Abstract
Through focusing on racial formation theory, systemic racism theory, and the racialized social systems approach, I argue that sociological race theories often reproduce methodological nationalism, stage-ism, and groupism. Such conceptual approaches often equate the boundaries of racial structures with the geographical borders of nation-states, racial categories are often presented as groups with cohesive racial interests, and there is a methodological proclivity to think in terms of distinct “periods” of racialization in a way that occludes moments of continuity. By contrast, I propose that race theorists ought to focus on transboundary entanglements, slow burning raciality, and dynamic racialization. Taking these concepts together, I specify that race theorists ought to develop understandings of how even hyper-localized conditions of race and racialization may be facilitated by transnational relations; that we ought to consider the continuity of racial domination over the long durée; and that we ought to think about racialization as a dynamic process, bringing more specificity to the notion of racial interests to think of specific moments in which different social fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) synergize their differing interests to maintain racial domination.
Keywords
Introduction: Rethinking racism . . . again
Decades have passed since Bonilla-Silva (1997) famously published Rethinking Racism. Sociologists, Bonilla-Silva argued, needed to understand racism less in terms of attitudes and prejudice, and more in terms of a social structure with its own internal logic of production and reproduction. This approach was one of several which sought to develop a structural understanding of racialization and racism which has continued to shape race theory today (e.g. Christian, 2019; Christian et al., 2019; Feagin, 2006; Feagin and Elias, 2013; Mueller, 2020; Omi and Winant, 2014; Ray, 2022). In this paper, I contend that we need to (again) rethink dominant sociological approaches in race theory.
Through focusing on racial formation theory (RFT), systemic racism theory (SRT), and the racialized social systems approach (RSS), I argue that sociological race theories often reproduce methodological nationalism, stage-ism, and groupism. Methodological nationalism refers to the process of “understanding a ‘society’ or its forms, relations, and processes by looking only within the spatial confines of that society, i.e. the confines of the particular nation-state” (Go, 2009: 783). In race theory, such methodological nationalism is evident in the way that the boundaries of racial structures are equated with the nation-state. Methodological stage-ism refers to the tendency to overemphasize historical breaks and transformations, resulting in the categorization of discrete, bounded temporal periods when thinking about racialization and racism. Lastly, methodological groupism refers to the tendency of race theorists to construe racial categories as cohesive racial groups, with their own set of specifically formed racial interests.
In each of these cases of methodological nationalism, stage-ism, and groupism, I highlight how we might transcend each of these limitations. I argue that instead of methodological nationalism, we ought to analyse “transboundary entanglements” (Go and Lawson, 2025) – that is, the sets of relations, often stretching beyond national borders, that engender racialization and racism in specific (often local) contexts. Rather than assuming stage-ism, we ought to also pay attention to “slow burning raciality”. Slow burning raciality is attentive to patterns of racism and racialization over the long durée, emphasizing how apparent historical breaks can be moments of continuity. Lastly, rather than groupism, I propose we develop accounts of dynamic racialization. Dynamic racialization highlights both how racial categories/categorization relate to wider social relations and structures, and how different fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) do not always share generic “racial interests”, but rather there are moments when their different interests are able to synergize together to effectively maintain racial domination. I will begin this discussion through focusing on methodological nationalism and transboundary entanglements, before proceeding to discuss stage-ism and slow burning raciality, and groupism and dynamic racialization.
From methodological nationalism to transboundary entanglements
Methodological nationalism broadly refers to the process of “understanding a ‘society’ or its forms, relations, and processes by looking only within the spatial confines of that society, i.e. the confines of the particular nation-state” (Go, 2009: 783). In terms of race theory, methodological nationalism prevents us from detecting relevant transnational relations which facilitate locally specific iterations of race/ism. I therefore contrast methodological nationalism to “transboundary entanglements”, which refer to “patterns of connections between or across social sites” (Go and Lawson, 2025: 2) which often stretch far beyond nation-state boundaries. Focusing on such transboundary entanglements enables us to view the transnational relations which engender racialization and racism in specific (often local) contexts.
In the context of RSS, RFT, and SRT, methodological nationalism is reflected in the way these conceptual approaches tend to equate the boundaries of racial structures to the boundaries of nation states. This is particularly apparent in the way that RSS defines the concept of “the racialized social system” (Bonilla-Silva, 1997), how RFT theorizes “the racial state”, and how SRT theorizes “elite white interests”. Through such methodological nationalism, these approaches struggle to make sense of the transnational relations across disparate geographical locations which engender racialization and racism in specific locales.
RSS was pioneered by Bonilla-Silva (1997, 2003, 2004, 2015) among others, who sought to craft various concepts to more explicitly categorize what racism is, and how it gets reproduced across the micro, meso, and macro levels. Here, the overriding concept is that of the racialized social system, defined by Bonilla-Silva (1997: 469) as “societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races”, and again as “societies that allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed” (Bonilla-Silva, 1997: 474). Such racialized social systems – characterized by unequal distributions of resources across a constructed racial hierarchy – are argued to be reproduced through racial ideologies (Doane, 2017), racialized emotions (Bonilla-Silva, 2019a), racialized organizations (Ray, 2019), racial grammar (Bonilla-Silva, 2012), racial interests (Bonilla-Silva, 2003), and racialized interaction orders (Rosino, 2017).
Methodological nationalism is built into the very definition of racialized social systems. The racialized social system itself is constantly defined as a “society”; while it is defined as such, an interrogation of the RSS literature demonstrates that “society” here essentially means the “nation state”. This conceptual conflation is evident in Bonilla-Silva’s (2007) comparative paper This is a White Country: The Racial Ideology of the Western Nations of the World-System. Here, Bonilla-Silva conducts a comparative analysis of the German, French, Dutch, and New Zealand racialized social systems, examining how each of them propagates a racial ideology of “new racism” based around myths of cultural inferiority, post-racial individualism, and racialized nationalism. While Bonilla-Silva admits that the racial ideology circulating within each of these nations appears similar, he argues that each of these nations has their own racial structure – their own racialized social system – and that each system is responsible for its own ideological production. As Bonilla-Silva (2007: 192; emphasis added) summarizes: “the racial ideology of Canada, Australia, and the United States is the direct product of their own racial situations”. Consequently, in Bonilla-Silva’s (2007) comparative analysis, the boundaries of racialized social systems are equated with the boundaries of nation-states. Such nationally-bound racialized social systems are then studied in terms of their unique internal logics, rather than in terms of their external relations, including the external relations which make the supposedly internal logics possible in the first place.
This problem of methodological nationalism is likewise evident in subsequent RSS works inspired by Bonilla-Silva. Consider, for instance, the prodigious work of Victor Ray, whose extension of the RSS framework has expanded the RSS repertoire for a new generation of social scientists. For Ray (2019: 29), racialized social systems refer to the macro-level, and provide the “background” in which racialized organizations (the meso level), and racial prejudice (the micro level) play out. However, much like Bonilla-Silva, Ray (2019) defines these macro, meso, and micro levels through a state-centred framework. The macro – that is, the racialized social system itself – to Ray (2019: 28) is characterized by “state racial categorization”, and “racialized laws”, involving struggles over “state resources” and “national inclusion”. Within this macro racialized social system, Ray (2022) argues structural racism is characterized by resource inequality – but much like Bonilla-Silva, these resources are defined in terms of nationally bound resources: education, employment levels, housing and so on. This renders structural racism as equivalent to national racial inequality. Furthermore, within this macro racialized social system, Ray (2019) argues that we have the crucial “meso” level of racialized organizations. However, again, in Ray’s (2019: 28) approach racialized organizations refer to organizations within a geographical nation-state, such as “individual workplaces”, “schools”, and “Churches”. Such an approach leaves little room for transnational analysis, despite the existence of transnational organizations that have been crucial in maintaining racial-colonial projects – including political (e.g. the United Nations, see Getachew, 2019), economic (e.g. the East India Company, see Erikson, 2014), and religiously-inspired (e.g. the American Colonization Society) organizations.
The RSS approach thus occludes transboundary entanglements. Through focusing on transboundary entanglements, one would not construe racialized social systems as nationally discrete “macro” units, but instead would emphasize how (i) racialized social systems may extend beyond national borders, and (ii) transnational relations may engender nationally specifically, or local conditions of, racialization and racism.
Consider, for instance, Bonilla-Silva’s (2007) aforementioned comparison between Germany, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Here, no analysis is given towards the relationships that exist between these racialized social systems with each other, or with other racialized social systems. This means that relevant transboundary entanglements for explaining these respective cases become noticeably absent in Bonilla-Silva’s analysis. For example, Nazism, in Bonilla-Silva’s (2007: 195) analysis, is analysed in terms of its genesis from an internal logic of the German racialized social system, described as “not an anomaly but a culmination of German enlightened nationalism”. No mention is made of the multinational corporations that helped orchestrate technologies of Nazism, such as IBM (Meghji, 2023), the violent colonial tactics of the British and Spanish that the Nazis mimicked (Wolfe, 2006), the international support that Nazism had throughout the 1930s in the war against burgeoning communism (Haslam, 2021), or the connections between Nazism and the racism of the US South (Du Bois, 1947). These are all relevant transboundary entanglements that would help us to understand the German case, but which are occluded in favour of more internalist interpretations.
Importantly, therefore, the critique towards RSS is not that it is U.S.-centric, but that methodological nationalism is built into its conceptual apparatus through the way that racialized social systems are defined, and analysed, as nationally discrete social structures. This means that even in the more well-known RSS work on structural racism in the U.S., the U.S. racialized social system is analyzed through a prism which occludes transboundary entanglements. Consider, for example, what Bonilla-Silva (2019a) has analyzed as the ascendant emotional repertoire of “white victimhood” in the U.S., whereby white folks claim that they are the truly oppressed people in their respective country (see also Song, 2014). This emotional repertoire is not just a “racialized emotion” which is generated via the internal arrangements of a national racial structure in the U.S., but is itself caught up in transboundary entanglements. Organizations which have been formative in legitimating the narrative of white victimhood – such as Turning Point – have largely done so through the international exchange of information, where they are able to claim that Western nations in general are going through an anti-white demographic turn in which whites will soon be minorities (see Ferber, 2023). Likewise, popular YouTubers who spread this narrative of white victimhood to their millions of viewers are themselves discussing these issues with international audiences, and in many cases (such as with PewDewPie and Paul Joseph Watson) may not even be based in the U.S. themselves despite influencing American racial ideology (see Lewis, 2018). In such a case, understanding such U.S. (white) emotional repertoires without paying attention to the transnational entanglements which are fuelling and providing an ideological “skeleton” for these emotions both misunderstands the transnational dynamics (or what relational sociologists call “flows”) that impact U.S racialization, and it also presents a picture of the U.S.’ racial politics as being unique rather than part of a wider, transnationally unfolding story.
These criticisms of methodological nationalism can also be levelled to the theorization of racial ideology in the RSS approach. As aforementioned, in this approach “racial ideology” is said to derive uniquely from “the direct product” of nation-states’ “own racial situations” (Bonilla-Silva, 2007: 192). Following Bonilla-Silva, others of the RSS approach have likewise treated racial ideolog(ies) as being nationally bound phenomena. For Doane (2017: 985; emphasis added), for instance, racial ideologies are “flexible and dynamic constellations of ideas that are linked to a racialized system – either to defend it or to oppose it”; however, because Doane follows Bonilla-Silva in understanding racialized social systems as nationally bound units, by logical consequence racial ideologies too become nationally bound – either supporting or opposing national racial arrangements. Likewise, while scholars such as Beaman and Petts (2020) marked a step forward for RSS scholarship in showing that similar racial ideologies, such as colourblindness, can exist in different geographies (e.g. the United States and France), their emphasis has been on showing the different genealogies of these racial ideologies as they emerged internally in a given national racial structure.
By contrast, in many cases we see that racial ideologies develop between different national contexts, demonstrating that such racial ideologies are characterized by transboundary entanglements. Consider, for example, the racial ideology of scientific racism – which held that the racial hierarchy was rooted in biological superiority/inferiority of distinct racial groups. Throughout the 1800s, this racial ideology was firmly rooted into the U.S. racialized social system – Du Bois (2007 [1940]) even details how phrenology was taught as factual science when he was studying at Harvard University in the late 1800s. However, scientific racism in general, and phrenology in particular, were not ideological inventions of U.S. – this was instead an ideology which had its central hub(s) across the European continent, including Linnaeus’ work on racial classification at Uppsala University in Sweden, Blumenbach’s work on racial classification with the Göttingen school of history in Germany, and the Edinburgh Phrenological Society which was formed in 1820 (Banton and Harwood, 1975). Such a case of scientific racism clearly demonstrates the need to account for transnational informational flows when tracking the development of racial ideology within a supposedly geographically bound racialized social system.
Similar issues of methodological nationalism are seen in the case of racial formation theory (RFT), popularized through the work of Omi and Winant (2014). Just like RSS, methodological nationalism is built into the definitions of RFT’s key concepts.
Four concepts are essential to racial formation theory: racial formations, racial projects, the racial state, and racial politics. Omi and Winant (2014: 13) define racial projects as the ways “human identities and social structures are racially signified, and the reciprocal ways that racial meaning becomes embedded in social structures”; slavery, Jim Crow, and colourblindness are all examples of different racial projects. Racial formation refers to the general ordering of these racial projects, and to the construction of race in a given socio-historical context; as Omi and Winant (2014: 109) put it, “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed”. Thirdly, you have the concept of the racial state. Contra the normative assumptions of much comparative historical sociology (Hammer and Itzigsohn, 2024), Omi and Winant (2014: 82) define the state in a non-territorial way, claiming the state is “composed of institutions, the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which support and justify them, and the social relations in which they are embedded”. Their argument is based on the premise that because every state institution is a racial institution, the state as a whole ought to be understood as a racial state.
Through focusing on the state as inherently racialized, Omi and Winant (2014) then direct their analysis toward what they define as “racial politics”. Their argument centres on the notion that the political sphere often acts as a central medium through which racial projects are legitimated, made durable, and/or transformed. Importantly for our discussion, Omi and Winant’s (2014) hypothesis is that the U.S. racial state has gradually shifted its racial politics from a war of manoeuvre/domination to one of war of position/hegemony. The abolition of enslavement and desegregation are given as two examples to show how “in the old days, the racial state could be more overt and violent. In the ‘post-civil rights’ era, the racial state cannot merely dominate; it must seek hegemony” (Omi and Winant, 2014: 147). Importantly, Omi and Winant are not dismissing continuing state racial violence, but they are stating that such violence is now part of a hegemonic project in which racially subordinate groups are incorporated into the state in novel ways (such as with putatively ending segregation and disenfranchisement).
To level the critique of methodological nationalism against RFT is a slightly different enterprise to the earlier critique of RSS. Throughout their argumentation, Omi and Winant regularly make claims about the importance of global, colonial history for understanding racialization writ large. Especially in the updated edited collection on Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (HoSang et al., 2012), Omi and Winant (2012: 309) declare that the U.S.’ postwar hegemonic project of desegregation was “but a ‘case,’ however important, of a global process in which displaced elites, empires, and ideologies struggled to reconstruct and indeed reimagine their racial regimes after the war” – in other words, that the U.S.’ racial politics was connected to the racial politics of places elsewhere. As Omi and Winant (2012: 308–309) thus argue, the US’ postwar racial politics – including its organization of a new hegemonic racial project – was part of a wider global shift in the way that race and racism worked: The U.S. encounter with race and racism in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond constitutes a case study of a global racial transition [. . .] The great wave of postwar political movements—anti-imperialist movements, civil rights movements, and the “identity politics” of the 1960s—all contributed to the radical transformation of the global racial order.
However, even though Omi and Winant give lip service to a more transnationally connected understanding of racial formation(s) and racial politics, their conceptual repertoire fails to allow them to follow through on this theoretical promise of studying transboundary entanglements. For example, even though they mention how the U.S. civil rights movement, along with anti-imperialist movements, contributed to a radical transformation of racial politics globally, they don’t actually analyze the connections which existed between said movements. Within their analysis, such movements appear more as simultaneous, but fundamentally isolated and unrelated events happening in distinct racial formations. This is a missed opportunity for analysis of transboundary entanglements, given the shared intellectual roots of civil rights and anti-colonial struggles: for instance, both Kwame Nkrumah and Martin Luther King Jr described Du Bois as the forefather of the Pan-African and civil rights struggles respectively, while the Pan-African, civil rights, and Indian anti-colonial movements involved the explicit borrowing of tactics of resistance, such as non-violent sit-ins (Drake, 1984).
The crucial problem for RFT is that while the racial state is defined in a non-territorial way, and even though proponents spend time critiquing what they define as “nation-based” theories of race (Omi and Winant, 2014: 57), RFT still conflates between the racial state and the nation-state. This is seen in the RFT commitment to study racial formations as nationally discrete iterations of racialization, demonstrated in a variety of RFT-focused scholarship. RFT scholars consistently argue that racial formations are characterized by geographically-situated racial states (often the U.S. nation state, though not necessarily so) whose primary function is to create and maintain a nationally-bound system of racial categorization (e.g. Cheng, 2014; Massey, 2009; Omi and Winant, 2014; Saperstein et al., 2013). The RFT foci in such literature is thus constituted by agendas such as: “the role of the state in constructing racial projects” (Cheng, 2014: 745), the “demographic patterns, socioeconomic structures, historical processes, institutional arrangements, social movements, material and expressive culture, and psychological attitudes” of those living within a racial/nation-state (Cha-Jua, 2001: 30), and the processes by which the state decides to racialize certain populations in particular ways (Cheng, 2014; Massey, 2009). Much like RSS theorists, RFT theorists therefore, such as Saperstein et al. (2013), fix the analysis of racial formations to the macro (the nation-state and state categorization), the meso (institutions and organizations that naturalize the state), and the micro (individual level action), while transnational relations are simply left out of the picture. Indeed, Thomas (2016) has taken this argument against RFT further, accusing the approach of a deliberate conservative state-centrism which domesticates issues of “race” in a way which occludes the realities both of racism and anti-racism. Thomas (2016) argues that this domestication is typical of U.S. sociology of race, whereby the social thought of anti-racist and anti-colonial radicals who espoused transnational approaches to race and colonialism – some of whom are named within Omi and Winant’s (2014) text, such as the Black Panthers, Kwame Ture, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah – is deliberately excluded from the mainstream sociological repertoire. 1
RFT’s neglect of the transnational raises problems for thinking about the pertinence of transboundary entanglements in racial politics. Consider Omi and Winant’s (2014: 13) insistence that “race” is nationally specific to a given racial state, when they note that: “it is apparent that what race means in different regional and national settings is highly variable. What race means in Brazil, Japan, or in South Africa is dramatically different from what it means in the United States”. Such a statement – while rightfully emphasizing the plethora of racisms across different contexts – overlooks the means by which racialization in a specific nation-state can be the result of transnational contexts. In researching race relations in Brazil, for instance, Frazier (1942) found that Brazilian racialization was being greatly influenced by the migration of British and American business-folk, with these migrant groups attempting to replicate the Jim Crow racial order in the Brazilian South. As Frazier (1942: 295) commented on such racialized effects of migration, through “the financial and industrial penetration of [Brazil,] the British and the Americans draw a color line” such that: Americans who have gone to Brazil as technical advisers have insisted that even distinguished Black officials be ejected from hotels and when their wishes were not respected they have left the hotels [. . .] Brazilians are careful to select pictures of the right complexion for the American public.
In Frazier’s (1942) analysis, understanding transboundary entanglements – especially in the context of international migration – thus becomes a cornerstone for understanding a nationally specific iteration of racialization (racialization in Brazil). Even the local, as Frazier points out, can be shaped by transnational relations.
While RFT may thus recognize the existence of transnational racial projects, it fixes its scope of analysis on the nation state in virtue of its commitment to the idea that “race” is a nationally bound variable. In fixing race as a nationally bound unit, however, RFT thus occludes the possibility of understanding transboundary entanglements that develop between racial projects and racial politics in different geographical location. Much like RSS, RFT thus equates racial structures with national structures, and sets an arbitrary geographical boundary around putative racial formations. Consider South Africa here, which Omi and Winant claim to have dramatically different racial formation to the US. As pointed out by Du Bois (1955), it was capital from US investors which sponsored the South African apartheid regime through the 20th century – especially in the diamond, cobalt and chromite industries – and the wealth that was generated from this was used by US companies at home to fight labour unions and maintain the presence of a racialized underclass in the US economy. As Du Bois (1955: 19) thus put it: “if Black South Africans cannot own land or live in the towns where they work, or be treated as human beings, the problems of African labor are increasingly problems of labor in [] the United States”. Just from this one example, one can therefore question whether apartheid in South Africa was actually a racial project involving a nationally discrete racial order, maintained by a geographically-bound racial state, enacting a set of nationally specific racial politics. Instead, it seems more generative to recognize that in case of apartheid, it was impossible to maintain a hegemonic racial project without transnational flows of capital and labour. In such a case, we again see that what appears as a nationally-specific racial project – apartheid South Africa – does not just produce and reproduce itself through a national “base” or series of social relations, but rather it relies upon a series of transboundary entanglements involving international capital, interests, and organizations.
Indeed, certain theorists have attempted to expand the RFT repertoire in order to be more attentive to transnational “racial projects”, but I wager that this work only takes us so far. Perhaps the most convincing of these expansions comes from the work on the “empire state” from Jung and Kwon (2013). For Jung and Kwon (2013: 934), “in contrast to nation-states, empire-states are not horizontally uniform but hierarchically differentiated [. . .] They entail the usurpation of political sovereignty of foreign territories and peoples. They encompass spaces of unequal political status and, through de jure and de facto practices, peoples with differential access to rights and privileges”. Jung and Kwon (2013) argue that conceiving of the U.S. as such an empire state will help to transcend some of the latent methodological nationalism of RFT’s focus on the “racial state”, especially in a context where the U.S.’ internal racial hierarchy has historically been shaped by their overseas imperial expeditions (see Go, 2023).
However, while Jung and Kwon (2013) develop the RFT approach in a positive way by considering empire-states rather than nation-states as a primary racializing force, they still face a problem with defining racial formations in geographic set ways: the only difference now is that the geography is one of empire-based (i.e. “home” and “overseas”) rather than nation-based boundaries. Indeed, Steinmetz (2023: 9) has referred to this logic as replacing methodological nationalism with “methodological empire-ism”, where we overlook the relations between different geographically situated empires. As a case in point, as I have written about elsewhere (Meghji, 2023), one can consider the private military company – Elbit Systems. While based in Israel, and while supplying the majority of arms used in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Elbit are also contracted by Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) to protect the border from so-called illegal migration, by the European Union to patrol the border in the Mediterranean, and by the U.S. where they have fifty-five towers in Southern Arizona to again “protect” the border (Meghji, 2023). In such a case, we see that the technology and securitization practices used to maintain so-called racial projects are not typical to distinct geographically arranged regimes – whether that be nation-states or empire-states – but rather proceed through interactions between different geographical locales: in this case, components of the Israeli, American, British, and EU “racial projects” develop through their shared knowledge and practices (and, indeed financial ties, given that they are all contracting the same company). Thus, while the “empire state” approach may be much more beneficial than the more orthodox RFT approach of the “racial state”, we see that RFT will suffer so long as it clearly defines racial formations and projects as geographically bound units: in reality, it is harder to demarcate a racial project or formation geographically when the practices and knowledges that such projects/formations rely upon are themselves circulating transnationally.
Notably, there have already been attempts to transcend some of the limitations of RSS and RFT. One such approach has been labelled by its proponents as systemic racism theory (Ducey and Feagin, 2017; Evans and Feagin, 2012, 2015; Feagin, 1995, 2000, 2006; Feagin and Ducey, 2021; Feagin and Elias, 2013), but again, this enterprise has failed to move beyond the issue of methodological nationalism. Systemic racism theory (SRT), popularized by Joe Feagin, is predicated on the notion that “U.S. society is an organized racist whole with complex, interconnected, and interdependent social networks, organizations, and institutions that routinely imbed racial oppression” (Feagin, 2006: 16). Feagin (2000: 16) contends that systemic racism highlights “the unjustly gained economic and political power of whites” which has shaped the “United States as a ‘total racist society’ in which every major aspect of life is shaped to some degree by the core racist realities”. The racial frames of the United States are so totalizing, Feagin (1995) contends, that even upwardly mobile members of the Black middle-class are not immune to the ideological face of systemic racism.
Feagin contends that SRT differs from RFT in the way that it pays much greater attention to the intergenerational transfer of wealth across elite whites that has sustained the organization of U.S. society as a whole since its invention as a nation-state (Feagin and Elias, 2013). Feagin’s (2006: 3) own example of this includes the Homestead Act passed in 1862, which allocated 246 million acres of land, much of which was taken from Indigenous communities, to almost entirely white farmers; he documents that “perhaps 46 million white Americans are the current descendants of the fortunate homestead families and are substantial inheritors and beneficiaries of this wealth-generating government program”. Feagin thus posits that SRT fills a void in sociological theories of race in the way that it highlights the centrality of intergenerational transmission for understanding the durability of structural (or “systemic”) racism. As Feagin (2006: 4) clarifies: One remarkable thing about this intergenerational transmission of unjust enrichment and unjust impoverishment over centuries is that virtually no mainstream scholars and other mainstream analysts of “race” in the United States have given serious attention to its reality and operation. The unjust, deeply institutionalized, ongoing intergenerational reproduction of whites’ wealth, power, and privilege is never the center of in-depth mainstream analyses and is rarely seriously discussed.
While SRT might provide a more historical approach to understanding U.S. racism, it does not contemplate the issue of methodological nationalism. Key to Feagin’s SRT approach is the notion that the driving force of U.S systemic racism is “elite white interests” (Feagin and Elias, 2013). Feagin and Elias (2013) argue that what Omi and Winant call “the racial state” is really just elite whites occupying positions of political power, a point reiterated later by Ducey and Feagin (2017) in their book Elite White Men Ruling. SRT holds that not only do elite whites maintain and pursue policies that will maintain their dominant position, but they also have the ability to produce key “racial frames” which disseminate racial meanings in ways that naturalize racial oppression (such as beliefs in biological or cultural racial inferiority). Importantly, SRT’s analysis of elite white interests paints the framework into a corner when it comes to methodological nationalism. This is because in the analysis of elite whites offered in SRT, elite whites are treated as a dominant demographic group within a given nation state. In his earlier work on systemic racism theory, Feagin’s (2006) analysis of elite whites tends to be synonymous to the economic and political elites in the United States; later in his co-authored work on systemic racism in Britain with Ducey (Feagin and Ducey, 2021), again the ruling white elites are synonymous to the political and monarchy elite in Britain.
However, defining white elites in this nation-centred manner elides the transnational connections that can exist between disparately located racisms. Again, to bolster the critique I turn to Du Bois’s work on elite white interests. In Du Bois’s work, elite whites are not just a nationally specific political formation, but a dominant group within the organization of the global colour line. For Du Bois, racialization and racial exploitation are geared towards capital accumulation; however, this accumulation need not only develop within the nation states where the racial exploitation is happening. Du Bois thus pinpoints multiple racial regimes – such as apartheid South Africa (Du Bois, 1954), Jim Crow America (Du Bois, 2014 [1935]), and settler colonization in East Africa (Du Bois, 2007 [1947]) – all of which involve nationally-specific racial projects which feed into a wider global circuit of racialized capital, labour, and exploitation. In The Status of Colonialism, Du Bois (1954) noted how in the mid-20th century, economic elites from Wallstreet to the cities of Paris and London maintained financial control over those on the wrong side of the colourline, commenting for instance that India “must pay prices determined in London and New York and sell for prices set in San Francisco and Paris” (Du Bois, 1954: 1), while “Tin from Bolivia [] coffee from Brazil, gold from South Africa, copper from Rhodesia, and uranium from Congo are all under foreign control and the native populations have their income and way of life dictated by powers outside their political control” (Du Bois, 1954: 2). Unlike Feagin’s approach in systemic racism theory, as Du Bois notes here, it was a cluster of transnational elites, not just a nationally bound socio-economic fraction, who were responsible for maintaining racial exploitation through economic imperialism. As Du Bois (1954: 3–4) summarizes it, rather than a national elite being the primary driving force of racial exploitation, you have “control of the labor of Asia and Africa, by the ruling classes in Western Europe and North America”. Indeed, Du Bois’s (1954) emphasis on the cluster of transnational elites is only more pressing in the contemporary era, when you see “non-white” racialized groups constructing their own iterations of racial domination: such as the Islamophobic Hindutva (Leidig, 2020) and populist Chinese (Zhang, 2020) projects. Much like in the previous discussion of RSS and RFT, even with SRT we therefore see a predilection for nation state-centred analysis instead of an analysis which follows the thread(s) of transboundary entanglements.
Methodological stage-ism and the occlusion of slow burning raciality
Alongside methodological nationalism, which occludes a focus on transboundary entanglements, mainstream race theory is also marked by a methodological stage-ism. Methodological stage-ism refers to the intellectual tendency to overemphasize historical breaks and transformations, resulting in the categorization of discrete, bounded temporal periods when thinking about racialization and racism. In doing so, the race scholar’s theoretical labour is (mistakenly) concentrated on period-ization, which happens at the expense of tracking flows of racialization, racial meanings, and racial practices through time. Methodological stage-ism thus refers to more than just “presentism”, though presentism is an example of methodological stage-ism. While presentism describes the analysis of present racial configurations outside of their historical roots (Go, 2018), methodological stage-ism refers more broadly to the categorization and consequent analysis of what are assumed to be distinct racial periods. In this section, I contrast methodological stage-ism to “slow burning raciality”. Slow burning raciality refers to the cyclical reproduction of patterns of racial domination over the long durée, demonstrating how racial domination remains durable over time.
Of course, as already mentioned, approaches like SRT are explicitly tailored towards understanding racism over the long durée through a focus on capital transmission (Feagin, 2000). It is thus undeniable that SRT avoids the trap of methodological stage-ism. The whole conceptual framework revolves around the premise that in order to understand the present of U.S racism, one has to understand its historical roots and routes. Likewise, SRT holds that while U.S racism can be “periodized” into separate epochs, “most basic elements and institutions of racial oppression in U.S. society have endured over time, even as some significant changes have taken place” (Feagin, 2006: 16). However, the story is different for RSS, and RFT.
Just as the racialized social systems approach embodies imbues methodological nationalism into the very definition of its core concept(s), so too does it write methodological stage-ism into its conceptual repertoire. As theorized by Bonilla-Silva (2015: 74), the RSS approach defines itself as embodying a methodological stage-ism in the way that it attempts to study the “contemporary foundation” of racial inequality outside of its colonial foundations, thus turning away from “the sins [of the] past (e.g. slavery, colonization, and genocide)”. 2 Furthermore, much of the RSS literature has focused on demarcating strict temporal boundaries around given racialized social systems as a precursor to empirical analysis: whether that be discussions of the “post-civil rights era” (Doane, 2006; Forman and Lewis, 2006), “Obamerica” (Bonilla-Silva and Ray, 2015), and “Trumpamerica” (Bonilla-Silva, 2019b). Indeed, the majority of the formative literature from the RSS canon has focused on what proponents have labelled as the era of “new racism” – characterized by the ascendance of colourblindness as the dominant legitimating force of the racialized social system (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 2007; Doane, 2006, 2017; Henricks, 2018; Hughey and Byrd, 2013; Hughey et al., 2015; Lewis, 2004; Lewis et al., 2000; Mueller, 2017; Ray, 2022; Ray and Purifoy, 2019). The RSS approach as a whole, therefore, responded to what its proponents conceived of as a “new” iteration of racialized relations.
RFT – just like RSS – is also open to charges of methodological stage-ism. Much like the RSS approach, RFT premises itself on studying temporally fixed racial formation(s) which are distinguished from the “before” and “after”; as Cha-Jua (2001: 26) notes: “racial formations represent specific systems of racial control that occur at particular historical moments”. RFT thus emphasizes analysis of a given racial formation as it presents itself in a snap-shot of history, rather than focusing on the long durée. Such an approach is clear in Omi and Winant’s (2014) original theorization of RFT. Here, Omi and Winant (2014) theorize racism in America through a periodization whereby the legitimated racial violence of enslavement and Jim Crow in the 19th and early 20th century was replaced by a new racial formation based on a project of state hegemony. Indeed, Omi and Winant (2014: 14) are clear that methodological stage-ism is an explicit approach of RFT, as they claim their interest is in “stress[ing] the shift from racial domination to racial hegemony that has taken place in the post-World War II period” and “the transformation of U.S. racial despotism”. The very key tenet of RFT, as explicated by Omi and Winant (2014: 15) is that “after World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the earlier system of racial domination”. In this regard, charging RFT with the claim of methodological stage-ism is not controversial, as the authors of the theory themselves base their conceptual apparatus around the notion of racial transformation(s).
Indeed, RFT’s stage-ism is also present in the approach’s more recent articulations. In the co-edited Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (HoSang and LaBennett, 2012), for instance, the co-editors make the argument the (early) 21st century witnessed the development of a new (American) racial formation characterized by (i) the U.S. as a securitized war-state in the aftermath of 9/11 (see also Razack, 2012; Singh, 2012), and (ii) a culture of colourblindness in the context of Obama’s presidential election (see also Carbado and Harris, 2012, De Genova, 2012
In both RSS and RFT, therefore, periodic difference or stages are emphasized at the expense of focusing on “slow burning raciality” – that is, the durable nature of racialization and racism over the long durée. Of course, the question of whether we ought to focus on distinct racial periods or on the long durée can only be answered in relation to the empirics – this cannot be a matter which is solved by armchair theorizing. However, with both RSS and RFT, periodization is assumed to the extent that analysis of racism over the long durée is “blocked” by the two approaches’ conceptual apparatuses. This occlusion of what I term “slow burning raciality” creates both methodological and conceptual problems for race theorizing.
Methodologically, it is apt to return to Du Bois’s (1898) provocation that “one cannot study the Negro in freedom and come to general conclusions about his destiny without knowing his history in slavery”. Indeed, Du Bois specifically wrote this critique in 1898 in a context where his contemporary social scientists were producing pathological depictions of Black Americans based on putative empirical studies which divorced the present-day conditions of Black Americans from their history of enslavement and exploitation. At the best, Du Bois levelled that such research was prone to the ecological fallacy; at its worst, such scholarship was mere confirmation bias; as Du Bois (1898: 13–14) summarized this situation: A college graduate sees the slums of a Southern city, looks at the plantation field hands, and has some experience with Negro servants, and from the laziness, crime and disease which he finds, draws conclusions as to eight millions of people [. . .] It is so easy for a man who has already formed his conclusions to receive any and all testimony in their favor without carefully weighing and testing, it, that we sometimes find in serious scientific studies very curious proof of broad conclusions.
Sociologists followed Du Bois’s critique in their own work, specifically working against the principle of methodological stage-ism in order to draw links between the past and present. This was particularly apparent in the tradition of “Black ethnography” spearheaded by folks such as Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, Allison Davis, and St Clair Drake, among others (see Meghji, 2024a, 2025). In studying Black Chicago ethnographically in the aftermath of the 1919 riot, for instance, Johnson (1968: xviii) was clear to situate the current conditions of Black Chicagoans in the longer history of enslavement and its aftermath, commenting: It is important for our White citizens always to remember that the Negroes – alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will [. . .] that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded, and maintained in the United States by the white people for their own benefit; and that they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence.
Likewise, while Drake and Cayton’s (1962 [1945]) infamous Black Metropolis is often read as being an ethnographic classic in its study of Bronzeville, Chicago (Saint-Arnaud, 2009), the authors of this study viewed it as an ethnographic project situated in a historical unfolding of race relations in the city which began in 1840 – that is, in the pre-abolition era (Drake, n.d.). Both Johnson, and Drake and Cayton, took a leaf out of Du Bois’s (1967 [1899]) earlier ethnographic study of Philadelphia. Here, Du Bois (1967 [1899]: 74) argued that if we are to understand race sociologically, we need to study both the “group” of Black people in Philadelphia and their “environment”, and this can be achieved only by situating ethnographic research in a longer unfolding history – as Du Bois commented: “our judgment of the thousands of Negroes of this city must be in all cases considerably modified by a knowledge of their previous history and antecedents”.
While both RFT and RSS have thus built conceptual approaches based on the premise that “racial formations” or “racialized social systems” have successive breaks, there are alternative approaches which highlight flows and relations through time. Such approaches focus on what I refer to as slow burning raciality – as a means of highlighting the durability of race and racism over the long durée. Indeed, thinking in terms of the long durée was crucial to thinkers like Du Bois well beyond just their ethnographic work. Consider, for instance, Du Bois’s (2014 [1935]) analysis of the move from enslavement to abolition to Jim Crow in the US South. At first sight, there appears to be a significant change in the racial order: a centuries-long process was abolished and replaced with a “new method” of racial hierarchization. However, as Du Bois argues, the Jim Crow era was very successful in repacking the relations and practices of enslavement into a different historical era. Du Bois (2014 [1935]: 698) demonstrates this when discussing the Black Codes of the US South, highlighting how Southern states criminalized menial actions of Black people; coupled with the loophole in the 13th amendment, which permitted enslavement as a punishment for crime, this started a new “expansion” of enslavement which became legitimated through the carceral system; as he commented in Black Reconstruction: In no part of the modern world has there been so open and conscious a traffic in crime for deliberate social degradation and private profit as in the South since slavery [. . .] Since 1876 Negroes have been arrested on the slightest provocation and given long sentences or fines which they were compelled to work out. The resulting peonage of criminals extended into every Southern state and led to the most revolting situations.
Du Bois (2007 [1947]) also developed this approach of analysing racial structures over the long durée in his critique of racial exploitation across the global colour line. Just like in his analysis of the move from enslavement to Jim Crow, Du Bois analysed the burgeoning era of decolonization, showing how despite the appearance of change, racial-colonial exploitation was remaining constant. As he noted in The Status of Colonialism (Du Bois, 1954: 1–2), for instance, the growing involvement of Western multinational corporations in European colonies/postcolonies meant that “there are many countries which have nominal independence which are under almost as complete control by other nations as formerly”, creating thus a “change in method of control [. . .] but not real change in the facts or rigor of results”. For Du Bois, unlike proponents of RFT and RSS, sociological analysis ought to focus on repeated patterns of racial domination, or on continuous flows through time, rather than on apparent periodic breaks. Indeed, contemporary scholars have practiced this Du Boisian ethos even if they were not explicitly engaging with the works of Du Bois. Fenelon (2016), for instance, has argued that approaches such as RSS fail to consider how contemporary anti-Indigenous racism in the U.S. links to the history of Indigenous genocide; Fenelon argues that the historical genocide of Indigenous people has created a structure of “White-blindness toward deeply racist constructions” of Indigenous people in the present, signalled for example in sports by the naming of teams such as the Washington Redskins, or the Chief Wahoo mascot for the Cleveland Indians baseball team. 3
Through bifurcating between the past and present, RFT and RSS produce partial analyses of social phenomena, often making it appear as though the present situation is “unique” rather than part of an unfolding story of racial domination over the long durée. Consider both RSS and RFT’s approach to colourblind racism – what Bonilla-Silva (2015) describes as the dominant racial ideology in the (U.S.) racialized social system, and what RFT theorists label as characteristic of the 21st century American racial formation in the “Obama” era (HoSang et al., 2012). For such scholars, colourblind racism is the central component of the “new racism” which constellates in the post-civil rights era (Bonilla-Silva, 2007; Doane, 2006, 2017; Lewis, 2004; Lewis et al., 2000). This whole notion of the era of “new racism” – as the name suggests – relies upon a break from the past; however, often these assertions of an historical break are spurious.
For instance, Bonilla-Silva’s (2015) assertion of a break relies upon a comparison with the contemporary total U.S. with the more geographically specific infrastructure of Jim Crow in the U.S. South. As Bonilla-Silva (2015: 19) argues, while “remnants of the old-fashioned Jim Crow racism are clearly [this] is not the core of the system and the practices responsible for reproducing racial domination today” because Jim Crow involved a total system of legally enforced apartheid. However, such a comparison is methodologically flawed, especially in a context where during the Jim Crow era, the US North were developing their own similar patterns of racial exploitation without the legal apparatus of apartheid (Hunter and Robinson, 2018), as documented by various classical ethnographers and social scientists. In Black Metropolis (Drake and Cayton, 1962 [1945]), for instance, the authors found that the Chicago Real Estate Board ran a colourbar, while many recreational institutions were for “whites only” even though none of these processes were legally permissible. Likewise, in Du Bois’s (1967 [1899]) Philadelphia Negro, he points out that while school segregation on the basis of race had been made illegal in 1881, the practice remained through the rest of the century.
Furthermore, these instances of racial domination in the US North were often legitimated through the very frames of colourblind racism which Bonilla-Silva (2017) argues to be typical of the “new racism”. Du Bois (1967 [1899]), for instance, recounts how white capitalists often articulated their practices within the “I’m not racist but . . .” frame; for instance, such capitalists would refuse to hire Black labourers justifying this on the basis that they (the white capitalists) were not racists, but that their other (white) workers will not work alongside Black folks: In general, however, the black mechanic who seeks work from a mill owner, or a contractor, or a capitalist is told: ‘I have no feeling in the matter, but my men will not work with you.’ Without doubt, in many cases, the employer is really powerless; in many other cases he is not powerless, but is willing to appear so. (Du Bois, 1967 [1899]: 130).
Likewise, “cultural racism” – that is, stereotypes about racialized groups – that RSS theorists argue largely replaces the biological approach to race in the “new racism era” (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Forman and Lewis, 2006; Lewis et al., 2000) was also dominant in the pre-civil rights era. Indeed, Du Bois (2007 [1940]: 58) even notes that the very reason why he was commissioned to conduct his study of Philadelphia was because a widespread myth among the white elite that the culture of Black folks – typified by “crime and venality” – meant that the city of Philadelphia was “going to the dogs”. Likewise, Johnson’s (1968) ethnographic work with white Chicagoans in the 1920s demonstrated that whites largely thought about Black people in terms of cultural pathologization, framing Black people in terms of their poor mentality, morality, criminality, and emotionality, leading to so-called secondary beliefs about Black people being lazy and uncivil.
While neither total system change or cyclical repetition are given a priori, and the existence of either needs to be demonstrated through empirical research, both RFT and RSS overemphasize the focus on periodic breaks to the extent that they occlude even the possibility of analyzing slow burning raciality over the long durée. By contrast, such long durée foci on slow burning raciality were at the fore of other sociologists’ works; we would do well to return to their ethos of searching for cyclical repetition and transhistorical relations, rather than assuming that the practices of racial domination can be so neatly periodized.
From methodological groupism to dynamic racialization
Having considered the problems of methodological nationalism and stage-ism, we now arrive at the final stage of the critique – a consideration of methodological groupism. Groupism refers to “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous, and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis” (Brubaker, 2002: 164). The approach presupposes a coherent sense of identity and unified collective interests, rather than treating such “groupness” as a dynamically formed, practical achievement (Monk, 2022). Both RSS and SRT move towards methodological groupism in their analysis. Both SRT and RSS, for instance, develop analyses of “[collective] racial interests” in a way that often reifies racial categories as cohesive racial groups. Further, RSS in particular overlooks the dynamic process of racialization itself, often neglecting the wider social processes, relations, and structures that give rise to specific sets of racialization over time. In this paper, methodological groupism is contrasted to “dynamic racialization”. Dynamic racialization firstly highlights how racial categories (or racial categorization) relate to wider social relations and structures – for example, racial categorization can be related to moral panics over migration and/or crime (Hall et al., 1978). Dynamic racialization secondly highlights how different fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) do not always share generic “racial interests”, but rather there are moments when their different interests are able to synergize together; it is in these moments of synergy that racial domination appears most apparent.
This paper is not the first to include the critique of groupism to RSS, with Mara Loveman (1999) starting this conversation 2 years after Bonilla-Silva published his 1997 Rethinking Racism paper. Part of Loveman’s (1999: 891) critique is that the racialized social systems approach confounds “categories with groups”, and in doing so, reifies the notion of racial groups much more broadly. Since this critique, Bonilla-Silva (1999: 899) wrote a convincing reply, emphasizing that his and Mara Loveman’s [. . .] disagreement revolves around the centrality each of us assigns to race in the modern world. M[ara] L[oveman] believes that because race is a socially constructed category, it is a lesser, colligated, and ultimately contingent phenomenon that may or may not have associational (group-level) significance. Accordingly she accuses me of elevating the status of race from an external to a real social category.
The debate between Bonilla-Silva and Loveman then centred on a much wider issue pertaining to the relation between ethnicity and race, and whether race – as Loveman (1999) and others (e.g. Wacquant, 2024) argue – is really just an historically specific, and heavily contingent subset of ethnicity. While I agree with Bonilla-Silva (1999) that we ought to treat “race” as analytically distinct from ethnicity, I also believe that we ought to return to a central element of Loveman’s (1999) critique. Namely, despite Bonilla-Silva’s (1999) defence of RSS, there are still questions as to whether this approach understands the dynamic nature of how racial identification and racial categorization actually happen.
Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) approach to the racialized social system has been to theorize what he terms a tri-racial form of racial stratification in the U.S. racial order. Within such a tri-racial model, Bonilla-Silva argues that the racial hierarchy is divided between three groups: whites, honorary whites, and the collective Black. Each of these groups, Bonilla-Silva (2014: 40) argues, develops their own social interests in maintaining or challenging the racial status quo; as he argues (emphasis added): If the ultimate goal of the dominant race is to defend its collective interests (i.e., the perpetuation of systemic white privilege), it should surprise no one that this group develops rationalizations to account for the status of the various races.
The expression of these racial interests, Bonilla-Silva argues, is found in the construction and deployment of racial ideologies (one example of which would be racial prejudice).
Thus far, as Bonilla-Silva (2014) admits when discussing his conceptual overlaps with the laissez-faire racism theorists (Bobo, 1999, 2011; Bobo et al., 1997), the racialized social systems approach does not differ too much from the earlier work of Blumer (1958) on racial groups and racial interests. Just as Bonilla-Silva argues that racial ideology emerges as a means of maintaining (or challenging) the current relations between different racial groups, so too does Blumer (1958: 3) argue that “race prejudice is fundamentally a matter of relationship between racial groups”.
However, while Blumer’s (1958) work has been open to charges of groupism (Brubaker et al., 2004), he was attempting to theorize the production of racial groups through we-they distinctions that later came to be known as boundary-making (Lamont and Molnár, 2002). By contrast, it could be argued that the racialized social systems approach did not dedicate enough attention to the making of (racialized) groups, and in doing so, leaves itself more open to charges of groupism. Bonilla-Silva (1997: 469) argues that racialized social systems are defined by “the placement of actors in racial categories or races”, but does not expand on how the creation of racial categories takes place, nor how actors are placed into such created racial categories. Instead, we are left with a more generic statement that: When race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure (a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the peoples who became “white”) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became “nonwhite”) (Bonilla-Silva, 2014: 39).
I do not disagree with Bonilla-Silva’s statement. Rater, I argue that the racialized social systems approach commits to a form of groupism in virtue of not theorizing the dynamic nature of racialization. Consider Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) own classification of whites, honorary whites, and the collective Black in the U.S. racial order. Under whites, Bonilla-Silva (2004) argues we have (among others) “Whites” “New Whites (Russians, Albanians, etc.)”, “Assimilated White Latinos”, and “Some Multiracials”, under Honorary White we have (among others) “Japanese American”, “Korean Americans”, “Asian Indians”, “Chinese Americans”, “Middle Eastern Americans”, and under the Collective Black we have (among others): “Blacks”, “Dark-Skinned Latinos”, and “New West Indian and African Immigrants”. On the one hand, such an approach overlooks how racialization does not just involve the categorization “from outside the group”, but also involves a recognition from those within the group that they are indeed members of the said group, and recognition from other groups that those people are indeed correctly categorized – in other words, there are three layers of validity checking (Jenkins, 1996). A similar iteration of this critique was articulated by Monk (2022: 5), who pointed out that conceptual approaches such as RSS (and RFT) often take “state categories of race/ethnicity” as a given, and consequently fail to consider how membership in various “subcategories”, as well as one’s “perceived categorical typicality”, play a crucial role in resource allocation. Monk’s (2022: 13) own example of this is colourism, given that “differences in skin tone among African Americans” – while not a state category of “race” itself – “are strongly associated with important outcomes such as educational attainment, earnings, marital patterns, and even mental and physical health”; indeed, Monk notes “there is more educational inequality within the black population along the colour continuum than there is between black and white populations as a whole”.
Building on Monk’s (2022) critique to consider boundary making and people’s practical understandings of race and difference beyond state categorization, a wide array of examples emerge which demonstrate RSS’ fallacious association between racial categories and collective groups. In a context where, for example, there is salient boundary making between African Americans and recent Black migrants from Africa and the Caribbean (Clerge, 2014), or where Iranian Americans present as white but are made hyper-visible through rampant Islamophobia and anti-migrant policies (Maghbouleh, 2017), it is not entirely clear why we ought to agree with Bonilla-Silva that racial categories translate into groups with collective shared interests (and if they are indeed collective groups, how that formation happens despite the putative intra-group boundary work and unequal resource allocation).
While RSS acknowledges that all racialization happens within a structure of racial hierarchy (i.e. racial categories are not just descriptive, but also evaluative), it still lacks a fully developed account of how and why certain people get racialized as such, and how this racialization may change over time. What is missing in such an account are questions as to how a group, such as Chinese Americans for instance, became racialized through fears around migration, health, and communism (Park, 1950), before then being racialized through the model minority myth (Lee and Zhou, 2015; Yi et al., 2020), and then again through a yellow peril myth in the COVID-era (Li and Nicholson, 2021), and precisely what this means as to their placement in the collective Black, Honorary white, or white categories.
It is precisely for this reason that one may prefer to think in terms of dynamic racialization – paying attention to how racialization becomes related to wider social relations, processes, and structures. Much like in the discussion of slow burning raciality, this notion of dynamic racialization was a key component of early critical race theory; Delgado and Stefancic (2001: 7), for instance, even state that one of the key tenets of critical race theory is that: [. . .] race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.
Dynamic racialization emphasizes how the meaning of, and membership within, racial categories may change over time. Processes of migration and “assimilation”, global fears over Islamic terrorism, and boundary work within racial categories, for example, are all relevant social relations and processes that have drastic effects on racialization itself. However, in contrast to such a dynamic racialization approach, and despite its strong commitment to constructionism, RSS makes racial categories seem like fixed, pre-existing groups that get interpellated into a racial structure, rather than being the products of race-making itself – thus the charge of methodological groupism.
SRT likewise struggles to overcome methodological groupism, again repeating a similar problem to RSS in the way that it presents a static picture of racial interests. An essential objective for systemic racism theorists is to ground an understanding of racism in the actions and interests of the elite fraction of a given racial structure; in SRT this dominant group are referred to as “elite whites” (Feagin, 2000, 2006) or “elite white men ruling” (Ducey and Feagin, 2017; Feagin and Ducey, 2021). Focusing on such elite actors, systemic racism theorists argue, allows us to track the durability of racism through successive eras, as waves after waves of “elite whites” are argued to reproduce the same basic tenets of racism (Feagin, 2006). Feagin (2006, 2023), for instance, argues that there is little substantive difference between the way that elite whites such as George Washington and the “founding fathers” wrote Blackness out of their definition of personhood in the American constitution, with the elite whites who now propagate myths of an impending demographic white extinction in America. For systemic racism theorists, it is this dominant fraction of elite whites who are responsible for the production of such dominant “racial frames” which are disseminated across society as a whole, with these racial frames producing and legitimating all aspects of systemic racism (Ducey and Feagin, 2017; Feagin, 2023). Given this logic, systemic racism theorists argue that “we must constantly accent the role of whites, especially elite whites, as the originators, enforcers, and remodelers of systemic racism in the United States” (Feagin, 2006: 7).
Indeed, SRT’s analysis here is not too far distinct from how certain RSS theorists have approached the notion of hegemonic whiteness (e.g. Hughey, 2010; Hughey and Byrd, 2013; Lewis, 2004). Much like SRT’s analytical focus on “elite whites”, proponents of RSS have highlighted how the dominant racial group – whites – are not a homogeneous fraction, but rather that there are dominant (hegemonic) whites, as well as non-dominant (non-hegemonic groups). As Lewis (2004: 634) summarizes this “diversity” of hegemonic and non-hegemonic whiteness: Whiteness works in distinct ways for and is embodied quite differently by homeless white men, golf-club-member-ship-owning executives, suburban soccer moms, urban hillbillies, antiracist skinheads, and/or union-card-carrying factory workers [. . .] In any particular historical moment, however, certain forms of white-ness become dominant. We can think of this form as something similar to what Connell [] calls “hegemonic masculinity.” Hegemonic whiteness then would be that “configuration of [racial] practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of [white supremacy]” and that secures the dominant position of whites.
RSS scholars, therefore, have used the notion of hegemonic whiteness in a similar way to how SRT theorists have used the notion of elite whites – to refer to a fraction of a “racial group” who can be viewed as culpable for the (re)production of racism as a whole. In such an approach, while “whites” are not construed as being one homogeneous social group, “elite” or “hegemonic” whites are presented as a group with collective interests, and moreover, these interests are construed by theorists as being – as Lewis (2004: 634) summarizes above – related to the overall “dominant position of whites” in general.
Just like with much of the critique so far, I do not wholly disagree with SRT’s analytic focus on elite whites or RSS’s focus on hegemonic whiteness, but I argue that it creates a slippage into groupism. In particular, focusing on elite or hegemonic whites, rather than on conjunctural expressions of the “wages of whiteness”, limits the ability for SRT and RSS to properly theorize racial domination. In arguing that dominant racial frames are produced by elite whites, and elite whites thus become responsible for the maintenance of systemic racism, other non-elite actors who are racialized at the top of the racial hierarchy – that is, whites – become akin to cultural dupes, merely repeating the racial myths of a dominant socio-economic fraction. In other words, the agency of non-elite whites appears to vanish into thin air, and racism instead gets explained through a sealed group of “elite whites”.
By contrast, a focus on dynamic racialization unearths conjunctural expressions of the “wages of whiteness” (Du Bois, 2014 [1935]), emphasizing how racial frames and practices are produced through a collaboration between different actors with differing interests in historically specific moments. Here, dynamic racialization highlights how different fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) do not always share generic “racial interests”, but rather there are moments when these different interests are able to synergize together; it is in these moments of synergy that racial domination appears most apparent. Such an approach can be identified in Du Bois’s scholarship.
In the reconstruction era, for instance, Du Bois (2014 [1935]: 205) highlighted how white workers and the white bourgeoisie overcame their divergent class interests in the way they combined to negatively racialize a new large demographic of freed Black folks: [. . .] instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers [. . .] and this split depended not simply on economic exploitation but on a racial folk-lore grounded on centuries of instinct, habit and thought and implemented by the conditioned reflex of visible color.
Indeed, Black Reconstruction (Du Bois, 2014 [1935]) involves a long discussion of the collusion between white workers and white capitalists also in the era of enslavement. As Du Bois (2014 [1935]) argues, the process of enslavement ought to have been a problem for white labourers – who would pay for waged labour when they could enslave someone who simultaneously becomes labour and capital? In this context, however, as Du Bois notes, white workers and elites were able to collude in the system of racial domination: white workers formed a mass police force, receiving waged labour in hunting down escaped enslaved people, outnumbering the enslaved population several times over. It was this mass collusion between white workers and the white elite – Du Bois (2014 [1935]) argued – that made enslavement such a durable system in the U.S. (contrasted to, for example, Haiti, where there was just a clear divide between the landowners and the enslaved, without white workers).
Indeed, even in his ethnographic work Du Bois (1967 [1899]) highlighted how racial domination was most salient when white workers and elites colluded in specific moments despite their differing interests. Consider Du Bois’s (1967 [1899]) analysis of the colourbar in Philadelphia’s labour market. Here, Du Bois shows that it isn’t the case that Black labour exclusion was the result of racism from white capitalists – in fact, many white capitalists had a predilection for Black labour as it was cheaper than hiring whites. Rather, white workers often ran a colourbar in their unions, refusing to admit Black members, while these same workers refused to work with non-union men. In practice, as Du Bois (1967 [1899]: 126) states, this created an exclusion of Black labour deriving from white labourers’ interests to quell competition from those who they construed as “driving wages down”: Thus the carpenters, masons, painters, iron-workers, etc., have succeeded in keeping out nearly all Negro workmen by simply declining to work with non-union men and refusing to let colored men join the union.
However, as Du Bois shows, the exclusion of Black workers has a further to layer to it. Namely, white capitalists agreed with white workers to not hire non-unionized workers, thus creating de facto segregation in the labour market but this allowed for such capitalists to then use Black labourers as a reserve labour force for strikebreaking in periods of industrial action (Du Bois, 1967 [1899]). While the interests of white workers and capitalists were thus divergent – the former group attempting to exclude Black labourers because they were driving down wages, the latter group realizing they could use Black labourers to outmanoeuvre industrial strikes – these divergent interests worked together to produce and sustain a colourbar in the labour market. Du Bois highlighted dynamic racialization, showing how there were no collective ‘white interests’, as per RSS, and neither were “elite white interests” necessarily the primary interests at play as per SRT. Rather, as per dynamic racialization, we see how racial domination proceeded from a collaboration between different actors with differing, albeit complementary, interests.
Such an approach of dynamic racialization, therefore, is significantly different to the way that SRT approaches the notion of “elite whites”. Dynamic racialization emphasizes historically specific moments where coalitions between different racialized-classed fractions lead to patterns of racialization and racism. By contrast, SRT analytically overplays the power of elite whites to control the racial structure at large, consequently overlooking the role of coalitions and networks of actors in sustaining racial domination. “Elite whites”, in SRT, thus become theorized as a group in and for itself, accused – as per the logic of the trial (Wacquant, 1997) – of being wholly responsible for racial configurations. If SRT were to better avoid the traps of groupism, it would instead be more apt to think about the role of elite whites in conjunction with other people, organizations, and processes in the maintenance of the racial order.
Concluding remarks: Theoretically capturing racial domination
Critique drives understandings forward. I have written this paper with such an ethos in mind. RSS, SRT, and RFT have fundamentally developed our understanding of race, racism, and racialization for the better. RSS shifted race analysts’ attention away from the “prejudice problematic” towards a fuller understanding of the structural nature of race, as well as the interrelated components across the meso and micro levels (see Bonilla-Silva, 2015, 2021; Christian, 2019; Ray, 2019). Similarly, RFT demonstrated the necessity of studying “racial projects” as political projects, highlighting the salience of the “racial state” in historical and ongoing practices of racial domination, again providing a framework which is often used in contemporary research (Collins, 2019; HoSang et al., 2012; Jung and Kwon, 2013; Omi and Winant, 2012, 2014; Winant, 2000). Alongside these two approaches, SRT has reminded us that even in our structural analysis we ought to have a focus on specific groups – especially elite whites – when considering the very construction of exploitative racial apparatuses, and that the actions of elite whites historically still have a bearing on the present (Ducey and Feagin, 2017; Feagin, 2006). However, as Bonilla-Silva (2021: 513) aptly observed: Only fools believe their theorizations are finished products. Theorists must respond to critics, address new data, allow for new ideas, concepts, and orientations to affect their work, and, once in a while, fine-tune or even change their concepts altogether.
With this in mind, this paper has been an attempt to show the limitations of previously innovative race theories, in the hope that we may be able to further generate progress in this field. I observed that race theories – RSS, RFT, and SRT in specific – often fall into the traps of methodological nationalism, stage-ism, and groupism. The boundaries of racial structures in such approaches are often equated with nation states, racial categories are often presented as groups with cohesive racial interests, and there is a methodological proclivity to think in terms of distinct “periods” of racialization in a way that occludes moments of continuity.
In response to this cluster of problems, I proposed that race theorists may do well if they focus more on transboundary entanglements, slow burning raciality, and dynamic racialization. Taking these concepts together, I specified that race theorists ought to develop understandings of how even hyper-localized conditions of race and racialization may be facilitated by transnational relations, and what this means for theorizing the “boundaries” of racial structures; that we ought to not presuppose that we can neatly periodize distinct “racial regimes”, and instead ought to consider the continuity of racial domination through the long durée; and that we ought to think about racialization as a dynamic process, bringing more specificity to the notion of racial interests to think instead of historical moments in which different social fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) synergize their differing interests to maintain racial domination. These social realities – of transnational relations, historical continuity, and dynamic racialization – are not novel phenomena; indeed, readers of this paper will see that in making my critique I have drawn upon classical (e.g. Du Bois, Drake, and Frazier) as well as contemporary scholars. Rather, transboundary entanglements, slow-burning raciality, and dynamic racialization – despite being present in the work of classical and several contemporary authors’ works – have remained largely absent in dominant sociological theorizing about race.
Rather than advocating that we simply need to “go back to the classics” in race theorizing, I have sought to generate concepts – transboundary entanglements, slow-burning raciality, and dynamic racialization – that can help develop race scholarship as we seek to move forward in the discipline. None of these concepts, as per any sociological concept, ought to be treated as a transcendental deity – the veracity of these concepts can only be ascertained through the trial of empirical research itself. Future empirical research on slow-burning raciality, for instance, could focus on conjunctural historical episodes which appear to signify transformation – such as the era of abolition and reconstruction, Jim Crow into the post-civil rights era, or “colourblind” to Trumpamerica periods in the U.S. – and empirically detail the extent to which racial domination (and/or its reproduction) actually changed, if at all. Likewise, research on transboundary entanglements could focus on the role of multi-national corporations – both historically and presently – in enforcing racial domination across fixed geographical spaces, paying attention to the consequences this has on the transnational flow of racial meanings, practices, and forms of domination and resistance. Lastly, research on dynamic racialization could focus on the process by which people claim membership in racial groups, as well as providing a more rigorous approach than assuming the general concept of “white interests” by empirically detailing how collaboration between groups with differing interests (e.g. white workers and white elites) sustains the colourline. While this has been a paper based on (generative) critique, the onus is now therefore on the wider social scientific community to put these concepts to such a test of empirical research.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.