Race Ends Where? Race, Racism and Contemporary Sociology

Abstract

In this introductory article we critically discuss where the study of race in sociology has travelled, with the benefit of previously published articles in Sociology supported by correspondence from article authors. We make the argument for sociologies of race that go beyond surface level reconstructions, and which challenge sociologists to reflect on how their discipline is presently configured. What the suite of papers in this collection shows is both the resilience of race as a construct for organising social relations and the slippery fashion in which ideas of race have shifted, transmuted and pluralised. It is in a spirit of recognising continuity and change that we present this collection. Some of the papers already stand as landmark essays, while others exemplify key moments in the broader teleology of race studies. This includes articles that explore the ontological ground upon which ideas of race, citizenship and black identity have been fostered and the need to develop a global sociology that is critically reflexive of its western orientation. The theme of continuity and change can be seen in papers that showcase intersectional approaches to race, where gender, nationality, generation and class offer nuanced readings of everyday life, alongside the persistence of institutional forms of discrimination. As this work demonstrates, middle-class forms of whiteness often go 'hiding in the light' yet can be made visible if we consider how parental school choice, or selecting where to live are also recognised as racially informed decisions. The range and complexity of these debates not only reflect the vitality of race in the contemporary period but lead us to ask not so much if race ends here, but where?

The “Irish question”: marginalizations at the nexus of sociology of migration and ethnic and racial studies in Britain

“…The emergence of interest in migration among sociologists in England coincided with increasing arrivals from commonwealth countries, particularly those in the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent, in the 1940s and 1950s, and tended to be framed by a "race relations" discourse (Meer and Nayak 2015). In the post-1945 period Irish migrants were consistently the largest in-coming group until the final decade of the twentieth century (Hickman and Walter 1997;Delaney 2013).…”

Breaking black: the death of ethnic and racial studies in Britain

“…Such optimism proved short-lived, however, when the urban unrest of 2001 and the attacks on New York in September that year ushered in a new, intense phase of the War on Terror. This refocused attention away from ongoing racial and ethnic inequality and social injustice towards the seeming failures of multiculturalism and the apparent inability of Britain's ethnic minorities (now largely recast as "Muslims") to "integrate" into wider modern society (Meer and Nayak 2015). While questions of race and racism largely fell off of the agenda, issues of religion, ethnicity and identity moved centre-stage, with evocations of "parallel lives" and "community cohesion" conjuring familiar and well-worn tropes of cultural difference and incompatibility that resonated strongly with the earlier "race relations" framework (Kundnani 2002;Alexander 2004), but now with a global securitized sheen (Kundnani 2014).…”

“…There were also 230,600 Arabs (CoDE 2012) while the "White Other" category increased by over one million peoplethe largest increase in any ethnic group category, and including 579,000 Polish migrants (ONS 2015). 16 The increasing complexity of Britain's social and cultural ethnoscape is, in part, reflected in the explosion of racial and ethnic studies, which has seen a rapid expansion of its borders, across disciplines and spanning terrains from the diasporic to the microcosmic (Bhattacharyya and Murji 2013;Meer and Nayak 2015). The growth of what has been termed the Ethnic and Racial Studies "journalplex" (Winant 2015(Winant , 2176 across the past forty years is one marker of this increase globally, as well as nationally, 17 while the British Sociological Association's "race, ethnicity and migration stream" is the largest and one of the most active in the discipline.…”

“…This constructed unity was evident too in the Marxian inflected (or post-Marxist) theorizations of race that emerged alongside these mobilizations, which rejected the ethnicist simplifications of the "race relations school" and turned their gaze outwards to the racial state and its social, economic, political and cultural formations (Hall et al 1978;Sivanandan 1981/2;CCCS 1982;Gilroy 1987;Solomos 1987;Miles 1993). Best exemplified by Policing the Crisis (Hall et al 1978), The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982) and, perhaps, the later There Ain't No Black (Gilroy 1987), the significance of this work lay in its insistence on placing diverse racialized communities alongside each other, as part of a broader set of racial structures, histories and discourses, while emphasizing the agency and shared struggles of racialized groups, and, importantly, placing "culture" both as a form of political identity and action (Gilroy 1987(Gilroy , 1993aAlexander 2002Alexander , 2014Meer and Nayak 2015). However, the later foundational status of this work, and its iconic scholarsparticularly Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and John Solomosshould not blind us to the broader, and more problematic, accounts of racial and ethnic identities which dominated the field through this period.…”

“…The always-already fraught alliance of (mainly) African-Caribbean and Asian constituencies under the banner of "black" splintered from the mid-1980s onwards around three dimensions: first, the resurgence of culture and ethnicity under the auspices of state-sponsored multiculturalism, in the wake of the youth movements of the late 1970s and the urban unrest of the early and mid-1980s, which splintered political alliances and promoted ethnic and religiously based constituencies and hierarchies (Kundnani 2002); second, the fracturing of shared socio-economic position and disadvantage, which was understood as "Asian" advantage, but which was actually Indian and East African Asian advantage (Modood 1992); and third the emergence of religion as a clear, if unexpected, faultline in anti-racist and leftist alliances, in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair in 1989, concerns around the emergence of a "Muslim underclass" and the protests around the Gulf War (Modood 1992;Runnymede Trust 1997;Alexander 1998;Meer and Nayak 2015). Indeed, when I began my "Art of Being Black" fieldwork in the late 1980s, one of my main informants, Darnell, commented, laughing, "you know, Claire, Blacks and Asians don't get on".…”