Mixed Race Studies

Racialization and its paradigms: From Ireland to North America

Current Sociology
Volume 64, Number 2 (March 2016)
pages 213-227
DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614782

Vilna Bashi Treitler, Professor of Black and Latino Studies; Professor of Sociology
City University of New York

This article offers a template for understanding and analyzing racialization as a paradigm. Further, this template is applied to the North American case – an important one because it has endured and spread across the globe despite the enormous weight of scientific evidence against it. The fallacy of race (and in particular the North American Anglo-origin variant) endures for two reasons. First, social agents seeking to gain or maintain power and control over paradigm-relevant resources benefit from reinvesting in pseudoscientific racial paradigms. Second, new science proving the fallacy of race is ignored because ignoring new paradigmatic science is in fact the way normal science operates. Thus, a paradigmatic analysis of race may help to explain why current social science approaches to the demise of racial thought may be ineffective.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the working paper “Racialization – Paradigmatic Frames from British Colonization to Today, and Beyond” here.

394. Paper Session: New Issues in Race and Identity

Crossing Borders: 2015 Annual Meeting
Eastern Sociological Society
Millennium Broadway Hotel
New York, New York
2015-02-26 through 2015-03-01

Sunday, 2015-03-01, 10:15-11:45 EST (Local Time)

Presider: Vilna Bashi Treitler, Baruch College, City University of New York

• Blacks, Latinos, Jews and Foreigners are Taking Over: How Innumeracy About Groups Shapes Public Policy Charles A. Gallagher — La Salle Uinversity
• Limited by the Color Line: How Hypodescent Affects Responses to Mixed-Race Identity Claims Casey Lorene Stockstill — University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Siblings: the Overlooked Agents of Racial Socialization of Black/White Biracial Youth Monique Porow — Rutgers University
• The Mulata Identity: Race, Gender, and Nation Nicole Barreto Hindert — George Mason University
• Resurrecting Slavery: Temporal Borders, Causal Logics and Anti-racism in France Crystal Fleming — State University of New York at Stony Brook

For more information, click here.

The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions

Stanford University Press
2013
240 pages
7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804757713
Paper ISBN: 9780804757720
E-bok ISBN: 9780804787284

Vilna Bashi Treitler, Professor of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies
Baruch College, City University of New York

Race is a known fiction—there is no genetic marker that indicates someone’s race—yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism.

In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups—Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans—she shows how each negotiates America’s racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these “ethnic projects” these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Racism and Ethnic Myths
• 2. How Ethnic and Racial Structures Operate
• 3. Ethnic Winners and Losers
• 4. The Irish, Chinese, Italians, and Jews: Successful Ethnic Projects
• 5. The Native Americans, Mexicans, and Afro-Caribbeans: Struggling Ethnic Projects
• 6. African Americans and the Failed Ethnic Project
• 7. The Future of U.S. Ethnoracism
• Notes
• Index