Critical Notes on Racial Domination: Toward an Alternative Bourdieusian Theory of Ethnoracial Difference, Domination and Intersection

Loic Wacquant’s Racial Domination is a major summary and extension of the French sociologist’s theorisation of what ‘race’ is and how it works. Critics have grappled with it on several fronts, usually defending their own perspectives or ideas from the critical scrutiny they received in Wacquant’s text. This paper, however, targets the as yet unquestioned core of Wacquant’s theoretical project: his appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. More specifically, I highlight several tensions and contradictions in the text that trouble his Bourdieusian baseline and call out for something he explicitly rejects: a conception of ethnoracial domination as constituting a specific field of struggle. I introduce and refine Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond’s argument in this direction to dissolve the inconsistencies in Wacquant’s argument, problematise his rejection of the idea and sketch how the intersection of ethnoracial domination and class operates.