Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Introduction: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory
The roots and routes of critical race theory
A ‘legal’ definition of CRT?
From a movement to a theory?
What is theoretical about critical race theory?
The racialized social system and practical social theory
Why does theory matter?
Towards the racialized social system approach
Internationalizing CRT: looking for the racialized social
system approach
Chapter overviews
Notes
1 The Racialized Social System and Social Space: Racial
Interests and Contestation
Defining the racialized social system: from ‘the state’ to ‘the
structure’
Reflections on social space
The racial and the relational
The race for meaning
Relating ‘race’ to place
Contesting ‘race’ in social space
The trap of ‘racial conflict’ in the race relations model
 Racial contestation beyond ‘race relations’
From racial contestation to racial interests: racial realism
and the wages of whiteness
Racial realism or racial progress?
Maintaining an interest in whiteness
From racial interests back to racism
Notes
2 Racial Ideologies and Racialized Emotions: Seeing, Thinking
and Feeling Race
Racial ideologies: from deception to perception
Colour-blind ideology in practice
Activating ideologies through emotional constellations
Emotions, ideologies and political conjunctures
Structures and individuals in racialized social systems
Notes
3 Theorizing the Racialized Interaction Order
The interaction order: from Goffman to the Black
sociological tradition
The racialized interaction order
Interaction orders of non-interaction
The interactive making of race: micro aggressions,
everyday racism, and racial action
Activating controlling images in the racialized
interaction order
From controlling images to white habitus
Interactional cogs and the racial structure
Notes
4 Meso Racial Structures and Racialized Organizations
The vague promise(s) of analytical sociology
What are racialized organizations and what do they do?
 From North American healthcare to Brazilian sugar mills
Racialized organizations and agency
Sport, racialization and agency
Workplaces as racialized organizations
Racialized organizations and the unequal distribution of
resources
Moving to the top?
Cultural industries, racial grammars and racialized
imagery
Notes
Conclusion: What is Critical about Critical Race Theory?
What about … ?
A global racialized social system?
The flexibility of the racialized social system approach: from
DesiCrit to TribalCrit and BritCrit
Why CRT and not RT?
Why do we need CRT now?
CRT and the environment
CRT, the ‘racial justice as diversity training’ industry
and the crisis of white liberalism
The hierarchy of racism(s)
Critical race theory and the quest for justice
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
The Racialized Social System
Critical Race Theory as Social Theory
Ali Meghji
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Ali Meghji 2022
The right of Ali Meghji to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Preface
Just over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater:
Voices from Within the Veil. This book is packed with history,
theology, autoethnography, hymns and poetry. One of his central
messages is that the world can be otherwise. We live in a time and
geopolitical climate marked by anti-intellectualism and campaigns
against critical thinking; nothing seems more clear than that we need
the world to be otherwise, and thus I wish to begin this book with Du
Bois’ comment:
From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms
beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms
are breaking, – great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and
cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all
that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be
done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver sea.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain,
because it is but a cry, – a small and human cry amid Promethean
gloom?
Introduction: Critical Race Theory as
Social Theory
In September 2020, President Donald Trump described critical race
theory (CRT) as being ‘like a cancer’, labelling CRT as an anti-
American ideology ‘deployed to rip apart friends, neighbours, and
families’. This presidential furore resulted in an executive order
which banned the teaching of CRT in employee training schemes
run by the federal agency or any company with a government
contract. Across the Atlantic, those in Britain were happy to echo
Trump’s disparaging of CRT. The state’s Minister for Equalities, Kemi
Badenoch, claimed that the government ‘stood unequivocally against
critical race theory’, while reactionary actor-turned-politician
Laurence Fox wrote: ‘Let’s call Critical Race theory by its real name.
Modern Racism. It’s organised and it’s scary’,1 and journalist Guy
Birchall exclaimed that ‘The type of people that whine about endemic
white supremacy, critical race theory and “decolonising” things
fundamentally dislike Britain and Western culture.’ Commentators in
Australia likewise were criticizing CRT as being part of a grievance
culture whereby ‘Any individual who fights against the Theory is
deemed by the Theory to be racist anyway and will be condemned
as racist by activists or the diversity police.’2
However, despite having a shared hostility towards CRT, such
commentators often had quite disparate accounts of what CRT
actually is. While Trump lumped together CRT with ‘Marxist ideology’
and the supposed militarism of Black Lives Matter, in Britain CRT
was seen as being an offshoot of the ‘decolonizing’ movement which
sought to recognize the darker side of Britain’s history, and in
Australia CRT was seen as being part of a wider ‘wokeist’ social
justice movement. Indeed, academics likewise have differed quite
radically in their understandings of what CRT is. While several
Marxist critics have seen CRT as being an assertion of race-centrism
steeped in identity politics (for instance Cole 2009a, 2009b), other
scholars more sympathetic to the CRT project have still described it
as ‘not a unified theory but a loose hodgepodge of analytic tools that
are frequently used in a catch-as-catch-can manner’ (Treviño et al.
2008: 9). Indeed, CRT is not even mentioned in Emirbayer and
Desmond’s (2015: 1) recent survey of theories of race/ism, despite
their assertion that ‘there never has been a comprehensive and
systematic theory of race’.
In a sense, these brief anecdotes quite neatly summarize both why I
write this book, and how I will approach the book’s content. On the
one hand, this book is written very much as an attempt to define the
conceptual contours of CRT through what has been termed the
racialized social system approach. Through showing how the
racialized social system approach is a social theory, this book
therefore highlights how CRT offers a flexible framework used to
study contemporary societal arrangements in a way that is grounded
in empirical research. Central to the racialized social system
approach is the attempt to show how racial inequality is embodied in
the structure of society and reproduced through the micro, meso and
macro levels. Of course, it is through exposing this structural
presence of racism that CRT has managed to attract such a large
following of reactionary disparagement. In this regard, I also write
this book to show how the public and political responses to CRT
often demonstrate the very same points that CRT seeks to make
about how racism becomes ‘hidden away’ and denied in society.
Furthermore, if we think about these public criticisms of CRT, they
are not limited to one nation state but instead spread transnationally.
While CRT is often construed as being a US-centric paradigm of
thought, this book therefore shows how – by virtue of being a social
theory grounded in empirical research – CRT offers a flexible
approach to the study of racial inequality across space and time.
There is a difference between conceptual flexibility and theoretical
universalism. As highlighted by postcolonial and decolonial
approaches, universalism is characterized by an assumption that
despite a theory ‘being the product of such a specific milieu […] the
thoughts produced […] simply apply universally’ (Connell 2018: 401).
Claims to universalism are thus layered in relations of epistemic
domination, constituted by a chauvinism where the ‘Theory’ is the
‘Theory of everything’, and everything must be comprehended
through the lens of this Theory.
It is not the aim of this book to present a picture of CRT as a
conceptual framework that can study all dimensions of racialization
and racism across all of time and space. Such a universalism, in
fact, would be in tension with CRT’s mission to battle epistemic
inequality and to theorize creatively in and through empirical
research. Rather, it is my aim to show how CRT – particularly
through the racialized social system approach – despite emerging
from a very specific discipline of legal studies, at a very specific time
in the US post-civil rights era, does in fact offer a flexible conceptual
framework that is useful for the study of racialization and racism
across the world. Of course, before proceeding into a fuller
discussion of such conceptual flexibility, it is useful to first clarify
these roots and routes of CRT.
The roots and routes of critical race theory
The reactionary criticisms of CRT – especially in the US – tend to
paint a picture of CRT as being endemic across the arts, humanities
and social sciences since the 1980s. The reality of the situation is
that CRT actually has a narrower intellectual lineage.
Of course, it is undeniable that in the second half of the twentieth
century, critical work on race and racism was growing in the US
academy. Ironically, due to the widely held post-civil rights ideology,
which assumed that racism was now a thing of the past, this critical
scholarship was largely about bringing legitimacy to frames that
centred racism as a primary axis of social organization. Thus, to
name just a handful of paradigms, in the 1970s we had Joyce
Ladner’s (1973) call to move beyond a ‘white sociology’ which
ignored continuing racial inequality, and Robert Staples’ (1976)
subsequent call for a Black sociology, which took Black knowledges
and methods seriously as a rebuttal of the dominant post-civil rights
ideology. In the 1980s, we had Angela Davis (1983) and Manning
Marable’s (1983) re-engagement with racial capitalism theory,
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) racial formation theory,
showing how the post-civil rights era constituted a racial project
which was still based on racial hierarchization, and Patricia Hill
Collins’ (1986) Black feminist sociology stressing the importance of
those epistemological frames which get pushed to the peripheries of
the academy for their centring of race and gender.
As scholars such as Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg
(2002) have pointed out, when a group of US legal scholars in the
1980s started referring to their work as ‘critical race theory’, there
was already a large amount of critical scholarship on race and
racism that was circulating in the US academy. Similarly to this wide
body of scholarship, the self-declared critical race theorists wanted
to displace ideologies which downplayed the continuing significance
of racism. It is with these critical legal scholars that I propose we
begin our overview of CRT as a strain of social scientific thought,
though we must keep in mind that they were not working in an
epistemological prism, but rather were part of a wider movement of
recentring critical perspectives on race and racism.

A ‘legal’ definition of CRT?

As a social scientific approach in law, CRT emerged at a specific
historical moment in the US in the 1980s, with the aim of exposing
the false rhetoric of the civil rights movement. At the material level,
CRT scholars pointed out that twenty years after the introduction of
civil rights legislation, Black people were actually worse off on many
socio-economic measures; as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1988: 1333)
summarized:
The African-American socioeconomic position in American society
has actually declined in the last two decades. Average annual
family income for African-Americans dropped 9% from the 1970’s
to the 1980’s […] Since 1969, the proportion of Black men
between 25 and 55 earning less than $5000 a year rose from 8%
to 20 […] African-American enrollment in universities and colleges
is also on the decline.
Such material statistics highlighted that despite the supposed legal
guarantees of equality, the material justice which was called for
during the civil rights movement was yet to be realized. Indeed, this
material reality was connected to the additional retrenchment of the
civil rights rhetoric at a discursive level. Crenshaw (1988) analyses
this retrenchment through focusing on the rise of ‘new right’
neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which accelerated under
Reagan’s administration in the 1980s. This neoconservative culture
was constellated around the belief that ‘the goal of the civil rights
movement – the extension of formal equality to all Americans
regardless of color – has already been achieved’ (Crenshaw 1988:
1334). This new right vision – typified by thinkers such as Thomas
Sowell – was held together by a contradictory view that the very
existence of civil rights legislation was evidence that the US provided
equal opportunities to everyone, and therefore that there was in fact
no need for the continuing presence of such equal opportunities
legislation. By a similar circular logic, such new right intellectuals and
politicians argued that civil rights activists were demanding equal
outcomes, rather than equal opportunities – and the duty of the state
was only to offer the latter. Indeed, this neoconservatism was
steeped in cultural racism in the way it argued that because Black
Americans had equal opportunities but not equal outcomes, these
unequal outcomes were the fault of Black people themselves for not
taking advantage of their equal opportunities.
Of course, there are many critiques of this period of
neoconservatism, especially from theorists of racial capitalism such
as Angela Davis (1983). What sectioned off CRT as its own
paradigm, however, was its empirical focus on how the US legal
system was continuing to reproduce racial inequality in the supposed
era of ‘civil rights’. It was in this context that CRT was deliberately
focusing on how the US legal system was itself a racializing force –
that is, how the US legal framework made race and sustained racial
domination. As the advocates of this position put it themselves:3
We began to think of our project as uncovering how law was a
constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law
constructed race […] Laws produced racial power not simply
through narrowing the scope of, say, anti-discrimination remedies,
nor through racially biased decision-making, but instead, through
myriad legal rules […] that continued to reproduce the structures
and practices of racial domination.
This is not to say that CRT scholars thought that the use of the legal
system to sustain racial domination was by any means a ‘new’
development in racial politics. In contrast, such legal scholars were
aware that this was primarily an issue of continuity, whereby the US
legal system, since its birth, has been founded on the rationalization
of white domination over racialized others. This is well spelled out in
Cheryl Harris’ (1993) ‘Whiteness as property’, where she shows how
the US legal system constituted a network of racializing and racist
forces: from the US Constitution defining the enslaved as ‘three-fifths
of all other persons’, the one-drop laws dictating that the children of
enslaved Black women – even when the father was white – were
themselves Black and therefore owned by the slaver, the legal use of
the enslaved ‘as a stand-in for actual currency’ (Harris 1993: 1720)
in legal disputes, and the Homestead Acts which reallocated
indigenous land to white Americans and failed to recognize
indigenous property ownership, it is clear that the US legal system
has been used to define and maintain the racial status quo.
Rather than saying that the entanglement of racism and law was a
new development, therefore, CRT scholars were interested in how
this entanglement – or articulation – was playing out in the current
moment of the post-civil rights era. Of particular interest to these
thinkers was a desire to show how ‘civil rights reformism has helped
to legitimize the very social practices – in employment offices and
admissions departments – that were originally targeted for reform’
(Crenshaw et al. 1995: xv).
This critique of civil rights legislation actually facilitating further racial
inequality is demonstrated in Derrick Bell’s scholarship.4 Take, for
instance, Bell’s criticism of legal reform post-Brown v. Board of
Education – the 1954 case which made it unconstitutional to
segregate public schools by race. As Bell points out, the legacy of
this case meant that US courts were much more concerned with
questions of statistical, demographic desegregation (for instance,
having schools that roughly represent the racial demographics of
their district) rather than questions of actual educational quality
which was accessible to Black students. This is important because in
a context of civil rights legislation, many whites feared the integration
of Black folks into their public institutions, and consequently took
flight from their urban areas to create white enclaves.5 This meant
that while educational segregation was de jure unconstitutional, it
was de facto still very much the norm. Indeed, the US legal system
was shaped so that such de facto segregation could not be
understood as a form of discrimination; schools could only be
accused of segregation if plaintiffs could prove that such segregation
was itself the result of ‘discriminatory actions intentionally and
invidiously conducted or organised by school officials’ (Bell 1995b:
24) – a criterion that was both equivocal and deliberately near-
impossible to attain.
Part of the issue of this period, from the CRT position, therefore, was
that the legal system only understood ‘racial discrimination’ through
a ‘perpetrator perspective’ that does more harm than it does good.6
Through this perspective, ‘the law views racial discrimination not as
a social phenomenon but merely as the misguided conduct of
particular actors’7 – in other words, racism becomes an issue of bad
actors rather than an issue of social (including legal) structure(s).
This legal perspective on racism meant that there were many
contradictory instances where anti-discrimination laws were invoked
in courts to legitimize racial discrimination. An early case where this
figured was Milliken v. Bradley (1974), where the Supreme Court
refused a remedy for racial segregation in Detroit (where the whites
had fled to the suburbs, leaving Black people concentrated in urban
areas, de facto segregated both residentially and educationally in
poorer social and educational spaces).8 Despite the district court
proposing a scheme that would integrate across the urban and
suburban schools, in order to battle educational segregation, the
Supreme Court directly invoked the anti-discrimination law that ‘an
inter-district remedy might be in order where the racially
discriminatory acts of one or more school districts caused racial
segregation in an adjacent district, or where district lines have been
deliberately drawn on the basis of race’, but that they found no
evidence of either of these violations.9
It was in this context, therefore, that CRT scholars argued that Black
people were ‘worse off in terms of legal theory’ in the post-civil rights
era ‘than they were under the former “separate but equal”
doctrine’.10 Indeed, the veracity of this argument can be
demonstrated through raising some questions: if civil rights
legislation was supposed to realize racial equality, how could the
very same laws be used by whites to claim anti-white discrimination
in university admissions?11 If the legal system was supposed to
bring material racial equality, how come the primary beneficiaries of
the resulting affirmative action have been white women?12 These
questions seem to point us towards the CRT position that, despite
the pretence of being race-neutral, the US legal system is in fact
deeply articulated in racialized processes.
From a movement to a theory?
Through its critiques of legal reform, CRT became recognized as a
growing academic paradigm in the US – by critics and advocates
alike. However, both critics and advocates of CRT failed to really
spell out the ‘T’ in CRT – that is, they failed to really think about what
made critical race theory theoretical. While critics saw this as a
problem for CRT, advocates saw this absence of discussion as a
deliberate strategy; upon reflection, Crenshaw (2011: 1261), for
instance, claimed that:
CRT is not so much an intellectual unit filled with stuff – theories,
themes, practices and the like […] In the same way that Kendall
Thomas reasoned that race was better thought of as a verb rather
than a noun, I want to suggest that shifting the frame of CRT
toward a dynamic rather than static reference would be a
productive means by which we can link CRT’s past to the
contemporary moment.
In thinking of CRT as a verb rather than a noun, Crenshaw thus
proposed we think of it as a practice, or methodology, for thinking
about racism rather than as a theoretical framework per se.
However, this did not mean that others in the CRT canon did not try
to lay out some conceptual foundations of the CRT framework – and
indeed, as we will see, scholars particularly in educational studies
found these early attempts at making a CRT framework very fruitful
for their analyses.
It was perhaps in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s two books
Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (2000[1995]) and Critical
Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) that we see some of the early
attempts to specify the key tenets of CRT in a way that still remains
popular several decades later. While both Delgado and Stefancic
were legal scholars firmly rooted in the ‘first wave’ of legally informed
CRT scholarship, their tenets of CRT were – in theory – applicable
well outside of the study of the legal system itself. These tenets were
as follows.
1. Racism is ordinary, not aberrational. Central to CRT – as iterated
by Delgado and Stefancic – is the idea that racism happens because
of social arrangements, not in spite of them. This requires moving
beyond the limited view of racism as an act of individual bigotry, and
instead envisaging racism as a structural power relation. Such an
argument, as Delgado and Stefancic show, had obvious
connotations in the field of legal studies from which CRT emerged.
As noted formerly, it meant that CRT scholars encouraged the US
courts, judges and whole legal apparatus to go beyond an
understanding of racial discrimination as something that had to be an
intentional action by an actor, and instead to embrace an
understanding of discrimination that also took into consideration the
wider structural effects of racialization: whether that be the role of
historical segregation on current relations, the use of officially ‘race-
neutral’ criteria for certain jobs (e.g. a certain level of qualification, or
score on a means test) which ends up disadvantaging Black
Americans, race-neutral hiring or admissions policies which treat all
racialized applicants as equal despite their differing locations in
social hierarchies, and so on.
2. Racism serves important purposes. Once we conceive of racism
as being ordinary, rather than being a ‘glitch’ in the system, we can
gain an understanding of how it does not ‘just happen’ but serves
specific purposes. Again, this was a point made in the context of
legal studies that is simultaneously applicable outside the legal field.
Early CRT scholars pointed out how racism functioned in the legal
system not as an aberration, but as a means of both rationalizing
and reproducing racial inequality. This can be seen in the
aforementioned cases of anti-discrimination legislation being invoked
to justify racial discrimination, just as much as it can be seen in the
enforcement of constitutional colour blindness (for instance, in
California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited state
governmental institutions from considering race in public
employment, public contracting and public education), or in clauses
in the US Constitution, such as in the 13th amendment, which
prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment
for a crime of which one has been convicted – all of which may
appear to be race-neutral but are in fact deeply entrenched in
producing racial inequality.
3. Race and races are products of social thought and relations. Here,
we see CRT committing to a constructionist conception of race
whereby ‘races’ are ‘not objective, inherent or fixed, they correspond
to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that
society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’ (Delgado
and Stefancic 2000[1995]: 7). Of course, this constructionist
approach resonates with the earlier CRT ethos of ‘uncovering how
law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law
constructed race’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv). Through this
constructionist approach to the race and law, CRT was able to show
how racialization was never an ‘even process’ but always a process
that was itself embedded in power relations; from the definition of
Black Americans as ‘property’ through the period of enslavement,
through to legalization of the one-drop rule, and the legalized
conversion of the Chinese from a nationality to a racial group in 1870
to justify the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888.13
4. The importance of intersectionality. While CRT has been accused
of race-centrism,14 intersectionality features as one of its
foundational concepts. As Delgado and Stefancic (2000[1995]: 9)
summarized in their CRT tenets: ‘No person has a single, easily
stated, unitary identity […] everyone has potentially conflicting,
overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances.’ Indeed, one of the
key pioneers of CRT – Kimberlé Crenshaw – was also a leading
figure in developing intersectionality in the field of legal studies. This
is not a coincidence. As Crenshaw (1989) argued, the legal system
had no legislation to think about issues of gender and race as they
are co-articulated. Take DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in 1976,
where five Black women brought suit against General Motors,
claiming that the business’ seniority system discriminated against
Black women due to the fact that they did not hire any Black women
prior to the 1964 civil rights legislation. The Court replied that ‘this
lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race
discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a
combination of both’ (quoted in Crenshaw 1989: 142). Given that
(white) women had previously been hired by General Motors prior to
1964, the case for sex discrimination was rejected. Upon
recommending that the case therefore be considered through the
lens of race discrimination, and the Black women’s response that
this defeats ‘the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a
race claim’, the Court simply replied:15
The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that
the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of ‘black
women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a
black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of
protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical
principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the
prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.
As seen in this example, critical race emphasis on intersectionality,
therefore, stressed not merely that inequalities are additive (for
example, a Black woman being marginalized in terms of being a
woman, and in terms of being Black) but rather that different
inequalities are constituted and expressed through each other. It is
safe to say, therefore, that while CRT has the word ‘race’ in it, as it
emerged in critical legal studies, it was not simply about the study of
racism as a something that could be studied as a singular, isolated
‘thing’; hence why intersectionality features as one of its defining
concepts.
5. The ‘unique voice of color’. The final key tenet sits in an ‘uneasy
tension with anti-essentialism’, to the extent that it holds ‘that
because of their different histories and experiences with oppression,
black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to
communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are
unlikely to know’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 9).16 Through this
notion of the ‘unique voice of color’, Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 9)
demonstrate that a large part of the classical CRT methodology
involved urging ‘black and brown writers to recount their experiences
with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique
perspectives to assess law’s master narratives’. This last point is
important. Encouraging legal scholars to recount their experiences
connects with the Du Boisian tradition of autoethnography, and the
belief that autobiography can be an effective mechanism for
reflecting on large, social structural relations. This is exactly the point
Crenshaw et al. (1995: xix) make when they claim that:
Critical Race Theory’s engagement with the discourse of civil
rights reform stemmed directly from our lived experience as
students and teachers in the nation’s law schools. We both saw
and suffered the concrete consequences that followed from liberal
legal thinkers’ failure to address the constrictive role that racial
ideology plays in the composition and culture of American
institutions, including American law school.
What was so groundbreaking about Delgado and Stefancic’s work
was that it showed how the CRT work in critical legal studies had a
clear conceptual foundation, and was not simply a movement of
activist scholarship, but that these conceptual claims could also be
taken up in other fields of inquiry beyond legal studies. It just so
happened that it was particularly educational scholars in the US who
first took to the task of engaging with this legal scholarship in a
different field.
After Delgado and Stefancic’s scholarship in legal studies, CRT
proliferated in US education studies throughout the 1990s and
2000s. The same year these books were published, Ladson-Billings
and Tate (1995) wrote a paper entitled ‘Toward a critical race theory
of education’, with Solórzano (1997) further opening the field two
years later in the paper ‘Images and words that wound: Critical race
theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education’. By this period of
the late 1990s, CRT was rapidly growing its own canon in education
studies, leading to William Tate’s (1997) review piece ‘Critical race
theory and education: History, theory, and implications’. Edited
collections on different applicants of CRT in US educational research
then became the norm, with a 1998 Special Issue on ‘Critical Race
Theory in Education’ in the International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education (Parker et al. 1998), Parker et al. (1999) co-
editing Race Is … Race Isn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative
Studies in Education,17 Ladson-Billings (2003) editing Critical Race
Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies: The Profession, Policies,
and Curriculum, and Dixson and Rosseau (2006) co-editing Critical
Race Theory: All God’s Children Got a Song.18
While this ‘new wave’ of CRT scholarship was based in educational
studies, it was fundamentally shaped by the key tenets of CRT that
Delgado and Stefancic formed from its application in legal studies.
Take, for instance, Ladson-Billings’ use of CRT in education studies.
In her canonical paper ‘Just what is critical race theory, and what’s it
doing in a nice field like education?’ she directly applies each of
Delgado and Stefancic’s five tenets of CRT to the field of education.
Firstly, she draws on the ‘unique voice of color’ in her
autobiographical reflections, claiming that this helps because
‘storytelling is a part of critical race theory’and that these stories can
help ‘underscore an important point within the critical race theoretical
paradigm, i.e. race [still] matters’ (Ladson-Billings 1999: 8).
Secondly, she argues that racism is an ‘ordinary’ feature of the
educational system which serves the purpose of maintaining the
racial status quo. She demonstrates this by focusing on how, for
instance, whites have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative
action in hiring within educational institutions, and how through
biased curricula, teacher stigmatization, biased assessments,
residential segregation and unequal school funding, Black folks face
a significant deficit in the US education system. While many recast
resulting educational inequalities through the lens of cultural racism
– arguing that Black people do not care about education – Ladson-
Billings (1999) thus stresses the need for counter storytelling: to
unearth the structural inequalities in the education system to reject
myths of Black inferiority. Indeed, given that even the CRT scholars
in legal studies looked at issues like educational segregation, it is no
wonder that there was such a synergy between legal and
educational CRT scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century.
What is theoretical about critical race theory?
Despite its emergence as a critical project speaking back against
structural racism in two of the major US structures – both law and
education – some within the academy were unsure whether the ‘T’ in
critical race theory was really warranted. In other words, some
doubted whether CRT was really a theory at all. Of course, some of
this criticism was levelled by those who were opposed to the overall
mission and/or methods of CRT. Scholars like Rubin (1992: 960), for
instance, have charged CRT with being circular, claiming that
‘Critical race theory is only a partial subdiscipline; although it is
based on distinctive norms, it lacks the distinctive methodology that
characterizes critical legal studies or law and economics. It relies on
familiar methods of analysis and frames familiar arguments to
support its distinctive premises’, while others such as Farber and
Sherry (1993: 814) have taken specific issue with the counter
storytelling method:
critical race theory has not yet established a comparable empirical
foundation. We know of no work on critical race theory that
discusses psychological or other social science studies
supporting the existence of a voice of color. Most critical race
theorists simply postulate the existence of a difference […] One
scholar denies that the existence of a distinct voice of color can or
need be proven, as it is solely a matter of authorial intent: Those
who intend to speak in the voice of color do so […] Thus far,
however, there has been no demonstration of how those new
perspectives differ from the various perspectives underlying
traditional scholarship.
Perhaps the critiques I find more intellectually stimulating, however,
are those from scholars who are critical of CRT’s status as a theory,
but who remain dedicated to its overall mission and method(s).
Indeed, even one of the pioneers of CRT itself – Crenshaw – could
be said to be of this ilk when she declares CRT is a verb rather than
a noun.19 To such scholars, CRT may be conceived of better as a
‘critical knowledge project’ – in Patricia Hill Collins’ (2019) language
– rather than being necessarily a critical social theory. This argument
is most explicitly spelled out by Treviño, Harris and Wallace (2008:
9), as we have seen, when they claim that:
CRT has many rigorous concepts and methods, but these have
not been coherently integrated in a way that would give CRT the
systematic structure – the intellectual architecture – that is
representative, and in fact required, of most social theory. What
we frequently get with CRT is not a unified theory but a loose
hodgepodge of analytic tools that are frequently used in a catch-
as-catch-can manner.
Central to Treviño et al.’s argument is that CRT may have a shared
ethos built around the shared tenets of counter storytelling, seeing
racism as normal and purposeful, intersectionality and so on, but this
does not necessarily provide the whole conceptual architecture
necessary for CRT to be labelled social theory. This critique, for me,
opens up two particular questions. Firstly, why should we care
whether something is, or is not, a social theory? Secondly, do we
want CRT to be considered social theory? I believe that we can
engage with both of these questions by turning to another approach
in CRT – and indeed the approach the rest of the book will centre on
– which shows the benefits of viewing CRT as social theory: the
racialized social system approach.
The racialized social system and practical social
theory
Whether or not the majority of people really care about whether or
not X is a social theory, social theorists themselves seem to place a
lot of emphasis on this question. For at least several decades, for
instance, many sociologists have been lamenting a ‘crisis in social
theory’, characterized by a lack of theoretical work at the expense of
a more positivist empiricism.20 Even sociologists of race have joined
in this debate about a supposed crisis of theory. Bonilla-Silva (1997:
465), for instance, claimed that ‘the area of race and ethnic studies
lacks a sound theoretical apparatus’, while Winant (2000: 178)
stated that ‘the inadequacy of the range of theoretical approaches to
race available in sociology at the turn of the twenty-first century is
striking’, Feagin (2001: 5) claimed that in race theory ‘we do not as
yet have as strongly agreed-upon concepts and well-developed
theoretical traditions as we have for class and gender oppression’,
and – as aforementioned – Emirbayer and Desmond (2015: 1) went
as far as saying ‘there has never been a comprehensive and
systematic theory of race’.21

Why does theory matter?

Of course, of interest to these social theorists of race was not merely
a scholastic curiosity about what makes a theory a theory. Rather,
each of these thinkers believed that theory is needed in the
sociology of race because it helps us to do something. As Golash-
Boza (2016: 129) aptly puts it: ‘the purpose of a critical theory of race
and racism is to move forward our understanding of racial and racist
dynamics in ways that bring us closer to the eradication of racial
oppression’. As summarized here, the purpose of social theorizing is
to help us achieve material change – it is not a chin-stroking exercise
that one can do in a vacuum away from the empirical world in which
one lives. This ethos is well summarized by Stuart Hall (1991: 42)
when he claims that ‘theory is always 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, described as ‘the
socially engendered emotions in racialized societies’.33 Such
racialized emotions form the basis for generating a sense of
group membership in the racial structure, and act as vehicles for
the formation and mobilization of racial interests. For instance,
in the run-up to Trump’s 2016 presidential election, many white
voters shared emotions of devaluation and non-recognition in
the context of the US moving to a ‘minority-majority’
demographic.34 Not only did this allow for white people to
strengthen their group identity through forming a collective
emotional bond, but this emotive bond allowed for the
successful implementation of a whole political project –
Trumpamerica – built around redistributing value and recognition
to ordinary white families.35
Fifth is the concept of the racialized interaction order, which
refers to the scheme of unwritten rules for interaction between
differently racialized agents (Rosino 2017). These unwritten
rules for interaction have both spatial and symbolic extensions.
Spatially, the racialized interaction order attempts to limit the
face-to-face contact between differently racialized actors (for
instance, via Jim Crow segregation in the US or Apartheid in
South Africa). Symbolically, the racialized interaction order
specifies idealized and routinized norms for how racialized
people ought to act in front of differently racialized people; for
instance, as highlighted by Garrett (2011: 13), in America Black
people are taught to not ‘run through an affluent neighborhood
for fear of being mistaken for the body of a thief’.
Last is the concept of racialized organizations. Existing at the
meso level, racialized organizations achieve at least two things.
Firstly, they exist as organizations – whether that be the
workplace, state institutions, housing markets, schools and
universities and so on – which ‘limit the personal agency and
collective efficacy of subordinate racial groups while magnifying
 the agency of the dominant racial group’ (Ray 2019: 36).
Through this dynamic, ‘the ability to act upon the world, to
create, to learn, to express emotion […] is constrained (or
enabled) by racialized organizations’ (Ray 2019: 36). Secondly,
racialized organizations enable whiteness to be structured as ‘a
credential providing access to organizational resources,
legitimizing work hierarchies, and expanding White agency’
(Ray 2019: 41). In other words, racialized organizations allow for
whiteness to be used as a property, or credential, to access
certain resources, such as housing, jobs or university places.36

Through these concepts, Bonilla-Silva’s racialized social system

approach thus expanded upon the central tenets of CRT laid out by
Delgado and Stefancic to the following:

1. Racism is embedded in the structure of society.

2. Racism has a material foundation.
3. Racism changes over different times.
4. Racism is often ascribed rationality.
5. Racism has a contemporary basis, and is not fully grounded in
the events of the past.
Internationalizing CRT: looking for the racialized
social system approach
While the racialized social system approach seems to offer a set of
useful tools that can be put to the trial of empirical research, it has
almost been left behind as other dimensions of CRT have expanded
across and outside of US geographical borders. Indeed, just as CRT
was taking off in American law and education studies, where it was
predominantly focused on a white–Black axis, other racially
minoritized groups in the US used this foundational work to explore
the educational and legal experiences of Latinos (which gave rise to
‘LatCrit’),37 South Asian Americans (which gave rise to ‘DesiCrit’)38
and indigenous Americans (which gave rise to ‘TribalCrit’).39 This
early US-centricity of CRT led to some early charges of
methodological nationalism, with scholars such as Goldberg and
Essed (2002: 4–5) arguing that CRT is:
unfortunately marked by an American parochialism, with being
caught up with the more or less restricted considerations of legal
structures, conditions, and rationalities in the US context. Scant
attention is paid either to the applicability and implications of its
key concepts outside of that context, or perhaps more importantly
[…] to thinking its central concepts through their globalizing
significance and circulation.
The wider international community then answered this call to think
through American CRT’s ‘central concepts through their globalizing
significance and circulation’. However, even as CRT expanded
beyond the US borders, this scholarship remained rooted in the first
‘two waves’ rather than engaging with the racialized social system
approach. In Europe, for instance, the majority of CRT scholarship
seemed to go one of two ways.
Firstly, there emerged a wave of scholarship which looked at how
legal systems across the European continent – despite the pretence
of being against discrimination – reproduced structural racism; this
scholarship was very much informed by American critique of civil
rights legal reform. Thus, scholars such as Möschel (2011) point out
that post-war European anti-discrimination law has largely gone
down the route of equating anti-racialism (arguing that we should not
use racial terms) with anti-racism (actions to dismantle racism);
preamble No. 6 to the European Racial Equality Directive (ERED),
Directive 2000/43/EC, for instance, holds that ‘the European Union
rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate
human races. The use of the term “racial origin” in this Directive
does not imply an acceptance of such theories.’40 In response to this
ERED, countries across Europe such as Italy, Austria, Germany and
France have all avoided using ‘race’ in national legal frameworks,
favouring notions of citizenship, nationality or ‘ethnic belonging’,
consequently making it extremely difficult to actually unearth
dimensions of racial inequality.
Secondly, there was a wave of scholarship, mostly located in Britain,
which looked at structural racism in the education system – this
movement has been termed ‘BritCrit’.41 Such scholarship engaged a
great deal with the US education CRT scholarship, but again took no
notice of the racialized social system approach. Thus, as Gillborn
(2011) argues, CRT’s inception in the UK was beneficial because it
created a context where British racism could be taken as a starting
point for analysis in education, rather than as something that had to
be proved. BritCrits thus produced invaluable evidence of racial
inequality in the British education system, from means testing
(Gillborn 2010), through to academic hiring (Rollock 2021) and
stigmatizing pupils (Rollock et al. 2015), all of which challenged the
dominant colour-blind rhetoric which was being enforced across the
British schooling system. However, the majority of this BritCrit
scholarship adopted Delgado and Stefancic’s tenets of CRT, and did
not think about how Bonilla-Silva’s racialized social systems
approach could be useful for social analysis. In co-edited books and
review articles focusing on CRT in Britain, such as Atlantic
Crossings: International Dialogues on Critical Race Theory (Hylton et
al. 2011), Warmington’s (2020) ‘Critical race theory in England:
Impact and opposition’ and Gillborn’s (2006b) ‘Critical race theory
beyond North America: Toward a trans-Atlantic dialogue on racism
and antiracism in educational theory and praxis’, we therefore see no
mention of the racialized social system approach.
Central to this book’s mission, therefore, is to bring some wider
international visibility to the racialized social system approach, and to
how it is an effective theory for thinking about racialization and
racism in different temporal and spatial locations. The aim is not to
attempt any universalization of the racialized social system
approach, but rather to show how it enables us to think critically
about racism and its articulation across the micro, meso and macro
levels. In order to do this, I have divided the book as follows.
Chapter overviews
In the first chapter, ‘The Racialized Social System and Social Space:
Racial Interests and Contestation’, I define the racialized social
system in depth. In particular, I look at how the racialized social
system involves the construction of race and unequal distribution of
resources across this racial hierarchy. I then pay attention to how
differently racialized actors develop racial interests to either preserve
or challenge the racial order, and how the racialized social system
therefore becomes a site of perpetuating contestation. In order to
explore such phenomena, I take inspiration from Bourdieu’s theory of
social space, essentially arguing that the racialized social system
approach is a certain analysis of social space.
In the second chapter, ‘Racial Ideologies and Racialized Emotions:
Seeing, Thinking and Feeling Race’, I look at the reproduction and
articulation of the racialized social system at the micro level. Firstly, I
pay attention to racial ideologies as the everyday frameworks people
use to explain racial phenomena in a way that reproduces racism. I
then connect such ideologies to racialized emotions – the emotional
bonds that act as vehicles for the transmission of racial ideologies. I
conclude this chapter by looking at three political projects –
Trumpamerica, Brexit Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – to
demonstrate how emotions and ideologies come together in the
reproduction of racism.
I stay with the micro in the third chapter, ‘Theorizing the Racialized
Interaction Order’. In this chapter, I draw on interactionist sociology
to show how the racialized social system necessarily entails a diffuse
system of interactional risks, and interactional rights, and that such
risks and rights are unequally distributed across the racial hierarchy.
I therefore use this chapter to clarify how racial projects of
segregation – such as Apartheid or Jim Crow – show very explicit
interaction orders, with legally distributed interactional rights and
risks. Further, I also focus on the contemporary to show how
differently racialized people continue to be afforded different
‘legitimate’ interactional rights and risks, using examples such as
that of Black professionals in the workplace.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Meso Racial Structures and Racialized
Organizations’, I turn to the meso. This chapter homes in on recent
scholarship on racialized organizations, paying specific attention to
how such meso structures constrain the agency of people of colour,
free up the agency of whites, and legitimate the unequal distribution
of societal resources. I use case studies ranging from sport to the
professional workplace and creative industries to highlight how
studying organizations is a crucial way for us to understand the
processes of racialization and racism.
I conclude in the final chapter, ‘What is Critical about Critical Race
Theory?’ In this chapter, I try to look at the potential limitations of
CRT and how various critical race theorists have therefore tried to
stretch its conceptual apparatus. In particular, I look at the
postcolonial challenge to CRT, questioning the extent to which CRT
is able to engage in transnational, historical analysis, and the extent
to which it practises methodological nationalism. Further, I also
specify some key dimensions of contemporary social life that
necessitate a CRT analysis – from the rise of ‘diversity training anti-
racism’ through to ongoing climate crises and hierarchization of
different ‘racisms’, therefore concluding that CRT may not be perfect,
but it is indeed necessary.
Notes
1 https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1306217761564241920.
2 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/tracing-the-dangerous-
rise-and-rise-of-woke-warriors/news-
story/19b519e58d3393b35d6fccec8d9e4135.
3 Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv.
4 Bell 1995a, 1995b.
5 See Pattillo 2005, 2013.
6 Freeman 1995.
7 Freeman 1995: 30.
8 A similar case at a similar time can be seen in San Antonio
Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 1973.
9 Quoted in Freeman 1995: 42. The anti-discrimination law being
invoked refers to the case of X where it was shown that in the
case of Y discrimination could be proved even if the inequality
was not intended.
10 Freeman 1995: 43.
11 Greene 1995.
12 Wise 1998.
13 Prewitt 2013.
14 Wimmer 2015.
15 Quoted in Crenshaw 1989: 142.
16 This concept is thus similar to the Du Boisian (2007b[1903])
notion of Black American ‘second sight’, whereby, by virtue of
their being dominated, Black Americans were said to be able to
 better understand society’s workings than the racially dominant,
who internalize an ignorance.
17 Which featured Ladson-Billings’ (1999) popular paper ‘Just what
is critical race theory, and what’s it doing in a nice field like
education?’
18 Featuring one of Ladson-Billings’ most widely cited papers,
‘Toward a critical race theory of education’ (Ladson-Billings and
Tate 1995).
19 Crenshaw 2011; see also Carbado 2011.
20 For instance, Abdel-Malek 1981; Gane 1983; Giddens 1987;
Kellner 1990; Law 2014; Turner 2009.
21 See Golash-Boza 2016 for an extended discussion of this
supposed ‘crisis’ of race theory.
22 Collins 1998: xiii.
23 P. H. Collins 2019: 92.
24 See Bonilla-Silva 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2015, 2016, 2020.
25 These concepts are defined briefly here because each is the
subject of one of the following chapters.
26 Bonilla-Silva 2015: 75.
27 Du Bois 2014[1935].
28 Bonilla-Silva 2017: 15.
29 Meghji and Saini 2018: 673.
30 Bonilla-Silva 2012: 174.
31 Ibid.
32 Bonilla-Silva et al. 2006: 231.
33 Bonilla-Silva 2019a: 3.
34 Ibid.
35 Lamont et al. 2016, 2017.
36 Indeed, through this lens, the sites that the first two waves of CRT
scholarship target – court houses, universities, schools, housing
and so on – can all be seen as racialized organizations: that is,
part of an overall racialized social system.
37 For instance, Luna 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2001.
38 See Harpalani 2013.
39 For instance, Brayboy 2005.
40 Quoted in Möschel 2011: 1651.
41 For a review of BritCrit, see Meghji 2021.
1
The Racialized Social System and
Social Space: Racial Interests and
Contestation
The very notion of a racialized social system may suggest that this
approach in CRT is at least partially rooted in the structural
functionalist theories of ‘social systems’ that dominated social theory
for a period in the twentieth century.1 However, while using the
language of ‘systems’ popularized through such structural
functionalists, the racialized social system approach’s genesis can
be located more in classical theories of structural racism. Indeed,
when we think of scholars such as Oliver Cox – writing when
theories of social systems were in the ascendence – their theories of
the racial system are far more influential in CRT than any abstract
social theory.
The link between Cox’s theory of structural racism, constructed in
the mid-twentieth century, and the contemporary racialized social
system approach goes beyond the fact that they both invoke the
concept of a ‘social system’. At the heart of both approaches is a
desire to provide an understanding of racism as being ‘more than
prejudice’, and to therefore direct social scientists towards the study
of the social arrangements that are deliberately constructed to
reproduce racial inequality. As Cox (1959: 321) summarized, the
dominant understanding of racism was ‘likely to be an accumulation
of an erratic pattern of verbalizations cut free from any on-going
social system’. In opposition to this individualized notion of racism,
Cox (1944: 452; emphasis added) instead proposes that:
 We cannot combat race prejudice by proving that it is wrong. The
reason for this is that race prejudice is only a symptom of a
materialistic social fact. If, for instance, we should discover by
‘scientific’ method that Negroes and Chinese are ‘superior’ to tall,
long-skulled, blonds – and this is not far-fetched, since libraries
have been written to prove the opposite – then, to the powers that
be, so much the worse for Negroes and Chinese. Our proof
accomplishes nothing. The white man’s ideas about his racial
superiority are rooted deeply in the social system; and it can be
corrected only by overthrowing the system itself.
Within such an approach as that outlined by Cox, we see clearly that
the very notion of ‘race’ itself – in terms of what we think race
signifies – is a by-product of a total social system. Within such a
reality, the only way to get rid of these ideas around race, and the
effects of racialization, is therefore to completely overthrow the social
system. This is the ethos embodied in Cox’s (1959: xxxviii; emphasis
added) claim that the ‘“master race” ideology and fascism, however,
are social attributes of a particular social system […] The master-
race idea and fascism can be purged from the social system only by
a change in the system itself.’
This view of race – whereby race is a product and legitimized force
of racism – is shared by the racialized social system approach. As
Bonilla-Silva (2015: 73) clarifies, race ought to be understood as an
‘epiphenomenon of a system of racial domination’. Rather than
searching for an essentialist conception of race as a static ‘thing’,
therefore, scholars such as Cox and Bonilla-Silva have instead
focused on the social practices, arrangements and processes that
produce and reproduce race and racial inequality. For Cox, this
pushed him toward an analysis of the racial system; for Bonilla-Silva,
this pushed him towards the study of the racialized social system.
Defining the racialized social system: from ‘the
state’ to ‘the structure’
When Bonilla-Silva (1997) sketched out the racialized social system
approach, he was attempting not to analyse a system within society,
but to analyse society in its totality. As Bonilla-Silva (1997: 469;
emphasis added) stated, racialized social systems refer to ‘societies
in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are
partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or
races’. In a similar spirit, Bonilla-Silva (1997: 474; emphasis added)
claims that ‘racialized social systems are societies that allocate
differential economic, political, social, and even psychological
rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially
constructed. After a society becomes racialized, a set of social
relations and practices based on racial distinctions develops at all
societal levels.’
I do not see it to be too beneficial to simply have a list of how such
racial structuring works across various racialized social systems. It is
sufficient to say that through this approach, when we are talking
about ‘racism’ we are not simply talking about bigoted politicians,
prejudiced teachers or ‘bad apples’ in the police force; we are
instead talking about dynamics such as (to name a few) the fact that
Black and Brown Brits are disproportionately represented in poverty
and underemployment,2 that people of colour in the US are
disproportionately exposed to air pollution,3 that lighter skin still
carries a higher symbolic and economic wage in countries across
Latin America, Africa and Asia,4 or that indigenous people in New
Zealand are subject to disproportionate incarceration and education
exclusion.5
The racialized social system approach, therefore, breaks free from
the view that ‘race’ only influences specific areas of society, and
instead argues that it influences the totality of society’s structure. In
this ‘omnipresent’ approach to racialization, the racialized social
system approach therefore differs both from other iterations of CRT
and from other sociological theories of racism.
Earlier iterations of CRT, as highlighted in the previous chapter, very
much focused their attention on specific institutions within the social
structure – particularly the education and legal systems. By contrast,
within the racialized social system approach, the education and legal
systems are, precisely, just that: two organizations within a larger set
of racialized social relations. The study of these organizations is
essential for understanding racial inequality, but the racialized social
system approach reminds us that at the end of the day, these are
just two organizations, closely aligned with the actions of the state (if
not fully within the state’s remit), through which larger schemes of
racial practices, ideologies, representations and grammars are
articulated. Earlier CRT may have been able to show how, for
instance, many inner-city schools remained racially segregated post-
Brown v. Board of Education because of phenomena like white flight
to the suburbs, and how the legal definition of discrimination allowed
for such segregation to be admissible; but only analysing the
education or legal system does not necessarily explain why whites
wanted to flee to the suburbs, why whites constructed and
reproduced a whole interaction order based on diminishing face-to-
face contact with other racialized people, and why they constructed
the racial ideologies they did to naturalize this inequality as simply
the way things are. In order to answer such questions, the racialized
social system approach therefore incorporates, but also goes
beyond, the focus on largely state-sponsored institutions.
Indeed, in turning away from the state as a primary locus of analysis,
the racialized social system approach also distances itself from other
sociological theories of race which do centre the state in their
analysis – such as racial formation theory. Popularized by Omi and
Winant’s (2015) prodigious scholarship, racial formation theory
analyses the practices of the racial state, which these scholars
declare plays ‘a crucial part in racialization, the extension of racial
meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social
practice or group’ (Omi and Winant 2015: 142). In their analysis of
the racial state, Omi and Winant thus write that the racial state is
‘increasingly the preeminent site of racial conflict’, whereby the state
both secures and maintains the racial equilibrium.6 Drawing on the
work of Gramsci, Omi and Winant thus conceptualize the US racial
state as moving from a period of racial dictatorship to a period of
racial democracy, where the state now maintains hegemonic power
over racialized minorities through absorbing, and consequently
insulating itself from, radical demands for racial reform.
It is useful here to take a step back and question how we can
compare and contrast theories. This comparing and contrasting does
not have to be a process of hierarchical organizing. Theories can be
understood as maps7. Like maps, different theories can be more or
less useful at particular moments, to achieve particular things. If one
were to come to London and wished to travel around via the
underground/subway, then they might want a map of the
underground routes. However, if they wanted to travel around via a
car, they might prefer a map of the roads. Perhaps they would like to
walk around and see the sights – in which case a map of the
walkways and main attractions would be appropriate. In each of
these cases, it is not the case that any of the maps are ‘more true’,
but they simply allow for different things to be known in a way that is
more or less practical depending on the person’s objectives.
In this vein of thought, it is useful to not think that the racialized
social system approach and racial formation theory are necessarily
at odds with one another.8 Rather, it is perhaps more apt to think
about them as different maps, which are trying to do different things.
Perhaps if we were interested exclusively in the relationship between
state practices, institutions and racialization, then we would find
racial formation theory most appropriate. However, should we wish
to extend our analysis beyond the state, then we might find the
racialized social system approach more use. If we were, for instance,
interested in the practices of non-state organizations such as the
media, social clubs, sports, NGOs, private sector organizations and
so on, the role they play in maintaining the racial order, and even
how they connect with the state to reproduce racial inequality, or
articulate the same racial practices, ideologies and processes as the
state, then we would probably have more luck with the racialized
social system approach than with racial formation theory.
The question then turns to ‘What is the racialized social system
trying to map out?’ In the introduction I have already sketched out
that this is not an attempt to create a universal theory of everything.
However, in this chapter we have said that this approach goes
beyond a focus on state institutions, and indeed, beyond a state-
centred focus in general. For this reason, I think it is apt to envisage
the racialized social system approach as an interpretation of social
space.
Reflections on social space
While the concept of social space may derive from the sociology of
Pierre Bourdieu, it offers a useful frame in which to discuss the
racialized social system approach. To Bourdieu (1998: 32), social
space is, simply, social reality – as he says, ‘all societies appear as
social spaces’. A central point here is that social space is
characterized by various hierarchies which have been made into
existence, and that social space itself is defined by these various
emergent hierarchies. As one might expect, Bourdieu (1998: 6) goes
down the route of talking about hierarchies in social space through
the lens of capital: ‘Social space is constructed in such a way that
agents or groups are distributed in it according to their position in
statistical distributions based on the two principles of differentiation
which [...] are undoubtedly the most efficient: economic capital and
cultural capital.’
We can still go along with the central theme of social space even if
we don’t necessarily want to embrace Bourdieu’s theory of capital(s).
At the heart of Bourdieu’s (1996: 12) theory is that social space is
itself defined in terms of the unequal distribution of resources across
various socially constructed hierarchies, and that to this extent,
social space:
is defined by the mutual exclusion (or distinction) of positions
which constitute it, that is, as a structure of juxtaposition of social
positions. Social agents […] are situated in a location in social
space which can be characterized by its position relative to other
locations (as standing above, below or in between them) and by
the distance which separates them.
At a base level, therefore, Bourdieu’s theory of social space
resonates quite clearly with Bonilla-Silva’s notion of racialized social
systems as ‘societies that allocate differential economic, political,
social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines’.
Through this reading, when Bonilla-Silva talks about such unequal
distribution of ‘rewards’ across racial lines, he is essentially offering
us an analysis of social space: he is showing how ‘race’ becomes a
central marker in social space used to produce and justify the
unequal distribution of societal resources. In other words, Bourdieu
and Bonilla-Silva are making the same point: inequality is built into
the game. Just as social space is defined in terms of the inequalities
(i.e. hierarchies) which it is constituted by, the racialized social
system does not exist without a racial hierarchy. However, it is not
only on this principle that the racialized social system approach
synergizes with Bourdieu’s theory. We can look at three more
convergences by focusing on the following key premises of social
space: that social space is relational, involving ongoing contestations
over the social order, characterized by groups who have different
interests in maintaining or challenging the status quo.
The racial and the relational
Part of the reason why Bourdieu theorized social space was to move
social theorists beyond a substantialist view of the world where
various categorizations – such as race, sexuality, class and gender –
were taken to be essentialist properties that simply ‘belonged’ to
people; hence Bourdieu’s (1990) catchphrase ‘the real is relational’.
By a similar logic, the racialized social system approach adopts this
relational constructionist understanding of ‘race’. Here, ‘races are not
“things” but relations’ – that is, ‘the content of race, its materiality,
and the interests of racialized actors, can only “be recognized in the
realm of racial relations and positions”’.9
Much has been written on the social construction of race, so for the
scope of this chapter I will just remark on what it means to think of
‘race’ as being relational (or more appropriately, what it means to talk
about racialization as a relational process). In particular, I want to
highlight two ways that ‘the racial is relational’: firstly, in terms of how
the meanings with which racialized categories are imbued are
relational to each other, and secondly, how the meanings of ‘race’
are also relational to specific developments of different racialized
social systems.

The race for meaning

The way ‘race’ has been constructed means that no racialized
category has any meaning in isolation – like ‘up’ and ‘down’ or ‘hot’
and ‘cold’, racialized categories only make sense in relation to one
another. This relational nature of race has been summarized in
copious amounts of scholarship, such as in Du Bois’ (2008[1920]:
308) remark on racialization that ‘Everything great, good, efficient,
fair and honorable is “white”. Everything mean, bad, blundering,
cheating and dishonorable is “yellow”, brown and black.’ Captured in
Du Bois’ comment is a recognition that what it means to be racialized
as white is diametrically opposed to what it means to be racialized
otherwise. This is always how racialization has worked: the only
people who have actually racialized themselves are those who are
white; every other racialized group had this subject of categorization
enforced onto them.10
This uneven process of racialization has its roots in colonialism,
empire and enslavement, starting in the late 1400s, whereupon ‘the
logic and practice of race was used to justify [and produce]
colonization, land dispossession, genocide, and extreme labor
exploitation’.11 When Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492,
for example, the racialization of indigenous people was inherently
formed via a relational comparison between the ‘civilized’ Christian
and the savage other. As Grosfoguel (2013: 81) highlights, the
indigenous were defined as ‘people without religion’, which, at that
time, was synonymous with ‘people without souls’. Through such a
relational racializing – of the civilized, European, Christian with a
soul compared to the savage, indigenous, non-religious with no
souls – we see how, through the concept of race in colonialism, the
indigenous became ‘expelled from the realm of the human’.
Importantly, this relational, religious, racialization had implications, as
Grosfoguel reminds us:12 ‘In 16th century Christian imaginary, this
debate had important implications. If “Indians” did not have a soul,
then it is justified in the eyes of God to enslave them and treat them
as animals in the labor process.’13
As historians of race have highlighted, particularly through the
emergence of European enlightenment and the scientific revolution,
this idea of race shifted from being essentially theological to being
biological – but the relationality remained.14 Thus, scientific theories
of race emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way
to supposedly prove that the world was populated by biologically
distinct groups of people that we could refer to as ‘races’. Of course,
these categorizations of ‘race’ were never purely descriptive, and
such biological theories were always legitimizing methods for racial
hierarchization. When Georges Cuvier, for instance, used
mechanisms such as measurement of skin tone and skull shape to
decide there were three races in the world – white, yellow and Black
– this was not just a descriptive statement, but a belief that these
supposed biological characteristics mapped neatly onto a relational
hierarchy whereby whites had ‘gained dominion over the world and
made the most rapid progress in the sciences, while the Negroes are
still sunken in slavery and the pleasures of the senses’.15 Similarly,
when Charles Darwin argued that we could divide the world into
distinct races all at varying stages of evolution, this again was used
to legitimize the relational racialization of the civilized European and
the savage other; as he states himself:16 ‘The belief that there exists
in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the
development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the
comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races.’
Even as we moved into the post-war era of racialization, where
organizations such as UNESCO had condemned scientific theories
of race,17 racialization remained a relational process which defined
and contrasted the superior characteristics of whiteness with
racialized others. Culturalist interpretations of race, for instance,
have contrasted the progressive, modern nature of whiteness to, for
instance, the pre-modern (or anti-modern) Muslim ‘race’,18 the
indoctrinated, sly Chinese,19 the ‘rapists, murderers, and thugs’ from
Mexico20 and the aggressive and threatening Black people.21

Relating ‘race’ to place

Nevertheless, when we are talking about race being relational, we
are also talking about how race achieves meaning in relation to the
specific racialized social system from which it emerges. While race
was, and continues to be, a global phenomenon – a mechanism of
categorizing the total world system – it also emerges from
geopolitically specific regions and geopolitically specific racialized
social systems. When scholars thus talk about the ‘dynamic’ and
‘shifting’ nature of race and racialization (e.g. saying someone is
‘without religion’ is unlikely to be a persuasive way of racializing
people today, while it was so in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries),
they are referring to how the meanings of race are malleable across
not just time but also space.
Take, for instance, different mechanisms of racialization in the
colonial era. Prior to its revolution in the 1790s, Haiti – as a colony of
the French empire – had more than a hundred different racial
categories of ‘race’ which ‘organized free and enslaved people of
color hierarchically’.22 Upon its independence as a ‘Black Republic’
in 1804, the Haitian Constitution of 1805 declared that land could
only be owned by ‘Blacks and Mulattoes’; however, this definition of
‘Black’ was very different from how it was defined in, say, the US.
When Article 12 of the 1805 Haitian Constitution claimed that only
‘Blacks and Mulattoes’ could possess land, this definition of
Blackness included white women who had married ‘native’ Haitians,
and Germans and Poles who had helped fight against the French
empire. To this extent, as Adom Getachew summarizes:23
‘Blackness was reconceived as a political category that signaled
“historical or potential resistance” to slavery and colonial domination.
It was the contributions of Germans and Poles to the revolutionary
war that allowed them to become Haitian citizens and therefore
black.’
So in this period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haiti
had quite a particular scheme of racialization. At the exact same
time, we can see how if we move spatially, then ‘race’ had quite
different meanings elsewhere. Just when Haiti – with its more than
one hundred categories of ‘race’ – was about to undergo its
revolution in the late 1700s, Mexico, for instance, was regulated by a
‘castas’ regime which had over one hundred different categories of
‘race’ depending on your supposed ‘mixture’ between indigenous,
Spanish and African ‘blood’.24 Upon its independence in 1810 – not
long after Haiti’s independence – the Mexican constitution then
prohibited the use of race as a mechanism of categorization.25 In
this respect, we can stay in a similar temporal period, but travel just
under 2,000 miles between Haiti and Mexico, and see a very
different mechanism of racialization both during and ‘after’ colonial
rule. Such realities mean that when we talk about race as being
‘relational’, we are also bringing attention to how race is related to
and embedded within its own specific geopolitical region.
This relational nature of race demonstrates that race is not simply an
objective category but is something that is made and moulded
through time. Indeed, this demonstrates the overall Bourdieusian
(1996: 21) approach of thinking of categorizations in social space
‘not as something given but as something to be done’. In the
racialized social system approach, it is held that racial contestation is
one of the primary ways that race is made and ‘done’.
Contesting ‘race’ in social space
Racial contestation is described by Bonilla-Silva (2015: 75) as ‘the
crucial driving force of any racialized social system’. In this regard,
Bonilla-Silva’s comment is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s own
theorization of social space being defined as a space of contestation
and competition. To Bourdieu (1985: 734), social space is defined by
an ongoing struggle to ‘conserve or modify [social] space’ – in other
words, to reproduce (for the socially dominant) or contest (for the
subdominant) the social order with its unequal distribution of
resources. Through this understanding, the struggle within social
space – in a kind of deliberately circular reasoning – is productive of
the very symbolic classifications (and accompanying material
inequalities) that are themselves the source of the conflict; that is,
‘race’ itself can arise from the process of racial contestation.

The trap of ‘racial conflict’ in the race relations

model
Through thinking about how racial contestation is itself a process of
race-making, and how this contestation is a ‘driving force’ of the
overall social system, we see the racialized social system approach
taking a very different point of view from other theories of racial
conflict. Indeed, one of the best-known theories of racial conflict (for
better or worse) stems from Robert Park and the Chicago School’s
work on ‘race relations’ in the early twentieth century.26 Studying the
dynamics of the ‘great migration’ of Black folks from the US South to
the urban North, Park and his colleagues theorized that the racial
violence that ensued from this migration as part of an overall race
relations cycle.27 Such a race relations cycle was characterized by
contact between different ‘groups’, an emergent conflict between
said groups, followed by the ‘winners’ of the said conflict
accommodating the subdominant, and then an eventual assimilation
of the subdominant in the dominant group.28
For many reasons, this model of ‘racial conflict’ put forward by Park
has been heavily criticized. As a very brief overview, we can break
down these criticisms into the following themes.
1. Park’s theory takes ‘race’ as a given. Rather than thinking about
racialization itself as taking place on an uneven landscape, Park and
the race relations school treat race as an objective, pre-given
category. Park and Burgess (1921: 632) even state this explicitly in
claiming that: ‘The really important matter is one about which there
need be little dispute – the fact of racial differences. It is the practical
question of differences – the fundamental differences of physical
appearance, of mental habit and thought.’ Through this static
understanding of race, the race relations paradigm claims that
conflict arises when two ‘objectively different’ races come into
contact with one another, rather than analysing how conflict itself
gives rise to the construction of difference.
2. Park’s theory of race conflict is astructural. Because the race
relations paradigm lacks a critical concept of racialization, it fails to
give us a critical understanding of racial violence. Conflict between
different groups, to Park (1928a, 1928b), is simply a facet of human
nature – conflict appears between any two different groups when
they come into contact with one another. However, such an analysis
radically overlooks the imbalance in power that exists between
different racialized groups. Thus, much of Park’s (1950) writings on
the race relations cycle focused on Black Americans moving from
the rural South to urban centres in the North in the early twentieth
century. To Park (1950), the conflict that subsequently ensued
between Black and white Americans was a result not of racism itself,
but of human nature. White racial violence was explained as being
part and parcel of the ‘conflict’ stage in the cycle, where such
violence was merely explained away as a natural antipathy that a
group espouses when encountering difference; as Park and Burgess
(1921: 631) describe it, ‘a natural contrariety, repugnancy of
qualities, or incompatibility between individuals or groups which are
sufficiently differentiated […] What is most important is that it
involves an instinctive feeling of dislike, distaste, or repugnance, for
which sometimes no good reason can be given.’
In Park’s (1950) understanding, therefore, when Black people moved
to the North and were met with job discrimination, poverty,
segregation and violence, this was merely a result of a natural
antipathy. Indeed, taking Park’s (1950) work to its conclusion, such
exclusion was not the result of a one-way antipathy from whites
towards Black Americans, but rather developed from an overall
struggle between two competing groups; to Park, it takes two to
tango. Such analysis, therefore, does not take into consideration the
imbalance of power between Black and white Americans.
3. Park’s theory is, ironically, devoid of an empirical basis. While
Park’s development of the race relations paradigm was
(incorrectly29) seen to be the beginning of empirical sociology, most
of his theoretical generalizations had no basis in empirical research.
Central to Park’s theory, for instance, is that racial conflict is a natural
phenomenon that occurs between different groups. Yet, as Cox
(1944: 454) writes, by neglecting the structural process of
racialization, Park does not consider the fact that animosity between
racial groups is not a natural feature of social life, but is something
that white people themselves created through their asymmetrical
racialization of others:
He assumes that there are fundamental color antipathies between
whites, yellows, and blacks. Of course, Park does not
demonstrate this; and we might ask the question: what historical
evidence is there to show that before the white man made his
contact with peoples of color there existed race prejudice among
these peoples?
Cox’s (1944) comment that ‘Park does not demonstrate this’ thus
becomes a central problem for the race relations cycle: there is no
empirical demonstration of the theoretical abstractions. The central
premise of Park’s (1950) race relations model – that we move from
contact to conflict, accommodation and then assimilation – or the
idea that racial groups have natural antipathies to one another do not
stem from empirical research or an engagement with the extant
literature. In other words, Park rarely cites previous studies or his
own empirical research when making wide generalizations about
race relations.30

Racial contestation beyond ‘race relations’

When we are talking about racial contestation, therefore, we are
talking about something very different from what Park and his
colleagues envisaged. Rather than thinking about racial contestation
as a form of social conflict that is a facet of human nature, it is
instead envisaged in a structural manner. In this structural manner,
racial contestation is not divorced from the overall racial hierarchy,
but is instead seen as an essential medium for the reproduction (or
transformation) of the racial hierarchy itself. Thus, racial contestation
is seen as (1) a struggle between differently racialized groups over
the unequal distribution of resources across the racial hierarchy, and
(2) a struggle between differently racialized groups over the symbolic
classifications (i.e. racial categorization itself) used to justify the
unequal distribution of resources across the racial hierarchy.31 In
this respect, it is useful to think of racial contestation as being both
about reproducing (for the racially dominant) or contesting (for the
racially subdominant) the social order on the one hand, and on the
other hand about reproducing or contesting the meanings of race –
and the concept of race itself – which are integral to the current
social order.
Again, just like racialization itself, these dynamics of racial
contestation are embedded in geopolitically specific racialized social
systems. Take, for instance, Brazil and the US. In both cases, we
have seen racial contestation play out in Black Americans’ and Afro-
Brazilians’ demands for civil rights and affirmative action. Both
contestations resulted in some kind of legislative change which – at
least in principle – would more equitably distribute resources across
the racial hierarchy. In the US, for example, the civil rights movement
gave rise to legislation desegregating (in law) housing, education
and the economy. In Brazil, public higher education systems
introduced quotas for Afro-Brazilians in 2001–2, again in theory
making educational resources (and consequently, economic
resources) more equitably spread across the Brazilian social order.32
Both the US and Brazil, therefore, show clear signs of racial
contestation at the level of challenging the material distribution of
resources in the social order.
However, both Brazil and the US also see racial contestation at the
level of racial classification itself. In both nations, anti-racist activists
are acutely aware of the disproportionate police violence towards
Black people.33 Such violence is often justified by the police through
their representations of Blackness as aggressive, dangerous and in
need of discipline; this helps explain why the New York police killed
Amadou Diallo in 1999 – as he reached into his pocket to show his
wallet, the police assumed he was reaching for a gun (despite his
being unarmed). Similarly, the Brazilian police murdered the Black
dentist Flávio Ferreira Sant́Ana in 2004 as they assumed him to be a
robber, without any investigation. This phenomenon of police racial
violence in both the US and Brazil therefore feeds into the symbolic
classification scheme of the racialized social system – the very
concept of race itself, and the meanings that the racialized
categorization of ‘Blackness’ is imbued with. Further, in both cases
we therefore see the racially subdominant contesting this symbolic
classification system in their attempts to ground alternative meanings
of Blackness. In the US, for instance, the social media campaign ‘If
they gunned me down’ developed after the murder of Michael Brown
in Ferguson, Missouri. Noting that the media tended to portray Black
victims as deserving of the violence enacted upon them, the
#iftheygunnedmedown campaign on Twitter involved:34
 side-by-side photographs of individuals, mostly minorities, in
poses or settings that could be interpreted as contrastingly
positive and negative. In one photo, for example, the individual
might be seen in military clothing reading to children in a
volunteer setting. The accompanying picture might depict that
same young man with an alcoholic beverage in hand, throwing a
‘gang sign.’ The question posed by Twitter users is a poignant
one: If I were gunned down by the police, which photograph
would the media use to represent me? Would they choose one
that cast a favorable light on me, or one that was more
questionable, and how would that depiction influence public
opinion?
Such a campaign, therefore, contested the central meanings of
Blackness that had been disseminated in the racial structure. A
similar social media movement took effect in Brazil in the ‘Eu Pareço
Suspeito?’ (‘Do I look suspicious?’) campaign, started by Gildean
Silva to commemorate the young Black men and women who had
been killed by the Brazilian police.35 This campaign – distributed via
physical leaflets, but also on Facebook – involved photos of (both
killed, and those still alive) young Black Brazilians with the text ‘Eu
pareço suspeito?’ running through the picture. Similar to the
#iftheygunnedmedown movement in the US, the Eu Pareço
Suspeito? movement in Brazil therefore focused on the framings of
Blackness in the dominant imagination, and attempted to contest
and reconfigure the notions of Blackness as inherently dangerous,
criminalistic and aggressive.
Of course, in some racialized social systems, racial contestation may
involve the struggle for recognition in a scheme of racialization that
erases your existence. Take, for instance, Colombia and Mexico.
Both of these nations were key destinations to which the Spanish
empire transported enslaved people. For this reason, both nations
have large Afro-descendent populations. However, Afro-Colombians
were only recognized as a census category in 2005 after activist
groups put pressure on the state; similarly, the Mexican census only
adopted the category of Afro-Mexican in 2015. In both nations, it was
through erasing the existence of ‘Afro-Mexicans’ and ‘Afro-
Colombians’ that the material domination of such groups was
(re)produced. In Mexico, for instance, the whole concept of the
nation state is built around the logic of mestizaje – racial mixture –
the idea that the nation is composed of a mixture between
indigenous and European people.36 The so-called ‘third-root’ of the
nation was thus excluded from the modern nation’s main scheme of
racialization, and all the material inequalities that they faced – from
housing segregation to unsafe environments and economic
destitution37 – were thus not able to even be construed by the state
as a subject for social policy. In such a case, therefore, we see racial
contestation playing out at a material and symbolic level, but this
contestation is different from the Brazilian and US examples above
in the way that it involved changing the scheme of racialization to be
recognized in order to then be able to receive social policy
amelioration.
From racial contestation to racial interests: racial
realism and the wages of whiteness
Of course, if we take a step back, we can question what the fact of
racial contestation shows us. Why is racial contestation the driving
force of the racialized social system? Why do some groups contest
the very schemes of racialization they are subject to? What are the
positive outcomes of racial contestation? Why do the racially
dominant themselves contest contestation from below? These
questions, while the answers may appear to be obvious, point us to
the concept of racial interests.
The racialized social system – and social space more generally – is
characterized by struggles and contestations, very plainly, because
different groups have different interests and stakes. This is precisely
the point Bourdieu (1985) was making when he referred to the
struggles in social space being about conserving or modifying the
social order: the dominant have an interest in reproducing the social
order, while the subdominant have an interest in contesting it. As
Bonilla-Silva (2019a: 2) describes in the context of racial
hierarchization: ‘racism has a material foundation – Whites, as the
dominant race, are invested in preserving the system because they
receive tangible benefits, whereas non-Whites fight to change it. The
driver of racial history then is not stupidity, ignorance, or irrationality,
but the process of racial contestation.’ Indeed, Bonilla-Silva goes as
far as to say that racial interests are the sole reason why we still
have racialized social systems in general. Moving beyond the idea
that racism is simply a legacy of the past – or, as Gilroy38
summarizes it, ‘some ahistorical antipathy to blacks which is the
cultural legacy of empire’ – Bonilla-Silva (2015: 74) thus grounds the
study of racism in its ‘contemporary foundation’ of racial interests,
stating that:39
 Racial structures remain in place for the same reasons that other
structures do. Since actors racialized as ‘white’ – or as members
of the dominant race – receive material benefits from the racial
order, they struggle (or passively receive the manifold wages of
whiteness) to maintain their privileges. In contrast, those defined
as belonging to the subordinate race or races struggle to change
the status quo (or become resigned to their position). Therein lies
the secret of racial structures and racial inequality the world over.
They exist because they benefit members of the dominant race.
In the racialized social system approach, therefore, racial interests
are useful as a concept because they help us to signal how ‘whites
form a social collectivity […] and that, as such, they develop a racial
interest to preserve the racial status quo’.40 Rather than alternative
paradigms in the sociology of race, such as Joe Feagin’s systemic
racism theory, which place emphasis on the actions of elite whites in
reproducing racism, the racialized social system approach thus
analyses whites as a social collectivity ‘for itself’.41 I want to
therefore explore this CRT notion of racial interests through two
particular dynamics: racial realism, and the wages of whiteness.

Racial realism or racial progress?

The concept of racial realism allows us to connect the racialized
social system approach with the legal-studies iteration of CRT.
Coined by Derrick Bell, ‘racial realism’ was a concept invoked to
show how whites – as the racially dominant – only make
concessions when it is in their interests to do so.42 Bell (1980: 523)
thus argues that ‘the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will
be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of
whites’, and consequently, there emerges the view that ‘racial
progress is sporadic and that people of color are doomed to
experience only infrequent peaks followed by regressions’.43
Indeed, as recounted in the previous chapter, one reason that CRT
came about in the 1980s was the realization that the promise of
racial progress offered in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s had
not led to any material progress for Black Americans.44 Bell himself
articulated the concept of racial realism when thinking directly about
the Brown v. Board legislation that supposedly desegregated
American education. Central to Bell’s argument was that
desegregation of education – at that particular conjuncture in the
1960s – served the interests of whites: he argues it allowed them to
maintain an international picture of the US as a leader of world
democracy, it enabled them to placate those Black Americans who
had fought in the war only to be discriminated against by the people
they protected, and it enabled the South to rapidly industrialize.45
Again, this reality of racial realism comes back to adopting a
structural approach to racism. When we think about moments that
many herald as being markers of racial progress in the US – such as
the era of reconstruction of 1865–77, or the civil rights legislation of
the 1960s – all of these moments happened in a context where
whites were the racially dominant group in the structural racial
hierarchy. This meant that ‘whites retain[ed] control during policy
transitions (including control of property, law, taxes, corporations,
philanthropy, and educational institutions)’ and consequently that
they could construct the so-called policies of racial progress in a way
that did not amount to meaningful social change.46 In the
reconstruction era, for instance, while enslavement was abolished in
the US South, the previous slave holders were richly compensated,
while the land given to Black Southerners was quickly taken away by
the state.47 Similarly, as Du Bois remarks on this era, laws such as
‘Black codes’ became institutionalized across the US South, where
Black folks could be incarcerated for a range of ‘offences’ from not
being able to provide proof of income for the coming year, through to
sexual intercourse with whites, breach of employment contract,
being drunk, possessing a firearm, or even in some cases simply
questioning a white person.48 Rather than being an era of progress
that afforded Black folks full citizenship, the reconstruction period
reconfigured the already extant practices of racial hierarchy.
Importantly, this element of racial realism is typical not just of the
American racialized social system, but of racialized social systems in
general. In South Africa, for instance, the end of Apartheid in 1994
may be construed as a key moment of racial progress. However, the
fact of the matter is that post-1994, Black South Africans, relative to
whites, have been disproportionately represented in poverty and low-
income jobs, while white South Africans have increased their
representation in the ‘elite’ economic positions.49 Elsewhere, in
Britain, for instance, anti-racist legislation has amounted to very little.
Britain passed race relations acts in 1965, 1968 and 1976, all of
which were to effectively outlaw discrimination in hiring, housing and
public services.50 However, rather than being a benign action of the
state, each of these anti-discrimination policies was directly matched
with immigration acts which aimed to restrict the migration of Black
and Brown people into Britain. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants
Act imposed increasing restrictions on who from the Commonwealth
could migrate to Britain – and indeed, became the first legislation to
convert such people from the Commonwealth from British citizens
into migrants – while the 1981 British Nationality Act made it further
difficult for Commonwealth citizens-turned-migrants to have
naturalized British citizenship.51 Moments of racial progress in
Britain, therefore, were more moments of restriction on how many
people of colour were actually allowed in the nation to begin with.
Thus, on the one hand it is useful to think about racial interests
through the prism of racial realism. Racial realism highlights both
how the dominant racial group maintains an interest in reproducing
their position, and consequently how, due to the structural position of
the dominant racial group, their interests carry a weight of power that
often means that anti-racist concessions still work in their favour.
However, on the other hand this discussion of racial realism has
largely focused on elites: social policy makers, those making
decisions at the top of the state and so on. The reality is that racial
interests are never just about the interests of elite members of the
dominant racial group. Indeed, the reason why Britain restricted
Black and Brown immigration was very much to appease white
workers who were concerned that the anti-racist legislation would
worsen their own material circumstances;52 similarly, the Black
codes of the US South enabled white workers to maintain economic
status over Black workers,53 and the state’s decision to only offer
equal opportunities legislation in the 1960s – rather than provide
equal outcomes – was itself based on a need to placate white
workers who ‘relied, as had generations before them, on the
expectation that white elites would maintain lower-class whites in a
societal status superior to that designated for blacks’.54 In order to
fully comprehend these binding interests, and indeed, the
consequent construction of whites ‘as a social collectivity’, we need
to appreciate how racial interests relate to the wages of whiteness.

Maintaining an interest in whiteness

As we have seen, one of the central premises of the racialized social
system approach is that the dominant racial group (whites) in the
social system receives both material and psychological benefits. 55
Through focusing on these benefits to being racialized as white,
scholars – starting with Du Bois – have found it useful to conceive of
the ‘wages of whiteness’.
When Du Bois was talking about the wages of whiteness, he was
focusing more on the psychological benefits bestowed upon actors
racialized as white, and how this psychological renumeration
reproduced the material racial hierarchy. Thus, in Black
Reconstruction, Du Bois56 commented on how in the post-
emancipation era:
instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical
fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square
across the economic layers [...] and this split depended not simply
on economic exploitation but on a racial folk-lore grounded on
centuries of instinct, habit and thought and implemented by the
conditioned reflex of visible color.
Thus, as Du Bois argues, while both white and Black workers were
exploited in the name of capitalism, the white workers at least had
bestowed on them a sense of superiority that derived from the
centuries of ‘racial folk-lore’. This superiority of the white working
class thus derived not solely from their economic position relative to
Black workers, but instead from a symbolic classification which
enabled them to think ‘Yes we are poor, but at least we are not
Black!’ Indeed, Du Bois argues this psychological ‘horizontal conflict
of classes through the vertical integration of race’57 was also the
logic that underlined Jim Crow segregation. As he wrote in ‘Georgia:
Invisible empire state’,58 segregation was primarily about appeasing
poor whites with a sense of entitlement and superiority over Black
Americans.
However, it is precisely in this Du Boisian analysis that we see a
connection between the psychological wage of whiteness and the
material racial structure. For instance, in the case of the post-
emancipation US and Jim Crow which Du Bois talks about, it was
providing white workers with a psychological superiority that
prevented meaningful coalitions to be formed between Black and
white workers – thus reproducing the racialized material economic
relations. As authors such as David Roediger (2007[1991]) and
George Lipsitz (1995) have pointed out, therefore, the ‘wages of
whiteness’ are fundamentally about the relationship between
symbolic racialization – which affords whites a sense of racial
superiority – and material racial inequality.
It was precisely this relation between racialization and material
inequality that scholars such as Ambalavaner Sivanandan stressed
in their analysis of the wages of whiteness in the British context. As
Sivanandan (1977) argued, the sense of superiority over Black and
Brown folks that even white workers adopted was crucial in
maintaining the material structure of Britain’s post-war economy,
which relied on the exploitation of those racialized downwards. Thus,
rather than forming coalitions with Black and Brown workers, white
trade unionists wanted to maintain their symbolic superiority over
such people and bargained with the state and industrialists to limit
the Black proportion of labour in their jobs to 5 per cent, and have a
‘last in, first out’ for Black workers.59 Such examples show how what
appears to be a psychological resource – a sense of superiority – is
indeed inherently connected to reproducing material relations, and
thus why Sivanandan (1977: 339) claims that racism:
 relegates [white workers’] black comrades to the bottom of
society. In the event, they come to constitute a class apart, an
under-class: the sub-proletariat. And the common denominator of
capitalist oppression is not sufficient to bind them together in
common purpose [and the white worker is therefore] a party to his
(i.e. the black worker’s) oppression. He too benefits from the
exploitation of the black man, however indirectly, and tends to
hold the black worker to areas of work which he himself does not
wish to do, and from areas of work to which he himself aspires,
irrespective of skill.
Before concluding this chapter, it is worth anticipating the likely
response that critics may have to this section on racial interests.
Concepts like the wages of whiteness – or, indeed, the very concept
of whiteness itself – are often met with the response that they
homogenize a variety of different social groups with varying degrees
of privilege.60 In some corners, therefore, the concept of the ‘wages
of whiteness’ has been criticized for portraying all white people as
unanimous oppressors in a way that overlooks their own sets of
material disadvantages – along the lines of class, gender, sexuality
and so on.61 One response to such critiques is seen in the growing
research agenda to map out the different ‘types’ of whiteness, as we
have seen in attempts by Matthew Jacobson,62 Amanda Lewis63
and Barnor Hesse.64
However, rather than going down the route of analysing all of these
white diversities, the racialized social system approach sticks to its
original premise that whites form a social collectivity with an interest
in reproducing their social position. Arguing this point does not
necessitate flattening out any differences between white people, and
neither does it necessitate a reality where all whites are racially
bigoted. Indeed, as we have already covered in our discussion of
intersectionality – a tool of analysis Crenshaw saw as being inherent
to the development of CRT – to analyse ‘race’ as a singular social
phenomenon is thoroughly misguided. Rather, as per CRT’s status
as a practical social theory, talking of whites as a social collectivity is
based on, and makes contributions to, the following areas of social
analysis:

1. Historical analysis. The claim that whites form a social

collectivity was not simply made by armchair theorizations.
Rather, it derives from the study of the history of racialization
and racism across time and space. The above examples of
post-emancipation and Jim Crow US, or post-war Britain, are
just two historical examples of the wages of whiteness in
practice; but a critical race theorist could just as well point to
examples such as (to name a few) white workers and elites both
vehemently supporting ‘White Australia Rules’ in the early
twentieth century to restrict immigration from the surrounding
‘uncivilized’ races,65 white elites striving for white farmers to
keep their land from reallocation in post-Apartheid South
Africa,66 or white workers across Europe in the twenty-first
century stigmatizing and blaming Black and Brown migrants for
their own economic troubles, rather than the state and capitalist
class.67
2. Political sociological analysis. The claim that whites form a
social collectivity can also be envisaged as being about the
potential of white mobilization in particular political conjunctures.
Akin to Stuart Hall’s analysis of articulation, this CRT approach
to the wages of whiteness is emphasizing that by virtue of being
racialized as white, at certain historical moments, the diversities
that separate those racialized as white can be trumped in order
to achieve various socio-political ends. This is the kind of logic
we see in, for instance, early suffragette movements across the
US and Europe where white women sought equality with the
world of white masculinity in a way that excluded Black women
and women of colour,68 in political campaigns like Powellist
Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 1980s,69, or, more recently,
in the Trump and Brexit elections of 2016.70 In this reading, the
wages of whiteness can be seen as a potential state of affairs
rather than a static depiction of racialization.
3. Social theoretical analysis. Lastly, by virtue of the two previous
points, the concept of the wages of whiteness is simply an
explanatory claim about social reality, which derives from
empirical research of the history of racialization and political
conjunctures. As highlighted previously, practical social
theorizing derives from the ethics that ‘theory properly
conceived should not be severed from the research work that
nourishes it and which it continually guides and structures’.71
The concept of the wages of whiteness is simply reflecting this
premise. Empirical research shows that the concept is a
convincing way of thinking about social reality, and it therefore
becomes a useful one to add to the CRT repertoire in its
analysis of social space. Through this reading, ‘the wages of
whiteness’ is a hypothesis that needs to be constantly put to the
trial of research.
From racial interests back to racism
Racialized social systems therefore seem to offer us a kind of
contradictory logic. On the one hand, they are characterized by
contestations between different (relationally constructed) racialized
groups over symbolic and material resources. This picture of
ongoing struggles makes it appear as though racialized social
systems are dynamic. However, on the other hand, we have a
recognition that by virtue of the racialized social system itself being a
hierarchical space, these differently racialized groups therefore have
differing interests to either reproduce or transform the social order.
Given that whites are at the top of the racial hierarchy, their shared
interests tend to be able to outmanoeuvre any contestations, and
thus – as per the concept of racial realism – we tend to get stable
structural ‘patterns amidst relatively superficial changes’.72 In the
next chapter, we turn our attention to racialized ideologies and
emotions, to further tease out how racialized social systems are able
to maintain their social order and equilibrium even in the face of
contestations.
Notes
1 See Baert and Carreira da Silva 2009.
2 Meghji 2021.
3 Pulido 2017.
4 Gordon 2013.
5 Webb 2017.
6 See Jung and Kwon 2013.
7 Here, I am borrowing from the analogy provided by Julian Go
2020.
8 Indeed, eminent scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins have even
labelled racial formation theory as an example of CRT (P. H.
Collins 2019).
9 Bonilla-Silva 1999: 901.
10 See Fanon 1963.
11 Bonilla-Silva 2019b: 1777.
12 Grosfoguel 2013: 82.
13 Of course, given that ‘race’ is dynamic, not static, it is worth
noting that while indigenous people were initially thought to have
no souls by the Spanish crown, this view was later revised, in the
1500s. In this revision, indigenous people were thought to be
capable of salvation through conversion, whereas those racialized
as Black were the non-peoples. See Maldonado-Torres 2010.
14 See Banton and Harwood 1975.
15 Quoted in Coleman 1964: 166.
16 Quoted in Carter 1898: 554.
17 Of course, scientific theories of race do continue to flourish, if not
linger beneath discourses of race. In organizations such as sport,
for instance, Black people are still described and analysed in
terms of their physical characteristics, while mechanisms such as
IQ tests and BMI measures – both with roots in scientific racism –
continue to be commonplace.
18 Meer 2013.
19 Yeh 2020.
20 Schaefer 2019.
21 Alexander 2012.
22 Getachew 2016: 835.
23 Ibid.
24 See Sue 2013.
25 Sue 2010, 2013.
26 See Meghji 2021.
27 Park 1950.
28 Ibid.
29 I say ‘incorrectly’ because it has been pointed out that the Atlanta
Sociological Laboratory – co-founded by Du Bois – was doing
empirical sociology decades before the Chicago School (see
Wright 2016).
30 For evidence supporting this criticism, see Park 1914, 1928a,
1928b; Park and Burgess 1921.
31 See Bonilla-Silva 1997, 2015, 2017, 2020; Mueller 2020; Roux
2014; Vargas 2014.
32 See Telles and Paixão 2013.
33 On Brazil, see Smith 2018; Vargas and Alves 2010. On the US,
see Alexander 2012; Crenshaw et al. 2015; Gilbert and Ray 2016.
34 Jackson 2016: 316.
35 See Gilliam 2015.
36 See Moreno Figueroa 2010.
37 Lewis 2012.
38 Gilroy 1987: 27.
39 Bonilla-Silva 2017: 15 (emphasis added).
40 Bonilla-Silva 2015: 75. Bonilla-Silva describes this as the ‘most
controversial’ element of this theory.
41 On systemic racism theory, see Feagin 2006; Feagin and Elias
2013.
42 See Bell 1992.
43 Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 154.
44 Crenshaw 1988.
45 Bell 1995a.
46 Seamster and Ray 2018: 327.
47 Du Bois 2014[1935].
48 See Davis 2006; Du Bois 2014[1935].
49 See Meghji 2017.
50 See Solomos 2003.
51 See Bhambra 2017; Mason 2000.
52 Sivanandan 1976.
53 Du Bois 2014[1935].
54 Bell 1995b: 23.
55 Bonilla-Silva 1997.
56 Du Bois 2014[1935]: 205.
57 Sivanandan 1976: 350.
58 Du Bois 1924.
59 See Fryer 1984.
60 Nayak 2007.
61 Cole 2017.
62 Jacobson 1999.
63 Lewis 2004.
64 Hesse 2007.
65 Hage 2002.
66 Lange 2018.
67 Virdee 2014.
68 Ferber 2007.
69 Hall 2017.
70 Meghji 2020b.
71 Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 30.
72 Ray and Seamster 2016: 1364.
2
Racial Ideologies and Racialized
Emotions: Seeing, Thinking and
Feeling Race
Thus far this book has been sketching out what it means from a CRT
perspective to see racism and racialization as being fundamentally
structural and systemic. However, it would be imprudent to suppose
that just because CRT offers an account of structural racism it is
itself a theoretical paradigm akin to structuralism. Rather, CRT –
through the racialized social system approach – offers a framework
which links the macro structure of racial hierarchy to the micro
workings of everyday life, emotions and perceptions. In this chapter,
I therefore want to focus on the concepts of racial ideologies and
racialized emotions to counter claims that ‘CRT lacks […] a structural
dimension which seeks to bridge agency and social structure.’1
Racial ideologies: from deception to perception
Theorizations of ideology have come a long way since Karl Marx’s
evocation of ‘false consciousness’.2 According to this classical
Marxist model, ideology was often a means of the ruling class
maintaining the social order through deception (or what Hall called
‘class propaganda’).3 Through this understanding, bourgeois
ideology meant that workers tended to be unaware of their
exploitative labour relations, simply accepting the state of affairs as
‘the way things are’, with institutions such as religion4 and the
cultural industries5 reproducing this mis/non-recognition of class
exploitation.
On the whole, the racialized social system approach moves quite far
away from this classical Marxist understanding of ideology.
Nevertheless, there is an overlap between the two frameworks in
terms of their understanding of where ideology comes from. While
Marx is known for the saying that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling ideas’,6 Bonilla-Silva (2017: 15) himself
engaged with this same text (Marx and Engels’ German Ideology) in
claiming that: ‘the frameworks of the dominant race tend to become
the master frameworks upon which all racial actors ground (for or
against) their ideological positions. Why? Because as Marx pointed
out in The German Ideology, “the ruling material force of society, is
at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.’ Thus, one could say
there is a similarity between classical Marxism and the racialized
social system approach in that both see ideology as being generated
in such a way that it benefits the dominant social group. However, in
terms of how the two approaches actually define ideology, and
indeed, how they examine the articulation of ideology, the two differ.
Indeed, the racialized social system approach seems to go down the
route of theorizing ideology in a similar way to Stuart Hall’s
understanding of the same concept.
Central to the racialized social system approach is that racial
ideology is concerned with perception more than with deception.
Through this lens, racial ideology is akin to a conceptual scheme
which produces and mobilizes consciousness rather than being an
opaque card which prevents reality from being ‘known’. It is for this
reason that, as we have previously seen, Bonilla-Silva (2017: 15)
defines racial ideology as ‘the racially based frameworks used by
actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge
(subordinate race or races) the racial status quo’. Expanding on this
preliminary definition, Ashley (‘Woody’) Doane (2017: 977) thus
refers to racial ideologies as ‘an ever-changing collection of
components that include frames, narratives, symbols, stereotypes,
discursive styles, and a particular vocabulary’.
Through thinking of ideology as a constellated framework with
component parts – a precursor rather than a barricade to knowledge
– we can see how ideology is much more practical and malleable
than suggested by the classical Marxist account. As Stuart Hall
regularly noted, such a classical Marxist model of ideology as false
consciousness imposes a rigid divide between members of the
oppressed who have ‘seen’ true reality and those ‘dupes’ who live in
a bliss of ignorance. As Hall (2021: 141) clarifies:
Take, for example, the extremely tricky ground of the ‘distortions’
of ideology, and the question of ‘false consciousness’ […]
‘Distortions’ opens immediately the question as to why some
people – those living their relation to their conditions of existence
through the categories of a distorted ideology – cannot recognise
that it is distorted, while we, with our superior wisdom, or armed
with properly formed concepts, can […] They also entail a peculiar
view of the formation of alternative forms of consciousness.
Presumably, they arise as scales fall from people’s eyes or as
they wake up, as if from a dream, and, all at once, see the light,
glance directly through the transparency of things immediately to
their essential truth, their concealed structural processes. This is
an account of the development of working-class consciousness
founded on the rather surprising model of St Paul and the
Damascus Road.
In contrast to this classical position, Hall (2017: 84) thus proposes
that we instead see ideologies as having ‘something true about
them’. Here, Hall is not saying that ideologies are simply the truth,
but rather that they offer narratives, frames and viewpoints which
resonate with certain social actors; from their point of view,
ideologies help social actors to understand their world(s), and
consequently come to identify elements of truth in ideology itself. To
illustrate with an example, under Thatcherism in 1980s Britain, poor
whites believed that immigrants were taking their jobs not because it
was true, but rather because they experienced rising unemployment
and insecurity, and a racial ideology of foreign invasion thus became
appealing to make sense of these experiences; the racial ideology
became a conceptual scheme for certain social actors to understand
their realities of economic destitution and marginality.7
Thinking of ideology as such a conceptual scheme, Hall (1996a: 26)
thus defines ideology simply as ‘the mental frameworks – the
languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the
systems of representation’ used to ‘make sense of, define, figure out
and render intelligible the way society works’. Furthermore, as per
Hall’s theory of articulation, such ideologies are not just abstract
frameworks, but they fundamentally shape social practice and
action; ideologies thus ‘touch [the] practical, everyday, common
sense and they “organize human masses and create the terrain on
which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle,
etc.”’ (Hall 1996b: 431, quoting Gramsci). To Hall, therefore,
ideologies work through binding social actors together around the
constitutive ideological components in a way that simultaneously
reproduces and develops the overall social order.
Following Hall’s thought, racial ideologies ought not to be construed
as ‘myths’ about race that can simply be debunked by logical
reasoning. Rather, racial ideologies encompass various styles,
frames, ideas and schemes of perception that offer a prism for the
dominant racial group to rationalize, reproduce and understand
social reality. To this extent, racial ideologies are inherently related to
the organization of the racial structure: there is no racial ideology
without a racial structure within which it can circulate and become
active, but the racial structure itself needs ideologies for its smooth
reproduction. It is in this line of thought that I want to focus on
instances of racial ideologies being expressed, starting with a
discussion of Bonilla-Silva’s work on colour-blind ideology, before
broadening out to a wider discussion of how racialized emotions
become central vehicles for ideologies to attain material reality.
Colour-blind ideology in practice
Colour-blind ideology is roughly characterized by the belief that we
have ‘transcend[ed] the disabling racial divisions of the past’.8 As a
racial ideology, colour blindness is thus an ‘interpretive matrix’
through which many people construe the social world, being a
central component in the ‘broad mental and moral frameworks […]
social groups use to make sense of the world, to decide what is right
and wrong, true or false, important or unimportant’.9 Given that
colour-blind ideology itself is predicated on the belief in the non-
existence of systemic racism, it therefore becomes a key sorting
process through which many social actors interpret and explain
processes and information – including evidence of racial inequality –
in non-racial ways. Colour blindness thus provides an epistemic
basis on which: ‘Black educational disadvantage is recast as Black
students being “unacademic” […] housing segregation (for Whites
and non-Whites alike) is recast as people gravitating towards those
“like themselves” […] and Black overrepresentation in the criminal
justice system is reinterpreted as Black criminality.’10 Colour
blindness, therefore, shows how important ideologies are for the
reproduction of structural social relations. Even when social space is
characterized by gross racial inequality – as captured in the US,
where Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of
whites11 – colour-blind ideology allows for such ‘facts’ to be
incorporated into a world view which at once dismisses the existence
of racism and consequently allows for the reproduction of the very
structural dimensions of inequality that are being denied.
Colour blindness also shows another important dimension of racial
ideology: that such ideologies can be rigidly enshrined in the very
fabric of society, but they also take on a flexible quality that is
adapted and deployed in everyday life. Take, for instance, the case
of France. Colour blindness here is embodied in the very nature of
the state, where the French Constitution’s First Article states that
France ‘ensures the equality of all citizens before the law, without
distinction of origin, race or religion’.12 However, at a practical level
this does not mean that all social actors simply believe France is
‘devoid’ of race, but rather they adapt the logic of French colour
blindness into their everyday repertoires. In his study of French
workers and security guards in a shopping centre, for instance,
Bonnet (2014) found that such actors would deliberately engage in
acts of ‘non-racism’,13 where they show a cognizance of French
colour blindness but still deploy practices and perceptions that
stigmatize racialized groups through non-racial language. For
example, security workers would refer to Arab-descent groups as
‘youths’, ‘gangs’ and ‘urban’, increasing their surveillance and
dispersal of these groups while vehemently stressing that their
actions are not racist but evidence-based policing. In such a case,
therefore, we see how colour-blind ideology seeps into everyday
practice and perception.
In Bonilla-Silva’s own examination of colour-blind ideology in the US,
he too pays attention to its everyday embodiment.14 In particular,
Bonilla-Silva analyses the process whereby actors incorporate
pieces of ‘evidence’ from their everyday experiences to – in their
eyes – ‘prove’ colour-blind ideology. Bonilla-Silva (2017: 61) refers to
this process as constructing ‘story lines’ of colour-blind ideology, as
he explains:
story lines [are] the socially shared tales that are fable-like and
incorporate a common scheme and wording. Racial story lines
are fable-like because […] they are often based on impersonal,
generic arguments with little narrative content […] What makes
these story lines ‘ideological’ is that storytellers and their
audiences share a representational world that makes these
stories seem factual. Hence, by telling and retelling these story
lines, members of a social group (in this case, the dominant race)
strengthen their collective understanding about how and why the
world is the way it is […] These racial narratives […] justify and
defend […] current racial arrangements.
One such common story line of colour blindness involves actors
realizing that certain racialized minorities have experienced upward
mobility, which leads them to confirm that minorities who are poor or
excluded face these realities due to their own fault. Such a story line
is aptly classified by Bonilla-Silva as ‘If Jews, Italians, and Irish Have
Made It, How Come Blacks Have Not?’ Another story line is
characterized as ‘I Did Not Get a Job (or a Promotion), or Was Not
Admitted to a College, Because of a Minority’, whereby the dominant
racial group (whites) construe their experiences of rejection through
the idea that minorities get preferential treatment in hiring and
education (and consequently, that to talk of racism against such
minorities is completely illogical). Just as with the aforementioned
case of the French security workers, therefore, what we see from
Bonilla-Silva’s study of white Americans is that colour-blind ideology
cannot just be thought of as some abstract set of ideas, but is rather
an ideology that gets articulated and finds practical, concrete reality
in the experiences of those who advocate it.
Activating ideologies through emotional
constellations
Of course, inside these story lines mentioned by Bonilla-Silva are
also emotional states. The ‘I Did Not Get a Job Because of a
Minority’ story, for instance, obviously entails emotions of
resentment, anger, unfairness and so on. In fact, once we adopt a
view of racial ideologies as being simultaneously embodied in macro
structures and in practical everyday lives, it becomes quite clear that
emotions are a key mechanism for bolstering and reproducing
ideologies – especially at the micro level. It is for this reason that the
racialized social system approach analyses racial ideologies and
racialized emotions in tandem with one another.
Racialized emotions can be understood as ‘the socially engendered
emotions in racialized societies’ (Bonilla-Silva 2019a: 3). Central to
the concept of racialized emotions is the idea that similarly racialized
groups ‘fashion an emotional subjectivity generally fitting of their
location in the racial order’, meaning that one’s racialized emotions
are related to, and often reproduce, one’s position in the racial
hierarchy.15 Whites, for instance, may feel justice and pride in their
position in the racial hierarchy, while the racially subordinate may
feel injustice and anger. Racialized emotions, therefore, can be
‘negative’ or ‘positive’. Whites may have negative emotions such as
fear of ‘Black thugs’ and ‘Muslim terrorists’, and indeed – as Simi et
al. (2017) show in the case of far-right radicalization – negative
emotions such as hatred often act as fundamental building blocks for
acts of racialized violence. On the contrary, however, whites may
also have ‘positive emotions’ of joy in reproducing the racial structure
(extreme examples may include lynching parties16). Rather than
simply seeing racialized emotions as being irrational impulses, or
micro mental states divorced from social structure, it is important to
see how such emotions influence the macro structure in the following
ways.
1. Firstly, racialized emotions help generate racialized group
subjectivities and interests. As scholars such as Randall Collins
(2019: 46) have shown, through feeling the same emotions groups
can generate stronger ‘solidarity and shared social identity’. This is
precisely the same for racialized emotions – in terms of both the
racially subordinate and the racially dominant. In terms of the racially
subdominant, for instance, sharing similar emotional responses to
racism can become a building block for transnational forms of anti-
racism. This was exactly the point Du Bois made in his
autobiography when he was reflecting on the connections between
the racism Black Americans faced and the racism faced by German
Jews in the 1930s. As Du Bois argues, both Black Americans and
German Jews felt like racialized outsiders in their respective nations,
and these shared emotions served as a basis for thinking about the
wider articulation of transnational white supremacy.17 In terms of the
racially dominant, sharing emotions becomes a way that whites can
bind together as a social collectivity. Again, this was a point Du Bois
(2007a[1940]) made when he discussed the ‘souls of white folk’, and
the ‘deep whiteness’ shared by this social collectivity. Du Bois was
not asserting that all whites were the same, but rather that they
shared an emotional investment in whiteness as a symbolic identity,
and thus that they articulated themselves as a social group. In
Australia, for instance, recent years have seen a burgeoning
following of the ‘It’s OK to Be White’ movement (see Sengul 2021).
This movement is composed of white Australians from a variety of
classed and gendered backgrounds, binding together around the
emotional acceptance and pride of whiteness and being white.18
2. What we see in the case of Australia, furthermore, is emotions not
just generating a social collectivity, but also serving as the basis for
transmitting racial ideologies – in this case, the ideology of colour
blindness. The reason why white Australians were claiming it was
OK to be white was because they believed others disagreed with
that fundamental claim; such whites were convinced that anti-white
discrimination was built into the social structure. This is the second
way that racialized emotions influence the macro structure: they
provide an epistemic skeleton for racial ideologies. We can approach
this through Raymond Williams’ (1977) notion of the ‘structure of
feeling’. When Williams theorized the structure of feeling, he was
essentially arguing that often we need to ‘feel’ things before we can
think them, and consequently that thinking often emerges from
feeling. Rather than theorizing emotions, therefore, as ‘stand[ing] in
the way of rationality’, it is more apt to see them as in fact being a
key component of rationality (Bonilla-Silva 2019b: 9). Consider, for
instance, Islamophobia in France – whites need to ‘feel’ Muslims as
a threat in order to think that border control is a good idea (Beaman
2021); in New Zealand, whites need to ‘feel’ and identify as New
Zealanders in order to think that indigenous people are not ‘true’
members of the nation (Kukutai and Didham 2012). From the other
perspective, when Du Bois19 declared that ‘one could not be a calm,
cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered
and starved’, he too was showing that the emotional responses to
violent racism served as a foundation for social thought. In this
regard, emotions for the racially subdominant too can act as
skeletons for ideologies which contest the racial order.
3. Of course, while Du Bois comments that one could not be calm,
cool or detached in the face of racism, we also have to recognize the
reality that different emotions are given different levels of legitimacy
and recognition within the racial structure. What Du Bois says is true,
and yet we are all too familiar with the fact that Black people’s
display of passionate emotions often does not compute well with
whites; indeed, in the US the trope of the angry Black woman has
been used to dismiss domestic abuse cases (Simmons 2020), while
the myth of the aggressive Black man has been used as a
justification for multiple acts of police violence (Hester and Gray
2018). This leads us to our third reflection on racialized emotions:
namely, there is a hierarchy of emotional rationality which helps
naturalize the racial order. Within this hierarchy, the emotions of the
racially dominant are given more legitimacy and value than the
emotions of others. Take, for instance, Britain in the 1970s, where
rising unemployment among the working class was coupled with
rising white violence towards people of colour (see Solomos 2003).
In response to this, the soon-to-be prime minister Margaret Thatcher
defended such violence by commenting that ‘people are really rather
afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a
different culture […] if there is any fear that it might be swamped
people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in’.20
Rather than appeal to the emotions of those being victimized by
violence, white people’s emotions of ‘fear’ were thus given more
prominence in political rhetoric. Similarly, consider the ‘Unite the
Right’ protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where white
supremacist groups gathered to oppose the proposed removal of the
statue of General Robert Lee.21 When Donald Trump declared that
‘You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had
people that were very fine people, on both sides’, we could see that
the emotions of those who were protesting against the monument
were valued (or at least legitimized) more than the emotions of those
who were affected by the violence of the white supremacist groups.
While some sociologists may defer the study of emotions to
psychology, focusing on racialized emotions shows us how these
micro feelings are in fact related to the macro social structure. I want
to now take a moment to reflect on a series of case studies in order
to demonstrate how racialized emotions, through relating to racial
ideologies, have significant material effects. In particular, I want to
focus on the political regimes of Trumpamerica, Brexit Britain and
Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Emotions, ideologies and political conjunctures
In 2016, we saw Donald Trump voted in as the president of the US
after a vitriolic campaign, and we saw Britain opt to leave the
European Union. Two years later, in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was voted
in as the next Brazilian president after leading a campaign which
explicitly positioned itself as being anti-‘political correctness’. These
three moments, coupled with electoral gains for far-right parties
across Europe, led to a wave of ‘populist studies’, with many
scholars assuming that we had a new, radical break with the political
past.22 However, from a CRT perspective we can see how these
‘populist’ projects were not a radical break with the past, but rather
that they emerged from racial ideologies and emotions that were
deeply entrenched in the racialized social system.
For instance, both Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the
campaign for Britain to leave the EU, deployed colour-blind ideology
that had already been circulating in the respective racialized social
systems for decades on end. In particular, both campaigns drew
upon extant ideologies that whites were becoming victims of racial
injustice in their respective nations. Such representations of whites
as racial victims only make sense through the lens colour blindness:
by arguing that we have moved ‘beyond racism’, whites are able to
claim that all racialized groups start on an equal, level playing field,
and consequently that any perceived ‘preferential’ treatment given to
racialized minorities (affirmative action, preferential hiring,
scholarships) is anti-white discrimination.
In Trump’s 2016 campaign, we see this post-racial frame of white
victimhood taking centre stage. A well-known example of this is
recounted in Hochschild’s (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land; a
book which was retrospectively labelled as being a key text for
understanding Trump’s electoral success. Focusing on Louisiana,
Hochschild (2016) examines how white people (in the working and
middle classes) were experiencing growing levels of deprivation, and
blamed these declining standards on ‘line cutters’ (queue jumpers):
Black Americans and immigrants who were receiving preferential
treatment in education and hiring. Furthermore, Hochschild shows
that such white people construed themselves as being stigmatized
through being labelled as ‘red-necks’ and ‘bigoted’. It was through
this perceived combination of material and symbolic exclusion that
white voters then construed themselves as – in Hochschild’s
language – strangers in their own land.
Such emotions of white marginality were further galvanized in
Trump’s campaign. In his electoral speeches, as Lamont et al.
(2017) show, Trump directly drew symbolic boundaries towards
lower-income white voters to make them feel valued rather than
marginalized in their own nation. Of course, this boundary work
relied on drawing sharp divisions between ‘indigenous’ white folks
and racialized outsiders. Thus, when addressing lower-income white
voters at rallies, Trump would often make reference to protecting
their jobs from foreign invasion, such as at West Bend, Wisconsin:
‘[Hillary Clinton] is proposing to print instant work permits for millions
of illegal immigrants, taking jobs directly from low-income Americans.
I will secure our border, protect our workers, and improve jobs and
wages in your community’ (quoted in Lamont et al. 2017: 169).
Trump’s campaign thus fostered an image that ‘hard-working’ white
families were being excluded in their own nation, and that his
political program could restore a feeling of valuation to these groups
(Lamont et al. 2017). Of course, this imagery of ‘indigenous’ white
America being threatened by racialized outsiders is most famously
represented in Trump’s electoral promise to ‘Build a wall’ along the
Southern US border in order to restrict immigration from Mexico.23 It
was this logic of the white ‘us’ and the racialized ‘them’ which
underlined Trump’s famous response to Clinton labelling his
supporters as ‘deplorables’, with Trump reframing them as ‘hard-
working’ patriots: ‘While my opponent slanders you as deplorable
and irredeemable, I call you hard-working American patriots who
love your country and want a better future for all of our people […]
Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in
our country.’
The post-racialism underlying Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign was
iterated in British discourses deployed in garnering voter support to
leave the EU. As Virdee and McGeever (2018) show, a central
argument deployed by the ‘Leave the EU’ campaign was that the
EU’s policy of open borders was leading to a situation where
racialized outsiders – ‘the migrants’ – were above ordinary Brits in
the material hierarchy. An example of such reasoning is captured in
this quote by Nigel Farage, a key figure in the Leave campaign:
‘Open-door migration has suppressed wages in the unskilled labour
market, meant that living standards have failed and that life has
become a lot tougher for so many in our country’ (quoted in Virdee
and McGeever 2018: 1806). Indeed, another key politician
supporting the Leave campaign – Boris Johnson (2018) – directly
invoked the concept of indigeneity when he criticized how the EU’s
policy of ‘open borders’ had marginalized British workers: ‘We also
need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the impact of 20
years of uncontrolled immigration by low-skilled, low-wage workers –
and what many see as the consequent suppression of wages and
failure to invest properly in the skills of indigenous young people’.
Similarly to Trump’s presidential campaign in the US, therefore,
Brexit was presented as a project that could redistribute value back
to the victimized, hard-working white families whose social status
had been relegated by racialized immigration. In Britain, this
narrative gained further traction after the referendum, when the
prime minister, Theresa May, in 2017 declared that Brexit was an
opportunity to build a Britain that valued residents of the (almost
exclusively white) towns that voted in high numbers to leave the EU,
thus addressing the ‘everyday injustices that ordinary working class
families feel are too often overlooked’ (May 2017). Of course, as
Shilliam (2020) points out, by using the examples of white
constituencies and towns – from Margate to Whitby – to refer to the
‘ordinary working class families’ who felt overlooked and faced daily
injustices, May simply bolstered the already ascendant post-racial
ideology that ‘ordinary’ white folks were the new Black. Indeed,
May’s quote shows how post-racialism and racialized emotions of
devaluation were not just a pretext for Brexit, but also gained
legitimacy as the political project developed.
This legitimacy of post-racialism and emotions of victimhood were
further bolstered by mainstream media and political discourse in the
aftermath of Trump’s and Brexit’s electoral success. Rather than
framing these two projects as instances of racialized nationalism,
focusing on the two projects’ significant number of (white) middle-
class supporters, or questioning why racial minorities in both nations
did not significantly vote for either project, this discourse simply gave
further credence to the idea that Trumpamerica and Brexit Britain
were driven by a need to redistribute value to the forgotten ordinary
white families and the white working class (Bhambra 2017). Thus, in
Britain there were claims that ‘Brexit voters are not thick, not racist:
just poor’ (O’Neill 2016), that ‘Brits who demand migration control
are NOT “motivated by racism”’ (Dixon 2017) and that ‘“Racial self-
interest” is not racism’ (Kaufmann 2017); and, indeed, Skelton
(2019) dedicated a book, Little Platoons, to the argument that Brexit
happened because poor white people in English towns felt excluded.
Across the pond in the US, Trump’s electoral success was described
as a ‘revolt of the masses’ (Fallows 2016), where Trump secured
victory ‘by a […] wave of support by the white working class’ who
‘were alienated, forgotten by the political establishment [and] their
status challenged by the country’s growing racial diversity’ (Jardina,
2019: 91). In both cases, the dominant discourse thus framed the
success of Brexit and Trump through the very post-racial, emotive
logic from which the two projects emerged. This is the same logic as
we see in the racial structure of Brazil in the context of Bolsonaro’s
electoral victory in 2018, albeit with a slightly different ideology.
Bolsonaro’s campaign built on an alternative racial ideology which
was dominant in Brazil’s racialized social system: the ideology of
racial democracy. This ideology holds that due to historical ‘mixture’
between the country’s different racialized groups, Brazil is either a
race-less or non-racist society (see Silva 2016). Given the strength
of this ideology, as Lamont et al. (2016: 128) clarify, even
‘denouncing racism and emphasizing racial identity [is] seen as
unpatriotic not only by the state but by society at large’. As Costa
(2016) has shown, as per our discussion of racial ideology, racial
democracy is not just a state-sanctioned perspective, but an
ideology which draws on everyday life and experiences. Thus, in
Brazil, racial democracy may be articulated at the everyday level of
what Costa terms ‘distancing moves’, whereby Brazilians may avoid
discussions of race, creating an equivalence between anti-racialism
and anti-racism.24 In this context, not only does open discussion of
race/ism thus constitute a violation of interactional morality, but, as
scholars have shown, it also means that the racially subdominant
struggle to comprehend their marginality through the lens of racism
itself. Just like any other racial ideology, therefore, racial democracy
becomes articulated at an everyday emotive and perceptive level.
It was precisely this racial ideology, which suppressed discussion
and expression of ‘race’ in Brazil, that Bolsonaro was able to both
propagate and galvanize in his election and political consolidation.
For instance, a large part of Bolsonaro’s campaign revolved around
the desire to ‘integrate’ indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians into
the nation’s culture of racial democracy, with the language of
integration directly invoked in claims such as ‘We are going to
integrate them [indigenous people] into society. Just like the army
which did a great job of this’ (Bolsonaro 2018). Bolsonaro thus
construed indigenous people as being essentially un-Brazilian, given
their failure to ‘melt’ into the racial democratic melting pot of the
nation (quoted in Marques and Rocha 2015): ‘The Indians do not
speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have
culture. They are native peoples. How did they manage to get 13%
of the national territory?’ Bolsonaro’s iteration of racial democracy
thus heavily focused on what he construed as the ‘problem’ of the
self-segregation of Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people, captured
in his repeated claims that ‘Not a centimeter will be demarcated
either as an indigenous reserve or as a quilombola.’25 Even after his
election, Bolsonaro immediately consolidated such an ideology of
racial democracy by deliberately building an administration that
sought to squash a culture of anti-racism in Brazil. This is best
signified, perhaps, by his appointment of the anti-anti-racist Sergio
Camargo as the head of the Palmares Cultural Foundation
(responsible for promoting Brazil’s Black presence), who was of the
view that ‘Black people complain because they are stupid and
misinformed’ by ‘the victim mentality of the left’ (Watson 2020).
CRT thus brings a lot to the analytical table when looking at
Trumpamerica, Brexit Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In particular,
CRT enables us to see how these projects stemmed from their
respective racialized social systems, emerging from their respective
structure’s racial ideologies and emotions. Such analysis, I argue,
offers some insights into how the racialized social system approach
seeks to link the micro and macro in its analysis.
Structures and individuals in racialized social
systems
It would perhaps be too predictable to say that the racialized social
system approach adopts a circular argument, whereby individuals
shape structures and structures also shape individuals. Rather, it is
more analytically useful to think about how critical analysis of the
racial structure necessitates analysis of racialized actors, and vice
versa. On the one hand, it is safe to say that while ‘racism has a
material foundation, humans cannot live of [sic] bread alone – that is,
race cannot exist without an emotional bond’.26 To adopt a full-blown
structuralist account of racism, consequently, would occlude those
very building blocks constitutive of the racial structure we are
claiming to be studying. Just as emotions provide the glue that sticks
disparate people together through shared interests (as we explored
in the previous chapter), they also provide the skeleton needed for
racial ideologies to become activated. Trump’s rhetoric of colour
blindness would not have been an effective ideology if it had not
connected with whites’ feelings of devaluation and non-recognition.
Similarly, Bolsonaro’s regular enunciation of racial democracy would
not have been so successful were it not for the emotional rules and
regulations that surround ‘race talk’ in a supposed racial democracy.
On the flip side, to take racialized emotions in isolation would also be
thoroughly anti-sociological. Post-racialism appealed to Trump voters
not just because they had emotions of devaluation, but also because
such ideologies fundamentally helped them to rationalize their
position in the social hierarchy. Indeed, the whole concept of racial
ideology is based on a materialist analysis of social structure: racial
ideologies inherently reproduce or contest the racial order. To this
extent, while ideologies find life at the micro level and resonate with
individual experiences (e.g. through stories that ‘I did not get a job
because they gave it to a Black person’), to analyse such ideologies
– and their emotional appeal – without analysing social structure
misses the whole point that ideas and emotions have material
effects.
The so-called micro/macro ‘problem’ is not really a problem for the
racialized social system approach as much as it is an example of the
nature of racism and racialization. To claim that racism is structural is
not to dismiss that it has micro components, and likewise to study
the macro and micro separately would be to split social reality
beyond recognizability. Such an interplay between the macro and
micro, or structure and agency, is further analysed in the racialized
social system approach’s concept of the racialized interaction order.
Notes
1 Parsons and Thompson 2017: 595.
2 See Marx and Engels 1972[1846].
3 Hall 1986.
4 See Shari’ati 1980.
5 See Horkheimer and Adorno 2002[1944].
6 Marx and Engels 1972[1846].
7 See Hall 2016.
8 Bobo 2011: 14.
9 Bonilla-Silva 2001: 62; see also Mueller 2020.
10 Meghji and Saini 2018: 673.
11 See Alexander 2012.
12 On race and French republicanism, see Beaman 2017, 2019;
Beaman and Petts 2020.
13 Lentin 2020 has expanded on the concept of non-racism in a
more systematic fashion in her book Why Race Still Matters.
14 See Bonilla-Silva 2017.
15 Bonilla-Silva 2019a: 2.
16 For an analysis of lynching parties in the US South, see Wells
2014.
17 As Du Bois quotes: ‘When I heard my German companions sing
“Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, umber Alles in der Welt
[trans. ‘Germany, Germany above all else, above all else in the
world’]” I realized that they felt something I had never felt and
perhaps never would […] I began to feel the dichotomy which all
 my life has characterized my thought: how far can love for my
oppressed race accord with love for the oppressing country? And
when these loyalties diverse, where shall my soul find refuge?’
(Du Bois 1968: 127).
18 While this movement appeals to violent white nationalist
organizations, it is also endorsed by everyday ‘non-extremists’.
19 Du Bois (2007a[1940]: 67).
20 Quoted in Natarajan (2013).
21 A key figure in the US South’s regime of enslavement. See Blout
and Burkart 2021 for a discussion of this rally from a sociological
viewpoint.
22 See Masood and Nisar 2019; see Mondon and Winter 2020 for a
discussion of the (mis)uses of populism.
23 Indeed, a few months later, in January 2018, Trump reiterated
these sentiments when calling for strict restrictions on immigration
from what he described as ‘shithole countries’ across Africa and
the Caribbean, calling instead for increased migration from
countries such as Norway (see Jardina 2019 for how this
connected to the centuries-long desire for US immigration policy
to maintain the whiteness of the nation state).
24 See also Cho 2009; Vargas 2004.
25 Seen in speeches such as one at the Hebrew Club (Bolsonaro
2017). ‘Quilombola’ here refers to Afro-Brazilian settlements.
26 Bonilla-Silva 2016: 243.
3
Theorizing the Racialized Interaction
Order
[T]he interaction [order] […] is in fact orderly, and […] this
orderliness is predicated on a large base of shared cognitive
presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained
restraints. How a given set of such understandings comes into
being historically, spreads and contracts in geographical
distribution over time, and how at any one place and time
particular individuals acquire these understandings are good
questions, but not ones I can address. (Goffman 1983: 5)
As a qualitative sociologist, I sometimes find myself in the crossfire
between those claiming ethnography is better than interviewing and
those claiming the opposite. One useful intervention from Jerolmack
and Khan (2014) was the reminder that what people say they do is
quite often different from what people actually do. This opens up the
possibility, thinking of the topic of this book, that there could be a
significant gap between racial actors’ racial ideologies and their
social practices.1 Indeed, one of the very reasons why Bonilla-Silva
invoked the concept of colour-blind ideology was to show this very
reality – where whites say one thing, but do another. For instance,
Bonilla-Silva (2017) points out that social surveys regularly show that
whites claim that they have no problem with a person of colour
moving into their neighbourhood, or that they have no problem with a
member of their family bringing a person of colour over for dinner,
and yet whites in the US remain one of the most segregated racial
groups, and most of them declare that they have no close friends of
colour. This shows a significant gap between people’s liberal ideas
on the one hand, and on the other hand their social practices which
actually reproduce the racial structure. In this chapter I want to focus
on such social, interactional practices which reproduce the racial
order, consequently engaging with Goffman’s above quandary as to
how interactions relate to social structure. To do this, I focus on the
racialized social system approach’s concept of the interaction order.
The interaction order: from Goffman to the Black
sociological tradition
The notion of an interaction order was theorized in Erving Goffman’s
1982 American Sociological Association presidential address,
referring to the routinized and idealized rules governing the domain
of face-to-face interactions. Central to Goffman’s intervention was
the idea that while the macro cannot simply be reduced to the
interactional level, there was some kind of homology or ‘loose
coupling’ between macro social organization and everyday
interactions. This is because, as Goffman clarifies,2 interactions do
not simply happen in a vacuum, but are themselves situated in wider
social relations and hierarchies. Thus, as Goffman (1983: 5;
emphasis added) comments: ‘The workings of the interaction order
can easily be viewed as the consequences of systems of enabling
conventions, in the sense of the ground rules for a game, the
provisions of a traffic code or the rules of syntax of a language.’
Part of the way that social hierarchies relate to the interaction order
is through what Goffman refers to as the distribution of interactional
rights and risks. As we will expand on in greater detail in this chapter,
the interaction order is characterized not by equally situated agents,
but by agents who relate to each other in a hierarchy; one
consequence of this is that different agents, depending on their
position in a social hierarchy, have different interactional rights. We
see this clearly, for instance, in legalized racial segregation, where
the segregated group are denied various interactional possibilities.
Furthermore, in this instance of segregation we can also question
what happens when such interactional rules are transgressed – what
happens if a segregated group start moving into areas they were
formerly barred from, as we saw with Rosa Parks’ and Claudette
Colvin’s respective refusal to give up their bus seats in Montgomery?
Well, both Parks and Colvin were arrested for their violation of their
interactional rights; one could say, therefore, that their interactions
carried with them a possible risk (i.e. of punitive measures) – a risk
that did not apply to, say, the white folks who were demanding their
bus seats. This is the second principle in action: the racialized
interaction order involves the unequal distribution of risks associated
with different interactions.
What we see in Goffman’s address, therefore, is in fact quite a
structural approach to interactions. As Goffman (1983: 6) himself
admits, if the interaction order is situated in social relations, this then
‘raises the question of policing’: who or what is responsible for
maintaining the routinized and idealized rules of interactions? How is
the unequal distribution of interactional rights and risks decided and
reproduced? If interactions are policed, how do groups with fewer
interactional rights and higher interactional risks change the
interaction order?
Interestingly, Goffman was not the first president of the American
Sociological Association (ASA) to reflect on these questions of
interactions and social organization in their presidential address.
Decades before Goffman’s intervention, Franklin Frazier – the first
Black president of the ASA – gave his 1949 presidential address,
entitled ‘Race contacts and the social structure’.3 The main premise
of Frazier’s (1949: 1) address was to show ‘how the study of race
contacts in the context of social relations […] will yield significant
results for sociology’. It was in this concept of ‘race contact’ that we
see Frazier engaging with a (yet to be named) interaction order not
only in his presidential address but also in his body of work more
broadly.4 Similarly to Goffman, but taking explicit aim at his
contemporary sociologists who were partial to studying the so-called
‘problem’ of the unassimilable Black American, Frazier (1949: 4)
points out that interactional studies are important because they show
how ‘people are likely to behave by virtue of the fact that they are
members of a certain group or are placed in a type of social
situation’ – in other words, social structure influences social action.
Frazier (1949: 5) then goes on to critique the unequal distribution of
interactional rights by commenting on segregation in the US North,
when he claims that ‘Negro communities which have emerged in
northern cities since the migrations beginning with World War I are
more segregated than the Negro communities in older southern
cities.’ Importantly, Frazier (1949: 6) clarifies that this distribution of
interactional rights follows directly from the workings of the racial
order, and that to study the interaction order (or ‘race contact’)
without incorporating a study of the wider social organization would
be profoundly incomplete:
the segregation of the Negro […] has been accomplished by the
activities of the organized real estate, commercial, and financial
interests […] Unless one includes in a study of race relations the
influence of this aspect of the social organization of the white
world, studies of racial contacts in the urban community will have
little validity.
Indeed, beyond this critique of interactional rights, Frazier also pre-
empts Goffman’s later iteration of interactional risks. Particularly,
Frazier writes about how members of the Black bourgeoisie
attempting to desegregate were met with higher levels of white
violence than members of the Black working class who remained
segregated – violating the interactional rule of segregation thus
came with its own set of interactional risks.5
What we have, therefore, in Frazier’s classical sociology is a
structural vision of interactions later theorized by Goffman. Just as
Goffman discussed an interaction order as involving routinized and
idealized rules for interactions, so too did Frazier note Black
Americans’ awareness of this interaction order when he discussed
the varying strategies that Black folks learned to perform when in the
presence of whites:6 ‘Lower-class families tended on the whole to
accept the white man’s conception of the Negro, and parents in
lower-class families taught their children techniques – often involving
lying and clowning and other forms of deception – for getting along
with whites.’ The racialized social system approach draws on this
Frazier-Goffman-esque approach to interactions in theorizing the
racialized interaction order. Much like the aims of Frazier’s ASA
address, this notion of the racialized interaction order seeks to show
how everyday ‘contacts’ are related to the wider racial hierarchy.
The racialized interaction order
By now, I hope it comes as no surprise that the racialized social
system approach argues that it is the dominant racial group who
construct the distribution of interactional rights and risks across the
racial hierarchy. Indeed, critical race theorists use the notion of the
racialized interaction order to refer to the distribution of these
interactional rights and risks.7 Such analysis of the racialized
interaction order, just as with the analysis of ideologies and
emotions, enables critical race theory to link the micro, mundane,
everyday dimensions of racism to the larger macro social
organization.
For the sake of this chapter, we will focus on two interconnected
genres of interaction orders that we have seen historically and in the
present day. Firstly, I will discuss those interaction orders which are
constructed to limit interactions between differently racialized people,
and I will then turn to the wider interactional making of race through
the everyday deployment of controlling images.

Interaction orders of non-interaction

Interaction orders which have sought to limit interactions have been
a popular way of maintaining the racial order since the invention of
race itself. Segregation allowed for colonial empires to at once limit
the ‘mixture’ of the putative pure and inferior races, while also
allowing the empires to control the location and movement of the
colonized in order to maintain social order and suppress any
insurgency. Clear examples of this include, for instance, the Spanish
crown passing a series of ordinances in the seventeenth century that
made it illegal for Black people in Mexico to gather in numbers of
more than three – both in public and in private (Dusenberry 1948).
Should this interactional right be transgressed, Black people would
be punished by up to two hundred lashes – thus, we have an
interactional risk when such colonial subjects gathered in certain
numbers. Similarly, in the British empire, the whole imposition of a
caste system in India is an example of an extremely rigid racialized
interaction order of segregation and social control. As Sujata Patel
(2021) notes, the British imposition of the caste system in India was
directly related to the nineteenth-century notions of race and blood
purity; ‘caste’, while it supposedly retained a basis in religion,
became a way that the empire divided the pure Aryan and non-Aryan
races in India. Different castes – that is, different ‘stocks’ of racial
groups – thus got limited to certain areas of India, creating a rigid
spatial system which significantly truncated interactions between
differently racialized people. Indeed, as Mark Brown (2001) shows,
through the series of Criminal Tribes Acts in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the British empire defined certain lower castes
as being biologically disposed to crime, and consequently assumed
to be criminalistic from birth; such laws allowed the British empire to
constrain the movement of lower castes between different regions.
So again, we have an example of a racialized interaction order –
based on the principles of segregation and regulation – used to
maintain the social order more broadly.
Such segregationist racialized interaction orders are not simply a
mark of the colonial era. Take for instance, Jim Crow in the US South
and Apartheid in South Africa under the National Party. Both of these
systems entailed racialized interaction orders based upon
segregation, founded upon a whole system of distributed
interactional rights and risks.
In Apartheid South Africa, for example, different racialized groups
were restricted to certain spatial units and had different interactional
rights and risks dictated by the legal system. Thus, laws like the
Natives Land Act (1913), the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian
Representation Act (1946), the Group Areas Act (1950) and the
Coloured Persons Communal Reserves Act (1961) each
successively worked to limit the amount of land Black and Asian
South Africans could own and where they resided.8 Furthermore,
this Apartheid system, which attempted to minimize interactions
between dominant and subdominant races, also entailed sets of laws
and scripts that allowed differently racialized actors to do (or not do)
certain interactive actions. Thus, while Black and Asian people’s
interactive remits were severely limited due to segregation, whites –
through the Preservation of Coloured Areas Act of 1961 – were
legally entitled to seize land from the racially subdominant. The
interactive possibilities of whites were thus far greater than those
afforded to racial others. Indeed, as documented by the research on
the ‘pass laws’ that were introduced in the 1950s, those racialized
downwards under Apartheid were required to travel with certain
documentation proving their identity, permission to be in the
respective region and permission to work.9 These identity books
(termed ‘dompasses’), therefore, essentially constituted legal
precondition for the racially subdominant to be afforded interactional
rights – if you did not carry them with you, the authorities had the
ability to fine and/or imprison you. In functioning as such, these
dompasses also demonstrated different interactional risks across the
racial structure: despite being the same interactional ‘type’, talking
with friends in a neighbourhood was relatively straightforward for
whites, but for Black folks – due to security laws which prohibited the
gathering of more than three people in certain regions – it could
constitute a violation of law.
Moreover, even when the Apartheid regime limited the interactions of
whites, we still see a difference in the distribution of interactional
risks.10 Thus, the 1927 Immorality Act (and its 1950 amendment)
and the subsequent Prohibition of Marriages Act in 1949 made it
illegal for whites to have sexual relations with or to be married to
people of any other race – prima facie, this is a clear infringement of
even the interactive possibilities of the racially dominant group.
However, when such interactional laws were transgressed, the risks
(in the forms of punitive punishment) were significantly higher for
those racialized downwards than for whites – especially in the case
of ‘interracial’ sex, Black women were typically accused of forcefully
courting white men in a way that often legally exonerated the latter
group.11
Conceptually, Jim Crow segregation in the US functioned in a similar
way to Apartheid in our discussion – as a racialized interaction order
that unequally distributed interactional rights and risks to reproduce
the racial order. As legally enshrined through the Plessy v. Ferguson
case in 1896, Jim Crow was characterized by the legislation of
‘separate but equal’; Black Americans were supposedly equal, but
public institutions and facilities in the US South were to be racially
segregated. Of course, looking at the precise nature of this racialized
interaction order, the notion of ‘equality’ seems to be quite some
stretch. As Du Bois (2014[1935]) writes in Black Reconstruction, the
Jim Crow South often involved the use of ‘Black codes’. Such codes
– lasting well into the twentieth century – put various legal
requirements upon Black folks: from proof of employment through to
proof of future income. However, if we look at the precise application
of these Black codes, and the punishments imposed on the grounds
of supposed violations of these codes, we see that they were
essentially about denying interactional rights, and increasing
interactional risks to Black folks. Under Southern states’ Black
codes, Black people were incarcerated for sexual relations with
whites, being drunk, possessing a firearm, and even in some cases
simply questioning a white person – all of which were interactive
social actions permissible when performed by whites, but actions of
immense potential consequence (i.e. risk) when performed by Black
people.
Such interactive risks (coupled with interactive liberties for whites) in
the Southern US are well captured in Ida B. Wells’ (2013) analysis of
lynching. As recounted in her autobiography chapter ‘Lynching at the
Curve’, in 1892 a group of Black people gathered in the Curve
District of Memphis to talk to and support each other after the murder
of two Black grocery store owners, Thomas Moss and Calvin
McDowell. Despite this group being explicitly non-violent, the judge
of the criminal court ordered the Sheriff to take a hundred men and
‘shoot down on sight any Negro who appears to be making
trouble’.12 As Wells describes, the Sheriff’s men:
obeyed the judge’s orders literally and shot into any group of
Negroes they saw with as little compunction as if they had been
on a hunting trip. The only reason hundreds of Negroes were not
killed on that day by the mobs was because of the forbearance of
the colored men. They realized their helplessness and submitted
to outrages and insults for the sake of those depending upon
them.
In light of these events, the Memphis Free Speech magazine
declared ‘The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither
character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself
against the white man or become his rival.’13 This is a recollection of
racial violence, but from a CRT approach, it provides insights into the
racialized interaction order. What we see here is firstly a series of
interactional risks: Black people could not gather together in public
without penal institutions construing that as a violent protest to be
suppressed; Black people had to stay calm in the face of white
violent racism and insults or potentially be murdered. On the other
hand, we also see a distribution of interactional rights: while Black
folks were denied the right to gather in a public place to talk with one
another, white folks were given the interactional right to violently
confront, injure and kill Black folks violating the supposed
interactional norms. Indeed, I want to stay with the content of Jim
Crow to broaden our discussion of the interaction order to think
about how race itself gets crafted and made through everyday
interactions.

The interactive making of race: micro

aggressions, everyday racism, and racial action
‘I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man
is a person who must ride “Jim Crow” in Georgia’ (Du Bois
2007a[1940]: 153). Du Bois’ words are not simply a restatement of
the US South’s legislation; they are fundamentally a claim about the
making of race. As Du Boisian interactionists have acclaimed, this
statement emphasizes how ‘race’ has no meaning outside of the
interactional practices that sustain its existence.14 As Paul Taylor
(2004: 109) clarifies, the very institutional facts of race only have
meaning by virtue of the social practices that bring them into being:
 To say that a black person is someone who would have to ride
Jim Crow in 1940s Georgia is to say that social practices bring
into being certain institutional facts that we can ignore only at our
peril. Just as we have conventions that turn properly constituted
pieces of paper into legal tender, we have conventions that turn a
person with a certain physiognomy and heritage into a black
person. And just as the dollar bill would revert to paper if properly
divorced from the context that transfigures it into money, I’ll revert
to whatever else I am when placed outside racially transfiguring
contexts.
From a critical race perspective, this means that we ought to study
racialized interaction orders not only to examine the unequal
distribution of interactional rights and risks, but more fundamentally
because we want to study the social practices that both engender
and reproduce ‘race’ itself. This ethos of studying the interactional
making of race is further teased out by Frantz Fanon. In a famous
section found in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon shows how he is
interpellated into a racial schema through an everyday act of race-
making; as he describes in an everyday encounter he had:15
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me
as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no
secret of my amusement.
‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened!
Fanon uses this everyday act to show how racialization itself, as it is
experienced by those racialized downwards, often proceeds through
these interactional social practices. As he clarifies, he was aware
that he was racialized as Black – he was told, given and realized his
ontological essence – not through a state-imposed census form but
through an everyday act of racialization:16 ‘I came into the world
imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with
the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I
was an object in the midst of other objects.’
This Du Boisian–Fanonian emphasis on the practical making of race
is historically accurate. After all, it was one thing for the British
empire to declare indigenous Americans as being savages, but this
also had to be enacted through interactional practices: whether that
be attempting to ‘civilize’ them through dress and education, or
simply violently drive them off their land; similarly, it was one thing for
Germany to declare Jews as being a threat to the state, but this too
had to be enacted through interactional practices and rules, from the
wearing of yellow badges through to murderous violence.17 In these
cases, there was no truth to the labelling of indigenous Americans or
Jews as ‘anti-civilization’, but rather these meanings ascribed to
‘race’ were made, sustained and legitimized through the actions and
practices of the racially dominant group.
Following this line of thinking, more recent scholarship has focused
the analytical gaze on ‘microaggressions’18 or acts of ‘everyday
racism’19 to highlight the interactional cogs of racialization. Scholars
such as David Embrick, Silvia Domínguez and Baran Karsak (2017:
200), for instance, have defined micro aggressions as everyday acts
of racial ‘othering’ that ‘are not solely acts perpetrated by individuals,
but may come about as a result of racialized mechanisms within
institutions that help reaffirm white supremacy’. From such an
understanding, Fanon’s ‘Look, a Negro!’ example demonstrates a
micro aggression – an everyday racial slight – that may exist at the
micro level but relates to the wider social process of racialization.
Essed’s theory of everyday racism likewise enables us to build such
links between micro interaction and macro structure.20 In this theory,
Essed argues that the binary between structural racism and
individual ‘micro’ racism simply places individuals outside of
institutions (and vice versa). Through theorizing different dimensions
of racism – including both institutional and individual (i.e.
interpersonal) racism – Essed consequently argues that we can
bridge ‘the macro (structural-cultural) properties of racism as well as
the micro inequalities perpetuating the system’.21
Indeed, Bonilla-Silva (2021) has connected with these themes of
micro aggressions and everyday racism to also account for what he
terms ‘racial action(s)’ more broadly. Such racial actions may not be
deliberate acts of bigotry, name-calling or discrimination – as we saw
in Fanon’s example – but instead refer to more routine behaviours all
of which have structural implications for the making of race, such as
‘buying houses, selecting schools, developing friendships, voting for
tenure cases in the academy, etc.’.22 As Bonilla-Silva shows here,
interactions do not simply ‘make’ the racially subdominant, but also
make whiteness itself: through routinely sending children to all-white
schools, living in white neighbourhoods, working with white
colleagues and so on, whites are able to interactionally make
‘whiteness’ as a sort of non-racial race. Such racial actions,
therefore, create interactional contexts and prisms in which whites
can claim that ‘race does not matter’ because the only folks there
are whites.
In studying the racialized interaction order, critical race theorists
therefore need to address the interactional making of the meanings
of both the dominant and the subdominant racial groups. We can
approach these two processes through the concepts of activating
controlling images and of white habitus.

Activating controlling images in the racialized

interaction order
I want to begin this section by referencing the well-known incident of
Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr being arrested in
2009 when entering his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.23
Gates was arrested after a neighbour had called 911, suspecting that
Gates was in fact a burglar attempting to break into this house. This
story is important not because it shows an incident of ‘racism gone
wrong’ – that is, racism directed to a Black professional when it
should only be directed towards those of a lower class. Neither is
this story important because it focuses on a well-known public figure,
whereas racism ought to only be directed to the unknown. This story
is important because it shows how race – in this case Blackness –
itself can be interpellated and brought into a hierarchal regime of
existence through social actions. This is precisely what I mean when
I talk about the activation of controlling images; activating controlling
images involves deploying ‘ideological collective representations’24
of race in interactions as a way of reproducing the existence and
meanings of race itself.
Controlling images themselves have been a focal point for race
critical analysis.25 Particularly in the work of Patricia Hill Collins
(1986, 2004), controlling images are analysed as a means of
showing how the stereotypes of Blackness – and particularly Black
women – are used to justify and reproduce material measures. The
controlling image of the Black ‘mammy’ in the early twentieth-century
US, for instance, was used by whites to reproduce the exploitation of
Black women’s labour in wet-nursing. Similarly, the controlling image
of the Black welfare queen in 1980s US was used to justify cuts to
social services.26 Central to such controlling images, as Collins
highlights, is that they are externally defined. This is why they are
called controlling images; they are not intended to be positive or
benign imageries and representations, they are intended to
reproduce relations of social control and domination/subordination.
Indeed, such images are also ‘controlling’ because they therefore set
kinds of rules for interactions – they control how differently racialized
actors can legitimately act in the presence of one another. It is my
contention that the everyday deployment of controlling images is a
defining feature of making race ‘real’.
Indeed, a significant amount of scholarship has focused on such
everyday deployments of controlling images. Such scholarship
equally highlights what Evans and Moore (2015: 443) call the
‘emotional gymnastics’ that people of colour therefore perform in
order to try to mitigate being labelled according to such controlling
images. For instance, Rashawn Ray (2017) has highlighted how in
the US, Black professionals in white neighbourhoods will avoid
exercising in public from fear of being stereotyped as a burglar or
criminal ‘on the run’; if they do exercise in public they will do so
wearing a university alumnus jersey to signal their professional
status, or whistle along to a piece of classical music. Such an
example is echoed in the work of Garrett (2011: 13), when he talks
about the interactional rules he had learned as a Black man in white
spaces:
you are taught don’t shop with your hands in your pockets for fear
that one’s body is mistaken for a shoplifter; don’t run through an
affluent neighborhood for fear of being mistaken for the body of a
thief, and don’t behave ‘ambiguously’ with a White spouse or
partner for fear of being mistaken as a rapist.
Such examples are powerful because they show how race can get
made through interactions – such as being mistaken for the body of
a thief – but it can equally well be made solely through the
recognition of the possibility of the interaction unfolding. This is what
makes race a ‘sticky’ thing, to use Suki Ali’s27 term: the
phenomenological awareness that you can, at any moment, be
interpellated into a racial schema through a singular interaction is
sufficient enough to make race ‘stick’ to you through your life. Such a
point is well highlighted in Elijah Anderson’s (2011, 2015) discussion
of ‘N****r moments’28. N-moments, as Anderson (2011: 253)
explains, refer to those situations where the colour line is drawn
through interactional encounters and the Black person ‘is powerfully
reminded of his or her putative place as a Black person’. While Black
folks may not be encountering them every second of every day,
there is always a lingering threat – a sword of Damocles – of a
pernicious interactional encounter. This is why we have seen a
series of social media hashtags, signalling the mundane things Black
people have been doing which provoked others to call the police on
them, such as #BBqingwhileblack,29 #Runningwhileblack30 and
even #Breathingwhileblack.31

From controlling images to white habitus

Importantly, however, we need to remember Bonilla-Silva’s words
that ‘racial domination is a collective process (we are all in this
game)’.32 We ought not to study the racialized interaction order just
to learn about the stigmatization of people of colour, and their
subsequent emotional repertoires. Neither ought we to study the
racialized interaction order only to learn about the construction of
non-dominant racialized groups. Rather, analysing interactions can
also enable us to understand whiteness itself, as captured in the
concept of white habitus.
White habitus can be understood as ‘a racialized, uninterrupted
socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste,
perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial
matters’.33 Importantly, this white habitus itself emerges from
interactions (that whites have with other whites) and non-interactions
(whites’ lack of interactional engagement with other racialized
people). In this regard, as Bonilla-Silva (2021) argues, the white
habitus is a consequence of white social action, including their
creation of segregated interactional spaces that are not intentionally
racist and discriminatory, but which still reproduce racial inequality. In
the US, for instance, this can be signalled through the creation of
multiple ‘white spaces’, from college fraternities34 to
neighbourhoods,35 schools36 and elite social clubs.37 In Britain, we
see similar white spaces in high-cultural institutions (e.g. art
galleries, classical music concert halls)38 and elite educational
institutions.39 In Brazil, we see white spaces in the reality of gated
housing communities (often overlooking favelas)40 and social clubs
(e.g. golf clubs),41 and similarly in Mexico we see golf clubs
becoming a key site of white sociality and segregation.42
Through the interactional creation of segregated and isolated
spaces, whites thus create interactional contexts in which they can
‘(mis)represent’ whiteness ‘as unraced and universal’.43 In other
words, the creation of spaces where you only interact with other
whites is constitutive of whiteness – as a relational position in the
racial hierarchy – itself. Once whites create their own ‘safe hubs’, the
foundations are laid for a racial solidarity, and consequently a strong
white identity can be constructed. Moreover, upon the creation of
white racial solidarity, the emergent white habitus consequently
‘generates practices, cognitions, perceptions, and emotions that
reinforce whiteness and account for Whites’ racial isolation’.44 Thus,
the white habitus that emerges from whites’ interactionally
segregated spaces itself legitimizes such segregation as being ‘not-
racist’.45 Instead, residential segregation is recast as ‘living with
people like yourself’, all-white golf clubs are all-white because ‘others
don’t like playing golf’, and so on. White habitus, therefore, both
emerges from and reproduces the racialized inaction order, creating
‘an atmosphere in which white hypersegregation seems proper,
thereby justifying inequality and maintaining the existing racial
hierarchy’.46
The creation of a white habitus, therefore, seems to legitimate a
particular way of seeing the world (i.e. racial ideology) that
reproduces structural relations. Studying interactions – including the
absence of particular interactions – therefore becomes a key way to
study the racial structure and its reproduction more broadly. Such a
link between segregated interactions, white habitus and racial
ideology has been the subject of research on ‘white talk’ in South
Africa.47 Such research has focused on post-Apartheid expressions
of Afrikaner whiteness, where the group’s long experience of being
self-segregated has led them to fundamentally ‘think’ in the same
way, adopting similar views towards the Apartheid era. For instance,
this white talk may be represented by the shared view that Apartheid
was an era of relative safety and calm, when – in the words of an
Afrikaner in Durbun featured in Steyn’s (2009: 152) research – one
could ‘sleep peacefully with your windows and doors open’. Another
example of such white talk is the shared view that the post-Apartheid
era signals a move towards anti-white racism, as put in the words of
another Afrikaner in Steyn’s (2009: 31) research: ‘There is not a
single perceptive and informed South African who could deny that
racism flourishes in their country […] that there are gangs of ruthless
killers who target white farmers and tourists simply because they are
white.’
What we see in such cases of white habitus, therefore, is just how
important it is to study interactions if we want to think about the
making of whiteness. While social psychological models may argue
that ideas shape behaviour (that is, interactions), what we see here
is that the creation of interactional spaces gives rise to ideas. It is
through constructing spaces (including segregated spaces) that
whiteness itself can be constructed as a social collectivity, and this
segregation provides fertile soil for the emergence of ‘group thinking’
that rationalizes the white habitus as objective and neutral – simply
the way the world is.
Interactional cogs and the racial structure
While CRT therefore shifts us away from reducing racism to being an
interpersonal relation, there is still a place for the study of
interactions in the racialized social system approach. That is, while it
is not appropriate to simply define racism as an ‘adjective used to
describe interactions, instilling a racialized interaction order is vital
for the racial structure’s smooth reproduction’.48 In other words,
while racism is not something that only exists at the level of
interactions, this does not mean that we ought to simply ignore the
interactional level. Indeed, if we do ignore the interactional level, we
do so at our own peril.
Once we delve into how the racial structure actually gets reproduced
over time and space – and indeed, how it even gets made – we
cannot help but turn our attention towards interactions. This is
because racialized interaction orders have been essential for
dictating the distribution of interactional rights and risks across the
racial hierarchy, thus becoming the cornerstone of racial projects
such as segregation. Furthermore, it is in and through interactions
that we often see the making of race itself – not only in terms of how
people of colour get interpellated into the racial hierarchy through the
deployment of controlling images, but also in terms of how whites’
interacting with each other enables them to evolve into a social
collectivity.
Both this chapter and the former chapter, through focusing on
interactions, ideologies and emotions, have highlighted that CRT
does have an approach to racism which suitably links the micro and
the macro. In the next chapter, I want to turn our attention to a
hitherto neglected area of this book – the meso level of racism –
through an analysis of racialized organizations.
Notes
1 Bearing in mind, as I will indeed explore in this chapter, that there
is likewise often a direct relation between ideologies and action.
2 Indeed, in a way not too dissimilar from Bourdieu’s own theory of
interactions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
3 Frazier 1949.
4 Indeed, in Goffman’s later presidential address (1983) he used
the notion of ‘contact’ as one component part of the interaction
order.
5 See Frazier 1957.
6 Frazier 1949: 7.
7 See Meghji 2019a; Rosino 2017.
8 On Apartheid see Dubow 2017.
9 See Savage 1986. These pass laws were an extension of the
colonial rule, which likewise had strict interactional rules used to
maintain the racial order.
10 Although, of course, such interactive restrictions were not
intended to be ‘anti-white’, but rather were based on the idea of
white superiority and the desire to maintain the purity of the white
race from mixture. Similar laws functioned in places like the US,
where, for instance, fifteen states between 1861 and 1967
banned marriages between whites and Asians (Sohoni 2007).
11 See Ellison and de Wet 2020.
12 Quoted in Wells 2013: 51.
13 Quoted in Wells 2013: 52.
14 See Taylor 2004.
15 Fanon 2008[1952]: 84
16 Fanon 2008[1952]: 82 (emphasis added).
17 See Friedman 2011.
18 Embrick et al. 2017; Huber and Solórzano 2015; Solórzano et al.
2000.
19 Essed 1991.
20 See ibid.
21 Essed 1991: 38.
22 Bonilla-Silva 2021: 4.
23 See Ogletree 2012 for an extended discussion of this incident.
24 Vasquez-Tokos and Norton-Smith 2017: 913.
25 See Collins 2004; Hall 1995; hooks 2014; Saha 2018; Wingfield
2007, 2010.
26 See also Davis 1984.
27 Ali 2006.
28 Henceforth ‘N-moments’.
29 Referring to the 2018 incident when Jennifer Schulte called the
police on Black people having a barbecue at Lake Merritt,
Oakland.
30 Referring to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man out for a
jog in Glynn County, Georgia.
31 Referring to the city proposal by Grand Rapids, Michigan, to
punish those abusing 911 call-lines to report Black people to the
police for ‘breathing while Black’ (i.e. doing any mundane act).
32 Bonilla-Silva 2014: xv.
33 Bonilla-Silva 2017: 73.
34 Syrett 2009.
35 Pattillo 2013.
36 Warikoo 2016.
37 Cousin et al. 2018.
38 Meghji 2019b.
39 Boliver 2016.
40 Maia and Reiter 2021.
41 Duarte 2012.
42 Cerón-Anaya 2019.
43 Emirbayer and Desmond 2015: 251.
44 Bonilla-Silva 2021.
45 Lentin 2020.
46 Bonilla-Silva 2021.
47 See Steyn 2009; Steyn and Foster 2008, 2012.
48 Meghji 2019a: 230.
4
Meso Racial Structures and Racialized
Organizations
The vague promise(s) of analytical sociology
Until now, this book has largely been concerned with analysis of the
macro–micro linkages that exist across and within the racialized
social system. We have looked at how the macro structure gets
reproduced by group interests, how micro phenomena such as
conceptual schemes, emotions and interactions bolster structural
relations, and how structural relations require a loose coupling with
the micro for its smooth reproduction. Such discussions, while being
valuable, do not tell the full story of racialization and racism. This is
because a crucial level of social reality has been left out – the so-
called ‘middle level’ of the meso.
Following the likes of analytical sociology, analysing the meso level
is important as it allows us to avoid falling into a structuralist ‘grand
theory’ approach and helps us to avoid a micro-oriented myopia that
turns a blind eye to social structure.1 Focusing on ‘the middle’ allows
us to turn our attention to phenomena that are not strictly at the level
of institutional social structures (such as the state) or at that of
individual agency. Instead, they exist as those in-between
organizational spaces – education, workplaces, industries and so on
– that are worthy of analysis in their own right. Indeed, the school of
analytical sociologists argued that it was in the meso organizations
that we can often approach what ought to be the main area of
sociological study – social mechanisms.2 The study of social
mechanisms, to such sociologists, is the primary way that we can
think about the reproduction of social relations and social action.
Central to the study of social mechanisms is that we provide
explanatory rather than causal arguments. As Hedström (2005: 68)
clarifies,
From an explanatory point of view it is not sufficient simply to
postulate that one social phenomenon causes another. Nor is it
sufficient just to point to a correlation between a presumed cause
and its effect. One must also open up the ‘black box’ to reveal the
social mechanisms that are believed to be at work.
In opening up this black box to reveal the social mechanisms at
work, the hope is that we start generating knowledge of ‘entities and
activities that are linked to one another in such a way that they
regularly bring about a particular type of outcome’.3
Those in CRT have taken seriously this call to analyse social
mechanisms. Hughey et al. (2015: 1352), for instance, have
lamented the ‘vague or erroneous causal models’ used in CRT at the
expense of mechanism-led explanations. To these authors, critical
race theorists need to dedicate more time to answering the ‘why’
question, as opposed to the ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions. Thus, when
discussing the example of racial ideology, these authors point out
that we may know that colour-blind ideology neatly links with the
social structure, but what we don’t know is: ‘how or why color-blind
racism might (or might not) direct human action and order toward the
(re)production of racial inequality. Additionally, how might the
structural arrangements of inequality create the ideological contours
of color-blind racism?’4 To Hughey et al., what they are really
searching for are explanations that follow the model, along the
following lines: ‘We have an observed relationship between color-
blind racism (C) and racial inequality (R). To explain the relationship
between them, we search for a mechanism (M), which in the
presence of C generates R as the outcome.’ 5
Perhaps slightly ironically, Hughey et al. do not ever explain fully how
we could ourselves generate such explanatory work of identifying
mechanisms from a CRT perspective. By contrast, this task of
identifying mechanisms – through explanatory analysis of the meso
– has been taken up by other CRT advocates, such as Victor Ray6
and Adia Harvey Wingfield.7 Central to these authors’ works, and
indeed the topic of this chapter, is the notion of racialized
organizations.
What are racialized organizations and what do
they do?
Racialized organizations, as Victor Ray (2019: 26) describes them,
are ‘racial structures’ which connect ‘organizational rules to social
and material resources’. Studying racialized organizations is
important, therefore, as it allows us to see how organizations are not
just race-neutral bureaucracies, but instead ‘constituting and
constituted by racial processes that may shape both the policies of
the racial state [i.e. the macro] and individual prejudice [i.e. the
micro]’.8 Key to this scholarship, therefore, is the notion that
organizations – as the meso level – are not just a link between the
micro and the macro, but are ‘key to stability and change for the
entire racial order’9 in their own right.
In order to understand why racialized organizations are worthy of
analysis in their own right, it is important that we consider them –
and all organizations, for that matter – to be structures. Of course,
while discussion of ‘structure’ makes us immediately think at the
macro scale, as Ray (2019: 33–4) shows, this need not be the case:
‘Just as the structure of capitalism is expressed in both the
commerce of a child’s lemonade stand and the massive accretion of
resources in a multinational corporation, racial structures are
produced via individual-, organizational-, and state-level actions.’
Thus, instead of equating ‘structure’ with the macro, we can follow
the likes of Sewell (1992) and Ray (2019) to think of structures as
schemas connected to resources. Schemas, as Sewell argues, are
essentially ‘generalizable procedures applied in the
enactment/reproduction of social life’ which constitute ‘fundamental
tools of thought’.10 These schemas incorporate an infinite number of
unwritten suppositions that guide social action, such as:
 rules of etiquette, or aesthetic norms, or such recipes for group
action as the royal progress, grain riot, or democratic vote, or a
set of equivalences between wet and dry, female and male,
nature and culture, private and public, or the body as a metaphor
for hierarchy, or the notion that the human being is composed of a
body and a soul.11
These schemas are generalizable, or ‘transposable’, because they
can be realized in a potentially undetermined amount of situations.
The schema of the moral binary between good and bad, for instance,
cannot simply be tied to one particular situation but is a schema we
use across institutional, everyday and organizational life.
Bringing this discussion back to racialized organizations, the point
being made is that such organizations connect schemas to societal
resources in a way that (re)produces the racial order. For instance, in
Jim Crow – as Ray (2019) demonstrates – we have an example of a
schema of racial segregation, ‘transposed’ or ‘generalized’ into a
variety of organizations (such as buses, lunch counters, bathrooms,
occupations, private universities), in a way that reserved certain
societal resources for whites. Furthermore, what we see in this case
of Jim Crow is that firstly this organizational deployment of
connecting racial schemas to societal resources was legitimated by
the state’s legal institutions (the macro), and secondly that racialized
organizations also shaped individual prejudice (e.g. Black people
sitting in the ‘wrong’ bus seat could be insulted and/or be targets of
racist violence). Racialized organizations matter, therefore, as they
are a key domain in the racialized social system for constructing and
legitimating racial rule; these organizations are fundamentally ‘racial
structures consolidating resources and social power’.12
From North American healthcare to Brazilian
sugar mills
As structures in their own right, racialized organizations are thus
crucial for the shaping of the micro and the macro of the entire social
system. Indeed, such links between the meso and micro, and meso
and macro, have been analysed in empirical studies of racialized
organizations.
Wingfield and Chavez (2020), for instance, examined the
organization of the US healthcare industry to show how it connected
to the micro of the racialized social system. Interviewing Black
workers at different levels of the organizational hierarchy – medical
doctors, nurses and technicians – they found precise relations
between one’s position in the organizational hierarchy and their
micro perceptions of racial discrimination. That is, Wingfield and
Chavez found that while doctors were more likely to explain racial
discrimination along the lines of institutionalized inequality (access to
medical school, school rankings and so on), technicians were more
likely to understand discrimination in terms of interpersonal
interactions (e.g. being stigmatized by prejudiced supervisors), while
nurses understood discrimination through a combination of both. Of
course, such realities were largely explained by organizational
mechanisms themselves. By virtue of being towards the top of the
organizational hierarchy, for instance, doctors’ authority and limited
day-to-day interactions may limit the amount of interpersonal
prejudice they face. Further, by virtue of their position towards the
top, doctors may play a larger role in processes like hiring and
organizational norms, both of which would give them insights into
more structural forces at play. On the reverse side, by virtue of being
towards the bottom of the hierarchy, technicians are less involved in
decisions like hiring and the setting of norms, and consequently are
more likely to construe discrimination through their own interpersonal
encounters.
The case of the healthcare industry, therefore, show how
organizations – to bring us back to the hopes of analytical sociology
– often show the mechanisms that allow us to understand the full
extent of racial ideologies and micro cognitive schemes. In Wingfield
and Chavez’s research, for instance, we see how organizational
mechanisms (e.g. playing a role in hiring and setting of norms, being
towards the bottom/top of an organizational hierarchy) affect the
racial ideologies and frameworks that individuals then deploy in their
daily lives (e.g. doctors thinking of racism in terms of structural
inequality versus technicians explaining racism as prejudice).
Indeed, a similar link between organizations and racial ideology is
teased out by Carrillo’s (2021) examination of the Brazilian sugar-
cane industry, but instead of focusing on the meso shaping the
micro, he examines the meso shaping the macro.
As Carrillo points out, sugar-ethanol mills in north-eastern Brazil still
follow very clearly the organizational patterns of the country’s long
era of slavery. Just as with the slavery plantation, the sugar-ethanol
mills still follow the makeup of a white owner of the land overseeing
a group of Black labourers working for little pay. Not only is the
economic logic of the sugar mill a remnant of the era of
enslavement, but the organizational norms are too. As Carrillo (2021:
60) highlights, in the era of enslavement, in the plantation economy:
the power to command (mandonismo) was central to white elites’
racial identity and status, with social standing vested in authority
over management decisions, such as the use of land and labor,
the distribution of negative externalities, and risk mitigation […] for
centuries, the racialized habits of plantations made hierarchies
appear natural to the social and economic order, while legitimizing
narratives worked to reproduce the racialized social systems in
which plantations were nested.
As Brazil moved into a ‘post-abolition’ era from 1888, these
organizational norms remained entrenched in the sugar-cane
industry. Thus, in the sugar mill’s organizational logic, Black
sharecroppers completed tasks such as planting and harvesting,
while the white oligarchy continued to command the labour and the
former ‘distribution of negative externalities, and risk mitigation’. Into
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this ‘risk mitigation’ which
white landowners had organizational control over was manifested in
the dangerous labour practices of straw burning and manual
harvesting – two tasks that posed health risks to workers (sometimes
to the point of death) – practices still regularly in use among the
sugar mills in north-eastern Brazil. As Carrillo shows, in this context
of Black labourers segregated into dangerous employment in the
white-owned sugar-cane industry, we see the process of racialized
organizations (re)producing racial ideologies to thus maintain racial
inequality at a macro level. Thus, many white mill directors deploy a
colour-blind frame of cultural racism to argue that manual labour is
good for Black workers as it steers them away from crime and into
employment;13 other directors deploy more ‘liberal’ frames in arguing
that if it were not for this (albeit dangerous) labour, these workers
would not have employment, and thus that in the grand scheme of
things this labour is good for them.
Again, such an organizational study leaves analytical sociologists
beaming in the way it brings mechanisms into play. On the level of
mechanisms, Carrillo’s research is showing that a racial ideology –
so-called colour-blind racism – becomes active when organizational
makeups allow for white elites to maintain control over resources (in
this case, the sugar-cane economy). Furthermore, in consequence,
such reasoning allows Carrillo to connect the meso to the macro. In
particular, Carrillo shows how a racial ideology deployed within a
particular organizational context ripples out to the wider structural
composition of the racial order: arguments that Black people are
more prone to crime and thus ought to be sectioned into manual
labour justifies structure-wide conceptual schemes of Black
criminality, in the same way that the liberal ‘this labour is better than
no labour’ justifies wider racial exploitation in the state economy.
Indeed, mechanisms are also at play here because we see the fact
that when different racialized organizations merge in their interests to
preserve the racial order, similar racial ideologies can become more
diffuse; for instance, the myth of Black criminality is so widespread
across Brazilian society in part due to the fact that it finds life in so
many different organizations: from the sugar mills to the police force.
The question of why we ought to study organizations, then, is
relatively straightforward. This meso level is an essential medium
through which racialization happens and racial structures evolve. To
ignore organizations at the meso level, or to reduce it to a subsidiary
of the macro level, therefore occludes analysis of the very
mechanisms which are integral to the total racialized social system.
Indeed, scholars have pointed out that the key aims of CRT analysis
are encapsulated in the study of racialized organizations.14 For
instance, CRT wants to shift away from the ‘racism as racial
prejudice’ position towards understanding racism as involving the
unequal distribution of resources across a racial hierarchy. Yet, as
Ray points out, one of the main reasons we study racialized
organizations is to examine how the unequal distribution of
resources is legitimated – as we saw, for instance, in the case of
white sugar mill owners in Brazil justifying the racialized division of
dangerous labour.15 Similarly, a key contention of CRT is that there
is a fundamental link between racialization and agency: ‘race’ was
created to deny difference in subjectivities between the colonized
people so they could simply be defined as savage – in this regard,
race was created to deny the existence of agency on behalf of those
racialized downwards. Again, however, this study of agency is a key
area of concern in the analysis of racialized organizations; as Ray
puts it, organizational hierarchies are one of the ways that agency is
actually expressed (or constrained) in the contemporary era.16 The
organizational hierarchy of the Brazilian sugar mills, to stay with the
same case, demonstrates a mechanism by which white elites are
able to expand their horizons of agency (dictating labour, deciding
the risks of labour practices etc.) at the expense of infringing the
agency of racialized others (e.g. Black labourers forced to practise
dangerous labour).
With this in mind, I therefore want to spend the rest of the chapter
homing in on how organizations constrain (or expand) the horizons
of agency along racial lines, and how they legitimate the unequal
distribution of societal resources. It is my hope, as per the call of a
minority of CRT scholars, that this may help develop our collective
engagement with the meso level when studying the racialized social
system.
Racialized organizations and agency
Let’s begin by considering the case of agency – and by agency, I am
broadly referring to the ability to express subjectivity and have one’s
subjectivity recognized by others.17 What we see in the case of
racialized organizations is that there is a clear differential in how
differently racialized people can, or cannot, be afforded this
recognition and expression of subjectivity.

Sport, racialization and agency

Take sport, and football (soccer) more explicitly as a case in point.
We clearly see that this organization frames the very subjectivities of
players along racial lines. As in other sports, football commentators
tend to refer to Black players in terms of their physical characteristics
(pace, power, strength), while white players are praised for their
mental capacities (tactical understandings, composure, game
awareness).18 For instance, when Campbell and Bebb (2020)
studied British commentary on thirty matches in the 2018 FIFA World
Cup, they found that the highest proportional amount of praise (47.9
per cent) aimed at white players centred on ‘learned abilities’ – that
is, attributes ‘that were considered to have been cultivated through
practice and scholarly mastery of their craft, such as reference to a
player’s technique, or passing ability’.19 This contrasted to the
highest proportional amount of praise (69.8 per cent) aimed at Black
players centring on physicality. Indeed, Campbell and Bebb even
found that looking specifically at the winning team – France – while
50 per cent of the praise given to this team centred on physicality, 95
per cent of those comments were given to Black and mixed-race
players, and no praise was given to Black or mixed-race players in
relation to their cognition or character. Indeed, across the pond in the
US, we see a similar reality with American football and the NFL. Up
until June 2021, the NFL practised ‘race norming’ – assuming that
Black players had lower cognitive functions than whites. Such race
norming meant it was near impossible for retired Black players to
make claims for concussion and other cognitive-related injuries
sustained while playing football.20
The cases of football (soccer) and the NFL, therefore, offer insights
into how organizations racialize in a way that replicates colonial
patterns of racism and agency. The patterns of racialization we see
in these organizations have similarities with the racialization we see
under the regime of scientific racism between the eighteenth and
early twentieth centuries.21 For instance, the FIFA World Cup
commentary, which framed Black people as first and foremost
athletic, is reminiscent of the way that enslaved Black people across
the Caribbean and Americas were said to be naturally suited to
lengthy, manual labour.22 Similarly, the supposition that Black
players have lower cognitive functions than whites, which the NFL
institutionally clung to in their race norming, is almost an
interchangeable statement with Charles Darwin’s from the
nineteenth century when he claimed that:23 ‘The belief that there
exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and
the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the
comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races.’ In this
regard, the way that the organization of sport makes a link between
agency and racialization is patently clear. Just as Darwin’s biological
classification of race was intended to dismiss the possibility of
considering those racialized downwards as thinking, subjective
agents, and just as the slavers racialized the enslaved as Black to
turn them from subjective beings into objects of capital, so too are
sports organizations racializing Black people as naturally less-than-
persons whose being is rooted in biology.
Importantly, however, this is not simply a case of organizations
merely replicating dominant representations of race. Rather, this
shows how organizations themselves are crucial in the very
production of racialization; the racialization in these organizations is
primarily aimed at buttressing the internal organizational hierarchy.
Nevertheless, while this racialization is tied to the specific workings
of the organization, it has both macro and micro repercussions. At a
macro level, this racialization becomes replicated across multiple
organizations and thus becomes fully institutionalized – for instance,
the racialization of Black football players as ‘biological things’ by
British commentators is replicated across organizations like
education, where Black pupils are pushed into sports rather than
academia.24 At a micro level, the racialization in sports organizations
connects to everyday prejudice. In Britain, for instance, the dominant
representation of Black players as being physical but lacking mental
ingenuity is connected to the abuse that Black players then face from
spectators in the stadium and on social media platforms; the making
of ape noises and the throwing of bananas are testament to this.25
Of course, this case of sport is a useful example to start with
primarily because there are many clear illustrations we can use to
highlight the link between racialization and agency.26 However, in
most organizations the magnifying and constraining of agency along
racial lines is practised in more covert ways. I thus want to turn our
attention towards mundane workplaces, and the way that they
expand the horizons of white agency while severely restricting the
agency of people of colour.

Workplaces as racialized organizations

Needless to say, there are different ways that agency can be
expressed in organizations. Agency can refer to the type of work you
are (or are not) allowed to do in the organization, the ability to set
organizational norms, culture and goals, and the ability to organize
other people’s labour. However, agency can also refer to more
mundane aspects of organizational life, such as being able to dress
in particular ways, perform certain emotions, speak in particular
ways and so on. In the case of racialized organizations, we see that
‘race’ becomes a central factor in many of these organizational
processes.
In her work on Black professionals in the US, for instance, Sharon
Collins (1983, 1997) showed that upon the supposed ‘opening up’ of
the labour market post-segregation, Black people were still sectioned
into specific jobs. On the one hand, Collins argues, this meant that
Black people started working for ‘general’ (read: white) companies in
human resources or diversity outreach positions.27 On the other
hand, this meant that Black professionals were sectioned into what
were seen as ‘segregated’ rather than ‘general’ markets – markets
that were targeted towards the needs of Black folks rather than the
entire population. As Collins (1983: 376) shows, in 1978, Black
professionals were thus disproportionately working in sectors like
public welfare (five times the rate of whites), correction (three times
the rate of whites) and housing and health (one and a half times the
rate of whites), creating a situation where ‘opportunities for black
middle-class employment are concentrated in black-oriented service
systems; blacks are underrepresented in services oriented toward
the more general public’. This workplace case is clear evidence for
how the meso organizations constrain agency in a way that has
macro effects. In Collins’ work we see that the agency of Black
people – in terms of the types of work they want to do – is
constrained by the overall segregated market.
Indeed, other scholars have stuck with the case study of Black
professionals in the workplace to explore how organizations
constrain agency. In particular, such work highlights the ‘emotion
work’,28 ‘racial tasks’29 and ‘emotional gymnastics’30 that Black
professionals have to perform in their professional lives due to the
organizational norms of their workplaces. In Evans and Moore’s
(2015) ethnographies of elite law schools and pilot training in the US,
for instance, they found that Black professionals had to avoid being
seen as ‘too emotional’ in order to be taken seriously. Even in the
face of micro aggressions, therefore, Evans and Moore (2015: 446)
detail how Black men, for instance, would regulate their emotions by
not even slightly raising their voice, in order to sever the putative
‘connection between black male anger and “danger”’.31 Such
research, therefore, shows both how the specific organizations limit
Black agency not only in terms of restricting their emotional
repertoires, but also in how they force Black professionals to act in a
way that is agreeable to their white colleagues – indeed, withholding
from an emotional performance is a performance itself. In order to
highlight this extra work that Black professionals have to perform
(even in their ‘non-performances’), scholars have thus studied
racialized organizations through the lens of ‘racial tasks’.32
Racial tasks refer to the ‘work minorities do that is associated with
their position in the organizational hierarchy and reinforces Whites’
position of power within the workplace’.33 Underlying this notion of
racial tasks is the organizational reality that:34 ‘Workers of color have
a myriad of expectations associated with their positions that White
workers do not, particularly the expectation that they will perform
certain tasks to become more palatable to the White majority. Racial
tasks are a key mechanism by which this happens.’ These racial
tasks are manifest in a myriad of ways. They could involve the way
that Black professionals working in white-majority organizations are
expected to lead diversity initiatives and race equality training, again
constraining their agency by dictating the type of labour they are
expected to carry out. On the other hand, it could refer to those
emotional performances previously noted by Evans and Moore.
Indeed, it could even refer to the performative labour of choosing the
right clothes to wear to avoid being stereotyped – as we see in
Wingfield’s (2007, 2010) research, where Black professional women
have to avoid dressing in ways that white colleagues will think are
overtly sexual. The example of ‘Black hair’ is a case in point here. As
Wilkins (1992) noted as the ‘legal’ iteration of CRT developed in the
1990s, corporate culture is defined by professionalism, but
professionalism itself is an organizational norm which is deeply
racialized and gendered. Research has shown that certain
organizations often see Black women’s ‘natural hair’ as being
unprofessional, and it is only recently in the US that states are
beginning to make it illegal to discriminate against hairstyles that are
used to represent ethno-racial heritage and belonging.35 In this
context, even the (not-)wearing of certain hairstyles thus becomes a
racial task for Black women to perform in organizational settings.
What we see in these series of racial tasks, therefore, is a synergy
between organizational norms (how to behave, what to wear etc.),
whiteness and restricted Black agency. Sara Ahmed (2014) lucidly
summarizes this interconnection of different processes when she
exclaims that ‘Sticking out from whiteness can thus re-confirm the
whiteness of the space. Whiteness becomes obtrusive, what gets in
the way of an occupation of space […] a sign of immobility.’ Ahmed’s
metaphor of movement and immobility is apt. If you think of
movement as freedom, what you see in the case of racial tasks is
that it allows some the agency of movement while others are denied
it – a white person, say, can raise their voice and show degrees of
passion, but that performative repertoire is not open to those who will
be stereotyped as the ‘angry Black woman’ or ‘aggressive Black
man’. Indeed, as Ahmed continues, such racial tasks thus create
obstacles to people of colour’s ‘occupation of space’ – in order to
occupy space, that is, to ‘fit in’ to the organizational culture, people of
colour will have to enact certain racial tasks such as performing
diversity work, being especially amicable – obstacles around which
whites simply do not have to manoeuvre.
Racialized organizations and the unequal
distribution of resources
Moving to the top?
Of course, this notion of movement and manoeuvre also speaks to
another organizational dynamic: hierarchy. In everyday language,
movement is built into the way we talk about organizations; we talk
about moving up and down the hierarchy, up the promotion ladder,
gaining a pay rise and so on. These metaphors of movement,
however, are talking about more than just organizational culture.
They are referring more broadly to resources, and how those who
have moved towards the top of organizational hierarchies tend to
have more resources (capital), and, indeed, how those towards the
top of organizational hierarchies can use their very organizations to
hoard resources at large.
Studying racialized organizations is therefore important because it
allows us to see how the dominant racial group maintain control over
organizations and consequently enable the unequal distribution of
societal resources. We can access this simply by thinking about
organizational hierarchies. In the US, for instance, occupational
segregation means that in Fortune 500 companies, Black people
make up just 1 per cent of CEOs and Latinos less than 2 per cent.36
In the United Kingdom, only 5.3 per cent of FTSE (Financial Times
Stock Exchange) 250 directors, and 4 per cent of FTSE 350 CEOs
or chairs, are people of colour.37 Even in places where Blackness
may be a demographic majority, this organizational hierarchy
remains. In South Africa, for instance, 86 per cent of CEOs of
companies listed on the JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) are
white (despite whites making up less than 10 per cent of the overall
national population).38 At a straightforward level, simply looking at
who is at the top of organizational hierarchies thus becomes a
predictive way to study how the dominant racial group – across
multiple organizations – gain unequal shares of resources in a
manner that becomes institutionalized across the whole racialized
social system.

Cultural industries, racial grammars and

racialized imagery
Nevertheless, as expected, racialized organizations can legitimate
the unequal distribution of resources in much more covert ways.
Furthermore, racialized organizations legitimate the unequal
distribution not only of economic resources, but of societal resources
in general – including, for instance, symbolic capital.39 Indeed, as
Bourdieusian scholars have shown, symbolic capital matters, as it
refers to those resources which are not completely economic, yet still
retain crucial importance for organizational life and mobility more
generally.40 Such symbolic capital can refer to resources like
esteem, recognition, value and influence. Moreover, symbolic capital
is also important to study in organizations because it refers to
agents’ and groups’ abilities (or lack thereof) to diffuse one’s ideas
across the total field or organization in question.41 A CEO of a
company, for instance, is largely able to shape organizational culture
not only because of their economic status, but also by virtue of their
wielding larger amounts of symbolic capital than other members in
their localized area of social space.
I want to focus, therefore, on how racialized organizations work,
more or less covertly, to legitimate the unequal distribution of
symbolic resources across the racial hierarchy. A useful way to
approach this is by focusing on the cultural industries. Within such
organizations, we see firstly how symbolic capital among people of
colour is limited by pigeonholing them according to racialized
identities, and secondly that control over the production of
racialization itself thus gets disproportionately controlled by a
managing white elite.
Take film, for instance, and the way that Oscar awards act as
somewhat of a holy grail. Indeed, as per understandings of symbolic
capital, winning an Oscar does not directly entail a ‘cash prize’.
Rather, you are awarded an Oscar trophy, and more importantly, the
prestige of having won the award. The award itself is thus symbolic
capital.42 Yet the way the film industry or industries work largely
stratifies such symbolic capital along racial lines. Thus in 2015, the
Oscar academy awarded all twenty acting nominations to white
people, repeating the same act in 2016, sparking a social media
campaign #OscarsSoWhite. More than five years later, another
prestigious film award, the Golden Globes, faced exactly the same
issue. Large corporations such as Netflix, Amazon Studios and NBC
refused to air the 2022 Golden Globes ceremony after the
organization in charge of the awards – the Hollywood Foreign Press
Association – had failed to hire diverse critics in the judging process.
While these two examples speak directly to film, they represent a
wider issue pinpointed by many sociologists of culture.
Just as Collins showed how Black professionals were pigeonholed in
‘segregated markets’, so too are people of colour in cultural
industries pigeonholed in certain areas which limit their ability to
acquire large amounts of symbolic capital. Anamik Saha (2016)
refers to this process as the ‘rationalizing/racializing’ logic of cultural
production.43 Cultural production in capitalism gets subsumed into
the overall political economy: book publishers will want to be sure a
potential book will sell well on the market before commissioning it,
just in the same way as TV executives will sign off on a programme if
they think it will get a high viewing audience, and so on. To this
extent, cultural products need to be rationalized in various ways
before they are commissioned and released to the world.
Nevertheless, as Saha argues, this process of rationalization is often
entangled with racialization.44 Thus, in his own research, Saha
focuses on writers of colour in Britain. As Saha points out, the
publishing industry is increasingly reliant on interfaces like BookScan
(a tool used to see book sales) in the rationalization process before
commissioning a proposed piece of work. Commissioners and
salespeople argue that the best way to predict the potential sales of
a proposed book is to see the actual sales of similar works. Yet this
process of judging ‘similar works’ is where racialization enters the
fray, as writers of colour are assumed to all be writing similar things
in similar styles. This leads to a situation where the value of the
writer of colour’s work is downgraded by virtue of simply being
pigeonholed as similar to the work of all other writers of colour. The
pigeonholing of authors of colour, therefore, is an act of limiting their
symbolic capital. It restricts the ability of their works to be recognized
in their own right, and instead dictates that their value mostly derives
from the ‘essential’ identity of the author; as Saha explains:
this process affects writers of color in a very particular and
specific way that reproduces neocolonial ideologies. As
demonstrated, this includes being pigeonholed with and
publicized alongside other minority authors who they have little in
common with, stylistically or thematically, or having their books
packaged in a way that overdetermines the ethnic or racial
identity of the author that […] results in the exoticization or
denigration of the text.
Of course, this is not simply limited to the publishing industry, but
applies to cultural organizations much more broadly. For instance,
Eddie Chambers (2012) has made exactly the same critique in the
context of art in Britain. Take Chambers’ critique of the Mappin Art
Gallery in Sheffield’s 1984 exhibition ‘Into the Open’, which was the
first in Britain to feature only Black artists. While prima facie some
may praise a ‘Black-only’ exhibition for the sake of representation,
what this exhibition really highlighted was a pigeonholing of artistic
work in a way that limited the symbolic capital of Black artists. Firstly,
this exhibition was kept separate from all of the gallery’s works by
white artists, making it seem as if the varying identities of the artists
made it unfit to showcase them together. Secondly, the exhibition
included a wide range of eclectic styles – from Sonia Boyce’s chalk
and pastel drawings through to Sylbert Bolton and Veronica Ryan’s
abstract non-figurative sculpture. What this created, therefore, was a
situation where:45
 the work of Black artists was relentlessly quarantined from the
general and mainstreamed body of exhibition activity […]
individually, Black artists were being denied the scale of resources
that more favoured white artists were relatively used to. Well-
resourced solo exhibitions and showing of work by numerically
small groups of artists were common with white artists. Black
artists frequently had to share often cramped and crowded
exhibitions spaces with many other Black artists.
Indeed, one of the stark features about this ‘Into the Open’ exhibition
was that it was not explicitly advertised as a ‘Black exhibition’, and
yet it was framed as such by media critics. Eminent art critic
Waldemar Januszczak entitled his review in The Guardian ‘Black
art’,46 while Maggie Lett in the Sheffield Morning Telegraph referred
to the exhibition as ‘Afro art’.47 The eclectic styles of the various
showcased artists, and the potential to acquire symbolic capital,
were thus denied by a total racialization (and reduction) of their
works.
Taking a moment to pause on this pigeonholing in publishing and art
organizations, we can again see why studying racialized
organizations at the meso level is so important. In these cases, what
we see is that organizations are central locations where racialization
takes place, and where whiteness is normalized, through the
production of particular racial grammars. As Bonilla-Silva argues,
racial grammars refer to the ways ‘we see or don’t see race in social
phenomena’,48 thus building upon Goldberg’s (1993: 46) notion of a
racialized grammar as ‘a preconceptual plane or set of primitive
terms’ used for representing objects as racial and non-racial. For
instance, in these cases we have ‘Black literature’, or ‘Black art’, but
we don’t have white inverses – Waldemar Januszczak, for example,
never wrote a review of exclusively white artists entitled ‘White art’.
Such organizations, therefore, are producing a racial grammar where
race only matters, and matters universally, when talking about
people of colour. Artists and writers of colour get pigeonholed in
racial identities, with their symbolic capital curtailed, while racial
identity simply does not matter for their white contemporaries. This
racial grammar, therefore, highlights the reality that ‘Whiteness
constitutes normality and acceptance without stipulating that to be
White is to be normal and right.’49
Moreover, such cultural organizations are not just limiting the
symbolic capital of people of colour via the production of such racial
grammars; they also racialize their particular organizations in a way
that reverberates throughout society. Think of the ‘Into the Open’
exhibition’s reception, for instance. Eminent critic Maggie Lett’s
review of this exhibition clearly produced racialized imagery when
she wrote, for instance, that ‘painting a picture to express anger is
not the same as creating a coherent work of art, which embraces an
aesthetic independence that leaves the mere political image on a par
with grafting’.50 Despite very few of the artists of this exhibition
actually using anger as a topic or motivation in their work, Lett
racialized these artists through the imagery of the aggressive Black
subject.51 Indeed, as Chambers (2012) argues, the fact that Lett
carried so much symbolic capital meant that she – as an eminent art
critic – was able to define the field of cultural production in such a
way that, for decades following ‘Into the Open’, Black art came to be
synonymous with expressions of anger. In this case, we see how
Lett’s review initially produced a racialized imagery of Black artists
as being aggressive, how this individual act reverberated throughout
the organization in a way that racialized Black artists universally, and
then – indeed – how this racialized imagery connected with the
overall racialized social system’s stereotypical construction of
Blackness.
At a wider level, what we see in the case of Lett is that certain
groups of people (i.e. the dominant race) have unequal control over
the symbolic ability to shape the production of racialized imagery
within and outside their organizations. I therefore want to conclude
this chapter by considering how cultural organizations are shaped so
that whites are able to maintain control over the production of
racialization in a way that reproduces racialized stereotypes.
Consider, for instance, the ‘Riz Test’. Taking inspiration from actor
Riz Ahmed’s critique of Hollywood, the Riz Test seeks to measure
whether films and TV reproduce negative stereotypes of visible
Muslims. The film or show ‘fails’ the test if the answer is ‘yes’ to any
of the following questions:52
If the film/show stars at least one character who is identifiably
Muslim (by ethnicity, language or clothing) – is the character …

1. Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?

2. Presented as irrationally angry?
3. Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-
modern?
4. Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?
5. If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? or if
female, is she presented as oppressed by her male
counterparts?

Building upon this Riz Test, Shaf Choudry and Sadia Habib (2021)
analysed more than 865 Western movies over the past century
which have a visible Muslim character.53 They found that 87 per cent
of these films failed the Riz Test, with the rate of failure actually
increasing after events like 9/11. Such findings of the production of
racialized imagery work for other racialized groups too. Plenty of
research, for instance, highlights how Hollywood and television work
to racialize Black people in stereotyped ways: from the ‘Black
Mammy’ imagery of the Black women carer54 to the status-obsessed
‘boojie’ Black professional55 through to the aggressive Black thug.56
It is not simply enough to say that cultural organizations merely
reflect dominant ideologies and stereotypes. As writers from the
postcolonial tradition have stressed, cultural writings and imageries
are themselves productive of dominant ideologies and
stereotypes.57 For instance, as Saïd (1994) has shown, colonialism
required the West to see the ‘rest’ as backwards and pre-modern in
order to justify colonialism as a civilizing mission; but to actually
define and stereotype large parts of the world as pre-modern, the
West had to build a whole set of cultural organizations –
incorporating artists, authors, poets and travel writers – to produce
the actual imagery of pre-modernity. Indeed, as Hall (1997: 232) later
said, it is by the constant circulation of racialized imagery across and
through different spheres that the imagery is translated into dominant
stereotypes across society at large, rather than the other way
around:
Images do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They
accumulate meanings, or play off their meanings against one
another, across a variety of texts and media. Each image carries
its own, specific meaning. But at the broader level of how
‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ is being represented in a particular
culture at any one moment, we can see similar representational
practices and figures being repeated, with variations, from one
text or site of representation to another.
Again, this takes us back to the importance of the meso in the
racialized social system approach. When the dominant racial group
are able to maintain control over different organizations – especially
within the cultural industries – we get synergies between different
organizations in the production of racialization. To this extent, not
studying organizations means not fully studying racialization.
Of course, this notion of ‘fully’ takes us back to the very start of this
book. In the introduction, we considered what theory is, and what
theories are for, arguing that theories help us to understand and
explain certain aspects of social reality. However, we also argued
that theories cannot assume universal truth, and indeed that such
universalism is impossible. I want to therefore come back full circle
to the introduction in the next chapter, considering the various ways
that we can ‘stretch’ the racialized social system approach, and the
areas where this approach comes up against its limitations.
Notes
1 On analytical sociology, see: Barkey et al. 2011; Boudon 2012;
Demeulenaere 2012; Hedström 2005; Schmid 2012.
2 See Schmid 2012.
3 Hedström 2005: 11.
4 Hughey et al. 2015: 1350.
5 Hughey et al. 2015: 1351–2.
6 See Ray 2018, 2019; Ray and Purifoy 2019.
7 See Wingfield 2007, 2010; Wingfield and Alston 2014; Wingfield
and Chavez 2020.
8 Ray 2019: 27.
9 Ray 2019: 30.
10 Sewell 1992: 6–7.
11 Sewell 1992: 8.
12 Ray 2019: 35.
13 Remembering from Bonilla-Silva 2003 that cultural racism is
‘colour-blind’ to the extent that it believes that aspects of
inequality (for instance, in incarceration rates) are not due to
systemic racism but instead are due to cultural traits of the group
in hand.
14 See Ray 2018, 2019; Ray and Purifoy 2019.
15 Ray 2019.
16 Ibid.
17 Of course, I think it is unhelpful to retain a myopic definition of
agency limited to expressions of bourgeois individualism, and I
 also think it is important to extend our definition of agency out to
non-human ‘things’. For the sake of this subsection, I am focusing
on agency as subjectivity in order to flesh out how organizations
constrain (or expand) the ability to recognize one’s subjectivity.
On agency and the non-human see: Darrah-Okike 2021; Go
2016; Meghji 2020b.
18 See Campbell 2016.
19 Campbell and Bebb 2020: 6.
20 See https://apnews.com/article/pa-state-wire-race-and-ethnicity-
health-nfl-sports-205b304c0c3724532d74fc54e58b4d1d?
utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=A
P.
21 This is not to say that biological theories of race have simply
evaporated, but that the status of race as a ‘biological thing’ is
now less part of the common sense than it was during this period.
22 See Williams 1944.
23 Quoted in Carter 1898: 554.
24 Rollock et al. 2015.
25 On the relation between racialization, Blackness and ‘ape
imagery’, see Hund 2015.
26 Of course, the reality of the situation is much more complicated
than simply asserting that universally all Black sports players are
treated in one way, and all whites in another. The point remains,
however, that sport organizations have the ability to restrict Black
agency in clearly racialized ways.
27 On Black professionals being forced into diversity positions and
onto committees, see also Wingfield 2007.
28 Evans and Moore 2015; Wingfield 2010.
29 Wingfield and Alston 2014.
30 Evans and Moore 2015.
31 Indeed, similar findings are uncovered in work on Black
professionals in the UK, e.g. Meghji 2019a.
32 Wingfield and Alston 2014.
33 Wingfield and Alston 2014: 276.
34 Wingfield and Alston 2014: 285.
35 See Tate 2013.
36 Ray 2019.
37 https://diversityuk.org/diversity-in-the-uk/bame-diversity-in-the-
ftse.
38 https://mg.co.za/business/2020-08-07-white-men-still-rule-and-
earn-more.
39 See Meghji 2019b for an extended discussion of symbolic capital
as a resource unequally distributed across the racial hierarchy,
from a racialized social system perspective.
40 See Bourdieu 1998; Wacquant 2013; Wacquant and Akçaoğlu
2017.
41 See Swartz 1997.
42 Of course, this symbolic capital can be ‘cashed in’ to yield
economic capital. Winning awards is a way to open doors to more
contracts, and so on.
43 See also Saha 2018.
44 Saha 2016, 2018.
45 Chambers 2012: 14.
46 Januszczak 1984: 9.
47 Lett 1984: 6.
48 Bonilla-Silva 2012: 174.
49 Bonilla-Silva et al. 2006: 231.
50 Lett 1984: 6.
51 Chambers 2012.
52 https://www.riztest.com.
53 https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/riz-test-most-
films-fail-measure-of-muslim-representation-on-screen-
1.1224848.
54 See Collins 2004.
55 Harris and Tassie 2011.
56 Rosino 2021.
57 See Hall 1995; Saïd 1994.
Conclusion: What is Critical about
Critical Race Theory?
What about … ?
Anyone who has been to an academic conference will be familiar
with the person who asks ‘What about … ?’ at the end of someone’s
presentation. As Howard Becker (2014) points out, this ‘What about
… ?’ is often attempting to do one of two things. Firstly, it could be
trying to ‘catch out’ the presenter by offering a case that directly
falsifies the theory or overall argument being put forward. In Becker’s
case, for instance, after giving a presentation where he argued that
deviant behaviour was better understood as a form of stigma rather
than something inherently criminal, a critic asked him ‘What about
murder?’, assuming that this would simply falsify Becker’s claim in
one quick blow. Secondly, the ‘what about’ could also be an invitation
to extend your analysis beyond the cases that you have been talking
about, helping to work out whether your explanations and
understandings are useful in other areas of social life. To an extent,
when the second wave of CRT emerged in education studies, this
was largely because a group of scholars had seen the critical legal
studies scholarship, thought this legal studies scholarship provided a
practical model for analysing structural racism, and consequently
asked ‘What about education?’ in a way that was productive to the
overall field.
Indeed, even the racialized social system approach can be thought
of as emerging from a series of ‘what about’ questions. Immediately
after Bonilla-Silva (1997) published his ‘Rethinking racism: Toward a
structural interpretation’, the racialized social system approach was
criticized for being overly structural to the extent that it eroded any
sense of agency.1 In this case, therefore, we see the question ‘What
about agency?’ being raised. Of course, this led to a significant
investigation of racialized ideologies, interests and interaction orders,
all of which showed how agency figures in this structural account of
racism. Similarly, when Ray (2019) wrote his ground-breaking theory
of racialized organizations, this largely derived from him reflexively
asking ‘What about organizations?’, and realizing that the meso level
had been largely occluded from critical race analysis.
Asking ‘what about’, therefore, can often be one of the more
productive ways to really think creatively with a theory. It can guide
us to new empirical cases in the same way that it can encourage us
to develop new conceptual tools. Of course, the flip side to this is
that asking ‘what about’ can also highlight limitations or problems
with our theoretical models. Unless we assume that our theories are
universal, we have to expect that our explanations are always
incomplete. Yet incomplete does not mean wrong, and neither does
incomplete mean that a theory is not useful. For a case in point,
Marx was writing in the nineteenth century,2 and yet Marxism has
undergone significant ‘stretching’ to account for phenomena he did
not originally analyse in their full complexity – such as colonialism3
and racial capitalism4 – and it has undergone significant theoretical
revisions in its understanding of concepts such as labour,5 religion6
and ideology.7 To say that Marxism is/was ‘wrong’, or that it is not
useful, simply because the theory encountered limitations, is
therefore thoroughly misguided.
With this in mind, I want to use this chapter to ask a series of ‘what
about’s of the racialized social system approach, in the hope of
highlighting not only how scholars have creatively thought with the
model, but also the limitations that it may come up against.
Importantly, this creative thinking with the racialized social system
approach is crucial for our current conjuncture, where critical race
analysis is being met with radical resistance across the globe.
A global racialized social system?
It could be legitimate to question, for instance, whether the racialized
social system approach is equipped to deal with global raciality, or
whether it is directed towards more state-centred analyses. Indeed,
such a debate has recently gained traction among those coming
from postcolonial and decolonial standpoints.8
Part of this critique stems from the very definition of the racialized
social system as referring to ‘societies in which economic, political,
social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the
placement of actors in racial categories or races’ (Bonilla-Silva 1997:
469; emphasis added). In this context, critics have questioned
whether the notion of ‘society’ is conflated with ‘the state’.9 Prima
facie, it seems as if this conflation of society and the state is being
made in the racialized social system approach. In Bonilla-Silva’s
(2007) own work, we get the notion of different national racialized
social systems, so that we can talk of the US racialized social
system, as well as other racialized social systems in France,
Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and so on. According to this
approach, therefore, each nation state has its own racialized social
system with its own set of racial ideologies, racial interests,
racialized emotions, interaction orders, organizations and so on.
The problem with seeing each nation as having its own disparate
racialized social system is that we lose sight of the global
interlinkages that exist between these supposedly autonomous
systems. Indeed, this is the general thrust of Goldberg’s (2015)
critique when he calls for a relational sociology of race.10 In this
relational model, Goldberg stresses that ‘racial ideas, meanings and
exclusionary repressive practices in one place are influenced,
shaped by and fuel those elsewhere’, and that ‘racist arrangements
anywhere – in any place – depend, to a smaller or larger degree, on
racist practice almost everywhere else’.11 Take the US racialized
social system in the twentieth century. As Du Bois (2014[1935])
points out, the structure of this racialized social system fit into a
whole global mosaic – the labour of the enslaved produced valuable
resources for US exports, such as cotton; these exports were
shipped to places like Britain, where the cotton was then woven into
garments and exported to colonial territories such as India as a
means of destroying indigenous markets.12 In such a case, there
was thus a co-dependence between the US and British racialized
social systems by virtue of the flows of capital. To use another
example, consider the German racialized social system in World War
II, predicated on the horrors of the Holocaust and eugenics. As
Wolfe (2006) points out, Nazi tactics for such eugenics and racial
structuring took directly from the British colonial tactics in the Boer
War and from the Spanish colonization of the Americas,13 and
Britain then used the same tactics as the Nazis after World War II to
suppress the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.14 Different racialized
social systems, in these cases, were thus interconnected both
temporally and in practice.
The question then turns to whether the racialized social system
approach is able to relationally analyse such global interconnections,
or whether it is more directed towards comparative analysis of
different racialized social systems. In the current state of the
literature, the racialized social system approach has sided more with
the comparative – rather than relational – approach. In Bonilla-
Silva’s (2007) ‘“This is a white country”: The racial ideology of the
Western nations of the world-system’, for instance, we get an in-
depth comparative analysis of the dominant racial ideologies in the
German, French, Canadian, Dutch and New Zealand social systems.
Rather than analysing the interconnections of these nation states’
systems, Bonilla-Silva instead argues that they: ‘have all developed
real – although different – racial structures that award systemic
rewards to their “White” citizens’15.
In contrast to such comparative analysis, where all of the racialized
social systems are ‘different’, there have been more relational
theories put forward which essentially see each of these systems as
a specific articulation of the same world system of white
supremacy.16 Indeed, it is this more world system-oriented approach
which dominated earlier scholarship on race, as highlighted in Du
Bois’ critique of the global racial hierarchy where he states:17
We grant full citizenship in the World Commonwealth to the
‘Anglo-Saxon’ (whatever that may mean), the Teuton and the
Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance we extend it to the Celt
and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the
brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an
undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full
stop, and in its heart the civilized world with one accord denies
that these come within the pale of nineteenth-century Humanity.
As per the ethos of this chapter, this critique of the racialized social
system approach is not to suggest that it is ‘wrong’ when it comes to
the global. Indeed, in light of such global entanglements, scholars
such as Michelle Christian (2019) and Melissa Weiner (2012) have
attempted to sketch out ‘global critical race theories’ which
significantly stretch the scope of the racialized social systems
approach. In particular, Christian’s work involves the concept of the
‘global racialized social system’. To Christian, this global approach
stresses three points which had previously been overlooked in CRT
scholarship:18

1. that ‘all racialized groups and countries come into existence

through a global relational racial field that is hierarchically
based’;
2. that ‘the specific mechanisms found in social systems are
embedded in multilevel, overlapping layers of structures, from
global to local, that must be disentangled to grasp the
complexity and evolution of racial orders’; and
3. that ‘by assuming white supremacy of the world-system to be at
the base of all racial orders, we never conceptually separate
race and racism from its historical inception’.

In other words, Christian’s approach allows us to pinpoint two

interlinked structures simultaneously: firstly, a global racial hierarchy
which works between different geopolitical regions, and secondly,
national racialized social systems which embody more localized
histories and social processes. This helps explain how, for instance,
you can have a country such as India, which has its own clearly
articulated racial hierarchy based on the principle of Hindu
nationalism,19 while also being populated by those who are
racialized downwards in the overall racial hierarchy by virtue of the
continuities of colonial power relations on the international scale.
Furthermore, if we wanted to, we could use the racialized social
system approach’s conceptual tools to study this global system
Christian has theorized. At the meso level, for instance, we can
analyse how organizations such as the World Bank and IMF have
worked to maintain the economic power of the ‘West over the rest’ in
political economy in the postcolonial era by dictating how countries in
the Global South ought to run their economies.20 In terms of
interaction orders, we can study how Western countries maintain
control over institutions such as the United Nations, which act as
interactional spaces for international diplomacy, and how these
interactional spaces afford unequal voting and speaking rights to
countries from the Global South.21 At the level of ideology, we can
theorize how the West has greater legitimacy for intervening in
international affairs, in part due to the dominant set of ideas that it is
the nations of the West who are the guardians and bastions of
democracy.22
Of course, this is all hypothetical. What I am saying is that if you
wanted to, there are ways that you could stretch the racialized social
systems approach to think about global interconnections more
succinctly, in ways it was not originally oriented towards. While CRT
– and the racialized social system approach in particular – has been
criticized for running towards methodological nationalism,23
analysing nation states as discrete, unconnected entities, Christian’s
(2019) work is a demonstration of how the theory may be more
flexible than such critiques first supposed.
The flexibility of the racialized social system
approach: from DesiCrit to TribalCrit and BritCrit
In fact, it is the flexibility of the racialized social system approach
which makes it such a useful way of analysing structural racism.
Throughout this book, I have used multiple temporal and spatial
examples ranging from the colonization of the Americas in 1492,
through to Apartheid South Africa, post-war Britain and Bolsonaro’s
regime in Brazil. I have also examined multiple different case
studies, from the Black art movement in Britain, through to the
workplace experiences of Black professionals in the US, and the
exploitation of Black workers in Brazilian sugar mills. To say that
CRT, and the racialized social system approach, are rigid would
therefore be quite imprudent given the wide range of empirical
phenomena covered in this book.
Moreover, this flexibility of CRT is largely thanks to those who have
creatively thought with CRT tenets and adapted and refined them to
their own research aims and studies. I refer to this process as
‘PlethoraCrit’, as the recent years have seen a proliferation of critical
race studies of structural racism that have paid attention to specific
racially minoritized groups. Vinay Harpalani (2013), for instance,
coined the notion of ‘DesiCrit’ to look precisely at the relation
between South Asian Americans and structural racism. Firstly,
Harpalani’s analysis uses the experiences of South Asians to think
about the structural normalization of whiteness. For instance,
Harpalani highlights how the controlling images of South Asians as
model minority ‘overachievers’ fixes whiteness as the norm which
racialized minorities all deviate from (by either underachieving or
overachieving relative to whites).24 Secondly, Harpalani also uses
the experiences of South Asian Americans to think about the role of
the US legal system in the racialization process – much in the spirit
of Crenshaw and the other ‘first wave’ critical race theorists. Take the
1923 US Supreme Court case of the United States v. Bhagat Singh
Thind, as Harpalani does. In this case, Thind – an Indian living in the
US – applied for naturalized citizenship, which, under the 1906
Naturalization Act, was only open to ‘free white persons’ and ‘aliens
of African nativity and persons of African descent’. Given that Thind
identified as Aryan, and argued that Europeans and Indians had a
shared heritage, he believed he qualified as a ‘free white person’
under this 1906 Act. Yet the Supreme Court denied this request,
holding that Thind did not meet the ‘common sense’ understanding
of white. Following this case, between 1923 and 1927 a further sixty-
five Indians (and even more from other regions of Asia) were
denaturalized under this Supreme Court’s ruling.25 As Harpalani
points out, cases like this highlight how the US used its legal system
to racialize those in the US that did not neatly fit into a Black/white
binary.
Furthermore, while Harpalani and others were developing DesiCrit,
indigenous scholars such as Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy were
developing their own CRT offshoot of ‘TribalCrit’.26 Not only was this
TribalCrit studying a separate group of minoritized people from those
being studied in other aspects of CRT – that is, indigenous
Americans – but it also reworked central tenets of CRT while
remaining true to the overall critical race ethos. In studying
indigeneity and TribalCrit, Brayboy (2005: 430), for instance,
switched the CRT central premise that ‘racism is endemic in society’
to the notion that ‘colonization is endemic in society’. Doing so
enabled Brayboy to switch the critical race focus explicitly onto the
dimensions of settler colonialism. Furthermore, Brayboy retained the
critical race focus on the power of the legal system in racialization,
but showed how this process plays out differently in the case of
indigeneity and other minoritized groups. In particular, indigenous
Americans face what Brayboy terms a doubled battle to be
recognized both as a legal-political group whose existence on this
land pre-dated the creation of the American state, and as a
racialized group who ought to qualify for civil rights legislation.
However, as executive orders such as President George W. Bush’s
of April 2004 signal, the US state only permits legal rights to
‘federally recognized’ indigenous groups, and consequently denies
legal rights to those who are racialized as indigenous and yet are not
members of formally recognized groups. Such legal entanglements
are particular to the case of indigenous people and, as Brayboy
argues, thus require a stretching and development of CRT beyond
its original contours.
Lastly, it would also therefore be apt to consider how CRT has been
extended beyond both conceptual and geographical contours.
Brayboy’s own work on TribalCrit, for instance, went on to inform
critiques of settler colonialism across multiple other geopolitical
regions, such as Canada,27 Australia28 and New Zealand.29 Each of
these articulations took the central ethos and conceptual frame of
CRT, but applied and stretched it in a way that was useful for
understanding the racialized dynamics in its particular case – in
other words, they both conceptually and geographically extended the
reach of CRT. We see a similar situation in Britain, where critical race
theorists have developed their paradigm of ‘BritCrit’.30 Starting with
David Gillborn’s 2003 paper ‘Education policy as an act of white
supremacy’ delivered to the British Educational Research
Association,31 critical race theorists in Britain quickly saw that the
framework developed in the US also helped to explain fundamental
workings of the British racialized social system.32 Despite seeing this
usefulness of ‘US theorizing’, however, BritCrit also developed its
own theoretical innovations and was not merely mimicking epistemic
allies across the Atlantic. Scholars such as David Gillborn and Nicola
Rollock, for instance, developed the concept of ‘WhiteWorld’,
referring to the ‘socially constructed and constantly reinforced power
of White identifications, norms and interests’.33 This concept of
WhiteWorld, as articulated in BritCrit, was aimed towards highlighting
how treating ‘white supremacy as a marginal extremist activity, as
opposed to being integral to the social and political formation, is a
category error’.34 In a context where British commentators and
liberals were joined in thinking of white supremacy as an ‘outsider’
position of far-right parties, BritCrit was instead using the concept of
WhiteWorld to push back against this position to highlight how white
supremacy was a diffuse system rather than a reactionary political
disposition.
Why CRT and not RT?
While CRT thus began in quite a narrow field of critical legal studies,
studying the specific historical conjuncture of the post-civil rights era
in the US, it would be imprudent to think that CRT began and ended
here. The various articulations of CRT show that multiple scholars
have found it a convincing way to think about a series of racialized
phenomena and relations far beyond the conceptual, empirical,
historical and geographical confines of the ‘first wave’ critical race
theorists’ scope.
However, despite the flexibility of CRT there also needs to be some
kind of agreement on what separates CRT from ‘RT’ (race theory)
more broadly. By now it should be clear that when I am writing about
CRT I am not simply writing about ‘critical research on race’, but
instead about a distinctive – albeit malleable – theoretical model built
for the empirical study of structural racism. The most explicit way
that CRT does this is through the racialized social systems
approach, where we have a set of concepts – from ideology through
to interests, emotions, interaction orders and organizations – that
allow us to study the workings and interrelations of racism across the
micro, meso and macro levels. To merely conflate CRT with a host of
other theories – even theories studying structural racism – is
therefore to ignore the overall conceptual repertoire of the racialized
social system approach. This is why in this book, for instance, I have
highlighted how CRT is different from state-centred approaches such
as those in racial formation theory, and how it differs from theories
such as systemic racism theory which centre the actions of elite
whites. We know, therefore, that CRT is more than just ‘critical
theorizing about race/ism’; both racial formation and systemic racism
theories critically theorize, and yet CRT remains distinct from them
(among many other critical approaches). Why, therefore, do we call
critical race theory critical, and what does calling it critical do?
An approach I would like to follow comes from Patricia Hill Collins’
(2019) work, where she explores CRT as a critical knowledge
project. Critical knowledge projects, as Collins argues, stem from the
resistance of ‘oppressed peoples’, seeking to address (and redress)
‘the deep-seated concerns of people who are subordinated within
domestic and global expressions of racism’.35 Critical knowledge
projects are thus not just exercises in abstract scholasticism, but are
instead epistemic arms in the struggle for social justice – they
provide critiques to inequality and provide the foundations for
thinking, doing and being otherwise. Critical knowledge projects such
as CRT are fighting on multiple grounds simultaneously. Firstly, they
are critiquing dominant social structures in the attempts to transform
them, and secondly, they are critiquing dominant epistemologies and
frameworks – even within the academy – which constrain the ability
to effectively form such critiques of social structures in the first place.
As Crenshaw et al. (1995) remind us, when CRT emerged in critical
legal studies, it was rejected not only by neoconservatives, but also
by white feminist liberals within critical legal studies who did not
appreciate the focus on structural racism and instead wanted to
centre questions of ‘gender’ in a race-neutral prism. Similarly, as
Warmington (2020: 1) comments on CRT’s reception in Britain,
‘CRT’s fiercest opponents have often been academics who depict
themselves as progressives’; here, Warmington is calling into play
how the British iteration of CRT has been questioned for its
blindness to class analysis.
When we talk of CRT as being ‘critical’, therefore, we are really
bringing to our attention its status as social theory (thus the ‘T’) that
constitutes a critical knowledge project. We are saying that it retains
an ‘outsider within’ status: it stems from within the academy, but it is
pushed to the peripheries of academia, it forms critiques of dominant
epistemologies from these peripheries, and it seeks to transform
social structures and relations outside the academy. Moreover, as
per the Du Boisian tradition of scholarship, CRT dismisses the idea
that there is a distinctive boundary between academia and the
‘outside world’, and consequently uses the realm of epistemology –
through building conceptual frameworks and explanations – to tackle
the world of practical, empirical, social problems, relations, structures
and inequalities. Indeed, it is this transformational ethos at the heart
of CRT which helps explain why CRT has become public enemy
number one across multiple contexts.
Why do we need CRT now?
When I started writing this book in 2020, President Donald Trump
was signing an executive order banning the teaching of CRT in
employee training schemes run by the federal agency or any
company with a government contract. Now that I am finishing this
book’s conclusion in late 2021, lawmakers are considering a ban on
teaching CRT in schools and public universities across twenty US
states – such as Wisconsin, Alabama and Florida. At this same time
that US states are seeking to ban CRT, the Australian Senate has
passed a motion moved by Senator Pauline Hanson to outlaw the
inclusion of CRT in the national curriculum. While Britain may not
formally have such legislative backing, the Minister for Equalities,
Kemi Badenoch, has claimed that the government ‘stood
unequivocally against critical race theory’ (quoted in Raven 2021)
and suggested that teachers who taught critical race theory would be
in breach of the law.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, none of these very
public criticisms really give a working definition of CRT. This means
that in the US, for instance, CRT has been defined in an infinitely
different number of ways, while academics who think critically about
race across the country are being blacklisted or denied tenure due to
suspicions that their work is reminiscent of CRT.36 It is very clear
that, especially in contexts such as Britain and the US, the backlash
against CRT is not necessarily about CRT as much as it is about a
reactionary move against critical thinking about racism, in an attempt
to curtail freedom of speech and critiques of the nation state. This
helps explain why, for instance, the attack on CRT in the US has
been coupled with a critique of the New York Times’ 1619 Project,
which seeks to analyse the role of enslavement in the making of the
US. While the 1619 Project has few – if any – ties to CRT, it still gets
criticized under the rubric of ‘anti-CRT discourse’ as reactionaries
(including President Trump) attempt to delete racism from the origins
of the US. Similarly in Britain, the historian David Abulafia’s (2021)
tirade in The Telegraph claimed that CRT is a ‘beguilingly simple
description of the past’, exemplifying how he understands CRT as
essentially a critique of past colonialisms and empires. To borrow
from Carol Anderson’s (2016) work, these attacks on CRT are
expressions of white rage, whereby any attempt at racial reparation
– even at an epistemic level of admitting there is structural racism –
is met with vitriolic resistance from whites, armed by (to name a few)
academic, media and political figures.
Interestingly and appropriately, therefore, we could actually apply a
CRT analysis to these criticisms of CRT itself. The violent rejection of
the ‘straw man’ CRT, for instance, quite patently displays the roles of
racialized emotions (white rage) and organizations (support from
media) in reproducing the racial order. Similarly, as Victor Ray
pointed out on Twitter,37 the fact that states and governments are
banning the teaching of CRT demonstrates a key point that first
wave CRT made: that the legal system enacts racial power. Indeed,
the way that CRT is often dismissed for an incorrect or simplistic
reading of the past can likewise be read as an expression of colour
blindness, as actors seek to cling to the view that racism is outside
the social formation of the state (and world). On another level,
moreover, we need to think about this backlash against CRT in terms
of the genuine fear of CRT’s possibilities. Banning CRT across
educational contexts is, straightforwardly, an attempt to delegitimize
a critical knowledge project which aims towards racial justice. The
very fact that governments across the world are building legislation
to illegalize CRT itself demonstrates the potential transformative
power of CRT as a critical knowledge project. It so happens that it is
at this precise time, nevertheless, that we urgently need these
transformations which can be mediated by CRT. I want to conclude
this chapter by considering a couple of burgeoning social forces
characteristic of our time, and ways that we need CRT to fight back
against them.

CRT and the environment

As I have written elsewhere, thinking about the environment and
climate crises is a must for the social sciences, given that there is a
strong possibility that soon there will be no world in which we can
even do social science.38 As a flexible social theory, CRT has a lot to
contribute to discussions of climate justice and environmental
racism, partly due to its emphasis on the unequal distribution of
material resources across a constructed racial hierarchy.
In many legal systems across the world, ‘racism’ is often defined in
terms of discrimination by one party (a person, an institution etc.)
against another party on the basis of racial or ethnic identity. By now
it should be clear how this understanding of racism is chasms apart
from the CRT approach, given that it essentially defines racism as an
interpersonal relation rather than a social system. Nevertheless, this
legal definition of racism as ‘one-off’ discrimination has severe
implications for dealing with issues such as environmental racism.
For instance, we know that across the West those racialized
downwards are disproportionately exposed to air pollution.39 The
environmental resource of clean air, therefore, is unequally
distributed across multiple racial hierarchies. However, by virtue of
air pollution having no ‘agency’, according to Western legal systems,
it is near impossible for this environmental racism to be challenged in
the courts.40 As Laura Pulido (2017) has highlighted in the US, for
instance, there have been around eight environmental justice
lawsuits against environmental racism filed on the basis of the Equal
Protection clause of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, but
all of these have failed due to their inability to prove discriminatory
intent – a requirement of a 2001 Supreme Court decision. This
means that in cases like Flint, Michigan, where a water crisis of lead
and bacteria contamination started in 2014 in a way that
disproportionately affected Black Americans, there is clear evidence
of a racialized inequality in environmental resources (clean drinking
water). There is also evidence that this water contamination is a by-
product of industrial waste being deposited in the Flint river.
However, because the various private and state organizations
dumping their waste in the river were not doing so with the intention
of racial discrimination, and because their waste removal was
permitted by law, events like the Flint water crisis are not able to be
classified as environmental racism within the apparatus of US
racialized social systems.
CRT, therefore, offers us an apparatus for thinking about how
contemporary crises – like climate crises – can be swept under the
carpet and legitimated within particular racialized social systems.
Through this approach, CRT unearths how environmental racism is
not a coincidence, or even necessarily an intentional outcome of
greedy polluting corporations, but rather part of the overall social
structure(s) which sustain racial inequality. In Britain, for instance,
Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah – a young Black girl living in south-east
London – died in 2013, becoming the first person in the UK to have
air pollution listed as a cause of death. This tragedy represented a
wider feature of the British racial structure, where especially in cities
such as London, children who are racialized downwards are
exposed to around 28 per cent more nitrogen oxide than white
children.41 However, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s death, and all of
these other children being exposed to air pollution, have not been
directly targeted by a central polluting organization. Rather, their
unequal access to environmental resources is the outcome of
various material measures all combining – including housing
segregation, deprivation, unaffordability of public transport, lack of
nearby schools and so on. When thinking about climate crises,
therefore, a CRT analysis is vital, as it shows how racialized
environmental inequalities are not simply a by-product of ‘just the
way things are’, but are instead part and parcel of the racialized
social system’s order.

CRT, the ‘racial justice as diversity training’

industry and the crisis of white liberalism
Turning from the climate to the ‘souls of white folk’, as Du Bois aptly
put it, CRT is also a vital intervention needed in a time that we can
loosely term the era of ‘white reconstruction’.42 Especially after the
police murder of the unarmed Black man George Floyd in the
summer of 2020, we saw countless organizations and people
solemnly declare that ‘Black Lives Matter’. These organizations
include the likes of McDonald’s and American Airlines, to pick two
examples, both of which actually make use of racialized prison
labour camps in the US. This ‘post-George Floyd’ era was very much
marked by a belief that simply uttering a statement that ‘Black Lives
Matter’ was seen to be a legitimate substitute for creating social
structures in which Black lives do in fact matter.
One particular process that became increasingly salient in the wake
of this death was the sharing of ‘readings about racism’, as white
liberals took on a collective duty to educate themselves on the issue
of race/ism. At the top of that list of readings, in many cases, was
Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) White Fragility, a New York Times
bestseller.43 The irony here, of course, is at least twofold. Firstly,
many of these liberals were attracted to anti-racist books, among
which they prioritized DiAngelo’s, as a means of tackling structural
racism. In other words, they subscribed to the very view of racism as
prejudice which can be ‘educated away’ that CRT seeks to move far
beyond. Secondly, the irony speaks directly to the inclusion of
DiAngelo and her book.44 DiAngelo has made a career from
diversity ‘white fragility’ workshops, where she is paid large amounts
of money to educate white people on their privilege. The author of
the book most recommended in the wake of Floyd’s murder,
therefore, was also coming from a viewpoint of racism as a social-
psychological aberration, something that needed to be confronted
‘within’, an issue internal to white people’s psyche that they needed
to reconcile with through paying large sums of money for training
workshops. Racism, from DiAngelo’s position, simply existed
because white people get too ‘fragile’, too sensitive when racism
comes up as a topic of conversation (whereas, in reality, this is a
symptom rather than a cause of racism).
Indeed, the issue here is not just of one author. Rather, decades and
decades of colour-blind ideology have led to a consolidation of the
idea that racism can be trained or educated away, and that the entire
system of racism is simply a series of interpersonal relationships and
‘unconscious’ biases. This colour-blind ideology is so powerful that it
even converted some of the most vehement critics of systemic
racism – most obviously Martin Luther King Jr – into liberals whose
anti-racism was supposedly predicated on ‘making sure everyone
gets along together’. Moreover, in this colour-blind era, time and time
again, as Satnam Virdee (2000) presciently remarked, we are
presented with a solution of representation when the issue of
inequality is fundamentally calling for an issue of redistribution.
Representation does not entail systemic change, and as Gramsci
reminded us, representation in fact is often a way of concealing the
inequalities built into a system (‘the police force can’t be racist, our
chief is a Black person!’).45 Indeed, one could argue the US had
good ‘representation’ when Obama was president, and yet it was
under the same presidency that Black Lives Matter came to fruition
as a movement. Britain currently has the most ethno-racially diverse
Cabinet ever recorded, and yet it is actively pushing an agenda built
around the position that it is the poor whites who are truly
marginalized, and that anti-racism and decolonization are simply
‘trendy’ and distracting topics (as signalled by the Minister for
Women and Equalities, Liz Truss). Simply put, therefore, CRT is
needed in this era of white reconstruction because even the
dominant, liberal understanding of structural racism is just the
‘racism as prejudice’ approach in disguise.

The hierarchy of racism(s)

Of course, a by-product of thinking of racism as prejudice is that
people become inclined to hierarchize the different ‘racisms’. If one
group are said to be receiving more prejudice, then they face ‘more
racism’ by this measure. This issue is particularly pressing in our
current conjuncture where, as Alana Lentin (2020) has pointed out,
public and political debates are consistently framed around deciding
which ‘racism’ ought to take priority in the struggle for justice (rather
than thinking about racism as a totalizing racial structure in which all
actors are positioned – including whites).
A clear example of this can be found in Britain, where contemporary
political discourse consistently attempts to pit anti-Semitism against
Islamophobia. Especially during the tenure of Jeremy Corbyn as
leader of the Labour party between 2015 and 2019, the left were
consistently accused of vehement anti-Semitism, while the left’s
response was often to simply make the mirror-image claim that the
Conservative party had a problem with Islamophobia. My aim here is
to not assess how valid either of these claims were, but rather to
show that such a case of ‘left anti-Semitism versus right
Islamophobia’ makes it appear as though these forms of racism are
entirely disconnected, and indeed, that one ‘matters more’ than the
other. In contrast to this, the racialized social system approach
shows how all these forms of racism are inherently connected – they
all belong to the same overall racial apparatus, and follow the logics
of this apparatus. In the case of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, for
instance, as Nasar Meer (2013) has argued, both show how
racialization is concerned with religion, both represent Orientalist
imaginaries, both adopt a position of cultural racism where the ‘group
characteristics’ of Jews and Muslims are stereotyped and
stigmatized, and both are articulated in the form of conspiracy
theories (the fears of a Muslim takeover of Europe, leading to
‘Eurabia’, and the conspiracy of Jewish control over the global
political economy).46
In fact, as scholars such as Mignolo (2011) and Slabodsky (2014)
have pointed out, separating ‘different racisms’ out from one another
is not just conceptually but historically flawed. If we stick with the
case of anti-Semitism, for instance, the very first use of the ‘ghetto’ –
a word now equated with the relegation of Black Americans to
destitute space – was instigated against Jews in Venice in 1516,
when the Venetian government claimed that Jewish people had
biological illnesses that would plague the ‘indigenous’ citizens.47
This ghettoization – physical segregation and intense surveillance –
of Jews thus became a model exported across Europe for dealing
with those racialized downwards in the metropoles and colonies.
Furthermore, as Slabodsky (2014) points out, by virtue of
movements like the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834), Jews in Spain
had to flee the European metropoles and found refuge in regions
colonized by the Spanish empire. This is why, for instance, there is a
rich tradition of anti-racist/anti-colonial Jewish/indigenous solidarity
across the Latin American continent.48
Bringing this back to CRT, the issue here is not that we want to
dismiss any differences in how differently racialized groups
‘experience’ racism. Rather, the issue is to stress how all racialized
people – including whites – exist in the same racialized social
system, and consequently that there is a necessary relation that
exists between their positions, exploitation and – in the case of
whites – supremacy. To clarify with another example: prejudice and
violence towards the East Asian diaspora in the West rocketed in the
wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but the ideology used to
justify this violence – the ideology that ‘this is a white nation and you
don’t belong’ – is a different articulation of the same ideology that the
West violently deploys at its borders against Black and Brown
refugees.49 In a time when we talk about ‘racisms’ in the plural, we
open up a gulf between different expressions of the same thing.
CRT, through prioritizing analysis of the racialized social systems
and its mechanisms of reproduction across the micro, meso and
macro levels, offers the perfect avenue to get us back to the correct
route of analysing interconnections rather than bifurcations.
Critical race theory and the quest for justice
This brings us back to the very crux of CRT. We use CRT to study
interconnections because we essentially want to dismantle racism,
and as Martin Luther King Jr (1963) put it, ‘[racial] injustice anywhere
is a threat to [racial] justice everywhere’. We cannot dismantle
racism unless we know what racism is (a social system, not
prejudice), how it functions, its mechanisms of reproduction, and its
effects, subsistence and construction across the micro, meso and
macro levels. CRT enables us to work towards answers in each of
these areas, and helps steer us away from the fallible (and farcical)
position that racism can be educated away through one-off diversity
workshops, that racial justice is when a Black man is in charge of a
company that exploits Black and Brown labourers, or that ‘the
problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the Birthers, [and] the Tea
Party’.50
Of course, it would be contradictory to say that reading any CRT
book is simply going to get rid of racism; but that is not the aim of
CRT scholarship. Our aim is to give us all tools to understand and
dismantle the racial system, in the hope of building something new.
Indeed, the world that CRT seeks is a world without race, where we
don’t have local and global structures predicated on racial
exploitation (and superiority). Unfortunately for humankind, having
an actually post-racial world has been the desire for centuries and
centuries, and the wish has shown little signs of being met. So for
this reason, I will conclude this book with a short excerpt from Du
Bois’ ‘The souls of white folk’, where he spells out exactly the central
premise of CRT – that racism remains, and will continue to remain,
so long as people benefit from the racial order:51
This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is
inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to
curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as
they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually
playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone,
saying:
‘My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that
the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to
say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the
good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one
day, be born white!’
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:
‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’
Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given
to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever
and ever, Amen!
Notes
1 Loveman 1999.
2 Marx 2004[1867].
3 Fanon 1963[1961].
4 Du Bois 2014[1935]; McMillan Cottom 2020; Robinson 1983.
5 Federici 2018.
6 Shari’ati 1980.
7 Hall 1991.
8 See Christian 2019; Meghji 2020b; Weiner 2012.
9 Meghji 2020b.
10 See also Goldberg 2009; Meghji 2017.
11 Goldberg 2015: 254–5.
12 See also Bhambra 2007.
13 See also Césaire 2001[1950].
14 See Imperato 2005.
15 Bonilla-Silva 2007: 188 (emphasis added).
16 See Grosfoguel 2013; Mills 1997.
17 Du Bois 1967[1899]: 386–7.
18 Christian 2019: 174.
19 See Masood and Nisar 2019.
20 See Mignolo and Walsh 2018.
21 Getachew 2019.
22 Grosfoguel 2007.
23 See Goldberg and Essed 2002; Meghji 2020b.
24 See Yi et al. 2020 for a further analysis of the model minority
myth and CRT.
25 Roediger 2002.
26 See Brayboy 2005.
27 Kumar 2009.
28 Fredericks et al. 2014; see also Bargallie and Lentin 2021.
29 Smith et al. 2016.
30 See Meghji 2021.
31 Later published as a journal article (Gillborn 2005).
32 Warmington 2020.
33 Rollock et al. 2015: 14. See also Gillborn 2006a and Rollock
2014.
34 Warmington 2020: 11.
35 P. H. Collins 2019: 88.
36 Most famously in the case of Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones,
whose involvement as the leader of the 1619 Project, which
investigated the role of enslavement in the making of the US, was
seen as being too close to CRT. She was refused tenure at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
37 See
https://twitter.com/victorerikray/status/1403437961367240711.
38 Meghji 2020a.
39 See Fecht et al. 2015; Meghji 2020a.
40 This contrasts with places such as Bolivia, where the ‘buen vivir’
legislation both gives agency to the environment and makes it a
duty to nurture the environment in social practice.
41 https://airqualitynews.com/2021/03/01/bame-children-exposed-to-
greater-levels-of-air-pollution.
42 Du Bois 2008[1920].
43 Ironically, many of the US conservatives moving to ban CRT
classify DiAngelo as one of the leading critical race theorists.
44 This is by no means a personal criticism; I am sure DiAngelo is
well intentioned.
45 Gramsci 1971.
46 See also Zia-Ebrahimi 2018. The concept of Orientalism, of
course, draws on the work of Saïd (1994) and his critique of
Western imagery of the ‘rest’ of the world.
47 See Sennett 2002; on the ghetto, see Wacquant 2008.
48 See Lesser and Rein 2008 for a history of Jewish people in Latin
America.
49 Yuval-Davis et al. 2018. On anti-Asian violence in the COVID-19
pandemic, see Meghji and Niang 2021; Yeh 2020.
50 Bonilla-Silva 2014: xv.
51 Du Bois 2008[1920]: 306.
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Index
American Football 99–100
analytical sociology 90–2
Anderson, Elijah 86
anti-Semitism 62, 82, 129–30
Apartheid 22, 26, 48, 52, 78–9, 88, 118
Australia 1, 52, 63, 120, 123
Bell, Derrick 7, 46–7
Black arts 107–9
Black Lives Matter 1, 127–8
Bonilla–Silva, Eduardo 17, 20, 23, 25, 29–30, 34, 38–9, 45–6, 56,
58, 60–3, 72, 83, 86, 108, 112, 114–15
Bourdieu, Pierre 18, 26, 33–4, 38–9, 45, 104
Brazil 26, 42–5, 69–70, 87, 94–7, 118
Brexit 53, 65, 67–70
Britain 1–2, 48–52, 64–7, 87, 100, 106–7, 115–18, 120
BritCrit 25, 118–20
caste 77
Christian, Michelle 116–17
Christianity 35–6
civil rights 3–8, 11–13, 24, 42, 47, 119, 121
Collins, Patricia Hill 4, 16, 18–19, 62, 84–5, 121–2
counter storytelling 15–16
Cox, Oliver Cromwell 28–9, 41
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 4, 5–13, 16, 52, 118, 122
critical knowledge projects 122
cultural industries 104–11
Delgado, Richard 9–14, 20, 23, 25
DesiCrit 24, 118–19
diversity training 27, 126–8
Doane, Ashley 56
Du Bois, W. E. B. 21, 35, 47–9, 62–4, 79, 81, 114–15, 122–3, 126,
131
enslavement 11, 35, 47, 95, 123
environmental racism 45, 125–6
Essed, Philomena 4, 83
European Racial Equality Directive 24
Fanon, Frantz 81–3
Floyd, George 127
France 25, 59–60, 63, 98, 114
Frazier, Franklin 74–6
Gillborn, David 25, 120
global sociology 114–17
Goldberg, David Theo 4, 24, 108, 114
Haiti 37–8
Hall, Stuart 17, 52, 55–8, 110
Harris, Cheryl 6
immigration 48–52, 66–8
India 77–8, 115–19
indigeneity 6, 24, 30, 35–6, 44, 63, 67–70, 82, 119
intersectionality 4, 11–12, 52, 84, 102–3, 110
Islamophobia 62–3, 109–10, 129
Jim Crow 22, 26, 50, 52, 77, 79–81, 93
King, Martin Luther, Junior 128, 130
Ladson–Billings, Gloria 13–14, 20
LatCrit 24
Lentin, Alana 128
media representation 43, 68, 86, 100, 105
methodological nationalism 24, 27
Mexico 37, 38, 44, 66, 77, 87
Mignolo, Walter 129
nationalism 68, 117
Nazism 115
Park, Robert 39–42
post-racialism 67–71
race relations theory 39–42
racial formation theory 4, 31–3, 121
racial grammar 21–2, 108
racial realism 45–9
racial tasks 101–3
Ray, Victor 23, 92, 97, 113, 124
Riz Test 109–10
Rosino, Michael 22
scientific racism 36, 99
segregation 8, 10, 14–15, 20, 22, 26, 31, 41, 45, 47, 50, 59, 70, 74–
5, 77–9, 93, 104, 126
Sivanandan, Ambalavaner 50–1
soccer 98–100
social mechanisms 91
South Africa 22, 48, 52, 78, 88, 104, 118
Stefancic, Jean 9–14, 20, 23, 25
stereotyping 13, 57, 84–5, 102–3, 109–10, 129
systemic racism theory 121
TribalCrit 24, 118, 119–20
Trump, Donald 1, 22, 53, 64–8, 71, 123–4
UNESCO 37
wages of whiteness 45–53
Wells, Ida B. 80
white habitus 84, 86–8
white rage 124
white victimhood 66–8
whiteness 6, 22–3, 37, 45–6, 49–53, 62–3, 83–8, 103, 108, 118,
131–2
Wingfield, Adia Harvey 94–5, 102
workplaces 100–3
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