Rethinking Race “Relations”: Understanding the State’s Role in (Re)Constituting Transnational Racial Order

• In Event: 30282 - Transnational Solidarities for Racial Justice

Abstract

In 2001, the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) formally called for a new approach to how states address and race and racism. The WCAR was followed by a program of action which issued recommendations for states to formally include their Afrodescendant populations in the social, political, economic, and cultural fabric of their nations. This article responds to growing sociological literature seeking to examine race transnationally by attending to Peruvian Afrodescendant inclusion as situated within a broader Latin American trend towards racial equality state interventions. It asks: How did the Peruvian state respond to the WCAR call to formally include its Afrodescendant population? Further, how were these inclusion measures influenced by other states’ formalized racial equality efforts? Drawing on archival research on Peru’s National Institute for the Development of Andeans, Amazonians, and Afroperuvians, I trace the Peruvian state’s formal inclusion of Afrodescendants from recognition to strategic plans to establish a legal rights framework. Addressing how other states’ legal and policy-based inclusion measures shaped Peru’s Afrodescendant inclusion efforts, this case elucidates the value of expanding understandings of systems of racial order beyond the limits of the nation-state. The article invites sociologists of race and the state to reformulate notions of the racial state to better capture how systems of racial order shift transnationally in the twenty-first century.

Author

• Kristina E. Lee, Northwestern University