Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s

Winnant and Omi describe this book as a “call-out,” meaning “a demand that new attention be paid to the deepening crisis of race and racism in the contemporary United States” (1). Highlighting the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, they note that the election has been seen as evidence that the United States has been “moving ‘beyond race’” (1).

In response, the authors cite activist Malcolm X, who remarked that if someone is stabbed six inches with a knife, it is still an improvement over being stabbed nine inches. In contrast to popular views that racism has declined and the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, the authors argue that racism is still present in systems of incarceration, housing, economics, health care access, and culture. Two reasons are given for the persistence of such racism. The first is the existence of systemic racism, meaning racial bias embedded in political, social, and economic systems. The second is that “race and racial meanings are neither stable nor consistent” (2).

Racism is shaped by historical forces, namely the conflict between oppression by white people and the struggles against such oppression by people of color. However, the problem is that people tend to assume they understand race, even though few can describe what race “means” (4). Instead, the meaning of race varies across time. For Marx, race was linked to the struggles of the working class against the bourgeoisie. Early United States sociologists like Albion Small and Edward A. Ross followed the racist theories of eugenics and supported the discriminatory Jim Crow laws.

Scholars and activists like W. E. B. Du Bois challenged scholarly claims that race was rooted in biology with a new social science that explored race and racism as social phenomena. This “Chicago school” of sociology eventually overcame the widespread assumption that racial categories were natural and could be proven through biology. However, the authors also criticize this approach as focusing on racism as “a product of individual ‘attitudes and prejudices’ rather than a social structure deeply rooted, not only in ideas and beliefs, but also in institutions, fundamental patterns of inequality, social geography, and the exercise of political power” (7).

The authors also assert that at any moment in time, there is a “particular phase of the trajectory of racial politics” (7): At any given historical moment, there is a stage in a political process involving racism or race that is either developing or declining. These developments unfold over the course of centuries. From this view, the authors make two important claims. The first is that, throughout its history and to the present day, the United States has always been an “extremely race-conscious nation” (8), with race influencing Americans’ economic and job status, political status, and social identity. The second is that in recent eras, there have been challenges to the racial hierarchy and the “containment” of such challenges (8). For example, the “spark of radical democratic hope” embodied in the civil rights movement of the 1960s was countered by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and the Democratic Party convention in Chicago during the same year, followed by decades of reactionary politics (9).

The authors argue that the older systems of open white supremacy have been “discredited” (9), but race and racism also continue to influence “nearly every aspect of social life” (10). The authors conclude that recognizing race as something “politically and historically constructed” enables individuals and groups to change the meaning of race (16).