The Racial Order - Softcover

Mustafa Emirbayer is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Matthew Desmond is assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard University. Together, they are the authors of Race in America, a companion to this volume.

“The Racial Order is a landmark in the theoretical analysis of race relations. Integrating and building on ideas from some of the most important thinkers on intergroup relations, Emirbayer and Desmond provide a comprehensive framework that takes race scholarship to a higher level of illumination and will inform and provide direction for empirical scholarship. Look no further for a publication that addresses the complexities of racial life with explanatory power.” (William Julius Wilson, Harvard University)

“In this ambitious theoretical program, Emirbayer and Desmond intertwine structure and culture, Bourdieu and Pragmatism, Durkheim and psychoanalysis. Their empirical scholarship is wide-ranging. The Racial Order inspires moral clarity about the pernicious racialism that continues to divide the American civil sphere.” (Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University)

“Race in its multiplicity and ineluctability has pervaded the modern world while paradoxically—or perhaps unsurprisingly?—evading comprehensive theorization. If the truth lies in the whole, as Hegel thought, that multi-dimensional racial whole has either been perverted in past racist biologism, flattened in class-reductivist Marxism or subjectivist psychologism, denied altogether in contemporary liberal color-blindness, or abandoned as a theoretical goal in pursuit of localized empiricism. Now, in this impressive interdisciplinary synthesis, Emirbayer and Desmond offer a bold and ambitious new framework for thinking of race that does justice to structure as well as agency, relationality and social psychology, recalcitrant white habitus and the transformational reconstructive ideal of racial democracy. Agree or disagree, every serious scholar of race will need to read this book.” (Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University)

“The Racial Order is a daring, ambitious, and important book. With its demanding but much needed conceptual equipment, it is also challenging and rewarding. By broadening significantly the range of authors whose work informs contemporary views on racial dynamics, Emirbayer and Desmond take a gamble: they add important layers of complexity to what often feels like a well-trodden sociological terrain. While The Racial Order will certainly generate debates, it should entice us to plough new paths for inquiry in what is perhaps the most highly politicized field of knowledge production in the social sciences. May social scientists committed to the pursuit of racial democracy and social justice raise to the occasion! It is well worth the effort.” (Michèle Lamont, director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University)

“This work begins with a compelling statement: ‘There never has been a comprehensive and systematic theory of race.’ The authors attempt to provide just that, drawing on and intricately interweaving nearly all prior race scholarship, with a special emphasis on the work of Dewey, Durkheim, and Bourdieu. Their approach stands out from prior frameworks by demanding greater attention to culture, making space for social psychology and collective emotions, emphasizing racial agency at every analytic level, and rejecting a binary between structure and culture.” (Choice)