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RETHINKING RACISM:
TOWARD A STRUCTURAL INTERPRETATION*
The study of race and ethnic conflict historically has been hampered by inadequate and simplistic theories. I contend that the central problem of the various approaches to the study of racial phenomena is their lack of a structural theory of racism. I review traditional approaches and alternative approaches to the study of racism, and discuss their limitations. Following the leads suggested by some of the alternative frameworks, I advance a structural theory of racism based on the notion of racialized social systems.
"The habit of considering racism as a mental quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned."
-Frantz Fanon (1967:77)
The area of race and ethnic studies lacks a sound theoretical apparatus. To complicate matters, many analysts of racial matters have abandoned the serious theorization and reconceptualization of their central topic: racism. Too many social analysts researching racism assume that the phenomenon is selfevident, and therefore either do not provide a definition or provide an elementary definition (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Sniderman and Piazza 1993). Nevertheless, whether implicitly or explicitly, most analysts regard racism as a purely ideological phenomenon.
Although the concept of racism has become the central analytical category in most contemporary social scientific discourse on racial phenomena, the concept is of recent origin (Banton 1970; Miles 1989, 1993). It was not employed at all in the classic works of Thomas and Znaniecki (1918), Edward Reuter (1934), Gunnar Myrdal (1944), and Robert Park (1950).^sup 1^Benedict (1945) was one of the first scholars to use the notion of racism in her book, Race and Racism. She defined racism as "the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority" (p. 87). Despite some refinements, current use of the concept of racism in the social sciences is similar to Benedict's. Thus van den Berghe (1967) states that racism is "any set of beliefs that organic, genetically transmitted differences (whether real or imagined) between human groups are intrinsically associated with the presence or the absence of certain socially relevant abilities or characteristics, hence that such differences are a legitimate basis of invidious distinctions between groups socially defined as races" (p. II, emphasis added). Schaefer (1990) provides a more...