Not just a social construct: Theorising race and ethnicity

Sociological theories of race and ethnicity have been dominated by the metaphor of the social construct, which suggests that they are ideological categories concealing 'real' principles of social structure. This idea is problematic because it elides the sense in which race and ethnicity operate both as functional principles of material exclusion and sources of social meaning. The paper examines critically the metaphor of social construction in leading contemporary theories of race and ethnicity, arguing that too often the context and the content of these processes of construction are not clarified and that, paradoxically, this can lead to the implicit incorporation of a racial essentialism into the explanatory enterprise. An alternative, symbolic approach to theorising race and ethnicity is suggested which avoids these pitfalls. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice and anthropological ideas of symbolic kinship, it argues that race and ethnicity can be theorised as both categories of material exclusion and of social meaning. The implications of this approach for understanding the historical construction of racial and ethnic categories are discussed, along with the implications for the relationship between sociological analysis and political activism in the arena of race.