Comparative Racial Structures.

This paper presents a framework for undertaking comparative analyses of racial systems. In it, I show that there are three identifiable components to racial structures that organize how "race" operates in a given nation or region for a particular time period. To be specific, in any given racial structure, you'll find racial categories; these are used to segregate individuals from one another as they are assigned to various groups. Racial hierarchies rank the aforementioned categories according to the privileges and demerits of the racialized distribution of a society's resources. Finally, racial politicultures provide the de jure and de facto rules that govern the monitoring of boundaries between racial categories, delimit the sanctions for crossing boundaries, manipulate hierarchies and categories to dole out or withhold racial privileges, and provide the means for transmitting racial commonsense among the people living within that particular racial system. This paper (which lays out a framework that will be used as the underpinning for a book-length examination of the dynamics of race and ethnicity in the United States) summarizes relevant race scholarship by organizing it into the comparative racial structure analysis I have developed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]