Abstract
The editors of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice (Molina et al., 2019) present a volume considering the formation of marginalized racial categories and identities—not from their position relative to Whiteness—but from their positions relative to each other. This is not a new insight in race-based scholarship (the editors include a lengthy “Further Reading” section documenting this work) but on the whole, it has been given less attention from race scholars due to a tendency to focus on the relationships between various marginalized groups to Whiteness. The main contribution of the volume is that it privileges this overlooked aspect of how racial categories form and change over time and across space in what the editors call a “mutually constitutive process.” It thus adds more depth and texture to the race concept, adds a new level of complexity to the study of race, and provides a generative analysis revealing new directions for future research.
The volume is divided into four parts (Theory, Politics, History, and Policy). It would be useful for race scholars working in multi-racial research settings—which it points out is increasingly the case—as well as for adoption in graduate courses in race and ethnicity studies (both general race studies and courses emphasizing a specific racial identity, such as African-American Studies). Because of its methodological approach, it may also be useful for scholars not specializing in race but who nevertheless come across it in the course of their work, such as immigration studies or urban studies. My review of its content is organized around three emergent themes: (1) distinguishing the relational from the comparative, (2) the specter of Whiteness, and (3) inter-racial relationality versus intra-racial relationality.
The volume defines racial relationality primarily by methodologically distinguishing it from racial comparison. For the editors, the comparative approach, “typically compares and contrasts the characteristics and experiences of different racialized groups, often treating their boundaries as stable and produced independently” (Molina et al., 2019: 8). This approach is critiqued by editor and contributor Natalia Molina as “leaving the construction of the categories themselves unexamined, thus, even if unintentionally, reifying them in the process” (Molina et al., 2019: 44). In other words, comparative analytic approaches are seen as limiting because they can fail to recognize that race is a “mutually constitutive process [and is] socially constructed” (Molina, 2019: 44). However, relational frameworks “ . . . go beyond the logic of comparison to examine the intersections . . . between/among what is being compared” (Molina et al., 2019: 8). A relational framework thus recognizes, unlike comparative ones, that “racial meanings, boundaries and hierarchies are coproduced through dynamic processes that change across space and time” (Molina et al., 2019: 8).
These comments provide important contrast between two similar methodologies, but end up needlessly elevating relationality at the expense of comparison when both have utility in race studies. The described limitations of comparison are valid, but if there are such strong limitations of comparison, then are there any such limitations with relationality as a methodological approach? The main limitation identified by the editors is that relational research is more difficult that other approaches because it requires scholars to perform much of the work outside their topical or disciplinary expertise (Molina et al., 2019: 12). It is possible, however, to consider relationality and comparison as more closely linked than the argument presented here. This linkage is especially pertinent to scholars with international research agendas where cross-national comparisons are inherent components of the analysis. Much of the research in this volume, by contrast, is situated almost completely in American contexts—with the notable exception of Roderick Ferguson’s (2019) work on the relational underpinnings of the global anti-colonialist/anti-racist movement of the mid-20th century. Would it be possible to perhaps have comparative research that is also relational, or vice versa? In this volume, Steven Salaita (2019) incorporates both approaches, as he uses similarities in oppression between Palestinians and American Indians to deepen our understanding of the racialized nature of American-Israeli relations.
As its title suggests, this volume is theoretically derived from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) influential Racial Formation in the United States and uses analytic frameworks developed there to inform its relational analyses, especially its explanations of racialization and racial projects. It is more generally guided by the principle—introduced by Omi and Winant (2015)—that race should not be regarded as a fixed set of categories but rather as a “sociohistorical process” where group boundaries are in constant states of flux due to social interaction. The volume extends these arguments to new analytic terrain and addresses an ongoing problem within race studies where “the dominant research and teaching paradigms continue to be organized around the model of examining racialized groups in isolation and in relation to whiteness” (Molina et al., 2019: 5). Contributions here, by contrast, are more interested in how a “history of enslavement” in the United States is conceptually linked to today’s “politics of racialized immigration” (Willoughby-Herard, 2019), or how Vietnamese refugees and Mexican immigrants in Central Arkansas came to occupy unique racial positions influenced by long-standing Black-White relationships, nationalism, and Christian charity (Guerrero, 2019). In doing this, contributors in the volume foreground agency under conditions of marginalization and disrupt the White/non-White binary found in much of race studies.
But the specter of Whiteness, nevertheless, hovers over much of the proceedings. As the editors point out on the first page of the introduction, “this work examines the experiences, struggles, and characteristics of [racially] subordinated groups and their standing within white supremacist and colonial structures of power” (Molina et al., 2019: 1). While all contributions in this volume acknowledge and engage with this basic fact of racial hierarchy, it is sometimes diminished due to the volume’s conceptual approach and theoretical background. For systemic racism theorists Joe Feagin and Sean Elias (2013), theories of racial formation focus too much on the creation of racial categories and not on racial hierarchy itself—and who ultimately controls it. More direct acknowledgements of racial hierarchy would be useful in the volume’s contributions focusing on animosity and hostility between subordinated groups. These analyses tend to end with the way hostilities help shape group identity, but from a systemic racism perspective, these hostilities could be further explained as types of complicated of “divide and conquer” strategies working simultaneously to further solidify a global—White-dominated—racial hierarchy. With this theoretical link, it is possible to identify even more similarities across the diverse situational contexts in this volume, and may help bridge divisions between theories of racial formation and systemic racism.
The relational approach to racial formation formulated here is inherently inter-racial, in the sense that it is concerned with relations between Vietnamese and Mexicans, Blacks and American Indians, Latino/as and Asians, and so on. The volume editors are critical of studying racial groups “in isolation” but this approach has led to the insight that no racial group or identity is monolithic—or the same across all individuals in the group. In other words, all racial groups are themselves diverse and can be best understood in terms of intra-racial relationality. This is the foundation, for example, of both Indigenous Studies (Holm et al., 2003) and African Diaspora Studies (Gilroy, 1993), with each tradition concerning itself with how global racial categories “Indigenous” and “Black,” respectively, are formed as a result of recognizing similarities and negotiating differences within the group. These two practices—recognizing similarities and negotiating differences—are core themes of the relational approach adopted in this volume (Molina et al., 2019). It seems that the conceptual approach to relationality adopted in intra-racial contexts by Indigenous Studies and African Diaspora Studies is very similar—if not the same, as the one used in inter-racial contexts here, allowing for potential multi-dimensional conceptualizations of racial relationality.
This last point is a perfect example of the volume’s biggest strength as an academic text, which is the generative analysis it produces. Each contribution produces meaningful discussions about overlooked aspects of racial formation, leading to new directions for future research. Indeed, my remarks are inspired by this generativity and should be read as a hearty endorsement of the book’s analytic approach and its contents. They are meant to be generative as well. But beyond its significance as an academic text—perhaps more importantly—this approach gives it considerable purchase as a political text. It lays out a potential blueprint for the creation of activist coalitions between racially subjugated groups precisely because it focuses on identifying similarities and negotiating differences between them. I thank the editors and contributors for their work in creating this valuable scholarship.