Understanding the Concept of Race

The Concept of Race

• Race is a contentious topic with questions surrounding identity, inequality, violence, oppression, whether race is socially constructed, and is "real".

Video Notes on the Concept of Race

• Race is a powerful marker that shapes stereotypes.
• Race is a political tool that changes to serve political and ideological purposes.
• Genetic similarity or difference is not compelling or statistically significant when defining race.
• Theories of race include racial objectivism, race as an ideological construct, and racial formations theory.
• Understanding race requires considering identity, history, new categories, and spectrums.

The Thomas Theorem

• If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, which applies to race, money, borders and adulthood.

Key point on race

• Concepts are theoretical tools to organize, simplify, and express ideas with analytic precision.
• A technical word has depth, precision, and generality in conversations.
• How race is conceptualized is a key point.

Sociological Observation

• Sociologists observe race by analyzing the observer.

Predominant Debate

• Race as an ideological construct is considered false consciousness.
• Racial objectivism suggests racial categories reflect an objective, essential aspect of human groups

Racial Objectivism

• Racial categories reflect an objective and essential aspect of human groups.
• This perspective is linked to segregationist and separatist viewpoints, as well as genocidal policies.
• Liberal social science treats race as a static category to be investigated or controlled for.
• A key idea is that one simply is one's race.

Omi & Winant’s Critique

• Critiques state nobody really belongs in boxes of "white," "black," "brown," "yellow," "red".
• Racial identity's processual and relational character, historicity and social comprehensiveness are ignored.
• There is no way to account for how people navigate incoherent racial messages and identities.

Race as an Ideological Construct

• Racial categories are false consciousness, invented to justify social domination.
• "Colourblind" view shown as equality.
• Race exists because society constantly recreates it, with ethnicity, class, and nationality being more objective bases for analysis.

Omi & Winant's Critique on race post enforcement

• The race construct has been enforced for over 500 years, becoming a fundamental principle of social organization and playing a role in individual identities.
• Omi & Winant do not side with objectivist or constructivist views.
• Racial formations is an alternative solution.

Racial Formations

• Race should be construed as a social construct constituting a fundamental organizing principle in social life, irreducible to other categories.
• Race is understood as unstable, historically contingent, and sustained/challenged by various "racial projects," like athlete protests.
• Race is neither biological nor ideological, but social.
• Omi & Winant argue to examine the process of racial formations.

Modern Racial Theory Task

• The central task is to focus on the continuing significance and changing meaning of race.

Weber's View

• Meanings can be comprehended without having actually done them.

Du Bois's Contribution

• Du Bois provided tools for both analysis and sociological understanding of race.

Key problems today

• Du Bois highlights "problems" like the experience of racial oppression, double consciousness, the veil, the color line, social progress, and sociology.
• The term "negro" appears throughout Du Bois's writing as preferred at the time.

Understanding Du Bois and "Double Consciousness"

• Double consciousness involves looking at oneself through the eyes of others and measuring one's soul by a world of contempt and pity.
• One experiences two-ness as an American and a Negro, with warring ideals in one body.
• The "double consciousness" has three issues: Black exclusion, white stereotypes, and internal conflict between African and American identities.
• There is unique power within the Black experience to merge the double self into a better and truer self.

Du Bois on the "veil"

• Du Bois stated he had "no desire to tear down that veil".
• The Negro is seen as a seventh son with second sight, but is only able to see himself through revelation of the other world.
• Du Bois realized he was different, shut out by a vast veil.
• He sees souls undressed and knows their thoughts, which they also know.

Du Bois and Dissonance

• Du Bois addresses dissonance from a contradictory situation, offering possibility for a deeper truth which is seen elsewhere in sociology such as:
• Martineau's interviews, Marx and Hegel's dialectic antagonisms, and Dorothy Smith's “bifurcated consciousness".

Standpoint Theory

• Sociology was controlled by white men which in turn reflected those views.

The overall effect

• Knowledge and ideas served to reproduce dominant ways of knowing, with sociology failing to describe significant aspects of social reality.
• Standpoints of marginalized individuals can generate illuminating insights regarding racial oppression and unpaid domestic labour

Du Bois: Recap

• Du Bois conceptualizes how race is socially constructed
• Racial formations are connected to social inequalities, prejudices, and the legacy of White Supremacy
• Du Bois addressed both black and white audiences
• Society is still based upon white supremacist systems.

Key Takeaways - Du Bois

• "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Du Bois (1903)
• The "color line" is still a problem.

Social Construct

• Race is a social construct, but in a society whose culture, economy, and laws are founded in racial oppression & slavery, it is very real in its consequences.
• The veil separates whites from seeing POC and recognizes realities of oppression; marking them as other and subjected to stigma, prejudice, alienation, and violence.
• Black Americans' "double consciousness" causes dissonance, and social & spiritual insight.

Du Bois Accurately Predicted

• "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.”

Du Bois On Social Progress & Change

• The negro problem requires systematic investigation and intelligent understanding as the world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know.
• The ultimate evil was stupidity whose cure was scientific knowledge.

Du Bois's Debate with Booker T. Washington

• There is a distinction between an adaptive conformist worldview vs. a radical sociological worldview
• Du Bois is looking for the root changes in the social structure resting on a theoretical understanding of socio-political change.

Du Bois on Social Change: 3 Key Issues

• Disenfranchisement: Blacks lack institutional means to secure property if they don't have a vote, despite gaining property / economic prosperity.
• Civic equality: there can be no long-term dignity as long as Black inferiority is essentially legislated under Jim Crow.
• Higher education needed as the Black community sorely needs college-educated teachers.

Du Bois Critique of Washington

• Du Bois' critique of Washington rests in a difference between a conflict and a functionalist response to racial oppression.

Du Bois Sociological Approach

• Direct organization against the roots of oppression is needed, where “resisting” only at the individual level makes one complicit in the harm.
• Failing to hold the white establishment accountable, the oppression remains intact and the burden is placed on ourselves and the future.

Du Bois Changing Views

• Increasingly critical of capitalism and examining interconnections in the formation of modern capitalism and racism interconnected.
• Blackness became the race of distinction under chattel slavery, where race became a tool of super-exploitation of enslaved peoples and divides the working class ideologically.

Du Bois Addresses Issues

• He addresses anger to the racial and economic structures afflicting working people.
• Capitalism cannot reform itself and systemic change must entail effort to give all men what they need.

The Challenge to Sociology

• Provides a compelling solution to the problem of "value neutrality" in sociology as the scholar cannot claim the pretence of objectivity but magnify history into a narrative of social significance and transforming data.
• Something in the past and abstract should give a connection to it for critical awareness, do something in a social situation to give greater clarity to the world.
• The critique is about the "Car Window Sociologist" - the man who seeks to understand the South by devoting a holiday trip.
• There is narrowness of imagination and systematically marginalizes him form dominant discourses of sociology.
• The Black man is darkened by a vast despair, while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and prostitutes.

Social Locations of Blacks

• Racial oppression determined the social locations of Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, not biological traits, making 'Black crime' is a sociological fallacy, being produced by social conditions not racial characteristics.
• The Black community is a heterogeneous community of social classes and diverse experiences, not a homogenous mass assumed by scholars.

Before Intersectionality

• Race and Poverty: “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardship".
• Race and Gender: Sexual objectification and disrespect of Black women
• Race and Capitalist exploitation: capitalism itself precludes equality and democracy, because it rests on the exploitation of labour
• Racial oppression experienced differently by POC: Du Bois notes a “colortocracy” in America and elsewhere