Race --The Condition of Neo-liberalism

• In Event: 338 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Shifting Focus, Rotating Lenses: Racism in the Discipline of Sociology

Abstract

The complex and coded operations of contemporary racism in the United States have led into a veritable theoretical impasse in the scholarship. This article argues that this is because of the narrow framing of ‘race’, and a lack of critical engagement with liberalism. The article instead shows that ‘race’ simply cannot be understood as a discrete category outside its social, economic, moral, and political embeddedness in liberalism. Taking a global and historical perspective, in conversation with Michel Foucault, the article elaborates the exigencies for the production of ‘race’ in liberal discourse and social practice on both sides of the colonial divide. The changing character and operations of race, I then argue, reflect the transformation of liberalism into the hyperbolic discourse of Chicago School neo-liberalism. If racial difference had to be marked in deep collective character earlier, in the neo-liberal social order, as capital normatively defines the mode of being itself, disposition becomes the most efficacious marker of race. The approach proposed here not only takes us beyond the rather artifactual distinction between ‘race’ and ‘class’, in which contemporary theories of race seem trapped, but also throws light on some of the hotly debated problems of contemporary ethnographic narratives of race and poverty in the U.S.

Author

• Vikash Singh, Montclair State University