Racism and the sociological imagination Bob Carter and Satnam Virdee Abstract Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those con- cerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the powerful theoretical obfuscation associated with these concepts, whilst on the other it prompts the notion that human agency has only an illusory role as an intentional agent. Drawing on the intellectual resources of a Hegelian-inflected historical materialism and realism, we challenge both claims by arguing for a post-race, post-ethnicity sociology of group formation, one which allows a greater scope for agency in the determination of social life. Keywords: Racism; anti-racism; class struggle; discourse; historical materialism; realism Introduction The work of Robert Park (1950) represents the first attempt to develop a sociological account of racism and ‘race relations’. He wrestled with the meth- odological consequences of regarding race relations as social relations whose significance to individuals derives from their symbolic force; they are effectual to the extent to which people believe them to be so (Carter 2000). Central to his account were two important claims: that the term ‘race’ referred to socially constituted phenomena – there were no races in a signifi- cant biological sense, but many people understood there to be ‘races’ – and that in so far as this was the case then it was possible and appropriate for sociologists to identify and analyse situations of ‘race relations’, that is those situations in which social relations between people were grasped in terms of Carter (Department of Sociology, University of Warwick) and Virdee (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Glasgow) (Corresponding author email: robert.carter@warwick.ac.uk) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00214.x The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 4