Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Is there a racial order? Comments on Emirbayer

and Desmond

Howard Winant

To cite this article: Howard Winant (2016) Is there a racial order? Comments on Emirbayer and
Desmond, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39:13, 2285-2292, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1202431

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ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 39, NO. 13, 2285–2292
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1202431

Is there a racial order? Comments on Emirbayer and

Desmond
Howard Winant
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

ABSTRACT
Emirbayer and Desmond’s THE RACIAL ORDER is a heroic but ultimately quixotic
effort. The work relies upon an attempted synthesis of Deweyan pragmatism
and Bourdieuian social capital theory. Emirbayer and Desmond deploy an
uneasy combination of approaches, insisting upon ‘reflexivity’ in sociological
study of race and racism (the pragmatism dimension), and crafting a dubious
taxonomy of sociological ‘fields’ where racial conflict takes shape, and in
which sociologists study race as well (the social capital dimension). A chapter
on ‘racial reconstruction’ proposes to apply their understanding to concrete
political struggles, in pursuit of an augmented ‘racial democracy’. While the
book is tremendously erudite theoretically and provides a valuable literature
review, it does not advance racial theory very much. The authors are
distracted by Bourdieu’s scientism and obsession with classification. Although
‘racial order’ is revealed to be a chimera, there is still much to be learned here.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 March 2016; Accepted 9 June 2016

KEYWORDS Pragmatism; reconstruction; Dewey; Bourdieu; race; racism

I have been around the block more than once with this book, The Racial Order.
I was a reviewer for its publication with the University of Chicago Press; its final
published form varies somewhat from the manuscript version I saw. I pre-
viously commented on the authors’ work on racial reflexivity – some of
which is included in this book – in an article for Ethnic and Racial Studies
(Winant 2012).
I have known Emirbayer for many years and admired his earlier work on the
sociology of pragmatism (1997). Desmond I have only met in passing, but I am
now deep into his new book Evicted (2016); it is knocking me out. Finally, Emir-
bayer and Desmond (hereafter ED) discuss rather extensively my work with
Michael Omi, work that overlaps in significant ways with their own.
In my view the idea that there could be a racial ‘order’ is deeply proble-
matic, since the concept of race is inherently unstable. This book is an

CONTACT Howard Winant hwinant@soc.ucsb.edu

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2286 H. WINANT

extended literature review whose theme is the sociological theory of race. The
‘order’ in the book is produced by the application of sociological theory to
race, but that ‘order’ is not actually about race; it is about the sociology of race.
Is The Racial Order an exceptional achievement or an elaborate failure?
Although the knowledgeable reader seesaws back and forth between these
two poles of the critical spectrum, wisdom compels a more balanced view.
There is a real temptation to see this book as a theoretical tour de force. The
authors have read extensively, not only about race and racism, but quite
exhaustively in sociological theory. Just about every conceivable sociological
approach, every sociological subfield and theoretical luminary, is touched
upon here and applied, sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, to race and
racism. In this way we are taken on an extensive tour of the sociology of
race. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it tends to dilute what argu-
ment there is about race ‘itself’. One learns a lot from the connections ED have
made, notably in their key conceptual chapter, ‘Interactions, Institutions, Inter-
stices’. Their attention to identity and experience – already evident in the work
on reflexivity – is grounded in a chapter on social psychology.
The book’s objective, stated in its first sentence, is to develop a ‘compre-
hensive and systematic theory of race’. ED decry the ‘theoretical thinness’ of
sociological work on race, contrasting it with the ‘empirical richness’ of the
field. They seek to overcome this limit. Race for them is an ordered system
that spans modern social relations: social structures, social action and
interaction, identity and institutions. It is a culturally articulated, dynamic
and recursive (or in their terms, ‘reflexive)’ social construct that spans the
‘micro-’ and ‘macro-’ sociological spheres, stretching from world-systemic
structures (empires, say) to intra-psychic ones (e.g. emotions).
There is also a real temptation to see this book as an elaborate failure. For
all their erudition and explication, ED do not deliver a ‘comprehensive and sys-
tematic theory of race’. Their idea of a racial order assumes the existence of a
regularity and logic that is inconsistent with the wide-ranging, spatiotem-
porally varied, and inherently conflictual character of racial identities, relation-
ships, and social structures.1 Beyond this and notable in its own right, ED are
very US-focused, despite occasional nods to other countries or regions of the
world.
So that objective is beyond their grasp. But whose grasp is it not beyond?
The race problematic is distinct from others: it is coterminous with the mod-
ernity/world-system/rise of capitalism problematic (‘primitive accumulation’);
it is subject to the comprehensive reductionism that subordinates race to
class-, nation-, and ethnicity- (i.e. culture-) based constructs (Omi and
Winant 2015), it is rooted in the stubborn contradiction of social construc-
tion/corporeality, and as noted, it is fundamentally unstable across time and
space.
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2287

OK. Within all that, you have to constitute your subject. You have to locate
race historically, genealogically, geographically, conceptually. But what if your
subject is pervasive? What if it is ubiquitous? What if it is itself constitutive of
your sense of self and of your work? ED have written extensively on these pro-
blems, relying on Deweyan pragmatism. This leads them to emphasize – and
attempt to practise – what they call reflexivity. This recursive concept
demands that we recognize that everyone’s concepts and claims are situated:
in time and space to be sure, but also as discursive initiatives in particular dis-
ciplines (or multiple ones). So ED are always repetitively commenting on their
own claims. This can become annoying, but it is demanded by their approach,
at least sometimes. ED’s insistence in The Racial Order on reflexivity in soci-
ology (and beyond) is a virtue, even if it is aimed inevitably at vindicating soci-
ology, or at least ED’s version of sociology. That is another quixotic project.
As I see it, there are two main contributions here, and two significant
defects. The first contribution is the effort – not always successful, but still
important – to produce a reflexive sociology of race. I criticized their approach
to this project in my earlier Ethnic and Racial Studies piece, but I also embraced
their effort. This ‘reflexology’ (sorry) is derived not so much from sociological
theory itself, which is generally as non-reflexive as any other social science and
subject to the same pervasive authorial objectivism as the Enlightenment-
based/Western canon tout court (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1989 [1944]
and their numerous descendants). Instead, ED draw their inspiration from
Dewey and the entire arc of American pragmatist philosophy whose origins
lie in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Dewey’s emphasis
on ‘self-reflective action’, and on ‘situated creativity’ drives ED’s sociological
‘reflexivity’.
The second contribution is based a source who in my view is far less helpful
for the racial theorist: Pierre Bourdieu. ED are devoted followers. I inveighed
against Bourdieu’s disorienting impact on racial theory in my previous com-
ments on ED’s work on reflexivity, so I will not rehash those arguments
here. But I do want to note a contribution that ED make, framed by Bourdieu’s
approach. In their analysis they see race as a ‘field’ of social relations. In Bour-
dieu, fields are sites of political conflict, of power, of domination and resist-
ance. The amount and kind of social capital that you have determines your
position in any field. Power is exercised in these fields. So in this way ED at
least begin to theorize racial politics. That is a plus.
Note that this gets them into trouble as well. Fields multiply. Where they
come from, how they are established and bounded, is not addressed. There
is a race field. It too is multiple; it is cosmopolitan, pluralist, multicultural.
‘Blackness’ is a field as well. ED devote some energy to discussing how
much ‘black capital’ prominent black figures possess(ed) or could deploy.
Malcolm X possessed ‘unlimited’ black capital, ED say. On the other hand,
Martin Luther King Jr.,
2288 H. WINANT

… on account of his willingness to engage politically with white authorities as a

civil rights leader, never attained (for some in the field of blackness) to a fully
unquestioned and authentic blackness, despite the towering accomplishments
to which he could lay claim. (97)

So here we are discussing the question of the authenticity of Dr King’s black-

ness. I kid you not.
Combine the field theory and the Bourdieuian apparatus overall, with
reflexivity; take extensive note of Dewey and to some extent Mead; apply it
all to race, and what you get is a lot of classifying and ranking, because
again, Bourdieu. Some of this happens in the public sphere and institutionally,
but a great deal more of it happens in everyday life, where racially structured
practices can be seen as habitus, where they are reiterated and reproduced.
Another important ‘field’ for ED is the field of culture, which in some ways
bridges between their notions of reflexivity – it is the place where we recog-
nize ourselves and reproduce ourselves, after all – and the more structural
fields of inequality, injustice, institutionalized domination, and resistance.
Based on our reflexive sociology of race, we are urged to work to create
more and greater racial democracy.
So now to the defects: This whole hot mess is the stuff of the ‘racial order’.
As someone who has laboured in these vineyards, I cannot see all the Bour-
dieu stuff – the fields, the political struggles within fields, the distribution of
social capital – as contributing a damn thing. Does it take us beyond racial for-
mation, critical race theory, intersectionality, and perhaps theories of subalter-
nity and the coloniality of power? Not that I can tell.
Omi and I proposed the concept of ‘racial projects’ to capture the dynamic
process of making and remaking race and racism, both as concepts and as
practices. We considered how vast is the range of racial signifiers, and
argued that racial discourse, racial signification (sometimes only implicit,
e.g. ‘coded’), in other words racialization practices themselves … , were
linked to structures of domination and power, both institutionalized and oper-
ating in everyday life. The reverse was also true, we suggested: in many insti-
tutions, in law and state activity, and indeed in everyday life as well, race is
present, race is being signified upon, at least implicitly if not explicitly. Like-
wise in many countries, all individuals must have a racial identity. Many,
indeed most, social policies have racial consequences. So what’s the differ-
ence between ‘fields’ and ‘projects’?
We presented racial formation as a process of cumulative and circular
development (drawing on Myrdal), asserting that it was a primarily political
process, and suggesting that it had something in common with what
Gramsci called ‘the life of the state’. Antonio characterized that as ‘ … a con-
tinuous process of the formation and superseding of unstable equilibria’
(1971, 182). In other words, projects accumulate and come into conflict, some-
times acquiring sufficient ‘weight’ or numbers of adherents to diminish the
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2289

powers of dominant groups, and to challenge white supremacy politically.

State agencies, social movements, individual and group identities, as well as
large-scale social structures, are reconfigured as the racial formation process
proceeds. This seems a lot like the question of racial democracy, whose exten-
sion and deepening ED see as the goal of what they call ‘racial reconstruction’.
So despite the tremendous referential effort that ED make, despite the
huge apparatus they construct to apply sociological theory more comprehen-
sively to the problematic of race, there is not much there in terms of theoreti-
cal advance. There is in fact little theory of race beyond the application of
Bourdieuian concepts of social capital to various supposedly racial ‘fields’,
and even if you think that clarifies matters – which I do not – you still wind
up with what is effectively a restatement of racial formation theory, or critical
race theory, or intersectionality theory.
What about racial politics? This is the second defect. Although the Bour-
dieuian framework is very political – in the sense that it is all about power –
it is almost scholastic in its scientism. There is folk knowledge and there is
science, baby, common sense and theory, and these two currents do not inter-
sect. Do not cross the streams, as the Ghostbusters would say. So where is
racial politics in this approach?
Although The Racial Order is very theoretical and very reflexive – as noted
there is a problem of logorrhoea – ED do offer some political guideposts,
towards the end of the book, in a chapter on ‘Race and Reconstruction’.
With this term they allude rather obviously to Dewey and Du Bois, who
each used ‘reconstruction’ in the title of one of their major works.2 This is a
‘What Is to Be Done?’ chapter that ‘ … explore[s] how settings of racial dom-
ination intelligently can be reconstructed, that is, how knowledge acquired
about racial domination can be deployed in concerted efforts to overturn it’
(285).3
Here ED seek to present a political agenda that they hope to harmonize
with the theoretical apparatus they have developed. Following a framework
roughly parallel to Giddens’s structuration theory (he is cited elsewhere in
the book), they propose that we think about reconstruction of the racial
order at the individual, interactional, and institutional levels. They also
discuss an ‘interstitial’ level of the racial order, in which they locate the
racial public sphere (Habermas is copiously cited as well), contentious racial
politics, and racially oriented social movements. It is here that people act to
challenge or defend the institutions and social structures that reproduce
racial domination.
While ED’s hearts are with the resistance to racism, it is not at all clear that
their theoretical labours lend themselves to these projects. Like other writers
on race, ED are diverted by the scientism of their Bourdieuian framework. The
immense theoretical corpus of Bourdieu’s theory turns out to be, not only a
class-reductionist enterprise, as noted above (domination is a function of
2290 H. WINANT

the possession of social capital, oppression is a function of its lack), but also
quite elitist in respect to the possession or absence of ‘truly warranted scien-
tific knowledge’. Theorists may desire thoroughgoing racial reconstruction,
but still they must ‘ … attend … in reflexive fashion, to the unspoken assump-
tions that influence race scholarship … presuppositions from the realms of lay
or scholarly common sense … ’. If you do not do this reflexive work, ‘lay’ and
‘folk’ knowledge, and ‘common sense’ too, will trip you up.4
Ouch. That is my response as a sociologist of race. Here ED are trying to
claim reflexivity as an antidote to mainstream social science, aka ‘objectivism’.
But they also want to be true to Bourdieu and lay claim to social science them-
selves. For Bourdieu and his acolytes, there is a yawning chasm between scien-
tific knowledge (about race or anything else) and lay knowledge (aka common
sense, folk knowledge). If you are not an accomplished reflexive social scien-
tist, your knowledge ain't shit.
Once more, where is racial politics in this approach? Where are social move-
ments, race consciousness, collective identities, nationalisms5 in this frame-
work? Indeed where is racial ‘self-activity’, the radical pragmatist political
dynamic that James analysed,6 himself echoing and seeking to expand
upon Duboisian pragmatism, which is evident throughout D’s vast ouevre,
but especially prominent in Black Reconstruction?
Recognizing these phenomena, it seems to me, requires repudiating the
idea of a ‘racial order’, at least in respect to sociology or any other disciplinary
framework. Racial theory derives from racial politics; it lags behind the self-
activity of both individuals and groups (yes, there are groups), trying as
always, in Hegel’s ‘owl-of-Minerva’ fashion, to make sense of what is already
happening. Race remains an unstable concept. It is a volatile and conflictual
dimension of social relations, hence a primarily political phenomenon. The
only ‘order’ is Gramsci’s ‘ … continuous process of the formation and super-
seding of unstable equilibria’.

Notes
1. In the totalizing perspective ED develop, of course, there is no concrete distinc-
tion between the ‘small’ and the ‘large’; this terminology is merely an analytical
convenience, not a material condition.
2. Pragmatism, the quintessential American contribution to philosophy, was itself
rooted in the trauma of the Civil War and in abolitionism. See Locke (1992
[1916]), West (1989), Glaude (2008), Menand (2002). Hence the term ‘reconstruc-
tion’ comes to Dewey (2004 [1948]), as well as to Du Bois (2007 [1935]), from the
Civil War and its 1865–77 aftermath. Only Du Bois, however, can be seen as a
pragmatist racial theorist. Dewey’s interest in race is limited at best. On pragma-
tist sociology, see Joas (1997).
3. The next sentence again echoes Racial Formation: ‘This transformative work can
be carried on through different methods and in diverse settings, from the family
dinner table to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.’
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2291

4. One could see ED as unconsciously criticizing themselves here:

Epistemological barriers lurk in the tendency to ignore – in the name of

objectivist social inquiry – the primary experience that, after all, is an integral
part of the racial object one investigates. Reflexivity exposes the implicit
elitism in theoretical approaches that, as it were, impose categories from
above just as much as it uncovers the scientific shortcomings of perspectives
that fail to question common sense. These various lessons of reflexivity all
have proven important in the core chapters of the present study. Whether
thinking in field-theoretic terms about racial objects, critically scrutinizing
determinist or rationalist approaches to racial dynamics, or probing the
social psychology of whiteness (to mention but a few examples), our study
has sought to put all these reflexive insights to effective use. (334–335)
5. ED take on board Shelby’s critique of black nationalism in a rather simplistic
fashion, it seems to me (2007, 329–330). They ignore Gilroy’s critique of nation-
alism (2002).
6. See Lee, Castoriadis, and James (1958). Grace Lee, later Grace Lee Boggs, was a
student of George Herbert Mead. Du Bois himself had studied with that other
James, William. For other comments along these lines see James (1969);
Rawick (1969).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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