The Sociology of ‘race relations’ is riddled with taxonomies—the ‘new racism’, ‘color-blind racism’, ‘laissez-faire racism’, and ‘symbolic racism’ are just a few of the concepts s that have been developed to try to understand racism in the contemporary era. None of these theorists are historical sociologists. Yet, all of these taxonomies they have developed evoke some notion about history. Their analysis of what is happening in the present implicitly and explicitly evokes some notion of what happened in the past. The ways in which the past is understood, however, are problematic. This talk will focus specifically on the theory of Color Blind racism with an eye to making explicit its claims about how the past does and does not differ from the present. It will offer an alternative reading of the past as a basis for making possible sharper and more incisive analyses of the present.

This event is part of a year-long series of talks and workshops entitled “Critical Sociologies of Race and Empire,” developed by a group of faculty and students in Sociology and American Studies. This series will explore new sociological work on race and empire from critical perspectives such as postcolonial and Du Boisian sociology.

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