Specifying Race: The Colonial Constitution of Race in a Set-Theoretic Framework

Background to The Problem: Sociological Theories of Race

In the first third of the twentieth century, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists debated whether “the races” of people were inherently equal or unequal. Having swayed popular opinion to equalitarianism by the mid-late twentieth century, the debates shifted to whether race was a legitimate (natural) taxonomic unit below the species level (Lieberman 1968). Did race “exist,” or was it, scientifically speaking, “a myth” (Lieberman 1968)? Sociologists of race now accept that racial domination makes race “real” even if race is not a legitimate, scientific, and natural taxonomy. Contemporary sociologists argue over the best way to study race, often prioritizing either materiality or semiotics.

Materialist traditions, at their most extreme, reduce race to economic configurations. Reacting to this reduction, symbolic scholars point to a pluralistic, nonmaterial, culturalistic center of analysis. Whereas economic reductionism can fail to account for social complexity, the culturalistic approach tends to “stop short with a set of plural explanations which lack an adequate theorization, and which in the end are descriptive rather than analytic” (Hall 2021: 199). ¹ In the context of sociology, those who prioritize the structural materiality of race focus on how race as a “master category” structures social life and can always be traced to resource allocation (Bonilla-Silva 1997, 1999; Marx 1998; Mueller 2017; Seamster and Ray 2018; Torres 2024; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). Those who focus more on the symbolic elements of race prioritize boundaries and social closures. They see race as a fiction that exists in people’s minds and study race as a conceptual category, or a phenomenon of belief and cognition (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004; Loveman 1999). Scholars grounded firmly in either tradition would acknowledge the import of studying both the material effects of race on people’s lives and the inconsistent and “subjective” nature of racial categories, but they choose different epistemic priorities.

The structural materialist frames are better suited to reveal how race structures people’s lives. These frames offer theories as to why racial categories exist, shift, and change. The symbolic boundary frameworks are better suited to show the complexity of how and when racial discourse changes. They demonstrate how categories and requirements for membership in categories are made and altered. Whereas the structural materialists can fail to capture the complexity of race-making in everyday life, symbolic boundary scholars often fail to offer tools to explain why race emerges when it does as a discourse or what the racial categories represent.

Moreover, the definitions of race used by the symbolic boundary scholars naturalize race more than the materialist conceptualizations that consider categories of race signifiers of economic configurations. Symbolic-centric scholars argue that the structural materialists’ frameworks lead to misapplication of rigid categories, reducing race to class conflict (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009), essentializing race categories in a way that reifies their naturalness (Loveman 1999), and reifying folk conceptualizations of race by using commonsense categories as categories of analysis (Wacquant 1997). These critiques overrepresent the analytic prioritization of the structuring nature of race as an ontological assertion about race being independent of the mind. However, structural materialists’ tendencies can indeed obscure the fluidity, adaptability, and inconsistency of racial identification and ascription in favor of emphasizing the totalizing effects of a racial world order (see e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2004). ²

Although the critics of materialist race frameworks emphasize the importance of exposing the human-made-ness of race, their conceptualizations of race ironically naturalize it. These scholars methodologically prioritize global comparison and local specificity, but their race definitions implicitly characterize race as a universal mode of human differentiation. The available definitions of race as a “symbolic category” or “social fiction” reify race as an inevitable, biological set of categories of distinction because their reference to what the categories are based on are the very logics of race. Racial categories, in these articulations, are “essentialized biological or cultural references to calibrations of the human body or fabricated human distinctions” (Hesse 2016:vii).

Desmond and Emirbayer (2009:336, Note 1), for example, consider race-making the process whereby “a social creation is mistaken for a natural phenomenon,” but they define race as “a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry [italics added.]” In this definition, the physical or ancestral difference that distinguishes some people from others is prior to race; race just gives these existing differences a name and a value. Even though these scholars actively consider racialization to be a process of misrecognition of a social phenomenon as a natural one, their analytic definition of race points to biological differences (phenotype and ancestry) as the substance of racial categories, reinscribing the naturalness the frameworks seek to refute.

Not only is the characterization of race as a symbolic category based on phenotype or ancestry essentializing, it is also inaccurate. When thinking through a racial lens, a person may use phenotype and ancestry to assign people to a racial category, but the categories themselves are not based on phenotype or ancestry. Consider this scenario: Two people in the same U.S. hospital are giving birth. One of the birthers is of small stature with fair, olive-toned skin and tightly coiled, coarse hair who descended from people who were stolen from different parts of West Africa and English and Dutch slave owners. The other person is tall and thin with deep reddish-brown skin and glossy curly hair whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from two different countries in East Africa. This person’s ancestry is of the Habesha, Tigre, Oromo, and Somali peoples. These two birthing people share no common ancestry apart from the common ancestry of being human. They have entirely different skin tones, hair textures, and facial and bodily features, which if individually isolated, could be associated with several different racial categories. However, the assisting nurse will likely consider both patients to be Black. If the nurse is among the U.S. medical professionals who underestimate the pain felt by Black patients (Hoffman et al. 2016), both people giving birth may experience a painful consequence of the nurse understanding them to be Black. Here, both patients experience potentially life-altering consequences of existing in a society where certain things about them signal to someone else they are “Black.” However, these two people share no ancestry or phenotypical characteristics beyond having all the trappings of average human beings (e.g., eyes, nose, lips). Racial categories are not based on phenotype or ancestry.

Hesse’s (2016) critique asks scholars to plainly state what material social conditions racial discourse actually refers to if it is not biological material conditions. In other words, “if race is an illusion, then we must ask what is it an illusion for [italics added]” (Torres 2023:126). Sociologists have helped explain how governmental racial categories emerge and change in specific moments, but the existing sociological theoretical tools cannot help us interpret what these categories actually represent (Coenders 2024).

Sociologists rarely ask what is being signified by racial signifiers like phenotype and ancestry as a standalone empirical question, perhaps because of our presentist tendencies (Inglis 2014). However, studying the social substance of race is a necessarily historical endeavor. This kind of work looks to sites where “race” conceptually emerges, that is, where people first start using the language of “race” consistently. It examines the social and material contexts in which these concepts emerge with the aim of pointing to the material social systems on which race as discourse is mapped at different points in time. This kind of scholarship can be found in arguments over the origins of the idea of race and its relationship to slavery (for reviews of race origins from a U.S. vantage point, see Allen 1994; Vaughan 1989), discussions of race and its relationship to capitalism (Hall 2021; Robinson 2020; Virdee 2019), work on race and its relationship to settler colonialism (Lowe 2015; Wolfe 2016), and in the broad historiographies and genealogies of the idea of race (Doron 2016; Doron and Haddad 2021; Fredrickson 1988; Gossett 1997; Hannaford 1996; Schaub and Sebastiani 2014, 2021; Smedley 2018; Stovall 2021; Wynter 2003). Whereas these studies explicitly ask what the social substance of race is, symbolic boundary frameworks deprioritize the question of racial substance. ³ This deprioritization has resulted in a void in the conceptual and analytic framing of race; in failing to make a claim about what the substance of race is, the slippery logic of biological race implicitly creeps back in.

The consequence of this is catastrophic and deeply ironic. As social scientists producing theory and science products, we risk legitimizing racial discourse as scientifically supportable (Coenders 2024). As sociologists of race, we may fall into the trap of reproducing racial discourse that naturalizes race (despite our insistence that race is not a natural category of differentiation). Specifically, the aforementioned definitions of race occlude the human-made-ness of race by considering the substance of the categories as created by nature or God (phenotype and ancestry) as opposed to thoroughly made and reproduced by us. Wynter (2003:273) calls the tendency to “repress the recognition of our collective production of our modes of social reality” social occultation. She considers social occultation a natural tendency of humans in societies. When we give a societal phenomenon an extra-human origin, we not only obscure the sociology of the phenomenon, but we also make the phenomenon inevitable. It becomes tantamount to a justification of the existence of race simply because it is what is/was/will be. This represses attempts at fundamentally changing or reimagining these societal arrangements. Thus, a sociology of race that makes room for efforts to fundamentally change racial inequality, racial oppression, and global racial orders must conceive of a theory of race that magnifies the human-made-ness of race, specifying its human-made substance.

Some race sociologists have attempted to bridge the gap between the two traditions of race scholarship to “articulate the connections between racist ideologies and racist structures” (Golash-Boza 2016:129), but they still bump up against the tautology that Hesse (2016) points us to. For example, Golash-Boza (2016: 131) actively pushes back against Desmond and Emirbayer’s (2009) critique of race scholarship, and defines racism as “both (1) the ideology that races are populations of people whose physical differences [italics added] are linked to significant cultural and social differences and that these innate hierarchical differences can be measured and judged and (2) the micro- and macrolevel practices that subordinate those races [italics added] believed to be inferior.” In this definition, the physical difference that distinguishes some groups from others (what people often understand as race in biological/phenotypical articulations) is prior to race. Even if the first clause is only naming that the ideology relies on the logic of distinct groups marked by physical differences, the lack of an alternative proposal for what the substance of race is, if not these physical differences, leaves the reader to assume these physical differences are indeed what the categories are based on. This definition thus implicitly confirms an existing, essential sameness and difference that the racial categories correspond to. Although both phenotype and ancestry as categories of analysis are also social constructions, they are comfortably situated in biological understandings of race. This can be thought of as an example of the psychological essentialism that characterizes so much of the social sciences (Mahoney 2021, 2023) despite the explicit intention of de-essentializing race and de-naturalizing racial categories.

Racial formation theory is the most successful and influential sociological theorization of race to bridge the materialist/semiotic divide. Omi and Winant (2014) connect the structuring material effects of race to the semiotic fluidity of race through the concept of racial projects. ⁴ However, instead of resolving the problems posed by the two camps, the theory falls prey to criticism from historical materialists (San Juan 1992), strong symbolic-centric scholars (Loveman 1999), and other scholars attempting to theorize race with a simultaneously material and symbolic foundation (Feagin and Elias 2013).

Racial formation theory, despite its explicit intentions to the contrary, naturalizes race. In this theory, race exists separately and prior to racism (Saucier and Woods 2016), without a clear articulation of what racial categories are based on, if not bodies. For example, Omi and Winant (2014:115) write that “the problem posed by race during the late eighteenth century was markedly different than it had been in the earlier stages of conquest and enslavement. The social structures through which race operated were no longer primarily those of violent subjugation and plunder.” They explain that “racially organized exploitation in the form of slavery, the expansion of colonies, and the continuing expulsion of native peoples, was both necessary and newly difficult to justify” (Omi and Winant 2014: 115). In their articulation, slavery, colonial expansion and genocide of the indigenous noAmerican people were forms of exploitation that were “racially organized”, which makes race conceptually exist outside these forms of exploitation such that it could organize their implementation. In this formulation, race operates through social structures, such as conquest and enslavement. In racial formation theory, racial difference exists apart from these social processes, which are organized based on these existing differences or the preexisting notion of the encounter with an already (racial) “other.” ⁵ This makes the idea of racial difference both natural and inevitable, working against the theorists’ intentions.

Race scholars re-essentialize race by failing to define the social basis of racial categories. Structural materialists avoid this trap by pointing to class and the practices of class reproduction as the substance of race (Bonilla-Silva 2021; Torres 2024). As symbolic boundary scholars note, however, these theories risk simplifying race and limiting our analysis when they do not have an explicit consideration of temporality and geography, specifying what class categories race categories correspond to.

For a sociological framework to thoroughly denaturalize race, it must clearly define the basis of racial categories while dually theorizing the material and symbolic dimensions of race. The remaining sections of this article articulate the basic premises of such a theoretical framework for the sociological study of race. To resolve the tension between materialist and semiotic conceptions of race, I draw on theorists who conceive of “race” and “structure” as dualistically discursive and material (Jung 2015; Lewis 2004; Mahoney 2021; Sewell 1992). I define race as a structure, where a structure is a system of enduring logical statements connecting human kind-categories that constitute mutually dependent role identities associated with historically sustained differential resource distribution. To avoid the inherently essentializing “property possession assumption” (Mahoney 2023) embedded in the sociological study of race, ⁶ I lean on set-theoretic constructivist framing. I define race as a subset of structures of descent-based difference, ⁷ a social phenomenon Wolfe (2016:7) calls “xenologies.” To resolve the naturalizing tautology of race conceptualizing in race sociology, I specify race as the structure of descent-based difference whose categories correspond to specific and varying regional trade and production relationships to Western European empires in the early-modern era.

Constructivist Set Theory: Race as Structure

To rethink race as an object of sociological study, I use Mahoney’s (2023) “constructivist set theoretical analysis.” Mahoney’s approach to social science “categories” intentionally resists essentialism. This approach calls on set-theory. It asks social scientists to understand categories of analysis (Brubaker 2013) in the social sciences as “conceptual spaces in the mind’s representational system” (Mahoney 2023:330). These conceptual spaces are defined by the meanings and understandings of categories for the person using them.

Instead of considering all things in the world that have X property to be in Y category—the property possession assumption—a constructivist set-theoretic social scientist considers the Y category a mind-dependent spatial set, where some or all members of that set share property X. The Y category, a conceptual space, exists prior to the entity in the natural world that it may classify. The entity is a member of a social category “when the mind processes it as having membership in the conceptual space for that category” (Mahoney 2023:331). Mahoney (2023:344) calls for a constructivist set-theoretic approach to abandon the “property possession assumption” in thinking about categories; instead, he argues for an embrace of the spatial-set assumption, or “the belief that social categories exist as spatial sets in human minds.” In a constructivist set-theoretic conceptualization of race, race refers to a conceptual set (or sets) of social phenomena, observable in the world.

Acknowledging the limits of overrepresenting race as either materiality or discourse, a suitable framework for the study of race must understand race in a material sense and a semiotic sense. Recent sociological theories that attempt to do that have relied on a Sewellian dual structuralism to join together the materiality and semiotic dimensions of race (Jung 2015; Lewis 2004).

Roughly 12 years after Hall wrote about the different approaches to the social scientific study of race (Hall 2021, Sewell reflected on a similar conceptual problem in understanding the word “structure” in the social sciences. Sewell (2005:126) articulated a theory that attempted to “overcome the divide between semiotic and materialist visions of structure.” Drawing on Gidden’s duality of structure and Bourdieu’s “habitus,” Sewell created a theory of structure that resolves cross-disciplinary tensions between scholars who conceive of “structure” as primarily material versus primarily cultural. Sewell’s dual theory of structure includes both material and ideological/schematic elements. For Sewell (1992:19), structure is “sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action.”

Jung (2015), like Lewis (2004), attempted to remedy the problem of prioritizing materiality or semiotic dimensions of race by using Sewell’s (1992) theory of structure alongside Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) structural theory of racism. Both Jung and Lewis accept the assertion that we live in a racialized social system, or a “society in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races” (Bonilla-Silva 1997: 496). Jung and Lewis adapt this to a Sewellian dual structure such that race consists of the dominant racial logics and the material oppression of some groups and elevation of others whose “groupness” is constituted via dominant racial logics. Jung and Lewis set a foundation for a sociological dual (in the sense of materiality and semiotic) theory of race as structure.

The framework I develop here builds on these two works, incorporating some mechanical dimensions of Mahoney’s (2021) definition of structure. ⁸ To theorize race as a discursive structure, I use Mahoney’s conceptualization of rules, institutions, and structures. A structure is “a social institution that distributes resources in ways that constitute mutually dependent role identities and that regulate behavior among actors with the constituted identities” (Mahoney 2021:104). A social institution is “a system of enduring rules that affect the distribution of significant resources” (Mahoney 2021:250).

Rules are “logical statements that connect together human kind categories designating situations . . . particular actions . . . general actions . . . and sanctions for non-compliance” (Mahoney 2021:246). A rule will determine if a particular action counts as a specific broader action in the context of a particular situation. For example, a rule of many spoken languages is that inflecting your voice at the end of a sentence means you are asking a question. In a Mahonian constructivist approach, these rules exist as collective understandings. Rules also instruct people to act in particular ways in certain contexts or face sanctions for noncompliance. For example, in many performance settings, a rule is “be quiet during the performance” or be shushed or asked to leave.

Drawing on Sewell and Mahoney, I view institutions as systems of enduring rules that directly correspond to ⁹ patterns of resource distribution. Examples of institutions include marriage and nationhood. Structures are institutions where resource distribution constitutes mutually dependent social roles that regulate behavior. Examples of structures include family structures (mother, father, child), prison structures (warden, guard, prisoner), and race (White person, Black person, Yellow person).

The rules that make up structures exist in a hierarchical relationship characterized by “depth,” where a rule is deeper based on how much other rules depend on it (Mahoney 2021; Sewell 2005). Deep rules govern basic modes of thought or communication. Sets of deep rules, such as logic, mathematics, and linguistic structures, can feel like common sense. Deep rules often go unnoticed, get taken for granted, and rarely change. Surface-level rules, on the other hand, depend on many other rules for their meaning and provide the foundation for few other rules. They are often consciously perceivable as rules that we can choose to follow or not. Examples of surface-level rules include pedestrian and traffic laws, tax laws, the rules of Scrabble, and dress codes. Surface-level rules are subject to contestation and vulnerable to change (Mahoney 2021).

Race: A Subset of Structures of Descent-Based Difference

I argue here that race is one of many structures of descent-based difference. A structure of descent-based difference is a system of enduring logical statements connecting human kind-categories whereby membership in a category is heritable through descent. As a structure, the categories constitute mutually dependent role identities. These role identities correspond to historical patterns of resource distribution. Other structures of descent-based difference include monarchies, royalty, nobility, some religious structures, and many other structures of slavery and empire since antiquity. Some of the deep enduring rules of structures of descent-based difference are that (1) people can be distinguished from each other based on who sired or birthed them, (2) people inherit traits from their parents and ancestors, (3) people can identify who is related to whom based on inherited traits, (4) these distinctions are meaningful, and (5) there are inherent similarities among people who share ancestry. From this foundation, I outline a sociological framework for a nonessentializing sociology of race as structure by specifying what rules constitute the structure of race.

For analytic accuracy and to denaturalize race, we must specify “race” as the structure of descent-based difference whose categories, scientifically formalized in the eighteenth century, were generated through the practices of early-modern Western European colonial expansion. When we apply the label “race” to phenomena across time periods, we risk epistemic presentism and universalism that makes the idea of racial distinction an inevitable, natural part of human society. This occludes the human-made history of the idea and social substance, or the practice, of race. It also conceptually hinders efforts to destabilize racial orders. The articulation of race as a superset of structures of descent-based difference, as opposed to a subset, acts as a social occultation of race.

As knowledge producers and consumers, what do we stand to gain or lose by choosing to name the broad set of related systems of ideas “race” versus conceiving of race as a “limited historical, ideological and political phenomenon—one tool among others in the arsenal of horror devised by human beings to demean, oppress or exterminate each other” (Dikötter 2008:1480)? ¹⁰ Morning (2018:60) asks if the “eurocentric account of race,” that is, locating race as a phenomenon of early-modern European colonial expansion, “reflects a lack of serious scholarship about the notions of human difference that have been obtained elsewhere at varied times and places.” Does it behoove scholars to think of the race concept as a “unique cultural product of a particular time and place” or as “an umbrella of similar concepts of difference that have emerged in some places outside Europe and at different times” (Morning 2018:60)? Within the parameters of set-theoretic framing, the question becomes whether we consider “race” the spatial set that covers all human structures that include rules that determine role-identities through the idea of descent or a more specific subset of structures of descent-based difference.

I argue that to denaturalize race, we must conceive of race as one structure among many in the “arsenal of horror devised by human beings” (Dikötter 2008:1480) born from the pursuit of excess security, comfort, and autonomy through the exploitation of others. Structures that existed before the articulation of “race” in the eighteenth century or before/apart from the social categories these early articulations of race referred to should not be called “race.” When scholars label broad and varied structures of descent-based difference “race,” they implicitly reify the naturalness and inevitability of racial difference by likening it to the broad logic of descent-based difference that occurs in countless ways across societies.

Although work that centers European conquest in defining race “provides little guidance to understanding how non-European societies organized social groups and difference” (quisumbing king and White 2021:4), we need not consider all systems of organizing social groups and difference “race.”. Scholars point broadly to various structures of descent-based difference, calling them “race” or racialism when these structures distinguish people from one another through logics of heritability in which the different groups correspond to different resources and social positions. These scholars identify “race” through the property possession assumption, applying the race label to any structure that follows the discursive rules of race (i.e., that there are naturally occurring distinct kinds of humans whose differences are heritable) regardless of time and place. Like the symbolic boundary scholars, this work defines race only through the lens of its discourse, without explicitly making claims as to what race is based on.

In addition to occluding the human-made-ness of racial categories, the race-as-superset framework is theoretically inconsistent. As an example, Desmond and Emirbayer (2009) concede that “race” is fairly new in human history but then consider any symbolic category that naturalizes a social order based on phenotype and ancestry “race.” However, very old categories, such as royalty and nobility, can naturalize social orders based on phenotype and ancestry yet are rarely considered race. For conceptual consistency, I argue that scholars should consider race to be the mutually reinforcing social order and discursive institution produced by Western European colonial expansion.

To avoid overrepresenting race and making it inevitable in our imaginations, we need a framework that can account for or at least consider the many ways individuals draw boundaries between people that use the idea of descent and phenotype. In doing so, we can compare these systems of belief and sharpen our understanding of the specificity of race and the enduring logics of descent-based difference that show up across the world at different times. Sociologists of race should broadly adopt a framework that considers race as a subset of structures of descent-based difference (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Race as a subset of descent-based difference.

In this framework for studying race, scholars who wish to study logics of difference that precede race and racism can consider these logics of descent-based difference. “Protoracial” logics, such as those of classical antiquity (Isaac 2013) and the European Middle Ages (including theories of physiological differences produced by geographic differences); the biologized religious persecution of Jewish and Muslim people; the “uncivilized,” “pagan” characterizations of Irish people (Heng 2011); the premodern colonial thought of European nobility of “better blood” (Hertz 1970, cited in Robinson 2020:55); the first allusions “to ‘race’ as a concept” based on geographic distinctions in China (Liang and Le Billon 2020:6); and the early imperial patrilineal logics of differentiation (Dikötter 2015) in China are all examples of systems of rules of descent-based difference that precede Race. ¹¹ These preracial systems of rules may have created the possibility for “modern race,” but to call these institutions “race” inaccurately essentializes race through the property possession assumption.

Some scholars find fault with the notion that race is a distinctly modern Western European colonial phenomenon because in their view, this perspective obscures the intra-Western-European conflict and articulations of difference, overrepresenting the binary of the colonizer versus the colonized (Virdee 2019). ¹² Virdee (2019:6) writes that the “tendency within postcolonial sociology towards homogenizing Europe (and Whiteness) obscures a consideration of the multiple routes through which racism was made.” Is this tendency an epistemological faux pas or an observation about colonial race-making? It was, in fact, Western European colonists (merchants, demographers, settlers, the military, colonial company employees) who united Western Europeans as “White.”

Take, for example, the demographic reports of the two European colonies on the Island of Hispaniola written by the French Creole ¹³ demographer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry. Moreau de Saint-Méry chronicled the demographics of Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue over the course of 18 years, publishing large descriptive monographs in 1796 and 1797 in which he classifies the racial typology of the areas’ residents. Despite his allegiance to France and his descriptions of the French as inherently more industrious, organized, and disciplined than the Spanish (Fumagalli 2011), he describes both the Spanish and French settlers as “White.” Scholars have demonstrated how the broad and enduring racial category of “White” can hold a diversity of subcategories and intersecting nonracial categories that order subpopulations of people within the “White” category hierarchically (Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Guglielmo 2004). What, then, makes intra-Europeans distinctions mentioned by Virdee (2019) “racial”?

Wacquant (1997, 2024) critiques the argument that race(ism) is the product of Western European colonial expansion because (1) European colonialism “neither initiated nor ever wholly contained” the biological categorizations of human difference; (2) “Jews, peasants, workers, rival and recalcitrant nationalities within nascent states” were “‘racialized’ by Europe” within Europe; and (3) traditions of racial thinking existed beyond the confines of modern Western Europe (Wacquant 1997:226). However, within this critique lies the property possession articulation that I argue stunts our analytic capabilities: For Wacquant, any biological or proto-biological categorization of people counts as (ethno) race, (ethno) racialization, or (ethno) racial thought.

Looking at early imperial and modern China, Wacquant (1997, 2024) and Desmond and Emirbayer (2009) cite Frank Dikötter’s (1996) work on race in China to argue that race (as an axis of human difference) existed before and outside of Europe’s discursive formalization of “race.” Dikötter (1996) shows that although the Chinese used logics of patrilineal descent-based difference long before any sustained encounter with Western notions of race, the end of the nineteenth century ushered in distinctly different notions of descent-based difference. Scholars have demonstrated how “Western notions of race” came to China in the mid-nineteenth century (Lan 2016). Dikötter labels Chinese nationalism “racial” when it relies on notions of patrilineal lines of descent and logics of “blood.” He distinguishes between two “racial” concepts that he translates to mean “nation-race” and “race.” He demonstrates that “nation-race,” a concept native to China, distinguished different groups in and near China using logics of patrilineal descent. “Race,” however, emerged in China in the late nineteenth century and conceptualized the world as composed of around five races, with the White and Yellow races competing for superiority and conquest. “Nation-race” integrated with “race” and became a subcategory of difference within the broader category of “Yellow.” “Race” now referred to the Western European articulation of different colonial others. Dikötter (1996:595) cites a 1920 Chinese textbook:

Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and White races are relatively strong and intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the White race. Only the yellow race competes with the White race. This is so-called evolution. . . . Among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and the White races. China is [i.e., belongs to] the yellow race.

This articulation of the “Yellow” race in the Chinese textbook corresponds to Linneaus’s 1758 edition of his human taxonomy where he describes the “Homo Asiaticus” category as “yellow” (luridus), changing its former characterization as “brown” (fuscus). This change in the description of the “Asian” category reflects both his engagement with the observations of Swedish and Dutch colonial company employees ¹⁴ (who were trading primarily in China and Japan for goods including tea) and his effort to create a hierarchical order. The typology was altered so it could go from lightest to darkest, most to least civilized, and so it would correspond harmoniously to the four humors of the body: phlegm, yellow bile, blood, and black bile (Kowner and Skott 2015). The imperial Chinese patrilineal logics of descent-based difference collided with and intermingled with Western European scientific/Linnean ¹⁵ -like racial categories.

In more recent literature on African migrants in China, scholars distinguish academic traditions that claim race existed in China before European influence from traditions that stress the distinction between Chinese constructions of difference versus Western notions of race (Lan 2016, 2019). These works tend to stress the “danger of reifying a Western-centered notion of race and racism in a non-Western society” (Lan 2019:486). The troubling element of this literature on African migrants in China is that it takes “Blackness” for granted, reifying the Western logic of naturally occurring self-evident races.

Without question or interrogation of the label “Black,” these race scholars refer to “Black Africans” without an elaboration of what that means as opposed to non-Black Africans. In this case, Blackness is self-evident and exists as the reference point on which racialization occurs, evident in the idea that “Black Africans” are being “racialized” as “dishonest and untrustworthy clients by Chinese migrants” (Lan 2019:491). Here, the “racialization” is not the conceiving of these people from Africa as “Black” (which the scholars are also doing). Instead, “racialization” is conceiving of these “Black people from Africa” as untrustworthy. Thus, the “Western notion” of race is presented as the labeling of these people (who are inherently and obviously Black within this framework) as somehow inferior or all similar. But the inherent racialization of these people from Africa as Black in the epistemic framework of the study is not interrogated. In a piece written on people of African descent in Iran, which stresses differences across groups of people who settled in different locations and assimilated in different ways, the author refers to this entire group of people as Black—despite their vast array of cultural differences (Mirzai 2018). Much like the literature on African migrants in China, this use of “Black” reflects the global spread of European racial taxonomies. Once again, the substance of racial categories is presented as something natural, essential, self-evident, yet undefined.

What do these scholars and their subjects mean when they say “Black?” I argue that (whether they acknowledge it or not) they are referring to the imagined group of people whose phenotypic and ancestral reference points are loosely based on the many people from Africa who became slavers or slaves and were dubbed “Negre, Black, Negro, and Preto” in the early modern era. They acquired this label through the process of the slave trade, which made the colonial economies of modern Western European nation-states such as Spain, France, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands possible. This diverse selection of people was scientifically rendered a human subtype, or a “race” in the late eighteenth-century European taxonomic and philosophic knowledge production.

These African migrants are not simply “Black” because they are observably “Black.” “Black” is not something essential or universally observable (think again to the birthing example or the possibility that Indian people with dark brown skin would not be considered the same race as these African migrants). Instead, these people are “Black” because recognizable signifiers (e.g., bodies, language, accents) associate them with people who were enslaved en masse in Africa and imported to colonies of specific Western European empires from the early sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. European colonial company men described people, both slaves and slavers, to European scientists who categorized all these people as one, associating them with the continent of Africa as one people based on the social roles they played relative to European empires.

If sociologists or race scholars broadly do not want to naturalize or essentialize race, we cannot consider race and racialization a broad scientific phenomenon. We must recast the broader phenomena of differentiation as “structures of descent-based difference” and specify race as the historically contingent, Western European phenomenon it is. That way, we can better identify how and when our frameworks implicitly (and likely unintentionally) naturalize or essentialize race.

Sociology of race functions as social occultation when it overrepresents race as all structures of oppression that rely on logics of descent-based difference. Defining race (as a category of analysis in social science) in property-possession terms inconsistently renders structures of descent-based difference as race. This rendering makes race a broad, far-reaching, inevitable social phenomenon and inaccurately detaches it from its genealogical roots. Conceiving of race as a specific structure with rules that come from a specific place and time associated with a set of specific social practices allows for a global, transnational, historically informed sociology of race that does not overrepresent race. It also makes room for the consideration and comparison of discourses of difference that are not generated by modern European colonial expansion.

Postcolonial Sociology of Race: the Substance and Rules of Race as Structure

To thoroughly de-essentialize race, an analytic framework must specify what the “substance” of race is and distinguish this substance from the discursive dimension of race. Following scholars who conceptualize race as both a discursive formation and a material practice (e.g., Fields and Fields 2012; Golash-Boza 2016; Hesse 2007; Locke 1992; Wolfe 2016), this work considers “race” multivalent. When we discuss race from a social scientific perspective with explanatory aims, we must consider both racial discourse (the signifiers) and race as practice (the signified).

To theorize the substance of race and the relationship between the discourse of race and the practice of race, I turn to postcolonial theorizing that consistently accounts for both the materiality and discursivity of race. Following Go’s (2018) argument that postcolonial theory is central, as opposed to supplementary, to the sociology of race, I show how a thoroughly articulated colonial sociological theory of race tends to the wounds that presentism and methodological nationalism have inflicted on the U.S.-based sociology of race. This perspective reaffirms the importance of transnational racial configurations that sociologists have emphasized (Go 2018, 2020; Hammer 2017; Hammer and White 2019; Magubane 2016; quisumbing king 2019; quisumbing king and White 2021).

As I demonstrated earlier, racial categories are not based on phenotype and ancestry. If not, what are they actually based on? What is the substance of the racial category? In the birthing example, the combination of physical features and other indicators signaled “Blackness,” but the two individuals did not share these features or any ancestry. “Blackness” as a category corresponds to the perceived identification of ancestry to peoples embroiled in the trans-Atlantic slave trade who existed in the large landmass we call Africa between the end of the fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century. If not phenotype nor ancestry, what do people who were born of people who lived in Africa from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries share that they do not share with people with ancestry in other continents? Nothing, except for the fact that some of their ancestors lived on the same large land mass and everyone who lived on that land mass during a certain time period were articulated as a single people in the eighteenth century (Hannaford 1996) by European scholars whose information about people outside of Europe came from European colonial tradesmen and European colonial explorers.

The social substance of race is the material social order produced by European colonial rule in parts of the world considered non-European between the last decade of the fifteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. Racial categories were derived from colonial positionality directly in relationship to early-modern Western European empires. Race as a social practice is the maintenance of “population-specific modes of colonial domination through time” (Wolfe 2016:10) that correspond to Western Europe’s colonial domination over large parts of the world during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In this conception, racial categories are not inspired by naturally occurring logics of difference between already established groups or based on the way people look or shared ancestry. Instead, racial categories and their boundaries are derived from relational social positions of European modern colonial empire.

Returning to Moreau de Saint-Méry’s demographic report of the French colony on the Island of Hispaniola, we see how the broadest racial categories correspond to use-value to the (French) European empire. Moreau de Saint-Méry characterizes the population of Saint Domingue into “les Blancs” (Whites), “les Negres” (Blacks), a group that includes “les Caraibes” (people native to the Caribbean islands), “Sauvages” (literally “savages,” referring to people indigenous to North America), “Indiens Occidentaux” (literally translated to West Indians or Occidental Indians), and finally, “les Indiens Orientaux” (literally translated to East Indians or Oriental Indians). ¹⁶ Importantly, the descriptive distinctions he names between the non-White categories (he does not describe the White/French colonizers in these terms) are framed as instructions on how to tell them apart because, he says, the West Indians, East Indians, and Africans can be confused. He refers to both physical and temperamental differences in relation to what kinds of laborer people would make for the colonies (e.g., whether their hands are small, their frames are large, or they are jovial). ¹⁷ People of African descent were categorized as well-suited for certain kinds of slave labor, people indigenous to settled land better suited for other kinds, and people from Asia (the East Indians) better suited for other work. This document demonstrates the making of French colonial racial logics; the distinctions corresponded to where people were from, how to tell them apart, and what role they could play for enriching the colony and metropole.

Defining race as a structure whose role-identity categories correspond to use-value for modern Western European empires aligns with the narration of modern history that asserts that European colonial imperialism starting at the end of the fifteenth century constituted a new (racial) world. ¹⁸ This was a new material global world order accompanied by new ways of interpreting social and political possibilities that reverberated across every continent (Anghie 2007; Lowe 2015; Maldonado-Torres 2008, 2012; Mignolo 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019; Quijano 2007; Trouillot 2002; Wynter 1995). All racial categories in this formulation are based on combinations of the geographic, labor, and trade relationships people had to Western European countries during modern colonial imperial expansion. Racial categories are the role-identities of race as structure, and they were constituted by the distribution of resources associated with Western European modern colonial imperial expansion.

This framing allows for a firmer foundation for historically specific, global, comparative studies of race. Grounding the study of race in Western European modern colonialism allows for a broad array of different racial systems. One way to distinguish racial systems from each other is by identifying the formal colonial power and the colony wherein race is being practiced. Thus, one can study the French racial system of Saint Domingue, the Spanish racial system of Florida, the Anglo racial system of Australia, and so on.

Comparative race, colonialism, and slavery studies have examined the differences in colonial race-making across Western European empires’ colonial expansions into the Americas. In this literature, there is a consensus that the production of race across these empires and colonies yielded different racial systems, but different authors have provided different explanations for these outcomes. Some of this work attributes different systems of racial classification and identification to different colonial practices influenced by the colonist nations’ cultures, religions, and doctrines (Elkins 2013; Fenelon 2016; Klein 1967; for reviews, see De La Fuente and Gross 2010; Tannenbaum 1992), some to varying national ideologies (Sue and Golash-Boza 2009; Telles and Flores 2013), and others still to different material conditions, such as economic needs (Harris 1964; Williams 1966) or population demographics in the colonial territory (Mcnamee 2020; Montgomery 2011). Although often considered competing views, I consider the empirical findings from these works to be additive. These findings show that a combination of empires’ cultural practices, settlers’ ideological commitments, and colonies’ material and demographic conditions create complicated systems of racial classification that vary not only by empire but also by each individual colony and population.

Different racial systems emerge at different moments, and different colonial regimes ruled over the same parcels of land at different times. This colonial temporality created layers of colonial laws and social contexts that produced temporally bound local racial systems based on logics from multiple colonial racial systems (Parham 2017). American Louisiana at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, showed traces of the French and Spanish colonial regimes’ racial systems (Parham 2017). This postcolonial conceptualization of the substance of race highlights intra-Western European differences. The framework does not fall into the trap of “flattening of history where Europe comes to be shorn of the conflicts that are ongoing within that space alongside those occurring beyond it” (Virdee 2019:6) because it accounts for the intra-European differences in competing systems/practices of race.

People around the world who were not necessarily settled or made official colonies were still fundamentally affected by and affected European race-making. The “Yellow” category, for example, situated as next in superiority after White in European Enlightenment taxonomies, reflects colonial companies’ ongoing trade with China and Japan. Unlike the indigenous people of the “West Indies/Americas,” who were a threat to colonial expansion in the “new land,” or the indigenous people of the more familiar West Africa, whose forced labor was needed for economic growth in the colonies, the people of China and Japan were primarily supplying goods through trade that could be sold and enjoyed in Europe. The people with whom European colonists traded became the reference for Linnaeus, creating a specific subgroup of people based on this trade. Again, we see that racial categories correspond to early-modern colonial relationships to Western European empires, not to naturally occurring groupings of people or to physical features or biological ancestry.

Summary of a Set-Theoretic Colonial Constitution Framework for Race

According to this framework, race is a social structure of colonial occultation: a system of rules that obscures the human-made-ness of the mutually dependent roles constituted by the distribution of resources and patterns of social relations generated by Western European colonial imperial expansion from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Race is an occultative structure because it makes surface-level rules appear to be deep rules. A constructivist set-theoretic framework for race reveals that the rules of race, thought of as deep and unchangeable (i.e., racial categories correspond to groups of people with shared phenotype and ancestry), are indeed surface-level rules (i.e., racial categories correspond to groups designated as groups by European colonists) that can be profoundly changed. The rules of the structure of race rely on the sets of rules that emerged from Western European Enlightenment science, the Western European Enlightenment philosophy of the Rights of Man, and colonial practices established during Western European colonial expansion.

Combining the set-theoretic notion of race as a structure with a an analysis of the colonially-constitution of race produces a conceptualization of race that specifies a time-bound social practice linked to a lasting and changing social structure. This framework provides sociologists theoretical precision, explanatory power, and a way out of producing knowledge that essentializes race, occluding its human-made-ness and rendering it inevitable.

In any given time, in any given location, there are overlapping logics and practices of human differentiation. Borrowing the metaphor of palimpsest from Parham (2017), we can think of people’s logics of difference (bound to time and space) as potential palimpsests of different structures. We will likely find a palimpsest of structures of descent-based difference (e.g., like contemporary China), and in some cases, there will be a palimpsest of specific racial systems associated with different Western European colonial practices of race (as in Hispaniola/Saint Domingue/Santo Domingo/Ayiti at the turn of the nineteenth century or New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century).

In this postcolonial set-theoretic framework of race, a structure of descent-based difference should be called “race” when its categories correspond to classification systems demarcating Western European (i.e., those with the right to colonize) from all others, whose membership in a racial categorical set is based on their relationship to Western European empires from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. This assertion does not imply a hierarchy of importance to the many imperialisms of the non-European worlds or premodern imperial practices. The Japanese, Chinese, Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires that parallel, to different degrees, modern European colonial imperial expansions are largely overlooked in American sociology. This oversight hurts sociology broadly. In many of these empires, racial discourse as a Western European social structure exists in different moments alongside other structures of descent-based difference. To analytically pull them apart allows for clarity and resists the tendency for social scientists to essentializes race by applying the specific structure to universal phenomena.

Conclusion

The discord between structural materialists and symbolic-centric scholars is a difference of epistemological priorities—structural materialists focus on how race as a global phenomenon shapes people’s lives, and symbolic-centric scholars focus on how race is defined, contested, made, and remade in different moments and locations. The different perspectives offer different explanatory lenses. The varying materialist approaches to race sociology do an excellent job of articulating the material consequences of race and racism. The varying semiotic-focused approaches provide excellent tools for comparing and specifying different systems of race and explaining variation, change, and inconsistency in racial logics and racial categories. This article demonstrates, however, that both traditions come up short if the goal is to avoid essentializing race.

Some symbolic-centric scholars critique the structural materialist frameworks for failing to capture the complexity of race-making, essentializing race. However, these scholars fail to provide an alternative framework that explains what the substance of race is, if not class. These scholars unintentionally obscure the human-made-ness of modern global racial inequality by leaving the substance of racial categories unspecified. For the consistency of the social constructivist paradigm, race theorists must define a substance of racial categories beyond phenotype and ancestry if they are to suggest that racial categories are indeed “human made.” What would it mean in race sociology if “race” is a mode of differentiation based on phenotype and ancestry? It would mean that racial categories are observable, naturally occurring distinctions.

Leaning on set-theoretic logic and postcolonial theorizing of race, this colonial-constitutive set-theory of race provides a solution to the tautology of race conceptualizing in both materialist and symbolic traditions of race sociology by defining the substance of race. Postcolonial epistemological tools denaturalize race in sociology by specifying that racial categories correspond to historically and geographically contingent groups of people made through early-modern Western European colonial practices. What would it mean if “race” is a mode of differentiation whose categories are based on use-value to Western European empires determined during early-modern colonial expansion? It would mean racial categories are human-made.

Although few sociological theories accommodate a dual material-discursive colonial conceptualization of race, there is a tradition in the sociology of race that concentrates neither primarily on the way race structures life globally nor the way race is constructed in a symbolic sense. Instead, this race scholarship focuses on the process of linking the material, conflictual, economic dimensions of race to the discursive, mind-dependent elements of race. Empirically, that has meant studying the contexts and practices that couple, decouple, or reorient discursive racial references to material racial substance. It requires uncovering or scrutinizing the social conditions, processes, and human actions that facilitate the codification of human-made social distinctions based on material practices as “racial difference.” Examples of this kind of scholarship can be found in studies that try to explain the why of changing racial classifications (Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Lopez 2000; Roediger 1994) ¹⁹ and especially work that traces how states disperse resources in ways that shape and were shaped by different racial ascriptions, laws, and practices (Fox 2012; Katznelson 2005; Khan 2021; Nakano Glenn 2002; Nobles 2000; quisumbing king 2022). This work is bound by time period and social contexts. A set-theoretic analytic definition of race that specifies its colonial constitution accommodates this kind of empirical work that exists in the intellectual spaces that connect the materialist and symbolic epistemic priorities.

The specification of race allows for this sociological theory of race to avoid the implicit reinscription of biological essentialism endemic to symbolic-centric conceptualization while still tending to global variation in racial systems sometimes overlooked by structural materialists. Understanding race in any part of the world, according to this framing, requires understanding how early-modern Western European colonial expansion affected the social relations of that region.

Future work using a set-theoretic, colonial-constitution race framework must trace how and when racial rules expanded, contracted, changed, and stayed the same through waves of Western colonialism that followed the early-modern period. This process has been called the study of “colonial recursion” (Coenders 2024; Stoler 2016), or the sociocultural processes that modify racial categories but also reinscribe colonial racial categories to colonial patterns of relations established in the early-modern colonial period. This theoretical lens can help clarify discussions of race in relationship to the concepts of “caste” and “ethnicity.” Most importantly, sociologists can thoroughly denaturalize race if we adopt this foundational definition of race as a specific structure of descent-based difference and cease to apply the label of race and racialization to varying structures of descent-based difference.