doc - Assignment Essays

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You will write one 2 – 3-page critical reading reflection paper during the quarter. The paper topic must correspond with one of the weekly topics and assigned readings, within the first 5 weeks of the quarter. It is up to you which weekly topic/readings to choose. Please submit the paper via Canvas by the end of Week 5.

1. Provide a brief synthesis of the reading(s) (about a ½ – 1 page)

2. Critique the reading(s) (about 1 page)

3. Pose a series of discussion questions (at least two) based on the readings with some background as to what made you think of those questions (about a ½ – 1 page)

4. Cite all sources and submit the paper via Canvas after you have completed it.

Writing a good critical reflection paper is more demanding than it might appear at first. It is not simply a matter of reading the text, understanding it, and expressing an opinion about it. You must allow yourself enough time to be clear about what each text says and how the texts all relate to one another (if there is more than one reading that week). In other words, these critical reflection papers require you to synthesize the intellectual work of others—that is, bring it together into an integrated whole. When preparing to write your papers, it is crucial that you allow yourself not just enough time to do the readings but enough to digest what you have read and to put the results together into a unified account.

Formatting: 1-inch margins, 12pt font, Times New Roman or some other “normal” font. There is no specific citation style required. Just be consistent and include both in-text citations and a reference section/bibliography/works cited page.

Please submit as a Word doc or PDF only.

https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220941024

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
2022, Vol. 8(3) 343 –354
© American Sociological Association 2020
DOI: 10.1177/2332649220941024
sre.sagepub.com

Racism in Pandemic Times

Ideologies are always on the move, as they must be
capable of expanding their influence and adapting
to new situations. This is the case of color-blind rac-
ism (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Doane 2017) during the
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Its major frameworks have significantly shaped
how Americans think about racial matters since the
1970s and, unsurprisingly, our current discussions
about coronavirus-related matters. The core of
color-blind racism, unlike Jim Crow racism, is
explaining racial matters as the outcomes of nonra-
cial dynamics (for similar arguments, see Bobo and
Smith 1997). The four central frameworks of color-
blind ideology are abstract liberalism (explaining
racial matters in an abstract, decontextualized man-
ner), naturalization (naturalizing racialized out-
comes such as neighborhood segregation), cultural
racism (attributing racial differences to cultural
practices), and minimization of racism. These
frameworks are molding how we understand,
among other things, (1) the work and role of essen-
tial workers, (2) the differential mortality rates of
COVID-19, and (3) hunger in the pandemic.

These color-blind-infused discussions are dan-
gerous, as they transpire in a mostly innocent, nice

manner. For instance, who would object to the idea
that “we are all in this together”? Why might such
a statement of unity in the middle of a pandemic be
regarded as having racial implications? Most peo-
ple would think like New York governor Andrew
Cuomo, who, after learning that his younger
brother had contracted the virus, tweeted that
COVID-19 is “the great equalizer.”1 This is the
power of ideology in general, and of racial ideol-
ogy in particular: it works best when it is not direct
and seems to represent how everybody thinks
(Bonilla-Silva 2001).

In this article I discuss how color-blind racism
has affected our understanding of the three afore-
mentioned subjects. As these three ideologically
colored issues are widely diffused, I concentrate on
analyzing the messages they convey as well as
what they fail to make explicit. This project is

941024 SREXXX10.1177/2332649220941024Sociology of Race and EthnicityBonilla-Silva
research-article2020

1Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University, Department of
Sociology, 268 Soc/Psych Building, Durham, NC 90088,
USA
Email: eb48@duke.edu

Color-Blind Racism in
Pandemic Times

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva1

Abstract
In this article the author examines how the frameworks of color-blind racism have influenced many topics
during the pandemic. Using readily available material from popular culture (TV shows, newspaper and
magazine articles, and advertisements) and from statements by government officials, the author examines
how color blindness has shaped our national discussion on essential workers and heroes, charity, and
differential mortality. The main argument is that color-blind racism is limiting our understanding of the
structural nature of the various racial problems coronavirus disease 2019 has revealed, making it difficult
to envision the kinds of policies needed to address them. the author concludes by summarizing what these
ideological perspectives block from view as well as addressing the nascent discursive cracks that might be
used to produce alternative frames for interpreting matters and organizing collective action.

Keywords
racial ideology, color-blind racism, pandemic, frameworks, disasters, ideology

https://sre.sagepub.com

mailto:eb48@duke.edu

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F2332649220941024&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2020-07-31

344 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8(3)

based on a momentous, still unfolding event in
which researchers are homebound. Thus, there is
little to gain in trying to be “methodologically
correct”—waiting for systematic, representative
data on the matters examined would likely make
the analysis less relevant, as such data will likely be
available long after the pandemic ends. However,
this is not a call for sloppiness. I will be as clear
about the relevance of the material selected for dis-
cussion and, when possible, provide evidence of
the level of influence of a source.2

My main argument is that the color-blind racial
framing of these three issues limits recognizing
that the problems made apparent during the
COVID-19 pandemic have a structural nature (e.g.,
class and racial inequalities, the lack of a proper
safety net, and the need for universal health care).
More significantly for my analysis, structural rac-
ism is mostly dislodged (or minimized) as a central
factor shaping the nation. Consequently, color-
blind racism–inflected discussions obscure how the
problems at hand are worse for communities of
color and may require race-based social policies to
address them—official discourse during disasters
tends to ignore marginalized communities’ view-
points and reflects dominant narratives (Tierney,
Bevc, and Kuligowski 2006). To be clear, my claim
is not that how some of these issues are being
framed is new (e.g., Whites’ idea that Black and
Brown people are sick because of their culture or
behavior, or because they are biologically different,
is not new) but that color-blind racism has made
these ideas more palatable to the general public
and, therefore, more salient.

I proceed as follows. First, I define the notion of
“racial ideology.” Second, I discuss the three sub-
jects shaped by color-blind discourse, explain each
of them, make visible their connection to racial
stratification, and try to clarify what the framing
obscures. Last, I summarize in the discussion sec-
tion the ideological work these three issues per-
form and mention two other emerging subjects
influenced by color-blind racism. As ideologies are
not without contradictions and cracks, I briefly
highlight how the tremendously fluid conjuncture at
which we are living—the confluence of a pandemic,
a recession, and a race-based protest movement—
has allowed counternarratives to emerge and for
alternative policies to be contemplated.

RACIAl IDEOlOgy
My goal in this section is modest. I outline the cen-
tral features of the racial ideology paradigm to ori-
ent my analysis (for a full discussion, see

Bonilla-Silva 2003). For good reasons, most theo-
rizations on ideology begin with Marx’s (2000)
classic The German Ideology. Marx’s premise is
that the fundamental division of any society is
based on class; hence the dominant class attempts
to present its views as universal. Second, the privi-
leged position of the dominant class facilitates rep-
resenting its views as universal. Third, the dominant
class’s ideas are fundamentally the “ideal expres-
sion of the dominant material relationships” (Marx
2000:192). Many Marxists assume that class
explains all divisions in any society, but race and
feminist scholars have long contended that race
and gender are central axes of division in moder-
nity that cannot be relegated to “secondary contra-
dictions” (Omi and Winant 2014; Hill Collins
1990). Yet Marx’s general insights about class ide-
ology are still useful and can be extended to the
analysis of racial matters. Thus, racial ideology is

the racially-based frameworks used by actors to
explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge
(subordinate race or races) the racial status quo.
Although modern societies articulate various
forms of hierarchy and, thus, societal ideology
encompasses frames from gender, racial, class,
and other forms of hierarchical structurations, I
focus here on how aspects of the larger
“ideological ensemble” play out in the field of
race relations. I label these frameworks “racial”
albeit I recognize that many (e.g., the frame of
abstract liberalism) are used to justify gender
and class inequality. (Bonilla-Silva 2003:65)

Of all the functions of racial ideology, a central
one is providing arguments to “account for racial
inequality” (Bonilla-Silva 2003:74). This is part of
what I intend to document in this article: that
COVID-19 pandemic subjects infused by color-
blind frameworks directly—or by omission—dis-
count racism or minimize its role.

Two other points before I proceed. First, ideolo-
gies are embedded not just in newspaper articles
and speeches by politicians but also in social texts
(e.g., films, pictures). Thus, although I include
comments from politicians, I rely heavily on mate-
rial from popular media, as “ideologies are
acquired, expressed, enacted and reproduced by
discourse” (van Dijk 2006:124). Second, students
of ideology have pointed out that ideological fields
are always partial and never “pure” (Irvine 2019).
Rarely does one find ideological expressions that
represent exclusively the dominant group’s views—
they usually incorporate some ideas from subordi-
nated groups (Poulantzas 1978). Also, as racial

Bonilla-Silva 345

ideology is often articulated within ideological
items expressive of other social divisions or
wedged in generic arguments (Hall 1986), most of
the material analyzed here does not reflect specific
discussions on race. Yet I will show that race looms
large in these seemingly nonracial discussions.
Last, in any ideological formation, various gender,
class, or racial ideological iterations coexist. In
contemporary America, for example, most Whites
espouse color blindness, but a segment clearly does
not, including the president, who has a long history
of overt racist statements and practices (Bonilla-
Silva 2019a), which he continues dispensing to
date (from labeling COVID-19 as the “Chinese
virus” to advocating a Nixon-like “law and order”
approach to deal with protesters).

PRAISE fOR “OUR HEROES”
Stories about heroes during this pandemic are ubiq-
uitous. Companies such as Kraft-Heinz, Budweiser,
Amazon, and Walmart have all produced commer-
cials or symbols heralding “essential workers” as
heroes. These advertisements are broadcast on a
variety of mainstream networks. These stories also
appear daily on TV segments, in which news
anchors salute “our heroes” and in print media
bearing headlines such as, “Heroes of the Front
Lines: Stories of the Courageous Workers Risking
Their Own Lives to Save Ours” (Time 2020). The
writer of a piece about cartoonists celebrating “the
heroes amid the pandemic” stated the core ele-
ments of this framing:

Companies and community members at all levels
are celebrating and elevating these unsung heroes
in countless ways: Some are donating personal
protective equipment, giving them free products
or offering free meals. Others are simply saying
thank you to those continuing to work. Residents,
streamers and students around the Bay Area have
united to collect hand sanitizer for local shelters,
hospices and jails, create masks for hospital
workers or donate money to international groups
aiding other countries fighting the pandemic.
(Bouscher 2020)

One of the cartoons accompanying the story
depicts a “Supernurse” (a White woman dressed as
Superman) flying a frail man away from the virus,
while another echoes the iconic image of Iwo Jima,
featuring a White-looking scientist, nurse, doctor, and
first responder symbolically planting an American
flag. Although there is no question that “essential
workers” are sacrificing themselves and deserve

praise, labeling them as “heroes” clouds our vision.
Our economy and our health care system cannot
depend on “heroes,” particularly when so many of
them are workers of color. What is needed is commit-
ment from the state and corporations to provide work-
ers with the necessary protection to safely fulfill their
jobs, as well as adequate pay for their sacrifices.
Framing these workers as “heroes” makes us less
likely to empathize and support those who choose to
strike, protest, or remain absent from work during the
pandemic. Nurses, for example, are organizing and
filing complaints to the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, and delivery workers at
Amazon and Instacart threatened to strike unless they
receive adequate protection, sick leave, and hazard
pay (DeSantis 2020).

Protests from these essential workers are
already happening and will likely increase. As
recent cases have shown, when “heroes” do not
behave according to our archetypal notion of hero-
ism, they become villains. For example, 10 nurses
at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa
Monica, California, were suspended after refusing
to enter coronavirus patient rooms before being
supplied with N95 masks (Murphy 2020). Hospital
management justified the suspension as due to
“[nurses’] refusal to treat the patients” which “con-
stituted abandonment and negligence” (Murphy
2020). The hospital management’s statement
exemplifies how the hero framework deflects
responsibility and blames workers:

We are so grateful for the heroic work our
nurses perform each day and will not let the
actions of a few diminish the appreciation we
have for all our nurses and their commitment to
our community. . . . Saint John’s cherishes its
nurses and is taking precautions sanctioned by
leading world, national, state and local health
agencies to ensure their safety. (Baker 2020)

How is color-blind racism shaping the discussion
of “our heroes”? Heroes, particularly those more
exposed to the virus, are disproportionally workers
of color, even though one would not know it from
the images circulating in the media. Our racialized
class structure leads Black and Brown workers to be
in jobs more exposed to COVID-19 than Whites.
Black and Brown workers represent 50 percent of
janitors, the bulk of nurses in supportive positions
(those more exposed to hazardous conditions and
receiving less protection), 44 percent of construction
workers, 50 percent of correctional officers, 52 per-
cent of bus drivers, a whopping 70 percent of grad-
ers and sorters of agricultural products (these are the

346 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8(3)

workers at Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, and other meat-
packing companies), and 30 percent of police and
sheriff patrol officers (Bureau of Labor Statistics
2020a). The abstract liberal way we discuss “our
heroes” blinds us to the racial composition of the
group, preventing the deeper question from surfac-
ing: why are workers of color overrepresented in
these dangerous, low-paying jobs in the first place?
Praising them as corporations, politicians, and
celebrities do naturalizes the racial status quo.

One occupation that clearly shows the high
exposure of workers of color to the virus is phle-
botomists, 50 percent of whom are Black and
Latino. Their basic job is to draw blood from
patients, and during the pandemic many have been
asked to “volunteer” to do coronavirus testing
(Velasquez-Caldera 2020). Because of their high
rates of exposure to fluids and people, phleboto-
mists have a higher than average exposure to the
virus. Adding testing for COVID-19 to their duties,
which required quick training, as “prior to the pan-
demic, only nurses and doctors were allowed to do
the swabbing” (Velasquez-Caldera 2020), has
made their job even more dangerous, particularly
considering that their median pay is $35,000
(Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020b).

The level of exposure to the virus is even higher
for bus drivers, janitors, and workers in the meat-
packing industry, all occupations with very high rep-
resentations of workers of color. Hence, rather than
admiration, salutes from our porches and windows,
or the song “Good Job” by Alicia Keys, what all
essential workers need, but particularly workers of
color, are masks, hazard pay, sick leave, and higher
wages. The virus has exposed the effects of the ero-
sion of our limited, highly racialized welfare state,
which has left large segments of society vulnerable to
health and economic disasters (Ward 2005). This ero-
sion was catapulted by the highly racialized politics
of the 1980s and 1990s, when the image of the “wel-
fare queen” and the notion of “welfare dependency”
were foisted by Republicans and Democrats
(Quadagno 1994). Accordingly, the kryptonite debil-
itating our true superheroes—essential workers of
color—is not the virus but years of antigovernment,
neoliberal, racialized rhetoric, and structural racism.

“DONATE TO fEEDINg AmERICA’S
CORONAVIRUS fUND”
The title for this section comes from the Web site of
Feeding America, the nation’s “largest domestic hunger-
relief organization” (http://feedingamerica.org). Almost
two weeks after the United States initiated social dis-
tancing measures to mitigate the spread of the virus,

nonessential workers began to lose their jobs. As of
April 30, the total number of unemployment claims
has reached 30 million and will likely increase in the
next few weeks (Dmitrieva 2020). Adding underem-
ployed workers to the mix, the number of food-insecure
Americans has skyrocketed to about 30 percent of the
working class and, for workers of color, an even higher
proportion.3

In response, the media, churches, and other
organizations have blanketed the airwaves with
stories about food banks serving two to six times
more clients than usual. These stories are heart
wrenching and invariably end with reporters’ or
organizations’ asking viewers for donations. The
precarious condition of workers in America is such
that many of those deemed “nonessential” are now
food insecure and relying on food banks. Food
insecurity, however, is not due to the virus. Between
12 percent and 15 percent of households have been
food insecure for a long time, and the rate has been
much higher for households of color. According to
Odoms-Young (2018), the rate of food insecurity
for Whites fluctuated from 7 percent to 10 percent
from 2001 to 2016, but for Blacks and Latinos it
ranged from 17 percent to 27 percent. This is why
hunger “is a racial equity issue” (Nitschke 2017).

Framing hunger as a charity matter derails us
from thinking about why workers were out of food
after just a few weeks of unemployment, why there
were such high levels of food insecurity before the
pandemic, and, more significantly for my discus-
sion, the fact that hunger is also a highly racialized
affair. This framing universalizes hunger in an
abstract liberal way when data on hunger show that
a quarter of households of color were food insecure
before the pandemic hit; this rate has likely
increased since the pandemic began. The racialized
facts around food insecurity will require in the
short term race-targeted, creative approaches to
help those most affected by the pandemic.4

Why is the United States food insecure when it
is the richest, most powerful nation in the world?
America is food insecure because income and
wealth inequality have returned to Gilded Age lev-
els. In 1929, the Gini coefficient was 49.91, and by
2018, after decades of staying in the 30s, it had
climbed back to 48.22 (Atkinson et al. 2017;
DePrieto 2020). Data on inequality are telling:
whereas “S&P 500 firm CEOs were paid 278 times
as much as average U.S. workers in 2018” (Institute
for Policy Studies 2020), restaurant servers, to use
one relevant example, hardly improved their earn-
ings since the early 1990s, and their federal mini-
mum wage has remained stagnant at $2.13 (Institute
for Policy Studies 2020).

http://feedingamerica.org

Bonilla-Silva 347

A 2019 study revealed that about 40 percent of
Americans do not have enough savings (a mini-
mum of $400) to deal with an emergency (Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2020).
This figure does not show the racial disparities in
liquid savings, and it is estimated that whereas “the
typical household had . . . 31 days of income in such
savings, the typical black household had just five
days’ worth” (Currier and Elmi 2018). The billion-
aire class Bernie Sanders talked about during his
presidential campaign run is real and is cannibal-
izing everyone. Three members of this class—Jeff
Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more
assets than the bottom half, and the top 1 percent
owns more than half of the entire stock market
(Institute for Policy Studies 2020). Shamefully, the
wealth of the billionaire class has increased by at
least 10 percent (close to $300 billion) between
January 1, 2020, and April 10, 2020 (Collins,
Ocampo, and Paslaski 2020). As is the case with
almost all data on inequality, the gaps are larger for
families of color. For example, in 2016, 37 percent
of Black and 33 percent of Latino families had zero
wealth, compared with 15.5 percent of White fami-
lies (Collins et al. 2020).

Racial disparities in food insecurity are a direct
reflection of the general trends in racial inequality:
higher rates of unemployment and underemploy-
ment, less wealth, poor access to retirement plans
(older folks of color are poorer than their White
counterparts), and access to grocery stores
(Nitschke 2017). The charity framing leads people
to pity the less fortunate, which may be a good
thing, but it also absolves the government and busi-
nesses from responsibility. After all, if the state
enforced a “living wage” across the nation, had
programs to deal with unemployment and a decent
safety net, adequately taxed the rich, and imple-
mented race-targeted programs on a variety of
areas (e.g., employment, education, wealth), we
would not have hunger in America.5 Hunger is the
outcome of the lack of democracy and the concen-
tration of power in the hands of the few (Moore
Lappé and Collins 2015). Therefore, charity is not
the fundamental way to address hunger or to close
the racial gap in food insecurity.

“IT’S VERy SAD. IT’S NOTHINg
WE CAN DO ABOUT IT RIgHT
NOW . . .”
The heading for this section comes from a state-
ment made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in a press confer-
ence at which Donald Trump and his coronavirus
task force acknowledged the racial mortality

disparities (Hellmann 2020). The subject of racial
health disparities extending beyond the pandemic
has garnered media attention and was heightened
by statements by Trump and his officers. In a press
conference, Trump pondered about the huge differ-
ences in mortality between Blacks (for the record,
Latinos and Native Americans too)6 and “other
citizens”:

We’re seeing tremendous evidence that African
Americans are affected at a far greater percen tage
number than other citizens of our country. But
why is it that the African American community
is so much, numerous times more than everybody
else? We want to find the reason to it. (Collins
2020)

Although it is very important for the media to
cover racial disparities in morbidity and mortality
due to COVID-19, by not explaining adequately why
they exist, we are left with the quasi-explanations
offered by members of Trump’s task force such as
Dr. Fauci, Ben Carson, Surgeon General Jerome
Adams, and other media personalities. Their com-
ments converge on one point: Black and Brown
people are viewed as unhealthy, which naturalizes
the reason for their health preconditions. To be
clear, these (non)explanations are thrown into fer-
tile soil, as Whites already believed that the cultural
practices of people of color (I have labeled this per-
spective as the biologization of culture, as it pres-
ents culture as immutable) and their biology were
different from Whites’ (Graves 2001). Color blind-
ness is a curious standpoint, as Whites can claim
that race is largely irrelevant in life while at the
same time believe that race is biology (“All Blacks
are . . .”) or reified culture (“They don’t have jobs
because they are lazy”).

An example of these (non)explanations comes
from Dr. Fauci:

As Dr. [Deborah] Birx said correctly, it’s not
that they are getting infected more often, it’s
that when they do get infected, their underlying
medical conditions—the diabetes, hypertension,
the obesity, the asthma—those are the kind of
things that wind them up in the [intensive care
unit] and ultimately give him a higher death
rate. (Nelson 2020)

This statement reifies the deficiency narrative
and opens the door for racist “culture of poverty”
discourses (Cunningham and Scarlatto 2018).
Similarly, in a very telling moment, Surgeon
General Adams said,

348 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8(3)

Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. And call
your friends and family. Check in on your
mother; she wants to hear from you right
now. . . . And speaking of mothers, we need you
to do this, if not for yourself, then for your
abuela. Do it for your granddaddy. Do it for your
Big Mama. Do it for your Pop-Pop. We need you
to understand—especially in communities of
color, we need you to step up and help stop the
spread so that we can protect those who are most
vulnerable. (Aleem 2020)

This statement was uttered after Adams had hinted
at the social determinants of people of color’s
preconditions:

We do not think people of color are biologically
or genetically predisposed to get COVID-19.
There is nothing inherently wrong with you. But
they are socially predisposed to coronavirus . . .
and to have a higher incidence of the very diseases
that put you at risk for severe complications of
coronavirus. (Aleem 2020)

Although Adams, who is Black, began his com-
ments by acknowledging that the disproportionate
mortality rates were because communities of color
experience the “burden of social ills,” by not elabo-
rating on this point, his statement on culture
strengthened already existing racialized interpreta-
tions, given that this part of his commentary was the
one that played out in the news.7 Adams defended
his remarks when PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor pushed
back during the press conference. Dr. Fauci came
to Adams’s defense after Alcindor’s question:
“Jerome, you did it beautifully. You can’t do it any
better than that. I know Jerome personally. I can
just testify that he made no—not even a hint of
being offensive at all with that comment” (Concha
2020).

Fauci has been heralded for his straight talk dur-
ing the pandemic, but on this matter his views are
as problematic as those of most Whites. He has not
advocated for a single policy to address health dis-
parities, before, during, or for after the pandemic.
In contrast, experts on health disparities have urged
immediate interventions such as providing hazard
pay to workers, reopening the Obamacare exchange,
dropping Medicaid work requirements, and revers-
ing plans to allow Medicaid spending caps to reduce
the mortality gap (Collins 2020).

Social scientists have addressed how the effects
of structural racism affect health disparities for com-
munities of color. They have shown that segregated

communities of color endure high levels of pollu-
tion, joblessness, poverty, and crime and that their
inhabitants experience higher levels of stress. But
this “American Apartheid” is not natural or by
choice but the product of the racialized practices of
banks, realtors, individual Whites, and the govern-
ment (Massey and Denton 1993). At the individual
level, the pivotal work of David R. Williams has
amply shown that people of color self-report higher
levels of exposure to discrimination and that this
affects their poor health outcomes (Williams and
Collins 1995). Yet as important as it is to assess the
health effects of discrimination at the individual
level, the most significant effects of racism are
structural and do not require intent. Gee and Ford
(2011) pointed to how segregation, immigration
policy, and legacies of racism have documented
effects on the health of people of color. In a more
recent review, Yearby (2018) showed how resi-
dents of segregated communities of color have less
access to healthy food, good hospitals, and play-
grounds and are more exposed to pollution, noise,
overcrowd housing, and high rates of crime. The
combined effects of poverty, unemployment, and
the aforementioned factors, as well as interpersonal
discrimination, generate chronic racialized stress
among people of color, which correlates with poor
health outcomes (Goosby, Cheadle, and Mitchell
2018). To be clear, racial segregation and the con-
centration of poverty and joblessness in communi-
ties (the improperly labeled “neighborhood effects”)
are the product of “ghettoization and racism”
(Marable 1983).

It is important to explain how structural racism
affects the health of minority populations—espe-
cially in disasters such as the current one—because
the naturalization of health disparities appears in
many guises. For example, Louisiana senator Bill
Cassidy, who is also a doctor, claimed that,

I think if you control for diabetes and hyperten-
sion, a lot of racial difference would go away.
And I say that not to dismiss the problem of
health disparities. We have to focus on health
disparities, but we can’t get distracted by that
which is true, perhaps, but unrelated to the
problem at hand [italics added]. (Doubek 2020)

The “distraction” Senator Cassidy does not
want to address is how structural racism creates
these disparities. His call for “controlling for” is an
important statistical practice but one often used in
race research to obscure huge absolute disparities
(Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2001). I must add that

Bonilla-Silva 349

in the case of health outcomes, class, whether mea-
sured by income, education, or occupation, does
not inoculate middle-class people of color from the
health effects of racism (Simons et al. 2015). By
not addressing the elephant in the room—why do
Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans have high
rates of obesity, asthma, and hypertension?—state-
ments such as Cassidy’s open the door for cultural
explanations of racial health disparities (i.e., “They
eat the wrong kinds of food, smoke too much, and
drink liquor all the time!”). For instance, in CNN’s
special “The Color of COVID,” the behavioral
explanation raised its ugly head. Former profes-
sional basketball player Charles Barkley said in the
program the following:

We as black people, we have to accept the fact
there is systematic racism. But that does not give
you a reason to go out and be overweight, have
diabetes. . . . We got to eat better, we need better
access to health care, we need better access to
being able to work out, and things like that. But
unless we get better health care which is part of
the system, unless we learn to work out better
and take better care of our bodies, we are always
going to be at a disadvantage. (Regan et al. 2020)

Although Barkley mentioned systemic racism in
connection to COVID-19 and claimed not to be
blaming poor Blacks, his narrative reinforced the
cultural framework to explain differential mortal-
ity. Similar to Barkley, Van Jones (2020), who
cohosted the show, had stated a week before the
program aired that he used his “social justice activ-
ism as an excuse to neglect [his] health” and asked
Blacks “to take more responsibility for [their] indi-
vidual health choices.” People of color are dying
disproportionally from COVID-19, not because
they are Black, Brown, or Native American or
because they use drugs, smoke, eat bad food, and drink
more than Whites (Mack, Jones, and Ballesteros
2017). Rather, they are dying as a result of our
racialized social system (Bonilla-Silva 1997) and
its effects on their communities.

DISCUSSION
In this article I have discussed how several subjects
related to the effects of the pandemic are shaped by
the major frameworks of color-blind racism in a
way that prevents understanding how structural
racism affects people of color, both before and during
the COVID-19 pandemic. I have shown how these
discussions center our attention on individual-level

action, culture, or biology and away from the struc-
tural causes behind inequality as well as from the
need for collective action. Specifically, the three
subjects analyzed promote believing that workers
should work at all costs,8 that hunger can be solved
by the actions of good Samaritans, and that Black
and Brown people are dying at a higher rate than
Whites because of underlying health conditions
and problematic behaviors. Instead of addressing
the poor working conditions of essential workers
(particularly of workers of color), America’s lim-
ited welfare state, and systemic racism and its man-
ifestations, the discussions we are having are
providing flowery rhetoric to make us feel good. A
“feeling good” story works precisely because we
are in the middle of a horrid pandemic that has
taken the lives of more than 100,000 people. It
works because Americans, perhaps more than most
people in the world, have been conditioned to both
“a rugged individualism” foundational myth and,
lately, to a self-help cultural logic (McLean and
Dixit 2018). And because the color-blind-shaped
issues I highlighted do their work mostly obliquely,
they fit almost perfectly the slippery nature of most
post–civil rights racial affairs (Bonilla-Silva
2015b).

I limited my examination to three subject areas,
but the frameworks of color-blind racism are
extending their tentacles in all directions. Let me
offer briefly two more examples. First, as men-
tioned in the introduction, the refrain “We are all in
this together” has become part of the response to
the pandemic. USA Today, for instance, has had a
running column titled “Coronavirus: We’re in This
Together” (French 2020), accompanied by a unity
graphic, throughout the pandemic. They are not
alone, as most media outlets have an equivalent.
Fox News uses the more Trumpesque label
“America Together” (Fox News 2020).

Although during disasters “community resil-
ience and unity, strengthening of social ties, self-
help, heightened initiative, altruism, and prosocial
behavior more often prevail” (Auf der Heide
2004:341), it is pure fantasy that the pain and suf-
fering are equally distributed across all segments of
the population. Vulnerable populations—old, rural,
poor, undocumented, or people of color—always
do worse during disasters and in their aftermaths.
The unity framing irons out the tremendous levels
of inequality in our nation and screens out concerns
about how class, race, gender, and other social divi-
sions exacerbate the pandemic’s impacts. How can
we believe the pandemic is the “great equalizer”
given the huge mortality experienced by people of

350 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 8(3)

color? If the “we are in this together” were not an
empty nationalist (Bratta 2009), color-blind slogan,
our future, as Forbes’s Lisa Fitzpatrick (2020)
admonished, would “include, plan for and protect
our most vulnerable too.”

My second example is how science is being pre-
sented as a neutral practice. Pfizer, for instance, has
a commercial (“Science will win”) in which the
narrator states this position in a straightforward
manner: “Science can overcome diseases, create
cures and yes, beat pandemics. It has before; it will
again” (Snyder Bulik 2020). This framing is perva-
sive, as the media and politicians of all stripes have
placed their faith in science as the vehicle to get us
out of the pandemic. The problem? The rationality
project of modernity was a highly racialized one
(Barnor 2007). The fact that science and scientists
are socially situated cannot be ignored even in the
middle of a pandemic. The history of science, par-
ticularly in the medical area, is plagued with racism
(Washington 2008). That history, unfortunately, is
still with us as even in this postgenomic moment,
race is being reinscribed (Duster 2015; Roberts
2011). I already mentioned problems with Drs.
Fauci’s and Adams’s stand on health disparities,
and Dr. Birx has shown her political partisanship,
as she did not rebuke Trump’s statements on
hydroxychloroquine or his comments on injecting
disinfectant as potential cures for the virus—she
blamed the media for continuing to talk about these
matters rather than moving on (O’Brien 2020). To
be clear, I am not antiscience; rather, I advocate a
critical engagement with science to address “how
power relations of race, class, gender, and imperial-
ism have already shaped the sciences and technolo-
gies we have” (Harding 2008:92). Such a stance
might help produce a more democratic and inclu-
sive science field (Berg and Lidskog 2018) and
limit the likelihood of repeating racialized medi-
cine during this epidemic. However, we already
have had two French doctors suggesting testing a
potential vaccine in Africa because “there are no
masks, no treatment or intensive care, a little bit
like it’s been done for certain AIDS studies, where
among prostitutes, we try things, because we know
that they are highly exposed and don’t protect
themselves” (Rosman 2020).

Nevertheless, as toxic as the color-blind fram-
ing of all these issues is, the multidimensional cri-
sis we are living has opened the largest space in
recent history to make demands and frame matters
differently.9 The murder of George Floyd by the
Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, has propelled

massive, multiracial mobilizations across the
nation and, indeed, the world. The notion of sys-
temic racism, which surveys consistently showed
was alien to Whites, has gained currency and is
propelling discussions and analyses that were not
possible before. Although the “public square” is
still controlled by corporations (Lutz 2012), the
movement has cracked everything giving voice to
the ideas, aspirations, and hopes of the racial subal-
tern. Social protest is advancing alternative per-
spectives (not just on policing) as their actions are
deemed “newsworthy” (Tierney et al. 2006). In
fact, the same media that have been pushing the
color-blind framing of the subjects I discuss here
are now frantically producing critical stories on
race issues in America. These stories have increased
exponentially, allowing the public to seriously con-
sider the viability of universal health care, expanded
welfare benefits, higher wages, better working con-
ditions, prison reform, defunding the police, and
many other policy options that were not in play just
a few months ago (Baradaran 2020).

The structural interpretations of race-class
issues in the nation seem to be getting a hold of the
masses, but at this point it is unclear if Whites real-
ize the implications of the arguments. Do the White
masses truly understand the concept of “systemic
racism”? Do Whites appreciate that if people of
color experience systemic disadvantages, they
experience systemic advantages? And what are
Whites doing, particularly those who proclaim to
be “liberal,” to uproot their “deep whiteness”
(Bonilla-Silva 2015a)? Are White protestors
changing their White networks of friends and pon-
dering about their White neighborhoods and
churches, or are they returning to their segregated
lives every night? We had a race rebellion in the
1960s, and once the protest moment ended, the ide-
alistic Whites who had participated in it quickly
morphed into the color-blind racists of today
(Caditz 1976). For Whites to change their mental
and emotional racial map, they must adopt a “feel-
ing of equality” stand (Bonilla-Silva 2019b), and
social protest will be key in this process (Piven and
Cloward 1977). But the fire this time must be
accompanied by a relentless, thorough effort to rei-
magine every aspect of our racialized world. If we
seize the moment, then we will no longer have to
proclaim something as simple as “Black Lives
Matter.” Will we become Martin Luther King Jr.’s
beloved community, or will the raisin need to con-
tinue exploding? Stay tuned, as this time, the revo-
lution will definitely be televised.

Bonilla-Silva 351

ACkNOWlEDgmENTS
I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their tough and
incisive comments. I did not like or agree with some of
their comments, but at the end of the day, their sugges-
tions made the article better. I also thank a friend who
read various incarnations of the article and Professor
Mary Hovsepian, who helped me address the reviewers’
comments.

NOTES
1 Andrew Cuomo’s Twitter, accessed April 15, 2020,

at https://twitter.com/nygovcuomo/status/12450213
19646904320?lang=en.

2 For a similar methodological strategy, see Bonilla-
Silva (2012).

3 Estimates of the rate of underemployment place it
at about 100 percent of the general unemployment
rate since 1994. But that rate is racially stratified,
as Latinos have experienced a rate that has been
about 80 percent higher than that among Whites
and Blacks at 100 percent. If the unemployment
rate today is 16 percent to 18 percent, then it is safe
to extrapolate that more than 30 percent of work-
ers of color are food insecure (Nunn, Parsons, and
Shambaugh 2019).

4 Latinos are twice as likely as Whites to live in
households without vehicles (12.0 percent vs. 6.5
percent), and Blacks are 3 times as likely (19.7 per-
cent) (National Equity Atlas 2020). Thus, depend-
ing on food banks to distribute food may not help
equally all households in need of food. On this, as
with many other policies, what is needed are “tar-
geted universal” polices so that all in need benefit
from the policy. To be equitable, the policy should
be calibrated by need (those who need more should
get more) (Powell, Menendian, and Ake 2019).

5 The U.S. Department of Agriculture (2020) gives
out about half a billion dollars of the food distrib-
uted by food banks. However, this amount is less
than 10 percent of the total amount of food distrib-
uted and needed by banks (Bouek 2010), the food
the Department of Agriculture purchases benefits
large companies at the expense of programs such
as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(Charles 2020), and the investment pales in com-
parison with the government’s corporate welfare,
which usually supersedes social welfare by about
50 percent (Reich 2019).

6 States and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention are not reporting Native American
mortality due to COVID-19, and reports suggest
that Native Americans’ mortality rate is among the
highest in the nation (Nagle 2020). The “health
preconditions” of Native Americans living on res-
ervations (about a quarter of Native Americans) are
worse than those of any other group in America.
This situation, combined with overcrowding, lack
of sanitation, and extreme poverty, will likely lead

to a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic, when
nations such as the Navajo experienced a 12 percent
mortality rate (Brady and Bahr 2014).

7 A Google search on the media follow-up to
Adams’s comment revealed that neither crit-
ics such as CNN’s Bakari Sellers, Essence, and
Congresswoman Maxine Waters nor supporters
such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post,
and John McWhorter stressed Adams’s comment on
the “burden of social ills.”

8 One of the most egregious cases is meatpacking
plants, where workers have been for a long time
dealing with line speed, high illness rates and inju-
ries, and inadequate health units in factories, as a
2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office study
found (cited in Bagenstose, Chadde, and Wynn
2020). And facing high rates of infection and deaths
in these plants, the government’s response has been
inadequate. Factory workers, unions, and even man-
agers say the federal government—including the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration—
has done little more than issue nonenforceable guid-
ance. On its Web site, for example, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention has released safety
guidelines for critical workers and businesses,
which primarily promote common-sense measures
of sanitization and personal distancing (Bagenstose
et al. 2020).

9 I began work on this article before the race rebellion
began.

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AUTHOR BIOgRAPHy
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a professor of sociology at
Duke University. He is currently working on a project to
explain why people in Latin America do not see overt rac-
ist depictions (e.g., actors in blackface, racist cartoons)
and even racist commentary as problematic.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/racism- row-french-doctors-suggest-virus-vaccine-test-africa-200404054304466.html

https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/pfizer-promotes-prescription-drug-help-and-science-power-messages-new-tv-ads-aimed-at

https://time.com/collection/coronavirus-heroes/

https://www.fns.usda.gov/tefap/emergency-food-assistance-program

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/working-at-coronavirus-drive-thru-testing-site-new-york.html

https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220949473

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
2020, Vol. 6(4) 441 –449
© American Sociological Association 2020

DOI: 10.1177/2332649220949473
sre.sagepub.com

Invited Feature Review

IntRODuctIOn
It has been 20 years since the first major research
article in a U.S. sociology journal declared the
study of the Internet vital to our disciplinary prac-
tice (DiMaggio et al. 2001). In that time, we have
moved from assessing the Internet as a communi-
cation technology to understanding digitality as a
technique, technology, and process of modern life.1
Despite important work on racism and technolo-
gies, sociology has not forged a cohesive theoreti-
cal framework for the study of race in the digitally
mediated society. Most research on technology
draws on the dominant paradigms in the subfield:
racial formation theories and critical race theory.
Although these approaches are useful, scholars
have discussed at length their weaknesses as they
concern systematic theories of race and racism
when the Internet is taken into account. Daniels
(2013) implored those in the interdisciplinary field
of Internet studies to “explore the work of [W.E.B.]
DuBois and more recent theorists, such as [Joe]
Feagin, who have extended his theoretical framework
in ways that are more robust for understanding rac-
ism.” Scholars have taken up this call, albeit spo-
radically. The greatest potential for redressing this

meaningful gap in the literature is at the intersec-
tion of platform capitalism and racial capitalism.
This focus puts the question of digital transforma-
tions of society squarely in the domain of the soci-
ology of race, ethnicity and racism.

In this review, I argue that our empirical study of
racism in the digital society suffers from a lack of
theoretical coherence. My argument puts forth that
there are two turns in the political economy of race,
ethnicity, and racism: networked capital that shapes
a global racial hierarchy that varies across spatial
geographies and the privatization of public and eco-
nomic life. Internet technologies produced the first
turn, and they accelerate the second turn. Internet
technologies are central to the political economy of
race and racism because Internet technologies are

949473 SREXXX10.1177/2332649220949473Sociology of Race and EthnicityMcMillan Cottom
research-article2020

1School of Information and Library Sciences, university
of north carolina, chapel Hill, nc, uSA

Corresponding Author:
tressie McMillan cottom, university of north carolina,
School of Information and Library Sciences, chapel Hill,
nc 27599, uSA
Email: tressiemc@unc.edu

Where Platform Capitalism
and Racial Capitalism Meet:
The Sociology of Race and
Racism in the Digital Society

Tressie McMillan Cottom1

Abstract
the study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust
formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. the author puts
forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. the argument for racial capitalism
draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation as
privatization and exclusion by inclusion. Internet technologies are now a totalizing sociopolitical regime
and should be central to the study of race and racism.

https://sre.sagepub.com

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442 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6(4)

the politics and capital of capitalism as we presently
experience it. The very scale of this relationship
begs for a theoretical program that can capture its
complexity and particularity. After outlining the
centrality of Internet technologies to the political
economy, I put forth racial capitalism as uniquely
suited for the study of race and racism in the digital
society.

WHAt IS SO DIffEREnt
AbOut tHE IntERnEt?
PRIVAtIzAtIOn by
ObfuScAtIOn AnD
ExcLuSIOn by IncLuSIOn
An early reader of this article posed a provocative
question: is there anything analytically distinct
about the Internet? My answer revealed my priors.
“Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to
say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly
basic logical fallacy. The question of what the
Internet does analytically that, say, “capital” or
“economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does
not already do is important. My answer is debat-
able, but the debate is worthwhile. I do not know
if the Internet adds something analytically distinct
to our social inquiries, but it adds something ana-
lytical precision. Other constructs capture impor-
tant dimensions of social life in a digital society.
For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is
a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters
2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial
meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and
Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020)
or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006) can
elucidate how ironic humor about Black people,
Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming plat-
forms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild
2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of
noteworthy approaches taken to studying Internet
technologies and “mainstream” sociological inter-
ests (i.e., economic cultures and discourses,
respectively). Still, sociological practice does not
systematically engage with the social relations of
Internet technologies as analytical equals to the
object of study. If there is anything particular
about Internet technologies for sociological
inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once
explicit, we should give it the same theoretical
care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013)
points us in the right direction when she argued
that

the reality is that in the networked society . . .
racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive
political agendas rooted in white power connect
across national boundaries via the Internet, a
phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi
and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a
primary structural agent in racial formation.

Daniels named to the global nature of both racism
and the networks of capital we gesture to when we
say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bring-
ing back the political economy of race and racism.
Internet technologies are specific in how they have
facilitated, legitimized, and transformed states and
capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app
with which underemployed skilled labor sells ser-
vices to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a
U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the
app is embedded in transnational capital flows.
Global patterns of racialized labor that determine
what is “skill” and what is “labor” mediate the
value of labor and the rents the platform can extract
for mediating the laborer-customer relationship.
Even the way we move money on these platforms—
“Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational
firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020).
Internet technologies have atomized the political
economy of globalization with all the ideas about
race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded
within. An understanding of the political economy
of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation
of how this transformation operates in everyday
social worlds: privatization through opacity and
exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are
distinctly about the power of Internet technologies.
And each characteristic is important for the study
of race and racism. Understanding platform capi-
talism helps us understand how these two charac-
teristics are important.

Internet technologies have networked forms of
capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020),
consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar,
Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube
et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations
(Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and pro-
duced new containers for culture (Brock 2020;
Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By
that definition, the Internet has amplified and
reworked existing social relations. Platform capi-
talism moves us toward the analytical importance
of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes.
Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data)
and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies),

McMillan Cottom 443

and they structure new organizational arrangements
among owners, workers, and consumers (see “pro-
sumers”). Even more important for the study of race
and racism, platforms introduce new layers of opac-
ity into every facet of social life. So-called mate mar-
kets move from neighborhood bars to dating apps,
moving family formation behind a platform’s velvet
rope (Hobbs, Owen, and Gerber 2017; Ollier-
Malaterre, Jacobs, and Rothbard 2019). It transforms
public education into “online delivery,” locking stu-
dent-teacher-school interactions into privately con-
trolled black boxes (Woolcock and Narayan 2000).
“Smart cities” extract our routine activities from pub-
lic life, which shapes democratic access to how our
communities are governed (Brauneis and Goodman
2018; O’Neil 2017; Walsh and O’Connor 2019). A
colleague recently bemoaned the difficulty of negoti-
ating with Facebook for data on political attitudes.
Many sociologists share her lament. In our routine
work we realize that different rules produce and gov-
ern data, from survey to observational, than the rules
even 20 years ago. That is but a minor example of the
myriad ways platform capitalism’s opacity is qualita-
tively distinct.

That opacity has a logic. Pasquale (2015) argued
that ours is a “black box society.” Administrative
opacity is a deliberate strategy to manage regulatory
environments. It shields organizations, both public
and private, from democratic appeals for access and
equity. As the state legitimizes the use of digital and
algorithmic decision making, it also creates new
data worlds (Gray 2018; Milan and van der Velden
2016) to which few sociologists have access. The
inaccessibility of these data is part of their value to
state and capital interests. Private data worlds where
decision making can be veiled from democratic
inquiry fuel economic and political commitment to
more datafication. This brings about more secrecy.
Sometimes, a firm or organization performs secrecy
just for the sake of secrecy. This reinforces its abil-
ity to do so and its right to do so (Seaver 2017).
Pasquale outlined three types of secrecy strategies.
One of those strategies, obfuscation, is particularly
relevant to the study of race and racism.
Theoretically, obfuscation operates much like will-
ful whiteness that can always claim ignorance of
statistical discrimination, for example, because it
owns the means of discovery. Obfuscation does not
mean that someone or some organization does not
know these data. It means that the information is
difficult to access and often couched in needlessly
complex technical jargon or process. As we priva-
tize public goods, Internet technologies promise
cost savings (usually by reducing labor) and

increased efficiency of whatever task is at hand.
Those Internet technologies introduce a web of data
extraction and valuation that has significant eco-
nomic value (Zuboff 2015). Obfuscation becomes a
technique of privatization through two processes.
One, it extracts data that would have previously
been public, publicly available or legally discover-
able. Two, it expands obfuscation as a logic, even in
organizations or institutions that have a public man-
date. When full privatization is not possible, obfus-
cation privatizes information by making it
inaccessible in practice. Information is the vessel
for social actions and social facts. If information is
inaccessible, the objects of everyday life are too.

Although secrecy and means testing for infor-
mation have always been features of the administra-
tive state and of capital, platform capitalism is about
the scale of secrecy, the value of secrecy, and the
logic of obfuscation. By thinking about the politics
of the Internet technologies embedded in the current
political economy, we more precisely capture a set
of social relations than occurs when Internet tech-
nologies are tangential to our analyses.

Thinking about the analytical utility of the
Internet also brought to mind one of the most vex-
ing dialectal tensions of racism under platform
capitalism. The Internet expands. This “pervasive
expansion” (Castells 2010) is near total. It is no
longer a question of whether one is “online.”
Whether or not one is online, one’s life chances are
shaped by online (Fourcade and Healy 2013). That
settles the thing. The expansion requires bringing
people into the social relations of Internet technol-
ogies. That can happen as a user (Ritzer 2015) or as
a site of extraction (Amrute 2016) or by producing
a surplus population of users and nonusers
(McCarthy 2016). This expansive quality sets us on
a crash course with a fundamental understanding of
what race does. Race (as deployed by racism)
excludes. It also devalues and stratifies. But exclu-
sion is one of the most studied aspects of race and
racism in social science. The racialized social hier-
archy produced these Internet technologies. Also,
Internet technologies became a dominant tool of
capital because of their ability to expand markets
and consumer classes. To both expand and exclude,
the platform-mediated era of capitalism that grew
from Internet technologies specializes in predatory
inclusion. Predatory inclusion is the logic, organi-
zation, and technique of including marginalized
consumer-citizens into ostensibly democratizing
mobility schemes on extractive terms.

One of the clearest articulations of predatory
inclusion comes from work on education, where

444 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6(4)

educational access and its attendant social rewards
are extended to excluded groups on extractive terms
(Dwyer 2018; Eaton et al. 2016; Seamster and
Charron-Chénier 2017). With higher education,
predatory inclusion looks like expanding “access”
to higher education (and its relation to labor market
and status returns) by offering online college
degrees that both for-profit and not-for-profit orga-
nizations market to African American women
(Cottom 2017). When those African American
women disproportionately enroll in these institu-
tions, they most often do so by taking on student
loans. Some of those loans are publicly subsidized
and others are from private lenders. These students’
loans have been shown to be harder to pay off, eas-
ier to default on, and more likely to reach negative
amortization than student loans taken out at other
kinds of institutions by other kinds of students
(Scott-Clayton and Li 2016). African American
women’s inclusion in higher education comes at a
high individual price and with a significant profit to
the financial caretakers of that extraction.

Predatory inclusion happens not only in educa-
tion. It operates through credit schemes, consumer
debt (Charron-Chénier and Seamster forthcoming)
and small business lending (Nopper 2010). It frames
how minorities are “included” in homeownership
schemes that pervert the value of ownership because
of bad loans and racist social policy (Taylor 2019).
Although not explicitly named, another example is
found in the “gig economy.” This is where waged
work has become harder to secure and surplus labor
is nominally included in the “digital economy” on
extractive terms. These schemes could happen
without Internet technologies. But they happen
using Internet technologies, and Internet technolo-
gies have made these cases more efficient. Moreover,
platform capitalism generates the logic, incentives,
and capital for these predatory inclusion practices.
Whether they use the Internet to affect these prac-
tices, the logic of capital that financializes through
algorithmic means at a scale made possible because
of network technologies makes these particular pro-
cesses of the digital society.

REtHInkIng RAcIAL
cAPItALISM
The digital transformation of the political economy
indelibly marks race and racism. Aspects of this
transformation have leveraged color-blind racism,
racial projects, white racial frames, and implicit
bias. These are, of course, dominant theories of race
and racism in sociology. A full discussion of how

these frameworks contribute to our understanding
of race and racism in the digital society is beyond
the scope of this article. It suffices to say that each
is important, and none is perfect. But theory’s goal
is not perfection but specificity. I have laid out that
scale, obfuscation, and predatory inclusion take on
particular qualities under platform capitalism. And I
have followed other research in arguing that plat-
form capitalism is a specific and current stage of
capitalism. Given these two priors, the study of race
and racism in the digital society should theorize net-
worked scale, the logics of obfuscation, and the
mechanisms of predatory inclusion. My survey of
published research on race and racism over the past
15 years in U.S. sociology journals finds brief
engagement with these aspects of our political
economy. Consequently, we have not explicitly sur-
faced the structure, politics, economics, and culture
of the Internet technologies that have transformed
society. This absence impoverishes how we under-
stand the contemporary social relations of race and
racism.

That same search found fewer than two dozen
sociology articles that use racial capitalism as a
theoretical framework. Cedric Robinson (2000)
never intended for his now classic Black Marxism
to speak to sociological practice. His intellectual
project was a liberatory philosophy for Black stud-
ies and the freedom of Black people across the
globe. But Robinson’s work calls back to two foun-
dational sociologists, W.E.B. DuBois and Oliver
Cox (Robinson 1990). It seems almost quaint now,
but when Robinson argued that racism and capital-
ism were historically co-constitutive, making “a
modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ depen-
dent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and geno-
cide” (Kelley 2017), it was heretical. Today, an
acclaimed French economist argues the same thing
without causing much of a stir (Piketty 2017). In its
simplest terms, racial capitalism gives race and
class equal theoretical relevance. That alone is a
worthwhile sociological project (Marable 2015).

More than being in conversation with sociologi-
cal greats, racial capitalism is a thoroughly contem-
porary discussion. Nancy Fraser (2016) offered a
robust engagement with Marxist sociology, the foun-
dations of capital, and the racialized global project of
expropriation. Similar to my claim that platform
capitalism is specific, Fraser stated that in “financial-
ized capitalism, accordingly, we encounter a new
entwinement of exploitation and expropriation—and
a new logic of political subjectivation.” Perhaps this
new entwinement or entanglement is conditioned on
the expansion and extraction potential of Internet

McMillan Cottom 445

technologies and resulting ideologies. Jodi Melamed
(2015) posited that racial capitalism is “a technology”
that correctly identifies capital’s nature: “Capital can
only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can
only accumulate by producing and moving through
relations of severe inequality among human groups”
(p. 77). Although far more theoretical and radical that
mainstream sociology prefers, both Fraser and
Melamed engaged the current conditions of capital
and labeled the processes of racialization. Like the
Internet technologies themselves, racial capitalism
captures the dynamic interplay between local and
global processes that are different but in the same
way. They all racialize because capital must.

A notable exception to the paucity of sociologi-
cal engagement with racial capitalism is a review of
Gargi Bhattacharyya’s (2018) Rethinking Racial
Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival
(Mercado forthcoming). Bhattacharyya’s formula-
tion of racial capitalism may be the most attractive
yet to those who study race and racism in the digital
society. The book’s 10 “theses” of racial capitalism
are a generative theoretical construction that offers
fertile ground for a research program. Two theses
respond to the obfuscation and predatory inclusion
character of platform capitalism. The first is that
“racial capitalism helps us to understand . . . the pro-
cesses that appear to grant differential privileges to
workers and almost workers and nonworkers and
the social relations that flow from these differentia-
tions” (Bhattacharyya 2018:x). The second is that
“racial capitalism operates both through the exer-
cise of coercive power and through the mobilisation
of desire” (Bhattacharyya 2018:ix).

cHALLEngIng ObfuScAtIOn
AnD PREDAtORy IncLuSIOn
tHROugH tHEOREtIcAL
cOHEREncE
Some empirical challenges of studying race and
racism in the digital society flow from the theoreti-
cal challenges of doing so. Chief among them is
digital technologies’ penchant for remaking the
ontological boundaries that define so much of our
professional work. Take for example a basic ques-
tion about racism and employment. There must first
be agreement on what constitutes a worker. In the
twentieth-century model of inquiry, the worker is a
waged employee of a government or firm. The
worker is mostly distinct from an entrepreneur who
creates jobs by starting a new firm. By the end of
the twentieth century, as freelancing and consulting

became more commonplace, the worker and entre-
preneur are even more analytically distinct from
merely the self-employed. Still, the ideas of firm
and worker organized enough economic activity
with internal consistency that the ontological
boundaries around these categories made for mean-
ingful observations and inferences. But what is an
Uber driver? Or an Instacart shopper? Or an influ-
encer? These are common enough modes of eco-
nomic activity in the digital society, and they are not
insignificant forms of work. Researchers may over-
state the scale of the “gig economy” given its actual
share of the labor market, but workers in this sector
of the economy are working nonjob jobs that chal-
lenge neat categorization. The so-called 1099 work-
force represents a collective risk shift from firms to
individuals (Cottom 2017; Hacker 2008) that
extends beyond employees to obfuscating the idea
of employee altogether. Digital technologies abet
that risk shift through the sociopolitical regime of
platform capture. That platform capture effectively
transforms workers into independent contractors.

The political economy of a digital society maxi-
mizes technology’s ability to transmogrify various
forms of work into nonwork by redefining “job”
and “worker.” This differentiation follows the
“sedimented histories of racialised dispossession
that shape economic life in our time” (Bhattacharyya
2018:x). But these new nonjob work arrangements
are also “new and unpredictable” and only appear
to grant differential privileges. The status differ-
ences between Google employees and long-term
temporary Google workers boiled over in 2018. At
the time, temporary workers constituted more than
half of Google’s global workforce (Wakabayashi
2019). Because of the racialized nature of differen-
tiation, temporary workers were concentrated at
non-U.S. sites and in nonprofessional roles. But
because of the transformations Bhattacharyya
(2018) described, this underclass of temporary
workers at Google’s famed California headquarters
included a notable number of white-collar roles.
The transmogrification had created a new point of
differentiation from a sedimented history.

These temporary white-collar workers included
lawyers, coders, and top-level engineers. Despite
their value to the organization and their location at
headquarters, temp Googlers were barred from cer-
tain spaces: cafeterias, the campus store, and cer-
tain parking lots. To enforce this separation, Google
issued red badges to temporary workers. Permanent
Google employees have white badges. Google’s
justification for this tiered labor system was that it
was necessary to protect trade secrets. Corporate

446 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6(4)

secrecy eventually gave way to obfuscation when
someone flooded the online chat boards where
temporary workers groused about their conditions
with spam and disinformation. Workers com-
plained that the tactics were beneath Google, not
because Google used them but because it used
them on U.S. workers. These modes of differentia-
tion are specific to the social relations that are
extended into new domains. Racial capitalism
would link the relationship among global South
labor relations, the historical sediments of race in
the United States, and the racialized history of the
capital that makes Google possible. It would iden-
tify how what happens in Mountain View,
California, is specific but also linked to these capi-
tal expropriation processes in other contexts. In this
approach, the obfuscation becomes part of the
empirical story, rather than a screen from inquiry.
Where the obfuscation occurs, racial capitalism
locates a technique of reconfiguring the social rela-
tions that are presently at work.

Unlike the demoralized temporary Googlers,
my Instacart shopper loves her job. So too do my
many students who pick up cash doing shopping or
running errands or driving for rideshare apps. My
students are not just the young coeds of popular
imagination. They are first-generation students.
Some of them are older. Many are parents or care-
takers for family members and friends. They relish
the opportunity to unpack the circumscription of
their civil liberties in the terms and conditions of
their favorite apps. When they turn that same socio-
logical imagination to the work they enjoy doing,
they do not find their enjoyment odd. Knowing the
extractive terms of their labor does not diminish
their enjoyment of the job. Platform capitalism
owes much of its dominance to how good it feels to
be captured by the platform. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
(2019) has stated that racism feels good and that we
must contend with how racialized emotions deter-
mine racialized experiences. Bhattacharyya simi-
larly calls to how racial capitalism mobilizes
desire. The desire for status, belonging, sexual
satisfaction—platform capitalism has efficiently
monetized all of our basic human desires by captur-
ing both space and place. Likes on Facebook give
us a hormone high. Internet romances feel like the
“real” thing to our bodies. Twitter fights are thrill-
ing. Role-playing video games engender all kinds
of emotional responses. Beyond social media, ide-
ologies like “hustling” and “entrepreneur” mobi-
lize our libidinal energy. In schooling, “personalized
learning” and “fast degrees” animate our desire for
social status while obscuring the risk of pursuing it.

Extraction and exploitation in the digital society
uniquely feel good. Racial capitalism encourages
us to identify the sites of coercion where desire
organizes “economic arrangements that cast [us] to
the social margins.” Other theories unintentionally
bifurcate racist extraction as a violent experience
because the outcomes of racist extraction are vio-
lent. Racial capitalism can feel good to both the
oppressor and the oppressed. That is especially true
in the digital society, where platforms and monop-
oly power have distilled the efficient mining of
human desire for profit.

A RAcIAL cAPItALISM
RESEARcH AgEnDA
One of the easiest and worst ways to build an intel-
lectual brand is to propose a “new” research
agenda. I want to do the opposite. I propose an old
research agenda that has new implications. No one
should engage with racial capitalism because it is
trendy. Racial capitalism should not and could not
be a single metatheory of racism, as Bhattacharyya
also argues. We should absolutely use the theories
of discrimination, bias, stratification, inequality,
social movements, and social justice that have con-
tributed so much to the profession.

At the same time, we cannot cede the study of
digitality to the center of the discipline. For all the
talk about the marginality of Internet studies in pro-
fessional sociology, a cursory read of American
Sociological Association meeting guides shows a
plethora of work that mentions digital, Internet,
online, and technology. We have dispersed the study
of Internet technologies across our working groups.
If anything, the empirical study of the Internet is on
the precipice of being decoupled from the study of
race, which could only make it more attractive to
the center of the discipline. Were that to happen, we
would lose one of the most dynamic lenses with
which to study the social world. The study of race,
ethnicity, and racism animates public discourse,
attracts investment, and motivates critical research
questions. The mismatch between job market spe-
cialties and job market hires has long shown that
when allowed to pursue their interests, a significant
share of emerging sociologists want to engage with
race and ethnicity.

Racial capitalism is a robust and flexible frame-
work for understanding the social relations of
Internet technologies. These social relations could
go by a dozen other names that resonate with soci-
ologists: capital, accumulation, financialization,
neoliberalism, and so on. Each of these constructs

McMillan Cottom 447

are embedded in intellectual histories that mischar-
acterize the racial nature of capital. The sociology of
race and ethnicity is uniquely positioned to address
the foundational issue of contemporary social life.
Racial capitalism is one way we can do that.

A research agenda should be a collaborative
endeavor. I will sketch only a brief proposal. A racial
capitalism research agenda should engage with
DuBoisian sociology, which has become an exciting
subfield. This research agenda should identify the
points of departure among the contemporary schol-
ars in the field. Fraser’s formulation of racial capital-
ism as concerned with expropriation/exploitation/
exchange versus Bhattacharyya’s exploitation/
expropriation/expulsion is a suitable place to start. A
research agenda should delineate what various for-
mulations apply to what local and global context.
Speaking of global, racial capitalism is well situated
to redress to the U.S.-centric character of the profes-
sion. Racial hierarchies are global relations lived
and remade locally. Every empirical project need not
attend to the global nature of its mechanism of study.
But the theoretical formulations should attend to
these connections. Predatory inclusion is the most
well-documented mechanism to date. A fuller
engagement with the practices of predatory inclu-
sion is a good next step. It should disentangle how
and under what conditions predatory inclusion
occurs. Is predatory inclusion more likely to lever-
age public goods than private? How does predatory
inclusion shape consumption, communities and
families? Is the inclusion elastic or are there bounds
for how much extraction a system can withstand
before losing legitimacy, political favor, or “prime”
consumer-citizens? Finally, a defining characteristic
of the digital society is its efficient methods of elimi-
nation through inclusion. This is the thorniest, and
therefore most generative, aspect of this research
program.

cOncLuSIOn
In the interest of clarity, I have exploited the relative
absence of racial capitalism in U.S. sociology jour-
nals to argue for its value to sociological practice.
But many sociologists engage with racial capitalism
in other disciplinary journals (Benjamin 2019;
Laster Pirtle 2020; Nelson 2016). That is unfortu-
nate for sociology, and especially for the sociology
of race and ethnicity. I have also overstated the
incongruence between the study of the Internet and
sociology of race. There are robust research pro-
grams in social movements, occupations, education,
sexuality, and intersectionality that engage how

racism operates in the digital society (Amrute 2016;
Brock 2020; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016;
Nakamura 2013; Neves 2013; Ray et al. 2017). We
can learn a great deal from these literatures and
approaches. We can and should build upon them as
we move the study of digitality to the center of our
subdisciplinary work.

What I have put forth is an approach to the polit-
ical economy of race and racism in a digital society.
Racial capitalism captures two key dimensions of
the digital society, which I describe here as obfusca-
tion as privatization and predatory inclusion.
Competing and complementary formulations of
racial capitalism all improve on the fragile bridge
that connects the study of race and racism to the
political economy of a digital society. As it turns
out, the study of race resolves the 20-year-old call
for sociologists to take the Internet seriously. Racial
capitalism shows that the Internet has already taken
race and racism seriously. By returning the favor,
the sociology of race, ethnicity, and racism can do
what it has done since the founding of the disci-
pline: making sociology matter for society.

AcknOWLEDgMEnt
I would like to thank the editors, David Brunsma and
David Embrick, for their thoughtful consideration of this
work. Early readers Louise Seamster, Jeffrey Guhin, and
Joshua Poe were critical to this essay’s development. All
errors are attributed to the author.

nOtE
1. For a discussion of racial theories in Internet stud-

ies, see Hamilton (2020).

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28 contexts.org

In her bid as a 2020

ocratic candidate

for President, U.S. Senator

Elizabeth Warren found

herself on the defensive

when President Donald J. Trump

repeatedly called her “Pocahontas.”

For years, Warren had claimed indigenous

ancestry. In an attempt to address the nagging

controversy about her claim, Warren took a

DNA ancestry test. The results showed a small

but detectable amount of Native American

DNA, possibly an indigenous ancestor six to ten

generations removed. Warren had long claimed

that she was part Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Lenape

(Delaware) based on family stories she heard

growing up.

b
y an

g
ela a. g

o
n

zales an
d

ju
d

y kertész

indigenous
identity,

being,
and
belonging

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1536504220950398&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2020-09-18

29SUMMER 2020 contextsContexts, Vol. 19, Issue 3, p. 28-33. ISSN 1536-5042. © American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. 10.1177/1536504220950398.

an
ce

st
ry

dn
a.

By 2019, more than 26 million Americans
had taken an at-home DNA-ancestry test.
Should interest in identity, family history, and
genealogy continue, by 2021, the most prolific
purveyors of such testing will have collected
and stored the genetic data of more than 100
million people—according to DNA test kit
vendors and market analysts.

A screenshot from an AncestryDNA commercial featuring
“Kim” who “discovered” her Native American ancestry.

However, in turning to DNA testing to silence her critics, she

reinforced one of the most insidious ways Americans think about

race as an innate and immutable biological fact.

In the past ten years, DNA-ancestry test kits have become

all the rage. Coinciding with the adoption of direct to consumer

genetic testing is the budding popularization of family history

and identity politics—a curious collision of interests, to be

sure. The two phenomena—increasing technological advance-

ments vis-a-vis genetic testing and the dynamics of determining

identity—are indeed linked. By spitting into a plastic tube or

swabbing the inside of a cheek, companies such as Ancestry

and 23andMe promise their consumers insight into the deepest

reaches of their ancestry. Simultaneously, the strongest appeal

by these producers of consumer genetic testing is their promise

to tell consumers who and what they are. The power to identify

merged with various technologies of identification serve mul-

tiple, often self-serving purposes. Unfortunately, the implications

of their coincidence are often lost on consumers of such tests

seeking answers to questions of identity.

By 2019, more than 26 million Americans had taken an

at-home DNA-ancestry test. Should interest in identity, family

history, and genealogy continue, by 2021, the most prolific pur-

veyors of such testing will have collected and stored the genetic

data of more than 100 million people—according to DNA test

kit vendors and market analysts.

For many, ancestry is synonymous

with identity but there are important

qualitative distinctions between what you

are and who you are. To the extent that

DNA ancestry tests might tell you what

you are based on an algorithm of reference

datasets, it cannot tell you who you are.

While identity, or who you are matters, for

many, so does what you are. Without an

identifiable ancestry, one’s very existence is

cast into doubt. Nevertheless, identity and

ancestry are not the same, nor should they

be confused with one another.

Ancestry refers to infinite lines of

descent as well as socio-political, religious,

and cultural origins. Identity, however, con-

notes in total the beliefs, values, and expressions that encompass

the memories, experiences, and relations that enable individuals

as well as groups to construct themselves in the present. For

those seeking to establish or confirm claims to a Native Ameri-

can identity, this latest technology makes tangible the necessary

evidence to do so. By unlocking timeless sequences of DNA,

genetic testing vendors purport to determine what you are.

Scientists interpret clues within genetic sequences embedded

in blood, saliva, bones and other bodily traces that have been

passed down through successive generations.

Genealogy companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe

render the genetic material that they test into decipherable,

easy-to-read pie charts that neatly divide percentages and

probabilities derived from algorithms obtained through data

accumulation. In so doing, for myriad consumers, the interpre-

tive work of science translates hereditary genetic material into

present-day constructs of identity, thereby determining not only

what you are, but also, who you are. Moreover, while testing

companies refrain from using the terms “race” or “ethnicity,”

their interpretations of genetic material invariably translate into

contemporary categories of race. The ramifications of market-

ing identity through genetic testing are significant. Consumers

are encouraged to embrace or distance themselves from DNA

test-kit ascriptions of racialized identities while confirming their

belief in racial difference. By examining the means by which DNA

tests assess genetic material such as blood and bones, we seek

to both interrogate their myth-making power, while subverting

them with indigenous constructs of belonging.

30 contexts.org

A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual.

Bu
re

au
o

f
In

di
an

A
ff

ai
rs

A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual. A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual.

Bu
re

au
o

f
In

di
an

A
ff

ai
rs

myth
Prior to her Presidential bid, questions concerning Elizabeth

Warren’s ancestry fi rst surfaced during her run for the U.S. Sen-

ate in 2012. The Boston Herald reported that she registered as a

minority in law school directories in the 1980s. Warren defended

herself by claiming that she was told of her Native American

ancestry in family stories passed down over generations and

claims that she never furthered her career by using her heritage

to gain an advantage.

In 2018, Warren joined the thousands of Americans turning

to DNA ancestry testing to discover or recover the truth of their

identity. She consulted Carlos D. Bustamante, a Biomedical Data

Science professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine

whose lab focuses on Population Genomics and Global Health,

Clinical and Medical Genomics, and Ancient DNA. Notably,

Bustamante had already gained popularity—unusual for a

“hard” scientist—on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, with Professor

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In turning to Bustamante’s testing lab to

silence her critics, Warren unwittingly reinforced two myths of

the American imagination: fi rst, the veracity of biologically-based

notions of race and identity, and second, the long-held belief

that many white Americans have indigenous ancestry.

One source of evidence of this myth-making can be found

in Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. White fears of tainted

“Negro” blood seeping into white lineages informed the Act and

similar race laws throughout the American South. To maintain

white racial purity, Virginia’s legislature made it unlawful for a

white person to marry outside of their race. In so doing, the state

racialized all non-whites, whether “negro, Mongolian, American

Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other

non-Caucasic strains” as “colored,” with one notable exception.

Known as the “Pocahontas Exception,” the Act ensured that

those members of Virginia’s elite families who claimed descent

from Mataoka, better known as Pocahontas, were irrefutably

and legally white.

Among citizens and descendants of contemporary tribal

nations, Warren’s situation underscores the abiding interest that

many people have in confi rming claims to indigenous ancestry.

When individuals who most consistently identify as white assume

another racialized identity, the behavior advances the under-

standing that historically, politically, and culturally-constructed

identities can be assumed and consumed without consequence,

without cost, without understanding.

What makes Warren’s experience of laying claim to indig-

enous ancestry unusual, and indeed, laudably exceptional, is that

in her apologia to contemporary Native Americans, and spe-

cifi cally, the Cherokee Nation, Warren owned her own actions,

“having listened and learned.” In light of the controversy, Warren

removed a video of her family’s ancestral history and released

a 9,000-word plan on tribal rights that ran twice the length of

her other campaign proposals. Nevertheless, for the Cherokee

Nation, as well as a number of indigenous scholars, Warren’s

planned policy and her apology rang hollow, was dismissed, and

failed to receive serious consideration.

blood
The popularity and proliferation of genetic ancestry tests

aimed at would-be Native American clients is only the latest

iteration of an ideological legacy of race and racial superior-

ity rooted in the body, and specifi cally, the blood. The use of

31SUMMER 2020 contexts

“blood” to trace ancestry, has multiple historical roots. In the

English historical context, “blood” made material the mechanism

whereby ancestry, lineage, and descent justifi ed or delegitimized

claims to property and status. Blood was infused with proper-

ties that confi rmed or denied the tell-tale traces of authenticity.

Authenticity, or its lack, was irretrievably embedded in either

pure, or suspect admixtures of illicit blood.

For post-Columbian indigenous peoples throughout what is

now the United States, “blood” initially operated as a metaphori-

cal translation of forms of relatedness and lineage. Over time

however, “blood” as metaphor devolved even as its literalness

increased, gradually mirroring a European biologic of identity. In

the 500 plus years since, technologies of establishing relatedness,

identifi cation, and evaluation, began to require the measure-

ment of “blood quantum.” The belief that “Indianness” can be

measured by the amount of “Indian blood” that one possessed

gave new meaning to indigenous understandings of “descent,”

“lineage” and “ancestry.” At the same time, this understanding

usurped indigenous beliefs about identity and belonging rooted

in culture, kinship, and community.

As of February 2020, there were 574 tribal nations

legally recognized by the U.S. federal government. Among

these, over 70 percent require a minimum blood quantum for

purposes of attaining tribal citizenship. Similar to the one-drop

rule once used to define someone as “Negro,” or anyone

with known or purported African ancestry,

blood quantum rules exemplify the elbow-

ing guidance of the federal authority since

the 19th century that defi ned as “Indian”

persons with some minimum percentage

of “Indian blood,” usually one-quarter or

more. Rooted in a biologic of race, these

directives were incorporated into tribal

constitutions that determine both tribal

belonging and citizenship status. To the

extent that DNA ancestry tests may provide

evidence of generic indigenous ancestry,

they fall far short of providing the proof

needed for tribal citizenship. This is why,

in response to the release of Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test result,

the Cherokee Nation released a statement that said in part that

DNA tests are inappropriate and useless in determining tribal

citizenship.

bones
Many who turn to DNA tests in search of indigenous

ancestry reinforce antiquated constructions of race and the

abilities of science to determine identity. Yet, contemporary

DNA ancestry-testing, and the marketing strategies that herald

it as an unassailable scientifi c determinant of race, misinform

people as to its ability to shed light on who or what they are. .

There are also signifi cant legal, historical, and ethical implications

upon which such claims rely as they naturalize biological notions

of relatedness apart from indigenous cultural moorings that are

rooted in people and place. A striking example of the differing

means by which many Americans determine racialized related-

ness from the ways in which indigenous peoples establish being

and belonging is the two-decade saga of The Ancient One,

better known as “Kennewick Man.”

In 2017, the 9,000 year old remains of The Ancient One

were returned to a coalition of tribal nations (the Confeder-

ated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Confederated Tribes and

Bands of the Yakama Nation, Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated

Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, and the Wanapum Band of

Priest Rapids). Claiming him as their ancestor, for twenty-one

years they sought to rebury him. Shortly after his discovery and

subsequent appropriation in the name of scientifi c inquiry into

his origins, anthropologist James Chatters purposed the skull to

mold a sculpture of what The Ancient One looked like. Naming

him “Kennewick Man,” Chatters described him as “Caucasoid,”

who lacked the “defi nitive characteristics of the classic Mongol-

oid stock.” Chatters further noted that he could easily “lose him

in the streets of most major cities.”

To Chatters, The Ancient One did not “look” Native Ameri-

can. Herein began a tale of multiple claimants: fi rst, The Ancient

When individuals who most consistently
identify as white assume another racialized
identity, the behavior advances the
understanding that historically, politically,
and culturally-constructed identities can be
assumed and consumed without consequence,
without cost, without understanding.

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native
American ancestry.

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co

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native

dn
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32 contexts.org

One himself, whose post-mortem existence as the ancestor of

present-day indigenous Columbian Basin peoples was now

under threat. Second, Nordic racial paganists now claimed that,

as their ancestor, The Ancient One represented evidence of an

even earlier European indigeneity in the Americas. Lastly, a group

of scholars—represented by the Army Corps of Engineers which

oversaw the land where The Ancient One was “discovered”—

sued the Federal government in order to prevent his remains

from returning to the Columbian Basin peoples under the Native

American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Later still, physical anthropologists at the Smithsonian

Institution completed an exhaustive inventory of The Ancient

One’s bones, from probing his cavity-free teeth, to disarticulat-

ing, exploring, measuring, and weighing every inch of what

his skeleton might reveal. Twenty years after his “discovery”

in 1997, cranial analysis combined with genetic comparisons

concluded that The Ancient One evidenced continuity with

indigenous North Americans over the course of eight millennia.

belonging
Marketers of genetic ancestry testing readily exploit the

American interest in genealogy. What is at the heart of such an

abiding interest? The preoccupation with who we are and what

we are has plagued Americans since the inception of the nation.

The need to root oneself, to belong has always been a core

American anxiety.This highlights the perniciously appropriative

behavior all-too-common among non-indigenous individuals.

Indeed, persons in the present who otherwise identify as white

need never be cognizant of, or own any historical attempts of

Native erasure by assigning to themselves a shared ancestry

unencumbered by that history. More than happy to perpetuate

a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” these formerly reviled,

historically subjugated peoples were blithely absorbed into the

body politic of the nation, as well as the bodies of its citizens.

Once made to vanish, Native Americans can now safely return in

a strand of DNA. We as observers, academics, and participants

in the varied dynamics of American identity politics should keep

in mind the histories and narrative inventions that inform what

it means to be indigenous in the 21st century.

At a 2017 event honoring the service of Navajo Code

Talkers during World War II, President Trump acknowledged

the historical presence of indigenous peoples by stating, “You

were here long before any of us were here.” Implicitly, this is the

same rhetoric that Trump wields against immigrants. This brand

of American myth-making privileges some Americans to a kind

of indigeneity that requires the erasure of their own immigrant

ancestry in order to legitimize their claims to being American

and belonging to the nation state.

Indeed, Trump has made a career of policing indigenous

identities. In 1993, while still an entrepreneur, Trump cam-

paigned to prevent New Jersey’s Ramapough Mountain Indians

from entering into the gaming industry in Atlantic City. He

invoked blood-based beliefs about indigenous identity when he

stated, “I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-

called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations.” In a

similar vein, Trump attempted to delegitimize the Mashantucket

Pequot, who operate one of the largest, most lucrative gaming

operations in the U.S., saying, “They don’t look like Indians

to me.” For Trump and many Americans,

beliefs about race, whether based on

blood, ancestry or phenotype, inform an

understanding of who can be indigenous

and what it means to be Native American.

In contrast to Trump’s narrative of

indigenous illegitimacy and inauthenticity,

the Cherokee Nation challenged Warren’s

claims to Cherokee heritage and racialized

constructions of identity. In a statement issued by the Chero-

kee Nation, “being a Cherokee Nation tribal citizen is rooted

in centuries of culture and laws, not through DNA tests.” The

Cherokee do not claim to base their response to Warren on

a construction of who may or may not be Native American.

Rather, their response is specifi c to the Cherokee construct of

belonging, and thus, being. Here, the Cherokee logic of being

and belonging disables a racialized construction of who is or is

not Cherokee and leaves to other tribal nations to defi ne for

themselves who and what they are. It also negates race as a

premise for the legitimization of both people and personhood.

And yet, the concept of “race,” with its politicized pathology

A 1986 registration card for the State Bar of Texas for Elizabeth
Warren with her Race indicated as “American Indian.”

Th
e

St
at

e
Ba

r
of

T
ex

Many who turn to DNA tests in search of
indigenous ancestry reinforce antiquated
constructions of race and ethnicity and the
abilities of science to determine identity.

33SUMMER 2020 contexts

of purity and blood, continues to operate as a fundamental fac-

tor in the construction of both indigenous and non-indigenous

identities. In the 500 plus years since Columbus made landfall,

and well over a century since the abolition of slavery, biologically-

based concepts of race remain deeply embedded and infused

throughout U.S. society and the American psyche. Advances

in genetic technologies have only strengthened such thinking

about notions of individual and collective identity, and the fun-

damental basis of kinship and relatedness.

For many Americans, Native Identity

is understood as something that resides

in bodily traces, from blood and bones to

DNA. The idea of genetics as an objective

science continues to uncritically inform

consumers, courts of law, legislators, and

policy makers. How extraordinary that

the past can be reduced to the flawless

minimalism of DNA. Yet, this approach

operates in accordance with an increasingly

fragmented, socially-isolating approach to constructs of family,

ancestry, and descent. All too vulnerable, are meanings of kin-

ship across multiple historical and socio-cultural perspectives,

as well as how such meanings reflect, refract, and conflict with

larger social forces.

The possibilities offered by genetics perpetuate and pro-

mote ideas of identity premised on a cultural logic rooted in

biologically based notions of ancestry and descent. In turn,

this cultural logic stimulated the development of technologies

that rely on the collection and analysis of both bodily traces

and resulting data upon which science relies. In lieu of a larger

knowledge of history and individual family histories, contempo-

rary non-indigenous consumers have taken to purchasing DNA

kits to better determine their ancestry, and thus, their identity.

Moreover, Americans, in particular, seek confirmation of family

histories that purport to include a distant, illusory indigenous

ancestor upon which they can firmly assert a Native American

identity. The simplistic construction of Native American identity

defined solely by DNA is not only naïve, but also self-serving and

ultimately, misinformed. In this sense, you are never entirely, and

certainly never exclusively, your genes.

For many Americans, the idiom of “DNA” like that of

“blood” conjures up powerful notions of ancestry and identity,

being and belonging. For Elizabeth Warren and the thousands

of Americans seeking proof of their “Indianness,” genetic

ancestry testing provides a point of leverage upon which they

can assert claims to indigeneity based on a “percentage” of

DNA shared with indigenous peoples. In a New York Times arti-

cle, Kim TallBear, an indigenous scholar at the University of

Alberta argued that such testing privileges whiteness and relies

on “settler-colonial definitions” of indigenous identity. It is in

this abstract world of ideas as well as a lived reality that colo-

nialism creates and reinforces the identities of the colonized

in opposition to the colonizer.

The view of race as social rather than biological has been an

enduring feature of sociological studies of race. The orthodoxy

in the social sciences is that race is socially constructed, not an

innate and immutable biological fact. In the United States, the

social construction of race is underpinned by an ideology that

has long-served the interests of certain groups in referential

and strategic ways. In a nation consumed with enumeration,

classification and categorization, family stories of being “part

Indian” or algorithms of DNA are bound up in long histories of

colonialism and racism that once usurped indigenous peoples of

their lands, languages and lifeways. Today, DNA ancestry test-

ing continues this process and further undermines indigenous

defined ways of being and belonging.

recommended readings
Bliss, C. (2013). The Marketization of Identity Politics. Sociol-
ogy, 47(5), 1011–1025.

Garroutte, E. (2003). Real Indians: Identity and the survival of
Native America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Roth, W. D.& Ivemark, B. (2018). Genetic Options: The Impact of
Genetic Ancestry Testing on Consumers’ Racial and Ethnic Identi-
ties, American Journal of Sociology 124(1): 150-184.

TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and
the false promise of genetic science. Minneapolis, MN: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.

Wailoo, K., Nelson, A., & Lee, C. (2012). Genetics and the unset-
tled past the collision of DNA, race, and history. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.

Angela A. Gonzales is in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State

University and Judy Kertész is in the History Department at North Carolina State

University. Gonzales’s research focuses on the interconnection between science, public

policy, and the racialization of Native American identity. Kertész research examines

the emergence of a “nativist” American nationalism during the early American

Republic, as well as the intersections of Indigenous studies, critical race studies, and

museum studies. In 2009, Gonzales and Kertész co-curated the Smithsonian exhibit,

InDivisible: African Native American Lives in the Americas, a collaboration between

the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum

of African American History and Culture.

We as observers, academics, and participants
in the varied dynamics of American identity
politics should keep in mind the histories and
narrative inventions that inform what it means
to be indigenous in the 21st century.

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