The Infracategorical Model of Inequality, Colorism, and the Erasure of Black Sociology: A Comment on Sakamoto, Iceland, and Ren (2026)

Sakamoto, Iceland, and Ren document substantial socioeconomic variation across non-Hispanic White ethnic groups and conclude this variation is “largely inconsistent with critical race theory.” The inference fails on three independent grounds. First, operationalizing race as five mutually exclusive nominal categories imposes a categorical instrument too coarse to capture racialization that operates through perceptual cues, subcategories, and gradients of typicality—a misspecification formalized in the Infracategorical Model of Inequality. Second, conditioning on education, region, and family structure partials out mediators of race, yielding direct effects misread as total effects. Third, low population-wide R 2 in race-only specifications does not adjudicate the causal weight of racialized mechanisms. The deeper failure is the erasure of Black sociology. Within-group disaggregation has been the analytic move of Black sociologists and allied scholars from W.E.B. Du Bois through William Julius Wilson to the contemporary colorism literature, all of which conclude that within-group heterogeneity refines the structural account of ethnoracial stratification rather than refutes it. In short, this is old wine in new bottles, and the wine came from the (predominantly) Black sociologists who appear in SIR’s bibliography and nowhere in their argument.