The Inner Machinery of Racial Domination

Chair and Moderator of the Roundtable: Bruno Cousin (Sciences Po - CEE). Discussant: Anwita Dinkar (Sciences-Po - CSO).

Loïc Wacquant’s "Racial Domination" critically examines the concept of race, a central yet contentious theme in contemporary social sciences. Drawing on global research and theorists like Bachelard, Weber, and Bourdieu, Wacquant offers new analytical tools to rethink racial classification, challenging prevailing ideas such as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” for their lack of clarity and effectiveness. He applies this framework to analyze the systems of Jim Crow and mass incarceration in the US, revealing how these institutions have shaped the marginalization of African Americans. The book concludes by exploring the relationship between knowledge and racial justice, making it a provocative resource for scholars of race, inequality, and social theory.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research associate at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris. His books are translated into twenty languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (expanded anniversary edition, 2022), The Invention of the “Underclass”: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge (2022), Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (2023), Jim Crow. Le terrorisme de caste en Amérique (2024), and Racial Domination (2024). 

He is at work on an ethnography of the penal state at ground level entitled “Fast-Food Justice: The Social Life of the County Criminal Court.”