The many faces of race: toward a global cultural sociology of co-descent

Race is conceptualized and articulated differently at various times and in various places. How then can sociologists of race draw meaningful comparisons across diverse cultural settings (or time periods)? This article proposes two strategies for cross-national scholarship on race. First, we must understand that race is just one member of a broader family of classifications grounded in shared or co-descent—and that it has different connotations in the U.S. than it does elsewhere. Paradoxically, then, researchers must let go of rigid preconceptions of what constitutes race, and cast a wide net to explore a range of adjacent notions of difference that they and their subjects may or may not label as “race.” This leads to the second strategy: the decomposition of any given concept of co-descent into key components in order to describe and compare it more precisely. Based on over 150 interviews conducted in the United States and in Italy, I identify seven meaningful dimensions of descent-based concepts of difference. This framework aims to contribute to a global cultural sociology of co-descent that can bridge myriad worlds of meaning-making and boundary-drawing, including those suffused with a notion of race.