Exploring the mechanisms of racialization beyond the black–white binary

ABSTRACT

Racialization plays a central role in the creation and reproduction of racial meanings, and its inclusion enriches the study of race and ethnicity. While the popularity of the term continues to skyrocket, defining precisely what is meant by racialization can be a daunting task, let alone identifying how, when, where, why, and under what conditions it operates. However, it is essential to recognize the processes of racialization in order to develop a more complete understanding of racial practices, particularly within these increasingly turbulent racial times.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialization
• mechanisms
• beyond black and white
• critical race theory
• racism
• racial meaning

Theories of race and racism seek to understand how race operates in the society and how racial inequality is created and maintained. “Racialization” as a concept has been used as a part of critical race theory to understand the process through which racial meaning is attached to something that is to perceived to be “unracial” or devoid of racial meaning. Racialization plays a central role in the creation and reproduction of racial meanings, and its inclusion enriches the study of race and ethnicity. While the popularity of the term continues to skyrocket, defining precisely what is meant by racialization can be a daunting task, let alone identifying how, when, where, why, and under what conditions it operates. However, it is essential to recognize the processes of racialization in order to develop a more complete understanding of racial practices, particularly within these increasingly turbulent racial times.

This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies aims to fill this gap by focusing on the mechanisms that undergird the operation of racialization. Thus, this issue works to empirically define the specific mechanisms by which racialization outside of black–white paradigm operates, in order to add knowledge to exactly how and why racialization happens. Moreover, we highlight the particular advantages and benefits of focusing outside of the black–white racial boundary in the social scientific study of racism, racial identity, racial meaning, and racial representation. Whereas much of the contemporary literature is focused on racial categories within the U.S. context, this issue emphasizes racialization beyond black and white racial categories from a broad perspective, including both global and interdisciplinary perspectives. It is our hope to lay out a roadmap for the future study of racialization and the study of race beyond the racial categories of black and white.

The first part of this introductory paper focuses on the development of racialization as a theoretical framework. It then describes opportunities for further theorization within the racialization framework before introducing the specific articles in this special issue.

Racialization as a theoretical framework

The use of “racialization” has evolved in the sociological study of race and ethnicity. Racial formation as a theory started in the 1970s by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their perennial book Racial Formation in the United States. In their formulation of racialization, Omi and Winant created a theory that moved away from explaining race as a product of other social phenomena or a dimension of power relations (Saperstein, Penner, and Light 2013). The focus then became on how race is defined, what meanings are attached to it, and how it is used to create and reproduce racism. As part of the overarching framework, racialization plays a central role in the creation and reproduction of racial meanings. Omi and Winant define racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (1986, 111). These racializations become the basis for this differentiation, and understanding of racialization emphasizes how the phenomic and the corporeal acquire meaning through social processes. Racialization may occur both on the micro and macro level. Many race scholars have used Omi and Winant's understanding of racialization as a way to understand racial meanings. However, the definition is not without controversy. Some argue that it can be limiting when studying groups that are experiencing newer forms of racism that may be different from past racist practices, like Islamophobia (Garner and Selod 2015).

Other scholars argued that racialization should be utilized instead of “race” because race is a scientific invalid term (Banton 1997). The use of the concept of racialization as a replacement for race has been framed as a way not to reify the idea of race as a biological or natural category, and to highlight the ways that racialization is corporeal and goes hand-in-hand with the creation of racial categories. Moreover, other scholars emphasize that racialization does not only occur in a top-down fashion, but groups can also racialize themselves (Miles and Brown 2003). In all of these refinements, racialization is understood as a racial logic that delineates group boundaries. As Murji and Solomos define it “the processes by which racial meanings are attached to particular issues – often treated as social problems – and with the manner in which race appears to be the, or often the, key factor in the way they are defined and understood” (2005, 3). The main focus of the study of racialization is to understand how meanings are attached to a series of experiences. Racialization cannot be understood as static; it involves change and ongoing practices that attach racial meanings to people. It is thus born out of social dominance and power.

Racialization and areas for refinement

While the aforementioned contributions have been of great importance to developing the field of race and ethnicity, there are still opportunities for refinement of the racialization framework. In particular, the concept of racialization is applied to every type of racial process, often without specificity. That is, while scholars discuss the effects of racialization on varied people and circumstances, a precise understanding of the mechanisms by which it functions is still lacking from the conversation. Some previous work in the field of racialization traces the processes of racialization in relation to particular racial groups. These works have shown why racialization occurs for these specific groups. However, scholarship has only just begun to put together larger patterns that indicate when racialization occurs, under what circumstances, and where it is more likely implemented.

An additional problem with the scholarly corpus of racialization is the focus on the black–white racial binary. The majority of the sociological research on race has focused solely on black and white racial identities and experiences, especially in the context of race relations in the United States. This “black/white binary paradigm”, in Perea’s (1997) words, presents an obscured view of the racial landscape of today's society. The importance and uniqueness of the experiences of black people, as well as the continued forms of anti-black discrimination, still holds true. Yet, there is a profound need to explore the experiences of new (and old) racial and ethnic groups that transgress the colour binary, even as they are informed by its historical and social structural dominance. While scholars increasingly bring data and analysis to the study of race and ethnicity that is irreducible to the black–white binary, special attention should be paid to the theories and concepts used by these scholars. Accordingly, the racialization thesis has a special appeal for scholars that move beyond and through the black–white binary. That is, the racialization approach affords the theoretical tools to understand both macro- and micro-level processes of group formation and exactly how these processes function – that is, their mechanisms. Many published works on racialization either focus on the racial meanings attached to actions, places, or organizations, or the attachment of these meanings to a group of people. Either approach serves as a robust theoretical tool for understanding both structural racial inequality and everyday interactional discrimination.

Racialization has a particular usefulness to study race in international and transnational contexts. The use of the concept and the focus on the mechanisms of racialization help scholars understand how, for example, national groups become understood as racial groups through immigration or how racial meanings shift over time and space. Racialization affords social scientists the theoretical manoeuvres to understand race and power beyond a particular social context and social time.

With this special issue, we aim to rectify these two limitations to the current landscape of racialization scholarship together as we highlight the mechanisms of racialization in relation to groups beyond and between the black–white binary. We do not intend to formulate a strict, linear, causal model of racialization. Rather, what we intend to do with this special issue is provide a roadmap to the mechanisms of racialization through the use of case studies outside of the binary. We define mechanisms as the myriad of possibilities of properties and actions that are organized in a way in which they regularly bring forth a particular outcome. By studying these mechanisms, we delineate the possible pathways to a phenomenon. These mechanisms of racialization create, solidify, legitimate, or reproduce this phenomenon through ideologies, actions, interactions, structures, and social practices. More importantly, as the racialization thesis continues to grow in its implementation, this special issue serves as a guiding point for future research.

Overview of articles

The first three articles investigate the relationship between racialization and the state. In his article, Steve Garner explores the role of a group that is distinguished from the white mainstream by culture alone. To this end, he examines the relationship between Gypsy-Travellers and the state. He argues that the state has utilized legislative processes which criminalize nomadic cultures to redefine group membership for Gypsy-Travellers, which has in turn limited the group's ability to engage in cultural practices of mobility.

Jennifer A. Jones and Hana Brown examine the production of Latino racialization through anti-immigrant laws. For this purpose, they focus on debates surrounding one of the most controversial anti-immigrant laws in recent history, Alabama's HB56. They argue that the state's racialization of Latino immigrants was not achieved solely through this one legislative action, but instead through actions at multiple levels of governance initiated over time. In doing so, the authors show how federalism is a multilevel process that is intertwined with the race-making powers of the state.

Saher Selod shows how state surveillance of Muslims is both racialized and gendered. To do so, she relays Muslim American's experiences “flying while Muslim” in a post-9/11 world bolstered by increased national security efforts, such as the no-fly list and the PATRIOT Act. She argues that state surveillance does not uniformly impact all Muslims equally, but instead is guided by gendered and racialized ideologies, wherein Muslim women are often more visible as racial subjects, but Muslim men are understood of as a greater threat to the racial order. Moreover, Selod highlights how these national policies have shifted the place of Muslims in the racial hierarchy.

The next two articles focus specifically on the interplay between racialization and identities. Michelle R. Jacobs investigates the internalization of racialized notions of Indian authenticity among urban American Indians. Jacobs illustrates the paradoxical nature of racialization's impact on individual identities, showing how American Indians both resist and reify dominant images and notions of “Indianness”, such as blood quantum, tribal enrolment, and phenotype. In doing so, she highlights how internalization of controlling images of racial identities acts as a persistent mechanism of racialization.

Atiya Husain explores the interaction between racialization and religion through her study of Muslims’ experiences, including those who identify as South Asian, white, and black. Although many now understand how Muslims have been racialized post-9/11, Husain argues that not enough attention has been paid to how this group is positioned relative to the black–white binary in the United States. Moreover, the lion's share of the black–white binary literature, she argues, has not theorized religion as a mechanism of racialization, focusing instead on phenotype. In response, Husain explores how gender and sexuality provide mechanisms that position Muslims, regardless of racial phenotype, as distinct from the black–white binary that structures the U.S. racial hierarchy.

The final three papers investigate the role of racialization in the media. Randy D. Abreu and Jason A. Smith investigate how racialization functions at the media policy and ownership levels. To this end, they explore the establishment of Latino-oriented television channels as part of the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal. These types of media channels act to provide superficial or weak diversity to otherwise homogenized media networks and often work to segregate groups and prevent blending into mainstream media sources. The authors argue that advocacy groups in the policy process demonstrate a collective notion of who and what constitute topics relevant to Latino interests.

Stephen Del Visco turns our attention towards the relationship between racialization and political projects. Although much attention has been paid to conservatism's relationship with people of colour in the United States, less consideration has been given to conservative racialized discourse about people of colour living abroad. Investigating the conservative periodical National Review, he argues that anti-communist discourse during the 1960s and 1970s functioned as a mechanism of racialization for East Asians. Specifically, Del Visco shows how conservative media painted East Asia as economically, politically, and socially stunted in order to create a hegemonic whiteness that structures an ideal politics.

Sheena Gardner and Matthew W. Hughey examine depictions of multiraciality in a variety of magazines in order to understand how multiracial identities are understood within the racial order. The authors identify the process of “multiracialization” to explain how the media racializes multiracial individuals in ways that highlight self-esteem, racial pride, and individual choices and discount dominant ideologies and racial discrimination. Interestingly, the authors find that depictions of multiracials rely almost entirely on black intermixture, showcasing a shifting racial order away from a black–white divide and instead towards a “black–non-black colour line”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.