Race relations is a false category masking underlying white racism

Evidence

According to Robert Miles, schemes like those of Cox and Rex oversimplified the relation between social structures and the ways in which people thought of the social relations in which they were involved. Racism was an ideology which could be relatively autonomous, rather than simply the product of a structured situation. Building on the view that medical science could not have progressed had doctors accepted the patient’s conception of his or her complaint as an identification of the disorder from which he or she was suffering, Miles went on to deploy Marx’s distinction between phenomenal form and essential relations. Phenomenal form could be equated with the patient’s conception of what was wrong. The essential relations could be equated with the real causes of the disorder (Miles, 1982:31-42). Calling attention to the conclusions of geneticists, Miles insisted that sociology must start from a recognition that the popular consciousness of race was false because “there is no scientific basis for categorising Homo sapiens into discrete races.” To use race relations as a general name for a field of study was a false problematic; it misrepresented the reality, which was that of white racism evoked as a result of the appearance of a new source of labor. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 672

Categorization

• DEFINE: Miles’s phenomenal form / essential relations distinction gives a Marxian tool to critique ‘race relations’ as a field-name, refining how racism gets defined in the vault’s CRT material.
• XREF: This anti-‘race relations’ framing connects to Omi and Winant’s own critique of the ‘race relations’ paradigm they displace with racial formation theory. — connects to: Treating race as a fixed biological category replicates the racism it opposes; Racism is real while race itself is a myth — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 39; Cordial racism works by erasing race as a category and denying harm — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1798 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Does the vault’s curation treat ‘race relations’ as a distinct paradigm superseded by racial formation, and does Miles get credited there?

Broader Connections

• Antiracialism is whiteness by another name, done through decategorization #corroborates (0.80)
• Racism is real while race itself is a myth #qualifies (0.75) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 39
• Cordial racism works by erasing race as a category and denying harm #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1798
• The end of formal racial subordination eliminated the structural basis for blatant biological racism #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3420
• Park defined race relations as depending on racial consciousness rather than racial difference #qualifies (0.72)
• Treating race as a fixed biological category replicates the racism it opposes #qualifies (0.70)
• Racism is usually wrongly folded into a general category of prejudice #qualifies (0.70) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 183
• Interracial interactions are structured by racial categories, not individual identity #complicates (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1823