Racial Formation

In the United States, race and racial categories have long been at the focus of numerous social, academic, and political debates. Historically, race was studied through the paradigm of biology; physiological differences (color, hair, and bone) were the basis for racial categorization. This biological grounding of racial difference gave way to three new conceptualizations of racial difference in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one based on the concept of ethnicity, the second on class, and the third on the concept of nation.

During the 1970s and 1980s, issues of class, country, and multiculturalism became highly contested terrains. [Page 1103]In response to these socio-politico-economic trends, Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s argued that all of these trends reduced race to ethnicity, class, or nation. These reductionstic models became proxies for race, but race as an analytically distinct category was ignored, according to Omi and Winant.

Against these dominant models, Omi and Winant put forth their theory of racial formation: that race was not a by-product of some other category but, rather, a sociohistorical process, both structural and representative, by which racial categories are formed, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. By recognizing the racial dimension to social structures (macrolevel) and the meanings that racial groups (microlevel) take on within those structures, Omi and Winant offer a theory of race as a point of struggle and contestation analytically distinct and irreducible to ethnicity, class, and nation. The authors consider race as a social construct, unstable and constantly transforming because of historical pressure and political struggle. Understanding true dynamics and ramification of race is particularly important in the United States where the concept has varied greatly over time without ever leaving the center stage. This entry looks at previous theories of race and discusses the creation of racial formation theory.