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48 pages 1 hour read

Michael Omi, Howard Winant

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986

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Themes

Race as a Master Category

Throughout Racial Formation in the United States, the authors do not deny the importance of other identity categories like class and gender for understanding oppression and its history. Instead, they suggest that race is “a master category, a kind of template for patterns of inequality, marginalization, and difference throughout U.S. history” (viii). They argue that race and racism have intersected with other forms of discrimination and oppression like sexism and have influenced how other identities are understood.

One example the authors give is how in the antebellum South, enslaved women were either seen through the maternal “Mammy” stereotype or as seductresses (248). The authors argue that anti-racist activism provided a model for other civil rights movements, like the feminist and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s: “While race is a template for the subordination and oppression of different social groups, we emphasize that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginalization and domination” (108). In other words, race has influenced how systems of oppression and “othering” have developed in the course of the history of the United States. The authors illuminate how under President Reagan’s administration, neoliberalism justified rolling back the welfare state, a process justified by the myth that tax money taken from white taxpayers was being spent to benefit racial minorities (214-15). Although racism was tapped into to justify these economic and social spending changes, they ultimately affect many Americans, regardless of race.

The authors insist that this does not mean that race is much more important than other categories: “We are not suggesting that race is a transcendent category—something that stands above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of inequality and difference” (106). Other identity categories are also important, both in terms of understanding society and history and as things that have power in social relations and politics. The authors are suggesting that race has a particular significance and influence because of the unique historical circumstances that shaped the history of the modern United States. As the authors state, “Since racialization began in the early days of conquest and slavery, race has infused all identities in North America” (252). In the context of the history of the United States, race has provided a model for how different minority groups are understood and treated by those in power, how activists may themselves form and assert their own identities, and how resistance to oppression may form.

The Role of Historical Trajectories

The authors mainly understand historical changes in terms of trajectories. They define a trajectory as “a political process, in which rising phases of mobilization are followed by declining phases […] taking place over centuries” (7). Specifically, the authors are interested in the trajectory of race and racial politics in the history of the United States.

The phases of the trajectory can vary, with trajectories rising or falling in stages. In Racial Formation in the United States, the authors focus particularly on the trajectory in racial history since the end of World War II in 1945. The trajectory began with the rise of the civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1960s. This was followed by a decline in the civil rights movement in the 1970s and the rise of right-wing racial reaction and the social-political ideology of neoliberalism, which undermined the United States’ welfare state and promoted the idea of color-blindness. As the authors summarize the trend,

Our idea of the trajectory of postwar U.S. racial politics suggests that the apogee of democratizing, inclusionist, and egalitarian trends was reached around the middle of the decade, and that a ‘downward’ trend (from the movement’s perspective) had begun by about 1970 (217).

The trajectory has seen the shift from widespread, explicit discriminatory racism to structural racism, where racism is subtly carried out by political, social, and legal institutions:

It has become much more difficult to understand anti-racism since racism went ‘underground’ at the end of the 1960s; since the racist practices and the meaning of racism have changed from ‘old school’ explicit discourses and white supremacist actions like lynchings and cross- burnings […] racism now takes more implicit, deniable, and often unconscious forms (129).

Trajectories do not run smoothly or cleanly. The trajectory of racial history has seen the victories of the civil rights movement, such as the overturning of segregation, become normalized. Nonetheless, the authors also argue that some forms of systemic racism, namely mass incarceration of racial minorities (258), continue to be seen as serious problems. In the view of the authors, the “long declining phase of the post-World War II political trajectory of race” continues to the present day (211). However, the authors also argue that the course of trajectories are constantly in flux, shaped by both those in power and the actions of average people and activists. The very nature of historical trajectories is that they can be changed as a result of both historical circumstances and the conscious actions of individuals and organizations.

Historical Change and Activism

A key point in Racial Formation in the United States is that race and racism are subject to constant historical change. Race is “neither stable nor consistent” (2). Changing historical and political circumstances affect how race is understood and how racial discrimination functions. Furthermore, the authors continuously stress that historical change is not just driven by the powerful: Activism has played, and continues to play, an important role in changing the conception and role of race in society.

For example, when the authors describe how the civil rights movement’s main achievement was politicizing the social, they note that it “was crafted in part by movement activists and theorists” (152). The victory of the civil rights movement was not from legislators and politicians but from activists and everyday people. Activism also occurs when the leaders and intellectuals of movements pay attention to day-to-day circumstances and the experiences of people on the ground. For the authors, it is “vast mobilizations” that help cause historical change (250). Intellectual theory does not help cause such change. Rather, intellectual theorists are trying to keep up with and explain change: “Theory is driven by demand; by the necessity to explain, account for, and manage (as well as to resist) socio-historical changes” (249).

This is an optimistic lesson that the authors try to communicate through Racial Formation in the United States. They suggest that “the masses, the multitude, whose ‘freedom dreams’ […] can transfigure and rearticulate the unstable and conflicted racial system yet again” (266). This means that activism and political mobilization can be effective and that people outside national politics and positions of political and social influence can shape history, even when it comes to something as foundational to the history of the United States as race. As the authors assert, “To recognize that race is historically and politically constructed is not only to see it as a ‘moving image,’ as something we make and remake over time; it is also to acknowledge our power, both collective and individual, to transform the meaning of race” (16). Thanks to this power, it is always possible that modern activism will transform the racial dynamics of the United States for the better.

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