COMMENT | The idea of ‘race’ and how colonial powers used it

In his first lecture, Professor [Loïc] Wacquant set two ground rules: whenever we see the word “race”, we are to put it in quotation marks. Second, we are not allowed to use the word “racism”... the act forces the person uttering or writing the word to remember that “race” is a social construct. How “race” is understood and experienced, how it is enacted, and the consequences of its particular enactments, vary over time and place.

- from the book This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn

COMMENT | It took me a long time - much too long - to read the Singaporean sociologist Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like. This book belatedly forced me to pay deeper attention to the complicated, problematic terminology behind those two words, "race" and "ethnicity", that we take for granted in an everyday context.

I began noticing particular assumptions as I pored over manuscripts I was editing, considering their implications and meanings. By not paying close attention, we strip them of deeper implications, and the result is that together with terms like "stereotypes", "prejudice", and "discrimination", they become absorbed into everyday use and lose their malicious power.

Where I once noted them almost unquestioningly, now I was deliberately considering their usage, as they peppered the pages and are taken for granted.

In some cases, I opted to substitute “race” for “ethnicity”. Perhaps it may be a less contentious choice that avoids the supposed biological connotations of “race” and the historical baggage that it has been saddled with.

But doing so means...