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

Racial Formation in the United States is a sociological and historical text written by Michael Omi and Howard Winant. First published in 1986, the book has gone through three editions, with the most recent edition addressing the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States’ first Black president. Omi and Winant seek to explore the development of ideas of race and racism in the United States, especially from the civil rights era to the presidency of Obama. After evaluating different theories about what drives race and racism in the United States historically and in the present day, they argue that race has had a powerful influence over the United States and its history from colonization to the present, so much so that it shaped how American society and the government have treated various oppressed groups.

Racial Formation in the United States is credited with creating a sociological theory called “racial formation theory.” According to racial formation theory, race is best understood as a constantly changing identity that is shaped by historical and economic influences as well as the activities of both activists and people in power.

This guide refers to the third edition of Racial Formation in the United States, originally published by Routledge in 2015.

Summary

Omi and Winant propose that the best way to understand the history of race and racism in the United States is as a series of historical trajectories “of racial reform and backlash” (76). This complex history began with the colonization of North America, the violent cleansing of native populations, and the use of enslaved peoples taken from Africa for cheap labor. This left the mark of race on US history: The authors argue, “The establishment and reproduction of race has established supposedly fundamental distinctions among human beings (‘othering’), ranking and hierarchizing them for purposes of domination and exploitation” (245-46). In other words, specifically in the history of the United States, race provided a basis for how other groups like women, the poor, and sexual minorities would be understood and oppressed.

From its colonization to about the World War II era, the United States was a “racial despotism” (130), meaning a society where racism was strictly imposed. This finally began to change with the civil rights movements of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The movements succeeded in pressuring the government to outlaw bluntly discriminatory laws and practices, such as school segregation and bans on mixed-race marriages. Even more importantly, it succeeded in what the authors describe as the “politicization of the social” (14), meaning the expansion of politics into the realm of everyday people’s social relationships and personal identities. This opened the way for other rights movements, such as the gay rights and feminist movements.

The authors consider other explanations for what drives race in the United States: the ethnicity paradigm or ethnicity theory (the idea that race should be understood as ethnic groups that are shaped by culture), Marxism (the theory that race is a product of class conflict and economic inequality), and nationalism (which holds that certain minority groups should be understood as being like nations). While these explanations contribute to their own analysis (253), the authors dismiss these as the central factor behind race and racism in the United States. Instead, they argue for race itself as the “master category” (viii), forged by the United States’ own legacy of colonialism and enslavement.

Since the 1970s, there has been a new direction in the historical trajectory of US race and racism. While the civil rights movement achieved some reforms, systemic racism remains, like a lack of funding for schools with majority non-white student bodies and the disproportionate incarceration of certain minority populations. With the rise of the political-economy ideology of neoliberalism and the idea of colorblindness, systemic racism has been ignored, with race increasingly seen as just an individual problem. This neglect of systemic racism has continued even with the election in 2008 of the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama. However, the authors hope that the work of anti-racist activists may change the trajectory of history once again.