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Faye Harrison
Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee

Abstract

At this post-colonial and post-cold war juncture, the invidious social distinction known as "race" is undergoing yet another phase of realignment and reconfiguration in many parts of the world, in both the North and South. In both marked and unmarked forms, race persists as a social reality, and, in many instances, it is intensifying. This is so despite passionate claims from biological anthropology, or sectors of it, that "race doesn't really exist." Folk constructs of race persist despite the declining resonance of biologizing caricatures once integral to commonsense knowledge. Today ideologies of race are commonly based on assumptions about the irreconcilability and unbridgeability of certain categories of cultures and nations. However, even in contexts in which the leading racial discourses revolve around a concept of culture, biodeterminism may still be strongly asserted. In other words, arguments about "the declining significance of race"and "the bell curve" may be fraternal twins in a single family.

In the light of the subtle and multiple guises of what can be understood to be "race," "racial," or "racist" around the world, it is important that confusion over race's continued significance, its global scope, and its entanglements with ethnicity, class, gender, and nation be offset by critical cross-cultural analysis. Ideally, the analysis of the social processes that constitute race making and re-making should have historical depth and elucidate the complex relationships between spheres of culture and political economy. Such a mode of analysis can be constructively informed by insights from human rights research and advocacy. Useful insights into contemporary racism and strategies to combat it can be gleaned from an examination of such units of the human rights system as the UN's Committee for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This committee offers an important angle from which to view racialization, the social censorship of anti-racist grievances, and the impact of current-day global integration on inter-ethnic conflicts.