Racial Formation in the United States

RACIAL FORMATIONS
Michael Omi • Howard Winant
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, eds., Racial Formation in the United States, Second
Edition, pp. 3-13.
In 1982-83, Susie Guillory Phipps unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital
Records to change her racial classification from black to white. The descendant of an
eighteenth-century white planter and a black slave, Phipps was designated “black” in her
birth certificate in accordance with a 1970 state law which declared anyone with at least
one-thirty-second “Negro blood” to be black. The legal battle raised intriguing questions
about the concept of race, its meaning in contemporary society, and its use (and abuse) in
public policy. Assistant Attorney General Ron Davis defended the law by pointing out that
some type of racial classification was necessary to comply with federal record-keeping
requirements and to facilitate programs for the prevention of genetic diseases. Phipps’s
attorney, Brian Begue, argued that the assignment of racial categories on birth certificates
was unconstitutional and that the one-thirty-second designation was inaccurate. He called
on a retired Tulane University professor who cited research indicating that most whites
have one-twentieth “Negro” ancestry. In the end, Phipps lost. The court upheld a state law
which quantified racial identity, and in so doing affirmed the legality of assigning individuals
to specific racial groupings.1
The Phipps case illustrates the continuing dilemma of defining race and establishing its
meaning in institutional life. Today, to assert that variations in human physiognomy are
racially based is to enter a constant and intense debate. Scientific interpretations of race
have not been alone in sparking heated controversy; religious perspectives have done so
as well.2
Most centrally, of course, race has been a matter of political contention. This has
been particularly true in the United States, where the concept of race has varied
enormously over time without ever leaving the center stage of US history.
What Is Race?
Race consciousness, and its articulation in theories of race, is largely a modern
phenomenon. When European explorers in the New World “discovered” people who
looked different than themselves, these “natives” challenged then existing conceptions of
the origins of the human species, and raised disturbing questions as to whether all could
be considered in the same “family of man.”3
Religious debates flared over the attempt to
reconcile the Bible with the existence of “racially distinct” people. Arguments took place
over creation itself, as theories of polygenesis questioned whether God had made only one
species of humanity (“monogenesis”). Europeans wondered if the natives of the New
World were indeed human beings with redeemable souls. At stake were not only the
prospects for conversion, but the types of treatment to be accorded them. The
expropriation of property, the denial of political rights, the introduction of slavery and other
forms of coercive labor, as well as outright extermination, all presupposed a worldview
which distinguished Europeans—children of God, human beings, etc.—from “others.” Such
a worldview was needed to explain why some should be “free” and others enslaved, why
some had rights to land and property while others did not. Race, and the interpretation of
racial differences, was a central factor in that worldview.
In the colonial epoch science was no less a field of controversy than religion in attempts to
comprehend the concept of race and its meaning. Spurred on by the classificatory scheme
of living organisms devised by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae, many scholars in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dedicated themselves to the identification and ranking
of variations in humankind. Race was thought of as a biological concept, yet its precise
definition was the subject of debates which, as we have noted, continue to rage today.
Despite efforts ranging from Dr. Samuel Morton’s studies of cranial capacity4
to
contemporary attempts to base racial classification on shared gene pools,5
the concept of
race has defied biological definition. . . .
Attempts to discern the scientific meaning of race continue to the present day. Although
most physical anthropologists and biologists have abandoned the quest for a scientific
basis to determine racial categories, controversies have recently flared in the area of
genetics and educational psychology. For instance, an essay by Arthur Jensen argued that
hereditary factors shape intelligence not only revived the “nature or nurture” controversy,
but raised highly volatile questions about racial equality itself.6
Clearly the attempt to
establish a biological basis of race has not been swept into the dustbin of history, but is
being resurrected in various scientific arenas. All such attempts seek to remove the
concept of race from fundamental social, political, or economic determination. They
suggest instead that the truth of race lies in the terrain of innate characteristics, of which
skin color and other physical attributes provide only the most obvious, and in some
respects most superficial, indicators.
Race as a Social Concept
The social sciences have come to reject biologistic notions of race in favor of an approach
which regards race as a social concept. Beginning in the eighteenth century, this trend has
been slow and uneven, but its direction clear. In the nineteenth century Max Weber
discounted biological explanations for racial conflict and instead highlighted the social and
political factors which engendered such conflict.7
The work of pioneering cultural
anthropologist Franz Boas was crucial in refuting the scientific racism of the early twentieth
century by rejecting the connection between race and culture, and the assumption of a
continuum of “higher” and “lower” cultural groups. Within the contemporary social science
literature, race is assumed to be a variable which is shaped by broader societal forces.
Race is indeed a pre-eminently socio-historical concept. Racial categories and the
meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and
historical context in which they are embedded. Racial meanings have varied tremendously
over time and between different societies.
In the United States, the black/white color line has historically been rigidly defined and
enforced. White is seen as a “pure” category. Any racial intermixture makes one
“nonwhite.” In the movie Raintree County, Elizabeth Taylor describes the worst of fates to
befall whites as “havin a little Negra blood in ya’ just one little teeny drop and a persons all
Negra.”8
This thinking flows from what Marvin Harris has characterized as the principle of
hypo-descent:
By what ingenious computation is the genetic tracery of a million years of evolution unraveled and
each man [sic] assigned his proper social box? In the United States, the mechanism employed is the
rule of hypo-descent. This descent rule requires Americans to believe that anyone who is known to
have had a Negro ancestor is a Negro. We admit nothing in between. . . . “Hypo-descent” means
affiliation with the subordinate rather than the superordinate group in order to avoid the ambiguity of
intermediate identity. . . . The rule of hypo-descent is, therefore, an invention, which we in the United
States have made in order to keep biological facts from intruding into our collective racist fantasies.9
The Susie Guillory Phipps case merely represents the contemporary expression of this
racial logic.
By contrast, a striking feature of race relations in the lowland areas of Latin America since
the abolition of slavery has been the relative absence of sharply defined racial groupings.
No such rigid descent rule characterizes racial identity in many Latin American societies.
Brazil, for example, has historically had less rigid conceptions of race, and thus a variety of
“intermediate” racial categories exist. Indeed, as Harris notes, “One of the most striking
consequences of the Brazilian system of racial identification is that parents and children
and even brothers and sisters are frequently accepted as representatives of quite opposite
racial types.”10 Such a possibility is incomprehensible within the logic of racial categories in
the US.
To suggest another example: the notion of “passing” takes on new meaning if we compare
various American cultures’ means of assigning racial identity. In the United States,
individuals who are actually “black” by the logic of hypo-descent have attempted to skirt
the discriminatory barriers imposed by law and custom by attempting to “pass” for white.11
Ironically, these same individuals would not be able to pass for “black” in many Latin
American societies.
Consideration of the term “black” illustrates the diversity of racial meanings which can be
found among different societies and historically within a given society. In contemporary
British politics the term “black” is used to refer to all nonwhites. Interestingly this
designation has not arisen through the racist discourse of groups such as the National
Front. Rather, in political and cultural movements, Asian as well as Afro-Caribbean youth
are adopting the term as an expression of self-identity.12 The wide-ranging meanings of
“black” illustrate the manner in which racial categories are shaped politically.13
The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society, in both collective action
and personal practice. In the process, racial categories themselves are formed,
transformed, destroyed and reformed. We use the term racial formation to refer to the
process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and
importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings.
Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social relations which
cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader category or conception.
Racial Ideology and Racial Identity
The seemingly obvious, “natural” and “common sense” qualities which the existing racial
order exhibits themselves testify to the effectiveness of the racial formation process in
constructing racial meanings and racial identities.
One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is
their race. We utilize race to pro vide clues abut who a person is. This fact is made
painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot conveniently racially
categorize—someone who is, for example, racially “mixed” or of an ethnic/ racial group
with which we are not familiar. Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and
momentarily a crisis of racial meaning. Without a racial identity, one is in danger of having
no identity.
Our compass for navigating race relations depends on preconceived notions of what each
specific racial group looks like. Comments such as, “Funny, you don’t look black,” betray
an underlying image of what black should be. We also become disoriented when people
do not act “black,” “Latino,” or indeed “white.” The content of such stereotypes reveals a
series of unsubstantiated beliefs about who these groups are and what “they” are like.14
In US society, then, a kind of “racial etiquette” exists, a set of interpretative codes and
racial meanings which operate in the interactions of daily life. Rules shaped by our
perception of race in a comprehensively racial society determine the “presentation of
self,”15 distinctions of status, and appropriate modes of conduct. “Etiquette” is not mere
universal adherence to the dominant group’s rules, but a more dynamic combination of
these rules with the values and beliefs of subordinated groupings. This racial “subjection”
is quintessentially ideological. Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the
rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity, often without obvious teaching
or conscious inculcation. Race becomes “common sense”—a way of comprehending,
explaining and acting in the world.
Racial beliefs operate as an “amateur biology,” a way of explaining the variations in
“human nature.”16 Differences in skin color and other obvious physical characteristics
supposedly provide visible clues to differences lurking underneath. Temperament,
sexuality, intelligence, athletic ability, aesthetic preferences and so on are presumed to be
fixed and discernible from the palpable mark of race. Such diverse questions as our
confidence and trust in others (for example, clerks or salespeople, media figures,
neighbors), our sexual preferences and romantic images, our tastes in music, films, dance,
or sports, and our very ways of talking, walking, eating and dreaming are ineluctably
shaped by notions of race. Skin color “differences” are thought to explain perceived
differences in intellectual, physical and artistic temperaments, and to justify distinct
treatment of racially identified individuals and groups.
The continuing persistence of racial ideology suggests that these racial myths and
stereotypes cannot be exposed as such in the popular imagination. They are, we think, too
essential, too integral, to the maintenance of the US social order. Of course, particular
meanings, stereotypes and myths can change, but the presence of a system of racial
meanings and stereotypes, of racial ideology, seems to be a permanent feature of US
culture.
Film and television, for example, have been notorious in disseminating images of racial
minorities which establish for audiences what people from these groups look like, how they
behave, and “who they are.”17 The power of the media lies not only in their ability to reflect
the dominant racial ideology, but in their capacity to shape that ideology in the first place.
D. W. Griffith’s epic Birth of a Nation, a sympathetic treatment of the rise of the Ku Klux
Klan during Reconstruction, helped to generate, consolidate and “nationalize” images of
blacks which had been more disparate (more regionally specific, for example) prior to the
film’s appearance.18 In US television, the necessity to define characters in the briefest and
most condensed manner has led to the perpetuation of racial caricatures, as racial
stereotypes serve as shorthand for scriptwriters, directors and actors, in commercials, etc.
Televisions tendency to address the “lowest common denominator” in order to render
programs “familiar” to an enormous and diverse audience leads it regularly to assign and
reassign racial characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority.
These and innumerable other examples show that we tend to view race as something fixed
and immutable—something rooted in “nature.” Thus we mask the historical construction of
racial categories, the shifting meaning of race, and the crucial role of politics and ideology
in shaping race relations. Races do not emerge full-blown. They are the results of diverse
historical practices and are continually subject to challenge over their definition and
meaning.
Racialization: The Historical Development of Race
In the United States, the racial category of “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial
slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo,
Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered “black” by an ideology of exploitation based on racial
logic—the establishment and maintenance of a “color line.” This of course did not occur
overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded
the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding
of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not
only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed:
“From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward
the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of
self-identification appeared—white.”19
We employ the term racialization to signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously
racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Racialization is an ideological
process, an historically specific one. Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
conceptual (or, if one prefers, “discursive”) elements and emerges from the struggles of
competing political projects and ideas seeking to articulate similar elements differently. An
account of racialization processes that avoids the pitfalls of US ethnic history20 remains to
be written.
Particularly during the nineteenth century, the category of “white” was subject to
challenges brought about by the influx of diverse groups who were not of the same AngloSaxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological
struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and Jews,
among other “nonwhite” categories.21 Nativism was only effectively curbed by the
institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within,
Europe.
By stopping short of racializing immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, and by
subsequently allowing their assimilation, the American racial order was reconsolidated in
the wake of the tremendous challenge placed before it by the abolition of racial slavery.22
With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, an effective program for limiting the emergent
class struggles of the later nineteenth century was forged: the definition of the working
class in racial terms—as “white.” This was not accomplished by any legislative decree or
capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather by white workers themselves.
Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized on racial lines as much as on
traditionally defined class lines.23 The Irish on the West Coast, for example, engaged in
vicious anti-Chinese race-baiting and committed many pogrom-type assaults on Chinese
in the course of consolidating the trade union movement in California.
Thus the very political organization of the working class was in important ways a racial
project. The legacy of racial conflicts and arrangements shaped the definition of interests
and in turn led to the consolidation of institutional patterns (e.g., segregated unions, dual
labor markets, exclusionary legislation) which perpetuated the color line within the working
class. Selig Perlman, whose study of the development of the labor movement is fairly
sympathetic to this process, notes that:
The political issue after 1877 was racial, not financial, and the weapon was not merely the ballot, but
also “direct action”-violence. The anti-Chinese agitation in California, culminating as it did in the
Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the
history of American labor, for without it the entire country might have been overrun by Mongolian [sic]
labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.24
More recent economic transformations in the US have also altered interpretations of racial
identities and meanings. The automation of southern agriculture and the augmented labor
demand of the postwar boom transformed blacks from a largely rural, impoverished labor
force to a largely urban, working-class group by 1970.25 When boom became bust and
liberal welfare statism moved rightwards, the majority of blacks came to be seen,
increasingly, as part of the “underclass,” as state “dependents.” Thus the particularly
deleterious effects on blacks of global and national economic shifts (generally rising
unemployment rates, changes in the employment structure away from reliance on labor
intensive work, etc.) were explained once again in the late 1970s and 1980s (as they had
been in the 1940s and mid-1960s) as the result of defective black cultural norms, of
familial disorganization, etc.26 In this way new racial attributions, new racial myths, are
affixed to “blacks.”27 Similar changes in racial identity are presently affecting Asians and
Latinos, as such economic forces as increasing Third World impoverishment and
indebtedness fuel immigration and high interest rates, Japanese competition spurs
resentments, and US jobs seem to fly away to Korea and Singapore.28 . . .
Once we understand that race overflows the boundaries of skin color, super-exploitation,
social stratification, discrimination and prejudice, cultural domination and cultural
resistance, state policy (or of any other particular social relationship we list), once we
recognize the racial dimension present to some degree in every identity, institution and
social practice in the United States—once we have done this, it becomes possible to
speak of racial formation. This recognition is hard-won; there is a continuous temptation to
think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objective, as (for example)
one of the categories just enumerated. And there is also an opposite temptation: to see it
as a mere illusion, which an ideal social order would eliminate.
In our view it is crucial to break with these habits of thought. The effort must be made to
understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings constantly
being transformed by political struggle.
NOTES
1. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 September 1982, 19 May 1983. Ironically, the 1970 Louisiana law was
enacted to supersede an old Jim Crow statute which relied on the idea of “common report” in
determining an infant’s race. Following Phipps’s unsuccessful attempt to change her classification
and have the law declared unconstitutional, a legislative effort arose which culminated in the repeal
of the law. See San Francisco Chronicle, 23 June 1983.
2. The Mormon church, for example, has been heavily criticized for its doctrine of black inferiority.
3. Thomas F. Gossett notes: Race theory . . . had up until fairly modern times no firm hold on European
thought. On the other hand, race theory and race prejudice were by no means unknown at the time
when the English colonists came to North America. Undoubtedly, the age of exploration led many to
speculate on race differences at a period when neither Europeans nor Englishmen were prepared to
make allowances for vast cultural diversities. Even though race theories had not then secured wide
acceptance or even sophisticated formulation, the first contacts of the Spanish with the Indians in the
Americas can now be recognized as the beginning of a struggle between conceptions of the nature
of primitive peoples which has not yet been wholly settled. (Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of
an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 16.) Winthrop Jordan provides a detailed
account of early European colonialists’ attitudes about color and race in White over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (New York: Norton, 1977 [1968]), pp. 3-43.
4. Pro-slavery physician Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) compiled a collection of 800 crania from
all parts of the world which formed the sample for his studies of race. Assuming that the larger the
size of the cranium translated into greater intelligence, Morton established a relationship between
race and skull capacity. Gossett reports that: In 1849, one of his studies included the following
results: The English skulls in his collection proved to be the largest, with an average cranial capacity
of 96 cubic inches. The Americans and Germans were rather poor seconds, both with cranial
capacities of 90 cubic inches. At the bottom of the list were the Negroes with 83 cubic inches, the
Chinese with 82, and the Indians with 79. (Ibid., p. 74.) On Morton’s methods, see Stephen J. Gould,
“The Finagle Factor,” Human Nature (July 1978).
5. Definitions of race founded upon a common pool of genes have not held up when confronted by
scientific research which suggests that the differences within a given human population are greater
than those between populations. See L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, “.’The Genetics of Human Populations,”
Scientific American, September 1974, pp. 81-89.
6. Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?”, Harvard Educational
Review 39 (1969):1-123.
7. Ernst Moritz Manasse, “Max Weber on Race,” Social Research 14 (1947):191-221.
8. Quoted in Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), pp. 168-70.
9. Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 56.
10. Ibid., p. 57.
11. After James Meredith had been admitted as the first black student at the University of Mississippi,
Harry S. Murphy announced that he, and not Meredith, was the first black student to attend “Ole
Miss.” Murphy described himself as black but was able to pass for white and spent nine months at
the institution without attracting any notice (ibid., p. 56).
12. A. Sivanandan, “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain,” Race
and Class 23(2-3) (Autumn- Winter 1981).
13. Consider the contradictions in racial status which abound in the country with the most rigidly defined
racial categories-South Africa. There a race classification agency is employed to adjudicate claims
for upgrading of official racial identity. This is particularly necessary for the “coloured” category. The
apartheid system considers Chinese as “Asians” while the Japanese are accorded the status of
“honorary whites.” This logic nearly detaches race from any grounding in skin color and other
physical attributes and nakedly exposes, race as a juridical category subject to economic, social and
political influences. (We are indebted to Steve Talbot for clarification of some of these points.)
14. Gordon W Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Garden City, NY. Doubleday,1958), pp. 184-200.
15. We wish to use this phrase loosely, without committing ourselves to a particular position on such
social psychological approaches as symbolic interactionism, which are outside the scope of this
study. An interesting study on this subject is S.M. Lyman and W.A. Douglass, “Ethnicity: Strategies
of Individual and Collective Impression Management,” Social Research 40(2) (1973).
16. Michael Billig, “Patterns of Racism: Interviews with National Front Members,” Race and Class 20(2)
(Autumn 1978):161-79.
17. “Miss San Antonio USA Lisa Fernandez and other Hispanics auditioning for a role in a television
soap-opera did not fit the Holly wood image of real Mexicans and had to darken their faces before
filming.” Model Aurora Garza said that their faces were bronzed with powder because they looked
too white. “‘I’m a real Mexican [Garza said] and very dark anyway. I’m even darker right now
because I have a tan. But they kept wanting me to make my face darker and darker’ ” (San
Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1984). A similar dilemma faces Asian American actors who feel
that Asian character lead roles inevitably go to white actors who make themselves up to be Asian.
Scores of Charlie Chan films, for example, have been made with white leads (the last one was the
1981 Charlie Chan and the Curse of Dragon Queen). Roland Winters, who played in six Chan
features, was asked by playwright Frank Chin to explain the logic of casting a white man in the role
of Charlie Chan: “‘The only thing I can think of is, if you want to cast a homosexual in a show, and
get a homosexual, it’ll be awful. It won’t be funny . . . and maybe there’s something there . . .’ ”
(Frank Chin, “Confessions the Chinatown Cowboy,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4(3) (Fall
1972)).
18. Melanie Martindale-Sikes, “Nationalizing ‘Nigger’ Imagery Through ‘Birth of a Nation’,” paper
prepared for the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 4–8 September
1978, San Francisco.
19. Jordan, White over Black, p. 95; emphasis added.
20. Historical focus has been placed either on particular racially defined groups or on immigration and
the “incorporation” of ethnic groups. In the former case the characteristic ethnicity theory pitfalls and
apologetics such as functionalism and cultural pluralism may be avoided, but only by sacrificing
much of the focus on race. In the latter case, race is considered a manifestation of ethnicity.
21. The degree of antipathy for these groups should not be minimized. A northern commentator
observed in the 1850s: “An Irish Catholic seldom attempts to rise to a higher condition than that in
which he is placed, while the Negro often makes the attempt with success.” Quoted in Gossett, op.
cit., p. 288.
22. This analysis, as will perhaps be obvious, is essentially DuBoisian. Its main source will be found in
the monumental (and still largely unappreciated) Black Reconstruction the United States, 1860-1880
(New York: Atheneum,1977 [1935]).
23. Alexander Saxton argues that:
North Americans of European background have experienced three great racial
confrontations: with the Indian, with the African, and with the Oriental. Central to each
transaction has been a totally one-sided preponderance of power, exerted for the
exploitation of nonwhites by the dominant white society. In each case (but especially in the
two that began with systems of enforced labor), white workingmen have played a crucial, yet
ambivalent, role. They have been both exploited and exploiters. On the one hand, thrown
into competition with nonwhites as enslaved or “cheap” labor they suffered economically; on
the other hand, being white, they benefited by that very exploitation which was compelling
the nonwhites to work for low wages or for nothing. Ideologically they were drawn in opposite
directions. Racial identification cut at right angles to class consciousness. (Alexander
Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 1; emphasis added.)
24. Selig Perlman, The History of Trade Unionism in the United States (New York: Augustus Kelley,
1950), p. 52; emphasis added.
25. Whether southern blacks were “peasants” or rural workers is unimportant in this context. Some time
during the 1960s blacks attained a higher degree of urbanization than whites. Before World War lI
most blacks had been rural dwellers and nearly 80 percent lived in the South.
26. See George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Charles Murray, Losing
Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
27. A brilliant study of the racialization process in Britain, focused on the rise of “mugging” as a popular
fear in the 1970s, is Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1978).
28. The case of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man beaten to death in 1982 by a laid-off Detroit auto
worker and his stepson who mistook him for Japanese and blamed him for the loss of their jobs, has
been widely publicized in Asian American communities. On immigration conflicts and pressures, see
Michael Omi, “New Wave Dread: Immigration and Intra-Third World Conflict,” Socialist Review 60
(November-December 1981).


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Racial Formation in the United States

Vinod CC dis – i need a discussion on the below topic
In 500 words or more, consider this statement: For cloud computing to become multi-jurisdictional, it must be separated from politics.Use at least three sources. Use the Research Databases available from the Danforth Library not Google. Include at least 3 quotes from your sources enclosed in quotation marks and cited in-line by reference to your reference list. Example: “words you copied” (citation) These quotes should be one full sentence not altered or paraphrased. Cite your sources using APA format. Use the quotes in your paragaphs. Stand alone quotes will not count toward the 3 required quotes.Copying without attribution or the use of spinbot or other word substitution software will result in a grade of 0.Write in essay format not in bulleted, numbered or other list format.

SOC 180A
Week 1- Lecture 1

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  • Racial Formation in the United States
    • Part 1- Paradigms of Race- Historical
  • Ethnicity Based Theory
  • Class Based Theory
  • Nation Based Theory
    • Many social scientists do not discuss race or they discuss very little about it
    • Very few theories and frameworks of race
    • How and why race operates is something they do not discuss in modern society
    • Capitalism is a racial project
  • Capitalism and race are always rooted to- land, labor, and power
  • Settler Colonialism= the United States is a democracy so we must understand the landed
    origin story of the US
  • Chattel Slavery= labor and how it places a role historically in the formation of the US
  • Racial Caterogies= we need a formal theory that helps us understand identify groups and
    give us a way to signify ourselves to others, how particular racial categories have
    emerged in different context
  • W.E.B. DuBois= classical sociologist and one of the founders of the discipline in the US
    • Always had an analysis that centered racal colonial capitalism in his analysis of modern
    society
  • Biological Understanding of Race
    • Social Darwinism= environmental conditions shape outcomes for different groups
  • What advance or disadvantage different groups might have
    • Spencerian= comes from Herbert Spencer, survival of the fittest
  • Borrowed from Darwin and applied it to human society
    • Eugenist= good gene, positive action or negative action based on a gene logic for superiority
    or inferiority, forced sterilization of a specific group
  • Negative Eugenist= Immigration polices and forced sterilization
  • Positive eugenist= deciding who and what has good genes and trying to make arguments
    based on if u put people together with great stalk, you will build a good society
  • Francis Amasa Walker
    • How social darwinism was promoted during his lifetime
    • Economist and very first president of the American Economic Association (leader in his
    filed)
    • Served as the superintendent for the US census
    • Coined and promoted “The Black Disappearance Hypothesis”= stated that american
    americans would soon go extinct and die out because they were to far out of there natural
    reign residence after the emancipation proclamation
    • What will become of black americans as they are no longer enslaved?
    • Chattel slavery kept people of african decent alive in america
    • He argued that chattel slavery curved black americans face there instincts and kept them
    safe
    • If one is outside of their natural habitat, a group will have a hard time to continue to live and
    succeed in there current environment
  • Franklin H. Giddings
    • Founder of American sociology
    • Spent most of his career at Columbia University
    • First professor of sociology at the university and first chair of the sociology department
    • Major contribution= his theory of “Consciousness of Kind”= birds of a feather flock
    together, people that have more things in common will naturally converge in ideas and ways
    of begins and a shared interest of preserving their group identity
    • Sociology approach= based on “Evolutionary Empiricism”= prove his theory of conciseness
    of kind through observable data and statistics, this idea that there was some inherit
    difference between groups
    • Wrote many books that influenced the discipline and trained over 50 phd students
    • Using biology and inheritance to justify racial difference and inequality
    • Talking about power as one group should sustain the other
  • Bell Curve (Book)
    • Intelligence and class structure in american life
    • This book as been a best seller for decade
    • The authors wanted to justify why colleges and universities should not consider race in their
    admission policies
    • One cannot talk about unequal outcomes without talking about the systems and conditions
    that structure that
  • Ethnicity & Race
    • What is the difference between the two?
    • Ethnicity Based Paradigm
  • Challenged biological theories of race
  • All sociologist say race is a social construct
  • Offers process driven and systematic understanding and explanation of how racial
    categories emerged and re-articulate themselves over time
  • “Race” as a social construct
  • Robert E. Park
    • Was a professor of sociology at university of Chicago
    • Chicago school of sociology, one of the most influential sociology departments
    • “Race relation cycle”= idea of assimilation, different groups might come to the US and have
    a distinct ethnicity/identity that is based on a nation, language, and experience
  • It was really a pathway to whiteness that required a processes of letting go of ethnic
    identities
    • No matter who u are when u come to the US, you ease on down the road to assimilate into
    whiteness
  • Immigration Act of 1965
    • People living in the US as immigrants that do not have a pathway to whiteness
    • Opened the doors for illegal pathway of immigration south/ non Europeans nations
    • Folks are phenotypically radicalized by skin color, facial features and more
  • What is Ethnicity?
    • Can be geographically based (nation, colonialism, ethnic groups)
    • Can be culturally based (language, religion, modes of being, shared historical experience)
    Week 1- Lecture 2
  • Article- Rethinking racial formation theory
    • The article was part of a issue that invited scholars to comment and critique the racial
    formation theory that was presented by omi and winat
    • US society’s racial foundation
    • White’s and white elite’s centrality in contemporary racism
    • Ignore racial oppression
    • Systematic Racism Theory= material, social, and ideological reality that is well embedded
    in major US institutions
  • Racial Formation Theory= taking history into account when we think about how racial
    categories emerge in a society and use that historical understanding to be a part of our
    analytical frame in present day
  • 1492= european expansion-colonial area in which European nation states took to colonizing
    the rest of the world
    • Great Britain, Dutch & Spanish colonization
    • European identity starts to merge
    • There is an us and a them
    • Defined by a colonial and imperial relationship
  • 1619= enslaved Africans were captured, stolen and brought to the shores of Jamestown,
    Virginia in the US
    • When the slave trades comes to the shore where we now know as the US
  • 1776= when the United States becomes a Nation, the US was colonial Britain
  • 1865- end of the Civil War, ratification of the 13th amendment, abolish of cattle slavery in the
    US
  • 1964= passing of the Civil Rights Act which expands civil rights across all races, gender and
    sexuality
  • A nation state makes race and that is the point of racial formation, not something that is
    objective
  • What is the US as a nation?
    • 1492- The US is a settler colonial nation
    • 1619- Founded on racial slavery
    • 1776- The US also became a democracy and empire
  • 4 Competing Logics
    • Democracy
  • Freedom
  • Equality
  • Merit
  • Liberty
    • Racial Slavery
  • Dehumanization
  • Total Unfreedom
  • Extraction
  • Alienation
    • Settler Colonialism
  • Dehumanization
  • Genocide
  • Erasure
  • Theft
    • Empire
  • Occupation
  • Extraction
  • Control
  • Domination
  • Racial Classification System in the US Over Time (US Census)
    • 1790
  • Free white meals, Free white females
    • There was such a thing that was unfree white meals and unfree white females
    • If they were categorized
  • All other free persons
    • Not all black people were slaves
  • Slaves
    • Slaves are not racial marked
    • There had to be black and non black slaves including white slaves
    • Captured the racial landscape of the time
    • 1870 (4 racial categories)
  • White
  • Black
  • Indian
    • Native American and Indigenous people
  • Chinese
    • Massive increase of Chinese immigrants to the US
    • Chinese was used by the US of anyone who came from East Asian decent
  • First census in the after math of the civil war
  • The idea of slavery was attached to blackness by this time
    • 2010
  • White
  • Black, African American or Negro
  • Some other race
  • Many new racial categories-to show the difference between race, ethnicity, and
    nationality
  • It has expanded over time in this country
  • Race
    • Race is an idea
    • Something that we as humans imagine and it becomes true as we state it to become true
    • It is a social construction
    • Only real because we make it real
    • It is a lived reality, it is a feature that is part of modernity
  • The Limits of Whiteness
    • Talks about Iranian Americans who have changed over time based off of events
    • Incapsulate what we mean when we say race is a social construct
  • Racial Hierarchy
    • Dehumanization of some groups based on their color of their skin
    • Play out in policies and beliefs in the way we see each other
    Week 1- Readings
  • Omi & Winant- Racial Formation in the US
    • Chapter 4
  • Race can be thought of as an essence= a trait that makes you who you are
  • Race can be thought of an an illusion= something in our heads that we make for a perfect
    non racial society
  • Expresses social conflicts by going towards different races
  • Society is based on the way we try to deal with racial differences
  • Neoconservative= not treating everyone differently cause of race, race can play no part in
    government action
  • Liberal= comprehending the fact that people of different race have not been treated the
    same in the back then and now they need different treatment to fix the damage that has
    been done in the past
  • Casual stereotypes are associated with racial formation
  • Something is only racist if it creates a social domination
    • Chapter 5
  • Republicans want to desperate racial minorities
  • Trajectory
  • Outward racial opposition= consist of slaves who escaped and formed communities in
    wood and swaps
  • Inward racial opposition= slaves being banned from the political system
  • In order to understand race, one must know the history behind it
  • And the issues that are being dealt at our present time
  • “Rules of the game”= race is a back and fourth game between political figure, policies
    and activities who oppose different types of race
  • Rethinking Racial Formation Theory
    • Racal formation theory- racial meanings and white racial framings
    • Racial formation= the sociological historical process by which racial categories are created
    in societies
    • Systematic racism theory= material, social, and ideological reality that is well- embedded in
    major US institutions
    Week 2- Lecture 1
  • History of “Color Blind” Doctrine
  • The curious life of color blind doctrine
  • Colorblindness & The Law
    • Two landmark decisions in history that really shaped American race relations in this country
  • Plessy vs. Ferguson- 1896
  • Brown vs. Education- 1954
  • These were considered supreme court decisions
  • Timeline of the Expansion of Black Rights in the US
    • Rights of African Americans
    • Population that has been caught up my law
    • 1865- 13th amendment- grants freedom to everyone
    • 1868- 14th amendment- universal rights to everyone in the US
    • 1896- Plessy vs. Ferguson
    • 1954- Brown vs. Board of Education
    • 1965- Voting Rights Act
  • 14th Amendment
    • Right to citizenship
    • Full protection under the law
  • 1896- Plessy vs. Ferguson
    • Tested the idea about full equality under the law
    • Justice John Marshal Harlan- Our constitution is colorblind
  • Introducing a language of colorblindness
  • Arguing that our constitution and US laws should not apply differently based on ones
    race, class or gender
    • Separate but equal doctrine
    • Black and white jobs and what so can be separate but claim equality
    • Legitimized racial segregation in the US/American apartheid
    • The rise of Jim Crow laws/Black code= codified racal segregation all through the US
  • Racism did not only apply to the south, it was across the country including CA where we had
    racial segregated public school systems
  • Ruby Bridges
    • 6 years old
    • Was the first African American to integrate her public school system in Alabama
    • The national guard had to escort Ruby everyday to school just so she could attend safely and
    without harm
    • Had to sit with them
    • Level of resistant that citizens of the US have had against this idea of racial equality
  • 1954- Brown vs. Board of Educations
    • Little Rock Nine in Arkansa
  • 9 African American students integrated a white high school
    • Landmark civil rights decision
    • Shattered the separate but equal doctrine in public schools
    • De-legimated explicitly race based exclusionary policies
  • Racism does not belong to the South
  • Racism is not only reserved for Black people
    Week 2-Lecture 2
  • Theory of Colorblind Racism- How it operates
    • Rationalization: Blaming the oppressed for their social position
  • Those people if they only cared about education and wanted better housing
  • Put the burden of inequitable outcomes
    • Employs racially coded excuses that aren’t about “race”
  • Key Terms (Important for Midterm Exam)
    • Race
    • Racial Structure
    • Racial Ideology
  • Bonilla-Silva on RACE
    • He agrees- Race is socially constructed
  • There is no biological explanation of race
  • It is something that human begins social construct to make it real
    • But also argues that it is also a social reality (it has real effects on the actors radicalized as
    “black” or “white”
    • It is a social reality for the skin that u are in
    • It has implication that play out on every level and every dimension of your life
  • Racial Structure
    • Social structure that produces systemic privileges to Europeans over non-Europeans
    • Historically located
    • The totality of social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege
  • Taking about a social structure that creates the condition under which we relate to racial
    categories in the US
  • Totality of social relations that reinforce white privilege- benefit of the doubt
  • Racial Ideology
    • Rationalizations to account for the status of various races
  • Why one racial group might do well in one area and fail in others
  • Attributing that structural success and failure to ones race
  • Using those to rationalize those outcomes and disadvantages
    • Racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify the status quo
  • Four of these frameworks that are very important
  • Need to know all four color blind racists frames
  • 4 Frames of Colorblind Racism
    • Abstract Liberalism
    • Naturalization
    • Cultural Racism
    • Minimization of Racism
  • Abstract Liberalsim
    • Distinctive Features
  • Individualism= your outcomes are based on your merit, if you are successful its because
    you worked hard and deserved it, if you failed then you are individually responsible for
    the outcome
  • Liberalism is an ideal
  • A moral aim about one ought to be
  • Universalism= the idea that the world works the same as the seat that you are in. this idea
    that because the system works for me, it obvious works for you
  • Egalitarianism= we are all equal, i treat everyone equal, i don’t see color or gender. we are
    all equal and human.
  • Meliorism= with time things will just get better. as long as we keep going, progress
    happens naturally. works to allow for always envisioning a equal and justice world
  • What are some problems with Liberalism?
    • European liberalism usually meant that only Europeans were human
    • As a result, the ideal of liberalism are often only applied to whites
    • Whether that is intentioned or unconscious, that is the way the system gets caught
  • An example from the text- What is problematic about it?
    • Supports equal opportunity for everyone without concern for gross structural inequality
    • Thus safeguards with privilege
    • Serves as a moral and justification for racial equity
  • An example from history
    • Lynch Kentucky
    • Lynch Colored Public School
    • Legally racially segregated school
    • School stayed opened until 1983
    • Legal lag to how these laws catch up to everyday reality
    • One school for the African American population and one school for the white population
    • Only school for African Americans in the city
  • Symbolic Inferiority/Superiority
    • Housing Segregation
    • Old and inadequate supplies
    • Unequal funding
    • Less amenities- no basketball court, no technology or labs
    • Inequitable facilities
  • Color Blind Response= ignores structural inequity and focus on individual acts of kindness
  • Anti Racist Response= Abolish Jim Crow Laws
    Week 2 Reading
  • Chapter 1- Racism without racists
    • Colorblindness= no longer have to take race into account
    • Racism is mostly committed by the white population
    • Black and latinos are discriminated by the white communities
    • White communities gets better eduction and housing
    • Blacks and latinos are generally unwanted in white neighborhoods
  • Chapter 2
    • Black will still never reach the superiority that whites have today
    • Talks about the four frames
    • Abstract Liberalism
  • People believe that blacks and whites should receive equal opportunities in any situation
  • Whites today see it as hiring someone for a job or accepting them to a university is not
    based on there race but qualifications
  • Government should not play a role in segregation
    • Naturalization
  • Segregation isn’t a factor of racism now
  • Self segregated communities cause thats how people choose to live
  • People choose to live in a community, not for its race but for its economic standing and
    religious beliefs
  • People like to be with people they are most similar with
  • Relates back to biological race
    • Cultural Racism
  • White people believe that blacks use discrimination as a way to show whites are above
    them
  • There are some black are successful in education and the work force
    • Minimization of Racism
  • People acknowledge discrimination but don’t believe that they are part of it
  • Minorities see discrimination then what really exists
  • Chapter 3
    • White peoples responses were racially disturbing when it came to color blindness
    Week 3- Lecture 1
  • Culture vs. Race
    • Language and how we operationalize langue in this class through writing and analysis
    • Good to know for everyday conversation
    • Culture
  • Basis for formation of group identity
  • Culture distinguishes groups
  • Culture distinguishes differences among groups
  • Through food, language, ethnicity, style of dress, religion, traditions, nationality
  • Culture is always in processes
    • Race
  • Difference plus power
  • It’s a hierarchy
  • What is whiteness as a social construct?
  • Racial hierarchy to make the point how systems of racism operate distinctively
  • Live under a system of global white supremacy
  • Whiteness as a social construct
    • Whiteness is the constriction of white race
    • Systems of privileges and advantages afforded to white people in US
  • Who is white?
    • Who gets to be white
    • Once you are white, do you stay white
    • Can whiteness change
    • What goes into who is white
    • An identity or a construct that is something that exist in the world
    • Is whiteness constructed just like every race
    • Signs are up discriminating other cultures like Jews
  • What does it mean to be white?
    Week 3- Lecture 2
  • Race and the University
    • Whiteness as Property
  • Published in 1993
  • Professor of Law at UCLA
  • by Sheryl Harris
  • Whiteness is a social construct
  • Relationship between race and property in the US
  • A story of racial passing= her grandmother was able to pass in a white world, benefit of
    the doubt and gave her privileges of safety
  • Whiteness as property- talking about the material benefits of whites
  • Not concerned about white people and personality
  • Talking about what does whiteness have to do with social location within a racial
    hierarchy, what does that offer and what benefits come from that
    • What material benefits do come with whiteness?- Dr. Harris
  • Personhood- understanding that this country was founded on a system of slavery
  • Rights- property ownership, representation in government, serve on jury
  • Economic benefits
  • Psychological conceptions of belonging, goodness, and deservedness- never having to
    worry if I’m allowed to be in this place and belong here
  • Public and private economic and social safety nets
  • Benefit of the doubt
    • Whiteness is a source of privilege and protection
    • 4 Competing Logics (Formation of the US)
  • Democracy, Settler Colonialism, Racial Slavery, and Empire
    • Whiteness
  • As identity
    • Culture and race
    • Group formation
    • What are the cultural factors that go into creating an us and them
    • So that we can know who is us and who is not us
  • As status
    • Whiteness offers a certain status within a social hierarchy
    • Where whiteness offers ultimate benefits
    • That status is a part of understanding the social structure of whiteness
  • As property
    • Something that has inherit value
    • Something that can be possessed
    • Inherit value comes from years of construction
  • Racial Formation Theory
    • Radicalization
    • Racial Project
    • Segregated school
  • A chosen exile
    • Documents an experience of racial passing in american life
  • The limits of whiteness
    • Has to do with Iranian Americans
  • Systemic Racial Theory
    • Systemic Racism= why certain neighborhoods seem to be inherently in doubt and others
    deprived
    • Racial oppression and domination
    • Whiteness
  • Color Blind Racism
    • Race
    • Racial Ideology
    • Racial Structure
    • 4 Frames of Color Blind Racism
  • The Racial Contract
    • Situates whiteness as a privileged racial class
  • Benefits of the racial contract
    • Psychic payoff
    • Cultural hegemony
    • Material advantage (economic payoff)
  • Key Terms
    • Racial State
    • Racial Polity
    • Racial Contract
    Week 3 Reading
  • Whiteness as Property- Cheryl Harris
    • Being white in the US- makes it accessible to have the right to own property
    • Talked about a story of her grandma who is black in blood but white in appearance
    • The history of property rights for Whites- importing Blacks to America as slaves
    • Whites performed these actions because they assumed that since they are white they have
    the right to do these things
    • Whiteness referred to whether or not one had property rights
    • Not a historical argument and still continues till this day
    • Since Blacks are Black they already have a disadvantage when it comes to everything
  • The Racial Contract- Charles Mills
    • How the realities of race relate to the modern world
    • Social contract= fundamental agreement between the government and governed
    • Humans began- every human had the right to do whatever they wanted
    • The trading of full freedom for the benefits of living collectively (such as stability and
    security)
    • The only “real” people were white people
    • Contract between “humans” (white people) and “non humans” (non-white people)
    • Race is more important to our daily lives then we think
    Week 4- Lecture 1
  • Understanding of Intersectionality Theory
  • Recap
    • Theories
  • Racial Formation Theory (Omni & Winant)
  • Systemic Racism Theory (Feagin & Elias)
  • Colorblind Racism Theory (Bonilla-Silva)
  • Racial and Colonial Capitalism (Itzigsohn & Brown)
  • Whiteness as Property (Harris)
  • Racial Contract Theory (Mills)
    • Know the Difference
  • Race vs. Ethnicity
  • Race vs. Culture
  • Race vs. Racism vs. Radicalization
  • Intersectionality
    • Powerful analytical framework
    • Intersectionality Theory- derives from Black feminism
    • Black intellectuals, creators, writers and women
    • Coined by Dr.Kimberly Crenshaw- UCLA LAW
    Week 4- Lecture 2
  • Dr. Patricia Hills Collins
  • “The difference that power makes: Intersectionality and Participatory democracy”
  • Whats this article up to:
    • Unpacks the “power analytic” of intersectionality
  • Analytic is a tool that helps you analyze something
  • How power manifest and how it moves and structures lives- intersectionality
    • Examines resistance traditions of subordinated groups, in this case Black Womyn
  • Offers a power analytic to see and address this
    • Implications of intersectionality and participatory democracy
  • Key Concepts
    • Intersectionality
    • Neoliberalism
    • Matrix of Domination
    • Domains of power framework
    • Construct of community
  • Principles of Intersectionality
    • There is not one definition of intersectionality
    • The term becomes all things to everybody
  • Domains of Power Framework
    • Structural
    • Cultural
  • Create a context in which we take certain racial logics for granted
  • Power related in that they oppress marginalized groups
    • Disciplinary
  • How codes of conduct are censored in society as a way of oppressing certain groups
    differently than others
    • Interpersonal
  • Everyday discrimination prejudice and all forms of matter of individual oppression
    • They are all interesting with one another
  • Collins argues that Words Matter
    • Racism, not race
    • Capitalism, not class
    • Sexism, not sex
    • These are all systems of oppression
  • Social Location Exercise
    • Where you are located on that hierarchy determines all sort of structural privileges or
    disadvantages you may face
    • Racism, Capitalism, Patriarchy, Colorism
    • See these system both individually and what work they do- Intersectionality
    • Help us see our privilege and disadvantage- Intersectionality
    Week 4- Live Lecture 3
  • Radicalized Subjectivity
    • The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. DuBois
  • 13 essays and a preface
  • A book that came out over 100 years ago
  • Still resonates till this day
  • Historian, Philosopher, Activist, Organizer
  • Originally and always is a sociologist
  • One of the architects of the disciplines of sociology
  • How does it feel to be a problem?
    • Opens up chapter 1 with this and posses it to himself
    • Lived experience and how one comes to understand themselves as a self
    • How the African American experience has been one that has been shaped by an outside
    world looking on to the black body as always a problem
  • Theory of Double Consciousness
    • Veil= barrier that separates a white and non white world
    • Second-sight= see beyond the veil and create systems of a
    • Twoness= feeling of a battle internally between ones radicalized self, his blackness nd
    americanness fighting with one another
    • No external conflict, just the internal conflict, being a radicalized subject created this
    within themselves
    • Theoretical construct that can go across racial groups
    • Has extended question of gender and sectionally
  • On the Veil
    • Created blindness
    • intangible, pervasive structure that determines social relations
    • Functions to sediment notions of ontological difference between social groups
  • MIDTERM
    • Posted on CCLE
    • All the relevant submission stuff is all on the front page at the bottom
    • Minimum 2 required sources

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Are you busy and do not have time to handle your assignment? Are you scared that your paper will not make the grade? Do you have responsibilities that may hinder you from turning in your assignment on time? Are you tired and can barely handle your assignment? Are your grades inconsistent?

Whichever your reason is, it is valid! You can get professional academic help from our service at affordable rates. We have a team of professional academic writers who can handle all your assignments.

Why Choose Our Academic Writing Service?

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  • Ability to tackle bulk assignments
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