Treating race as a political construct requires situating racialized mobilization in social change

Evidence

What is surprising at first sight, however, is that there have been few attempts to produce detailed accounts of the processes that may help to explain these changes, especially in Europe (Favell, 1998). In Britain, Solomos and Back’s study of race and political mobilization in Birmingham during the early 1990s highlighted the need for detailed case studies of the changing terms of the relation between race, politics, and social change (Solomos and Back, 1995). One of the starting points of this research was the hypothesis that race is first and foremost a political construct. From this starting point Solomos and Back argue that the racialization of political mobilization has to be contextualized within processes of social change and identity formation, within specific political cultures and discourses and within wider processes of social and economic change. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how categories are socially and institutionally constructed, echoing work on racial formation theory (Omi and Winant).