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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth.
Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.
Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.
Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Concept introduction
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Preface
Problemstellung: When the Politics and Analytics of Race Collide
Sociological reset: epistemology, methodology, theory
Specifying domination
Caveats and preview
1. Reframing Racial Domination
1. Historicize
2. Spatialize
3. Dislodge the United States
4. Forsake the logic of the trial
5. Race as denegated ethnicity
Diagonal of racialization
Excursus: the radical abdication of Afropessimism
Dialectic of salience and consequentiality
Race-making through classification struggles
2. Elementary Forms of Ethnoracial Rule
1. Categorization
2. Discrimination
3. Segregation
4. Seclusion
5. Violence
Architecture and articulations
The lure of “racial capitalism”
Classification, stratification, and the state
The mystification of “structural racism”
“Structural racism” redux: a penal illustration
Race-making as group-making
Group hysteresis, denigration, and disgrace
3. Jim Crow as Caste Terrorism
From song and dance to doxic notion to analytic concept
The rise and reign of the one-drop rule
Economic infrastructure: sharecropping and peonage
Social core: bifurcation and deference
Superstructural lock: political and judicial exclusion
The omnipresent specter of “white death”
Jim Crow as caste terrorism: virtues of conceptual clarity
4. Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh
Reframing black hyperincarceration
Four peculiar institutions
How the ghetto became more like a prison
How the prison became more like a ghetto
How prison is remaking “race” and reshaping citizenship
History, penality, and place
Coda: From Racial Domination to Racial Justice
Varieties of racial domination
Three paths to racial justice
Historicity of racial domination
Acknowledgments
References
Index of names
Index of notions
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.
The conceptual relationship between ethnicity and race.
Figure 2.
The continuum of ethnicity from ordinary to racialized.
Figure 3.
The diagonal of racialization.
Figure 4.
The dialectic of ethnoracial salience and consequentiality.
Chapter 2
Figure 5.
The checkerboard of ethnoracial violence.
Figure 6.
The conceptual architecture of racial domination.
Figure 7.
The social fabrication of groups.
Chapter 3
Figure 8.
The economy of deference and violence.
Figure 9.
The building blocks of Jim Crow as caste terrorism.
Chapter 4
Figure 10.
Black prisoners guarded by white correctional officers.
Figure 11.
The symbiosis between hyperghetto and warehouse prison.
Coda: From Racial Domination to Racial Justice
Figure 12.
The analytic space of commodification and racialization.
Figure 13.
Three paths to racial justice.
List of Table
Chapter 4
Table 1
The four “peculiar institutions” and their basis
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Concept introduction
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Preface: Bachelard,Weber, Bourdieu
Problemstellung: When the Politics and Analytics of Race Collide
Begin Reading
Coda: From Racial Domination to Racial Justice
Acknowledgments
References
Index of names
Index of notions
End User License Agreement
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Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early twenty-first century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, needed to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability – notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.
Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late nineteenth century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late twentieth century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.
Both sharply focused and wide ranging, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris. His books have been translated into 20 languages and include Urban Outcasts (2008), The Invention of the “Underclass” (2022), and Pierre Bourdieu in the City (2023), all published by Polity Press.
Racial Domination
Loïc Wacquant
polity
Copyright © Loïc Wacquant 2024
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First published in 2024 by Polity Press
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Dedication
Pour Megan, vie de ma vie
“With race theories, you can prove and disprove anything you want.”
Max Weber, second meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (1912)
PrefaceBachelard, Weber, Bourdieu
This book has two distant roots, the one personal and the other scholastic. The first is the existential and intellectual shock of landing in Chicago in 1985 and residing on the edge of the hyperghetto of Woodlawn for six years. Having to “learn race” à l’américaine to navigate its shoals day-to-day was a heart-rending and mind-bending experience.1 The second is the lecture course entitled “Elementary Forms of Racial Domination” that I have taught regularly at Berkeley since I moved there in 1994. To design this course, I had to educate myself because, although I had worked closely with William Julius Wilson, the leading sociologist of race and class in the country, I had never taken a course on “race” myself and, following a series of absurd circumstances, I had been hired at Berkeley to cover the topic. So I read widely and voraciously across epochs and continents, since it was obvious to me, given my French, universalist categories of perception and appreciation – which functioned at once as lenses and blinders, as do all cognitive constructs – that the United States was the wrong place to use as sociological template.
At the outset, I thought the question to start with was: why is it so hard to (re)think “race”? Why is the topic enwrapped in mental confusion, moral emotion – Du Bois speaks of “passion and distress” – and political vituperation, more so than any other on the anthropological horizon? Does the fact that racial inequality offends our democratic sensibility and violates our civic commitment to universal dignity, combined with the unspeakable horrors committed in its name, suffice to account for the scalding heat generated by the topic? This made me turn to the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard and his signal concept of “epistemological obstacle”: notions, beliefs, and turns of thinking that stand in the way of the production of rigorous knowledge.2 The reframings proposed in chapter 1 of the present book are so many attempts to push these obstacles out of the way and to set the parameters of a new landscape of inquiry.
The next question was: what is “race” a case of?The answer is what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence,” the imposition of “a social principle of vision and division,”3 that is, a basis for classification, in the symbolic order, that becomes realized as stratification, in the material order, and validated by that very correspondence which makes ethnoracial difference and hierarchy seem founded in the order of things. This means that we must grasp race-making as a particular case of group-making, with both generic and specific properties, derived from the fact that race is a cultural construct fashioned by history that presents itself as a natural construct stamped by biology.
This raised the issue of how to study race as symbolic violence and material encasement across epochs and continents without falsely universalizing and unthinkingly transporting everywhere the particular folk constructs and ethnoracial doxa of one society, the United States, France, Brazil, Indonesia, etc., posturing as scientific concepts. This called for taking a decidedly analytic stance which recommends breaking down a social form into its constituent elements and specifying their articulations. The methodological device tailor-made to actualize that stance is Max Weber’s ideal type. And so I turned to the latter’s essays in Wissenschaftslehre for guidance to erect my conceptual scaffoldings, to which chapter 2 is devoted.4 I also found in Weber’s theory of “status groups,” that is, collectivities marked out by public claims to honor, a solid peg on which to hang my conception of race as a denegated subtype of ethnicity.
A final query that has guided and goaded me to write this book is this: can we reconcile the analytics and the politics of the “race question”?5This is a particularly thorny matter writing in the turmoil of black mobilization in the United States and beyond in the 2020s, but that question has haunted students of ethnoracial domination for over a century, ever since W. E. B. Du Bois’s prophetic 1903 pronouncement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” How do we strike a balance between these two standpoints without the one disregarding or overwhelming the other? The path I have taken is guided by the view, decidedly unpopular in the current moment, that defends and draws on the relative autonomy of science from current affairs. It postulates that scholarship needs to be sheltered enough from the heat of battle to secure its epistemic footing, build its models, and articulate the mechanisms that produce, reproduce, or transform the realities of ethnoracial rule, and only then engage that knowledge in the civic debates and battles aimed to topple it.
This means being clear-eyed and resolute about the need to meet criteria of analytic integrity and empirical validity before worrying about the political popularity and policy repercussions of the research conducted. I take heart in the fact that it is the same Du Bois who wrote, in the conclusion to a summation of “The Study of the Negro Problems” published in 1898:
We live in a day when in spite of the brilliant accomplishments of a remarkable century, there is current much flippant criticism of scientific work; when the truth-seeker is too often pictured as devoid of human sympathy, and careless of human ideals. We are still prone in spite of all our culture to sneer at the heroism of the laboratory while we cheer the swagger of the street broil. At such a time true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science, and continue to insist that if we would solve a problem we must study it, and that there is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.6
1.
I retrace this intellectual peregrination and its prehistory in colonial New Caledonia in “Carnal Concepts in Action” (2023d).
2.
Gaston Bachelard,
La Formation de l’esprit scientifique. Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective
(1938).
3.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Espace social et pouvoir symbolique”, in
Choses dites
(1987).
4.
Max Weber,
The Methodology of the Social Sciences
(1949 [1920]). See also the book-length introduction by Julien Freund to Max Weber,
Essais sur la théorie de la science
(1992 [1965]).
5.
I raised that question way back then in Loïc Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination” (1997), which is manner of abbreviated ancestor to this book.
6.
William E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems” (1898), p. 23, my emphasis.
ProblemstellungWhen the Politics and Analytics of Race Collide
The scientific mind forbids us to have an opinion on questions that we do not understand, on questions that we do not know how to formulate clearly. Above all, one must know how to pose problems. And, whatever one might say, in scientific life, problems do not pose themselves. It is precisely this sense of the problem that is the hallmark of the true scientific mind. For a scientific mind, all knowledge is a response to a question. If there was no question, there cannot be scientific knowledge. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed.
Gaston Bachelard, La Formation de l’esprit scientifique, 1938
Race everywhere, race all the time, race über alles. Accelerating since the turn of the century, a seemingly epochal shift in academic and public debate has taken place devaluing class and valorizing race, gender, and sexuality as principles of social vision and division, analytic categories, and foundations for civic claims-making.1 Battles over the social organization of production and economic redistribution have been overshadowed, if not entirely displaced, by struggles for the recognition and promotion of embodied identities, ascribed by nature or fashioned by culture. The (re)discovery of the historical horrors and contemporary ramifications of Western colonialism, the excavation of the branching consequences of transatlantic slavery in the longue durée and the acceleration of non-Western immigration in countries of the global North have solidified this shift. The diligent denunciation of racism, deemed “institutional” or “structural,” and of its insidious effects has become de rigueur and “diversity” is now celebrated and promoted, not only by universities, but also by the media, corporations, governments, transnational organizations, politicians, and citizens’ associations, creating a vibrant market for a new cadre of diversity consultants.2 The proliferation of legislation, conventions, and administrative apparatuses entrusted with detecting and fighting ethnoracial discrimination in the European Union and, a contrario, the growing electoral appeal of racialized populism across the continent all attest to the burning urgency of the question.3 But how are we to make sense of the protean, slippery, yet seemingly self-evident reality of “race” that claims such priority in academic attention and civic energy?
Sociological reset: epistemology, methodology, theory
The present book takes heed of these trends and troubles and seeks to assemble the building blocks of a neo-Bourdieusian theory of racial domination as a relation of symbolic violence and material encasement. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism and its derivative, the agonistic theory of group-making, to develop an analytic of race-making, that is, a parsimonious set of interlinked categories designed to help us parse the “race question.” In a nutshell, it pours cold analytical water onto a hot topic in the hope that we can thus reformulate it on paper so as to better advance toward its resolution in historical reality.4
This approach stems from the observation that, to a degree unmatched in other domains of social inquiry, the politics of race gravely skew the analytics of race. Consider the mandate to denounce the phenomenon under scrutiny in the terms of the current political debate (and the more vitriolic the denunciation, the better);5 the propensity to drown it in an endless flow of moral emotions; the near-exclusive focus on groups mobilized in the national political and academic fields (to the neglect of other categories that remain invisible); the exportation of US-based categories and problematics around the globe regardless of the configuration of racial division in the receiving country; the race to discover race where others failed to detect it, leading to endless historical regress (from the modern era to feudalism to antiquity) and relentless geographical annexation (of countries where ethnoracial divides are blurred or faint); the urge to celebrate subordinate categories (their agency, creativity, and resistance), or the common presumption that members of racialized populations are endowed with a special sociological perspicuity and even unique insights into the foundations of racial inequality (as opposed to its phenomenology).6 To be sure, some of these postulations, turns of thinking, and civic commitments can energize research and serve the requirements of creative social inquiry as well as public engagement.7 But, all too often, they adulterate “this sense of the problem” that Gaston Bachelard saw as “the hallmark of the true scientific mind,” and by crimping social inquiry they risk curtailing the historical possibilities for transforming the realities of “race” on the ground.
This book rests on the conviction that, to parse ethnoracial domination, we need an infusion of epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, historical depth, and geographical breadth more than we need yet more excited expressions of moral fervor and chaste vows to pursue racial justice, a topic to which I return in the conclusion to this volume. We need a fundamental analytical reset – a new Problemstellung that derails accepted ways of studying “race and racism” or “race and ethnicity” (in the most common designation), dissolves long-standing issues, and generates fresh questions and novel empirical insights.
To articulate this agenda, I draw on three thinkers: the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, the German legal scholar and political economist Max Weber, and the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Bachelard’s tow, I follow the precepts of historical rationalism, which holds that scientific knowledge proceeds through rupture with common sense and involves, not the discovery of ready-made “facts” waiting to be “collected” in reality, but their construction by the controlled deployment of theoretical and technical instruments.8 From Max Weber, I borrow the characterization of ethnic and status groups as collectivities rooted in “positive or negative estimations of honor,” the concept of closure referring to strategies aimed at restricting the life chances of subordinate categories, and the methodological device of the ideal type as means for “univocal communication.”9 Lastly, I draw on Bourdieu’s theory of social space and symbolic power as the institutionalized capacity to impose cognitive categories of construction of the social world and his genetic sociology of classification struggles through which agents strive to impose those categories and shape the social world accordingly.10 Let me then provide the rudiments of the epistemology, methodology, and theory that undergird my analytical endeavor.
1. Bachelard’s historical epistemology
This book is grounded in the “historical epistemology” of Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Georges Canguilhem, elaborated during the period 1928–68, based on studies in the history of the physical, astronomical, and life sciences respectively, and imported into the social sciences by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.11 This philosophy of science diverges sharply from the two epistemological traditions that have historically dominated Anglo-American social science and the continental Geisteswissenschaften, namely, positivism and hermeneutics. It asserts an unshakeable faith in the creative powers of reason and in scientific progress through rupture and discontinuity, what Bachelard calls surrationalisme.12
Bachelard’s revolutionary approach to knowledge formation starts from the premise that epistemology must be grounded in the history of scientific practices and not in a priori principles. It must familiarize itself with work in the laboratory to grasp science as the concrete mating of thought and experiment, reason and reality, concept and percept, which varies with each discipline. This work is collective; it is the task of a community of inquirers and it requires what Bachelard calls “the union of the laborers of proof.” Anticipating many of the ideas later popularized by Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms,13 historical epistemology conceives truth as “error rectified” in an endless effort to dissolve the prenotions born of ordinary and scholarly common sense. It proposes that science advances, not through the encyclopedic accumulation of facts, but through discontinuities by constantly questioning its own foundations to foster the emancipation of the mind from previous scientific conceptions. Equally distant from theoretical formalism and from empiricist operationalism, idealism and realism, it teaches that facts are necessarily suffused with theory, that laws are but “momentarily stabilized hypotheses” (in the words of Canguilhem), and that rational knowledge progresses through a polemical process of collective argumentation and reciprocal control. Moreover, epistemology takes sides: it is the judge which “passes judgment on the past of knowledge and the knowledge of the past.”14
Canguilhem singles out three axioms at the center of Bachelard’s thought: “the theoretical primacy of error,” which records the fact that science never starts tabula rasa but always by pushing aside knowledge already there and gives error a positive role in the process of discovery; “the speculative depreciation of intuition” captured in Bachelard’s pithy expression, “intuitions are very serviceable: they serve to be destroyed”;15 and “the positioning of the object as the perspective of ideas,” by which Bachelard means that the vector of knowledge formation goes from the mind to the world, from the rational to the real, and not the other way around as empiricism would have it. From the first axiom the French philosopher derives his key concept of epistemological obstacle, which designates, not just the external knowledges circulating in the world, but the internal and necessary moves of the mind that stand in the way of scientific production.16 Applied to the sociology of racial domination, the notion points, first, to the ordinary racial doxa that every researcher encounters in the society she studies; second, to the racial expertise the sociologist believes she holds as an investigator of the phenomenon; and, third, to the tendency to think the social world in substantialist terms – epitomized by the duo of “race and racism” (as if race was a thing independent of racism, however defined) and by the group-oriented approach that dominates scholarship on the topic. A fourth obstacle consists in the temptation to derive the sociology of race from its politics, which negates the relative autonomy of scientific production.17
To circumvent epistemological obstacles, Bachelard recommends that we effect an epistemological rupture by breaking with common-sense notions and ready-made scholarly problematics.18 Importantly, rupture is an activity, not an inaugural act carried out once and for all at the start of research; its implementation must be embedded and continually reiterated in scientific practice itself. It follows that there is a fundamental and necessary distinction between folk notions and analytic concepts – and this applies most urgently to “race.”19 Issued out of the social world, folk notions are practical recipes that help us navigate in that world, resolve mundane issues, and satisfy ordinary needs. Not so the analytic constructs that the scientist forges for the express purpose of empirical description, hermeneutic interpretation, and causal explanation. Elaborated in and for the scientific field, tested by the community of scholars, they must obey minimal standards of semantic stability and neutrality, display logical consistency and type specificity, and prove heuristic in the formulation of theory and the conduct of research.20 So much to say that, insofar as it necessarily carries the historical unconscious of a particular society and time, the notion of “race” cannot be included in the analytical tool box of the sociology of racial domination. It enters in the latter as an object and not as an instrument of analysis.
The notion of epistemological rupture, in turn, leads to the imperative of epistemological vigilance: “The scientific mind forbids us to have an opinion on questions that we do not understand, on questions that we do not know how to formulate clearly.”21 We must constantly beware of the notions, half-conceptual, half-descriptive, that we come across in our scientific investigations; query our own concepts as to their origins, structure, and meaning; step back and question our own questions, the terms in which we formulate them, and the blind spots they imply. In short, we must be reflexive when we articulate our scientific problématique – another term introduced by Bachelard to stress the fact that scientific problems do not pose themselves but must be articulated by the scientists, plural, over and against conventional ways of thinking.22 The French philosopher thus speaks directly to the agenda of a sociology of racial domination when he writes: “All scientific culture must begin with an intellectual and emotional catharsis. Then remains the most difficult task: to put scientific culture in a state of permanent mobilization, to replace closed and static knowledge with an open and dynamic knowledge.”23
If Bachelard is right that scientific knowledge grows discontinuously, by rupture with “knowledge already there,” this requires periodically resetting the epistemic parameters of scholarly production so that new concepts, original theories, and a novel landscape of empirical objects may emerge.24 This is what I try to do in the first chapter by proposing five reframings of ethnoracial domination that, together, seek to clear the path for a conceptualization of race-making, not as an object sui generis, but as a particular case of the dynamics and dilemmas of group-making.
2. Weber’s concept of ethnicity and method of the ideal type
In an oft-mentioned but rarely dissected section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Weber fashions a provisional definition of ethnic groups as “those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or customs, or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration.”25 The symbolic element is the lynchpin of the construct and groupness varies accordingly: “This belief must be important for the propagation of group formation. Conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.” It follows that ethnic membership (or “common ground,” Gemeinsamkeit) is “a presumed identity” that “does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere.”26
Earlier in the same chapter, Weber defines “race identity” as “common inherited and inheritable traits that actually derive from common descent. Of course, race creates a ‘group’ only when it is subjectively perceived as a common trait,” which happens when physical proximity between groups is “the basis for joint (mostly political) action” or “when some common experiences of members of the same race are linked to some antagonism against members of an obviously different group.” Weber presses on: “The resulting social action is usually merely negative: those who are obviously different are avoided and despised or, conversely, viewed with superstitious awe.”27 Remarkably, then, Weberian “race” is made via the same process as ethnicity, through collective belief born from historical experience and fastened on a culturally salient trait, here a physical feature.28 This means that race is a subtype of ethnicity and that ethnicity flows from identification (by members) whereas race flows from categorization (by outsiders).
This clarification of Weber’s conception of ethnicity and race further implies that ethnicity itself may be grasped as a subtype of status group, which Weber defines as a category based on “an effective claim to social esteem in terms of positive or negative privileges.”29 The German sociologist suggests as much in this passage: “The belief in common ethnicity often delimits ‘social circles’” made up of persons brought together by “the belief in a specific ‘honor’ of their members, not shared by the outsiders, that is, the sense of ‘ethnic honor’ (a phenomenon closely related to status honor).”30 Reconceptualizing ethnicity as a particular kind of status group is fruitful because it leads us to the concepts of class and closure.
Regarding class, Weber notes that “class distinctions are linked in the most varied ways with status distinction,” but that they may be understood as the material (production, objective) and symbolic (consumption, subjective) side of group-making, respectively.31 Regarding closure (Schließung), that is, the varied strategies whereby a group effects “the monopolization of cultural and material goods and opportunities,”32 it is key to group formation. The creation of “closed relations” is pivotal to the formation of ethnoracial groups, amorphous or instituted. Notably for our model-building, it admits of gradations situated on a continuum: “Both the extent and the methods of regulation and exclusion in relation to outsiders may vary widely, so that the transition from a state of openness to one of regulation and closure is gradual.”33 We will indeed see in chapter 2 that discrimination, segregation, seclusion, and violence are so many instruments for effecting closure, extracting economic value, and tracing as well as enforcing boundaries between ethnoracial categories.
On the methodological level, I draw on Weber to deploy the notion and mode of reasoning of the ideal type (Idealtypus), the abstract mental construct that the social scientist necessarily elaborates to approach and order analytically the empirical manifold. Weber explains: “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discreet, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified mental construct (Gedankenbild). In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality … Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case, the extent to which this ideal construct approximates to or diverges from reality.”34 Weber gives as illustration the concepts of neoclassical economic theory that presume a rational actor and a free market; these do not describe actual economic conduct and institutions – they are not an anthropology – but they offer a benchmark to map and understand the deviations of reality from the pure model. They are “limiting concepts” that serve to delineate and dissect social reality, and thus provide a basis for the imputation of meaning and of adequate causation, including the formulation of counterfactuals.
The ideal type thereby fosters the wedding of theory and history. It can be modified as the research unfolds, as some properties are subtracted and others added for heuristic power, and it is a multiscalar tool: one can ascend or descend in level of abstraction and elaborate an ideal type of a component of an ideal type (as I do in chapter 4 in my analysis of the relations between the black hyperghetto and the prison archipelago in the United States). Critics of the approach have complained that the ideal type is artificial, simplifying, if not simplistic, and thus cannot capture the profuseness and multisidedness (Vielseitigkeit) of historical reality. But these are the very strengths of methodological perspectivism: “The more sharply and precisely the ideal type has been constructed, thus the more abstract and unrealistic in this sense it is, the better it is able to perform its functions in formulating terminology, classifications, and hypotheses.”35
Another common critique is that the ideal type is arbitrary relative to the essence of the phenomenon. Again, it is a strength of the method that it does not make strong ontological claims – as do many theoretical approaches, such as Marxism. For Marx, the essential truth of capitalism resides in the extraction of surplus value via wage labor for structure and the class struggle for dynamics. Weber would retort that this is nothing but an ideal type, and a very fruitful one at that. Like Monsieur Jourdain speaking in prose, social scientists who endeavor to theorize build ideal types all the time without realizing it and the latter “serve as harbor until one has learned to navigate safely in the vast sea of empirical facts.”36 We will see in chapter 3 that, because they disregard the need for methodical abstraction, historians of “Jim Crow” (a folk concept) have amassed quantities of facts without the means to capture and compare the many variants of that regime of racial domination across time and space.
3. Bourdieu’s theory of social space and symbolic power
Bourdieu’s theory of social space and symbolic power may be characterized as genetic structuralism insofar as it fastens on the twofold process whereby history becomes sedimented in socialized organisms as cognitive structures (systems of dispositions) and objectified in the form of social structures (systems of positions). Retracing this double genesis allows the sociologist to illumine the resulting dialectic between dispositions and positions, habitus and social space (or fields), from which practice springs. This dialectic spans the gamut from full agreement – leading to social acquiescence and reproduction – to complete discordance – leading to social contestation and transformation.37 Bourdieu’s theory, in turn, rests on a social ontology that is radically historicist in the sense that there is no ultimate foundation to this dialectic, no overriding causal factor and directionality to history, no invariant other than the unremitting struggles for social recognition and thence position characteristic of the human condition.38
This applies to groups in particular, which are not given ready-made in reality but are the product of a symbolic work whereby mental constructs are turned into historical realities. The core of Bourdieu’s sociology thus resides in the social alchemy of the realization of categories in things and bodies: “Nation, ‘race’ or ‘identity’, in the current phrase, are inscribed in things – in the form of objective structures, de facto segregation, economic, spatial, etc. – and in bodies, in the form of tastes and distaste, sympathies and antipathies, attraction and repulsion that are often said to be visceral.”39 Resolving the mystery of group-making entails two analytical moves. First, we must situate agents in social space, that is, the multidimensional distribution of capitals (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, for the main species) that anchor objective positions and constraints bearing on actions and representations. Second, we must heed what Bourdieu calls the “semantic elasticity of the social world,” the fact that it is the object of rival perceptions and thus “can be uttered and constructed in different ways, according to different principles of vision and division – for instance, economic divisions or ethnic divisions.”40
This paves the way for struggles to capture and deploy symbolic power defined as the power to conserve or to transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories of perception of that world. These struggles can be waged individually (as with gossip and insult in everyday life) or collectively by symbolic entrepreneurs (such as unions, parties, and social movements) vying to make their vision of the world come true. At stake in these battles is “the monopoly over the legitimate representation of the social world, this classification struggle that is a dimension of all manner of struggles between classes, age classes, sexual classes, or social classes.”41 Following this approach, race can be construed as a naturalizing principle of social vision and division that shapes subjectivity, society, and history to the degree that it has affirmed itself over and against rival principles and thus, to a minimal degree, succeeded in shaping social reality in its image.
What I call the agonistic theory of group-making is an account of the process whereby competing mental categories are “realized,” in the sense of turned into entities endowed with facticity. It tackles “the question with which all sociology should begin: that of the existence and of the mode of existence of collectives.”42 The analytic of racial domination I will develop in chapter 2 is a particular derivation of that general theory spawned by Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism as follows:
One last implication of Bourdieu’s theory concerns the special role of the state as paramount symbolic agency. For the French sociologist, the state is “the locus par excellence of the concentration and the exercise of symbolic power,” “the central bank of symbolic capital that guarantees all acts of authority.”43 It shapes the creation and conformation of social collectives insofar as it inculcates categories of perception (through the school system and the law in particular); arbitrates conflicts between rival symbolic agencies and entrepreneurs which advocate for competing principles of classification; and it validates identities through bureaucratic procedures, rites and ceremonials. A racial state is a state that does all three of these things based on ethnoracial grounds.
I rework Bourdieu’s dyad of social space and symbolic power – which constitutes the irreducible conceptual core of his thought, and not the usual triad of habitus, capital, and field44 – into the duet of classification and stratification. As a concrete manifestation of symbolic power, classification operates in the symbolic order; it organizes perception and directs patterns of thought, feeling, and action. This results in the differential accrual and accumulation of forms of capital across the different categories composing the operant classification and thus a distinctive stratification in the material order, as a slice of social space. The differential distribution of efficient resources to the classified agents, in turn, impacts their ability to preserve or overturn the existing classification, creating a recursive relationship between classification and stratification as the two central pegs of the agonistic theory of race-making as indicated above. It follows that ethnoracial classification and ethnoracial stratification are the two modalities of existence of race.45
The challenge of the sociology of racial domination is to hold together these two modalities and to identify the concrete institutions that embody and enforce each of them. Analysis of the logics of categorization must imperatively be accompanied by an analysis of the material grounding of these categories and in the correlative potency of paramount agencies of symbolic power. This is implied by Bourdieu when he writes: “If the notion of ethnicity or race – which is the most ordinary expression of the thing – exists through the perception that agents have of it, this does not mean that it is a subjective creation that could be transformed by a wave of a magic wand, by an ethical conversion determined by moral preaching of any kind.”46
This schema allows us to make two much-needed correctives to the conventional constructivist approach as applied to ethnoracial inequality which I call the fluidity thesis and the suffusion thesis. The fluidity thesis refers to the commonly expressed view that, because it is “socially constructed” and can therefore be contested, race is endowed with a “fluidity,” “inherent instability,” and even “volatility” that would make it almost evanescent and allow it to be reconfigured anew at any moment.47 In fact, as we shall see throughout this book, fluidity is historically variable, running from evanescent to hard-wired. The more racialized forms of ethnic domination are deeply entrenched by dint of the inertia of material structures embedded in social and physical space (think segregated neighborhoods) and by the hysteresis of habitus (think ethnically inflected taste and moral emotions).48 The suffusion thesis refers to the widely held presumption that if race is operative in a given social formation, it necessarily pervades all of its institutions and impacts all patterns of action, cognition, and relations. I propose to drop this presumption so that we can make the sectoral pertinence of race an empirical question. Drawing on Weber’s critique of Marx’s suffusionist view of economic causation, I suggest that we distinguish between racial phenomena, racially relevant phenomena, and racially conditioned phenomena,49 to which I would add racially indifferent phenomena.
Specifying domination
Having provided a liminary definition of “race,” the next step in a theory of ethnoracial domination is to specify what the term domination means. The notion is commonly thrown around in the social sciences but just as rarely defined. It is remarkable that, in their lucid article “What Is Racial Domination?” published under the “State of the Art” rubric of the Du Bois Review in 2009, Desmond and Emirbayer delineate race with precision but forget to explicate domination, other than to say it assumes two forms, “interpersonal and institutional racism” (with the term “racism” itself left undefined).50 To specify domination, I will draw on the work of Weber, Foucault, and Bourdieu to craft a compact analytical definition of the same.
Domination is at the core of Max Weber’s foundational tome, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1920). It anchors his sociology of politics, charisma, bureaucracy, and democracy in capitalist society. It captures his vision of the social world as organized by intersecting modes of rulership and traversed by the eternal clash of antagonistic interests and values.51 The German sociologist defines domination (Herrschaft) as “the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons.” It does not encompass all manners of exercising power or influence insofar as it always “implies a minimum of voluntary compliance.”52 Compliance may be obtained by habit, expediency, or as a result of the belief that the dominated have in the validity of the command. This belief, in turn, undergirds three types of legitimate domination: traditional (appealing to the sanctity of custom), charismatic (flowing from faith in the special powers of a leader), and legal-rational (rooted in the impersonal formalities of law and bureaucracy).53 In historical reality, any existing regime of domination will be a dynamic combination of these three pure types. Moreover, domination fosters consociation and tends to transform amorphous action into persistent association and thus stimulate the formation of social groups.54
It is useful, to better delineate Weber’s concept of domination, to compare it to his definition of “power” or might (Macht) as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.”55 Domination generates obedience while power overcomes defiance. This categorical differentiation on paper gets blurred in social reality where the two phenomena overlap or morph into each. On the one side, the subordinate may obey because her resistance has been defeated, in which case the successful exercise of power leads to the establishment of domination, legitimate or not. Conversely, to resist, the agent has to withdraw obedience, if it was hitherto granted, in which case the failure of domination leads to the exercise of power. Moreover, logically, domination obviates the exercise of power – which contradicts Weber’s contention that “domination constitutes a special case of power”56 – but power may rely on domination to achieve its end with a lower expenditure of social energy. The upshot of this disquisition is that it is difficult to maintain a clear distinction between the two concepts and the two phenomena, and that domination works by entering into the subjectivity of the dominated to bend their will, leading Weber to speak of “psychic coercion.”57
The Weberian conception of domination finds its expression in the subsequent works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, whose inquiries divulge the varied mechanisms, modalities, and outcomes of domination – even though neither provides a stable definition of the notion as they use it. Foucault, for one, never quotes Max Weber, which suggests he did not read him in depth, which is a mystery and a pity considering the overlap between their intellectual concerns: the culture–power nexus, the metamorphoses of reason, and the uniqueness of Western modernity.58 But his conception is strikingly germane to that of the German sociologist, although he consistently equivocates between domination and power. Foucault rarely stops to define his major concepts or gives multiple definitions in the course of specific historical analyses that do not always cohere. This is particularly the case with the notion of domination, which remains polygonal and elusive throughout his corpus. Let me nonetheless essay a compact characterization anchored by the concepts of discipline, biopower, and governmentality.
In his classic study of the birth of the prison, Surveiller et punir (1975), Foucault portrays disciplines as “general formulas for domination” targeting the body, noting that they imply “the formation of a relation that, in the mechanism itself, makes [the body] more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely.”59 Disciplines partake of the multiplication of apparatuses of judgment and normalization; they are “methods of domination” whereby subjectivity is formed, subjection effected, and value extracted. Their net-like spread manifests the crystallization of a new constellation Foucault calls “power-knowledge” (pouvoir-savoir), whereby the workings of power implicate the formation of a corpus of information about its targets and where that knowledge, in turn, oils the wheels of domination. According to Foucault, after the mid-eighteenth century, disciplines proliferated across institutions that each generated new domains of inquiry: schools begat pedagogy, hospitals birthed medicine, asylums fostered psychiatry, barracks fomented military strategy, workshops spawned industrial engineering, and, last but not least, the prison gave birth to criminology.60 Whereas sovereign power centers on the state and works from the top down, disciplinary power works from the bottom out as it “descends deeply into the thickness of society” and diffuses capillary-style: “The political technology of the body” partakes of a “sort of microphysics of power” that generates obedience by shaping the subject through what Foucault calls dressage – which can be translated indifferently as training or taming – and obviates the need for force.61
In the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1976), Foucault differentiates power from “a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body.”62 He elaborates the notion of “biopower” as a technique for the “subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” essential to the growth of capitalism through the “accumulation of people.” In his later writings, the French philosopher crafts the concept of “governmentality” as a vehicle for domination. Governmentality is “the conduct of conduct” or “the meeting between techniques of domination and techniques of the self.”63 In the modern West, “the techniques and procedures for directing human behavior” admit many derivations that effect “the government of children, the government of souls and consciences, the government of a household, of a state, or of oneself.”64 An implication of these analyses is that domination is productive of new subjects and objects; it is also multi-institutional, insinuating, and suffusive, a view that converges with Weber’s position that “without exception every sphere of social action is profoundly influenced by structures of domination.”65
Pierre Bourdieu was an early and avid reader of Max Weber, and he refers to the German sociologist profusely in his lecture courses at the Collège de France from 1983 to 1997. In the early 1960s, he mined Weber’s economic sociology to parse the cataclysmic social transformation of colonial Algeria. He then absorbed Weber’s theory of science and wedded it to the French tradition of historical rationalism to elaborate his sociological epistemology in Le Métier de sociologue (1968). In the 1970s, Bourdieu drew on Weber’s sociology of religion to develop his signal concept of field. He also showed in La Distinction (1979) that Weber’s opposition between class and status could be collapsed into the material and the symbolic dimensions of class. Indeed, in his lifelong efforts to develop a theory of symbolic domination, Bourdieu comes back time and again to Weber, whom he credits with suggesting the very possibility of “a materialist theory of the ‘symbolic’.”66
Bourdieu uses the term domination in a broad Weberian sense when he proposes that the phenomenon is suffusive and multifaceted; but he is chiefly concerned with one variant, namely, symbolic domination.67 Tersely put, symbolic domination arises when the dominated sees herself through the eyes of the dominant. It operates invisibly via knowledge, a process captured by the triad cognition–recognition–misrecognition. It consists in the inculcation of categories of perception and appreciation (mental structures, taxonomies, but also desires and aspirations) that lead the dominated to collaborate in her subjection because, being issued from the world, these taxonomies mirror its objective divisions and thereby make that world appear as the only possible world.68 For example, if I perceive a society objectively organized around the Malay/Chinese opposition (with institutions, networks, and neighborhoods segregated accordingly) through mental categories grounded in a series of homologous dichotomies, Malay/Chinese, high/low, inside/outside, straight/crooked, culture/ nature, honor/dishonor, etc., I am inclined to agree with the social order. I take it for granted: it becomes doxic. I cannot envision a world beyond this ethnoracial division and I spontaneously act in manifold and banal ways that reproduce it – for instance, by patronizing stores run by my co-ethnics and ostracizing members of my community who marry outside of it.69
For Bourdieu, symbolic violence is this “soft, gentle coercion,” this “censored and euphemized violence, that is misrecognizable and recognized” through which the dominated comes to act in compliance with the social order by anticipating its dictates.70 It allows the dominant to economize energy by diminishing the amount of material force needed to impose their commands and thus secure the social order. So much to say that there exists an inverse relationship between physical and symbolic violence. We will see indeed in chapter 3 how that dialectic plays out in the brutal regime of racial domination colloquially known as Jim Crow in the postbellum South of the United States.
Three further conceptual points need stressing here to grasp how Bourdieu construes the office of knowledge in domination. Against the tradition of Kantian idealism, the author of Distinction proposes, first, that cognitive categories are not a priori but historical constructs issued out of classification struggles. Indeed, social taxonomies are at once products, weapons, and stakes in the battles, waged in fields of cultural production (science, law, journalism, politics) as well as in the state, to impose symbolic templates through which people will see the social order and organize their conduct.71 Second, the French sociologist insists, again against the spiritualist bias of the Kantian tradition, that categories are not just mental constructs but, rather, that they are wired deep into the socialized organism in the form of moral emotions, visceral likes and dislikes that are beyond the grasp of consciousness,72 such that agreement with the world “transcends the alternative between constraint by forces and consent to reasons, between mechanical coercion and willful, free, deliberate submission.” Bourdieu explains: “The effect of symbolic domination (gender, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc.) is exerted, not according to the pure logic of a knowing consciousness, but in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus.” Through symbolic violence, submission to domination is at once “spontaneous and extorted”;73 it eludes the Weberian distinction between obedience and resistance; it springs from the structural complicity born of the correspondence between social structures and mental structures, position and disposition, social world and socialized body.
The third point is the distinction Bourdieu establishes between two modes of domination: the personal and the structural.74 The personal mode of domination, characteristic of precapitalist formations, relies on the direct, face-to-face, relationship between two persons, say, the planter and his sharecropper or the small shopkeeper and his employees. It is stamped by “the coexistence of overt, physical and economic violence, and of the most refined symbolic violence,”75 as when paternalism overlays relations of brute exploitation. The structural mode of domination, by contrast, relies on such faceless mechanisms as the labor market, bureaucracy, the law, and the state to secure the social order. “Objectification in institutions guarantees the permanence and the cumulativity of acquisitions, material as well as symbolic, which can subsist without the agents having to recreate them continually and integrally by deliberate action.”76 In La Noblesse d’État (1989b), Bourdieu illustrates this notion by showing how the distribution of prestigious credentials by elite universities effects a social selection under the guise of an academic selection, allowing the children of the dominant class to return to positions of eminence, but with the symbolic benefit of seeming to owe their eminence to their superior valor and merit, in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of those denied these credentials.77
Pierre Bourdieu on racism(s)
In his first book Sociologie de l’Algérie published 1958, the young Bourdieu tackles colonial racism
