Mixed Race Studies

The Marketization of Identity Politics

Sociology
Volume 47, Number 5 (October 2013)
pages 1011-1025
DOI: 10.1177/0038038513495604

Catherine Bliss, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Sociology has begun to question how new genetic sciences affect older ways of constructing and contesting social identity, including forms of identity politics that have brought women and minorities significant gains. This article presents US debates on genetics, identity politics, and race in order to theorize emergent transformations in light of the genomic revolution. Examining recent developments in the realms of pharmaceuticals and ancestry estimation, I argue that traditional forms of identity politics are still actively at work, though they are being marketized in novel ways. This article combines theories of racialization and medicalization to detail how genomics ushers in a subtle new version of identity politics: a pharmaceuticalized citizenship wherein health rights and political participation are co-envisioned in individualistic molecular terms.

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We Need to Talk about Race

Sociology
Volume 48, Number 6 (December 2014)
pages 1107-1122
DOI: 10.1177/0038038514521714

Bethan Harries, Research Associate
Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity
University of Manchester, United Kingdom

It is not easy to name racism in a context in which race is almost entirely denied. Despite a recent focus on the ‘silencing’ of race at a macro level, little has been done to explore the effects of living with these processes, including how they might be resisted. Drawing from a study with 20–30 year olds in Manchester, this article addresses this gap. It examines how respondents disavow racism they experience when to do so is counter-intuitively understood to be associated with being racist or intolerant. These narratives demand that we ask the question, why is racism denied? Or, why is it difficult to articulate? To do this, the article argues we must access narratives in ways that reveal the embeddedness of race and contradictory levels of experience and bring attention back to the meanings and effects of race in everyday life in order to challenge racism and white privilege.

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Answer Formats in British Census and Survey Ethnicity Questions: Does Open Response Better Capture ‘Superdiversity’?

Sociology
Volume 46, Number 2 (April 2012)
pages 354-364
DOI: 10.1177/0038038511419195

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

During a period of unprecedented ethnicity data collection in Britain, an almost universal characteristic of this practice has been the mandated use of the decennial census ethnicity classifications. In Canada and the USA a greater plurality of methods has included open response, now recommended for the 2020 US Census. As the ethnic diversity of Britain has increased, driven by immigration dynamics and population mixing leading to ‘superdiversity’, the census is no longer able to capture the new populations. The validity and utility of unprompted open response is examined in several ‘mixed race’ datasets. It is argued that open response can be a modus operandi for large-scale ethnicity data collection and that the lack of consistency in recording of such responses need not necessarily be viewed as a drawback. Open response offers substantial insights into the country’s superdiversity in a way that ethnicity categorization alone cannot.

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Finding, and correcting, my mistakes

Sociology
Volume 39, Number 3 (July 2005)
pages 483–499
DOI: 10.1177/0038038505052488

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Bristol

Mistakes are inherent in the process of research but can illuminate it. Some of the author’s mistakes have been false assumptions shared with others of his generation. His early work lacked a sufficiently sharp focus for him to be able to make any interesting mistakes. In 1967 he claimed that race was used as a role sign when he should have claimed that phenotypical differences were so used. He tended to take race as a synonym for colour, and failed to appreciate that a social construct could not be a basis for a general theory. His subsequent attempts to correct these mistakes are outlined.

Sir Karl Popper, one of my teachers, taught that we should learn from our mistakes, indeed ‘that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes’ (1969: ix; see also Agassi, 1968). In line with this doctrine, I have looked for the mistakes that I have made in the study of ethnic and racial relations, and what I have done to correct them. The exercise has strengthened my belief that Popper’s claim was either a pardonable exaggeration or depended on a restrictive conception of what constitutes knowledge. For in social science much can be learned from a data-gathering inquiry, like a social survey or a population census, or from attending a lecture. In the accumulation of new knowledge there are two phases. The first is inductive in character, gathering and sorting observations. The second phase, in which hypotheses about causal relations are put to the test, relies on deductive reasoning. Popper’s doctrine applies best in the second phase.

Much research in contemporary social science is entangled in the transition from the first to the second phase. Not all inquiry makes this move. Information collected for the purposes of public policy, like a population census, may remain descriptive. When, however, the research worker perceives in the information an intellectual problem, something requiring explanation, there is an impulse to deductive reasoning.

Another of my teachers, Sir Raymond Firth, told me that Malinowski, his teacher, used to insist that ‘without problems there are no facts’. Only when a scholar has decided on the problem can he or she decide which facts are or could be relevant. ‘Science begins with problems, practical problems or theoretical problems’, wrote Popper (1994a: 95–101). Yet the perception of a problem is no simple matter. The German expression Problemstellung is useful as denoting the recognition that something constitutes an intellectual problem; this recognition should include a formulation of the problem in such a way that it can be addressed, for, as others have said, a problem well stated is a problem half solved. Some of my mistakes have been false assumptions that I have shared with others of my generation, errors that can be identified only in retrospect. In trying to correct them I have learned things that, for me, constituted personal discoveries. Many of these were steps on the way towards the identification of causal relationships and the prospect that, one day, it may be possible to subject them to empirical testing…

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