The Racial Order

Scholars of race and racism are hungry for the nourishment that The Racial Order promises. After asserting that “there never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race” (p. 1) and lamenting the lack of theoretical development in sociological race studies that has handicapped race and racism scholars’ understanding of racial change (pp. 2–5), Emirbayer and Desmond lay out a theoretical framework guided by key pragmatist insights embodied in the works of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that aims to “provide an effective language with which to think and talk about—and intelligently to address—the problems of race in today’s society” (p. 25). The framework is organized into three important parts: Reflexivity, Relationality, and Reconstruction. The first part, an indictment of the relative nonreflexivity of race scholars regarding their intellectual projects, is largely a rehash of prior published work (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012). The three tiers of unconsciousness—social, disciplinary, and scholastic— work to cloud the objectivity of social theorists in ways that paralyze race theories into circularity. This part, consisting of one chapter, defines the racial object of race in symbolic terms of reification and engages productively in the ongoing debate regarding the collapsibility of race, ethnicity, and nationality (Bonilla-Silva 1999; Brubaker 2004, 2015; Loveman 1999; Omi and Winant 2014; Wimmer 2008, 2015) by insisting that race deserves its own intellectual constructionism despite the fact that ethnic formations predate racial formations. The bulk of the manuscript is devoted to part II, which focuses on the structures (chapter 3), dynamics (chapter 4), institutions (chapter 5), and social psychology (chapter 6) of the racial order. Between chapters 3 and 4, Emirbayer and Desmond break down the false divides among structure and agency, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin (p. 180). (Racial) structures become relational processes, not things—dynamic, not static—a perspective that integrates Bourdieu’s “field” into race theory. Meanwhile, agency (or racial dynamics) becomes iterative propensities to accept the illusions created by racial projects that are necessary to navigate the racial field. Between chapters 5 and 6, the authors disappear the micro/macro divide, arguing instead for an interaction-grounded understanding of institutions (“bounded sets of practices” [p. 204]) and interstices (publics and social movements) as sites where the racial field is reproduced agnostically through routinization. Interactions animate the social psychological forces (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices) that create a collective racial habitus, which is embodied in the individual via the body, the cognitive realm, the morality of one’s ethics, and aesthetic appreciations. Whiteness, exploitation, appropriation, universalism, and other forms of symbolic violence to dominated peoples are derivatives of these forces. The final portion of the manuscript attends to envisioning a racial future that draws on the assumptions of the prior chapters. The authors suggest that the people have three options—color-blindness, cosmopolitanism, or racial democracy—pointing to points of intervention via individuals, interactions, and institutions. Idealistic to the end, the manuscript closes with an optimistic view of race scholarship headed, of course, by its “comprehensive” theory of the racial order. The efforts of Emirbayer and Desmond are commendable; however, the project they set forth for themselves is built upon dubious claims. Rather than being the first comprehensive and systematic theory of race, The Racial Order, I would argue, provides an alluring, synthetic language of U.S. race relations that marginalizes and colonizes 707201 SREXXX10.1177/2332649217707201Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review research-article2017