Beaud and Noiriel have no problem with the concept of race. They merely feel that it must remain in its proper place and be dealt with only as a “variable or special case, understood as part of a broader scientific problem” (p. 192). We are in complete disagreement with this, but we do agree with the authors when they assert that there is no such thing as pure racism, independent of inter-class domination. But this is also true of class relations, which never exclude racial or gender domination, which inclines us to “conceive both the irreducibility of the racial question and its inextricable link with relations of class and gender.”
Now while race and class are closely associated, the injustices and wrongs suffered by racial minorities can nonetheless not be reduced to class relations, to capitalist domination. To reduce everything to class locks us into an interpretive framework which is both Eurocentric and economistic (precisely the one used in Race et sciences sociales). Yet a racial analysis will be legitimately faulted for failing to talk about class, though the opposite is rarely true.
Comments