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

Race is a slippery concept. In fact, the authors assert that the “very act of defining racial groups is a process fraught with confusion, contradiction, and unintended consequences” (105). At the core, racism is a way of marking groups as the “other” (105), just like divisions by class, sexuality, gender, and age. None of these categories are “fixed, objective, social fact” (105). Even age can be socially constructed.

These categories are constantly being defined and fought by governments, the groups in power, and the groups being categorized. The authors argue that in the United States, race is a “master category,” meaning “something that stands above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation” (106). The origins of this master category can be traced to unique historical circumstances, such as the displacement of Native Americans and the use of enslaved African people in the American colonies. Race overlapped with other categories like gender, and race became a “template for the subordination and oppression of different social groups” (108).

Historically, race has been viewed as either “objective or illusory” (109). Objective views of race include scientific racism, which holds that humanity can be separated into different fixed racial groups.