Disaggregating Racism - by Kenneth W Jackson (Hardcover)

About the Book

If racism is embedded in everything, can the concept explain anything? Tracing the persistence and changing forms of racism from the colonial era to today, Jackson offers a revitalized argument for why understanding racism remains essential to interpreting our contemporary world.

Book Synopsis

If racism is embedded in everything, as many of the current understandings imply, can the concept explain anything? If the whole system is racist, is antiracism possible without dismantling everything? This book is a comprehensive response to these thorny questions.

Moving beyond the classic debates in sociology, anthropology, and race studies about structure vs. agency, materialism vs. culture, and racism as intentional human act vs. racism as unintentional systemic force, Jackson argues that racism embraces all of these: structural racism influences and is influenced by individual and collective agency; material conditions motivate cultural constructions of race which in turn affect material conditions; and intentional and unintentional human actions form a dynamic social process of racial stratification. Racism, Jackson contends, is a social process which uses racial categorization to solve organizational issues related to the production and distribution of valued societal resources.
Disaggregating Racism advances this argument by analytically separating racism into four constitutive components-race, social structure, power, and legitimation-and demonstrating how their interaction produces both the durability and variability of racism across time. Tracing these dynamics across four historical periods, from the colonial era to the contemporary United States, the book shows not only how racism persists, but how and why it changes-thereby restoring analytical precision to the concept and reopening the question of what effective antiracist intervention can realistically achieve.

Review Quotes

Disaggregating Racism is a fascinating exploration of how conceptions of racism have shifted from explicit biological doctrines of racial hierarchy and individual prejudice to contemporary emphases on institutional, structural, and systemic forms. Yet, Kenneth Jackson argues persuasively that an excessive focus on structure risks reifying social systems as independent actors, minimizing the role of everyday practices and individual behavior, and weakening the analytical usefulness of the concept of racism. He advances a unifying framework that understands racism as an ongoing social process through which power, structure, racial classification, and legitimation operate to organize the production and distribution of valued resources across time and institutions. Provocative and historically grounded, Disaggregating Racism provides a clarifying account of the persistence of inequality.

The United States is currently experiencing racial tensions not seen since the Civil Rights era. On the cusp of becoming a majority non-white nation, Americans are grappling with how this demographic change will impact them. Some are not handling this impending change well and this has resulted in Americans increased attention to racism. Disaggregating Racism by Kenneth Jackson helps us understand this current moment by reviewing our understanding of racism as a concept and practice, and examining its impact today. Jackson deftly shows how institutional racism was embedded into the fabric of the United States from its inception and how it remains salient. This book is a must read for everyone seeking to understand how we arrived at this place in our nation and how we can possibly extricate ourselves from this moment.

About the Author

Kenneth W. Jackson is Professor of Sociology at Texas Southern University, USA.