On The Contributions of Cognitive Sociology To The Sociological Study of Race

Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.
On the Contributions of Cognitive Sociology to the

Sociological Study of Race
Wayne H. Brekhus*, David L. Brunsma, Todd Platts and Priya Dua
University of Missouri
Abstract
In this article, we argue for cognitive sociology as a framework for studying the sociology of race.
Cognitive sociology concerns itself with classification, identity construction, meaning and collec-
tive memory and is thus centrally concerned with generic issues that apply well to racial category
construction and maintenance. We, first, outline the cognitive sociology framework. We then
elaborate on traditions in the sociology of race and racism that have implicit affinities to cognitive
sociology. We argue that cognitive sociology provides a useful generic framework with which to
look at specific issues in racial classification, the social construction of race, and to racist cogni-
tions, while critical race theory and other sociology of race frameworks can compliment cognitive
sociology by addressing issues of power and domination in cognitive frameworks.
The cognitive sociology approach is becoming influential (see European Journal of Social
Theory 2007); however, its potential for the study of race and racism has been unrealized.
We suspect that this is for reasons both related to the subfields of cognitive sociology and
to the sociology of race. Cognitive sociology has mostly situated itself within the sociol-
ogy of culture and social theory – focusing on meaning-making processes – while the
sociology of race has generally located itself within social stratification and social inequali-
ties frameworks – focusing on processes of racial inequality and ‘race relations.’ These
two traditions are ultimately quite complimentary, but, starting from different empirical
and theoretical concerns, have rarely overlapped. Our aim throughout this article is to
first explicate the ontology of cognitive sociology, demonstrate the undeveloped and
implicit link between the study of race and the cognitive approach, epistemologically
sharpen this link, and to suggest ways to make the implicit link more explicit.
The cognitive turn has been among the most significant intellectual developments in
recent years and one that has transformed a broad range of sciences and social sciences.
Although the cognitive turn has been more indirect in sociology (Strydom 2007, 340)
than in many disciplines and perhaps not fully realized (Bergesen 2005), the cognitive
turn has made significant contributions to the sociological study of boundaries, organiza-
tions, risk, and social movements (Brubaker et al. 2004, 54). Cognitive sociology is
becoming an increasingly influential subfield in its own right with a growing presence in
both the sociology of culture and in sociological theory. The cognitive turn in sociologi-
cal theory is well-documented (Cerulo 2002; Cicourel 1974; DiMaggio 1997; Fuller
1984; Strydom 2007). Strydom (2007, 351) provides a comprehensive overview of many
strains of cognitive sociological theorizing ranging from strong naturalistic to strong
humanistic approaches.
In this review, we focus primarily on cognitive sociological approaches that fall in the
middle of the naturalistic to humanistic continuum that Strydom identitfies (e.g. Brekhus
2007; DiMaggio 1997; Zerubavel 1997). It is important to point out that cognitive socio-
logy differs from cognitive social psychology. Cognitive social psychology focuses on
ª 2010 The Authors

Journal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
62 Cognitive Sociology of Race
individual cognition in the immediate social context and concerns itself with how indi-
viduals choose from multiple information processing strategies on the basis of goals,
motives, needs, feelings, and the situational context (see Schwartz 1998). Cognitive social
psychology looks at the individual as he or she is socially influenced, but does not typi-
cally look at the collective cognition of communities as a unit of analysis. Methodologi-
cally cognitive social psychology and cognitive sociology also differ. Cognitive social
psychology typically employs experimental methods, whereas cognitive sociology uses
historical, ethnographic and other sociological methods that analyze social life outside of
the experimental setting. Cognitive sociology analyzes the broad sociocultural mediation
of a number of cognitive processes including classification, meaning making, identity con-
struction, collective attention and disattention, and collective memory (Zerubavel 1997).
In particular, cognitive sociology shows us how the categories we construct, the classifica-
tion conventions we use, and the meanings we give to our classifications as individuals,
and as collectives, are socially, culturally and subculturally constructed (Brekhus 2007,
450).
Eviatar Zerubavel (1997, 2–3) introduces cognitive sociology as a domain of inquiry
that addresses aspects of cognition that are neither cognitive universals nor idiosyncratic
to particular individuals (see also Brekhus 2007, 450; LaRossa et al. 2005). This middle
ground between cognitive universalism and cognitive individualism is important to
understanding social processes of boundary construction and meaning-making. People
think not as universal social actors or as individuals but as members of a social and cul-
tural context. Cognitive sociologists use the notion of the ‘thought community’ or
‘thought collective’ to conceive of the ways that we think as social actors. Ludwik Fleck
(1979)[1935]) first developed the idea of the ‘thought collective’ to refer to members of a
community sharing a similar thought style or worldview in his discussion of the develop-
ment of ‘truth’ in the sciences. Mannheim (1985)[1936]) further developed the idea that
mental structures are shaped by social structures and that individual worldviews are the
product of the affiliations they belong to (see also Simmel 1955). Borrowing Schutz’s
(1967, 97–138) concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ to express the notion of socially shared
worldviews, Berger and Luckman (1966, 23) developed a detailed theory of the social
construction of reality that relies heavily on cognitive dimensions such as relevance struc-
tures, worldviews and their role in the sociology of perception and attention. Berger and
Luckmann’s notion of the ‘social construction of reality’ has often been used to discuss
race, but the phrase ‘race is socially constructed’ is rarely examined with full attention to
the cognitive presuppositions of their approach (Hook 2006; Spencer 1999).
While recent works in cognitive sociology fit largely within the sociology of culture,
sociological theory, and sociology of knowledge specializations, the generic processes that
cognitive sociologists study could be importantly and effectively imported into the sociol-
ogy of race. These generic concerns – classification ⁄ categorization, attention ⁄ inattention,
perception, memory, meaning-making, markedness ⁄ unmarkedness, and identity construc-
tion – are especially relevant to understanding race, racialization, and racism. The litera-
ture on race and racism towards the end of the 20th century and certainly into the
twenty-first is ripe with socio-mental phenomena: racial classification schema (re)con-
struction (Brunsma 2006; Williams 2006), racial (re)formations (Omi and Winant 1994),
racial ideology (Bonilla-Silva 2006), racialized social structures (Bonilla-Silva 1997), racial-
ized spaces, whiteness, white habitus (Bonilla-Silva et al. 2006), racial scripts, race talk
(Cerulo 2007; Pollock 2004), racial literacies (Twine 1996), stereotyping, racial (re)pre-
sentations (hooks 1992), racial identity (re)formation and maintenance (Abdelal et al.
2006; Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002b; Waters 1990, 1999), and the fact that with
ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Cognitive Sociology of Race 63
things racial – seeing is believing (Spencer 1999). Consider the implications of following
quote from critical race philosopher, Charles Mills:
‘One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and
self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past
few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, coloniza-
tion, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the
terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain set of structured blindness and opacities
in order to establish and maintain the white polity’
(1997, p. 19, emphasis in original)
The affinities between cognitive sociology and the sociological study of race and racism
are quite strong – yet, the development along these lines has been scattered.
In the study of race and ethnicity the cognitive sociology approach has been undevel-
oped and implicit (Brubaker et al. 2004, 54). Our aim throughout this paper is to dem-
onstrate this, epistemologically sharpen and focus a cognitive sociological framework to
the study of race, and to suggest ways to make the implicit connection more explicit.
Brubaker et al. (2004) and Rydgren (2007) have begun to explicitly bring cognitive soci-
ology into the study of ethnicity. We wish to take their call for a cognitive sociological
study of ethnicity a step further and show how it can improve our understanding of
broader processes of race, racialization, and racism.
In the remainder of this article we will first suggest some of the problems with non-
cognitive approaches to race. Then we will delineate several categories from which the
cognitive sociology of race can be articulated and advanced. Those categories include: (1)
classification conventions and the social weighting of attributes, (2) memory, narrative
and the sociology of attention, (3) the social construction, mobility and strategic use of
identity as it relates to markedness and unmarkedness, and (4) cultural repertoires (such as
‘white habitus’) and a sociology of the racially unmarked (on the need for a sociology of
the unmarked, see Brekhus 1998).
Problems with the non-cognitive sociology of race

Although sociologists studying race often talk of race as ‘socially constructed’ they rarely
trace social constructionism back to its cognitive roots; moreover, much race analysis
treats race (and racialized groups) as a social category, a demographic variable or a com-
munity in ways that implicitly reconstruct and reproduce the social construction of race
as a categorical variable (see Zuberi 2001). Brubaker (2002, 164–66) suggests that the
construction of race and ethnicity not only treats them as ontological coherencies, but
also socially reifies them as stable, natural categories (see Spencer 1999, 2006). Morris
(2007) shows that the logic of race as a fixed entity, even while we claim it to be a social
construction, is not just inherent in quantitative variable research, but that qualitative
researchers and ethnographers often situate their own race as a sort of context-free inde-
pendent variable. He notes that failure to see race as dynamic and influenced by the par-
ticular racialized contexts one studies, causes ethnographers to simply operationalize their
race as a reified fixed variable such as ‘white’ (see Nayak 2006; Renn 2000, 2003)
Williams (1990, 3) points out that when we treat races as primordial categories the
relational basis of race is often lost. We tend to map ‘races’ cognitively as ‘groups’ that
exist independently in the population. This ‘group’ concept, Brubaker (2002, 163)
argues, functions as a taken-for-granted reality requiring no critical scrutiny or explica-
tion: ‘[Groupism is] the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally

homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief pro-
tagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis.’ In this sense, we see
the socio-mental process of lumping and splitting that allows us to experience a racialized
world wherein ‘islands of races’ are socially carved and continually reified as such in rela-
tion to other ‘islands of meaning’ (Zerubavel 1991).
The carving of islands of races is not innocuous. Mills (1997), for instance, ‘marks’ the
fact that the past 500 years of human history has been a racial project of white suprem-
acy. For Mills (1997, 1–3) white supremacy has operated as an unmarked political system
that has informed the makeup of the modern world. Moreover, Dávila (2001), Hill Col-
lins (2005), Gray (1995), and Sheller (2003) have pointed to how popular forms of media
(e.g. advertising, music, television, and movies) have not only constructed conceptions of
race, but have reified essentialized differences between whites and non-whites. In each
case, certain attributes are marked as being somehow distinct from other racial groups.
As some of these critiques and studies suggest, implicitly employing a cognitive socio-
logical view in race studies is not new. Yet, the cognitive approach to race is rarely made
explicit. Our main objective is to both focus and sharpen the cognitive sociological imag-
ination in the study of race – for the racialized social structures within which we exist
(Bonilla-Silva 1997) map onto our cognitions, providing ideological cartographies that
allow navigations through social life. Racialized social structures are not just ‘out there,’
they are mapped ‘in here.’ We highlight the potential contributions of cognitive socio-
logy to the sociology of race by focusing on classification, social and mental weighing,
narrative, memory and attention, and identity mobility, identity construction and the
power of social unmarkedness.
Classification conventions and mental weighing

One of the central concerns of contemporary cognitive theorizing is classification and the
use of lumping and splitting to produce socially constructed ‘coherent’ and ‘meaningful’
categories. Zerubavel (1996, 421) defines lumping and splitting as the sociomental process
of grouping ‘similar’ things together into distinct islands of meaning, while separating dif-
ferent clusters or islands of meaning from one another. Prior to their introduction to cog-
nitive sociology, the concepts of lumping and splitting originated in taxonomy—a field
concerned with species, subspecies and even races in the animal kingdom. Cognitive soci-
ologists use the terms lumping and splitting in a cultural classification sense rather than a
biological sense so that lumping and splitting can apply to such disparate cultural classifi-
cations as separating musical genres (Bryson 1996), classifying styles of rock climbing (Ful-
ler 2003), or defining academic identities (Zerubavel 1995). The biological and
taxonomic origins of the concepts make them especially useful for looking at cultural
classifications like gender (Epstein 2007) and race that are socially perceived to have bio-
logical bases. Central to the notion of classifying reality into ‘islands of meaning’ (Zeruba-
vel 1991, 5–20) is that within-category differences are minimized and between-category
differences are inflated so as to carve discrete islands of meaning out of continuous grada-
tion. In the case of race, we now know explicitly that it is just the opposite genetically
(see Duster 1990; Fujimura et al. 2008).
Cognitive sociology also looks at the role of social and mental weighting in the classifi-
cation, perception, and identity construction process (see Cerulo 1997). Some acts, attri-
butes and identities carry more sociomental weight than others. Mullaney (1999) shows,
for instance, that the ‘marked’ holds far more social weight than the ‘unmarked’ in iden-
tity attribution; some heavily marked acts carry a one-time rule for identity attribution,

while most acts require a maximum-capacity rule for identity assignment. For instance,
some acts such as homicide are so heavily marked that a single act may mark one’s iden-
tity for life as a ‘murderer,’ while a single instance of gambling or smoking does not usu-
ally mark one’s identity as a ‘gambler’ or a ‘smoker.’ To maintain an identity as a
gambler or smoker one must maintain consistent and sustained activity gambling or
smoking. Similar to the one-time rule, some forms of social classification use a ‘one-drop
rule’ to give marked attributes the weight to tip the scales from a mostly unmarked iden-
tity to a completely weighted marked social identity.
The anthropological ‘hypo-descent rule’ of racial classification wherein racially mixed
persons are assigned the status of the subordinate racial category is a clear example of the
cognitive sociomental weighing that allows the marked racial background of a mixed race
person to assume far greater weight in their racial identity than their unmarked racial
background. In the United States, black ancestors weigh more heavily in determining our
racial classification than white ancestors. Davis’s (1991) detailed analysis of ‘the one-drop
rule,’ wherein any known or traceable amount of black ancestry defines one as ‘black,’
illustrates the ways that social markedness and mental weighing affect the cultural classifi-
cation and social construction of racialized identities. As the parallels between Davis’s
work and the processes of social marking and mental weighing demonstrate, studies of
race cannot only benefit from cognitive sociology but can also, in turn, influence cogni-
tive theorizing in other social arenas. The concept of a social ‘one-drop rule’ for weight-
ing marked identities and acts (even those not related to race), for instance, has been
developed within cognitive sociology and the study of sexual identities (see Brekhus
1996).
Williams (1990, 2) argues that race is an especially important site for the study of cul-
tural classification because it involves placing natural marks (skin pigmentation) onto
social marks (culture). The study of race is important not just for what it shows us about
race, but for what it shows us about cultural classification more generally. Following
Zerubavel’s (2007) call for a focus on similarities across cases, it would be interesting to
develop a general framework for explaining differences and similarities in racial classifica-
tion schemes (see Davis 1991; Spencer 1999; Zuberi 2001) and in cultural classification
schemes beyond race. Zerubavel (2007) argues for a social pattern analysis in sociology
that pays attention to the general form, rather than the specific details, of classification
conventions, meaning-making systems and identity constructions. Much sociology of race
and ethnicity focuses on the details of specific cases, but would benefit from a cognitive
perspective that draws attention to general patterns that cut across specific cases.
Davis’s (1991) study of the classification of black identity in the United States and
Garroutte’s (2003) study of American Indian identity claims in the United States are
two examples of interesting case studies that could be compared across cases. Davis
(1991) looks at the overriding importance of socially marked ‘ancestry’ or ‘blood’ and
its ability to wash over all other ancestries in determining one’s racial definition within
the context of black or negro identity in America. Garroutte (2003) shows that Ameri-
can Indian identity is very complicated and raises questions about what the proper
framework for making a racial or ethnic determination are; cultural association, blood
quantum, and self-identification can all weigh in determining an American Indian iden-
tity. A cognitive social pattern analysis of the differences and similarities between the
‘one-drop rule’ and the ‘blood quantum rule’ and how they illustrate the mental
weighing and social marking of race would be valuable not only to the sociology of
race, but parallels to these types of classification strategies might be applied to aspects of
social classification more generally.

A particularly interesting aspect of American Indian racial identity that Garroutte

(2003) and Nagel (1994) draw attention to is that the weighting of ‘doing Indianness’ (as
reflected by living in Indian communities and participating in Indian cultural practices)
matters. This is interesting because racial identity in the United States, in most contexts,
is seen as something you biologically are, not something you socially accomplish. Often
identity is seen as essential rather than accomplished and as such claims to ‘being’ an iden-
tity are usually privileged over attempts to claim an identity by ‘doing’ or acting out the
identity (Mullaney 1999; Brekhus 2008, 1072). The importance of ‘being’ vs. ‘doing’
claims to identity debates is one that race scholarship can contribute to by highlighting
the various social and legal weights given to being and doing claims across a range of his-
torical and contemporary racial identities.
In addition to examining racial classifications, the heuristic concept of mental weighing
can also be utilized when studying the assignment of group attributes. Pager (2007, 3),
for example, notes that people in the United States consistently regard blacks as a vio-
lence prone racial or ethnic group. As evidenced by the original book jacket of Sanyika
Shakur’s (1993) autobiography, a former L.A. gang member responsible for numerous
violent crimes and multiple homicides, praising his life story as giving eloquent voice to
‘the black ghetto experience today’ blacks are sociomentally perceived and represented as
a violent category even though most members of the category do not commit violent
crimes (see Brekhus 2000). Pager (2008, 193) notes that the general lumping of blacks as
violence-prone has real consequences in terms of employment, housing, credit, and con-
sumer interactions. Pager (2007, 93–94) argues that high levels of incarceration cast a sha-
dow of criminality over all Black men, implicating those who have never had negative
contact with the law. In this sense, the criminal justice system serves to legitimate and
reinforce racial stereotyping. Moreover, the actions of a few, help to define all members
of a socially defined racial group as a violence prone deviation from the ‘typical’ human
social actor,
Memory, narrative, and the sociology of attention

In addition to looking at classification conventions and the assignment of group attributes,
cognitive sociology allows us to look at the organization of memory in narratives and the
ways we attend and disattend to different features of the past to construct the present.
Rydgren (2007) explicitly brings the cognitive sociology traditions of Dimaggio and
Zerubavel into the study of ethnic conflicts. Arguing for a sociocognitive approach to the
meaning-making that groups use to remember, attend to, and construct the past, Rydgren
looks at the role that the collective memories of thought communities play in ethnic con-
flicts (see also Griffin 2004). He shows how narrativization is a powerful sociocognitive
mechanism for ordering and simplifying unstructured events into coherent narratives
(Rydgren 2007, 232). Following Zerubavel’s (2003, 1) concerns with cognitive starting
points and endpoints, Rydgren looks at the ways that individuals selectively remember
aberrational elements of the past and construct those elements as typical rather than atypi-
cal. In particular, he looks at the ways that thought communities develop simplified ana-
logisms to order events into simplistic teleological narratives that create an inevitable
trajectory of conflict and thus actually produce ethnic conflict. Rydgren (2007, 235) notes
that ‘collective memory is biased towards remembering vivid information—with the
result that dramatic events, such as war and conflict, are more easily remembered than
long periods of peace’ and that societies with a history of prior conflicts are thus likely to
overestimate the likelihood of future conflicts and even fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy

of conflict. This emphasis on the asymmetrical remembrance of the past also points to the
markedness of some past events and the unmarkedness of most of the past and to the
greater epistemological and social weight we give to ethnic conflict than to ethnic
harmony.
Rydgren (2007) leads the way for a cognitive sociology of memory in ethnic conflicts,
but there is little corresponding cognitive sociology of memory literature that explores
racial conflicts. Although Rydgren limits his analysis to ethnic conflict, this same kind of
narrative and collective memory framework would be beneficial for the analysis and
meaning-making of a variety of racial histories, collective memories and group-makings
around the concept of race (for works on race and collective memory see Dwyer 2000;
Kachun 2003; Shackel 2003; Blight 1989; Eyerman 2001). May (2000) provides one
example of a cognitive sociology of local collective memory in his study of race talk
among African-American men in a Chicago neighborhood tavern. Using Zerubavel’s
(1996) notion of mnemonic communities or ‘communities of memory,’ May (2000, 203)
explores how a small network of African-American men generate a collective memory of
negative interracial interaction that gives reported racial encounters a compounding effect.
Similar to Rydgren’s (2007) findings in his macrosociology of ethnic conflicts, May
(2000) showed that conflicts shaped perceptions of the past more than harmony and that
a narrative emphasizing past conflicts created a perception that racial conflict is ubiqui-
tous. May (2000) concludes that individuals in segregated mnemonic communities who
collectively remember negative encounters in their race talk, develop a shared under-
standing of the past that helps to restrict the ways that they might view race relations in
the future. Although he studied race talk and collective memory among the most marked
of American racial groups, May (2000, 312) points the way to future research in suggest-
ing that members of other racial groups also develop micro-‘communities of memory’ to
share stories of negative racial encounters that then narrow their view of race relations.
One might imagine, for example, an ethnographic study of race talk among a segregated
white community around negative interactions with African-Americans that included talk
of unpleasant interactions, petty crimes and other negative encounters.
Linking microstudies of memory with macrostudies of memory, Eyerman (2001) looks
at the discourses around remembering the past. In his analysis of African-American mem-
ory, he suggests that cultural trauma is representational wherein slavery serves as the point
of origin from which the formulation of black identity, as it relates to the social construc-
tion of blackness, race, and difference, has emerged. Eyerman suggests that there were
two narratives of African-American representation in post-slavery America, a ‘progressive’
narrative and a ‘tragic’ narrative. The progressive narrative emphasized African-American
advances in post-slavery years. This narrative became institutionalized in 20th Century
debates over black representation in media (Eyerman 2001, 132–153). In a debate about
representing the negro voice on radio, Eyerman (2001, 148) notes that ‘framed by the
progressive narrative, [it was determined that] blackness should be represented as culti-
vated, but still ‘black,’ that is similar to yet different from ‘white’.’; this entailed demon-
strating conviction, character, and a willingness to serve but not be subordinated to the
nation. In the progressive narrative, the slave past was seen as an ‘unwanted, but necessary
step towards acceptance in a modern, American society’ (Eyerman 2001, 148). The tragic
narrative was articulated by black nationalists, particularly members of the Nation of Islam
(Eyerman 2001, 165–173). Black nationalists tended to see Africa not only as a spiritual
home and cultural resource but also as a site of redemption; they were less concerned
with physically returning to Africa as a fixed geographical location than in finding com-
fort from its symbolic meaning as homeland, as something beyond and outside slavery

(Eyerman 2001, 167). African religions became a way of gaining redemption and salva-
tion after the tragedies of slavery. Black nationalists produced practical advice on how to
change behavior by adopting values of self-discipline, independence, self-love, unity,
racial purity, and self-respect. This narrative emphasized white society as ‘an oppressing
Other, a totality from which one was alienated and against which one must constantly
struggle, so as not to be its victim or dupe’ (Eyerman 2001, 173). In highlighting these
differing narratives, Eyerman demonstrates how different ways of interpreting the past,
can lead to different ways of constructing the present.
Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi (2007) similarly show how understanding the racial past
defines the racial present. They analyze the first museum in South Africa that commemo-
rates apartheid to show how macrolevel institutions can influence memory at the micro-
level. They demonstrate that although apartheid can be considered a difficult past in that
it is constituted by moral trauma, disputes, tensions, and conflicts, it is commemorated in
the museum through a narrative of consensus rather than a narrative of conflict (Teeger
and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007, 59). In the consensus narrative, the museum consistently
attempts to divorce a dreadful past from a hopeful present and to construct historical dis-
continuity between the past and the present (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007, 64).
The museum directs memory of the past by situating individuals within a specific mne-
monic message that is then enhanced by the controlled nature of the museum’s physical
setting that does not allow visitors to be distracted from its message; in this way, it
‘attempts to control and demarcate the range of available readings’ (Teeger and Vinitzky-
Seroussi 2007, 64). For instance, a required introductory film that provides a historical
context for apartheid enables this process by directing the way visitors are supposed to
consume museum artifacts (65).The museum encourages people to forget the past, by
presenting a narrative emphasizing reconciliation, goodwill, forgiveness, and acceptance
of the past (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007).
Themes of redemption, adjustment and acceptance are constructed in many racial and
ethnic trauma narratives. Such themes are socially and culturally produced out of a range
of possible options and only appear ‘natural’ and ‘logical’ after their construction. Stein
(2009) shows, for instance, that the Jewish Holocaust survivor narrative themes of
redemption and adjustment did not occur until long after the World War II. She demon-
strates that before widespread ‘Holocaust consciousness’ Jewish survivors, in order to
avoid stigma, had to remain largely silent about their past and create a biographical
discontunity between their past and present selves (Stein 2009, 48). Far from smooth
integration, survivors compartmentalized their lives and distanced themselves from the
past in a post-war world that did not initially want to hear their stories (Stein 2009, 58).
Only after the eventual rise of a Holocaust consciousness (created over time by holocaust
survivors forming backstage identity communities that they later brought frontstage) did a
redemption narrative replace a stigmatized silence (Stein 2009, 58). The cognitive socio-
logical approach and its attention to narrative structure and social pattern analysis can
enhance the sociological analysis of race by analyzing and comparing such narratives of
race, ethnicity and trauma.
Identity mobility and the strategic use of the marked and the unmarked
Dramaturgical studies of race look at the micro-negotiation of racial boundaries (Bailey
2006; Lewis 2003; Storrs 1999; Twine 1996). These studies can benefit from cognitive
sociology’s interest in the everyday production and negotiation of social category bound-
aries. Recent cognitive approaches to identity construction have looked at how marked

and unmarked social identities and identity attributes are negotiated and have variable
saliencies across different social contexts (Brekhus 2008, 1069). Individuals can accentuate,
mask, or mute different aspects of their identity in different social contexts and different
social networks (see Anderson 1999, 98–106; Brekhus 2003; Grazian 2003, 2008;
Renfrow 2004). Rockquemore and Brunsma (2002a, 47–49) make a similar observation
about race in their discussions with biracial individuals who perform a ‘protean racial
identity’ that allows them to shift between racial identities to match the racial category of
the social networks that they are presently in. Similarly, in a dramaturgical analysis of
racial discrimination, Feagin (1991) demonstrates that racial discrimination varies in differ-
ent social spaces with areas of greater public exposure leading to more susceptibility of
racial discrimination. Perry’s (2002) comparative study of white youth in predominantly
white and in racially mixed schools also demonstrates the multiplicity and situational vari-
ability of white racial identities. More recently, Perry and Shotwell (2009, 39) argue that
youth, in creative talk and interaction with one another, invent, deploy, shed and rein-
vent racial meanings in their practices and that they never fully settle into fixed social
boundaries.
Because strategic theories of doing race and ethnicity examine the shifting boundaries of
race and ethnicity and show its social construction at the micro-level, they often employ an
implicit cognitive sociology. Eisinger (1978, 90) identifies ethnicity as having a strategic
choice or optionalist character wherein individuals can adapt their ethnic presentations in
response to external social forces. In this optionalist view, ethnicity may be shed, resur-
rected, or adopted situationally. Similarly, Waters (1990) examined the cognitive, percep-
tual, and subjective notions of ethnicities, arguing that social assumptions about physical
appearance influence an individual’s ability to move into and out of ethnic groups as well as
their choice of ancestries with which to identify (see also Hansen 2005). Whites have the
luxury of choosing to have an ethnic identity and the option of choosing which ethnic iden-
tit(ies) to claim. Wilkins (2004) study of Puerto Rican wannabees who hung out with and
wanted to be culturally defined as Puerto Ricans shows that whites can even adopt a minor-
ity racial identity to shed their whiteness when it suits their convenience. This could be
attributed to ‘white privilege’ (McIntosh 1988), whiteness as practice (Dyer 1997; McDer-
mott and Samson 2005), or failure to acknowledge that whiteness as a set of unmarked and
unnamed cultural practices is a location of structural advantage (Frankenberg 1993); it is a
space that is often defined by its borders (see Black 2004).
Although the first strategic theories of this kind dealt with ethnicity rather than race,
the idea that race can be context dependent and strategically utilized has also begun to
gain currency. Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001) focused on biracial individuals in order
to understand how ‘cognitive interpretations of differing racial categories interact with
significant symbols to influence the way social actors understand themselves and their
relationship to others’ (226). They found that individuals strategize and choose the way
they constructed identity based on social and psychological processes such as social net-
works and interaction. Rockquemore (2002) also problematize the influence of appear-
ance on racial identity by suggesting that there are differences in the ways Black ⁄ White
biracial women are perceived by others. She posits that biracial women may not be
accepted by Black women because of their lighter skin color yet simultaneously be seen
as Black by whites in the course of their everyday lives (see also Brunsma and Rockque-
more 2001). In doing so she shows that even within a society, classification conventions
and identity attribution can vary from one ‘thought community’ to another. Even in
everyday life, the project of race requires a lot of cognitive work of selective attention
and selective inattention. Blee (2002, 27) has observed that members of organized racist

groups rarely join them as an outlet for long-held beliefs; rather they learn racist views
after joining. In essence, they learn racist views once they join racist ‘thought communi-
ties.’
Our ‘thought communities’ are also ‘optical communities.’ (Zerubavel 1997, 33–34).
Visual perception of the same sensory information varies cross-culturally, historically and
within cultures (Friedman forthcoming). We make racial attributions based on visual cues
and the visual cues we attend to depend on the optical communities we belong to. In
the United States, skin color is marked and given great weight as the primary racial indi-
cator, while the rest of the body is ignored as racially neutral. A cognitive sociology of
race could further analyze this socio-optical construction of race in the United States and
in other cultural contexts. Friedman (forthcoming) highlights the role of culturally pro-
duced selective visual perception in the social construction of sex and gender. A cognitive
approach to the sociology of race could similarly examine how optical communities
socialize members to visually perceive and thus socially construct race.
Cultural repertoires, white habitus and a sociology of the racially unmarked

A more macro-oriented approach to racialized thought communities appears in the works
of Bonilla-Silva and his colleagues (see Bonilla-Silva and Embrick 2007; Bonilla-Silva
et al. 2006). Employing a notion of cultural repertoires, schemas and ‘white habitus’
among whites who live in social and residential segregation, Bonilla-Silva and Embrick
(2007) analyze the unreflexive discursive structure of white worldviews on race. They
examine in detail how whites’ segregation shapes their racial expression, attitudes, aesthet-
ics and cognition (Bonilla-Silva and Embrick 2007, 323). They find that white informants
do not interpret their isolation from blacks as segregation nor do they interpret it as a
racial phenomenon or problem; they simply see it as ‘normal’ or ‘just the way things are’;
this naturalization of white isolation as normal, non-racial, and even positive (Bonilla-
Silva and Embrick 2007, 330–331) fits ideally with cognitive sociology’s emphasis on the
asymmetry between the marked and the unmarked (see Sullivan 2006).
Brekhus (1996, 502) illustrates the importance of distinctions where only one side of
the contrast is given explicit social value (often negative):
Social markedness highlights a contrast between marked phenomena that are explicitly given
a social value as either positive or negative and unmarked phenomena that are tacitly regarded
as neutral or generic. Note that this conception differs from the idea of social value (e.g.,
Durkheim and Mauss [1903]1963; Schwartz 1981; Williams 1990): whereas social value
emphasizes the key distinction as being between negative and positive status, the concept of
social markedness emphasizes the key distinction as being between statuses given explict social
value (negative or positive) and statuses given no explicit social value. The contrast is impor-
tant because in concealing the unmarked element’s social value, social marking hides the
relational basis of identity.
The key cognitive element in social marking is that the most insidious positive social
value is not that social value which is explicitly celebrated, but that social value which
is disattended and thus maintains the hidden social privilege of being normative.
A color-blind racist ideology (Bonilla-Silva 2006), fits perfectly into the markedness and
unmarkedness framework because it is an ideology (and its concomitant racist practices)
that has its power not in the explicit valuing of whiteness (like that found in white
supremacist movements) but because of its unconscious, unintentional and powerful
reconstruction of whiteness as the generic un-raced and ‘normalized’ category. It is this

construction that allows whites to see their race-exclusive social networks and racially-
segregated neighborhoods as ‘normal’ and ‘positive’ rather than a part of a de facto seg-
regationist society. Because cognitive sociology is concerned with the sociology of
attention and perception as well as the sociology of denial (see Zerubavel 2006), it pro-
vides the tools to further describe our ‘polite inattention’ to white racial self-segregation
and to white privilege—the unspoken elephant in the room of a racialized society. As
the title of Mica Pollock’s (2004) Colormute suggests racial privilege is not only
‘unseen,’ but ‘unspoken.’
Said’s (1978) seminal work, Orientalism, uses an implicit marked and unmarked cogni-
tive sociological framework when he describes the creation of the East and West as
‘semi-mythic’ (p. xviii) whereby the West is constructed as ‘rational, developed, humane,
superior’ and the East is constructed as ‘aberrant, undeveloped, inferior’ (p. 300). The
construction of the East as aberrant, undeveloped and inferior implies that the West is the
standard of normalcy by which all civilizations should be normed and measured against.
Moreover, lumping the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ into separate categories allows us to disat-
tend intracluster similarities; whereas splitting them into discrete entities widens interclus-
ter differences. The notion of the unmarked as rational, developed and superior also
appears in the everyday talk of Perry’s (2001) white students who see themselves as the
norm by which their non-white peers are defined against.
Perry’s (2001, 2002) study of white youth and the construction of ‘cultureless’ identi-
ties further contributes to our understanding of the figure and ground relationship
between the marked and the unmarked. She demonstrates a marked ⁄ unmarked cogni-
tive framework in the speech of white high school youths who assert racial superiority
by claiming that they have no culture because to be cultureless implies that one is
either the ‘norm’ (the standard by which others are judged) or ‘rational’ (developmen-
tally advanced) (Perry 2001, 57). Frankenberg (1993) similarly discovered that adult
white women described themselves as cultureless and devoid of ethnic culture and race.
These studies of talk about whiteness explore the ways that social unmarkedness is
reproduced in everyday race discourses. Perry also brings us to the issue of identity
mobility and context by showing how unmarked white identities were constructed dif-
ferently in mostly white and in mixed multiracial contexts. In the overwhelmingly
white school, white identity seemed cultureless to whites because white cultural prac-
tices were taken for granted, naturalized, largely unrecognized and unquestioned; by
contrast, in the multiethnic school whites reflected on their whiteness through the lens
of European American rational authority—a lens that refracted whiteness into all that
was controlled, rational and cultureless and otherness into all that was uncontrolled,
irrational and cultural (Perry 2001, 85). In line with Perry’s work, a cognitive sociology
of race suggests room for a semiotics of racial speech. Linguists interested in semiotics
(see especially Saussure 1959[1915]) have noted that the meaning of things derive from
their opposition to other things. The figure of minority racial identity provides the
contrast by which white identity becomes the ‘cultureless’ ground in white racial
speech.
Conclusion
An integration of cognitive sociology with race scholarship benefits both race scholarship
and cognitive sociology. Although most of the focus so far has been on drawing out cog-
nitive sociology’s potential for the sociology of race, it is important to acknowledge that
this fusion is a two-way street. While race scholars are primarily concerned with the

morally salient and politically important issue of racial oppression, the conclusions they
imply about cognition can be translated to a variety of contexts beyond the specific racial
contexts they study. In his call for a cognitive sociology focused on ‘social pattern analy-
sis,’ Zerubavel (2007) makes the case for using ethnographic data to speak about broad
analytic themes beyond the specific context of the data. Racial studies that look at the
social marking and weighting of racial attributes and that look at how the privileged mask
and mute their privilege in making color-blind and colormute statements also demon-
strate broader generic principles about the relationship between unseen and unspoken
privilege and seen and acknowledged stigma. Moreover, the challenges to groupism dem-
onstrated in careful social constructionist studies of race can help us to understand group
constructions and the processes of lumping and splitting in other social contexts.
In this article, we have argued for a more explicit cognitive sociology framework in
the sociology of race. Cognitive sociology concerns itself with classification, collective
memory, social inattention and attention, collective meaning-making and the social con-
struction of identity groups through social marking. Although many excellent studies of
race employ cognitive sociology implicitly, we argue for a more open and explicit recog-
nition of the cognitive sociology framework. An integration of cognitive sociology and
critical race studies will not only improve race studies but will contribute to an enriched
cognitive sociology.
Short Biography
Wayne H. Brekhus (PhD Rutgers) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University
of Missouri. His research interests include cognitive sociology, culture and identity, sexu-
alities and sociological theory. His publications in cognitive sociology appear in several
journals including Sociological Theory, The European Journal of Social Theory, Reseaux: Com-
munication, Technologie, Societe’ and Sociological Forum. In his solo-authored book Peacocks,
Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity (2003, University of
Chicago Press) he develops a general theory of social identity from an ethnographic ana-
lysis of the identity management strategies of gay male suburbanites. He is also a co-
author of Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology, with John F. Galliher
and David P. Keys.
David L. Brunsma is Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the Univer-
sity of Missouri. His current research focuses broadly on race, racism, antiracism and
human rights. His most recent books include The Leading Rogue State: The U.S. and
Human Rights (2008, Paradigm) and Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America, Second Edi-
tion (Rowman and Littlefield). He and his family lives and loves in Columbia, MO.
Todd Platts is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of
Missouri. He holds a BS in sociology from York College of Pennsylvania and an MA in
sociology from Ohio University. His research interests include popular culture, cultural
sociology, cognitive sociology, and social control. His dissertation will focus on allegorical
temporality in zombie cinema as it relates to shifting and emerging socio-cultural con-
cerns, fears, and anxieties.
Priya Dua is a doctoral student of Sociology at the University of Missouri. Her current
research focuses on the ways women experiencing hair loss or baldness construct a femi-
nine identity. Her previous publications include ‘Feminist Mentoring and Female Gradu-
ate Student Success: Challenging Gender Inequality in Higher Education’ in Sociology
Compass and ‘The Impact of Gender Characteristics on Mentoring in Graduate Depart-
ments of Sociology’ in American Sociologist.

Note
* Correspondence address: Dr Wayne Brekhus, 312 Middlebush Hall, Columbia, Missouri 65211, United States.
E-mail: brekhusw@gmail.com, brekhusw@missouri.edu
References
Abdelal, Rawi, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston and Rose McDermott 2006. ‘Identity As a Variable.’
Perspectives on Politics 4: 695–711.
Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. 1st ed. New York:
W.W Norton.
Bailey, Benjamin. 2006. ‘Black and Latino: Dominican Americans Negotiate Racial Worlds.’ Pp. 285–300 in Mixed
Messages: Multiracial Identities in the ‘‘Color-Blind’’ Era, edited by David L. Brunsma. Boulder: Lynne Rienner
Press.
Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckman. 1966 The Social Construction of Reality a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,
1st ed. Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday.
Bergesen, Albert. 2005. ‘Culture and Cognition.’ Pp. 35–47 in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture,
edited by Mark Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Black, Cheryl. 2004. ‘Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington.’ Theatre Survey 45: 19–40.
Blee, Kathleen. 2002. Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Blight, David W. 1989. ‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Mem-
ory of the Civil War.’ The Journal of American History 75: 1156–78.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 1997. ‘Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.’ American Sociological Review
62: 465–80.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the
United States, 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo and David G Embrick 2007. ‘‘Every Place Has a Ghetto...’’: The Significance of Whites’
Social and Residential Segregation.’ Symbolic Interaction 30: 323–45.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Carla Goar and David G Embrick 2006. ‘When Whites Flock Together: The Social Psy-
chology of White Habitus.’ Critical Sociology 32: 229–53.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 1996. ‘Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity: Sexual Identity Construction and
Maintenance in the United States.’ Sociological Forum 11: 497–522.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 1998. ‘A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus.’ Sociological Theory 16: 34–51.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2000. ‘A Mundane Manifesto.’ Journal of Mundane Behavior 1: 89–105.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2003. Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2007. ‘The Rutgers School: A Zerubavelian Culturalist Cognitive Sociology.’ European Journal
of Social Theory 10: 448–64.
Brekhus, Wayne H. 2008. ‘Trends in the Qualitative Study of Social Identities.’ Sociology Compass 2: 1059–78.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2002. ‘Ethnicity Without Groups.’ Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 43: 163–89.
Brubaker, Rogers, Mara Loveman and Peter Stamatov 2004. ‘Ethnicity As Cognition.’ Theory and Society 33:
31–64.
Brunsma, David L. 2006. ‘Public Categories, Private Identities: Exploring Regional Differences in the Biracial
Experience.’ Social Science Research 35: 555–76.
Brunsma, David L. and Kerry Ann Rockquemore 2001. ‘The New Color Complex: Appearances and Biracial
Identity.’ Identity 1: 225–46.
Bryson, Bethany. 1996. ‘‘‘Anything but Heavy Metal’’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes.’ American
Sociological Review 61: 884–99.
Cerulo, Karen A. 1997. ‘Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions.’ Annual Review of Sociology 23:
385–409.
Cerulo, Karen A. 2002. Culture in Mind: Toward a Sociology of Culture and Cognition. New York: Routledge.
Cerulo, Karen A. 2007. ‘Talking About Race.’ Sociological Forum 22: 219.
Cicourel, Aaron. 1974. Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press.
Dávila, Arlene 2001. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Davis, F. 1991. Who Is Black?: One Nation’s Definition, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. ‘Culture and Cognition.’ Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–87.
Durkheim, Émile and Marcel Mauss [1903]1963. Primitive Classification. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Duster, Troy. 1990. Backdoor to Eugenics. New York: Routledge.
Dwyer, Owen J. 2000. ‘Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict.’ Professional Geogra-
pher 52: 660–671.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London; New York: Routledge.

Eisinger, Peter K. 1978. ‘Review: Ethnicity as a Strategic Option: An Emerging View.’ Public Administration Review
38: 89–93.
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs. 2007. ‘Great Divides: The Cultural, Cognitive, and Social Bases of the Global Subordina-
tion of Women.’ American Sociological Review 72: 1–22.
Eyerman, Ron. 2001. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Feagin, Joe R. 1991. ‘The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places.’ American
Sociological Review 56: 101–16.
Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Friedman, Asia. forthcoming. ‘Toward a Sociology of Perception: Sight, Sex, and Gender’. Cultural Sociology.
Fujimura, John H., Troy Duster and Ramya Rajagopalan 2008. ‘Introduction race, genetics, and disease: Questions
of evidence, matters of consequence.’ Social Studies of Science 38: 643–56.
Fuller, Steve. 1984. ‘Review: The Cognitive Turn in Sociology.’ Erkenntnis (1975-) 21: 439–50.
Fuller, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Creating and Contesting Boundaries: Exploring the Dynamics of Conflict and Classification.’
Sociological Forum 18: 3–30.
Garroutte, Eva. 2003. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Gray, Herman. 1995. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for ‘‘Blackness’’. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Grazian, David. 2003. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Grazian, David. 2008. On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Griffin, Larry J. 2004. ‘‘‘Generations and Collective Memory’’ Revisited: Race, Region, and Memory of Civil
Rights.’ American Sociological Review 69: 544–57.
Hansen, Alan. 2005. ‘A Practical Task: Ethnicity as a Resource in Social Interaction.’ Research on Language and Social
Interaction 38: 63–104.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2005. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York:
Routledge.
Hook, Derek. 2006. ‘‘Pre-Discursive’ Racism.’ Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 16: 207–32.
Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Kachun, Mitch Alan. 2003. Festivals of Freedom : Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations,
1808 – 1915. Amherst, Mass. [u.a.]: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
LaRossa, Ralph, Wendy Simonds and Donald Reitzes 2005. ‘Culture, Cognition and Parenthood.’ Pp. 423–8 in
Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research, edited by Vern Bengtson, Alan C. Acock, Katherine R. Allen, Peggye
Dilworth Anderson and David M Klein. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lewis, Amanda E. 2003. ‘Everyday Race-Making.’ American Behavioral Scientist 47: 283–305.
Mannheim, Karl. 1985. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. San Diego, CA: A Harvest
Book.
May, Reuben A. Buford 2000. ‘Race Talk and Local Collective Memory among African American Men in a
Neighborhood Tavern.’ Qualitative Sociology 23: 201–14.
McDermott, Monica and Frank L Samson 2005. ‘White Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States.’ Annual
Review of Sociology 31: 245–61.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through
Work in Women’s Studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.
Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Morris, Edward W. 2007. ‘Researching Race: Identifying a Social Construction Through Qualitative Methods and
an Interactionist Perspective.’ Symbolic Interaction 30: 409–25.
Mullaney, Jamie L. 1999. ‘Making it ‘Count’: Mental Weighing and Identity Attribution.’ Symbolic Interaction 22:
269–83.
Nagel, Joanne 1994. ‘Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.’ Social Problems
41: 152–76.
Nayak, Anoop 2006. ‘After Race: Ethnography, Race and Post-Race Theory.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 29: 411–30.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed.
New York: Routledge.
Pager, Devah 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Pager, Devah 2008. ‘The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit,
and Consumer Markets. Annual Review of Sociology 34: 181–209.

Perry, Pamela 2001. ‘White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30:
56–92.
Perry, Pamela 2002. Shades of White: White Kids and Racial Identities in High School, Durham: Duke University Press.
Perry, Pamela and Alexis Shotwell. 2009. ‘Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis.’ Sociological Theory
27: 33–50.
Pollock, Mica. 2004. Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Renfrow, Daniel G. 2004. ‘A Cartography of Passing in Everyday Life.’ Symbolic Interaction 27: 485–506.
Renn, Kristen A. 2000. ‘Patterns of Situational Identity Among Biracial and Multiracial College Students.’ Review of
Higher Education 23: 399–420.
Renn, Kristen A. 2003. ‘Understanding the Identities of Mixed-race College Students Through a Developmental
Ecology Lens.’ Journal of College Student Development 44: 383–403.
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. 2002. ‘Negotiating the Color Line: The Gendered Process of Racial Identity Construc-
tion among Black ⁄ White Biracial Women.’ Gender & Society 16: 485–503.
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann and David L. Brunsma 2002a. Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.
Rockquemore, Kerry Ann and David L. Brunsma 2002b. ‘Socially Embedded Identities: Theories, Typologies, and
Processes of Racial Identity Among Black ⁄ White Biracials.’ Sociological Quarterly 43: 335–56.
Rydgren, Jens 2007. ‘The Power of the Past: A Contribution to a Cognitive Sociology of Ethnic Conflict.’ Sociolog-
ical Theory 25: 225–44.
Said, Edward 1978. Orientalism, 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959 [1915]. Course in General Lingusitics, New York: Philosophical Library.
Schutz, Alfred 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. [Evanston, IL]: Northwestern University Press.
Schwartz, Barry 1981. Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Schwartz, Norbert. 1998. ‘Warmer and More Social: Recent Developments in Cognitive Social Psychology.’
Annual Review of Sociology 24: 239–64.
Shackel, Paul 2003. Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape. Walnut Creek,
CA: Altamira Press.
Shakur, Sanyika 1993. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member. New York: Penguin.
Sheller, Mimi 2003. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London, New York: Routledge.
Simmel, Georg 1955. Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Spencer, Rainier 1999. Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States. Boulder, CO: West-
view Press.
Spencer, Rainier 2006. Challenging Multiracial Identity. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers.
Stein, Arlene 2009. ‘‘As Far as They Knew I Came from France’: Stigma, Passing, and Not Speaking about the
Holocaust.’ Symbolic Interaction 32: 44–60.
Storrs, Debbie 1999. ‘Whiteness as Stigma: Essentialist Identity Work by Mixed-Race Women.’ Symbolic Interaction
22: 187–212.
Strydom, Piet 2007. ‘A Cartography of Contemporary Cognitive Social Theory.’ European Journal of Social Theory
10: 339–56.
Strydom, Piet 2007. ‘Special Issue on Cognitive Sociology.’ European Journal of Social Theory 10(3).
Sullivan, Shannon 2006. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press.
Teeger, Chana and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007. ‘Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South
Africa.’ Symbolic Interaction 30: 57–78.
Twine, France Winddance 1996. ‘Brown Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture and the Construction of White Iden-
tity in Suburban Communities.’ Gender 3: 205–24.
Waters, Mary 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Waters, Mary 1999. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Wilkins, Amy C. 2004. ‘Puerto Rican Wannabes: Sexual Spectacle and the Marking of Race, Class, and Gender
Boundaries.’ Gender and Society 18: 103–21.
Williams, Richard 1990. Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Creation of Black and Irish Identities in the United
States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Kim 2006. Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar 1991. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar 1995. ‘The Rigid, the Fuzzy, and the Flexible: Notes on the Mental Sculpting of Academic
Identity.’ Social Research 62: 1093–106.
Zerubavel, Eviatar 1996. ‘Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification.’ Sociological Forum 11: 421–33.

Zerubavel, Eviatar 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar 2006. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2007. ‘Generally Speaking: The Logic and Mechanics of Social Pattern Analysis.’ Sociological
Forum 22: 131–45.
Zuberi, Tukufu 2001. Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.


On The Contributions of Cognitive Sociology To The Sociological Study of Race

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

On The Contributions of Cognitive Sociology To The Sociological Study of Race

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.

On the Contributions of Cognitive Sociology to the

ª 2010 The Authors

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Problems with the non-cognitive sociology of race

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Classification conventions and mental weighing

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

A particularly interesting aspect of American Indian racial identity that Garroutte

Memory, narrative, and the sociology of attention

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Cultural repertoires, white habitus and a sociology of the racially unmarked

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London; New York: Routledge.

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

ª 2010 The Authors Sociology Compass 4/1 (2010): 61–76, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00259.x

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi