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White Supremacy As Class Compromise: The Poverty Of Structural Racism As A Theoretical Paradigm, Cody Robert Melcher

Wayne State University Theses

In this thesis, I develop a theoretical frame through which the perpetuation of racial inequality in the United States can be fruitfully interpreted. This reconceptualization is necessary, I argue, because the now dominant paradigm of so-called “structural racism” is methodologically untenable. I contend that the seminal theoretical and empirical accounts within the paradigm do not provide compelling or methodologically sound explanations for the perpetuation of racial inequality, often (and disturbingly) ignoring the historical record of race relations in the US. Specifically, I show that these accounts rely on the dubious causal mechanisms of structural inertia or ideological racism. Where these …