Rethinking racism again? Assessing conceptual deadlocks and innovations in race theory

Through focusing on racial formation theory, systemic racism theory, and the racialized social systems approach, I argue that sociological race theories often reproduce methodological nationalism, stage-ism, and groupism. Such conceptual approaches often equate the boundaries of racial structures with the geographical borders of nation-states, racial categories are often presented as groups with cohesive racial interests, and there is a methodological proclivity to think in terms of distinct “periods” of racialization in a way that occludes moments of continuity. By contrast, I propose that race theorists ought to focus on transboundary entanglements, slow burning raciality, and dynamic racialization. Taking these concepts together, I specify that race theorists ought to develop understandings of how even hyper-localized conditions of race and racialization may be facilitated by transnational relations; that we ought to consider the continuity of racial domination over the long durée; and that we ought to think about racialization as a dynamic process, bringing more specificity to the notion of racial interests to think of specific moments in which different social fractions (e.g. white elites and white workers) synergize their differing interests to maintain racial domination.