Abstract
Over the past twenty years, race scholars’ attempts to understand the persistence of racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era have produced a body of scholarship focused on analyzing and theorizing the structural dimensions of white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Emirbayer and Desmond 2015; Feagin 2006, 2010; Omi and Winant 2014). While the structuralist approaches to race and racism in these works are quite diverse and at times even antagonistic, they have generally called attention to the need for a more careful accounting of the complex relationships among structures, ideologies, and practices that constitute and maintain patterns of racial hierarchy. Moon-Kie Jung’s most recent work, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present, is one of a handful of particularly notable contributions to this scholarship for its direct engagement with sociological theories of structure, culture, and agency.
As has become his scholarly trademark, Jung sets out in this book to pose and answer critical questions about contemporary theories of race and racism. First, how can structural theories of racism more adequately address links between structural phenomena, cultural understandings, and agency in accounting for racism’s durability and malleability? Second, how do we theorize the importance of both dominant and subaltern ideologies and systems of meaning for the ways people construct, maintain, contest, and transform race and racisms? Third, how has a tendency toward methodological and theoretical nationalism in U.S. sociologies of race limited our understanding of the multiplicity and overlapping of racisms? On a related note, how might contemporary theories of assimilation and immigration benefit from these insights? Finally, what are the possibilities for a more critical theory of racial politics and antiracist practice based on these insights?
Jung answers these important questions inthree interrelated parts. In Part I he outlines a new theory of racism that specifically addresses the lack of an adequately developed—or fully articulated—idea of structure in contemporary structural theories. He takes Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) groundbreaking “racialized social systems” approach as his point of departure, noting sometimes vague definitions of both ideology and structure and, in his salient critique of “racism as ideology,” a frequent reliance on a conflicted understanding of ideology as a structural appendage. By drawing on William H. Sewell, Jr.’s (1992) equally important work on the dual nature of social structure, Jung offers a more nuanced understanding of structure that incorporates cultural practices, agency, and social change.
In Part II, Jung problematizes U.S. race scholars’ unquestioning reliance on the nation-state as a core analytical category. Identifying this practice as symptomatic of methodological and theoretical nationalisms pervading U.S. social science, the author makes a compelling case for using the concept of “empire-state” when analyzing the United States, given its foregrounding of the “usurpation of the political sovereignty of foreign territories and corresponding populations” in state-building (p.59), which he draws from scholars of empire. In addition to its ability to better capture how the U.S. racial regime has historically produced “competing and overlapping geographies and temporalities” (p.81), Jung argues, such a conceptual approach underscores the importance of comparative-historical analyses of race and racism while moving scholars toward a sociology of race that is more theoretically and methodologically engaged with the sociological study of empire.
Jung continues this line of inquiry by offering a cogent critique and suggested reorienting of contemporary assimilation theories. While acknowledging the important contributions of both neoclassical and segmented assimilation scholars to address past omissions and errors, the field remains generally hampered by its core theoretical assumptions about the salience of race. Building on his earlier discussion of the implications of the empire state as a more appropriate analytical category, Jung points out how the continued focus on locating and analyzing differences and similarities in the assimilation trajectories of newer and older waves of migrants overlooks the crucial roles of race and racism in what is best understood as an ongoing and contentious politics of national belonging. What is particularly interesting here is how Jung mines the early twentieth-century writings of Robert E. Park and others to point out that imperial state conceptions of the United States are not entirely new to assimilation theory, but rather are casualties of the aforementioned methodological and theoretical nationalisms that encouraged an increasingly narrower range of comparative cases and analytic models. Using empirical insights from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constitutional law on race, he demonstrates how such an approach contributes to a useful framework for analyzing the links between the histories of racialized minorities.
In Part III, Jung offers similarly impressive theoretical and empirical contributions in an analysis and critique of Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence and its core concept of doxa, or subconscious consent, which, given recent events, is ripe for examination. Here, Jung complicates Bourdieu’s assumption of the unanimity of doxa by offering the concept of “doxic asymmetry” (p.64), which casts new light on the frequently overlooked, though well-documented, subaltern strategies and ways of knowing featured prominently in the works of sociological pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois (p.66). Jung offers the important concepts of symbolic coercion and symbolic perversity to better analyze how thedominant’s tacit nonrecognition of both the subaltern’s and its own discourses of inequality and suffering actively maintain and legitimize various forms of violence against the dominated. He supplements these with rich case studies of legitimized state violence against Filipino laborers in Hawai’i (Chapter 5) and an analysis of the indifference embedded in governmental and media discourses about African American unemployment over the last four decades (Chapter 6).
In the work’s innovative conclusion, Jung further articulates a critical sociology of race and politics of antiracism that incorporate the aforementioned concepts. He doesso in part by referencing novelist and essayist James Baldwin, whose words appear in epigraphs throughout. Acknowledging Baldwin’s tense relationship with the discipline, Jung deftly calls attention to a sociological prescience about race and racism in Baldwin’s writings, including an understanding of the socially constructed nature of race long before it became a widely accepted notion, and the doxic asymmetry and racialized politics of national belonging that Jung elaborates on earlier in the text.
Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy stands as an incredibly insightful and important work in the sociology of race that sets new theoretical and empirical agendas. Bringing together classical and contemporary theories in innovative ways, Jung offers scholars of race and scholars of assimilation a fresh perspective on central questions in the field. Through a careful re-examination of existing core concepts and the development of new ones, he makes a crucial intervention in the structural racism debate, moving us closer to a better articulated and more robust theoretical understanding of racism. This work is required reading for those seeking a critical understanding of both contemporary and historical racisms.