Specifying Race: A Set Theoretic Analytical Framework for a Post-Colonial Sociology of Race

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Anticolonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Perspectives

Abstract

Dominant sociological traditions presently constrain U.S. sociological theory such that it cannot sufficiently explain race. Other disciplines with more robust theoretical frameworks, particularly postcolonial studies, threaten to “surpass” the sociology of race (Magubane 2016). Two traditions that underpin a characterizing debate in the sociology of race have roots in the historical materialism of Marx and the symbolic interactionism of Weber. Famously coming to a head in 1999 in a debate between Eduardo Bonilla Sylva and Mara Loveman (1999; 1999), the shadowy tension between sociologists who prioritize the way race impacts people’s material lives and those who prioritize how race changes as a mind-dependent, symbolic category continues to shape methodological tendencies and race definitions. This paper demonstrates how prioritizing either the material or the discursive dimension of race at the expense of the other deeply limits the capacity for race scholarship by essentializing race. The way out of this predicament is not better theorizing in a Marxian tradition or better theorizing in a Weberian tradition, instead, this paper follows the rising call for Postcolonial, Du Boisian sociologies of race and empire (Bhambra 2023; Coenders 2024; Go 2018, 2020; Hammer 2017; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Magubane 2016; Meghji 2021, 2024; Quisumbing King 2019) and proposes a postcolonial sociological race framework that roots out the hidden essentialism in dominant U.S. race sociology by insisting that scholars consider the substance of racial categories the social positions established by early Modern Western European colonial expansion.

Author

• Luna Vincent, Northwestern University