A black-white paradigm in antiracism theory obscures other racisms and inequality forms

Evidence

However, in developing this broadly critical response, multiculturalists have also more recently come to face another, perhaps more intractable problem - a problem brought on to some extent by this very process of accommodation with antiracist theory. For example, the privileging of racism over other forms of discrimination in early conceptions of antiracism resulted in an increasing preoccupation with “color racism” and the black-white dichotomy. This, in turn, led to a “grand theory” approach which, in attributing racism as the primary modality in intercultural relations, came to be seen as both reductive and essentialist (see Donald and Rattansi 1992; MacDonald et al., 1989; Modood, 1992, 1998a, 1998b). Such an approach subsumes other factors such as class, religion, and gender, and fails to address adequately postmodernist accounts of identity as multiple, contingent, and subject to rapid change. These emphases in antiracist theory also considerably understate both the multiplicity of racisms and their complex interconnections with other forms of inequality (Gilroy, 1992; Modood, 1998a, 1998b; Rattansi, 1992, 1999). As McLaren and Torres observe of this: “[the] conflation of racialized relations into solely a black-white paradigm has prevented scholars from engaging more fully the specificities of particular groups and from exploring more deeply comparative ethnic histories of racism and how these are linked to changing class relations in late capitalism” (1999:45-6). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Assimilationist anti-racism both erased black-white difference and homogenized black peoples — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1189; Intersectionality struggles with fluid racial identity despite its anti-essentialist aims — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 76; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”