How Do Sociologists Define Race

Sociologists define race as a concept that is used to signify different types of human bodies. While there is no biological basis for racial classification, sociologists recognize a long history of attempts to organize groups of people based on similar skin color and physical appearance. The absence of any biological foundation makes race challenging to define and classify, and as such, sociologists view racial categories and the significance of race in society as unstable, always shifting, and intimately connected to other social forces and structures. Sociologists emphasize, though, that while race is not a concrete, fixed thing that is essential to human bodies, it is much more than simply an illusion. While it is socially constructed through human interaction and relationships between people and institutions, as a social force, race is real in its consequences. How to Understand Race Sociologists and racial theorists Howard Winant and Michael Omi provide a definition of race that situates it within social, historical, and political contexts, and that emphasizes the fundamental connection between racial categories and social conflict. In their book ​Racial Formation in the United States,  Winant and Omi explain that race is: ...an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle,† and, that â€Å"...race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Omi and Winant link race, and what it means, directly to political struggles between different groups of people, and to social conflicts which stem from competing group interests. To say that race is defined in large part by political struggle is to recognize how definitions of race and racial categories have shifted over time, as the political terrain has shifted. For example, within the context of the U.S., during the founding of the nation and the era of enslavement, definitions of black were premised on the belief that African and native-born slaves were dangerous brutes—wild, out of control people who needed to be controlled for their own sake, and the safety of those around them. Defining â€Å"black† in this way served the political interests of the property-owning class of white men by justifying enslavement. This ultimately served the economic benefit of slave owners and all others who profited and benefited from the slave-labor economy. In contrast, early white abolitionists in the U.S. countered this definition of blackness with one that asserted, instead, that far from animalistic savages, Black slaves were humans worthy of freedom. As sociologist Jon D. Cruz documents in his book ​Culture on the Margins, Christian abolitionists, in particular, argued that a soul was perceptible in the emotion expressed through the singing of slave songs and hymns and that this was proof of the humanity of Black slaves. They argued that this was a sign that slaves should be freed. This definition of race served as the ideological justification for the political and economic project of the northern battles against the southern war for secession. The Socio-Politics of Race in Todays World In today’s context, one can observe similar political conflicts playing out among contemporary, competing definitions of blackness. An effort by Black Harvard students to assert their belonging at the Ivy League institution via a photography project titled â€Å"I, Too, Am Harvard,† demonstrates this. In the online series of portraits, Harvard students of Black descent hold before their bodies signs bearing racist questions and assumptions that are often directed toward them, and, their responses to these. The images demonstrate how conflicts over what â€Å"Black† means play out in the Ivy League context. Some students shoot down the assumption  that all Black women know how to twerk, while others assert their ability to read and their intellectual belonging on the campus. In essence, the students  refute the notion that blackness is simply a composite of stereotypes, and in doing so, complicate the dominant, mainstream definition of â€Å"Black.† Politically speaking, contemporary stereotypical definitions of â€Å"Black† as a racial category do the ideological work of supporting the exclusion of Black students from, and marginalization within, elite higher educational spaces. This serves to preserve them as white spaces, which in turn preserves and reproduces white privilege and white control of the distribution of rights and resources within society. On the flip side, the definition of blackness presented by the photo project asserts the belonging of Black students within elite higher education institutions and asserts their right to have access to the same rights and resources that are afforded to others. This contemporary struggle to define racial categories and what they mean exemplifies Omi and Winants definition of race as unstable, ever-shifting, and politically contested.