Abstract
In the age of Black Lives Matter, the urge to understand why and how racism has been perpetuated in American society has never been more urgent. Opening with yet another tragic story of the police shooting of an unarmed Black youth, Moon-Kie Jung’s most recent book is a timely addition to the theoretical understanding of racial inequalities and domination. Jung challenges the dominant 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 interaction to geopolitics. Further, Jung explicitly brings back the cultural or semiotic dimension of social life into his structural analysis of racism. Jung advances three core racial schemas continually in use, thus making racism persist: categorizing people into races by some notion of “collective heredity,” basing the suitability/unsuitability of civic inclusion on race, and presuming superiority/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 society’s dominant groups, as are all racial ideologies. Thus, Jung contrasts racial ideologies like colorblind schema with dominant groups’ actual performative racist practices.
In the second part, “Denaturalizing the Nation-State,” Jung bridges the sociologies of race and empire. In chapter 3, he argues that the United States has never been a nation-state, which is horizontally homogeneous, and has always been an empire-state, which is hierarchically differentiated, namely, encompassing different degrees of sovereignty, territories of unequal political status, and differentiated access to rights and privileges. Jung emphasizes that the United States has always been a racial state and a state of white supremacy. What racial states and empire states share is the hidden and taken-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 the 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). Later, in chapter 4, he 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 given and fail to engage in 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 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 5’s case is that of the 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai’i, focusing on how the dominant groups 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,” the dominant group’s tacit refusal to recognize subaltern dissent; Jung asserts that relations of domination entail asymmetrical doxa. In chapter 6, 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 Black/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 theoretically, methodologically, and empirically rich—he draws data from archives, media, oral history, and statistical sources—but its values also rest in its ability to broaden the scale and depth of the discussion on racial inequality.