When questions do not yield answers: Foreclosures of racial knowledge production

Those who study racism in the U.S. enter into a conceptually ordered field. What we study is filtered in ways that are relevant to established questions of the field, effectively straining possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and what might otherwise be asked. A case can be made that despite disagreements over theory, studies on racism agree upon the importance of the following questions: What is the content, form, and style of racism, and how has it shifted in patterned and resilient ways over time? Answers to these questions vary, as do the perspectives and interests they advance, but in many ways, the substance remains the same. Too often subsequent answers are bent on the idea of racial transcendence, claiming ideology has shifted from a biological to cultural basis, or contending that racist structures today are substantively unique from the past. These themes represent a routinized convergence of intellectual thought: Change is prioritized. Rather than debate if this emphasis is correct, my suggestion is that there are other meaningful questions worth asking.