Race and Crisis: A Critical History of the Production of Community Difference

In this article I juxtapose the sociology of race of W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber. They exemplify an early radical sociologization of race, rejecting the biological and naturalistic presuppositions, prevailing in their historical context. Through this juxtaposition I aim to derive an approach for thinking about the relationship between race and crisis. By crisis here I mean conjunctures in which the attainment of formal equality is followed by practical inequality, which acquires racialized forms. The latter could eventually become anchored in the legal framework. Both sociologists think in the period between the end of US Civil War and the early twentieth century, when the practical racialized inequalities, following the emancipation, were judicialized in the „Jim Crow“ system.