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American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing "racial institutional orders": a "white supremacist" order and an "egalitarian transformative" order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.
Whether race is the "American Dilemma," racial inequities have been and remain confounding features of U.S. experience. Has racial injustice been a great aberration within a fundamentally democratic, rights-respecting regime? Has the United States instead been an intrinsically racist society? Has racial discrimination been the spawn of psychological or cultural pathologies, or a tool of class exploitation, or a political "card" to be played in power games, or something else?
One might expect political science in the United States to be the center of debates, if not answers, on such questions. But American political scientists have historically not been much more successful than America itself in addressing racial issues. We seek to do so by connecting theoretical frameworks emerging in the subfield of American political development, including King (1995), Lieberman (2002), Orren and Skowronek (1994, 1996, 1999, 2002), and Smith (1997), with insights from scholars of race in other areas of political science and other disciplines (e.g., Dawson and Cohen 2002, Omi and Winant 1994, and Wacquant 2002). We argue that American politics has historically been constituted in part by two evolving but linked "racial institutional orders": a set of "white supremacist" orders and a competing set of "transformative egalitarian" orders. Each of these orders has had distinct phases, and someday the United States may transcend them entirely-though that prospect is not in sight.
This "racial orders"...