David Goldberg (2002) distinguishes between naturalist and historicist racism. The distinction helps us to more clearly see how racism becomes politically articulated within the context of the nation-state. Naturalist racism was predominant from the 17th to the 19th century. It refers to the pseudo-scientific belief in the immutable division of humanity into biological…
Comments closedTag: David Theo Goldberg
I was invited to write an article for the ABC Religion and Ethics website. On 12 August 2017, a white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville resulted in the death of Heather Heyer and nineteen injuries, as “white nationalist” James Alex Fields, Jr. ploughed his car into counter-demonstrators.…
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This is the third contribution to the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series. In it I look at the argument advanced by David Theo Goldberg (2009) that a relational approach to the study of race and racism reveals more than a comparativist approach does. I propose, however, that before being able to discuss the relative adequacy of either approach, we must have a good understanding of what is being researched when we centre race in accounts of historical or contemporary social, political and economic processes.
In 2014 I published an article, Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe, in a book I co-edited with Hamburg sociologist Wulf D. Hund, Racism and Sociology.
I examined work by mainstream ‘migration, ethnicities and minorities’ (MEM) scholars in Europe. Through institutes and departments often aligned with policy-making, these scholars often receive the lion’s share of the funding to research issues which, from a race critical perspective, are wholly about race. Yet their work mainly tends to neglect, elide or even deny the salience of race. In my view there are three main reasons for this:
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