Content area
Full Text
Abstract:
There is now little contest in the social sciences over rejecting racial essentialism in theory and analysis of race. There is, however, contest and confusion over what exactly it means to reject racial essentialism. Is it appropriate to define and employ racial groups as a category of analysis given that there is no scientific basis for racial categorization? Is racial identity meaningful and viable as a concept if a rejection of essentialism is where one begins analysis? Do we have any epistemological basis for persisting in using the terminology of "race" and "races"? The consequences for social analysis that stem from rejecting racial essentialism are as yet unclear. In this essay, I focus in particular on the consequences for representing racial subjectivity. I first review the scholarly consensus on rejecting racial essentialism and several theoretical alternatives proposed in the literature for representing an anti-essentialist racial subjectivity. I then consider the film Bulworth as a popular representation of an anti-essentialist racial subjectivity. I find promise and impossibility in both the theoretical and popular representations.
Keywords: critical race theory; essentialism; racial subjectivity; popular culture; film
Race is a social and historical construction, rather than an inherent, fixed, essential biological characteristic. Scholarship in sociology, anthropology, in legal studies-the home discipline of the movement called Critical Race Theory (CRT)-renders this point a virtual unquestioned certainty. Critical Race Theorists Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp and Angela Harris (2002) highlight the uniformity of the rejection of essentialism within CRT, noting that it is "de rigeur" to claim antiessentialism and that there exists "an anti-essentialist bandwagon." Valdes, Culp and Harris also note that despite this consensus on the rejection of essentialism, there is little consensus on what anti-essentialism means. They argue that it has come to mean different things to different people and seems to be able to stand for a wide variety of theoretical assumptions.
The rejection of essentialism forces a destabilization in the very concept of race itself. This destabilization has different kinds of consequences depending upon analytic focus mat fall into two broad groups: consequences for the analytic use of racial groups as a "variable" and consequences for the analytic concepts of racial identity or racial subjectivity. This essay focuses in particular on consequences for the analytic...