Notes on race as denegated ethnicity

Abstract

Building on my book Racial Domination (Polity Press, 2014), I disentangle the vexed relationship between race and ethnicity. Race is best understood as a disguised or denegated form of ethnicity, that is a naturalized principle of social vision and division based on positive or negative “social estimation of honor” (Weber), a basis of classification and stratification that claims to be grounded in the necessity of nature and biology instead of the arbitrary of culture and history. I replace the three commonly accepted manners of conceiving this relationship, disjunction, intersection, and subsumption or nesting, with the schema of the continuum of ethnicity, running from ordinary ethnicity stamped with aura, which is fluid, thin, elective, episodic and tends to horizontality, to racialized ethnicity stained by stigma, which is rigid, thick, imposed, enduring and tends to verticality. This schema allows us to unload the historical ethnoracial unconscious of the United States which infects the study of racial domination the world over. The logical and historical priority of ethnicity over race suggests that we should rid the social sciences of the latter as analytic category.