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At the heart of sociology lies a paradox. Sociology recognizes itself as a preeminently modern discipline yet remains virtually silent on what W.E.B. Du Bois identifies as modernity’s “most magnificent drama”: the transoceanic enslavement of Africans. Through a reconsideration of his classic text Black Reconstruction in America, this article offers an answer to the paradox: a profoundly antisocial condition, racial slavery lies beyond the bounds of the social, beyond sociology’s self-defined limits. Consequently, even when actually dealing with racial slavery, social theories—even radical social theories, such as Du Bois’s Marxism—inexorably misrecognize it. Placing the enslavement of Black people at the center of analysis and drawing on the insights of Saidiya Hartman and other radical theorists in Black studies, an underdiscipline of antisociology is proposed as a collective project to provincialize the social and to more adequately account for the incommensurability of antiblackness.

This essay introduces the special issue, which originates from a two-day symposium on race and transnationalism. It proposes a particular angle from which to consider the following seven articles and the study of race and racism in general. In response to sociology and neighboring disciplines’ mounting predictions of ‘Black exceptionalism’ and imminent assimilation of Asians and Latina/os into whiteness/non-Blackness, a two-part alternative approach is briefly suggested: (1) critically engage the most theoretically and politically challenging scholarship in Black studies (notably outside sociology) that asserts the singularity of anti-Black racism; and (2) think through the social positions of non-Black peoples of color in light of and not losing sight of the first part. An overview of the special issue follows.

This article reviews theoretical developments in the sociology of the US racial state since the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States. After briefly outlining their theory, it surveys the still diminutive literature and concludes by pointing to promising future directions, drawing on insights from other disciplines and incipient stirrings from within sociology. Destabilizing the unquestioned assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, the article reconceptualizes it as an empire-state. This turn establishes a firmer footing for the claim that the United States is intrinsically a racial state and yields a generative framework for reconsidering and stimulating scholarship toward more effective analysis and critique.

In the past two decades, migration scholars have revised and revitalized assimilation theory to study the large and growing numbers of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean and their offspring in the United States. Neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories seek to make sense of the current wave of migration that differs in important ways from the last great wave at the turn of the twentieth century and to overcome the conceptual shortcomings of earlier theories of assimilation that it inspired. This article examines some of the central assumptions and arguments of the new theories. In particular, it undertakes a detailed critique of their treatment of race and finds that they variously engage in suspect comparisons to past migration from Europe; read out or misread the qualitatively different historical trajectories of European and non-European migrants; exclude native-born Blacks from the analysis; fail to conceptually account for the key changes that are purported to facilitate “assimilation”; import the dubious concept of the “underclass” to characterize poor urban Blacks and others; laud uncritically the “culture” of migrants; explicitly or implicitly advocate the “assimilation” of migrants; and discount the political potential of “oppositional culture.” Shifting the focus fromdifferencetoinequalityanddomination, the article concludes with a brief proposal for reorienting our theoretical approach, fromassimilationto thepolitics of national belonging.

In the past few decades, the social sciences have turned decidedly away from essentialist and reductionist ways of theorizing race and its articulations with nation and class. Though invaluable in advancing the social-scientific study and critique of race and racism, this turn has led many to conceptualize race increasingly as an empty signifier whose articulations with nation and class are wholly a matter of contingency This article suggests that we reengage the project of theorizing the insistent, historically recurrent articulations of race, nation, and class without falling into the old traps of essentialism, reductionism, and ahistoricism. Taking colonial Hawai`i as an example, this article analyzes how these categories articulated to racialize Japanese and Filipino migrant labor differentially in the age of empire.

In the past two decades, the scholarship on prewar Hawai`i, particularly of its workers, took a much needed critical turn toward the study of racial and class confl icts, challenging the long-standing dominance of the assimilationist framework. However, an anachronistic deployment of a pan-Asian racial category and an attenuated conceptualization of racism have impeded the turn, an important consequence of which has been an inadequate grasp of the racial inequality and division between Japanese and Filipino workers. I argue that a key to overcoming these shortcomings is the abandonment of a unidimensional conceptualization of racism that underlies not only the study of Hawai`i but also much of the sociology of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, this essay seeks to demonstrate why and how Japanese and Filipino workers faced different racisms, different not only in intensity but in kind, and what differences they made in relation to the production and reproduction of working-class racial inequality and division.

By the close of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had become a newly annexed territory of the United States and was tightly controlled by a cohesive oligarchy ofhaolesugar capitalists. The “enormous concentration of wealth and power” held by the Big Five sugar factors of Honolulu up until statehood was unparalleled elsewhere in the United States (Cooper and Daws 1985: 3–4). In contrast, native Hawai‘ians and immigrants recruited from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines—in successive and overlapping waves—endured the low wages and poor working and living conditions characteristic of other agricultural export regions.

A normative desire for interracialism undergirds and structures the sociology of race. However, focusing almost exclusively on racial divisions and conflicts, the sociology of race rarely subjects interracialism to explicit analysis. One consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as deracialization-the removal of racism. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it. Prototypically, there has long been a scholarly consensus that Hawaii's interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s presupposed deracialization: that a "colour-blind" class ideology, advanced by the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, effaced racial divisions. Refuting this interpretation, this paper demonstrates that a deracializing class ideology was not straightforwardly adopted by Hawaii's racially divided workers. Instead, a leftist ideology of class served as the initial pivot for an affirmative transformation of race, producing an interracial ideology that rearticulated, rather than disarticulated, race and class. The paper concludes with several implications of reconceptualizing interracialism affirmatively.