This thesis critically evaluates theories of racism in everyday life. Theories of racism are often based on the ideal of scientific objectivity. As a consequence, knowledge of racism is always in conflict with everyday life. The thesis criticizes the presupposition that race is a subjective illusion existing independently of concrete social practices. Two main approaches to racism are compared: subjectivist and objectivist. Because of their shared epistemological basis – the dualism of the subjective and objective world – these approaches offer opposing, yet equally flawed explanations. Racism is either a consequence of irrational individuals caught in the past, or a normal and universal consequence of human nature. Race is reduced to a mental phenomenon that people learn from racist ideologies, or to a meaning which follows automatically from the nature of perceptual-cognitive processes. In contrast, this thesis attempts to show that race exists not merely as a mental category but as a lived meaning that cannot be understood independently of the individual’s everyday experience, habits, and practical knowledge of the society in which they live. Race is treated not as a universal meaning, but as an actually existing, meaningful whole within capitalist relations, that is not however causally related to them.
|
