Race and racism must be distinguished analytically and politically

Evidence

The lack of specificity here, the emergent ambiguities, blurs the line and so presupposes an answer to a question not even posed: namely, is racial characterization inevitably racist? All too often the use, if not the very conceptualization, of “racialization” determines an answer in the absence of analysis. I want to insist, by contrast, on distinguishing between race and racisms, conceptually as much as politically – as objects and categories of analysis, as analytics or frames of analysis for different contexts, different if related geopolitical regions, as I put it below. To insist on the distinction even as their deep, complex, often tortured connections need disentangling acknowledgment. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 352

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the race/racisms distinction as a core analytical move for the whole book.