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🪵 The Threshold

Race is a product of racism, not its cause.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, definitional_content, trade, corroborated, seed, category/definitional-content
aliases@solomos_companion_2002, loc. 107, @kumar_islamophobia_2012, loc. 92

4 min read

Race is a product of racism, not its cause.

Evidence

So categories such as race and ethnicity are best conceived as political resources. They are used by both dominant and subordinate groups for the purposes of legitimizing and furthering their own social identities and interests, claims and powers. In this context it is important to remember that identities based on race and ethnicity are not only imposed, even though they often are, but they also can be formulated and fashioned through resistance. Here racially constituted minorities play a key and active role. It is more accurate as a consequence to speak of a racially fashioned or created (or more commonly, if awkwardly, of a “racialized”) group than of a racial group since race is a product of racism and not vice versa. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 107

Fourth, “race” is not simply a category of classification or differentiation but rather a construct that emerges from practices of racism. Thus, while Orientalism has a long history in the United States and in European nations, it is a protean ideology that exhibits veneration as well as vilification. Significantly, Orientalism is not always tied to systems of oppression like colonialism or imperialism. What my analysis shows is that there is no straight line from the Spanish Inquisition to the torture regime of Abu Ghraib. Even while various projects of racialization draw on the past and attempt to fix “race” as existing across time, there are in fact no unbroken lines of continuity. Anti-racists should avoid falling into the trap of accepting the fictive concept of “race” and its transhistorical and essentializing modes of articulation. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 92

This article began with a question regarding whether a religion can become a race over time and through a process of resignification. In the specific context of Europe and the United States, it is not only possible, but Islam has, in fact, come to operate as a race. If we start with the assumption, as discussed in Part I, that race is not real, is not a fact, that there is no biological basis for it as most critical race scholars have come to understand, then race is a fiction and a specter that only appears to exist, but is a product of racism. The ideology of racism uses racecraft— a set of tools and practices—to justify the treatment of a group of people as different and subordinated based on some shared difference. The difference is given meaning by racism. It does not exist prior to racism. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 516

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines race as a product of racism, offering the conceptual core of racialization.
  • XREF: Connects to critical race theory and the long scholarly debate over whether race precedes racism or vice versa. — connects to: Race is a social reduction to sheer force, not a natural trait — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124; Race exists only as a specter produced by racism, not as reality; Racism is real but race is only an idea manufactured by racist practice. (+8 more)
  • SEED: Angle: ‘Race Is Made by Racism’ — tracing how racecraft converts religion into a racial category in law.
  • corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 107; Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 92; Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 516

Broader Connections

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