What [the great social theorists of the 19th century] could agree upon, though, was the belief that racial and social ethnic bonds, divisions and conflicts were remnants of a pre-industrial order which would decline in significance in the modern period.
The authors suggest that the concept of what defines race is a relatively modern invention, tracing back only a few centuries. An overview of the political and social philosophers—the titans of the 1800’s such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim—assumed that the future would be just as disinclined to consider, much less answer this question as those living in the millennia before them. Race had not become a problem until the Age of Exploration and it was assumed that it would no longer be a problem for the Post-Industrial Age. Irony, huh?
The dominant paradigm of race for the last half-century has been that of ethnicity.
What is most disturbing and oppressively so about this quote is that it was written in the mid-1980’s. Despite advancements in genetics that have made cloning a reality and the potential for editing the DNA of babies very much a real possibility, racism is still primarily defined within the genetic foundation of ethnicity. Ethnicity can be determined by genetic testing; race cannot. Why? Because even now—more than three decades after these words were written—no definitive answer has yet been provided on exactly what constitutes race. It is purely a political concept unrelated to any known method of scientific determination, but one: the highly suspect science of looking at someone to determine the color of their skin pigmentation.
…operations of the Federal Reserve Board or the framing of tax policy, were defined as nonracial issues the 1960’s.
What the authors are doing here is providing examples of a process known as “insulation” in which certain areas of governance are essentially removed from oversight of racial inequality by virtue of being designated as not affected by such aspects of ideologically-based agenda and policies. This process of “insulation” is described by the authors as unequalled by any other democratic government operating within a capitalist economy. There is a saying that everything, ultimately, comes down to a question of politics, but the institution of “insulation” denies the very basis of assumption by mandating that some elements of how the government runs the country is irrefutably not subject to racial biases and prejudicial motivations at any significant level.
The central argument of this work, the central issue in racial policy—that U.S. racial dynamics are the subject of permanent political contestation—cannot be addressed by “colorblind” theory or policy.
The Introduction to the volume commences with a challenge to the widespread notion that America is a colorblind society in which equal opportunities are available to everyone and nobody is guaranteed success. Essentially, the book from that point becomes a systematic debunking of the myth that the American Dream is the result of a colorblind construction of opportunities and privilege. The quote above is the final sentence of the next-to-last paragraph and serves as an efficient and comprehensive summary of the argument made by the authors which have been backed up with extensive research, facts, statistics and analysis.
