Prevailing social science wrongly treated race as static and merely correlational

Evidence

This led them to conceptualize race and racism as aberrant and anomalous in USS. society, rather than as constitutive elements of the nation-state, foundational ideas about the nature of the American people, and lineaments of the limited democracy that operated in every USS. institution, public and private. In prevailing social science research, race was conceptualized and operationalized ina fixed and static manner that failed to recognize the changing meaning of race over historical time and in varied social settings. Race was understood much too simply: as an independent variable that was correlated with other variables to assess the scope and degree of economic inequality, health disparities, residential segregation, or incarceration rates. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 11

Categorization

• XREF: The critique of race-as-independent-variable directly corrects methodology the vault’s other race inequality claims may rest on. — connects to: Social-science methods smuggled Orientalist racism past academic scrutiny — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 261