Racism and Stratification: A Two-Way Relation

The article presents the main intuition of Stratification Economics (SE): racism and stratification are closely linked. It suggests, however, that this relation need not imply a causation from racism to stratification alone. More specifically, it points out two open issues in SE: the need for an account of the racist ideology that underlies racist action, and the need to overcome a standard theory of the market economy, which inevitably clashes with SE. It suggests that the economy must be viewed as a capitalist one, where distribution is a key feature and, consequently, class and race coexist. It then provides two possible accounts for racist ideology that are rooted in the way a capitalist market economy functions: “ceremonial racism” uses race as a ceremonial means to distinguish the worst off from the rest; “scapegoat racism” is a reaction to social debasement that uses the worst off as scapegoats. Both accounts suggest that racist ideology may result from distributional issues and stratification rather than the other way round.