Understanding racism requires abandoning commonsense language for a new conceptual framework.

Evidence

What this means is that any understanding of racism must be based on a recognition of the racialized nature of society, and the processes that maintain both stability and social change. This requires explicit consideration of the aspects of racialization related to state policies and actions; the relationship between racialization and class and gender inequality; and, especially today, its relationship with international politics and trade, that is, patterns of globalization. Ideologies, images, and attitudes, alongside actions, both individual and institutional, that might be called racist, spread their effects throughout all areas of society. Thinking about racism in this way requires us to develop a new language and a new conceptual framework. No simple notion of racism will work. We must first discard much of the commonsense language that we use (Miles, 1982; Small, 1994a). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1851

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: why analytic vocabularies for racism fail when they borrow commonsense terms like ‘race relations’ — a linguistics-of-social-science piece.
• XREF: connects to: Faculty must unlearn racism before they can learn decolonization — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 84