June 21

9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

1.B.03

Mireia Triguero Roura

Abstract: The consensus among European scholars (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) is that “race” is a social category rooted in colonialist ideology and unfit for understanding social relations in Europe today. Interpretations of contemporary discrimination and animosity towards immigrants by nativist Europeans favor cultural over racial explanations, with few exceptions (Flores, 2015). The use of “race” as a category of analysis is seen as contributing to the reification of racial boundaries in society (see discussion in Brubaker and Cooper, 2001). Consequently, most research ignores the folk understandings of “race” as a category of practice in the sites it studies and assumes altogether that race does not structure social relations. This confusion of normative positions with empirical realities obfuscates our understanding of the reproduction of inequalities in Europe. This research's goal is twofold: to document the historical presence and subsequent erasure of “race” in Spanish social science textbooks and to identify the consequences of this erasure. Through the text analysis of over 80 textbooks since the end of the Franco dictatorship until today (1975-2018), I find that, although older textbooks had a systematic understanding of racial categories, at a certain point, “race” as a conceptual category completely disappears and gets substituted by “culture.” This erasure has two main effects. First, it inhibits understanding of Spain’s colonial past. Second, despite the erasure, implicit concepts of race continue to be present in explanations of world events. I argue that this continues to reify the concept of race while making it impossible to explicitly challenge it.

Disciplines: Sociology
Political Science

Substantive Tags: Identity and Ethnicity, Immigration/Migration, Racism/Nativism, Social History, Southern Europe

Research Networks: None of the Above

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