Affect and the sociology of race: A program for critical inquiry

Abstract

Theorizing the centrality of race remains a key issue within the social sciences. However, an examination of four programs that dominate critical inquiry, particularly in the US context -Racial Formation Theory; Systemic Racism; Color-Blind Racism; and Critical Race Theory -reveal two key problems: a reductivist account of the role of culture in the production of race and racism and the essentializing of the political identity of racial Others. This article, then, considers a different paradigm for the study of race -an affective program. Two components of an affective program identified in this article are: (a) a more dynamic account of culture, opening up the realm of the discursive to more than just signification and representation, but also expression; and (b) locating the possibilities of racial politics as matters of racialized and anti-racist practices rather than matters of racial identity.

Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition

“…Others point to CBT's challenges with essentialism (Thomas 2014) and the "fluid and dynamic" nature of ideologies (Doane 2017:1). In principle, CBT assumes that dominant ideologies are "always 'in the making'" (Bonilla-Silva 2015a:79) and flexible enough to accommodate "contradictions, exceptions, and new information," not to mention intragroup distinctions (Bonilla-Silva 2001:63).…”

“…CBT describes ideology like a ready-made set of tools; consequently, researchers chase, document, and reify CBT's established frames (Burke 2016), often with little attention to intersectional analysis (Bonilla-Silva 2015a). Relatedly, because the theory prioritizes declarative culture (i.e., explicit discourse and conscious schema), CBT obscures other, equally important indicators rooted in affect, practice, and tacit schema (Jung 2015;Lizardo 2017;Thomas 2014).…”

“…and when they engage in practices where they use their power and resources to ameliorate and share the "extraordinary costs and burdens of racism" with people of color to the greatest extent possible (Feagin 2014:22;Thomas 2014). The tenet of interest convergence thus explains how and why dominant racial logics are reproduced (or change) over time; predicts the terms under which evolutions and regressions occur; and guides ideological and practical interventions.…”

The Rebirth of the U.S.-Mexico Border

“…Following Thomas's (2014) call to better attend to the active and dynamic properties of culture in the unfolding of racialization, our focus here is to illuminate how the policing of brown-bodied others by brown-bodied state agents produces a complex tethering of power, subjectivity, and embodied racialized practices: what we term a phenomenology of racial power. Our understanding of a phenomenology of racial power is foregrounded in Nick Crossley's scaffolding of Merleau-Ponty's "being-in-the-world" as a form of embodied action (the body as active) with Foucault's description of power as inscribed upon the body (the body as acted upon) (see Crossley 1994Crossley , 1996.…”

“…This last point demands that critical race scholars recognize the body as active and acted upon and that these modalities of corporeal activity are dual characteristics of the same processes. Thus, our phenomenological account of racial power aims to address Thomas's (2014) call for a more dynamic account of culture in the enabling and constraining of contemporary racialization and rejects essentialist political racial categories by centering the experiences of Latina/o state agents who function as both enforcers and targets of racial power.…”