On the Dangers of Disconnecting Race and Racism

The paper critically reviews some recent contributions to the debate about the nature of race and racism. It questions the analytic and empirical divorce between race and racism for which Floya Anthias and others have argued. It suggests that disconnecting race and racism while insisting on the retention of a concept of race could well give rise to a view that race is, after all, a valid scientific concept denoting a real biological division of the human species. This paper argues, instead, for a focus on race as a social relationship rather than a category of human being. It suggests that race and racism are inextricably linked and that, moreover, recently discovered new racisms depend for their power on the continued influence of biologically determinist modes of conceptualising human difference.