Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies

Unformatted Document Text: Holloway 6 analysis. I am not trying to discern the contents of policymaker’s heads or the “true” goals of any individual’s rhetoric but rather to understand how shared understandings concerning race are arrived at in terms of United States drug policy in Latin America. Consequently, race and racism need to be understood in more comprehensive terms. Bonilla-Silva’s (2001; 2003) articulation of the racialized social system locates racism not as the sole product of individual minds but also the result of a racially hierarchical structure. The racial structure is the reflection of the superordinate and subordinate positioning of different races where the dominant race receives distinct advantages and the lesser races struggle for parity. In this context, racism is understood as the racially based framework 11 , or racial ideology, used by the dominant race to justify, explain, accept, or discount the existing racial hierarchy in order to protect its collective interest by maintaining position. While other frameworks exist, it is the dominant racial ideology against which all racial actors must compare their ideological positions. He labels the dominant ideology that filters and mediates the current racial order color-blind racism. Bonilla-Silva draws on Giddens’ structuration theory to explain the relationship between structure and ideology – each is constituted in and through recurrent practices: “Both change through the ‘racial contestation’ of actors in a racialized social system” (2001, p. 85, n. 48, emphasis in original). I have adopted CDA for this project because at its root is the effort to problematize the taken-for-granted ideas, beliefs, customs, etc, embedded in language practices that mask the power relations in a given society or situation (van Dijk, 1997). It is important to point out that discourse analysis is not simply a collection of methods for analyzing individual texts but a methodological approach that is derived from key ontological and epistemological assumptions: Traditional qualitative approaches often assume a social world and then seek to understand the meanings of this world for participants. Discourse analysis, on the other hand, tries to explore how 11 “These frameworks are the social representations of the races, that is, the conscious and unconscious sum of ideas, prejudices, and myths that crystallize the victories and defeats of the races regarding how the world is and ought to be organized” (Bonilla-Silva, 2001, p. 64, emphasis in original).


Authors: Holloway, Johnny.