Working-class Racism

Abstract

The concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ present notoriously thorny and controversial problems of definition. I concur with those who interpret ‘race’ as a social construct. Racial categories cannot be explained through a ‘scientific’ system of classification based on biological/genetic methods but are ideological constructs, forms of boundary definition between groups, that have evolved within specific historical and social contexts. ‘“Races” are socially imagined rather than biological realities’, notes Miles.¹ The dynamic process by which boundaries are delineated (‘racialisation’) allocates persons to particular groups by reference not only to supposed biological difference (usually phenotypical) but also cultural characteristics and other symbolic markers. ‘Race’ is chameleon-like, continually being reworked, and Stuart Hall has recommended an investigation of the ‘different ways in which racist ideologies have been constructed and made operative under different historical conditions’.²