Racial Formation in the United

Racial Formation in the United States, By Michael Omi and Howard Winant

According to Racial Formation in the United States, by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, races are not born; rather races are fashioned out of societal constructions, historical needs, and personal assumptions about what constitutes identity. An African-American person may have Nigerian, Northern European, and Arab DNA, but he or she is seen as 'black' in the eyes of most Caucasian-Americans, and perhaps, even in his or her own eyes. Because of the history of the United States, race remains one of the most contentious but also the most durable methods of classifying individuals. Even though race is not necessarily genetically a given, because every person's DNA and personal history consists of a conglomeration of ancestry, this does not mean that race can be ignored as a very special source of self-definition because of the fact race has been viewed as an essential category for so long within the American framework of political and psychological identity.

This theory has political as well as personal implications. For example, Affirmative Action seeks "to overcome specific socially and historically constructed inequalities," not by creating race as a category, but by acknowledging the effects the categorization has had, previously, upon people's lives. (73) Omi and Winant first wrote their text during the 1980s, during the high tide of the Regan conservative revolution, when the desire to forget America's negative racist past was often described as desiring to see people as just people, or just as Americans, rather than in terms of these American's racial categories. This supposed idealism, the authors suggest, merely creates more injustice, namely blindness to the social inequality created by racism because of past history. Radical theories of racial construction also treated race as a subservient category to class, nationalism, and ethnicity. But even though such theorists may desire race to be less important, this does not take into consideration the material reality of how slavery as an institution made race a particularly divisive source of social and psychological friction in American history.

The authors do not see the meaning and definition of what constitutes race as static. Rather, on a personal as well as a social level, racial identity is being continually "formed, transformed, destroyed and reformed." (61) This is why they use the term racial formation, because they believe race is created in the mind and in society, but once it is created, the category of race is always there. It can be re-classified and redefined, but one can never go back to simply being 'just' a neutral or non-racial person. Even for so-called races such as the Irish to 'become' white, or 'merely' ethnicities and not races requires self-definition against another racial category, such as black Americans.

The authors state that at the beginning of the history of the United States, slavery and race were not conjoined characteristics. Many white people were indentured servants. However, as slavery and blackness became increasingly common categories of negative description, the notion of slavery as a black and racial state of being became accepted, and black national identity of country origin was erased. The idea of white as racially non-black is also a relatively recent innovation. Once upon a time, Jews, Irish people, and Chinese people were considered alien, other, and non-white by European society. In the United States, however, although such groups were discriminated against, because of the early history of slavery, whiteness and blackness, free and slave, became the dominant categories within the American framework of thought about race.

Race can thus be transformed by societal change, self-definition, and political struggle, but it cannot be ignored or subsumed under ideas that class, gender, or national origins is what 'really' matters Omni and Winant analyze race's intersection with society on macro and micro level. At the macro level, when groups of people identify with or against a race they are more likely form collective social structures, such as affiliations of economic, political, and cultural origin. This requires a kind of micro level of racial identification in the lived experience of politics, society, and culture. For example, to apply this theory to a contemporary context, the discrimination experienced against persons with national origins in Asia and common United States experiences has created the concept of an Asian-American, although this category might include people with ancestors in both China and Japan, whose great-grandparents might have been national enemies. Micro-level identification and current macro-level identification in the contemporary context of the United States creates the 'Asian-American' racial category.