Race scholarship has displaced class as the center of social inequality debates

Evidence

One of the most notable features of recent developments in the field of racial and ethnic studies has been the search for an adequate theoretical analysis of what we mean by notions such as race, racism, and ethnicity. In a growing number of advanced industrial societies, questions about race and ethnicity have moved to the center of scholarly debate, to a considerable degree displacing preoccupation with class and other forms of social inequality. This is evident in the massive increase in scholarly texts regarding race and ethnicity, and the growing number of specialized journals in a variety of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities focusing on theoretical and empirical research on race. This is in marked contrast to the earlier study of race and ethnic relations as largely a sociological or anthropological concern. The crumbling of these disciplinary boundaries in research around race has meant that it is no longer possible or desirable to approach the study of race and/or ethnicity from a single disciplinary perspective. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 96

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the broader shifts in critical theory away from economistic analysis toward cultural/identity frames; parallels the reader’s interests in discourse analysis and institutional power.
• SEED: Angle: the disciplinary fall of race studies from sociology/anthropology into an interdisciplinary hub mirrors similar turf shifts in other fields — worth an essay on how boundary-crumbling changes what counts as evidence.

Related

• Race studies spread across disciplines, displacing class-centered analysis and its sociological monopoly. (similarity 0.93)
• Race and ethnicity research split across disciplines because their referents resist single-method capture (similarity 0.90)
• Critical race and ethnicity studies remained marginal until late in the twentieth century (similarity 0.89)
• Race studies expanded rapidly across many disciplines in recent decades (similarity 0.89)
• Studying race now requires crossing disciplinary boundaries. (similarity 0.88)
• Race and ethnicity entered the core of social science only after the 1980s. (similarity 0.86)
• Mainstream social science historically treated race as a static independent variable. (similarity 0.85)
• Race studies now extend into cyberspace, fashion, and sports scholarship (similarity 0.84)
• Academic study of race long ignored whiteness as an unexamined norm. (similarity 0.84)
• Race-politics scholarship skews to local cases and policy studies, leaving theory underexplored (similarity 0.84)
• Prevailing social science wrongly treated race as static and merely correlational (similarity 0.84)
• Race-and-politics scholarship remains largely descriptive and undertheorized (similarity 0.84)
• No clear analytic framework yet connects race, politics, and social change (similarity 0.84)
• The boundaries separating race from ethnicity as fields of study remain unclear. (similarity 0.84)
• Racial divisions remain socially powerful even when their conceptual foundations are false (similarity 0.84)