9. Thinking sociologically about race

The concept of race → socially constructed

• Good reason to pay closer attention to how race is conceptualized

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What do sociologists observe when race is studied?

• 1. Racial objectivism:

  • Racial categories reflect an essential aspect of human groups (colour of skin)

• Race as ideological construct:

  • Racial categories are perpetuating false consciousness

2. Racial objectivism

• Segregationist and separatist

  • White vs black people, asian people - “people have to keep to their own kind”

    • Holocaust, Indian act

• Race as ideological construct:

  • racial categories are false consciousness

  • race is to justify social domination

  • “colourblind” view of equality

• Key ideaL race only exists bc we constantly recreate it

  • Ethnicity, class, nationality

OMI & WINANTS CRITIQUE

• Race construct has become a fundamental principle of social organization

  • deep roles in social identities

^They go with → racial formation theory

Solution

• organizing principle in social life that cannot be reduced to social class or ethnicity, that has no biological basis

Understands race as…

• unstable, historical influence, highly variable

• challenged or kept by “racial projects”

  • e.g. athlete protest against racism → angry white men

Du Bois → Racial oppression

• double consciousness

• the veil and “standpoint”

• the colour line

  • Him on social progress and sociology

Double consciousness

• sense of always looking at one self through the eyes of others

  • Seeing yourself one way, but others view you differently

  • Hard to develop sense of self with multiple social identities

3 Issues with double consciousness

• effects of the exclusion of black people from mainstream society

• The power of white stereotypes in black life and thought

• the inner conflict between what is “African” and what is “American”

→ Du Bois identifies the black experience as a unique power

→ Unintended consequences

• the ideas are replicated in dominant ways (old yt mens decisions)

• sociology fails to explain the social reality when it comes to the perspective of the marginalized

  • racial oppression, sexual reproduction, childcare, unpaid domestic labour

• Dubois addressing black and white audiences

• takes the many factors of the phenomenon with its connection to race → looking at the legacy of white supremacy

REVIEW: The problem with the 20th century is the construct of race and its consequences - “THE COLOUR LINE”

• founded in racial oppression and slavery

• separates people and take away their humanity, marks people as other

• black individuals obtain a double consciousness (being black vs being american)

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“the ultimate evil was stupidity” → curing it using scientific investigation

Du Bois’s debate with Booker T Washington

• Du Bois supports radical social change to address inequality, focusing on the entire social structure (The root) . He believes in immediate progress, contrasting with Booker T. Washington's gradual approach.

Du Bois on social change 3 Key issues:

1. Disenfranchisement

   • Lack of vote

   • if there is no vote for them, theres no prosperity in pproperty and economics. they lack the means to secure their property

2. Civic equality for African Americans

   • Washington promotes thrift and self-respect

   • erasing black inferiority

3. Higher education

   • Real progress institutional level, need for college-educated teachers

→ Du Bois grew critical of capitalism, highlighting its link to racism. Under slavery, Blackness became a racial marker, used by capitalism for the super-exploitation of enslaved people and to divide the working class ideologically.

• Dubois addresses his anger to the racial and economic structures that are existing that affect the working people

  • “capitalism cannot reform itself- its doomed to self-destruction”

• Systemic change needs effort to give all that they need, and see what they can contribute