Defining Race, Marketplace, and Other Key Concepts

Source (To cite): G.D. Johnson, K.D. Thomas, A.K. Harrison, and S.A. Grier (Eds.), Race in the Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 7-10.

The following explanations are not comprehensive. They should be considered good working definitions, intended to establish common understandings of how [we conceive and operationalize these terms]. We realize that each term can be (and have been) additionally complicated.

Race

Race, in the context of RIM, cannot be separated from power. We define it as a mode of sociopolitical classification that creates enduring hierarchies based on physical appearance, cultural practices, and ancestry. Race is generally thought to comprise specific inherent qualities ascribed to biological differences, including skin tone, blood, and other physical/physiological characteristics. In contrast, ethnicity encompasses cultural qualities achieved through socialization, such as language and religious practices. Under most circumstances, society will not accept a person changing their race. Although race divides humanity into several distinct subsets, its original and continued impact is to privilege White classified people as a group relative to non-whites through “the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of [equitable] economic opportunities” (Mills 1997, p. 11). Racial hierarchies manifest as both ideologies that get applied to racially differentiated identities and practices, which facilitate, perpetuate, and magnify race-based inequalities (Golash-Boza 2016). As such, our definition of race includes social and ethnic groups who experience racialization under its overarching classificatory design (Silverstein 2005).

Although regarded as a totalizing force—meaning that race consistently ranks among the most salient factors in determining people’s identities, outlooks, and life chances—a vital dimension of RIM scholarship involves addressing the intersections between race and other socially consequential categories including gender, class, age, sexuality, ability, and religion as they concertedly relate to marketplace thought and practice. Indeed, such intersectional frameworks are essential to grasping lived experiences of race. For instance, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000, p. 47) engages the importance of intersectionality in US consumer society in these terms:

Patterns of consumer racism that fall more heavily on Black women affect the purchasing power of their income. Because African American women usually are responsible for families, they do much of the shopping for housing, food, clothing, health care, transportation, recreation, and other consumer goods. Consumer racism in all of these areas means that Black women’s depressed incomes simply do not have the same purchasing power as those of White men or women.

Marketplace

On the other hand, we understand markets to be socially constructed fields of social interaction and systems/networks of exchange featuring a wide range of valued assets and resources. We often think of markets in economic terms and tend to characterize them as involving exchanges of commerce and money. Marketplace, in our formulation, includes sites of cultural interchange, exchanges of service, as well as brokering in political power, ideology, and persuasion. Accordingly, marketplaces are envisioned as broad and inclusive formulations that incorporate arenas of retail, finance, housing, health care, politics, education, advertising, employment, media, religion, and the like.

In forwarding RIM and its goal of inclusive, fair, and just marketplaces, our objective is not to promote some sort of “black capitalism” as one scholar may have erroneously believed (Micheals 2018); nor do we have a visceral hatred of markets. We do not conceptualize markets as antisocial enclaves or as mere synonyms of capitalism and neoliberalism. On the contrary, as many scholars have demonstrated, markets play a critical role in the social life of any modern society and are meaningfully connected to ways of expressing love and care (Bandelj et al. 2017; Graeber 2004; Zelizer 2005). As such, they are valued mechanisms of social integration, coordination, and distribution (Ferguson 2015). To paraphrase anthropologist James Ferguson (2015, p. 128), our aim is not necessarily to replace markets with something else (racism also holds a key place in the development of welfare states, see Bhambra and Holmwood 2018) but to use them to do socially useful things that would be impossible to do without them.

Having outlined RIM’s conceptions of race and marketplace, a handful of other concepts [...] also warrant preliminary definitions:

Capitalism:

An economic system that centers on the private ownership of resources. In a capitalist society, the means of trade are primarily owned and controlled by private entities, rather than cooperatively or by the state. Typically, the process of generating goods and/or providing services produces significant tension between the private owners’ desire to maximize monetary profits, steward the environment, and support social welfare.

Colonialism:

The extension of political and economic control, typically by European powers (colonial states), over new territories and their inhabitants via the procurement of lands, exploitation of ecological resources, racialization of native peoples, and imposition of sovereign authority through commissioned (such as colonial officials and military) and noncommissioned (such as missionaries, traders, and settlers) agents of the colonial state.

Commodification:

The process or act of transforming a person or thing (tangible or intangible) into a commodity—that is, an object intended for trade.

Dialectical:

The dynamic, interconnected, and often contradictory relationship between social structures, cultural practices, and each individual’s ability to act independently.

Discrimination:

Unjust treatment of individuals or categories of people, generally, as a result of conscious or implicit bias associated with one or more identity coordinates, such as race, gender, age, sexuality, and social class. Discrimination can be experienced at the interpersonal level as well as through systems, structures, and institutions.

Identification:

The process whereby individuals recognize themselves (self-identification) and/or are recognized by others as belonging to collectively identified social group (such as race, gender, sexuality, religion). Such recognitions typically involve some ascription to (in the case of self-identifications) or expectation of adherence to the norms associated with the collective group. We emphasize processes-of-identification ahead of any notion of set identity, as the former draws attention to the fact that what we consider “identities” are, in everyday practice, fluid, negotiated, and materialize through social interaction.

Ideologies:

Tacit (taken for granted) perceptions of the world and how it works, which advance the interests of particular groups, justifying and normalizing their position within the existing social structure.

Legitimation:

The manner with which a person, place, or thing gains justification and normalcy by their/its perceived or actual association with the values and norms upheld by a given society.

Marketization:

The process of transforming a public-sector enterprise or communal aspect of society (such as air or water) into one that is privately operated, controlled, and sold for consumption. This process typically requires making changes to the legal structure of the enterprise itself and/or the environment where it operates.

Neoliberalism:

An economic ideology that advocates for free-market enterprise. Rather than perceiving the government as a provider of public welfare, the state’s primary function is to promote markets and foster competition, mainly through cutting or completely removing business-related regulations, restrictions, and oversight, and enacting pro-business trade practices, such as developing low or no taxation trade zones—think North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Racialization:

The process or act of designating a social group and/or their cultural practices to a particular racial identity, regardless of how individual members of the social group self-identify, in such a way that this classification is assumed to be essential, inherent, prevailing, and hierarchical relative to other racial groups.

Racism:

(1) The ideology and practice of designating social groups according to race (racialization) and recognizing such designations as a basis for hierarchical ranking and differential treatment. (2) A prevailing (global) structuring force that grants privileges and access to resources on the basis of perceived proximity to Whiteness and imposes social and material disadvantages based on proximity to Blackness.

Source (To cite): G.D. Johnson, K.D. Thomas, A.K. Harrison, and S.A. Grier (Eds.), Race in the Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 7-10.