The Racialized Social System. Ali Meghji

I then connect such ideologies to racialized emotions – the emotional bonds that act as vehicles for the transmission of racial ideologies. I conclude this chapter by looking at three political projects – Trumpamerica, Brexit Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil – to demonstrate how emotions and ideologies come together in the reproduction of racism.

I stay with the micro in the third chapter, ‘Theorizing the Racialized Interaction Order’. In this chapter, I draw on interactionist sociology to show how the racialized social system necessarily entails a diffuse system of interactional risks, and interactional rights, and that such risks and rights are unequally distributed across the racial hierarchy. I therefore use this chapter to clarify how racial projects of segregation – such as Apartheid or Jim Crow – show very explicit interaction orders, with legally distributed interactional rights and risks. Further, I also focus on the contemporary to show how differently racialized people continue to be afforded different ‘legitimate’ interactional rights and risks, using examples such as that of Black professionals in the workplace.

      In the fourth chapter, ‘Meso Racial Structures and Racialized Organizations’, I turn to the meso. This chapter homes in on recent scholarship on racialized organizations, paying specific attention to how such meso structures constrain the agency of people of colour, free up the agency of whites, and legitimate the unequal distribution of societal resources. I use case studies ranging from sport to the professional workplace and creative industries to highlight how studying organizations is a crucial way for us to understand the processes of racialization and racism.

      I conclude in the final chapter, ‘What is Critical about Critical Race Theory?’ In this chapter, I try to look at the potential limitations of CRT and how various critical race theorists have therefore tried to stretch its conceptual apparatus. In particular, I look at the postcolonial challenge to CRT, questioning the extent to which CRT is able to engage in transnational, historical analysis, and the extent to which it practises methodological nationalism. Further, I also specify some key dimensions of contemporary social life that necessitate a CRT analysis – from the rise of ‘diversity training anti-racism’ through to ongoing climate crises and hierarchization of different ‘racisms’, therefore concluding that CRT may not be perfect, but it is indeed necessary.

Notes

      1  1 https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1306217761564241920.

      2  2 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/tracing-the-dangerous-rise-and-rise-of-woke-warriors/news-story/19b519e58d3393b35d6fccec8d9e4135.

      3  3 Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv.

      4  4 Bell 1995a, 1995b.

      5  5 See Pattillo 2005, 2013.

      6  6 Freeman 1995.

      7  7 Freeman 1995: 30.

      8  8 A similar case at a similar time can be seen in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 1973.

      9  9 Quoted in Freeman 1995: 42. The anti-discrimination law being invoked refers to the case of X where it was shown that in the case of Y discrimination could be proved even if the inequality was not intended.

      10 10 Freeman 1995: 43.

      11 11 Greene 1995.

      12 12 Wise 1998.

      13 13 Prewitt 2013.

      14 14 Wimmer 2015.

      15 15 Quoted in Crenshaw 1989: 142.

      16 16 This concept is thus similar to the Du Boisian (2007b[1903]) notion of Black American ‘second sight’, whereby, by virtue of their being dominated, Black Americans were said to be able to better understand society’s workings than the racially dominant, who internalize an ignorance.

      17 17 Which featured Ladson-Billings’ (1999) popular paper ‘Just what is critical race theory, and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?’

      18 18 Featuring one of Ladson-Billings’ most widely cited papers, ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’ (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995).

      19 19 Crenshaw 2011; see also Carbado 2011.

      20 20 For instance, Abdel-Malek 1981; Gane 1983; Giddens 1987; Kellner 1990; Law 2014; Turner 2009.

      21 21 See Golash-Boza 2016 for an extended discussion of this supposed ‘crisis’ of race theory.

      22 22 Collins 1998: xiii.

      23 23 P. H. Collins 2019: 92.

      24 24 See Bonilla-Silva 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2015, 2016, 2020.

      25 25 These concepts are defined briefly here because each is the subject of one of the following chapters.

      26 26 Bonilla-Silva 2015: 75.

      27 27 Du Bois 2014[1935].

      28 28 Bonilla-Silva 2017: 15.

      29 29 Meghji and Saini 2018: 673.

      30 30 Bonilla-Silva 2012: 174.

      31 31 Ibid.

      32 32 Bonilla-Silva et al. 2006: 231.

      33 33 Bonilla-Silva 2019a: 3.

      34 34 Ibid.

      35 35 Lamont et al. 2016, 2017.

      36 36 Indeed, through this lens, the sites that the first two waves of CRT scholarship target – court houses, universities, schools, housing and so on – can all be seen as racialized organizations: that is, part of an overall racialized social system.

      37 37 For instance, Luna 1998; Solórzano and Yosso 2001.

      38 38 See Harpalani 2013.

      39 39 For instance, Brayboy 2005.

      40 40 Quoted in Möschel 2011: 1651.

      41 41 For a review of BritCrit, see Meghji 2021.