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Considers several explanations of racial & ethnic phenomena in current debates in the literature on race & racism in social theory, & analyzes some of the emergent issues in the field. The study of race & racism is traced to the work of US sociologists in the 1920s & 1930s, post-WWII study of migrant labor & colonialism in the UK & Western Europe, & 1960s study of race relations in the UK, where Michael Banton's race relations problematic (1991 [see abstract 91X8195]) became the dominant approach. Critiques of this problematic, primarily from a Marxist perspective, emerged in the 1980s to unseat Banton's framework as the dominant approach. Debates over the politics of race & racialization in the 1980s have been accompanied in the 1990s by the study of cultural forms of ethnicity in urban areas & greater attention to the multiple forms of racial ideologies. The current period is witness to a variety of theoretical paradigms, none of which are nearer to resolving the many theoretical problems that have characterized this literature for some time. A key issue in this regard is developing a way to establish the epistemological validity & causal power of racialization & race formation without endorsing everyday ideological discourses of race. D. M. Smith