“The Meaning of “Racism” by Jiannbin Shiao and Ashley Woody: Summary and Critique

🔹 Conceptual Ambiguity of “Racism”

• Inflated and Deflated Usage:
  • The concept of racism has been stretched to include a variety of social phenomena—individual bias, institutional discrimination, systemic inequality, etc. This inconsistency weakens the term’s conceptual clarity.
  • “The wide and also inconsistent use of ‘racism’ has meant that the term now ‘weakens rather than enhances arguments concerning race’” (Wilson 1987:12).
• Moral Condemnation vs. Analytical Use:
  • Racism is often used as a label of condemnation rather than as a precise analytical concept:
    • “Its purpose is not descriptive but rather to ‘signal the speaker’s unambiguous condemnation of the belief or practice in question’” (Quillian 2006:301).

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🔹 Proposed Framework: Four Meanings of Racism

Shiao and Woody categorize “racism” into four distinct constructs, expanding on Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) framework.

Type of Racism	Definition	Example Constructs
1. Attitudes (Racism1)	Racism as individual mental states, biases, or prejudices	Negative perceptions of nonwhite groups, racial resentment, group position ideologies (Bobo & Tuan 2006)
2. Cultural Schema (Racism2)	Racism as socially constructed cultural meanings	Racialization processes, dominant racial ideologies (Omi & Winant 1986), controlling images (Collins 1990)
3.1 Structural Racism: Racial Dominance (Racism3.1)	Preexisting inequalities due to historical racial hierarchy	Segregation, economic disparity, criminal justice bias (Alexander 2012), systemic white advantage (Feagin 2013)
3.2 Structural Racism: Maintenance Processes (Racism3.2)	Mechanisms that sustain racial inequality	Discrimination, exclusion, state policies, racial violence (Wimmer 2013), cultural mobilization (Bonilla-Silva 2018)

1️⃣ Racism as Individual Attitudes (Racism1)

• Racism often conceptualized as prejudice, bias, or personal bigotry.
• Example: Jennifer Hochschild et al. (2012) argue that racism has “failed as ‘a language with which to understand persistent racially inflected disadvantage’” (p. 145).
• Critique:
  • Reduces racism to an “individual disease” and ignores systemic aspects (Byrd 2011:1013).
  • Limits public discourse to individual morality rather than institutional solutions.

2️⃣ Racism as Cultural Schema (Racism2)

• Racism as social meanings and representations embedded in culture.
• Example: Omi & Winant’s racialization framework—”the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (1986:64).
• Racial meanings shape:
  • Group hierarchy (Kim 1999)
  • Media portrayals (Golash-Boza 2016)
  • Self-identity negotiation (Waters 1999)

3️⃣ Structural Racism: Racial Dominance (Racism3.1)

• Existing racial inequalities embedded in institutions.
• Forms of preexisting racial dominance:
  • Economic disparity (e.g., housing segregation, redlining)
  • Cultural dominance (e.g., white racial frame) (Feagin 2009).
  • Educational and health inequalities
• Key Example:
  • Reskin (2012) describes how race-linked disparities across multiple domains create a self-reinforcing “race discrimination system”.

4️⃣ Structural Racism: Maintenance Processes (Racism3.2)

• How racial inequalities persist over time.
• Active discrimination: Legal barriers, workplace hiring biases, voter suppression (Pager et al. 2009).
• Political mobilization of racism: White nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment (Bobo 2017).
• Racial violence and coercion: Ethnic cleansing, police brutality, historical genocide.

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🔹 Empirical Findings: Citation Analysis of 1,037 Sociology Papers

Shiao and Woody conducted a citation and content analysis of 1,037 sociology journal articles (1995-2015) to examine how “racism” is used.

Findings:

1. Six Distinct Citation Communities
   • Different scholarly subfields define and use “racism” differently.
   • Example: U.S. sociologists emphasize racism as structure, while European scholars focus on cultural dimensions.
2. Prevalence of Structural Racism (Racism3)
   • 48.9% of papers define racism structurally, but often without clear differentiation.
   • Growing prominence of “systemic racism” theories (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2001, Feagin 2006).
3. Fragmentation Among Sociologists
   • Different subfields focus on different aspects of racism.
   • Tension between attitudinal vs. structural conceptions.

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🔹 Implications for Sociological Research & Public Understanding

• Need for an inclusive yet differentiated approach.
  • Rather than arguing over a single definition of racism, scholars should use multiple interconnected frameworks.
  • “A singular concept may obscure multiple social processes at play” (Pascoe & Diefendorf 2018:124).
• Implications for Public Sociology:
  • Calls for greater clarity in anti-racism discourse:
    • Anti-Racism1: Changing individual attitudes.
    • Anti-Racism2: Challenging racial narratives & stereotypes.
    • Anti-Racism3.1: Eliminating racial disparities in institutions.
    • Anti-Racism3.2: Dismantling discriminatory structures.

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🔹 Conclusion

• Conceptual fragmentation in the meaning of “racism” affects both academic discourse and public understanding.
• Proposed solution: A differentiated approach that integrates attitudes, culture, and structure rather than pitting them against each other.
• Final Thought:
  • The persistence of racism depends on the balance between different forms of racism and the effectiveness of anti-racist efforts across all dimensions.

1. Lack of Engagement with Intersectionality

• The article primarily analyzes racism through a structural and sociological lens but does not extensively engage with intersectionality, which considers race alongside gender, class, sexuality, and disability.
• While the authors acknowledge cultural dominance and white racial framing, they do not deeply explore how racism intersects with other social inequalities.
• “The infrequent citation of female authors in all communities except Community E may be related to the scarcity of intersectionality in the analytic sample.” (p. 17)

2. Overemphasis on Academic Citation Networks

• The study focuses on academic discourse around racism, particularly citation patterns in sociology journals, but does not sufficiently account for real-world applications of these theories.
• While useful for mapping theoretical trends, it does not clarify how these academic perspectives influence public policy, activism, or lived experiences of racism.
• The authors themselves acknowledge that their study may be detached from public sociology:
  • “Future research might examine the meaning of racism at the interface of social science and lay audiences (e.g., in college, and even K–12, textbooks).” (p. 20)

3. Minimal Engagement with Non-Western Conceptions of Racism

• The article centers U.S. and European sociological frameworks, neglecting global perspectives on racism from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Indigenous communities.
• The framework could have been expanded to incorporate colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonial power structures more comprehensively.
• While the study mentions ethnic boundary-making, it does not fully explore racism in non-Western contexts.

4. Conceptual Overcomplication

• The article introduces four categories of racism (Racism1, Racism2, Racism3.1, Racism3.2), but these distinctions may not be practical for broader sociological or public discussions.
• The differentiation between preexisting consequential inequalities (Racism3.1) and processes that maintain racial dominance (Racism3.2), while theoretically sound, might blur in practical applications.
• Some scholars might argue that this complicates rather than clarifies the debate on how racism operates in society.

5. Limited Examination of Racial Ideology in Mass Media and Popular Culture

• The framework does not sufficiently address how racism is reinforced and transmitted through mass media, pop culture, and social media.
• While cultural schema (Racism2) is discussed, it focuses more on academic discourse rather than how racial ideologies are shaped and challenged in popular culture.
• This is particularly important in the 21st century, where digital racism and algorithmic bias play a growing role in perpetuating racial inequalities.

6. Reliance on Western-Centric Scholars and Theories

• The majority of the citations in the study come from U.S. and European sociologists, reinforcing a Western-centric perspective.
• It overlooks decolonial thinkers and scholars from the Global South who have critically analyzed race outside the Western racial framework (e.g., Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo).
• The dominance of U.S. sociological paradigms may limit its applicability in understanding racism globally.

7. Assumption That Structural Racism is Universally Accepted in Sociology

• The authors assume that structural racism has become the dominant framework in sociology, but this overlooks ongoing debates about race, class, and power.
• Some sociologists (e.g., William Julius Wilson) argue that economic inequality plays a greater role than race in contemporary disparities, which the article does not directly address.
• The political implications of defining racism primarily through structure vs. attitudes could have been further debated.