Exporting Race: Norms, Categories & “The All-American Skin Game”

The American definitions of “race” and “racism,” which often conflate academic and lay conceptions, have been exported with American social science into debates of race in the Middle East and Africa. These definitions assume that the American distinction between race, as primarily about skin color, and ethnicity, as denoting cultural difference, is universally accepted. Over the past fifty years, a semantic shift in American academia and society has redefined race from a biological term to a social construct, further confounding its use as the concept travels outside the U.S. context, imposing American understandings of difference. This confusion has both scholarly implications and political consequences.