ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how we can we think with and against race. There is a long history of arguments about replacing the term ‘race’ with something else, because race has no foundation in biology but is rather a social construct whose meaning is transformed bv processes of racialisation. A range of arguments about how to use race in contemporary analyses of racism is presented and discussed. The main argument is broadly aligned with that of Stuart Hall – that we cannot just do away with race in sociological thinking, replacing it with another concept such as ethnicity. At the same time, there is a different though related question concerning racial identities, and how these should be approached theoretically and also as experienced identities. Paul Gilroy’s arguments about ‘planetary humanism’ and the subjectivities mobilised through ‘convivialities’, and related arguments by Appiah, address this question. Thinking ‘beyond race’ is also addressed when examining the implications for race and racism of demographic changes, including the rise of majority-minority populations, and of ‘mixed-race’ populations. Emirbayer and Desmond’s arguments about the possibilities of emancipatory ‘racial reconstruction’ as ‘racial democracy’, where racial identities continue to play a part as people move towards emancipation, are discussed.
