Abstract
Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After asserting that “there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race” (p. 1) and lamenting the lack of theoretical development in sociological race studies that has handicapped race and racism scholars’ understanding of racial change (pp. 2–5), Emirbayer and Desmond lay out a theoretical framework guided by key pragmatist insights embodied in the works of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that aims to “provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—and intelligently to address—the problems of race in today’s society” (p. 25). The framework is organized into three important parts: Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction. The first part, an indictment of the relative nonreflexivity of race scholars regarding their intellectual projects, is largely a rehash of prior published work (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012). The three tiers of unconsciousness—social, disciplinary, and scholastic—work to cloud the objectivity of social theorists in ways that paralyze race theories into circularity. This part, consisting of one chapter, defines the racial object of race in symbolic terms of reification and engages productively in the ongoing debate regarding the collapsibility of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Bonilla-Silva 1999; Brubaker 2004, 2015; Loveman 1999; Omi and Winant 2014; Wimmer 2008, 2015) by insisting that race deserves its own intellectual constructionism despite the fact that ethnic formations predate racial formations.
The bulk of the manuscript is devoted to part II, which focuses on the structures (chapter 3), dynamics (chapter 4), institutions (chapter 5), and social psychology (chapter 6) of the racial order. Between chapters 3 and 4, Emirbayer and Desmond break down the false divides among structure and agency, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin (p. 180). (Racial) structures become relational processes, not things—dynamic, not static—a perspective that integrates Bourdieu’s “field” into race theory. Meanwhile, agency (or racial dynamics) becomes iterative propensities to accept the illusions created by racial projects that are necessary to navigate the racial field. Between chapters 5 and 6, the authors disappear the micro/macro divide, arguing instead for an interaction-grounded understanding of institutions (“bounded sets of practices” [p. 204]) and interstices (publics and social movements) as sites where the racial field is reproduced agnostically through routinization. Interactions animate the social psychological forces (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices) that create a collective racial habitus, which is embodied in the individual via the body, the cognitive realm, the morality of one’s ethics, and aesthetic appreciations. Whiteness, exploitation, appropriation, universalism, and other forms of symbolic violence to dominated peoples are derivatives of these forces.
The final portion of the manuscript attends to envisioning a racial future that draws on the assumptions of the prior chapters. The authors suggest that the people have three options—color-blindness, cosmopolitanism, or racial democracy—pointing to points of intervention via individuals, interactions, and institutions. Idealistic to the end, the manuscript closes with an optimistic view of race scholarship headed, of course, by its “comprehensive” theory of the racial order.
The efforts of Emirbayer and Desmond are commendable; however, the project they set forth for themselves is built upon dubious claims. Rather than being the first comprehensive and systematic theory of race, The Racial Order, I would argue, provides an alluring, synthetic language of U.S. race relations that marginalizes and colonizes critical race scholarship by ignoring, and at times outright dismissing, the modes of thought of historically hypermarginalized scholars of color. For instance, let us consider the manuscript’s engagement with critical theories of race and racism. A quick Google search of the phrase “race theory” reveals that the exact phrasing is mentioned 41,400 times in scientific studies, while accompanied by the phrase “critical race theory” but only 9,360 times without such an accompaniment. The sheer depth of the theoretical and empirical development of critical race theory (Bell 1989; Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 2000; Ladson-Billings 2013) coupled with its diffusion to a wide variety of disciplines beyond legal studies (Delgado and Stefancic 2001) suggests that the motivating argument of Emirbayer and Desmond (p. 1) may apparently be true with some qualifications: With the exception of critical race theory, there are few satisfying theories of race that are “comprehensive and systematic.” The term “satisfying” is central in this qualification as it acknowledges the subjectivity of social theorizing while reflexively pointing out the positionality embedded in the social construction of race knowledge.
Moreover, this qualification reveals a glaring omission of the sweeping, ambitious intellectual project of The Racial Order: racism. The authors provide a theory of race that shies away from grappling with the complexities embedded in the term “racism” by fusing it with the concept of “racial domination.” For instance, in the 476 pages of text that constitute the intellectual work, there are a mere 44 mentions of the term “racism” and a mere 41 mentions of the term “racial domination” (their cousin term for “racism”). This is just not enough space to clearly lay out the forces that intertwine race and racism (racial domination). Instead, these terms are mostly reserved for references to others’ work, used interchangeably, and left undefined (for better analysis, see prior work by the authors: Desmond and Emirbayer 2009, 2010). Still, The Racial Order provides a toolbox of theoretical concepts that students may use to discuss and analyze racial matters using terminology popularized by dominant ethno-racial groups. For the student of race, this is not a fruitless exercise. However, for the student of racism and antiracism, it leaves much to be desired.