The Racialized Social System. Ali Meghji
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a detour on the way to something more important’; theorizing is an important activity, but this activity should not stop at the act of theorizing itself; it needs to be engaged in lived worlds and social realities. This approach to theorizing, to me, is a clear example of what we mean when we talk about practical social theory.
By calling social theory practical, I mean that ‘theory properly conceived should not be severed from the research work that nourishes it and which it continually guides and structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 30). Social theories are thus necessarily entangled and interactive with data, description, empirical work and research questions (see Besbris and Khan 2017; Maxwell 1996). This is not to endorse a form of empiricism, whereby social theories are nothing but descriptions of specific case studies from which the theories are unable to generalize or infer. Rather, it is to claim that social theorizing ought not to proceed at the ‘meta’ level, divorced from the social world which is being studied (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Such meta-theorizing simply ‘moves the object of sociology away from embodied life towards the ethnography of ideas’, meaning ‘that a sociologist can have a long and successful career without talking or listening sociologically to anyone beyond the seminar room or conference colloquia’ (Back 2007: 16). Rather, social theorizing ought to be concerned with conjuring up concepts which can be deployed and developed – ‘put on trial’ – in and through empirical research.
A large component of my book is dedicated to showing this fact: that critical race theory is indeed a practical social theory, and therefore offers a useful framework for thinking about the micro, meso and macro dimensions of racism across time and space. However, before I proceed to this discussion there is another important ethical issue that first requires treatment.
At the heart of my claim that CRT is indeed a theory is an issue of epistemic justice. As Patricia Hill Collins (1998) has highlighted, the very definition of ‘social theory’ itself has been produced by many academics who have no vested interest in challenging the racial status quo. However, as Collins (1998: xiii) argues, this does not simply mean that ‘elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought’. Rather, what this really shows is that elites ‘possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal’ while they ‘derogate the social theory of less powerful groups who may express contrary standpoints on the same social issues by labelling subordinate groups’ social theory as being folk wisdom, raw experience, or common sense’.22 In claiming that CRT is a social theory, therefore, we are opening up the reality that there are multiple different forms of theorizing within the academy that do not fit within the legitimated concept of ‘elite theorizing’, and indeed we are questioning the situation whereby:
racial theory seems to be absent because neither critical racial theory nor intellectuals of color fit comfortably within Western conventions. Privileged white men have long dominated social theory within European and North American intellectual production, enjoying easier access to the epistemic power granted to theorists than African Americans, whose very intellectual abilities remain suspect […] Significantly, intellectuals of color have been denied entry into the academy, with only a select few gaining access to faculty and research positions, and with even fewer obtaining positions as philosophers or social theorists.23
Claiming CRT is a social theory thus enables us to do at least two things. Firstly, it allows us to reconfigure the epistemic devaluation of work centred on ‘race’, showing how theorizing about race contributes to understandings of the social at large. Secondly, it allows us to think of how CRT is a practical social theory in the way that it theorizes ‘about the social in defense of economic and social justice’ (Collins 1998: xiv). This dynamic is captured in the racialized social system approach.
Towards the racialized social system approach
The racialized social system approach is interesting because while it is linked to both the law and education CRT scholarship, citationally it is quite sectioned off from the rest of the CRT oeuvre. Thus, the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva – pioneer of the racialized social system approach – is not mentioned in Delgado and Stefancic’s (2001) introduction to CRT, or in the central edited collections on CRT in education (Dixson and Rosseau 2006; Ladson-Billings 2003; Parker et al. 1999). This is quite surprising given that the racialized social system approach offers a host of concepts that deepen the mission of the first two CRT ‘waves’.
As articulated by Bonilla-Silva, central to the racialized social system approach is the idea that racism is a structural phenomenon which provides material and symbolic benefits to those racialized as white.24 In this regard, Bonilla-Silva shares with the first two waves of CRT scholarship a definition of racism that goes far beyond acts of individual prejudice or bigotry, and instead seeks an analysis of racial inequality as having a material base which is reproduced via processes at the micro, meso and macro levels. Bonilla-Silva (1997) argues that racism begins with racialization – the process whereby society’s ‘economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in [socially constructed] racial categories’ (Bonilla-Silva 1997: 469). This racialization of society leads to the formation of a ‘racialized social system’. Within such a racialized social system, Bonilla-Silva (1997: 469–70) clarifies:
The race placed in the superior position tends to receive greater economic remuneration and access to better occupations and/or prospects in the labor market, occupies a primary position in the political system, is granted higher social estimation (e.g., is viewed as ‘smarter’ or ‘better looking’), often has the license to draw physical (segregation) as well as social (racial etiquette) boundaries between itself and other races, and receives [...] a ‘psychological wage’.
Through this lens, the racialized social system approach gives us a threefold materialist definition of racism as involving:
1 the social construction of race,
2 the placement of racialized people into a distinctive racial hierarchy, and
3 the unequal distribution of societal resources across this racial hierarchy.
Part of the reason why this approach is so convincing is that it does not just leave us with this threefold definition, but also analyses how the realms of racialization and the unequal distribution of resources across the racial hierarchy are reproduced. To do this, the following concepts are invoked:25
First is the concept of racial interests, referring to how ‘whites […] develop a racial interest to preserve the racial status quo’.26 For instance, this may involve the sorts of realities described by Du Bois,27 where white workers sided with white capitalists rather than their Black counterparts, thus prioritizing the psychological benefit of being racialized as white.
Second is the concept of racial ideology, described as ‘the racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify […] the racial status quo’.28 For instance, in many countries, post-racial ideology – the belief that structural racism no longer exists – is used by the racially dominant to explain racial inequality away as being the result of non-racist events; this may involve ‘Black educational disadvantage [being] recast as Black students being “unacademic” […] and Black overrepresentation in the criminal justice system [being] reinterpreted as Black criminality’.29
Third is the concept of racial grammar, which refers to ‘how we see or don’t see race in social phenomena, [and] how we frame matters as racial or not race-related’.30 For instance, in the US we speak of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), but not of historically white colleges and universities (the existence of which necessitated HBCUs), and we have notions of ‘Black music’ and ‘Black TV’, but we do not have white inverses.31 Such a racial grammar, therefore, universalizes and invisibilizes whiteness in the racial structure, reproducing the situation whereby ‘Whiteness constitutes normality and acceptance without stipulating that to be White is to be normal and right.’32
Fourth is the concept of racialized emotions,