Race: real and unreal

Chapter 2 asks what it means to be ‘critical’ about ‘race’. The chapter begins by exploring social theories of race and racism, examining the ways in which theorists have understood both the origins of modern ideas about race and the social reproduction of race thinking and practice. In particular, Chapter 2 unpacks the social construct thesis by considering race not only as being socially constructed, but as a fully social relationship (one that is internal to the history of modernity) and as a tool of cultural mediation. The second half of Chapter 2 discusses leading edge approaches in contemporary critical race studies. These include CRT but also critical social theory as applied to race; race critical theory; analyses of racial capitalism; and Afropessimism. By locating CRT within wider Black Atlantic thought, this chapter argues that CRT’s insistence on the centrality of racism does not only derive from its analysis of US civil rights struggles but from a transnational body of scholarship that has understood that racism is not a decorative feature of society and that, though it is in one sense ‘unreal’, it is never merely illusory or subjective.