Racial Orders

In the Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith article Racial Orders in American Political Development, the authors explain that American political science has struggled to adequately deal with the issue of race in their analysis. They go on to say that American politics has historically been constituted in party by two evolving by linked “racial institutional orders:” a set of “white supremacist” orders and a competing set of “transformative egalitarian” orders. It is in these two orders that most decision-making processes can be broken down. This “racial orders” thesis rejects claims that racial injustices are aberrations in America, for it elaborate how the nation has been pervasively constituted by systems of racial hierarchy since its inception. But more than most approaches used, it also captures how said injustices have been contested by those they have injured and by other political institutions and actors. The framework they put forth provides a to organize empirical evidence of the extent and manner in which structures of racial inequalities have been interwoven with economic as well as gender and religious hierarchies and social institutions.
What they are able to do with their research is to analyze the “political economy” of American racial systems by

For some major topics, this is appropriate. However, in order to grasp the concept of race in the antebellum era, multiple orders analysis must encompass both master/slave order and America’s racial orders. This ultimately leads us to posit two evolving racial systems, the white supremacist and egalitarian transformative racial orders. White supremacist orders created to defend slavery and to displace tribes, the expansion West, and racial manifest destiny. This white supremacist order made explicitly racial identities seem natural and vital to