Race and Racism

Few ideas have been so fraught with controversy, or have provided as much occasion for discussion and debate, as that of race. Race is a highly contradictory notion. Although deeply intertwined with the development of the modern world and intimately involved with the rise of Enlightenment-based rationalism, the idea of race also preserves fundamentally pre-modern and irrational characteristics. It is frequently dismissed today as an illusion ("There is no such thing as race"; "There is only one race: the human race"; etc.). Yet race continues to demarcate and stratify the world's peoples in striking ways. Indeed, at the same time as it is dismissed, race is also taken for granted. While on the one hand constituting a fundamental aspect of human identity, something recognized across the world, on the other hand race identity has very different meanings in particular societal and cultural settings, such that a person who is identified as belonging to one racial category ("white," for example) in country A, may not be afforded that same racial status in country B.

From a logical point of view this situation is at the least very peculiar, since the wide variations just discussed do not in general undercut the near-universal acknowledgment of racial identity, racial hierarchy, and racially stratified status, such that lighter skin is perceived as "better" or "more attractive" than darker, for example. So how can these problems be explained? Is race an illusion or an objective reality? Is racial identity (or racial difference) a natural or sociohistorical attribute? Is race an atavistic holdover from an earlier epoch of conquest, colonialism, and African slavery—which were all organized along racial lines—or is it a more-or-less permanent means of organizing inequality and domination on both a local and global scale? What makes the racialized body so indispensable as a marker of socioeconomic difference? And why does race continue to operate so well at the crossroads of identity and social structure? After all, despite contemporary reluctance to recognize the continuing significance of race, race still operates as a social fact (in the Durkheimian sense of that term). It links the micro-social dimension of human existence (at which are located the personal, the experiential, the direct interactions by which we know ourselves and each other); and the macro-social dimension of human existence (at which institutions, markets, nation-states, and social stratification operate).