Abstract
In the age of Black Lives Matter, the need to understand why and how racism has been perpetuated in American society has ever more urgency. Opening with yet another tragic story of the police shooting death of an unarmed black youth, Moon-Kie Jung’s Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy is a timely addition to the theoretical understanding of racial inequalities and domination. Jung challenges prevalent and unquestioned assumptions about racism and develops new analytical concepts and theories to rethink racism and white supremacy from the past to the present.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, “Denaturalizing Common Sense,” Jung outlines a new theory of racism based on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of racism and William Sewell, Jr.’s theory of structure. Building on Bonilla-Silva’s emphasis on structural character and Sewell’s analysis of the duality of structure in cultural schemas and material resources, Jung offers a theory of racism entailing a multiplicity of structures with reiterative articulation of schemas and resources through practices that range from everyday interactions to geopolitics. Further, Jung explicitly brings back the cultural or semiotic dimension of social life into his structural analysis of racism.
Jung theorizes three core racial schemas continually in use that cause racism to persist: categorizing people into races by some notion of “collective heredity”; basing the suitability/unsuitability of civic inclusion on race; and presuming superiority or inferiority on the basis of race. Further, Jung “contends that racism is composed largely of nondiscursive and performa-discursive practices that are enactments of tacit schemas” (p. 50). Outlining how dominant and subaltern ideologies of racism differ, Jung shows that schemas of “colorblindness” operate at relatively “shallow” depths in public discourse (p. 45) and are reflective discourses offered by those who are dominant in society, as are all racial ideologies. Thus, Jung contrasts racial ideologies like the colorblind schema with dominant populations’ actual performative racist practices.
In the second part, “Denaturalizing the Nation-State,” Jung bridges the sociologies of race and empire. In Chapter Three, he argues that the United States has never been a nation-state and has always been an empire-state—that is, a racial state, and a state of white supremacy. What racial states and empire states share is the hidden and take-for-granted assumption of white dominance. Jung asserts that the empire-state uses “methodological nationalism” to link the racial subordination of colonized peoples to noncolonized peoples’ dominance. He notes, for example, that “the racial subjection, colonial and noncolonial, and fates of Blacks, American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Filipinas/os, Samoans, Chamoru, and others were interlinked” (p. 79). Thus, he urges scholars to look beyond the “white-nonwhite relation of domination at a time within the borders of a nonexistent nation-state” (p. 80).
In Chapter Four, Jung invites readers to incorporate the critical theories of race and racism to the sociology of immigration as he critiques “the racial unconscious of assimilation theories” (and by this he means both neoclassical assimilation theories and segmented assimilation theories). His argument with these theories is that both take the existence of “mainstream American society” as a given and fail to engage the possibility that significant changes can be made to structures of racial inequality and domination. He advocates instead for scholarly approaches that consider race when interrogating the politics of national belonging and formal citizenship.
In the book’s third and final part, “Denaturalizing Ignorance,” Jung offers two case studies and uses them as tools to illustrate the ignorance of the dominant ideology. (To Jung, whether this ignorance is willful or not is immaterial.) Chapter Five’s case is that of the 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai`i, focusing on how racially dominant individuals legitimized the use of physical coercion. Combining Bourdieu’s theory of practice with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, Jung develops the notion of “symbolic coercion,” dominant populations’ tacit refusal to recognize subaltern dissent; Jung asserts that relations of domination entail asymmetrical doxa. In Chapter Six, he develops the notion of “symbolic perversity”—a combination of conscious knowing and unconscious unknowing—as he critiques the New York Times’s failure to transparently report on the black vs. white unemployment ratio, an important measure of racialized economic inequality.
Jung’s work is utterly unsettling and bold. He urges sociologists to go beneath the surface of white supremacy to tap its source and denaturalize it ontologically and epistemologically. The critical theory of racism Jung proposes can amplify the voices of so many who remain largely unheard: the black poor, the incarcerated, Muslims, or unauthorized immigrants. Jung’s contribution is rich theoretically, methodologically, and empirically—he draws data from archives, media, oral history, and statistical sources—but its value also rests in its ability to broaden the scale and depth of the discussion on racial inequality.