Abstract
This article provides a critical assessment of comparative sociology of race and ethnicity (CSRE). It underscores leading themes and conceptual paradigms that shape current studies in cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-regional, and transnational perspectives on race. It highlights cutting-edge work in the field by examining some cardinal concerns in studies by region, and it points to lacunae that must be addressed by future research. I argue that studies of race in sociology have been anchored in concepts, theories, and paradigms that are heavily derived from U.S.-based experiences and models for too long. I urge for more studies of race and ethnicity that are not limited by this dominance of U.S.-based perspectives or by those that privilege Western contexts such as Europe. This is because there is no cogent reason to assume that race and its intertwined concept of ethnicity are primarily or originally U.S.- or Western-grounded phenomena. The article concludes by pointing to some conceptual and methodological notions that ought to guide future research in the area.
Introduction
Race—and to a significant extent ethnicity—is a universally problematic concept. We encounter its centrality to social and political phenomena throughout the world. As such, it is not limited to one or two geographical regions. At the same time, it is a contested concept. Given the variety of experiences of race, ethnicity, racism, ethnocentrism, and racial/ethnic identity, the burgeoning field of comparative sociology of race and ethnicity (CSRE) provides us with immense opportunities for new research that can illuminate seemingly intractable problems related to these issues. In this article, I provide a critical overview of recent developments in CSRE organized by regional concerns. I posit that we race scholars are in dire need to move beyond U.S.- and Europe-based models and paradigms of race in order to (1) objectively analyze the realities of racial and ethnic phenomena of the non-Western world without a presupposed white supremacy lens and (2) create a constructive feedback loop to encourage self-reflectivity on the current dominance of U.S.- and Europe-based approaches in the era of transnational migration in which the world is afflicted and conflicted by different kinds of racial ideologies and ethnocentrism while avoiding the trap of an easy East versus West dichotomy. I underscore some leading motifs that cut across the regional research, particularly through looking at East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. By way of conclusion, I provide some guidelines about the direction toward which we ought to be moving in CSRE with respect to issues and methods in the study of race/ethnicity beyond a conventional single-country analysis that presupposes Euro-American racial concepts as normative.
Scope of Comparative Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Much of the widely accepted sociological work that deals with race emanates from the United States, both in terms of theories and paradigms. While race scholars have gained much from this perspective, we ought to not be bound to it. Even within mainstream sociology, some significant scholarship has urged for more transnational, cross-regional, and inter-country comparisons of racial phenomena (see Stone and Dennis 2003). These works include those of Pierre van den Berghe (1967, 1970), which cover race/ethnic relations in vast regions of the globe, building on initial foundations by W.E.B. Du Bois, Max Weber, and Robert Park. For instance, he surveyed racial/ethnic relations in Mexican, Brazilian, American, and South African societies and attempted to extract an explicitly cross-national comparative framework of dominant-minority relations that can lead us to some generalization and specificities of racial phenomena (van den Berghe 1967). Comparative studies on race from sociological perspectives themselves are not uncommon where “race,” “ethnicity,” or “nationality” are used as independent variables in quantitative research, particularly in health-related fields. However, it is important to note that while studies that use quantitative methods are critically important for sociological knowledge to progress, a comparative perspective on race and ethnicity properly understood must have a recognition that “race” is a historically grounded notion. For this reason, sociology that overlaps politics, history, and theory is equally important vis-à-vis quantitative and demographic work. What we need now is research that deals with “race” as a dependent variable or captures the malleable nature of “race.” In this sense, two major lines of contribution from American sociology should be noted.
The first one comes from those who study nationalism and citizenship. Among them, the most influential work is Rogers Brubaker’s (1998) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. The work sparked the “race is central to the making of the nation” narrative even beyond scholars who study non-Western contexts due to its analysis of Germany as a Volk-based nation as opposed to the territorially based model of the French citizenry, which is similar to the United States. The second major line of contribution comes from those who study racial/ethnic identities of immigrants who came to the United States from the other parts of the Americas. One example is Mary C. Waters’s (2001) Black Identities. By elucidating how different understandings of blackness in the United States and their homeland affect adaptation patterns of immigrants, she claims that West Indian immigrants who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation. This work has become a prelude to the burgeoning interests in race in Latin America and the Caribbean among U.S.-based CSRE scholars, as I discuss later.
Building on the legacy of these early scholars of comparative race, we ought to resist the temptation to remain within the confines of U.S.-centered models or those that are necessarily grounded in Western experiences (see Adekunle and Williams 2010). While there is a significant new push toward transnational comparative accounts, even recent cutting-edge work presumes the United States as the basic context. This includes recent contributions in the study of race and religion and in racial residential integration (see Emerson, Korver-Glenn, and Douds 2015; Sin and Krysan 2015). Moreover, given the complexities of race/ethnicity concerns across cultures and regions, new research should be open to a variety of models, theories, and accounts that may even clash with other theories. It is for this reason that we ought to also resist the temptation to develop a single, comprehensive account of race and racism (see Golash-Boza 2016). Plurality and diversity characterize global race/ethnic studies; hence, we must be open to theories and models that emanate from different parts of the world without the need to fit them into a Procrustean bed, which may likely be grounded on monistic U.S.- or Western-centered schemas. Just as there are competing accounts of sociological notions such as class and gender, we can have alternative theories of race.
Before moving on to the regional concerns, I would like to provide my account of this nascent field: What is CSRE? Building on the foundational contributions, CSRE seeks to examine cases, contexts, and paradigms outside both the U.S. and the European milieus. CSRE helps de-center race studies, especially away from the United States. This does not mean setting U.S. concerns aside: The idea is to allow CSRE’s findings to loop back into U.S. research to make it more complete (see Persons 1999). U.S. race relations are neither uniform nor universal; CSRE helps to correct this oft implicit assumption in race/ethnic and postcolonial studies. In principle, the methodological aim is to have two or more cases or groups for analytical comparison proper. While the comparative method has been used in Western contexts, it is important to underline that there ought to be a non-Western context in cases of CSRE analysis (see Koopmans 2013; Lu, Liang, and Chunyu 2013). Many such cases might involve the racialization of indigenous populations or groups without reference to migration. Others will be about the racialization of domestic groups that migrate internally. I would also add that some studies that focus on one single country (historically or in a contemporary setting) in the non-Western world that has been vastly understudied can qualify as part of CSRE research if their findings illuminate questions that concern race more broadly outside the specific area of study. The link between comparative race and nationhood/immigration is a crucial component of current CSRE work. This is owed to the tendency of contexts of reception to be key determinants in how a group is racialized in an age of rapid globalization. These contexts of reception may involve the state’s official ethno-racial classificatory laws and its policies of reception and alienage. It may also involve a country’s racial ideology and its historico-discursive conceptualization of racial groups.
In what follows, I provide a critical assessment of some leading research results organized along regional concerns. The volume and breadth of comparative international perspectives on race is large despite the fact that we do not see them represented as much as necessary in mainstream sociology.
Views of Race outside the West: East Asian Perspectives on Racialization
We can commence our assessment by examining some comparative perspectives on race from the traditional “Other” of the West: Asia. While the terms West, East, and Asia are artificial and unwieldy, we must confront them as a first step in dismantling the Occidentalist dominance in studies of race. The extent of Asia is all too broad, but we can begin with a narrower focus on East Asian contributions. In this tradition, much of the literature refers to the interplay between imperialism, nation building, and postcolonialism in shaping national identities through the (re)construction of racial hierarchies or ethnic identities. Some contributions emphasize the contrast between East and West; others underscore the dialectical push and pull between them. Accounts that shed the most light are those that employ historical analysis along with the study of racialization by the state due to the political imperatives of the period examined. These approaches that focus on state-led forces of racialization illuminate questions such as the somatic, the use of science and pseudo-science, aesthetics, and the role of elites in (re)shaping racial discourse. The following are some of the major motifs that are discussed in these approaches.
Ethnic Nationalism and Racialization of the Self
Ethnonationalism as a basis of state-based identity is one central paradigm of racialization in East Asia. When racialization is discussed, much of existing Euro-American literature pays attention to racialization of minority groups by the dominant group. What is analyzed is how the dominant group (often whites) racializes minority groups by emphasizing their differences. In contrast, studies on racialization in East Asia tend to focus on the processes and means of how the empire, state, or elite group racializes itself (vis-à-vis its significant Other) and other minority groups by emphasizing its own uniqueness (cf. Dikötter 1997; Yoshino 1992).
In this sense, The Myth of the Homogeneous Nation (1995) 1 and The Boundaries of the Japanese (1998) by Eiji Oguma have had tremendous impact on subsequent works beyond East Asian Studies. Japan as an “ethno-racially homogenous nation” has been a widely held belief among the Japanese and propagated by the state in the post–WWII period via Nihonjinron literature (discourse about the Japanese). Rather than examining the popular Nihonjinron literature, Oguma carefully examined the intellectual history regarding the views held by anthropologists, historians, linguists, jurists, government officials, and other writers from the Edo period through the mid-twentieth century on the nature of Japanese ethno-racial identity. What has emerged is, in contrast to the popular claim of Japan’s homogeneity in Nihonjinron literature, various perspectives on the nature of the Japanese and their origins held in prewar Japan.
One important lesson that we can learn from Oguma’s works and his followers is that under changed political circumstances, a racial ideology is rearticulated to respond to situational imperatives. When the Japanese empire annexed Korea in 1910, the common descent thesis as the Japanese racial ideology (Japanese and Koreans share a common descent and culture) functioned to legitimize Japan’s rule over Korea. With its retreat from empire, however, Japan had to reconstruct its racial ideology toward the idea that only the Japanese people were entitled to partake in a unique Japanese culture and have a distinctive Japanese blood. The newly born racialized Japanese identity in the postwar era meant exclusive nationhood depending on who has Japanese blood or not and simultaneously categorized subordinate populations as members of “inferior races.” The essence of Japan’s “racialized” nationhood was dependent on historical forgetfulness and invention of antiquity/authenticity, as a shift of racial ideology from a multiethnic Japanese empire to a homogeneous Japanese nation-state, from the mixed-blooded Japanese race to pure-blooded Japanese race. In this way, the myth of the enduring purity of Japanese blood and homogeneity was established (Suzuki 2016; see also Lie 2001).
Drawing on the case of Korea, Gi-Wook Shin (2006, 2013) also focuses on ethnonationalism as the basis of Korean identity. Here, ethnic nationalism is linked with the belief that Korea is a racially distinct and ethnically homogenous nation, and thus racism in Korea is connected with Korean ethnic nationalism. Shin argues against Western scholarship that tends to describe this ethnic nationalism as inherently more divisive and dangerous than political nationalism; however, he also argues that East Asian scholars tend to overlook its potentially dangerous elements.
Historically, Shin (2013) argues, a distinctly Korean nationalism gained traction over Pan-Asianism in response to Japanese imperialism. Koreans have pursued modernization in the era of globalization with a sense of competition in the service of ethnic nationalism—under the slogan segyehwa (literally, globalization), which denotes a nationalistic purpose. Interestingly, globalization and the modernization effort have also generated a sense of inferiority among Koreans toward whites, perceived as dominant in the global economic system. 2 Shin also shows that immigration due to labor shortages and foreign marriages has made Korea into a multiethnic society. Whereas Korea’s ethnic nationalism provided a sense of cohesion, Shin argues that Korean society needs to adapt to its new multiethnic reality with a more effective policy of multiculturalism, creating an inclusive identity.
A similar concern with the use of ethnicity for the formation of national identity is found in Fei Xiantong. Fei (1988) is regarded as the leading Chinese sociologist/anthropologist of the twentieth century. His work focuses on characterizing the history and formation of zhonghua minzu, “the Chinese people as a whole” (p. 217). He argues that Chinese identity emerged from a plurality of ethnic groups or what are called “nationalities” in Leninist ethnic policy. The unity grew out of a millennia-long process by which the Han ethnic group absorbed other national minorities to become the most numerous and influential ethnic group, forming the backbone of the Chinese people (Fei 1988). According to Fei (1988), part of the reason the Han were able to form the nucleus of the national identity and build an extensive network was that they lived primarily in agricultural regions; this idea connects with his major work, From the Soil (Fei [1948] 1992). Fei also discusses the challenges of dealing with a pluralistic society amid rapid industrialization.
Along parallel lines, Yukiko Koshiro (1999, 2013) studies Japanese attitudes and policies related to race/ethnicity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a study on Japanese imperial policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she points out that the Japanese never banned interracial marriage with colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan, as did many Western colonial powers (Koshiro 2013). Instead, intermarriage with colonial subjects was common, and it fell under the umbrella of the broader policy of “Japanization,” a “vision in which the Japanese empire would ultimately become a great melting pot of the Eurasia-Pacific region, and in which colonial subjects could—and should—become Japanese” (Koshiro 2013:476). Koshiro argues that the self-understanding of Japan as an “insular nation” is a postwar idea designed to rationalize the loss of the imperial domains (see also Oguma 1995, 1998; Suzuki 2016).
Critique of the East-West Dialectic
Nation-building as it relates to East-West dialogues is another crucial motif. Hoei Eun Kim (2014) has explored German-Japanese interactions during the mid-late nineteenth century, particularly among “doctors of empire” during the Meiji period. In a study of the story behind what he calls the “Kubo Incident,” in which students at the prestigious Keijo Medical College organized a strike in response to Professor Kubo Takeshi’s remarks that involved Korean anatomy, Kim traces Kubo’s professional career, which “closely parallel[ed] the colonial expansion of the empire” (Kim 2013:414). Japanese science in the medical and anthropological fields was heavily influenced by interaction with German scientists, who began to exhibit an obsession with race in the late 1870s. Kubo himself conducted influential studies that involved taking measurements of hundreds of Korean men and women, and his work advanced notions of racial determinism and hierarchies. Kim (2013:412) argues that the Kubo Incident reveals the “paradox of race in colonial Korea under Japanese rule.” The paradox has to do with the Japanese attempt to legitimize its rule both by emphasizing its superiority above the Koreans but also maintaining a sense of racial and cultural connection between the Japanese (colonizer) and Koreans (colonized).
The critique of Occidentalism is salient in other research. Arguing that Western scholarship defines race too narrowly, Yasuko Takezawa (2005, 2015a) identifies three dimensions that she proffers are particularly relevant for race studies in East Asia: race (r), Race (R), and Race as Resistance (RR). Race in lowercase refers to indigenous social, economic, and political stratifications based on notions of inherited and largely static physical characteristics. Race refers to scientific or pseudoscientific categorizations of race originating in Western theory but influential in East Asia beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Race as Resistance refers to minority groups’ emphasis on distinctive racial characteristics to identify and counter discrimination.
While Takezawa (2015a, 2015b) acknowledges that Western notions of race, particularly conceptions of civilizational hierarchy and aesthetic values based on race, heavily influenced East Asian societies beginning in the late nineteenth century, a running theme of her work is the way that East Asian intellectuals and leaders adapted Western notions to their nation-building purposes. In a fascinating study of geography textbooks from the first half of the Meiji period, many of which were translations from Western sources, she argues that Japanese translators and textbook writers adopted elements of Western concepts of race but often strategically omitted and altered these concepts to suit Japanese geopolitical and nation-building agendas, particularly in the third decade of the Meiji period.
National Identity and Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism and its production of multicultural societies are cardinal concerns for scholars who study the Asian region. Daniel Goh (2008, 2014; Goh et al. 2009) deals with multiculturalism in postcolonial contexts, notably Malaysia and Singapore. He argues that racialist policies adopted by colonial powers profoundly shaped the development of multiculturalism in such societies. The British increased the racial pluralism of both countries with their economic policies and then introduced what Goh calls “statist multiculturalism” through the institution of a racially ordered census and other policies to “manage and discipline inter-racial relations.” While Goh (2008:235) acknowledges recent scholarship pointing to the conclusion that the concept of race is a social construction, he argues that “the race concept reflects social realities that have been historically structured by colonial racialization and continue to be driven by them.” Scholars cannot ignore race; once incorporated into a society, the idea of race has significant social and political implications: “Race then is not simply an artificial idea to be deconstructed but a sociological fact, a category of analysis that should be examined in specific historical contexts and in its link to social institutions [italics added]” (Goh 2008:235). Goh (2008) also argues against the distinction between race and ethnicity, contending that these concepts were intertwined in the history of colonialism and decolonization.
Migration and Racialization
Finally, we can underscore the linkage between ethnicity, race, and migration in some important recent work in Asian CSRE. Zhou, Shenasi, and Xu (2016) focus on migration, the formation of immigrant identities, and interactions between immigrants and local residents. They analyze Chinese attitudes toward black Africans based on survey data, exploring “interracial dynamics beyond the black-white paradigm” (p. 141). They argue that theories about inter-ethnic interaction that have been applied in the “Global North”—in particular, the threat, ethnic economy, and contact perspectives—do not necessarily apply in the “Global South.” The researchers draw the conclusion that while Chinese residents of Guangzhou report negative perceptions of black Africans, they do not perceive them as threatening; indeed, residents are largely welcoming of migrants and relations are generally civil. Perceptions are also apparently dependent on the kind of interactions that residents have with migrants.
Other accounts emphasize the role of contextual factors, not innate culture, in racialization processes. My own work, Divided Fates, explores various means of racialization by the state by examining the experiences of three Korean diasporic groups: oldcomer Koreans (Zainichi Koreans) and newcomer Koreans (Tainichi Koreans) in Japan and Korean immigrants in the United States. In doing so, it builds on Zhou et al.’s (2016) emphasis on the link between migration and race. I posit that cross-national, cross-cultural, and comparative accounts are a sine qua non to better understand what race is. The comparison of three Korean diasporic groups highlights the contrasting adaptation between Zainichi Koreans and U.S. Koreans and somewhat similar adaptation patterns between Tainichi Koreans and U.S. Koreans. It illuminates how the destinies of immigrants who originally belonged to the same ethnic/national collectivity diverge depending on destinations and how they are received in a certain state and society within particular historical contexts. I find that the mode of incorporation (a specific combination of contextual factors) rather than ethnic “culture” and “race” plays a decisive role in determining the fates of these Korean immigrant groups (Suzuki 2016).
Views from the Hemispheric South: Latin American Perspectives on Race
The second “Other” that must be examined, especially from the vantage point in the United States, is the rest of the Americas. For too long, there has been an implicit sense of “American exceptionalism” vis-à-vis Ibero-America, and it has also been evident in studies of race and ethnicity. Fortunately, some scholars have recently made it clear that the United States does not stand alone and in many ways is similar to (and affected by racial formations and paradigms emanating from) neighboring countries to its south. Recent work also shows how demographic transformations in the United States due to migration are altering widely accepted racial paradigms within the United States.
Structural Theories of Racism
There are two principal, if competing, accounts of race in this tradition. The first is that of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (2015:74) work on the post-Civil Rights United States, defending a “structural theory of racism” against a more individualist “prejudice approach” that is “central in sociology and psychology.” He predicts the “Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the United States,” which includes a shift from a biracial (white vs. nonwhite) to a “triracial” order common to many Latin American states (Bonilla-Silva 2004, 2015). The notable feature of this hypothesized shift will be the emergence of an intermediate classification of “honorary whites,” reflecting his emphasis on “intermediate spaces” in racial stratification between white and “the collective black” (Bonilla-Silva 2004, 2015). He also suggests, using a three-tiered simplified heuristic, that the emerging triracial order may lead bureaucratic officials to abandon racial categories in censuses and other areas of administration, an outcome he would deem premature (Bonilla-Silva 2004, 2015).
More broadly, Bonilla-Silva (2015) argues for a shift in focus based on the claim that the origins of racialism lie in the European encounter with the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. He argues that: Logically . . . racial theory should have been rooted in the experiences of the first peoples who experienced racialization, but that was not the case. Almost all of our racial and ethnic theorization has come from the United States or Europe. . . . Even when Latin American and Caribbean writers have written about race, they have relied mostly on American or European theorizations. (P. 79)
Bonilla-Silva is correct to point out that we ought to carry out more research on the original moments of racialization in the Americas. What this implies is that we need more work on the colonial era processes of racialization at the inception of European colonialism in the Western hemisphere (the Spanish conquest of the Amerindians). Even in race studies on Latin America (which is a region of the world perhaps more commonly explored by U.S.-based sociologists vis-à-vis other regions), sociology lags behind other fields in the historical approach to race. In this respect, inspiration can be derived from the disciplines of history and political science (see Martínez 2008; von Vacano 2012). More historical sociological work ought to be done to understand both how colonial states racialized subjects and also whether proto-racial paradigms existed in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish in the continent. At the same time, the racialization of Asian peoples by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century could also be a point of comparison with the cases of Latin American colonial racialization in the same time period.
Pigmentocracy
The second main account is that of Edward Telles, which elucidates the precedence of skin color over other racial features in some Latin American countries. According to him, “Unlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color of physical appearance rather than ancestry” (Telles 2004:1). His work focuses on the significance of race and racial inequality in Latin America, specifically Brazil. It draws on a 1995 national survey in Brazil in which racial classification was designated by interviewers as opposed to official census reports that rely on self-classification. He and coauthor Nelson Lim (1998:473) found that “the estimate of white-nonwhite income inequality in Brazil is greater when interviewer classification is used than when self-classification is used.” They conclude that “previous studies have underestimated racial inequality because they have relied solely on official statistics, in which race is based on self-classification, or on an unknown mix of self-classification and interviewer classification” (Telles and Lim 1998:473).
Telles’s 2004 book, Race in Another America, continues to explore the differences between the distinct racial categories in the official census, the more fluid popular conception of race that generally prevails, and the black-white dichotomy that Afro-Brazilians champion. More fundamentally, he notes that the idea of the dichotomous “color-line” by Du Bois has made American race relations the “paradigmatic case for the sociological understanding of race” (p. 2). Racism is prevalent in Brazil, but it operates more subtly and in different ways. Telles challenges both the mestizaje (mestiçagem) notion that was the “foundational concept of Brazilian racial ideology” and the ideological framework championed by black activists and many in academia painting Brazilian society as inherently exclusionary and racist. The truth about race in Brazil involves both inclusion and exclusion.
Telles (2004) focuses on the complex term moreno, which is widely used throughout Latin America, instead of remaining tied to the mestizaje paradigm. Moreno, which denotes brown or brownish, is also used by some people to refer to those of African ancestry. It is a term that is about nonwhite racial identifications; thus, it is located in relation to whiteness, blackness, indigeneity, and miscegenation. Historically, it was used to refer to a subcaste of free blacks, such as those in Puerto Rico. In Brazil, it is a flexible term, sometimes even referring to those of European descent whose skin has been darkened by the sun. However, the central importance of the term moreno in Telles’s work is in showing how it allows a variety of people who would otherwise be associated with blackness as negros to use a term (moreno) that avoids links to direct racial inferiority in a highly hierarchical and pigmentocratic society.
In a volume based on the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA), Telles (2014:3) broadens the analysis beyond Brazil, arguing that “skin color is a central axis of social stratification in at least several Latin American countries, though it is often ignored.” The term pigmentocracy, borrowed from Chilean anthropologist Alejandro Lipshutz, connotes a combination of ethnoracial categories and a skin-color continuum (Telles 2014). As in Brazil, the findings of the book are mixed: Telles notes that several Latin American states have enacted multiculturalist policies, based on popular support, aimed at addressing grievances and discrimination against indigenous groups and “Afrodescendants,” yet perceived discrimination remains commonly reported.
Historical Approaches
The works of Bonilla-Silva and Telles stand in contrast with the more historical approach taken by Mara Loveman (2014) or Cristina A. Sue (2013). For instance, Loveman’s (2014) work focuses on the connection between race and nationality in Latin America. She examines censuses of Latin American countries in different periods, seeking to explain the reason for varied use of racial classification. She builds on research on “social statistics,” suggesting that “official numbers, backed by the authority of science and the state, do not merely describe social reality, but help to constitute it” (Loveman 2009:439).
Her conclusion is that the use of racial classification by national statistics agencies in Latin American countries, notably from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, is connected with modernization and development projects directed by states in the process of nation-building (Loveman 2013, 2014). This period was “the heyday of racialist and racist science in Europe and the United States,” and Loveman (2013:344) argues that Latin American censuses were in part designed to “confront predictions of a racially degenerate Latin American future” in European discourse. They were also intended to present a curated image of racial uniformity and national cohesion.
An alternative account is given by the historian María Elena Martínez. Martínez (2008) traces the Spanish concept of blood purity, its connection to the explicitly racial caste system in colonial Mexico, the sistema de castas, and its influence on post-independence “gendered and racialized imaginings of the nation” in Mexico. In addition to archival research on public documents of various types that illuminate tangible manifestations of the idea of blood purity, Martínez adopts a Nietzschean genealogical approach, as interpreted and embraced by Cornel West and similar to the work by Diego von Vacano (2012), to trace the idea from its origins in religion, ideology, and material interests to its transfiguration in the colonial setting.
Against the Clash of Civilizations
Perspectives on the Racialization of Muslim and Middle Eastern Populations
A third principal regional concern for CSRE is the treatment of Islamic populations not just in the Middle East but throughout the world. Given the global nature of Islam even before the relatively recent waves of immigration, this case stands in a sense as one that is sui generis in some respects. In recent years, as a result of increased migration of Muslim groups to Europe and North America, coupled with the aftermath of 9/11, the racialization of Islamic populations must be considered as one of the central contemporary issues for CSRE. To be sure, there are large Islamic populations in Asia that are ethno-racially distinct from Middle Eastern populations, such as the Hui in China. China also has another large Islamic ethno-group called the Uyghurs. However, these types of Islamic populations are rarely discussed in Euro-American academic discourse, which is primarily centered on racialization of Turks and Middle Easterners due to their religion.
Pierre Bourdieu could be regarded as one of the forerunners of the interest in race/ethnicity in sociology. Early in his career as a self-taught researcher, Bourdieu conducted ethno-sociological field studies comparing the Kabyle Berbers, who are mainly Muslim, in colonial northern Algeria during the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s with the inhabitants of his own rural hometown of Béarn in southwestern France (Calhoun 2006; Goodman 2009; Wacquant 2004). He was an “observer of the interpenetration of large-scale social change and the struggles and solidarities of daily life” (Calhoun 2006:1403). He compared the disruptions of social life in northern Algeria due to colonialism and integration into the market economy with similar developments in Béarn (Wacquant 2004).
Bourdieu’s thinking underwent shifts during his career. While initially viewing the Kabyle in terms of modernization theory, he became a critic of it and of neoliberalism later in his career (Calhoun 2006; Wacquant 2004). Originally a structuralist, he developed a critique of structuralism, working toward an approach combining structuralism and phenomenology (Calhoun 2006). One of his central contributions is to incorporate the idea of habitus, the notion of a settled mode of life transmitted through daily social interactions in traditional societies, and its disruption in periods of economic and cultural instability (Calhoun 2006; Wacquant 2004).
Integration of Islamic Immigrants
Recent Francophone sociology on race focuses on daily social interactions as well, some of it dealing with the carceral state, a theme that goes back at least as far as Foucault. Much of Farhad Khosrokhavar’s work has examined the treatment, experiences, and radicalization of Muslims in French prisons, where they are overrepresented (Beckford, Joly, and Khosrokhavar 2005). He notes changes in the process of radicalization since the 1990s and argues that “intense frustration due to the lack of facilities for prisoners causes a high level of resentment, in particular in regards to [how] religion” fuels radicalization (Khosrokhavar 2013:305).
With co-authors Beckford and Joly, he compares the French approach to treatment of Muslim prisoners with the United Kingdom’s, reflecting its policy of “laïcité” (secularism). They argue that “Muslim inmates in France have never come even close to obtaining the kind of consideration that British prisons show towards the religious and pastoral care of Muslims” (Beckford et al. 2005:276). He broadens this comparative approach to assess the general situation in France with regard to Muslim immigration and a failed immigration policy, in comparison with other European nations: Why do so many more attacks of this magnitude occur in France than in other European countries? (Khosrokhavar 2016). He argues that “the French exception” plays a major role due to its republican, anti-religious traditions.
Demographer Patrick Simon studies the question of whether second-generation immigrants can integrate into French society and whether they will be “included in, or excluded from, the prevailing national identity and come to feel that they belong” (Foner and Simon 2015:1). In a volume of essays co-edited with Nancy Foner, he explores “fears and anxieties about national identity and issues of belonging” related to immigration, particularly of Muslims, to Europe and “nativist” reactions (p. 3). Simon’s (2003) work is directly related to French immigration and integration policy. He coordinated a recent report based on thousands of interviews of immigrants conducted in 2008 and 2009 (Bohlen 2016). The report is intended to inform “government policy on promoting equality and combating discrimination for reasons of origin” and “public debate on immigration” (Simon, Beauchemin, and Hamel 2010:5). His team found that most children of non-European immigrants consider themselves French, but many report facing discrimination and low social mobility, especially children of parents from Sub-Saharan and North Africa (Bohlen 2016).
Immigrant integration policies are a central concern for other scholars. Patrick Weil (2004) has been actively engaged with this topic in France for over three decades. As a member of the Stasi Commission supporting the policy of laïcité, he endorsed a recommendation to “ban conspicuous religious symbols in public schools,” including headscarves worn by some Muslim girls. His argument was that some Muslim girls faced pressure from Muslim men and boys to wear the headscarf against their will. A large majority of Muslim girls do not want to wear the scarf because they have the right of freedom of conscience. He supported the formation of a Muslim Council to represent French Muslims and assist with integration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in which a French Muslim was implicated (Howarth and Varouxakis 2003).
Identity Formation
In political sociology, Riva Kastoryano (2009) focuses on questions related to national identity, religion, and multiculturalism. She argues that “European space is the space in which all identities are ultimately negotiated” (p. 18). In her edited volume (Kastoryano 2009) on the challenges associated with multiculturalism as a basis of European political unity, she further argues that the lack of European civic identity risks leading to a definition of a European “us” founded on a social order as a common good but as a space of prosperity and security founded more on exclusion (based on ethnic and religious criteria) than on inclusion. She has the Muslim populations of Europe in mind.
In her influential book Negotiating Identities, which examines the interplay between immigrants and the French and German states, Kastoryano (2001) analyzes the headscarf controversies in France—where “the Other is the Muslim”—and other manifestations of the tension between French secularism and expressions of Islamic faith. She builds on the notion of negotiated identities to argue that Muslim immigrants to France engage reflexively with the inhabitants of France and other European countries, both shaping and shaped by dominant national identities (Kastoryano 2001). This is in large part because states treat immigrants as belonging to a collective unit, differentiable from the larger society.
In the U.S. context, Kristine Ajrouch (2004) ably applies a framework common in feminist sociology, arguing that gender relations play an important role in the “articulation of boundaries that distinguish ethnic membership” (p. 372). Drawing on focus group interviews of Arab adolescents in Dearborn, Michigan, she seeks to reveal the ways “gender relations contribute to the adaptation and identity formation among Arab American adolescents residing in an ethnic community” (p. 387). Perceived differences in gender relations and views of “appropriate feminine behavior,” shaped by religious and cultural values, relate to the way adolescent Arab women distinguish themselves from “white girls” (Ajrouch 2004).
Ajrouch’s findings about Arab women’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis white women are perhaps in tension with her conclusions in a coauthored study with Abdi Kusow (Ajrouch and Kusow 2007) that Lebanese Shi’a immigrants “embrace whiteness as a preferred social identity,” if unconsciously. This is in contrast with Somali Muslim immigrants to Canada, who tend to emphasize a nonracial, Islamic identity. The authors argue that “transnationalism,” a process by which immigrants preserve connections with their homelands, is an important element of the process of identity formation. Immigrants’ experiences of minority or majority status in their home countries, combined with the need to negotiate racial, ethnic, and religious hierarchies in their host countries, affect their approaches to identity formation.
Historical Approaches
A more historical approach is taken by some scholars. Muhittin Ataman (2003) argues that the classical theory and historical practice of Muslim empires up to the Ottoman Empire was “very liberal” in its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities. Islamic political theory included recognition of religious and ethnic pluralism and specific provisions for protection of religious minorities (dhimmi status) and the preservation of cultural distinctions (Ataman 2002). The modern nation-state has deviated from these norms: “Muslim nation-states, established in the twentieth century and governed by secular and nationalist leaders, do not reflect the Islamic reality, and they are very repressive of the Muslim majority as well as ethnic minorities of their countries” (Ataman 2003:96).
Ataman identifies leaders of Islamic revival movements who challenged the nation-state and its implications for ethnic policy. According to Ataman (2002), many well-known intellectuals and activists vehemently opposed secular nationalism, and even “conformists” who advocated an accommodation to nationalism rejected strong versions of nationalism that would violate Islamic principles of equal treatment and protection for minorities.
Stigmatization
Still in the Middle East but dealing with different populations, the issue of stigma is salient. Nissim Mizrachi has authored several studies related to destigmatization strategies of “ethno-racially stigmatized groups” and reactions of such groups to implementation of policies related to multiculturalism (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012). In the introduction to a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, he and Michèle Lamont introduce the issue as a major contribution qua the first “systematic qualitative cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in a wide variety of contexts” and a launching point for further study of destigmatization strategies (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012:365). In the same issue, he and Adane Zawdu analyze different approaches of Ethiopian Jews in Israel based on 40 in-depth interviews (Mizrachi and Zawdu 2012). They find that the choice between “adoption of a bounded Jewish identity” and a “global racial identity” is closely related to class. In a similar study coauthored with Hanna Herzog, Mizrachi analyzes destigmatization strategies of Arab Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews, noting that “the language of identity politics was absent from all of [their] interviews” and suggesting that moving beyond an approach treating “western identity politics as the gold standard” in the analysis of destigmatization strategies (Mizrachi and Herzog 2012:431).
Influenced by the sociology of culture, Mizrachi recommends focusing on the “lived experience” of minorities in future studies of identity formation and multicultural contexts. The recent work by Michèle Lamont et al. (2016) builds on the comparative framework used by Mizrachi to provide an analysis of how stigma and discrimination are felt by marginalized groups in Israel, Brazil, and the United States. The authors of this crucial intervention argue that differing patterns of response are due to the extent to which such collectivities are groups, the sociohistorical contexts of group conflict, and their national ideologies and cultural repertoires. This analysis of sociohistorical contexts and national ideologies overlaps with my findings in the study of three Korean diasporic groups in Japan and the United States (see Suzuki 2016).
Comparative Views of Race in Africana Studies beyond the Color Line
Marxist approaches to racial conflict have been influential in Africana Studies beyond the U.S. case. Bernard Magubane (1979) takes such an approach to the subject of race and racism, with a focus on South Africa. Before discussing apartheid and white supremacy, which was the core ideological anchor on which white South Africa was established, he details the history of Dutch and English colonization in South Africa, focusing on the themes of exploitation and dehumanization: “White supremacy and racism are but expressions of measures European adventurers and colonizers deemed necessary to colonize, expropriate and exploit and rule colonized peoples” (Magubane 2001:3). The Marxist influence is clear: “Race is the mask of class in the final analysis” (Magubane 2001:4). In addition to “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century, he describes the humanitarian “civilizing mission” that he argues served as cover for British imperialism and oppression. Missionaries saw South Africa as the “gateway” to the continent, and the country figured prominently in the campaign to abolish the slave trade.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s multidisciplinary social and political thought remains a puissant force for contemporary critical theory and Africana studies. For Reiland Rabaka (2007), a “multimethodological” and multidisciplinary approach to a range of issues must be associated with critical theory. Racism is first and foremost; but also (from the critical theorist’s perspective), the interconnected issues of sexism, class oppression, and other forms of imperial dominance must be examined (Rabaka 2006). He argues that Du Bois’s critique of racism and original contributions including the origination of Black Marxism are “virtually incomprehensible and seemingly incoherent without taking into consideration his bravura and often simultaneous critiques of Eurocentric and bourgeois education, sexism (and particularly patriarchy), Black civil rights and social justice struggles, colonialism, and capitalism, among other issues” (Rabaka 2006:748–49).
I believe that Du Bois’s interdisciplinary—even occasionally “antidisciplinary”—approach ought to be a guiding light of CSRE. As Rabaka (2006:741) puts it, it is a core element of Du Bois’s contribution to the “simultaneously intellectual and sociopolitical interdisciplinary discipline of Africana studies.” Along with Rabaka, we ought to follow Du Bois’s aspiration for wide-ranging scholarship in CSRE, an idea we glean from Africana Studies. His intellectual interest and political involvement in Pan-African movements, including the African diaspora, can serve as a model for a “more multicultural, transethnic, transgender, and non-Western European-philosophy focused” critical theory (Rabaka 2006: 732, 735, 738–39; see also Marovah 2015).
Conclusion: Looking Ahead and Suggestions for Future Research in CSRE
We can see from the assessments given previously, which cover a broad swath of regional interests, that a multiplicity of concerns animates current work in CSRE. From these assessments, we can make some preliminary suggestions about the direction toward which the field ought to be headed. Given the rich diversity and variety of ideas, models, theories, and paradigms on race that emerge from the panoply of cultural/regional traditions discussed here, I do not believe it is adequate to urge for a single way, method, approach, or conceptualization of race, ethnicity, racism, or racial identity. The world is variegated and complex: One single, comprehensive, or unified grand theory of race may not have the same purchase in eighteenth-century Japan as in twenty-first century Brazil, for example. It may be theoretically possible someday, but our present task is to gather more evidence from history and from present empirical work.
Along general lines, and again due to this diversity of experiences, sociologists interested in race should be more open to international, cross-cultural, and cross-regional perspectives. This means a diminution of the valence of U.S.-grounded approaches or those that hold the Western experience as normative. As many of the case studies described previously suggest, race is a phenomenon that is deeply affected by particular historical developments in specific junctures. Contingencies that occur in Context A may not be the same as those in Context B. We must be able to trace those contingencies to understand what race means to a given group. For this reason, I would urge for more comparative sociology and empirical work that gives texture to historical analysis. At the same time, the aforementioned cases show that much of what shapes racialization is done by states, laws, censuses, policies, and parties. In other words, the nature of the state—be it imperial, or liberal-democratic, or socialist, among others—matters. For this reason, CSRE must be alive to political sociology. We ought not to see race as merely an independent variable in regression analyses.
It may be true that throughout the history of the modern world groups that have come to be known as white (of certain European ancestry) have dominated much of the rest of the world through imperial policies and racist paradigms. However, this is not always the case. Some Euro-American groups who are now called whites have been seen as “inferior” or “undesirable” in some central ways (e.g., in the racial hierarchy of Japan or in Sinocentrism). Moreover, we still need to understand the nature of race and racism before the modern Age of Discovery, before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, as well as indigenous racial notions in Japan before contact with Europeans, for example. These are questions that historical and cultural sociology can help us address, perhaps with interdisciplinary methods. The disciplines of history, anthropology, and political science ought to be used as means to fortify sociological inquiry in the field of CSRE. From our previous assessment, we can note that the leitmotifs that cut across regions in the field include imperialism and colonialism, nation-building, East-West and South-North tensions, core and periphery, postcolonialism, science, aesthetics, color discrimination, gender, migration, class, stigma, and intellectuals’ discourse.
Interdisciplinary work, in the way that Du Bois urged, will help us transcend some current impasses. It will help us move beyond the binary “black/white” or “white/nonwhite” paradigm that we received from U.S.-based sociology of race. Interdisciplinary approaches will also help us understand the new developments in race and genomics that we are beginning to address in sociology. One pressing task will be to see if a finding from a particular context can be applied to a very different one to explain racialization processes. This will require expertise involving cultural, linguistic, and historical differences. In this sense, for explicit cross-national comparisons of racial/ethnic groups, collaboration of experts on various regions is highly encouraged.
While much of the contemporary world seems to be closing off, sociology must open up more. Nativism, hyper-nationalism, populism, anti-immigrant policies, and openly xenophobic attitudes are on the rise in the United States and Europe. In the face of these developments and to better understand them, address them, and provide alternatives, sociology should not remain fixed to Western or U.S.-derived models of race and ethnicity. With increased attention to views outside the United States and the West, we can achieve a broader, more eclectic conception of race. This is the purpose and challenge of comparative, cross-national, and cross-cultural perspectives of the field in the present. Some of the new findings will be at odds with each other, but such discoveries will animate debates that will lead to more vibrant and variegated views of race and ethnicity in contemporary sociological research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to give special thanks to Diego von Vacano for providing advice for this article. Ben Peterson, as a graduate assistant, also provided invaluable assistance throughout.