About This Module

Where Module 1 examined how institutions make race, Module 2 turns to the traditions of thought that allow us to analyze it. The module assembles the major theoretical frameworks of the sociology of race — intersectionality and critical race theory, W. E. B. Du Bois's account of double-consciousness and the color line, the critique of whiteness and the concept of hegemony, and the study of the body and cultural production. These are not treated as a single doctrine but as a set of complementary lenses, each developed to make a particular dimension of the racial order visible. Across the four units the module builds a shared analytical vocabulary — intersectionality, double-consciousness, the color line, whiteness as property, hegemony, embodiment, and cultural production — that learners will carry into the empirical modules that follow.

The module's organizing argument is that these theories are not neutral descriptions delivered from outside the racial order, but tools forged in large part by those who live within it — much of the tradition emerging from Black feminist, Du Boisian, and queer-of-color thought. Each unit supplies a distinct vantage point: the intersection of several axes of power at once; the doubled vision of a subject who sees herself through the eyes of a society that demeans her; the critique of whiteness as an unmarked norm and of the hegemony that holds a racial order in place without constant force; and the body and culture as sites where racial meaning is imposed, performed, and contested. Read together, the units give learners a critical apparatus — a set of frameworks they can bring to bear on cases throughout the rest of the course.

Module Objectives

By the end of this module, learners will be able to:

• Explain why the major theories in this module treat racial categories and racial experience as objects of analysis rather than natural facts, and articulate what each framework is designed to foreground.
• Apply the module's core concepts — intersectionality, double-consciousness, the color line, whiteness as property, hegemony, and embodiment and cultural production — to specific historical and contemporary cases.
• Distinguish the standpoints from which these frameworks were developed, recognizing how much of the tradition emerges from Black feminist, Du Boisian, and queer-of-color thought rather than from a detached outside observer.
• Use the module's theoretical vocabulary to analyze present-day controversies — over identity and the law, voting rights, and the regulation and representation of bodies — connecting theory to concrete cases.

The Four Units

The module unfolds across four units, each developing a distinct framework for analyzing race and ethnicity.

• Unit 2.1: Identity Politics, Intersectionality, and Critical Race Theory — Introduces intersectionality, identity politics, and critical race theory as frameworks for analyzing how race operates together with gender, class, and sexuality, and how it is embedded in law. Works from the Combahee River Collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Hill Collins to develop a vocabulary for thinking about overlapping axes of power and the legal architecture of antidiscrimination.
• Unit 2.2: Double-Consciousness, the Veil, and the Color Line — Turns to the foundational Black sociological tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, developing double-consciousness, the veil, and the color line as analytical concepts. Treats Du Bois not only as a theorist but as an empirical sociologist, and considers his data portraits as an early experiment in visualizing the color line.
• Unit 2.3: Whiteness, Hegemony, and Histories from Below — Takes whiteness as an explicit object of analysis through Cheryl Harris's argument that whiteness has functioned as property, the sociology of whiteness, and the labor history of the "wages of whiteness." A second thread on hegemony and history from below examines how domination is sustained and resisted, and brings the frameworks to bear on a recent voting-rights controversy.
• Unit 2.4: Body, Embodiment, and Cultural Production — Treats the body as the site where racial meaning is most intimately produced and contested, moving from imposition — Sabrina Strings on the racial genealogy of fat phobia — to production: how racialized people make culture, from Black hair to queer-of-color community, that reworks the meanings assigned to their bodies. Reads popular culture as contested terrain through cases including the CROWN Act and the memory of Stonewall.

The four units do not advance a single linear argument so much as assemble a toolkit of complementary frameworks — from the intersection of identities, to the doubled vision of the racialized subject, to the critique of the dominant position and the resistance that operates beneath it, and finally to the body and culture where these dynamics are lived. Together they equip learners with the analytical lenses that the empirical modules to come will put to work.