 191, 193, 196, 201; projectivity and, 148; publics and publicity and, 217, 327, 426n151; on reflective intelligence, 134–­35, 183, 193–­94; relational thinking and, 80; on settlement houses, 327; on sociality of action, 169; societal reform and, 288; symbolically mediated communication and, 196; on universal neighborliness, 276 Melville, Herman, 309–­10 memory, 164–­65, 409n83 Mendelberg, Tali, 413n157 mental health, 265

468 Merton, Robert K.: analytical sociology and, 370n62; causal mechanisms and, 384n144; on consequences of social action, 163; empiricism and theoreticism and, 430n200; on insider doctrine, 38; on middle-­range theorizing, 227, 365n24; positivism and, 371n82; sociological race studies and, 379n74; on systems of theory, 21 Mexicans. See Latinos Meyer, John, 206 Michels, Robert, 206 Mill, John Stuart, 20, 105, 276 Mills, C. Wright: crossroads situations and, 18–­19; definition of objects of inquiry and, 51, 382n120; epistemology of ignorance and, 251, 295; on experiments in living, 309; on ideology of social pathologists, 34; pragmatism and, 9, 11, 191; on qualitative research, 354; race as ahistorical and, 65; on sociology, 234–­35; universalizing theories and, 20–­21, 371n82; on vocabularies of motive, 37, 170–­7 1, 201 Mills, Charles, 59 minstrelsy, 253–­54 Misak, Cheryl, 48 Mische, Ann, 134, 256 Mitchell, Stephen, 258–­59 Mitchell, Wesley, 206 Moby-­Dick (Melville), 309–­10 modernity: art and, 252; capitalism and, 58, 59–­60; classification struggles and, 166; emergence of global racial system and, 58–­60, 299; epistemology of, 359; European colonialism and, 15, 57–­ 58, 83; field of social classes in, 16; habitus and, 138, 241; institutional complexes of, 211, 214, 220, 423n116; intellectual class and, 372–­73n10; morality and, 238; progressive differentiation in, 81, 210, 340; projectivity and, 147; publicity and, 219; rationalism, 136, 238; rise of social science in, 31; whiteness and, 267 Moerman, Michel, 202 Mohr, John, 204 Momaday, N. Scott, 241 Montaigne, Michel de, 42 Montesquieu, 426n149 Morris, Aldon, 159, 226, 430n196 Morris, Charles, 131 Morris, Edward, 267, 439–­40n139 Morrison, Toni: black-­white binary and, 107; on color blindness, 296; curses as theme in work of, 124; in field of blackness, 95; in-­group members in need and, 125; love as antidote to racial domination and, 126; on need for home, 122; on whiteness and nonwhiteness, 37; white standards of beauty and, 261 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 41–­42, 102, 379n74, 407n46

index multiculturalism and multiracialism: attributes of multicultural individuals and, 309–­10; in authors’ argument, 339; blindness to racial injustice and, 301; citizens of the world and, 276; color blindness and, 255, 299–­300; cosmopolitanism and, 276–­77, 296–­97; exposure to racial Others and, 277; hope of, 298–­99; immigration and, 161; implications of, 290; Kant and, 299–­ 300; learning from other cultures and, 300–­301; multicultural entrepreneurs and, 175; multiracial competence and, 175, 176; multiracial habitus and, 275–­76; multiracial political contention and, 330–­31; nonideal theorizing and, 300; as normative, 298; pragmatism and, 286; versus racial democracy, 302, 307, 443n22; racial reconstruction and, 291, 296–­301, 309–­10; recognition of dominated groups and, 297; reification of cultures and, 300; respect for other cultures and, 300; sociological inflection and, 297; whites in multiracial schools and, 267–­68, 439–­40n139 Mumford, Lewis, 303 music, 121, 213–­14, 402n208 Myrdal, Gunnar: on American Creed, 132; empirical studies of race and, 2; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1; on prejudice, 242, 434n21; sociological race studies and, 379n74 Nagel, Thomas, 46 National Association of Scholars, 208 National Basketball Association, 325 National Fair Housing Alliance, 322 National Football League, 326 nationalism, 117, 150, 185, 212 nationality, 55–­64, 156, 445n77 Native Americans: Alcatraz Island occupation and, 412n148; alcoholism and, 262–­63; authenticity and, 111–­12; boarding schools and, 150, 158, 163; creation of minority category for, 155; field of Indianness and, 111–­12, 153; Iroquois roots of American governance and, 113; justness of struggle of, 272; placement of children with Anglo families and, 214; practical wisdom among, 274, 275; racial misrecognition of, 265; symbolic categories and, 52; Trail of Tears and, 158; tribal identity among, 155; US treaties with, 412n148 neoclassical economics, 169 neoliberalism, 211 Newton, Isaac, 389–­90n10 Ngai, Mae, 63, 65 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 329 Nixon, Richard, 413n157 Nussbaum, Martha, 271 Obama, Barack, 5, 94, 111, 125, 294 Obama, Michelle, 95, 97

index objectivity, actors’ belief in their own, 199 object relations theory, 116–­17, 400n179 O’Brien, Tim, 123 Ocean, Frank, 97 Ogbu, John, 41–­42 Olson, Mancur, 229 Omi, Michael: fundamental debates in race scholarship and, 60–­61; lack of systematic theory of race and, 2, 3; on race as autonomous field, 212; on racial formation, 52; on racial projects, 149–­ 51; sociological race studies and, 379n74 O’Reilly, Bill, 166 Orientalism, 119 Panic of 1837, 303 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 293, 294 Park, Robert: Saul Alinsky and, 328; ecological context and, 81; habits and, 138; institutionalism and, 206; lack of systematic theory of race and, 2; on moral order, 127, 186; professionalization and, 288; psychology of racial prejudice and, 277; racial interaction and, 195; sociological race studies and, 379n74; Booker T. Washington and, 13, 369n48 Parsons, Talcott: AGIL schema of, 205; correspondence across fields and, 345; cultural systems and, 104; declining resonance of habitus and, 239; Freudian theory and, 258; grand theorizing of, 7, 18–­21, 22; on institutions and moral phenomena, 205–­6; multiple environments of action and, 128; normativist approach to study of collective action and, 229–­30; public sphere theorizing and, 427n162; sociological race studies and, 379n74; symbolic violence and, 437n89; on theory and empirical research, 4, 5 Pascal, Blaise, 69 Patterson, Orlando: on black nativism, 111; on chordal triad of freedom, 406n16; on cultural versus social factors, 99; on intellectual neutrality, 37; on puzzle of persistence, 6, 365n19; on socioeconomic factors, 265; on whites’ torture and murder of blacks, 120 Pattillo, Mary, 35, 89 Paulle, Bowen, 248 Peirce, Charles Sanders: abduction and, 351, 454n45; community of inquiry and, 48; fallibilism and, 382n110; habit and, 136, 270; objective reality and, 48; pragmatism and, 8; semiotics and, 130, 194; theory of signs and, 180, 181; theory of truth and, 48; truth and, 48 Penner, Andrew, 369–­70n54 Peters, Russell, 175 Peterson, William, 398n141 Picasso, Pablo, 88, 392n48

469 Piven, Frances Fox, 318 Plato, 246, 289, 301–­7 Plessy v. Ferguson, 154, 293 politics: affinities and boundaries in, 431n206; claims of victimization in, 165; contentious, 425n143; determinism versus free will in debates about race and, 185, 416n3; linguistic codes in, 413n157; partisan realignment under Nixon and, 413n157 Ponce de León, Juan, 113 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 164 poverty. See class and poverty Powdermaker, Hortense, 35 Powell, Walter, 206 power: asymmetries of, in publics, 221; cultural dominants versus capitalist dominants and, 216; field of, 216–­17, 425n146; versus field of publicity, 222; multiple conceptions of, 127–­28 pragmatism: case for interactionism and, 191; causal mechanisms and, 227; classical, 198–­99; collective action and, 229; collective emotions and, 114; community of inquiry and, 48; community organizing and, 328; contextualization of experience and, 167; cultural pragmatics and, 131; declining resonance of habitus and, 238–­39; ethnomethodology and, 170, 188, 198–­99, 388n206; fallibilism and, 311; forgiveness and, 310; habit and, 136–­39, 244; ideals and, 343; inseparability of mind and body and, 245; institutionalism and, 206, 421–­22n93; interstitial-­ level change and, 326–­27; justificatory accounts and, 171; knowledge as tool and, 287–­88; linguistically mediated problem solving and, 201; objectification and primary experience and, 69; optimism of, 265; practical consequences and, 294; practical evaluation and, 168–­69; projectivity and, 148–­49, 150; publicity and, 217; qualitative sociology and, 354; racial cultures and, 307; racial democracy and, 310–­11; reflexivity and, 30–­31; relationality and, 80, 181; return to experience and, 193–­95; social psychology and versus collective psychology and, 235, 265; symbolic interactionism and, 196; theoreticism versus empiricism and, 200; theory of social movements and, 230; theory of truth and, 48; tragic sense of life and, 273; urban ethnography and, 71 prejudice: color blindness and, 292; definition of, 242, 434nn21–­22; as individual versus collective process, 242–­43; pathology of, 257; psychic effects of, 259–­60; in race scholarship, 242; racial domination beyond, 317; as sense of group position, 242–­43; as unconscious habit, 277 prudence: in philosophy, 168; practices as price of entry to racial world and, 172; situationally based judgment and, 167

470 publics and publicity: aggression and cruelty among, 224, 429n189; in authors’ argument, 338; Civil Rights Movement and, 226, 231; cohesion of, 429n185; collective emotions and, 222, 223–­24; definition of publics and, 218; exclusion and inclusion and, 222; field of blackness and, 217; field of power and, 216, 222; field of publicity and, 221–­22; functions of publics and, 218; interstitial-­level change and, 327; as interstitial phenomena, 187; leader-­follower dynamics in, 223, 428n183; neglect of, in race scholarship, 233; overlapping of publics and, 220–­21; power asymmetries and, 221; pragmatism and, 217; publics versus civil society and, 218–­19, 426n149; racial reconstruction and, 327; rifts among, based on ethnicity and race, 223–­24; social movements and, 215–­16, 224–­25, 425n143; subaltern counterpublics and, 221; tension and solidarity in, 223; types of publics and, 219–­21, 426–­27n161, 428n172; unequally valued cultural styles and, 217–­18, 426n55; working alliances and, 222, 223, 429n185 Putnam, Hilary, 288 Quijano, Anibal, 57 Quine, W. V. O., 7, 21 race: as ahistorical, 65; ancestry and, 51, 52–­53; coded language of, 413n157; colonization and, 89; conservation of races and, 143–­44; construction of, 160; corporeal knowledge and, 247; cultural traits of races versus racial fields and, 100–­101; definition of, 51, 52–­53, 154, 335; denial of racial order and, 57; emergence of idea of, 144; epistemic, 89; versus ethnicity and nationality, 55–­64; as fiction, 54, 68, 70, 143; as fixed essence, 82; fluidity of, 369–­70n54; genetics and, 53, 383n130; global systemic features of, 57; as historical invention, 386n183; illusio and, 23, 24, 142–­46; in immigration restrictions, 63–­64; intersectionality and, 453n37; in marrow of racial habitus, 237; modernity as racial formation project and, 58; new racial order and, 392n49; normative whiteness and, 35; one-­drop rule and, 154; as performance, 62–­ 63; phenotype and, 51, 52–­53; polar extremes of reasoning about, 291; as a practical accomplishment, 198–­203; process of racialization and, 54; proletarianization of, 96; racial collusio and, 142, 143, 251, 408n65; in racial fields, 83–­84, 89–­90; racial inequality and, 17; racialization of ethnicity and, 15, 56–­57; racialized discourses and, 106; racial object and, 49–­55; reification of, 89, 291, 320, 330, 355, 453n41; rifts among publics and, 223–­24; skin tone and, 88, 93–­94; social closure and, 156; in sociological profes-

index sion, 358–­59; tribes and, 68; union organizing and, 212 race scholarship: from above and below, 71; analytical groupism in, 42–­43, 55; analytics of racial action in, 135; authors’ analytic strategy and, 24–­25; black-­white binary in, 16–­17; Bourdieuian sociology and, 11; caste and class school and, 156, 397–­98n133; causalism versus voluntarism in, 158–­59; change versus permanence in, 180, 415n211; cognitivist approaches in, 54–­55, 242–­43, 245; collective habitus in, 250; complexity and, 350–­51, 353–­54, 359–­60; construction of ethnographic object and, 84; critical race theory and, 36, 380n84; crosscurrents affecting black scholars and, 369n48; culturalist versus structuralist perspectives in, 98–­105, 395–­96n106, 397n118; definition of racial object in, 49–­55; denial of racial order in, 57–­58, 60–­61; disciplinary unconscious and, 38–­43, 377n58; diversification of the academy and, 375n44; dualisms in, 152; Durkheimian tradition and, 9–­10; elitism in, 69, 335; empirical investigations and, 2–­5, 6–­7, 364n9; fact-­value distinction in, 285–­86; as fiction, 276; field of power in, 216–­17; field of publicity in, 222; focus on racial dispositions versus racial prejudice in, 280; focus on racially privileged and, 132; focus on unhealthy rather than healthy dispositions in, 269; foils in, 41–­42; folk categories in, 160; fundamental debates within, 60–­61; global approach to, 15–­16, 58; grand theorizing in, 18–­22; history and sociology in, 61–­62, 64–­65; illusio in, 143–­44; influences on questions in, 374–­75n38; insider doctrine in, 376n56, 377n62, 377n64; institutions and institutional complexes in, 186–­87, 209–­11, 215; interactional analysis in, 188–­93, 337–­38; inter­ action order in, 184; internecine problems and, 46, 381n98, 381–­82n100; intersectionality and, 345–­50; lack of systematic theory of race and, 1–­3, 6–­8, 25–­26, 359–­60, 363n6, 364nn9–­ 10; lack of unitary conceptual language and, 6; limitations of authors’ project and, 12–­22; logocentrism in, 103, 396n114; methodological issues in, 354–­58; micro versus macro approaches and, 192, 418n29; minor debates versus substantive struggles in, 378–­79n73; moral-­practical concerns in, 358–­59; multiple environments of action and, 128–­29; new historical moment in race relations and, 5–­6; objectivity and truth in, 46–­48; observational write-­ups in, 356–­57; omissions in, 232–­33; parochialism and overspecialization in, 42–­43, 45–­46, 58, 65–­66, 74–­75, 100, 342–­44, 380n84; particularity versus universality in, 61, 62, 357–­ 58, 380–­81n92; position-­takings in, 39–­41, 159;

index pragmatism in, 8–­9, 11, 48, 139, 196; primary experience in, 68–­72, 75; problems for inquiry and, 442n4; progressive orthodoxy in, 42; projectivity in, 149–­50; psychoanalytic approaches in, 258–­59; Quine-­Duhem thesis and, 7; race and gender of scholars and, 358–­59; racial competence necessary for, 176; racial conflict versus consensus in, 132–­33; racialization of the West and, 144; racial presuppositions in, 31; rational choice theory and, 416n7; John Rawls’s writings and, 443n26; reflexivity in, 11–­12, 29, 72–­73, 315–­16, 334–­35, 373n22; revisionism in, 57–­58, 60–­61, 385n167; roots of racial order and, 212; scholastic unconscious in, 43–­46, 103, 139, 380n84; social network analysis and, 417n11; social psychology and, versus collective psychology in, 234–­37; social unconscious and, 34; sociodicies and mythologies in, 105; sociological race studies and, 379n74; space of possibles in, 40–­41, 379n74; strategic regressionism and essentialism in, 369–­70n54; substantive issues in, 352–­53; synthesis and analysis in, 333–­34; temporally and spatially situated approaches in, 66–­68; theoretical touchstones and, 8–­12; theory versus empirical research in, 3–­7, 14–­15, 55, 334, 351, 364n9; universalization of racial concepts in, 378n72; US-­centric bias in, 345; white habitus ignored in, 254–­55; whiteness studies and, 36–­37; white privilege in, 374n31; workplace isolation and, 208 racial agency. See agency racial classification: boundaries between races and, 144, 154, 155–­56, 161, 176; collective-­emotional realm and, 161; competition and cooperation among dominated groups and, 165–­66; complexity and, 273–­74; compulsion to inquire about race and, 174; cosmopolitan habitus and, 276; culture and, 161; dual work of consecration and denigration and, 325; everyday enactment of racial boundaries and, 197–­98; habitus and, 243; immigration and, 52–­53, 63, 161; interactional analysis and, 202; monoracial competence and, 175; multiracialism and, 275–­76; naturalization of categories and, 53–­54, 67–­68; origins of Rwandan racial categories and, 374n31; price of entry into racial group and, 142–­45, 172, 173–­77; racial capital and, 162–­63; racial competence and, 173–­77; racial explanations of events and, 166; racial taxonomies and, 62, 63, 65–­66; reclassification and, 161; rites of degradation and, 161; rites of institution and, 145–­46, 161; state imposition of, 160–­61, 212–­13; symbolic categories and, 51–­52; symbolic reclassification and, 324–­25. See also classification struggles racial competence: agency and, 135, 337; bodily cognition and, 246–­47; definition of, 173–­74;

471 interactional displays of, 174; monoracial, 175–­76; multiracial, 175, 358; as necessary for scholars of race, 176–­77; practical mastery and, 171–­72; smooth functioning of racial order and, 133, 199–­200. See also racial intelligence racial democracy: affirmative action and, 323; attributes of racially democratic individuals and, 310–­12; in authors’ argument, 339; as best end of racial reconstruction, 331–­32; continual evolution of, 331; Deweyan theory and, 220, 300–­301, 305–­6, 308, 310–­12, 326, 331; distributive justice and, 302–­3; fallibilistic pluralism and, 311; hidden agenda approaches and, 324; interactional-­level change and, 318–­19; local problems and, 328; means of achieving, 312–­13; persistence and, 315; publics and publicity and, 327–­28; racial reconstruction and, 291; revolutionary movements and, 328–­29; Tocqueville on democratic liberty and, 313 racial domination. See racism and racial domination racial fields. See fields racial inequality: accumulation and disaccumulation of opportunities and, 88; habitus of righteous indignation and, 272; historical explanations for, 65; intercategorical complexity and, 55; neighborhood inequality and, 66–­67; obsession with racial difference and, 67, 387n194. See also class and poverty; racism and racial domination racial intelligence: addressing challenges of racial order and, 268–­69; anger and, 269–­74; in authors’ argument, 338; citizens of the world and, 276–­77; compassion and, 274–­80; cosmopolitan habitus and, 276–­77; cultural labor and, 278; definition of, 269–­70; displayed in social movements, 272–­73; forgiveness and, 278–­79, 442n190; habits of, 270, 316–­17; love and, 278, 279–­80; multiracial habitus and, 275–­76; nonviolence versus violence and, 274; open-­mindedness of youth and, 269; practical wisdom and, 274–­75, 281; responses to oppression and, 270–­74 racial propensity, 133, 142–­44, 336–­37 racial reconstruction: the analytic versus the normative and, 285–­86; blindness to racial injustice and, 301, 304; choosing to move into, 281; color blindness and, 291–­96, 308–­9; community activism and, 328; cosmopolitanism and, 291, 296–­301, 309–­10; cultural work and, 314; distributive justice and, 302–­3; diversity training and, 319–­21; dualism of solutions and, 24; ends of, 287–­91, 305, 307–­12; extension of authors’ theoretical agenda and, 343; habit and habitus and, 23–­24, 268; hidden agenda approaches and, 323–­24; ideals and values and,

472 racial reconstruction (cont.) 286; individual and collective processes and, 291; individual-­level change and, 307–­12, 313–­18; institutional-­level change and, 321–­26; interactional-­level change and, 318–­21; interracial collaboration and, 306–­7; interstitial-­ level change and, 326–­31; knowledge as tool for, 285, 287–­88, 289; law and grace in, 305; legal approaches and, 321–­22; means of, 287–­91, 305, 312–­13, 331–­32; moral regulation and, 325–­26; multiculturalism and, 291, 296–­301, 309–­10; nonideal and ideal theorizing and, 289–­91, 301–­ 2, 323, 446n86; race traitor role and, 318–­19; racial democracy and, 291, 301–­7, 310–­12, 326–­27, 331–­32; racial healing and, 316–­17; racial justice and, 301–­2, 304–­6; symbolic reclassification and, 324–­25 racial structures: as bundles of processes, 179–­80; mutability of, 182; racial agency and, 180, 182, 185 racial taxonomies. See racial classification racism and racial domination: absolution for whites’ culpability in, 209; accusations of, 198; amnesia and, 353; antiracism and, 159, 304–­5, 314, 318–­19, 323; blindness to, 301; children’s introduction to, 408n65; colonialism and, 59, 384–­ 85n157; color-­blind racism and, 295; communal effects of, 189; competition and cooperation among dominated groups and, 165–­66; conservation strategies and, 152, 159; contradictory emotions elicited by, 121; countermobilization against resisters of, 164; discursive position-­ takings and, 159–­60; domination of historical narratives and, 113; double consciousness and, 203; economics and, 211–­12, 424n125; exacerbated by efforts to mediate, 214–­15; exploitation and, 156–­57, 411n129; fields of struggle for dominants in racial order and, 423n116; field-­theoretic approach to, 98; financial exploitation and, 303–­4; fundamental attribution error and, 110; housing policy and, 303, 322; institutionalized, 186–­87, 206, 209, 213–­14, 421n91; in interactions, 188, 191–­ 92; internalized oppression and, 255–­56, 261–­62; interracial dialogue and, 174; intersectionality and, 350; invisibility of, 303; Kant and, 299–­300, 445n71; language and, 214; longevity of, 180; love as antidote to, 126; mechanisms of legitimation and, 34–­35; in middle-­class workplace, 207–­8; model minorities and, 107–­8; neighborhood-­ based initiatives against, 328; “nigger moments” and, 197–­98, 298; observational write-­ups in the social sciences and, 356; opportunity hoarding and, 156–­57, 411n129; origins of, 59; passivity versus agency and, 132–­33; protoracism and, 384n146; proximity of races and, 277, 441n184; psychic effects of, 259–­60; race card and, 166;

index versus racial democracy, 311–­12; racial identity and pride and, 122; racial statistics and, 355–­56; racial tokens and, 208; racist publics and, 221; relational character of, 196; relative awareness of possession of capital and, 109–­10; resistance by exchange of racial capital and, 162–­63; resistance by mimicry and, 163–­64; reverse racism and, 254; rites of degradation and, 161; self-­limitation and, 257; subversion strategies and, 152, 159, 162–­64; symbolic violence and, 255–­56; thousand cuts and, 271, 298, 317; total domination and, 153; universality of, 60; use of symbols in struggle over, 162, 164–­65, 412n148; vulgarization and, 430n200; white against black violence and, 120; white privilege as defining feature of racial order and, 61 Rainwater, Lee, 356 Ramos-­Zayas, Ana, 70 Randolph, A. Philip, 93 rational choice theory, 244–­45, 416n7 Rawls, Anne, 202–­3 Rawls, John: affirmative action and, 323; color blindness and, 292–­93, 308; critiques of, 443–­ 44n34; ideal theorizing and, 289, 323, 443n19; influence of, 330; moral universalism and, 45; race scholarship and, 443n26 Ray, Raka, 432n223 Reagan, Ronald, 320, 413n157 Redding, Otis, 402n208 reflexivity: in authors’ argument, 334–­35; benefits of, 72–­73; break with the break and, 68, 71; change in individual habitus and, 314–­15; in classical generation of sociologists, 32, 373n17; as collective undertaking, 73–­74, 315–­16, 389n217; construction of racial objects and, 49; cosmopolitanism and, 309; crisis of, in academy, 372n3, 372n6; definition of objects of inquiry and, 51; disciplinary unconscious and, 38–­43, 377n58; Du Bois on, 31; Durkheim and, 11, 22; elitism and, 69; ethnography and, 388n211; extension of authors’ theoretical agenda and, 343; in Fanon’s works, 121; freedom from determination and, 289; historical and comparative analysis and, 74–­75; historical sociology and, 65, 386n182; iden­ tity and, 38–­39; importance of, 29; inequalities among Jews and, 387n192; multiculturalism and, 300, 309; objectivity and truth and, 46–­48; observational write-­ups in the social sciences and, 356; past and future and, 409n83; popularization of, 30; as process, 389n217; progressive orthodoxy and, 42; purpose of, 22–­23; racial action and, 134, 406n14; racial agency and, 183; as reflex, 74, 316; rehistoricization and, 64; relationality and, 75–­76; scholasticism and, 355, 395n88; self-­ effacing self-­disclosure and, 37; shock of being seen and, 37; social unconscious and, 34–­38;

index spheres of influence on thinking and, 373n22; as threatened perspective, 30; three-­tiered typology of, 33–­34; whiteness and, 36–­37 relationality: in authors’ argument, 334, 335–­37; Bourdieu’s concept of fields and, 23; capital as social relation and, 79, 89; clash between interaction orders and, 202–­3; in classical sociology, 79–­81; code of race talk and, 174; code-­switching and, 175, 415n203; collaboration and, 306–­7; cultural labor and, 278; differing temporal orientations and, 415n203; diversity training and, 319–­21; ethnographic tradition and, 195; interactional practices and, 185–­86, 416n5; interaction order and, 184; limits of, as means toward change, 319, 321; methods for studying, 198; multiracial competence and, 175, 176; multiracial political contention and, 330–­ 31; “nigger moments” and, 197–­98; pragmatism and, 80, 188; processes versus substance in, 79; racial reconstruction and, 318–­21; reflexivity and, 75–­76; relational inquiry and, 351–­52, 354–­ 55; versus substantialism, 75, 81, 364n12 resistance: as creative, 229; by exchange of racial capital, 162–­63; innovative techniques of, 228–­29; by mimicry, 163–­64. See also interstices; social movements Ricci v. DeStefano, 293 Rice, Condoleezza, 95, 96 Ricoeur, Paul, 73 Rieder, Jonathan, 120 riots. See urban uprisings rites of institution, 144, 145–­46 ritual process theory, 131 Roberts, John, 294 Rogin, Michael, 310 Rolling Stones, 402n208 Rorty, Richard, 149, 162, 240 Rosaldo, Renato, 113 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 105, 426n149 Russell, Bertrand, 165 Rwanda, 374n31 Ryan, Mary, 429n189 Sacks, Harvey, 201–­2, 420n79 Sahlins, Marshall, 396n115 Said, Edward, 119 Sandel, Michael, 443–­44n34 Saperstein, Aliya, 369–­70n54 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 37, 147 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 131 Sayer, Andrew, 247 Schonberg, Jeff, 247–­48 Schurz, Carl, 298, 445n66 Schutz, Alfred, 148, 179, 200 SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), 226

473 segregation. See integration and segregation Selznick, Philip, 205–­6, 207 semiotics, 130, 131, 180, 181 Seneca, 19, 442n188 September 11, 2001, attacks, 138n135 Sewell, William H., Jr., 397n124 sexuality: beliefs about nonwhites’, 252; color preferences in, 261; homosexuality and, 111, 126; white erotic habitus and, 252 Sharpton, Al, 166 Shaw, Clifford, 328 Shaw, George Bernard, 241 Shelby, Tommie, 317, 329–­30 Sheller, Mimi, 425n139 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 112, 124 Simmel, Georg, 79, 129, 213, 333 Simone, Nina, 121 Sinclair, Upton, 328 Siu, Paul, 195 Skocpol, Theda, 397n124, 432–­33n224 slavery, 152, 153, 157, 328–­29 Small, Mario, 102, 327 Smelser, Neil, 229 Smith, Adam, 372–­73n10 Smith, Christian, 42 Smith, Dorothy, 203, 345 Smith, Lillian, 261–­62 Smith, Philip, 398n134 Smith, Susan Sandra, 123 Smith, Zadie, 175, 245 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 226 social movements: in authors’ argument, 338; causal mechanisms and, 226–­27; Civil Rights Movement as paradigmatic of, 225–­26; claim making and, 187, 224, 228; classification of approaches and, 431n216; cognitive mechanisms and, 228; collective action problem and, 229; collective-­emotional mechanisms and, 228, 431n209; convergence of fields in, 230–­31; definition of, 224–­25; importance of, to race history, 225, 429–­30n195; institutional surroundings and, 230–­32; interstitial-­level change and, 328–­29; origins of, 232; overlapping publics and, 220–­21; paradoxical acts and discourses and, 228–­29; political opportunity structures and, 230; protest and political fields and, 432n223; versus publicity, 215–­16, 425n143; racial intelligence in, 272–­73; relational mechanisms and, 227–­28, 431n205; repertoire of contention and, 228–­29; resource mobilization and, 229; social performance and, 229; structure of, 226; trauma reenactment and, 256; typology of collective behavior and, 432n219. See also interstices; resistance social network analysis, 84, 116, 391n29, 415n199

474 social orders, 339–­41 social psychology: in authors’ argument, 338; versus culture, 265; inseparability of mind and body and, 245; internalized oppression and, 256; overspecialization and, 344; pragmatism and, 235, 265; racial dispositions versus racial prejudice in, 280; versus study of agency, 234; tendencies working against intelligence and, 270 social structural realm: academia and, 204; autonomy of the symbolic order and, 10, 106; black rage and, 271–­72; Bourdieu’s theoretical schema and, 216–­17; capital and, 79, 82, 89, 354; censures inherent in, 260; centrality of, in race scholarship, 98–­99, 101–­3, 222; cultural realm and, 18, 99, 103–­4, 113, 116, 128–­29, 161, 204, 265, 340–­42, 350–­51; fields related to social relations and, 91; global racial order and, 15; institutional ethnography and, 203; interactional analysis and, 188–­89, 190–­91; mapping of, 90, 417n11; multiculturalism and model for, 297; negation of social relations and, 229; nomos of social relations and, 36; inside organizations, 208, 226; poverty and, 317; publics and, 223–­24; racial organization of, 150; sentiments in, 416–­17n9; social movements and, 226–­27; social relations of production and, 81; social relations of racial domination, 59, 98, 126–­27, 383n130; social relations of racial fields and, 82, 83–­84, 90, 159, 336; social relations underlying production of racial knowledge and, 39; symbolic violence and, 256 social unconscious, 34–­38 sociology: analytical, 370n62; breaks in, 31–­32, 68, 71; causal mechanisms in social movements and, 357; cultural, 98, 104, 106, 115, 398n134; description and explanation in, 357; emotions in, 114, 115; extension of authors’ theoretical agenda and, 345; historical, 64–­65, 385n178, 386n184; individual judgment in, 169; interactionist, 188–­93; versus interdisciplinary work, 452n27; intersectionality and, 345–­50, 453n37; intersection of biography and history and, 234–­35; versus intrapsychic experience, 171; inversion of race of scholars and racial attitudes in, 377–­78n67; of knowledge, 32; mechanisms of legitimation in, 34; methodological issues in, 354–­55; mission of, 205; moral-­practical concerns in, 358–­59; multiculturalism and multiracialism and, 297; observational write-­ ups in, 356; obsession with racial difference and, 387n194; overspecialization and, 343–­45; particularity versus universality in, 357–­58; political-­deterministic theories and, 219; psychoanalytic, 259; qualitative versus quantitative, 354–­56; race and gender in profession of, 358–­59; as science of institutions, 205; sociology

index of race textbooks and, 352; universalizing theories and, 20–­21, 371n82 Somers, Margaret, 41, 64, 385n178, 427n168 South Africa, 66 Southern Conference Educational Fund, 430n196 Spivack, Gayatri, 369–­70n54 Stack, Carol, 37, 376n53 Steele, Claude, 261 Steele, Shelby, 271, 272 Steinmetz, George, 365n24 stereotypes, 261, 320 stigma, 196–­98 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 393n63 Stowe, Harriet Beecher. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) stratification orders, 24, 340, 345–­47, 451n2 Strauss, Anselm, 170, 196, 206, 354 street gangs, 146, 409n79 structural functionalism, 115 substantialism: focus on racially privileged and, 132; insidiousness of, 4; power in, 127; racial structures and, 179–­80; versus relationalism, 75, 81, 127, 364n12 Suttles, Gerald, 139 Swidler, Ann, 126, 171 symbolic interactionism, 188, 194, 196–­98, 239, 243 symbolic violence: addiction and, 267; affirmative action and, 266–­67; in authors’ argument, 338–­39; black bourgeoisie and, 266; blaming the victim and, 264; cultural and social-­ psychological, 264–­65; definition of, 250; depoliticization of subjugated group and, 263–­64; displacement onto family members and, 262; in dominant sector of racial order, 267, 270; focus on dispositions not causes and, 268; health effects of, 266–­67; impediments to growth in racial life and, 311; inner-­city, 263; lack of forgiveness and, 278; misrecognition of full humanity and, 264; negations of, 277–­78; optimism versus determinism about results of, 265–­66; Parsons’s writings and, 437n89; personal change and, 314; psychoanalytic perspective on effects of, 257–­58; rage and, 262, 267; research tradition on class and, 341; self-­destruction in reaction to, 260, 261–­62, 263; trauma reenactment and, 256 Tarrow, Sidney, 224–­25, 425n143, 431nn205–­6 Tavory, Iddo, 454n45 Taylor, Charles, 105, 167, 297, 300, 445n77 Telles, Edward, 381n93 Texas A&M, history courses at, 208 Thevenot, Laurent, 9, 12, 171 Thomas, Clarence, 95, 96 Thomas, W. I.: Chicago-­style ethnography and, 9; collective and individual disorganization and,

index 13, 287; empirical studies of race and, 2; ethnographic tradition and, 194–­95; on habits, 138; institutionalism and, 206; psychology of racial prejudice and, 277; racial interaction and, 195; societal reorganization and, 287; sociological race studies and, 379n74 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas, Thomas Thrasher, Frederic, 195 Thurman, Wallace, 93 Till, Emmett, 157 Tilly, Charles: on affinities and boundaries in politics, 431n206; case for interactionism and, 191–­92, 417–­18n26; causal mechanisms and, 226–­27, 357, 384n144, 431n209; on collective-­ emotional mechanisms, 228; on contentious politics, 425n143, 429–­30n195; critical realism and, 430n200; defense mechanisms and, 431n202; definition of social movements and, 224–­25; empirical action in social movements and, 228; on emulation and adaptation, 207, 411n129; influences on, 191; justificatory accounts and, 171; on opportunity hoarding, 5, 156; on political opportunity structure, 230; rationalist versus normativist approaches and, 229–­30; on relational mechanisms of social movements, 228, 431n205 Timmermans, Stefan, 454n45 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 219, 224, 277, 313, 328 Toulmin, Stephen, 136, 286 Travolta, John, 249 trust, 200–­201, 223, 226, 429n188, 429nn184–­85 Truth, Sojourner, 162 Turner, Nat, 113, 157 Turner, Victor, 9, 131, 275 Twain, Mark, 107 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 125 United Farm Workers of America, 329, 330 United Packinghouse Workers of America, 330–­31 University of Texas, history courses at, 208 urban uprisings, 158, 329–­30 US Bureau of the Census, 160–­61 US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 322 US Department of Justice, 322 US Supreme Court, 293, 294, 320 VA (Veterans Administration). See Veterans Administration (VA) Van Ausdale, Debra, 408n65 vandalism and looting, 273–­74 Veblen, Thorstein, 206 Veterans Administration (VA), 150 victimization, 165 Vietnam War, 123

475 violence: bodily emotion and, 248; law of conservation of, 262; toxic stress and, 248. See also symbolic violence Virgil, 281 Wacquant, Loïc: ethnography and primary experience and, 70; on export of US scholarly categories, 378n72; on institutional analysis, 203; on logic of the trial, 316, 448n151; making of ethnic boundaries and, 56; race theorization and, 363n6; race versus ethnicity and, 384n143; on racialization, 56–­57; on racial violence, 157–­ 58; on scholastic bias of academics, 103; stigma and, 197; universalizing approach of, 61 Waldinger, Roger, 2 Walker, Kara, 125 Wallace, George, 122 Walzer, Michael, 147, 302–­3 Warner, W. Lloyd, 397–­98n133 Washington, Booker T., 13, 87, 95, 327, 369n48 Waters, Mary, 97–­98, 252, 275 Weber, Max: Bourdieu and, 101; on Calvinism, 238; on communities of belonging, 122; epistemological breaks and, 31; flight from ambiguity and, 168; on genesis of modern capitalism, 58; on habitus, 139, 238; influence of, 206; on institutional complexes, 210; life orders and, 211, 340, 451n3; on monopolistic closure, 140; political sociology of domination and, 256; on progressive differentiation, 81; on social classification around race, 156; on social closure, 260; sociology of domination and, 11; on status hierarchies, 159 Wells-­Barnett, Ida B., 347 Werner, Craig, 402n208 West, Candace, 202 West, Cornel, 9, 149, 288, 307, 381–­82n100 Westbrook, Robert, 329 Wheelock, Eleazar, 163 White, Harrison: case for interactionism and, 191; correspondence across fields and, 345; field-­ theoretic approach and, 90; on institutions, 204; organizations-­as-­fields and, 206–­7; on processes-­in-­relations, 79, 179; publics and, 218, 426–­27n161; reflexivity and, 32; social networks and, 81; universalizing theories and, 371n82 White, Hayden, 30, 386n184 whites and whiteness: absolution for culpability of, 209; antiracism and, 318–­19; appropriation of cultural forms and, 97, 253–­54; Baldwin as seminal analyst of, 36; blacks striving toward, 95; in black-­white binary, 106–­7; as bourgeois, 96; capital and, 85–­88; collective-­emotional realm and, 113, 117; as constructed against blackness, 251, 260; costs of whiteness and, 120–­21; definition of white race and, 154; as dominant

476 whites and whiteness (cont.) pole in racial order, 57, 58–­59, 61; domination of historical narratives and, 113; entitlement and, 122; epistemology of ignorance and, 251–­52; expansionism of, 235, 253–­54, 278; familism and, 126; fear of crime and, 189–­90; foundations of whiteness theory and, 36; in global racial field, 83; greeting sequences and, 202–­3; historical construction of, 375–­76n49; hustling techniques of, 247–­48; immigration restrictions and, 63–­64; impediments to growth in racial life and, 311; insider doctrine and, 38; institutional distrust and, 403n220; minstrel fetishes of, 119; as moral choice, 251–­52; museums and Eurocentrism and, 213; music and, 121; new historical contexts of, 254–­55; nonwhites’ embrace of white standards of beauty and, 260–­61; normativity of, 35–­37, 251–­53, 270; obsession with racial difference and, 387n194; other racial groups’ proximity to, 88, 392nn49–­50; passing into, 156; projectivity and, 235–­36; race traitor role and, 318–­19; racial intelligence among, 270; as racial project, 151; reactions of, to criticism, 252–­53; as reference category, 89; reverse discrimination and, 319; self-­negation and foregoing of whiteness and, 267–­68, 439–­40n139; Southern and Eastern European immigrants and, 155; standard white English and, 253; transgression of racial boundaries by, 145–­46; United States as white nation and, 298–­99; urban uprisings of, 158; visibility of, to nonwhites, 35–­36; white entitlement and rage and, 120–­21; white guilt and, 120, 121; white habitus and, 250–­55, 313–­14; whiteness of whiteness scholars and, 377n64; whiteness theory and, 251; white privilege and, 61, 109–­10, 128, 189, 207, 250–­51, 253–­55, 277, 318, 374n31, 399n148; white supremacy and, 120, 150, 185, 291, 297; “white trash” and, 392n41; in women’s movement, 253–­54 Wiesel, Elie, 442n190 Wilkins, Amy, 267–­68 Williams, Hank, 121 Williams, Hosea, 272–­73

index Williams, Patricia, 93 Wilson, August, 95 Wilson, William Julius: cultural versus structural analysis and, 102–­3, 395–­96n106; on culture versus social psychology, 265; discrimination versus labor market mismatches and, 212, 424n127; empirical studies of race and, 2; on hidden agenda approaches, 323–­24; sociological race studies and, 379n74 Wimmer, Andreas, 55–­57, 59–­62, 155, 384n143 Winant, Howard: fundamental debates in race scholarship and, 60–­61; lack of systematic theory of race and, 2, 3, 6; on race as autonomous field, 212; on racial formation, 52, 58; on racial projects, 149–­51; sociological race studies and, 379n74 Winfrey, Oprah, 95 Winnicott, D. W., 400n179 Wirth, Louis, 195, 239 Wisconsin School, 341 Wolf, Eric, 4, 68 Woodward, C. Vann, 65 workplace concerns, 207–­8 Wright, Richard: Black Boy by, 248, 260; on black self-­denial, 260; on collective-­emotional themes, 117; in field of blackness, 95; on Zora Neale Hurston, 94; Native Son by, 262; on “Negro problem,” 35; Outsider by, 272; sensitive works of literature and, 248 Wu, Frank, 108, 331 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 413n162 Zimmerman, Don, 202 Zimmerman, George, 166 Znaniecki, florian: Chicago-­style ethnography and, 9; collective and individual disorganization and, 13; definition of objects of inquiry and, 51; empirical studies of race and, 2; ethnographic tradition and, 195; on habits, 138; historical accounts of sociological race studies and, 379n74; societal reorganization and, 287 Zorbaugh, Harvey, 70, 100–­101, 138–­39, 195 Zuberi, Tukufu, 355 Zucker, Lynne, 206