Specifying Race: The Colonial Constitution of Race in a Set-Theoretic Framework

Sociologists of race tend to prioritize either how race structures people’s lives or the change and variation of racial categories across time and space. This bifurcation constrains sociological race theorizing. Structural materialist sociologists tend to minimize the significance of variations in racial systems across the world, and symbolic boundary race sociologists turn away from theorizing the substance or basis of racial categories. These tendencies either overdetermine racial categories or naturalize racial difference. As a solution, in this article, I synthesize theses of the colonial constitution of racial categories with dualistic theories of race as structure. I specify race as a historically contingent subset of broader structures of descent-based difference whose categories were generated through early-modern Western European colonial expansion. Systems of racial classification vary regionally based on the history of the region and its population’s trade and labor relationships to specific Western European empires from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.