Critical Race Theory,Marxism,and the Problem of Ideology

Ideology and Marxism

A preliminary question might be: Why do we need a concept of ideology at all? Pierre Bourdieu, in a conversation with Terry Eagleton, put the matter bluntly: “I tend to avoid the word ‘ideology.’ . . . It [is] a manner of making visible a sort of invisible separation between the true knowledge—the possessor of science—and false consciousness” (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992:113). Yet the need persists for a concept that enables us not only to understand the mental frameworks people use to make sense of their world but also to develop a sound basis for criticizing frameworks that are not merely false but contribute to injustice. ³

A significant sociological tradition associated with Mannheim (1936) sees ideologies as belief systems or worldviews that need to be approached neutrally or “relationally” to adequately understand them (Shils 1972; Turner 1995). For critical race theory, however, along with Marxist, postcolonial, and many feminist theories of society, it is necessary to develop an evaluative or critical stance toward belief systems to reveal how ideological thought is not merely false or distorted but actively contributes to an oppressive social order. Particularly in the case of racial ideologies, Mills (1997, 2017) and similarly minded theorists contend that the failure to adopt such a critical stance is both an intellectual weakness of modern political thought and a symptom of its epistemic complicity.

Critical conceptions of ideology also enjoy the sort of long and highly disputed use that can prove illuminating for current purposes. Geuss (1981:4) helpfully distills the tripartite “family of ways” in which critical conceptions of ideology are most often advanced. First, in an epistemic critique, ideas are seen as ideological when they are mistaken, distorted, or biased. A constellation of beliefs, attitudes, or dispositions constitutes an ideology in this instance because its claims about the world are false, empirically slanted, or misleadingly incomplete. Second, in a genetic, or political, critique, ideas are ideological insofar as they misrepresent social reality in ways that originate in, express, or serve the interests of a (typically dominant) social group. ⁴ Finally, in a functional critique, ideas are ideological because they reproduce unjust and oppressive social arrangements. Here, unfounded or distorted forms of consciousness that establish or reinforce relations of domination and exploitation are seen as ideological because of their social effects. Over the long history of ideology critique, theorists have emphasized one or more of these grounds for distinguishing between ideological and nonideological forms of social consciousness. Yet what is the relation between these epistemic, political, and functional dimensions of ideology?

An early answer to this question emerged in the work of Marx and Engels. Beginning with their writings later published in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels ([1932] 1977) introduced the critical notion of ideology as a set of ideas held, consciously or not, by a ruling class. In doing so, they developed a genetic or political conception of ideology: Such ideas are produced by and advance the interests of society’s dominant group, and they become the “ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels [1932] 1977:64) of the social order. This early conception harbored ambiguities, however. A close reading of The German Ideology reveals a text, as Eagleton (1991:79) notes, that “hesitates significantly between a political and an epistemological definition of ideology.” When Marx and Engels ([1932]1977:64) famously declare, “[t]he ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” of the society, they appear to mean these are false ideas that express the material interests and legitimize the power of society’s dominant class. But are the ideas of the ruling class ideological primarily because they are illusory? Because they are advanced by a dominant group? Because they reproduce an oppressive society? We could imagine sets of ideas that are ideological in all three dimensions, which may have been how Marx and Engels understood the capitalist ideology of their day. The problem for sociological theory, though, is that we cannot simply assume this to be the case.

A second area of tension arises in Marx and Engels’s approach to the relationship between ideology and nondominant social groups. If ideology is an illusory set of social beliefs reflecting the interests of a dominant class and those beliefs become the ruling ideas of society as a whole, they presumably influence the beliefs of subordinate classes as well; otherwise, it is unclear in what sense they could be considered ruling ideas. If these ideas do exercise a socially pervasive influence, how might a subordinate class develop beliefs that reject these illusory ideas and even come to challenge them? Clearly, Marx and Engels argue strongly for the likelihood of such a challenge, and from the Communist Manifesto onward provide many suggestions as to how working-class consciousness might develop in the face of society’s ruling ideas. Nevertheless, an enduring tension exists between the abstract notion that nondominant groups are influenced by dominant ideologies and the assertion that social location makes them much less likely to be.

To further complicate matters, later work by Marx presents a different conception of ideology. In a section of the first volume of Capital titled “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” Marx ([1867] 1977:166) argues that in capitalist societies the social relations between producers do not present themselves as “direct social relations between persons in their work” but rather as “what they are”: “material relations between persons and social relations between things.” Even though the production of value and the reproduction of society itself depend on the collective activity of its laborers, a capitalist system of generalized commodity production by “private individuals” (Marx ([1867] 1977:165) ensures the social character of each producer’s labor—its connection to the labor of others—does not become apparent except through the exchange of the commodities they produce. Not only does the economic structure of capitalism shape the fundamental relations between persons in singularly exploitative ways, but the nature of this structure generates a partial, misguided view of the underlying workings of society itself. In a further mystification, this “world of commodities,” no longer recognizable as the historical products of human labor, manifests in everyday life not as a social reality particular to capitalism but as the full, natural state of the world (Marx ([1867] 1977:155). ⁵

For the Marx of Capital, this does not mean the various aspects of capitalist economic life as they present themselves—private ownership, market exchange, the values of goods, and so forth—are merely imaginary. They are, as Geras (1971:75) insists, not “illusory appearances but realities”—realities that are part and parcel of how capitalism is lived. Because “the operation of the market economy itself induces ideological beliefs in the agents of capitalist production” (Callinicos 2004:159), the shared conviction that those realities are simply natural to the modern world can be characterized as a materially produced form of societal consciousness. Under these circumstances, a picture of society as a unified order becomes difficult for all members to achieve; ideology, as Eagleton (1991:85) observed, has now been “transferred from the superstructure to the base” in such a way that its functional and epistemic characteristics have become fused. The question of how workers might grasp the unjust nature of the real social relations that are reproduced beneath this ideological level of appearances is left unresolved. ⁶

Subsequent theorists attempted to develop these core insights in several ways. Particularly influential in this regard was the early work of Lukács, who sought to elevate Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism into a systemic principle of capitalist society. Introducing the expansive concept of “reification,” Lukács ([1922] 1971) theorized ideology as a dominant and oppressive form of societal consciousness with far-reaching epistemic effects, including the ability to shape much of modern philosophical thought. For Lukács, reification—the objectifying tendency of the commodity form to pervade all areas of capitalist social life—not only obscures the underlying social character of labor, but it also actively shapes the dominant ideas and forms of knowledge of the larger society. In this way, Lukács provides a uniform and expressive conception of ideology, an ideational totality in which all levels of society are imprinted with the oppressive form of reified, bourgeois consciousness. ⁷ However, nested within this functional-epistemic theory of capitalist ideology is a strongly genetic/political conception. Because the narrow rationality of society is also the expression of capitalist class interests, those ideological distortions are imposed by the epistemic limits of the social group that produces it—limits the group itself cannot recognize. In this way, ideology takes on a double or self-reinforcing identity: a distinctively class-based set of political beliefs that also operates as a pervasively structured form of social consciousness.

Yet the working class is not fully encaged within similar epistemic constraints. Developing an early version of standpoint theory, Lukács ([1922] 1971:166) contends that capitalism’s daily conditions of existence, which reduce each worker to a “mechanized and rationalized tool,” can also confer an epistemic advantage, one that grants the working class an elevated understanding of the unjust nature of society. For Lukács, the objective dynamics of capitalism itself set the proletariat on a path toward becoming the “unified subject-object of history” (Lukács ([1922] 1971:197)—that is, the collective agent and the historical product of social transformation, not through philosophical contemplation but through practical, revolutionary activity.

Lukács’s early work, and in particular the concept of reification, exerted considerable influence on the development of twentieth-century Western Marxism, and it would later resonate in certain circles of American sociology (Jay 1984; Pitkin 1987). Subsequent commentators, however, even sympathetic ones, have found Lukács’s proleptic account of this proletarian “revolutionization” unconvincing, and along with it his conception of ideology. ⁸ Criticisms of the latter have focused on the concept of reification and its expansive, multivalent status within Lukács’s social theory—simultaneously the dominant form of social consciousness, the distorted beliefs of a particular class, and “the central structural problem of capitalist society” (Lukács [1922] 1971:83). Despite the initial conception of society as “a unity of diverse elements” (Lukács [1922] 1971:9), reified social thought here appears to take shape as the unmediated emanation of an oppressive social structure. It is a theory of domination that seems to entail, as Stedman Jones (1971:48) notes, “the saturation of the social totality” by “pure ideology.” Implausibly, the material structure of a society seems to prescribe “a single, fixed and unalterable way” (Hall [1983] 2021:149) of understanding itself, thereby stretching an emphasis on systemically oppressive functions into a strong form of structural determinism.

Likewise unpersuasive is the claim that ideology simultaneously expresses a structural imperative and the singular belief system of a particular class. By suggesting the structurally generated consciousness of capitalist society somehow represents the “ideological essence of a pure class subject” (Stedman Jones 1971:48), Lukács’s account seems to imagine a capitalist class that can comprehensively shape the social meaning of its era by unitarily advancing its own ideational project. This emphasis on the genetic or political nature of ideology suggests, as Eagleton (1991:101) notes, that each social class has “its own peculiar, corporate ‘worldview,’” and ideological dominance therefore entails “one of these worldviews imposing its stamp on the social formation of the whole.” Yet it is not persuasive that ideologies exist in a one-to-one correspondence with particular classes or social groups (Hall [1983] 2021; Larrain 1983), and even when ideologies are in some way related to group interests, the relationship is often not simply an expressive one. Ideological beliefs may express, legitimize, or universalize the interests of a group; they can also disavow, dissemble, or even run counter to them.

Furthermore, the claim that an oppressed group—in Lukács’s ([1922] 1971) account, the proletariat—might somehow remain free of a dominant ideology securely maintained by societal structure and ruling class power alike also strains credibility. To be sure, Lukács does distinguish between the actual and the theoretical consciousness of the proletariat, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the everyday experience of social subordination might encourage the development of alternative perspectives and even lead some to an oppositional consciousness. Indeed, Lukács’s emphasis on the epistemic advantages that accrue from experiencing social life “from below” would be taken up later in the twentieth century by feminist standpoint theories (Wylie 2004), which, in turn, influenced critical race theorists such as Mills. Yet it is difficult to reconcile the claim that dominant ideologies are generated by societal structures with the claim that dominated social groups are structurally positioned to develop their own oppositional consciousness. In effect, Lukács fused, as Eagleton (1991:102) put it, “two discrepant theories”: one a structural notion of ideology derived from commodity fetishism and the other a “historicist” perspective on ideology as the “worldview of a class subject.” In the process, the possibility that the social beliefs of subordinate groups may be complex, contradictory, or even incoherent receives too little consideration. ⁹

Recent theorists have looked to Gramsci (1971), whose more supple and strategic conception of ideology offers a useful counterpoint to that of Lukács. For Gramsci, modern capitalist societies, especially those with democratic institutions, achieve social stability not simply by relying on economic structures and coercive forms of state power but by securing active support from the governed. Gramsci develops the concept of hegemony, by which he means a type of political dominance that rests not on coercive power but on the voluntary consent of subaltern classes or groups, to emphasize the important role of ideological work—the transmission of ideas, values, cultural beliefs, and habits of speech—in constructing the broader social alliances that authorize and contribute to stable political rule, even in exploitative and oppressive societies. This emphasis on hegemony not as a static social condition but as something that is actively pursued and often contested—and which, even when achieved, must be continually renewed—imparts a much more dynamic and conflictual character to ideology than earlier Marxist conceptions.

Gramsci recognized that ideologies are not simply oppressive mechanisms or false appearances. When understood within a certain historical context, ideologies constitute “psychologically” meaningful beliefs and social identities that need to be understood on their own terms. Furthermore, Gramsci (1971) distinguishes between structural ideologies and ideologies that are “arbitrary” or “willed.” Structural or “historically organic” ideologies “‘organize’ the human masses” and “create the terrain” on which subjects act, acquire consciousness of their social position, and engage in struggle with one another (Gramsci 1971:376–77). Willed ideologies, by contrast, emerge more contingently or strategically, taking shape within an established horizon of thought and action but nonetheless constituting an active, subjective engagement with existing conditions. Ideologies do not simply take the form of abstract structures of thought or “systems of ideas”; they are living, circulating beliefs that are built on (and taken as) a kind of social “common sense” (Gramsci 1971:325–26, 423).

Gramsci also disavows the notion of a close correspondence between ideologies and particular classes. Rejecting a strongly genetic conception of ideology, he advances a theory of capitalist social structure that defines the terrain on which political and ideological processes collide but without specifically determining those processes, their outcomes, or their meanings for social actors (Gramsci 1971:376–77). For Gramsci, there is rarely a single, unified, and coherent “dominant ideology” that pervades the social order; instead, ruling ideologies, as Eagleton (1991:123) notes, typically cohere from a “hybrid of elements” that can appeal to multiple classes. Social beliefs operate on a differentiated terrain in which an array of ideological currents engage. ¹⁰

It is in this context that the notion of hegemony defines the ideological conditions in which dominant social classes may secure popular consent in a society marked by unjust oppression. To win hegemony, for Gramsci, is to establish moral, political, and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing a particular worldview throughout society. Particularly in liberal societies, dominant classes may seek to exercise power by forging a “hegemonic bloc”—a composite formation “that selectively integrates the interests of different social forces and class fractions” (Colpani 2022:225). As a type of practical, moral knowledge, hegemonic ideologies may be intellectually contradictory and even incoherent but can appeal to an array of social actors, enlisting disparate interests into stable blocs of social and political support. ¹¹

Gramsci’s writings by no means settle all the questions and ambiguities raised by Marxist theories of ideology. ¹² Yet it is useful to counterpose the integrative holism of a Lukács to the more dynamic and processual conceptions of Gramsci, and the latter’s ideas have been adapted in various ways for theoretical interventions into questions of racial ideology (Hall [1986] 2021; Shelby 2003)—a topic to which I soon will return. Before doing so, though, it is important to reconstruct and assess the different substantive concerns of critical race theory.

Critical Race Theory and Racial Ideology

The fundamental project of critical race theorists has been to explain the position of race and racism at the center of the modern social order. Philosopher Charles W. Mills referred to his race-critical philosophy as a form of radical liberalism; sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva characterized his own framework as a “racialized social system approach” and has developed a more explicit theory of racial ideology. Yet the two theorists are in broad agreement in terms of the racial constitution of modern society. Less often recognized, they also share an intellectual affiliation with Marxist theory, particularly ideas emerging from the young Marx and Engels. By situating each thinker’s mature conception of racial ideology within his larger intellectual project, we can see how several threads within the complex legacy of Marxism’s own handling of the problem of ideology may have found their way into core propositions of critical race theory.

Mills draws on several political traditions—liberalism, Black radicalism, Marxism—to retheorize the nature of racial oppression (see also Maghbouleh 2022; Marwah 2022). After early publications that understood racial injustice within Marxist conceptions of capitalism and class, Mills set out a new approach that theorized race and modern racism on their own terms. His landmark opus, The Racial Contract (Mills 1997), along with subsequent elaborations (Mills 2003, 2010, 2017), are foundational for many race-critical theories of injustice. Reworking older race-neutral “social contract” models, Mills contends that modern society is based not on popular consent between equals but on a fundamental agreement among whites that institutionalizes the exclusion, exploitation, and domination of non-whites. In Mills’s account, white people, who were brought into existence as “whites” during the rise of European capitalism, created “race itself as a group identity” (Mills 1997:63); in doing so, they exerted for themselves a dominant, exclusionary claim on personhood. For Mills (1997:4, 110–11, 125–27), race is socially constructed and materially consequential, and white racism is an ideational and socio-systemic form of hierarchical privilege.

The underlying asymmetry of this racial contract, Mills (1997:3, 11, 93) contends, has led to a political system marked by global white supremacy—a “power structure” in which socioeconomic privilege, material distribution, ethical norms, rights, and burdens are all differentially apportioned by race in ways that systematically benefit whites (see also Jagmohan 2015; Marwah 2022). Racism thus operates as a material reality and a primary social force shaping the structure of modern societies; whites as a group are structurally positioned to coerce, persecute, and exploit non-whites as a group, regardless of the fate of particular individuals. For its beneficiaries, this racial arrangement gives rise to a distinctive type of ideological social consciousness. An “epistemology of ignorance” afflicts whites with a “structured blindness” toward the power of whiteness itself—a kind of cognitive dysfunction that renders whites as a group unable “to understand the world they themselves have made” (Mills 1997:18–19; see also Mills 2017). Even while constructing a two-tiered moral code that is bifurcated by race, whites espouse a liberal universalism that denies “the actual racial structuring” (Mills 1997:95) of their own society and takes for granted the appropriateness of concepts that legitimize and reproduce this racial order.

Taken on its own terms, Mills’s critical philosophy offers a sweeping and powerful conception of the racist foundations of modern society and an ongoing challenge to the whiteness of conventional social and political theory. If we read his theory of racial ideology in relation to conceptions inherited from Marxism, however, we notice significant echoes of Lukácsian formulations. One is that racial ideology can be understood as simultaneously a material property of the social order and an active project grounded in the experience and interests of a ruling social group. Mills’s early work conceptualized ideology as a structurally or materially generated phenomenon, a “social superstructure,” but largely within a Marxist framework that he would come to reject (Mills 2003:59–88; Mills and Goldstick 1989:417). Yet his mature work on ignorance and white interests also retains a strongly structural cast; the notion of the racial contract, which he concedes is merely a “metaphor” for societal arrangements, nonetheless encapsulates for Mills (2017:37) a fundamental link between “real-life societies . . . structured through and through by hierarchies of power and privilege” and “the actions and inactions” of those who are thereby privileged. White ignorance, as a form of “structural group-based miscognition,” enables Mills (2017:49) to fully conjoin the epistemic, genetic, and functional dimensions of ideology into a structural theory of the social reproduction of racial domination.

In its basic propositions, Mills’s theory presents a unitary conception of racial ideology—an expressive totality dominated by a materially generated, racist social consciousness. As with Lukács, social thought initially seems to operate as the unmediated effect of an oppressive social structure, and this structurally generated ideology places its full imprint on all forms of social knowledge, from the belief systems generated within everyday social institutions to philosophy itself. Superficially, this strongly materialist theory of ideology seems to lead to the mechanical, narrowly prescriptive characterization of dominant social belief associated with a simple structural determinism. Like Lukács, though, Mills couples this structural conception with the notion that ideology also operates as the instrumental, group-based expression of white racial interests. ¹³ Mills, like Lukács, seems to be entertaining two distinct theories of ideology, one that is functional in orientation and the other genetic. Yet by fusing these two conceptions, Mills develops a strong “structuration” frame inasmuch as racist social belief is doubly reinforced by structural imperative and dominant group-based practices. This double determination results, at least for sociologists, in a conflationary theory of ideology. Because structure and dominant-group agency are presented as mutually constitutive in a way that elides distinctions between the two, this formulation forfeits any analytic means of unraveling their influence on one another (Archer 2020). As with Lukács’s use of reification as bourgeois consciousness, the temptation to strongly integrate the functional, genetic, and epistemic conceptions of ideology enlarges the notion of structural racism into a deterministic kind of theoretical holism.

Where do non-whites figure in this epistemic-genetic-functional conception of racial ideology? Developing a version of standpoint theory, Mills (1997:109) contends that racially subordinated groups—and Black people in particular—gain a “perspectival cognitive advantage” grounded in material experience. Confronted by a phenomenological disjuncture in how white and non-white groups perceive everyday social reality, Blacks develop a double consciousness (Du Bois [1903] 1997) that enables them to recognize and criticize the structural power of a racial contract that remains invisible to most whites. Mills (2017:57) is not insisting that all Black people develop this critical consciousness; white ignorance “will be shared by non-whites to a greater or lesser extent because of the power relations and patterns of ideological hegemony involved.” But for Mills (1997:109), the long, rich tradition of Black critical thought is itself a testament to the “alternative moral and political perception of social reality” that results from the “epistemology of the victims” of a racist social order. In this sense, epistemology too is strongly shaped by social structure and racial-group position, as philosophy itself—in pursuit of a putatively universal and raceless “ideal theory” (Mills 2017:72–90)—comes to be encased in structural, group-based miscognition.

Mills’s work raises the question of whether the dominant racial ideology, within such a highly structural conception, exerts a strong influence over nondominant racial groups. If so, we would expect to see such an ideology enlist the support or at least neutralize the opposition of nondominant racial groups in ways that legitimize a racist order. But if the experiences and interests of subordinated racial groups predispose them to an alternative moral and political perception of social reality, how could racist ideologies ever appeal to them? As a philosopher, Mills may not have been expected to fully address such questions, but these are important questions for sociological theory. These questions point to the recurring problems inherent in a strong conception of white supremacy, one that unifies or systematizes the epistemic-genetic-functional dimensions of racial ideology.

Bonilla-Silva has developed his own critical race theory that aligns in broad terms with that of Mills while also elaborating a fuller and more closely focused account of racial ideology. Does Bonilla-Silva’s theory resolve the conceptual problems found in Mills? In the fifth edition of his pioneering work Racism without Racists, Bonilla-Silva (2018) summarizes his conception of racism as sets of beliefs, relations, and practices within a racialized social system. He argues that once the social category of race emerged historically, it formed a “global” (Bonilla-Silva 2018:9) social structure “that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the people who became ‘white’) over non-Europeans (the people who became ‘non-white’)” (Bonilla-Silva 2018:8). The resulting racial structure encompasses “the totality of the social relations and practices” that reinforce white supremacy; it is the task of those who study this structure to “uncover the particular social, economic, political, social control, and ideological mechanisms” responsible for the reproduction of racial privilege (Bonilla-Silva 2018:9). These mechanisms, which have a material foundation in deeply institutionalized social hierarchies, remain in place because the dominant racial group continues to defend its “collective interest” and maintain its privileges. “Therein,” concludes Bonilla-Silva, “lies the secret of racial structures and racial inequality the world over. They exist because they benefit members of the dominant race” (Bonilla-Silva 2018:9).

Bonilla-Silva’s earliest work, like that of Mills, was strongly shaped by Marxist thought. Echoing the early Marx, Bonilla-Silva’s (2001) initial theory of ideology sees societal consciousness as strongly tied to social-group membership because ideologies are “the broad mental and moral frameworks, or ‘grids,’ that social groups use to make sense of the world, to decide what is right and wrong, true or false, important or unimportant” (Bonilla-Silva 2001:62). To defend its collective interests, a racially dominant group develops ideologies, or “racially based frameworks,” that explain and justify the status of various races; these ideologies, in turn, become “the organizational map” (Bonilla-Silva 2001:44) that guides the actions of social groups. Different groups have the capacity to construct such frameworks, but those developed by the dominant race “tend to become the master frameworks” against which “all racial actors ground (for or against) their ideological positions” (Bonilla-Silva 2018:9).

Much like early Marx and Engels, Bonilla-Silva sees the ideological practices of the socially dominant group, now reconceived as the racially dominant group, as decisively imprinting its interests onto societal consciousness in general. And just as Marx came to emphasize the functional nature of capitalist ideology, Bonilla-Silva (2015a:76) eventually characterizes ideology not simply in epistemic terms as mistaken belief but as material and consequential practice: “ideology, racial or otherwise, is intrinsically connected to domination.” Quoting the famous dictum from The German Ideology, Bonilla-Silva (2018:240) insists that in terms of racial domination, “the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Because social subjects develop their consciousness within particular social locations shaped by racial-group association and collective identity, the views and behaviors of social actors are “fundamentally connected” to their material position in a “racial regime” (Bonilla-Silva 2015a:75). Racial ideology, seen as synonymous with systemic racism, becomes both a white epistemic project and the functional “glue” that holds together an entire racial order (Bonilla-Silva 2018:18).

Central to Bonilla-Silva’s contributions and a major influence on the sociological analysis of racism is the notion of colorblind ideology. Closely tied to an abstract liberalism that embraces meritocracy and race neutrality, colorblind ideology, for Bonilla-Silva (2018:17-52), designates a post-1960s set of ideas that purports to explain ongoing racial inequality not in terms of biological or moral inferiority (the ruling ideological frame of a Jim Crow racism now made taboo by the Civil Rights Movement) but as the outcome of nonracial dynamics, particularly the supposed cultural limitations of non-white groups. At the broadest level, colorblind racism takes the form of thematic “frames” that minimize or naturalize racism, typically expressed through abstract claims asserting the socially pervasive character of equal opportunity and individual choice. Within the context of these frames, racial “styles” and “stories”—rhetorical strategies and pseudo-histories that disavow racism while latently expressing or reinforcing it—operate as central elements of the seemingly de-racialized ideological practices that reproduce white supremacy and contemporary patterns of racial domination.

As with Mills, a strongly integrated epistemic-genetic-functional conception of racial ideology is embedded within Bonilla-Silva’s work. Social structures place whites in privileged positions within a racist hierarchy; whites develop racist beliefs that serve and justify their own group interests; and the expression of those dominant beliefs reinforces existing structures of white privilege. To be sure, none of these linkages are entirely seamless or uniform; despite their collective privilege, whites can be fractured by gender, class, sexual orientation, or other divisions, and these intersectional differences matter. Yet the social reproduction of white privilege does not require unanimity, and whiteness remains an “embodied racial power” (Bonilla-Silva 2018:156) regardless of the uneven distribution of white advantage or the more complex views of certain “white racial progressives.”

A powerful spur to recent scholarship, Bonilla-Silva’s critical race theory has influenced a great deal of sociological research, much of it exploring how justifications of structural racism operate as an embedded logic within various narratives, discourses, and other types of expression (Bonilla-Silva 1997, 2018; Burke 2016; Doane 2006; McKinney 2005; Mueller 2017). His theoretical approach, however, like Mills’s, raises questions about the analytic implications of examining white supremacy as simultaneously the dominant ideological practice of a powerful racial group and a durable social structure defined by racial domination. By tightly integrating the functional and genetic dimensions of ideology, Bonilla-Silva, like Mills, sets up a structuration analytic frame that often blurs meaningful distinction between functional imperatives and dominant-group-based interests. ¹⁴ Much like Lukaćs’s notion of reification, racist ideology emanates here from a social structure shaped by dominant-group beliefs—beliefs that, in a circular way, can be characterized as ideologically dominant inasmuch as they serve the interests of a group that is already recognized as structurally privileged.

The strong genetic conception of ideology in Bonilla-Silva leads to a complementary emphasis on collective racial interests and embodied group consciousness. As with Mills’s epistemology of ignorance, the generalizing frame of colorblind racism suggests that similar types of ideological expression by dominant-group members likely stem from shared material experience, collective interest, or structural advantage (i.e., white privilege)—but without well-defined distinctions between these phenomena. In this way, Bonilla-Silva’s reliance on a notion of structural racism, particularly when complemented by a group-based conception of social consciousness, tends to essentialize the social category of racial difference as experiential identity and collective actor (Magubane 2022; Omi and Winant 2009). Although Bonilla-Silva sometimes uses the notion of “hegemony” (see e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2019), he does not really examine how the prevailing set of racial beliefs emerged through ideational struggle with other ideologies or how social authority might rest on tacit or active support from nondominant social actors.

In effect, if racial ideological dominance for Bonilla-Silva (2001:77) is secured through structural and political mechanisms that affect all social actors, how might subordinated racial groups develop “alternative ways of ‘making sense’” of the racial order? Unlike Mills, Bonilla-Silva does not advance a version of standpoint theory or presume that everyday experience will necessarily lead non-whites to develop oppositional or alternative beliefs. Indeed, Bonilla-Silva finds that even though Blacks and whites generally hold different racial attitudes, the two groups share similar ideological frames. The ideological “transmission belt,” Bonilla-Silva (2018:179) concludes, “is working well” because the dominant colorblind ideology “provides the frames to organize difference” for Blacks and whites. Yet I would suggest this theoretical approach is poorly suited to the task of understanding racial attitudes as empirical evidence of subjectively chosen belief; instead, the strongly functional-genetic emphasis in the theory tends to preposition attitudes as expressions or denials of presumed racial-group interests—or as functional stimuli for the reproduction of racial ideology itself. Because Bonilla-Silva sees the views and behaviors of social actors as “fundamentally connected” to their material position, his theory has little room for distinguishing between oppositional and alternative racial beliefs, including anti-racism(s) that may develop a (potentially contradictory) amalgam of these ideas (O’Brien 2009).

Recent contributions to critical race theory betray frustration with its theoretical limitations. Burke (2016:103, 105), for example, expresses concern that research on colorblind racism has grown “stagnant,” a kind of “echo chamber” merely identifying the presence of racist ideology without offering other insights. Like Burke, Mueller (2020:162) urges researchers to address this problem by delving more empirically; the aim is to explore how racist ideology, or white ignorance, is not simply derived from structural imperatives but is generated, “sometimes creatively,” in local contexts. Yet core theoretical problems would still remain. Deeper empirical exploration is unlikely to yield rich analytic returns if guided by an expressive conception of racial ideology—if it is theoretically presumed, in other words, that social investigation at multiple levels will find hegemonic forms of racism all the way down. ¹⁵

Instead, it may be more useful to reconceptualize the relationship between the epistemic, functional, and genetic dimensions of racial ideology in capitalist society and to draw out the implications for the study of social structure, group consciousness, and oppositional belief. For critical race theorists, the concern is typically that retheorizing racial ideology in relation to capitalism invariably leads to “class reductionism” (Bonilla-Silva 2001:50)—a conception of racism as merely derivative of capitalist class relations. Yet this need not be the case. New theory, I suggest, can conceptualize racial ideology in relation to capitalism in ways that are not reductive while also grappling with problems—determinism, correspondence, an overreliance on standpoint—that early Marxism and mature critical race theory seem to share.

Problematizing Ideology

New theoretical approaches to racism would do well to engage with ongoing efforts to understand the socio-epistemic complexity of ideological formations in relation to capitalist structures of modern social life. As an intellectual and political project, Marxist theory remains committed to developing critical knowledge about the nature of false beliefs within capitalism in order to transform it. By the same token, as a materialist investigation of social life, Marxism is also oriented toward explicating the complex socio-historical conditions that give rise to ideological expression and conflict and that therefore stand in the way of this emancipatory project. An enduring challenge, as we have seen with critical race theory, is that the epistemic and social dimensions of ideology are neither identical nor entirely separable (Eagleton 1991; Morris 2016). Racist ideologies are false but not merely false; the work they do in the world is integral to their power as ideologies. Yet these ideologies are not simply reducible to the social functions or interests they serve. Their work in the world is performed in and through their claims about the world—claims that, unless undermined by critique supported by research, often pass for social knowledge (Jaeggi 2009; Shelby 2003).

Early Marxist theories, as we saw earlier, often struggled—much like critical race theory—to disentangle the epistemic, political, and functional dimensions of ideology. An important initial question, therefore, is how a more heterodox Marxist theory of capitalism might evade a structurally determinist theory of ideology. Here, it may be useful to return briefly to the original concept of commodity fetishism, to clarify its insights and the limits of what it might explain. For Marx, this fetishism, which results from how capitalist relations of production come to endow the commodities constituted by labor with independent value, means the basic structure of society not only reproduces itself through the exploitation of labor but also routinely generates a partial, distorted, and superficial understanding of itself—an understanding not of an exploitative society organized in service of capital accumulation but a market economy characterized by the voluntary and equivalent exchange of commodities. This market-exchange-centered understanding is not false or illusory per se; it is instead an “inadequate explanation,” in economic and political terms, of how capitalist society works (Hall [1983] 2021:147; see also Geras 1971). Yet just as a deeper understanding of material conditions cannot by itself provide a full accounting of social relations, the theory of commodity fetishism does not exhaust the ways ideologies, as social phenomena, need to be conceptualized, distinguished, and challenged.

It remains possible, of course, to draw out from Marx’s observations, much as Lukács did, a theory in which this fetishism, or reification, pervasively shapes social consciousness and even philosophy itself—operating, in effect, as capitalism’s structurally generated and self-reproducing dominant ideology. Marx’s own discussion, however, is not so far-reaching. Although capitalism’s underlying economic relations may encourage a superficial and misfocused emphasis on market exchange, there is, in Hall’s ([1983] 2021:146) words, “no fixed and unalterable relation between what the market is and how it is construed within an ideological or explanatory framework.” What seems more convincing is that the routinized processes of capitalist commodification produce neither an illusory consciousness nor an ideology in any direct sense but “categories for the forms of appearance” of underlying social relations (Marx [1867] 1977:677)—categories of thought that do not constitute patently false beliefs so much as partial, limited “chaotic conceptions” (Marx 1973:100) that contribute to the “misleading surface of social life” (Shelby 2003:162). When specified in these terms, a Marxist theory of capitalist social structure and its effects on social consciousness need not entail a deterministic approach to ideology—economic, racial, or otherwise.

How might this less deterministic conception of capitalism establish the basis for a robust yet nonreductive theory of racial ideology? In a series of probing interventions on behalf of a Marxism he terms “Afro-analytical,” philosopher Tommie Shelby (2003, 2014, 2021) developed an understanding of ideology as false belief that sustains various forms of exploitation and domination. Racial ideologies, for Shelby (2003:184), are distorted or misleading characterizations of “racial” (biogenetic or cultural) attributes that oppress “those they mark off as inferior races and other subordinate groups who might find solidarity with them.” The material basis of racist ideology, in his view, is ultimately found in a society’s capitalist structure, which predisposes social actors (at different locations and for various reasons) to “accept illusions about themselves and their social life” (Shelby 2003:186) in ways that obscure society’s fundamentally exploitative arrangements. Contrary to reductionist Marxist views, however, racial ideologies for Shelby are not mere reflections or obfuscations of nonracialized economic processes. Race-related injustice “cannot be reduced [italics added] to how racial ideology conceals systematic forms of domination and exploitation” because racism, once crystalized, creates “additional race-related ills”—institutionalized relations of racial oppression for which segregation, ghettoization, and hyper-incarceration stand as ready examples (Shelby 2014:71). Yet unlike the critical race theorists reviewed earlier, Shelby (2005:142) also insists that “nonracial structural” processes do exist and that distinguishing between these processes and those driven by racial ideology is an important analytical and political task. For Shelby, racism as false belief is a powerfully important but delimited component of social consciousness; precisely what racism is functional for can encompass more than simply racial oppression.

Theorizing racism nonreductively thus entails recognizing an irreducible unevenness to the material conditions of social life and their relation to racial ideology. Hall ([1980] 2021, [1983] 2021, [1986] 2021), like Shelby, rejects any expressive theory of society that would see racism as a systemic property that manifests throughout the entire social order. Building on Gramsci, Hall insists that whereas structural conditions tend to “create the terrain” on which subjects acquire consciousness and engage in social practices, precisely how particular ideological expressions take shape and relate to social structure remains open to interpretation and analysis. Emphasizing the “combined and uneven” (Hall [1980] 2021:238) relations between race and class, Hall ([1986] 2021:322) contends that racism routinely occurs “in some but not all” locations in racially oppressive capitalist societies, and therefore, ascertaining its presence and dynamics requires an approach that is sensitive to differentiation, context, and relationality. In effect, the precise ideological work that race may be doing in any social setting cannot be deduced from prior theoretical claims but instead requires research and analysis that is alive to varying historical conditions and strategic purposes.

Marxist theory, therefore, can formulate the relationship of racial ideology to social structure, a major weakness in critical race theory, in ways that do not, as Bonilla-Silva has charged, explain racism simply as a consequence of class dynamics. Recent debates over “racial capitalism,” by reexamining the relation of race to social structure in theoretical and historical terms, helps underscore and clarify this point. Central to these debates, although not always clearly articulated, has been the fundamental question of whether racism is contingently or necessarily related to capitalist societies. ¹⁶ Strong conceptions of racial capitalism, claiming that capitalism and racism are intrinsically co-constitutive, view racialization as structurally or historically necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist order (see e.g., Gilmore 2017; Melamed 2015; Post 2023; Robinson 2021). Adherents of the contrary position, asserting that racial ideology is only contingently related to capitalism, characterize this relationship in various ways—from merely “circumstantial” (Walzer 2020) to the historically patterned “articulation” of two distinct systems of domination (Dawson and Katzenstein 2019)—but insist on sharply distinguishing the two phenomena. To simplify, these debates tend to ask whether racism and capitalism can be understood independently of one another (Wacquant 2023) or whether capitalism itself is “never not racial” (Gilmore 2017).

Part of the problem with this stark polarity is a theoretical confusion not over racism but over capitalism—capitalism, that is, as an abstract system versus capitalist societies as particular social formations. Marxist theory has long recognized an important conceptual distinction between capitalism as a mode of production (the “economic structure of society”; Marx [1859] 1988:389) and actual capitalist societies, which in their specificity exhibit “endless variations and gradations” (Marx [1894] 1981:927) that can only be grasped through empirical study. ¹⁷ Capital’s abstract logic, as Sewell (2008:527) notes, “never appears in isolation except as a thought experiment”; when manifest in determinate societies through institutional structures and human agents, capitalism is always subject to dynamics and pressures that are somewhat autonomous from it. Mobilizing this important distinction, Conroy (2024) has developed a fruitful middle position in the debate over racial capitalism—one from which we might see racial ideology in relation to capitalism as logically contingent and relatively autonomous but also as historically persistent in ways that often contribute to capitalist reproduction.

It is useful to separate out the different parts of this position. Distinguishing between the abstract requirements of capitalism as a social system and the particular historical dynamics of capitalist development, Conroy (2024) observes that race, in theoretical terms, is not logically necessary for the production, exchange, and reproduction of capital. This theoretical claim is fully reconcilable with the assertion that racism has been instrumental in enabling and legitimating many of capitalism’s important historical features—including racial hierarchy itself in various forms. This latter assertion is not the same, however, as the questionable contention that racism has been historically necessary for capitalist development. Such a contention often relies, as Conroy notes, on a retrospective functionalism, one that indiscriminately redefines as “racial” the varying ascriptive forms of differentiation that have accompanied and often facilitated capitalist development. Instead, if race is understood as relatively autonomous or logically and historically contingent in relation to capitalism as a theorized system, then empirical research can distinguish between socially or historically patterned dynamics of racialization that contribute to the functional requirements of capitalist imperatives and other dynamics that do not (Dawson and Katzenstein 2019). From this position, one can recognize the historical reality of many racial-capitalist claims: for example, that racism in capitalist societies often facilitates intraclass competition among workers (Taylor 2016), or that racism frequently marks an important distinction between capitalist exploitation and expropriation (Fraser 2019), or that it has legitimized key forms of extractive place-making (Gilmore 2017). But capitalism does not require racism to perform these social functions.

Relative autonomy means that racial ideology needs to be understood within a theory of capitalism but is not simply a dependent construct without particular logics or enduring material consequences of its own. Far from being merely epiphenomenal, racism’s specific articulations, as Hall ([1980] 2021:226) observed, have been “sedimented and solidified by real historical development over time,” and the social effects of racism are seen in its powers to institutionalize and reinforce relations of domination and exploitation. By the same token, racism’s capacity to create these institutionalized effects does not render it transhistorically “systemic” or establish white supremacy as the fundamental relation of the modern social order. In capitalist societies, the articulable forms of racial ideology remain contingent and varied, their content malleable, their function mutable, and their precise relation to other ideological discourses in any given historical instance an empirical question. ¹⁸

Theorizing this more complex, mediated relationship between racial ideology and capitalist societies helps unbind any necessary correspondence between racial categories, groups, and constituencies. Mills and Bonilla-Silva emphasize group-based consciousness, and useful notions such as “linked fate” remind us that material conditions of racial oppression can furnish important preconditions for group solidarity (Chandra and Chen 2022; Dawson 1994). Yet, as Magubane (2022) points out, simply because individuals assigned to certain racial categories are similarly situated does not mean they “share a profound sense of identity” or “define their interests in the same way.” Although racial ideology in a capitalist society often advances socially privileged interests, this type of ideology is also used in instrumental ways to enlist a variety of social actors. The notion of a “racial interest” should not be seen as the structurally or positionally derived aspiration of a given people so much as a historically specific construct that likely entails different material stakes for those who may be “hailed” by it. ¹⁹ Viewed in this way, a central question regarding racial ideology and social interest is not simply who is speaking for this putative interest but also what constituencies are constructed on its behalf and on what basis, in political terms, are those constituencies convened. To answer these last questions, it is important to ask how racial ideologies may articulate with other forms of ideological expression, most centrally, capitalist ideologies of individual self-interest, market virtue, and economic development, but also those related to gender, nation, sexuality, religion, and other axes of social difference and power.

In similar terms, ideological articulations by members of subordinated racial groups are likely to be complex and uneven. A multicentury-long Black radical tradition, as Mills (2018) and many others have pointed out, furnishes abundant intellectual and political resources for constructing critical, anti-racist responses to white racial ideology. A key challenge, however, is that although the dominant racial “common sense” is typically disjointed and contradictory as well as racist, this constellation of popular knowledges nevertheless constitutes the doxa or “master frameworks” (as Bonilla-Silva correctly maintains) against which more coherent and compelling ideologies, including anti-racist ones, “must contend for mastery” (Hall [1986] 2021:317). The problem here is not only how subaltern actors engage with predominant ideologies—ideologies that may draw indiscriminately even if only implicitly from capitalist, racist, patriarchal, imperial, and other discourses—but also how these articulations construct different kinds of political constituencies. Anti-racist belief, when seen in this light, emerges not simply as positionally derived epistemic advantage or as a form of collective expression that is inherently oppositional to social oppression. Instead, as Shelby (2003:180) notes, nonhegemonic ideologies such as Black capitalism or Black nationalism, which often present as types of anti-racism, can operate in certain contexts as “reactionary forms of consciousness built out of existing ideologies (racist, nationalist, liberal, patriarchal, and religious ideologies),” and their proponents may advocate for the replacement of existing forms of oppression with new ones.

A heterodox Marxist approach wants not only to contest the falsity of many popular ideologies but also to understand their complex social grounding and hybrid character. Beliefs about race are likely to articulate with those related to class, as well as gender, ethnicity, nation, and sexuality, through dynamic, contextual, and often contentious processes that do not simply reproduce a static or monolithic social order (Hall 2017). Taking seriously the entrenched durability of racial ideology within capitalist societies, such an approach avoids the race-critical insistence on ideology’s genetic correspondence to a given racial group or its function in reproducing a racially defined social order. In this way, a Marxist theory of racial ideology can illuminate how types of racist belief and practice operate on a social terrain structured by a system of capital accumulation—but nonreductively, understanding that racisms can develop their own logics that, depending on context or contestation, may or may not facilitate capitalist reproduction.

The relative merits of this approach become even clearer when we examine how critical race theory is often applied to macro- or meso-level social phenomena. Binding together the strategic and reproductive dimensions of racial ideology, these applications tend to produce static, de-temporalized, and nonconflictual accounts of racism and social life. Building on Bonilla-Silva, for instance, Christian (2019:173, 181) theorizes a modern world system driven over the past half millennium by a global white supremacy that shapes “racist structure” and “racist identity” in all “national racial social systems.” Yet even a cursory historical survey of the myriad ways “race” (itself variously configured) has articulated with capitalism in the Euro-Atlantic and non-Western worlds over the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries does not support this sort of teleological account culminating in a worldwide racial ideology (Subrahmanyam 2023). When approached transnationally, race and racism exhibit multiple logics that are related in different ways—sometimes complementarily, sometimes contradictorily—to capitalist projects of colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, and decolonization (Steinmetz 2016; Wacquant 2023; Zimmerman 2010).

Similar problems emerge when race-critical theories focus on contemporary social institutions. Scholars drawing on these theories tend to construct closed-loop, often functionalist ideal types in which racial ideology operates as the normative glue and lubricant between social structure, white interests, and the reproduction of racial inequality. In Bracey’s (2015:562) theory of the state, for example, white people instrumentally (acting as one?) control state power, institutionalizing “white-privileging conventions” in ways that serve and invariably reproduce white collective interests. For Moore (2020), social institutions such as law and education are similarly defined by their white-supremacist ideologies, and these ideologies reproduce a social structure that can only reproduce their whiteness. Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations is somewhat more complex and open-ended. In this schematic model of organizational reproduction, racial ideology is presented as distinct from “racial substructure,” and conflicts over cultural “schemas” and material resources can potentially alter the racial projects that organizations pursue (Ray 2019:33). Yet Ray’s cultural schemas also function causally as ideological substructures—with the result that racial ideology, as both belief and structure, appears theoretically predestined to determine organizational purpose and behavior from above and from below. More generative research in these fields would theorize racialization and social institutions in relation to dynamic changes in twenty-first-century capitalism, exploring how racial ideology may be articulating—perhaps flexibly, unevenly, opportunistically, or contentiously—with new logics of value extraction in various institutional settings (see e.g., Purifoy and Seamster 2021; Summers 2019).

To illustrate the analytical promise of these sorts of questions, I provide a brief example of how they might guide contemporary urban research. Drawn from an ongoing research project, the following is a condensed summary of field observations made after a series of public forums recently conducted in the city of Chicago:

Developers, community members, and city officials at three public forums are debating the merits of several competing proposals to develop a new casino in the city. A large number of speakers emphasize, in conventionally race-neutral language, the wide-ranging economic benefits of the project—for consumers, workers, businesses, community residents, and the city as a whole. Government officials and developers observe that what’s good for “property values” and “public safety” is good for everyone. Many speakers also refer to the project’s likely benefits in more explicitly racial terms. Several casino operators claim they would provide greater opportunities for “minority community members” than their competitors would. African American developers promise that their project’s ownership structure would put “African Americans and Hispanics at the table making decisions.” Hispanic development partners claim their project would deliver overwhelming benefits to “Black and brown people” in the form of jobs and investment opportunities. Black activists ask whether “Black capital” can be trusted to deliver on those promises, even questioning at key moments whether Black investors are “really Black.” Throughout, many speakers are using the term “racial equity,” or merely “equity,” but they seem to mean somewhat different things by it. This equity-oriented language flits in and out, as race-neutral development talk also continues. ²⁰

What can we observe about these sorts of exchanges? How do they generate particular questions about racial ideology or suggest preliminary ways to interpret or problematize these exchanges as ideological phenomena?

Armed with a theory of structural racism, a critical sociologist might make initial sense of these exchanges as textbook instances of racial ideology anchored in and directed toward the societal reproduction of white supremacy. Much of the discourse at these events, in fact, is steeped in the ostensibly nonracial language of colorblind racism. Yet is this language of universal benefit only directed toward white people? Is it directed toward all white people? And is the social function or strategic purpose of the language used at these events simply to invisibilize whiteness? This language—what sociologists have called the discourse of “value-free development” (Logan and Molotch 1987)—has long been used by property developers and state actors in U.S. cities to assemble urban growth coalitions in pursuit of capitalist land-value appreciation. These development coalitions routinely use deracialized language to enlist multiple constituencies—social interests that are racially and nonracially defined—in support of capital-accumulation strategies (Boyd 2008; Cox 2015). In the process, colorblind racist discourses often operate, either singly or in conjunction with other discourses, as highly effective ideologies for advancing capitalist interests, in part because of the plural and cross-cutting social interests they construct.

What is also striking about this brief field-note summary is the flurry of “racial equity” talk, much of it pushing in very different directions. What should we make of this? Explicitly racialized discourse at these public forums seems to draw on a wide variety of ideological currents, perhaps taking advantage of race as a sliding, unstable construct, a “floating signifier” (Hall [1997] 2021). At certain moments, as when a Black activist challenges the racial identity of a Black developer, race itself is being redefined, perhaps antagonistically, in terms of class. Yet much of the discussion, even that which is avowedly anti-racist in rhetoric, also seems broadly facilitative of long-established capitalist logics of urban development, although not necessarily so. In this way, capital accumulation and economic “common sense,” although not determinative of how racial ideologies are articulated or contested in such venues, may establish the terrain on which much of this race-related discourse is deployed, refracted, and understood.

More would need to be said about these exchanges, of course, if they were to be fully considered as empirical objects of research. ²¹ By focusing briefly on this one example, I have tried to illustrate the claim that when viewed within an expansive Marxist theory, the ideological work that race may be doing in such contexts is likely to be contingently intertwined with systemic logics of capitalist development and much more discursively complex than many critical race theories might lead us to expect—often cross-cutting in terms of racial interests, coarticulated with other ideological discourses, and irreducible to expressive conceptions of the social world.

Racial Ideology and Social Theory

Critical race theory has done much to deepen our understanding of racial ideology. Once seen merely as the expression of prejudicial ideas, racism now can be taken seriously as a distorted form of social consciousness that advances particular material interests, often in invisible or race-neutral ways, and that actively contributes to well-established relations of oppression and exploitation. By theorizing boldly about racial ideologies, critical race theorists have opened up new ways to understand the variety, persistence, and social effects of racist belief. As we have seen, however, the particular notion of racial ideology at the center of the theory—a set of claims tightly linking false belief, group interest, and structural reproduction—often leads to a circular conception of white supremacy as the singular expression of an essentialized group interest and the structural foundation of social consciousness writ large. By positing a conflationary set of causal interdependencies between false ideas, white group agency, and societal reproduction, critical race theory elides important distinctions between groups, beliefs, and social structure in ways that yield a closed-loop and often functionalist type of racial determinism.

Further problems ensue when racial ideology is understood in one-to-one correspondence with a dominant racial group. Racist beliefs indeed tend to advantage particular groups, but ideologies become functionally effective by constructing or hailing social identities in ways that transcend narrow interests. The precise relation between ideology and group interests is thus also open to question, given that the assumption that racist beliefs straightforwardly express those interests presumes a singular type of articulation by an already constituted collective body. These questions about racial ideology extend to oppressed groups as well. Whereas standpoint theories suggest a certain epistemic privilege comes with social subordination, counter-ideologies do not spring full-blown from the social location of the oppressed (Rouse 2009). Anti-racist ideologies, when they do emerge, may be plural or mutually antagonistic; they may also, like racist ideologies, construct social identities from heterogeneously racialized subjects and serve to reproduce social inequality.

Developing a compelling theory of racial ideology requires grappling with its socio-epistemic complexity in modern capitalist society while also positing a less deterministic relation between social structure, group identity, and ideological belief. In this spirit, I proposed a heterodox Marxist theory in which racial ideologies, although historically entrenched and socially institutionalized, are mobilized on a terrain of conflict that is broadly structured by capitalist social relations. Racist belief and practice, in this view, tend to support racial inequality in particular and unjust social arrangements more generally, but they may or may not function in ways that reproduce the larger social order. This mediated relationship between racism and social structure should encourage sociologists to examine racial ideologies without assuming pregiven connections between racist beliefs, social groups, and ideological constituencies. Instead, racial ideologies can be seen as dynamic, strategic, and historically specific; although motivated by and taking shape within capitalist society, these ideologies often claim to speak on behalf of a varied array of social actors. In doing so, racism today often coarticulates with a range of ideological discourses, especially (although not at all exclusively) with market-oriented categories of belief related to development, prosperity, and individual freedom. By the same token, beliefs expressed by members of racially subordinated groups, however anchored in shared oppression, should not be defined a priori as epistemically privileged, even though, as a result of reflection and struggle, they can become so.

This theoretical approach pushes sociology not only to examine the false claims and pernicious effects of racial ideologies but also to develop new ways to understand their complex social etiology, their context of emergence, and their relationship to other forms of exploitation and oppression. In doing so, the theory recognizes the importance—and offers new insights to the task—of investigating the deeply entrenched character of contemporary racism and exploring its connections to a range of group interests and to a larger social order that it neither defines nor fully reflects. Key insights produced by critical race theory, especially those focused on the durability, adaptability, and invisibility of particular forms of racism, should continue to inform any effective critical theory. By addressing the complex problem of racial ideology within an expansive Marxism, however, theorists can develop a broader array of generative questions and more effective ways to investigate them.