Racialized Boundaries

Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist struggle

Anthias and Nira Yuval- Davis

London and New York Routledge

*Analysis the constructs of race and racism

*Ethnicity is understood as a political as well as cultural phenomenon

*Explore the ways in which 'race' and racism serve as a structuring principles for national processes, both defining the boundaries of the nation and the constituents of national identity

*Examine ways in which 'race' and racism inter-relate with other social divisions, such as class and gender and the ways 'Blackness' can play a part in the radicalisation process.

*Consider some of the ideologies that have influenced the 'Race Relations Industry as well as the struggle around it.

*In particular- look at the ideology of 'the community' which underlies in different ways, both the multiculturalist' and 'into-racist' schools of thought and they link it to a critical examination of 'identity politics'.

*Notoriously difficult areas where racism crosses paths with class and gender and a probing look at the assumptions underlying multiculturalism and equal opportunities.

The concept of 'Race' and the Racialization of social divisions.

*Two recent books, that of Gilroy (1987) on the one hand and that edited by Cohen Barris (1988)

*Go some way towards clarifying some of the central theoretical and political issues involved.

*Contextualising race and racism within ethnic processes and in relation to the other prime divisions of class and gender.

*Our basic position is that race categories and their specification require an incorporation into the social ontology go collectivity and belongingness in order to be understood.

*Whiles agreeing with Miles (1982) that the race relations problematic is inadequate and that racism has to be located within economic, political and ideological relations rather than relations between 'races', we do not agree that the category of race has to be ruled out of court 'because it is a category of everyday life and should not be employed analytically (Miles, 1982)

*From a sociological point of view, 'race' denotes a particular way in which communal differences come to be constructed and therefore it cannot be erased from the analytical map as Miles (1984) suggests.

*On the other hand Gilroy (1987) sees it as a valid social construct. His position is that organisation on the basis of 'race' as a socially constructed but also real cultural entity can at times have primacy in modern societies entail race structuralism.

*However, he fails to provide what race depends on. In our view race constructs of collectivity and belongingness (ethnic phenomena) through notions of common origin or destiny, not in terms of cultures of difference but in terms of boundaries.

*Race is one way  by which the boundary is to be constructed between those who cannot belong to a particular construction of collectivity or population.

Cohen states: The largest problem is how to devise an analytical which distinguishes clearly between different types of racism and recognises the historical individuality of those subjected to them (1988)

This entails understanding racisms as modes of exclusion, inferiority, subordination and exploitation that present specific and different characters in different social and historical contexts Extreme examples are those of extermination, segregation and slavery.

*Historically, ethnic, national or racial categories have been formed in various ways, through conquests, colonisation and immigration, and of course the modern variants of these categories under the sway of capitalism and imperialism as well as their most prominent political form, that of that liberal democratic state.

* Groups that have been called or have called themselves national at one point, in one territory, have become ethnic or racial.

*Ethnic groups involve the positioning of boundaries in relation to who can and cannot belong, according to a culture or symbolic practise.