Antiracism Theory

Definitional Concepts of Race, Racism, and Antiracism Theories

Before discussing antiracism theories, a few perspectives on race are important as an entry point even though the meanings of race are continually in dispute as an ideological concept in any sociopolitical context. This contested terrain is natural, expected, and is testimony to its active role in shaping the human experience. It also gives evidence of race and racism as permanent fissures in creating a harmonious social order.

Historic conceptions of race are complex and have long been accepted as a biological, fixed idea that is based largely on encoded phenotype (e.g., skin color, hair color and texture, eye or nose shape). From this perspective, racial variation is believed to be scientific, objective, and based in biological differences that are intrinsic, definite, and fixed. However, skin color holds prominence as the key determinant of one's race because it is permanent and a visible appearance marker. Biological differences provide ease in categorizing groups and ascribing innate DNA, genetics, and ancestry to any differences (including differences that are not biological but that are social constructions). With the backing of science and its privileged status as truth producing, racial differences that play out as social differences are explained as innate and natural. From this perspective, race is used to explain social hierarchies and structures of injustice and inequality. For example, differences in social status are explained and justified as objectively predetermined by race. Thus, a natural social order exists based on biology and racial inferiority.

In attempts to shift from biological determinism, particularly after the gains of the civil rights movement, culture and ethnicity became frequently used concepts to replace race as the dominant discourse. This shift should have resulted in more than linguistic change. It had the potential to challenge the idea of race as biological and to embrace race as a social construction. In some instances, however, culture and ethnicity are used as referents for race, and they are viewed to be similarly fixed, distinct, and permanently assigned to certain groups in a return to biology. In still some other instances, the concepts of culture and ethnicity afforded many the safe illusion that they are avoiding race and the images and connotations that circulate with its history and racist practices. But all too often, they became mere replacements for race rather than recognizing that culture is a complex set of characteristics described by James Banks as (a) values and behavioral styles; (b) nonverbal communications; (c) perspectives, world-views, and frames of reference; (d) identification; (e) cultural cognitiveness; and (f) languages and dialects.

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