Social Movement Framing Tasks and Contemporary Racisms: Diagnostic and Prognostic Forms

Abstract

Increasingly, race scholars define racism as a structural and systemic phenomenon, rather than a matter of personal prejudice alone. Various theories of racism have been developed by asking “What causes racial inequality?” and defining as racist those mechanisms that reproduce it. In this essay, I ask a different question to expand the toolkit from which scholars can identify the racisms that characterize the contemporary era. Acknowledging that dramatic changes to systems of racial oppression are historically brought about by social movements, I ask, “What causes anti-racist movements to fail?” and define as racist those factors that prevent anti-racist movements from mobilizing supporters in the pursuit of change. I thus propose, define, and describe two forms of racism that connect theories of race and racism to theories of social movements. To enable success, social movements engage in (among other tasks) diagnostic and prognostic framing—that is, they identify conditions as problems and propose solutions. I thus propose the following forms of racism that manifest as sentiments that prevent anti-racist movements from successfully carrying out these tasks: diagnostic racism and prognostic racism. In conclusion, I explain how this conceptualization of racism complements and extends prevailing theories of race and racism and underscores the utility of bridging theories of race and racism and social movement theories in studies of race relations.