Department Colloquium: Kareem Khalifa

"Construction Under Constraint: Race Categories for the Working Social Scientist"

Abstract: Among race theorists in the social sciences, social constructionism about race enjoys overwhelming consensus. By contrast, when studying racial dynamics in the US, empirical researchers in the social sciences rely on the race categories used in the Census. The Census categories are grounded in ancestry in geographic regions, so they’re invariant to many of the social conditions that are often hypothesized to “construct” races. In this talk, I’ll argue that the Census categories license a thin realism about race that, when coupled with their empirical track record in social-scientific research, impose severe constraints on—and challenges to—constructionist theorizing about race.

Kareem Khalifa is a Professor at UCLA.