Contemporary sociologists reject the argument that race is rooted in biology and have devoted decades of sociological research to understanding how race is socially constructed. According to German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1911), “The existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority.” In the following sections, we’ll explore a variety of theories used to understand race. First, we will examine the role of pseudoscience in understanding racial categories, before moving on to theories that challenge some initial constructions of race and difference.

11.3.1 “Science” and Social Theory

Thanks to Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, early European scientists came to accept that all humans descend from a common ancestor and therefore are the same species. However, the misleading racial categories outlined by Blumenbach endured and created the false assumption that race was a biological phenomena. The superiority of the white race was accepted by early scientists and social theorists. This led them to believe that race was rooted in biology and that white people were “naturally” superior, even as they struggled to understand and describe the origins of social inequality.

Many scientists and social theorists doubled down on biological race, by way of social Darwinism. This worldview combines Darwin’s ideas about biological evolution with unsupported theories that race is genetically determined and can therefore be selected for through breeding. During the late 1800s, eugenics was a pseudoscientific political project to “improve humanity” through selective breeding of the “best” specimens of white humans. Eugenics lent a veneer of scientific legitamcy to Hitler’s racist campaign of genocide in Europe. In addition eugenics undergirded the forced sterilization by the U.S. government of women of color, mostly Indigenous and black women, who were seen as unfit mothers. Even with these faulty and problematic foundations, eugenics and biological race were also widely accepted in the United States for much of the twentieth century.

11.3.2 Emancipatory Theories

The anthropologist Franz Boas began to question commonly held ideas about biological race and European racial superiority while working with Inuit people on Baffin Island in 1883. He developed a theory of cultural relativism, which asserts that the differences between groups of people were culturally determined, and could only be understood by considering specific cultural and historic contexts. Throughout his career, Boas challenged racism with rigorous social science. In spite of his broad impact in the field of cultural anthropology, the biological basis for race remained a basic assumption of physical anthropology until the 1960s (Caspari 2003).

In his classic 1903 sociological text, The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. Du Bois—you met him in Chapter 2—theorized about racial identity. Du Bois posed a provocative question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”. Starting with his own childhood experience of being excluded and treated differently by children who were white, he describes a growing awareness of his racialized identity, and of how racial identity connects to meaning, power, and social consequence. His groundbreaking field research described the harsh economic and social consequences of racial segregation, including extreme poverty, exploitation, and alienation.

Du Bois also described the “spiritual strivings” of an enduring human community subject to the harsh impacts of a racist state. He celebrated the agency, beauty, and inherent human dignity of people who are black and of black community. His research demonstrated that the problem is not black folks, the problem is racism, which he described as “the color line.” He urgently invited people who are white to look through the veil of racism that divides us. Aldon Morris, a Du Boisian scholar, argued that The Souls of Black Folks was an early iteration of #BlackLivesMatter (Morris 2017).

11.3.2.1 White Privilege

White privilege, the unearned set of social advantages available to white people, was first identified by Du Bois as a “psychic wage of whiteness.” As white theorists began to respond to critical theories of race, their scholarship became more reflexive and attentive to the meanings and impacts of white racial identity on people who are white. White theorists have explored this idea, by considering white privilege (McIntosh 1988), and white fragility (DiAngelo 2018) and racial identity formation in working-class people who are white (Roediger 2017).

11.3.3 Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory is an intellectual and social framework that examines how racism is embedded in American social life through its systems and institutions. This theoretical framework emerged from the intellectual and social movements of civil-rights scholars and activists who want to examine the intersection of race, society, and law. In this framework, race is a social construct, something that changes depending on the social and political conditions of the society at a particular point in time. Race is not something that is rooted in biology or has some essence behind it. The framework centers the knowledge and experiences of people of color and points to how those knowledges and experiences intersect with other identities, such as gender and sexuality.

11.3.4 Racial Formation Theory

Racial formation theory refers to the fact that society is continually creating and transforming racial categories (Omi and Winant 1994). For example, groups that were once self-defined by their ethnic backgrounds (Mexican American, Japanese Americans) are now racialized as “Hispanics” and “Asian Americans.” The notion of racial formation points to how what we define as race varies and changes as political, economic, and historical contexts. In other words different race classifications arise at particular places and at particular points in time. For more about this topic, revisit “What Is Race?’ earlier in this chapter.

11.3.5 Colorblindness/Theory of Racial Ignorance

Colorblindness, or color-blind racism, is a form of racism that is hidden and embedded in our social institutions. The notion that one “does not see color” is problematic and serves to erase experiences of racial and ethnic minority groups. The United States cultural narrative that typically focuses on individual racism fails to recognize systemic racism. Colorblind racism has arisen since the post-Civil Rights era and supports racism while avoiding any reference to race (Bonilla-Silva 2015).

The theory of racial ignorance explains how racial ignorance (“I don’t see color”) reinforces white supremacy, the belief that white people are better than other races. Racial ignorance is built into the core of racialized social systems and leads to the reproduction of inequalities (Mueller 2020). Colorblindness or claiming racial ignorance is problematic at both individual and structural levels. At the level of the individual, white ignorance refers to a person’s willful ignorance about racial injustice. From a structural perspective, racial ignorance develops from a process that systematically perpetuates racial injustice. The structuralist view allows us to identify patterns of ignorance that contribute to white racial domination. By examining racial ignorance as a structural problem, we can begin to work towards building equity (Martín 2021).

11.3.6 Intersection Theory

Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1990) further developed intersection theory, originally articulated in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which suggests we cannot separate the effects of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes. You first learned about this theory in Chapter 2 and Chapter 9. When we examine race and how it can bring us both advantages and disadvantages, it is important to acknowledge that the way we experience race is shaped, for example, by our gender and class. Multiple layers of disadvantage intersect to create the way we experience race. For example, if we want to understand prejudice, we must understand that the prejudice focused on a white woman because of her gender is very different from the layered prejudice focused on an Asian woman in poverty, who is affected by stereotypes related to being poor, being a woman, and her ethnic status.

11.3.7 Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory explores colonial relations and their aftermath, and how those relations have been constituted. The framework tends to focus on subjugated people and their ways of thinking. Postcolonial theory challenges the theoretical frameworks of mainstream American sociology. Most classical and modern theorists assume that their frameworks are universal and can be applied to all societies (Connell 2007). Even though the theorists, who have specific backgrounds and positions within their own societies, developed their theories in very specific societies at particular points in time. As noted earlier, most of what is considered sociological theory is derived from the ideas of white, upper middle class men living in the United States and Europe. Generally, postcolonial theories critique empires by suggesting that empire, colonialism, and imperialism matter and they should be critiqued. Theorists believe that power struggles tied to colonialism shape societies and influence how individuals view the social world (Go 2016).