Racial Formation Theory

Racial formation theory is a theoretical perspective created by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant that focuses on race relations in the United States. By racial formation, they refer to the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed, and they treat the concept of race as a middle ground between extreme social construction and a rigid, fixed biological definition. Omi and Winant argue that extreme social constructionism, embraced by both right-wing and left-wing ideologues, leads to an understatement of how deeply racialized U.S. society is. On the other hand, they continue, proponents of the idea of race as a fixed biological constant, also covering the range of the political continuum, understate the contested and changing nature of the structure and meanings of racial categories. To rectify the problem with each position, Omi and Winant propose racial formation theory.

Racial formation theory conceptualizes two dimensions of race in the United States: (1) contest and struggle over distribution of resources, institutions, and political power along racial lines and (2) contest and struggle over the applied cultural meanings and the signification of race to individual identities, issues, and experiences. These two distinct but interrelated processes underlie what Omi and Winant call “racial projects.” Racial projects encompass attempts to redefine group-level racial identity as well as to reorganize or redistribute resources along lines delineated by racial identity. Racial projects link the meaning of race to the organization of social structures. Various social actors such as elites, political groups, cultural organizations, or intellectuals may initiate racial projects, which take place on both macro- and micro-levels. At the micro-level, individual identity interacts with race at the macro-level of social structure. Racial injustices and inequalities at the macro-level, for instance, compel actors at the micro-level to mobilize social movements that challenge the racial order. Such projects reorganize the sociopolitical meanings of race, generating a new racial order. However, the new racial order itself then becomes the subject of future contention.

Racial formation theory emphasizes the role of the state in shaping and creating racial categories, as these are not constant across time. Importantly, governmental policies, laws, and institutions have racial categories written into them as a basis for the allocation of resources. For instance, the Federal Housing Authority Manual of 1934 restricted loans to African Americans while guaranteeing them to European Americans in a practice commonly known as “redlining.”

Scholars criticize several aspects of racial formation theory, particularly its heavy focus on racial [Page 743]categories while ignoring the centrality and deeply rooted systemic nature of racism. Racial formation theory conceptualizes racism as an ideology instead of a social system around which U.S. institutions are organized. While racial formation theory acknowledges the construction of racial categories, the theory downplays the genesis of race in the 17th-century American colonies during the dawn of capitalism. By failing to acknowledge the invention of race and the inherently hierarchical and unequal design of racial categories, racial formation theory promotes the idea of their permanency, thereby making the concept of race into something concrete. One of the strengths of this approach, however, is pointing out that the meaning of race changes over time and that the state plays a role not only in shaping those meanings but in distributing resources predicated on those meanings.

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