Resolving the trouble with "race"

The article sketches a neo-Bourdieusian framework for rethinking racial domination. It proposes that we need to (1) historicize the notion of "race" to disclose the ongoing complicity between common sense and science; (2) to expand the geographic scope of the discussion (by bringing together West and East, and metropole and colony) and to dislodge the United States from its Archimedean position; (3) to forsake the logic of the trial; (4) to break with racial common sense yet repatriate in our model ordinary racial constructs; and (5) to disaggregate ethnoracial phenomena into "elementary forms" of racial domination, namely, categorization, discrimination, segregation, seclusion (including ghettos, camps, and reservations), and violence. This analytical approach makes it possible to grasp "race" as a denegated modality of ethnicity entailing the denial of honor and the naturalization, eternalization, and homogenization of inequality. It sets for the sociology of racial domination the central task of uncovering how a system of ethnoracial classification is created, inculcated, and mapped onto a system of ethnoracial stratification, that is, of grasping "race" as a particular modality of "group-making."