Farewell to “race and racism”: On the analytic primacy of ethnicity

In the course of my response to the five critics of “Race as Denegated Ethnicity,” I explicate the core principles and concepts of my book Racial Domination (2025) by contrast with the reigning paradigm of “race and racism.” I assert the need to sharply differentiate analytic from folk concepts; to move from population to problematic; and to “provincialize” the US, whose racial common sense fosters essentialism at the heart of constructivism. I propose to grasp “race” as a disguised subtype of ethnicity (on both logical and historical grounds) and race-making as a particular case of a general theory of group-making as the “realization” of categories inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism. This theory seeks to model the dialectic of classification and stratification by means of Weberian ideal types. It breaks racial phenomena down into a concatenation of elementary forms: categorization, discrimination, segregation, seclusion and violence. Replacing “race and racism” with ethnoracial domination (with its three faces of exploitation, subordination and exclusion) enables social scientists to stop replicating the “race effect”; reveals that “racial capitalism” and “structural racism” are rhetorical and not analytical notions; and provides powerful tools for both understanding and undermining racial oppression.