Racialization and its paradigms: From Ireland to North America |
Racialization and its paradigms: From Ireland to North America
Current Sociology
Volume 64, Number 2 (March 2016)
pages 213-227
DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614782
Vilna Bashi Treitler, Professor of Black and Latino Studies; Professor of Sociology
City University of New York
This article offers a template for understanding and analyzing racialization as a paradigm. Further, this template is applied to the North American case – an important one because it has endured and spread across the globe despite the enormous weight of scientific evidence against it. The fallacy of race (and in particular the North American Anglo-origin variant) endures for two reasons. First, social agents seeking to gain or maintain power and control over paradigm-relevant resources benefit from reinvesting in pseudoscientific racial paradigms. Second, new science proving the fallacy of race is ignored because ignoring new paradigmatic science is in fact the way normal science operates. Thus, a paradigmatic analysis of race may help to explain why current social science approaches to the demise of racial thought may be ineffective.
Read or purchase the article here. Read the working paper “Racialization – Paradigmatic Frames from British Colonization to Today, and Beyond” here.
Tags: Current Sociology, Ireland, Vilna Bashi Treitler