Rex defined race relations situations by matching structure plus deterministic belief

Evidence

One of the main sociological problems in defining such a field has been that of consciousness. If people were conscious of racial differences in the United States but not in Brazil, just what was it they were conscious of? Should evidence about Brazil be used only as a negative example, as Park implied? Cox outlined a more general approach. He viewed race as a political idea which was generated by particular sorts of social situation and identified seven as being of special relevance. This scheme was elaborated by John Rex (1970:9) who emphasized the dependence of belief systems on underlying structures. Rex maintained that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of a race relations situation were the presence of exploitation and oppression, role ascription, and a deterministic theory of social groups. He identified nine historical situations in which relations were likely to be conceived in terms of race, those: (1) at frontiers where peoples at different technological levels were in competition; (2) in which one group supplied unfree labor, or (3) supplied it under unusually harsh and exploitative terms; (4) of inequality in estate or caste systems; (5) of inequality along a continuum; (6) of cultural pluralism; (7) of urban stratification with migrants forming an underclass; (8) in which members of an outsider group perform pariah roles, or (9) in which they become scapegoats (Rex, 1973:203-4). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 671

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharp definitional grounding: Rex’s structuralist definition of ‘race relations situation’ with three necessary conditions, useful for qualifying vault-wide claims about racial formation.
• XREF: Cross-links to vault definitions of racialization (Omi & Winant) and structuralist accounts of race in earlier material; also echoes Cox’s political-idea framing. — connects to: Rex pioneered explaining racial conflict through migration status and market-position inequalities — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2160
• QUESTION: The list of nine situations claims race arises in stratified contexts including caste, estate, and underclass — worth reconciling with ethnicity-vs-race definitions used elsewhere in the vault.

Broader Connections

• Rex pioneered explaining racial conflict through migration status and market-position inequalities #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2160