Racialized Boundaries, Class Relations, and Cultural Politics

“Race” and “ethnicity” though key concepts in sociological discourse and public debate, have remained problematic. Policy pundits, journalists, and conservative and liberal academics alike all work within categories of race and ethnicity and use these concepts in public discourse as though there is unanimity regarding their analytical value. Racialized group conflicts are similarly advanced and framed as a “race relations” problem and presented largely in black/white terms. ¹ A prime example of this confusion is the analysis of the causes of the April 1992 Los Angeles riots. In the aftermath of the riots, academics and journalists analyzed the riots as a matter of race relations—first it was a problem between blacks and whites, then between blacks and Koreans, and then between blacks and Latinos, and back to blacks and whites. The interpretation of the riots as a race relations problem failed to take into account the economic changes, the economic restructuring, and the drastic shifts in demographic patterns that have created new dynamics of class and racialized ethnic relations in Los Angeles (see, for example, Davis, 1990).