Critiquing the “Racial Orders” Framework from an Ecological Perspective

• In Event: Structure in Motion

Abstract

Many have criticized the structural racism framework -- the dominant framework in the study of race -- for presenting an overly static picture of race relations and politics.  One of the most successful alternatives suggested to the structural racism framework is Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith’s “racial orders” framework. Unlike the structural racism framework, the racial orders framework recognizes a “transformative egalitarian order” at work in US racial politics and relations; the source of dynamism that the structural racism framework lacks is in the conflict and compromise between the transformative egalitarian order -- comprised of a coalition of state institutions, non-state institutions and political actors who share the broad goal of transforming the US in racial egalitarian ways -- the white supremacist order, and the anti-transformative order. The racial orders framework is to be lauded for its placement of race at the center American political development and its recognition (at least in theory) of the entwinement of systems of race, gender and sexuality, among others. But I argue that it both underplays the sources of dynamism in racial relations and politics and provides an inadequate picture of how significant changes in racial politics and relations have occurred.  I assess the racial orders framework from an ecological perspective inspired by intersectional scholarship that portrays human systems of oppression as entwined, interactive and dynamic, new materialist scholarship that aims to repair the radical conceptual break between human and non-human, and work on complexity that understands systems as non-linear and presents change as configurational. From this perspective, the racial orders’ prioritization of the political in explanations of political change, the complete lack of attention to non-human systems, and its effort to offer a “parsimonious” account of political and racial change that can be boiled down to a few “key independent variables” are all problematic. I argue for the virtues of an ecological framework that recognizes path dependency (like the racial orders framework) while at the same time allowing for the unpredictability of non-linear change, complex causality, and the actant-cy of non-human systems. Such a framework does a better job of explaining the racial structure in motion and at rest than the racial orders framework.

Author

• Greta Fowler Snyder, Williams College