Racial Domination

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth.

Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability—notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.

Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.

Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Bachelard, Weber, Bourdieu

Problemstellung: When the politics and analytics of race collide

Sociological reset: epistemology, methodology, theory
Specifying domination
Caveats and preview

1.-Reframing Racial Domination

1.-Historicize
2.-Spatialize
3.-Dislodge the United States
4.-Forsake the logic of the trial
5.-Race as denegated ethnicity
Diagonal of racialization
Excursus: the radical abdication of Afropessimism
Dialectic of salience and consequentiality
Race-making through classification struggles

2.-Pentad of Ethnoracial Rule

Disassembling racial domination
1.-Categorization
2.-Discrimination
3.-Segregation 
4.-Seclusion
5.-Violence
Architecture and articulations
Lure of “racial capitalism”
Classification, stratification, and the state
The mystification of “structural racism”
“Structural racism” redux: a penal illustration
Race-making as group-making
Group hysteresis, denigration and disgrace
3.-Jim Crow as Caste Terrorism

From song to doxic notion to analytic concept
Rise and reign of the one-drop rule
Economic infrastructure: sharecropping and debt peonage
Social core: asymmetric bifurcation and the mandate of deference
Locking the system: political and judicial exclusion
Specter of “white death”
Caste terrorism: the virtues of conceptual clarity

4.-Fatal Attraction: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh

Reframing black hyperincarceration
Four “peculiar institutions”
How the ghetto became more like a prison
How the prison became more like a ghetto
How the prison is remaking race and reshaping citizenship
History, penality and place

Coda: From racial domination to racial justice
Varieties of racial domination
Three paths to racial justice
Historicity of racial domination

About the Author :
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

Review :
“Written in Wacquant’s characteristically pugnacious and brilliant style, Racial Domination dissects the logic of race-making and the reproduction of racial inequality with precision and depth. A must-read for everyone who longs for a theoretical analysis of race that goes beyond the routine and ritual evocation of its structuring power and offers a nuanced understanding of the underlying mechanisms.”
Andreas Wimmer, author of Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks

“In this lively book, Wacquant offers a perfect blend of historical analysis, reflexivity, and sociological restructuring to move beyond some of the pitfalls and myopia encountered in the study of race. Racial Domination will surely be discussed by social scientists for years to come.”
Ali Meghji, author of The Racialized Social System