Rassifizierende Humandifferenzierung. Ein Plädoyer für spezifizierende Vergleiche statt ethno–zentrischer Subsumtion

Loic Wacquant rightly argues that for sociology, “race” can only be an ethnosociological category of a racializing practice, and that internationally prevalent concepts of race are implicitly based on an ethnocentric image of US society. There, of course, race is also being substantialized and essentialized by the dominated. An alliance of social movements and critical sociology is responsible for conceptual racism. A major weakness of Wacquant’s agenda lies in the fact that his subsumption of race under a vague concept of ethnicity leads to ethno–centric overstretching. It makes it impossible to determine what is general and what is specific about race. What is needed, instead, are specifying comparisons of forms of human differentiation: race, ethnicity, denomination, language and citizenship should first be clearly separated analytically, before, secondly, comparing them with other distinctions (such as gender, class, age, disability) to determine their family resemblances, and, thirdly, examining their empirical interferences with other distinctions.