In Racial Formation in the United States, Third Edition, Michael Omi and Howard Winant “discuss the centrality of race in the organization of political life in the United States” (pg. 3). They hope “to provide a coherent conceptual framework by which [they] can grasp the importance of race as a key category: of inequality, of difference/identity, and of agency, both individual and collective” (pg. 3). They argue, “The concept of race, developing unevenly in the Americas from the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere down to the present, has served as a fundamental organizing principle of the social system. Practices of distinguishing among human beings according to their corporeal characteristics became linked to systems of control, exploitation, and resistance” (pg. 3). In U.S. history, they write, “From the very inception of the republic to the present moment, race has been a profound determinant of one’s political rights, one’s location in the labor market, and indeed one’s sense of identity. The hallmark of this history has been racism” (pg. 8). Omi and Winant continue, “Racial formation is thus a vast summation of signifying actions and social structures, past and present, that have combined and clashed in the creation of the enormous complex of relationships and identities that is labeled race” (pg. 13). Finally, “After World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the earlier system of racial domination” (pg. 15). Omi and Winant’s work is largely synthetic, drawing upon the work of Antonio Gramsci.
In Part I, Omi and Winant write, “The radical charge that the construction of American economies, cultures, and states, both in North America and elsewhere in the hemisphere, depended on slavery and empire. Indeed the fact that these imperial projects and subsequent American nations were intrinsically racist projects themselves, was discomfiting for ethnicity theorists” who had attempted to focus on more fractionalized differences (pg. 41). They continue, “The racial cleavages we see in the nation are the products of the exploitative and exclusionist commitments of the white nations: its deracination of the indigenous inhabitants of North America; its capture, killing, transport in chains, and enslavement of millions of Africans; its conquest of adjacent territories and its relegation of their inhabitants to lesser status; and its massive dependence on immigration, mostly on the part of people not considered (or not yet considered) white” (pg. 77). In Part II, Omi and Winant “suggest that the establishment and reproduction of different regimes of domination, inequality, and difference in the United States have consciously drawn upon concepts of difference, hierarchy, and marginalization based on race” (pg. 106-107). They continue, “The process of race making, and its reverberations throughout the social order, is what we call racial formation. We define racial formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” (pg. 109). In terms of racial projects, Omi and Winant write, “Racial projects occur at varying scales, both large and small. Projects take shape not only at the macro-level of racial policy-making, state activity, and collective action, but also at the level of everyday experience and personal interaction. Both dominant and subordinate groups and individual actors, both institutions and persons, carry out racial projects” (pg. 125). In part III, Omi and Winant “suggest two important changes characterize postwar racial politics: paradigm shift and new social movements. Paradigm shift occurred as the hegemonic theory of race, based in the ethnicity paradigm of race, experienced increasing strain and opposition…The second change was the rise of new social movements, led by the black movement, as the primary means for contesting the nature of racial politics. These movements irreversibly expanded the terrain of political conflict, not only recentering and refiguring race, but also refiguring experience itself as a political matter, a matter of identity and self-conscious activity” (pg. 161). In terms of the pushback, Omi and Winant argue that code words made it easier for neoliberals and neoconservatives to rally a base against civil rights gains. They write, “Neoliberalism was at its core a racial project as much as a capitalist accumulation project. Its central racial component was colorblind racial ideology. The hegemony of neoliberal economics is matched and underwritten by the racial hegemony of colorblindness” (pg. 211). They continue, “The new right could deploy a politics of resentment that flowed directly from the southern strategy” (pg. 211). Finally, “The colorblind racial project fit in nicely with neoliberalism’s emphasis on market relationships and privatization, but it clashed with neoliberalism’s barely covert racism” (pg. 212). ( )