Racial formation
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Racial formation is a theory by Michael Omi and Howard Winant which posits that the concept of race is socially constructed along two interrelated dimensions of institutional structures and practices of signification. The meaning of race, in its institutional and symbolic dimensions, is the result of competing 'racial projects' conceived of in Gramscian terms of hegemony. Especially in the post civil rights era in America, racial struggles are seen to take on the form of Gramscian 'wars of position.'
The primary challengers of this theory, in the authors' own estimations, are 'reductionist' accounts of race: these theories reduce race to epiphenomenal status, meaning that race is determined by supposedly more real phenomena such as class, nation, ethnicity, etc. (As an example of reductionism, think about the debates over the relative merits of class-based v. race-based affirmation action: proponents of the former system argue that class refers to more 'real differences' in US society than race does.)
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
[edit] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States
- From the 1960s to the 1980s (NY: Routledge, 1986/1989)
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 as "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. Phipp'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.
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. 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. (57)
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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 re-formed. 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. (61-2)
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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 setters as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed: "From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift towards the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identification appeared -- white."
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 history 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 Anglo-Saxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and the Jews, among other "non-white" categories. 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. 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. 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. (64-5)
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Racial formation: the creation of racial meanings
Much racial theory, we have argued, treats race as a manifestation or epiphenomenon of other supposedly more fundamental categories of sociopolitical identity, notably those of ethnicity, class and nation. In such accounts, race is not regarded as a continually evolving category in its own right; in fact, these approaches have often imagined that race would decline in importance, even disappear, as economic or political "progress" rendered "race-thinking" obsolete.
We hope to alter this situation by presenting the outlines of a theory of racial formation. In our view, racial meanings pervade US society, extending from the shaping of individual racial identities to the structuring of collective political action on the terrain of the state.
An approach based on the concept of racial formation should treat race in the United States as a fundamental organizing principle of social relationships. To give this notion some concreteness, let us distinguish between the micro-level and macro-level of social relations.
At the micro-level, race is a matter of individuality, of the formation of identity. The ways in which we understand ourselves and interact with others, the structuring of our practical activity -- in work and family, as citizens and as thinkers (or "philosophers") -- these are all shaped by racial meanings and racial awareness.
At the macro-level, race is a matter of collectivity, of the formation of social structures: economic, political and cultural/ideological. ... The racial order is organized and enforced by the continuity and reciprocity between these two "levels" of social relations. The micro- and macro- levels, however, are only analytically distinct. In our lived experience, in politics, in culture, in economic life, they are continuous and reciprocal. Racial discrimination, for example -- considered as a "macro-level" set of economic, political and ideological/cultural practices -- has obvious consequences for the experience and identities of individuals. It affects racial meanings, intervenes in "personal life," is interpreted politically, etc. Another example: racial identity -- considered as a "micro-level" complex of individual practices and "consciousness" -- shapes the universe of collective action. The panoply of individual attributes -- from one's patterns of speech or tastes in food or music to the economic, spatial, familial, or citizenship "role" one occupies -- provides the essential themes for political organization, the elements of economic self-reliance, etc.
The theory of racial formation, then, suggests that racial phenomena penetrate and link these two "levels" of social relationships. But this is only part of the story; the concept of race as an organizing principle of social relations provides a description, a classification of racial phenomena in the US, and also explains the continuity of these phenomena, but it does not yet offer a conception of the process of racial formation. To grasp this process we must understand the way in which the meaning of these phenomena is politically contested.
Contesting the social meaning of race
Once we understand that race overflows the boundaries of skin color, superexploitation, 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 objecive, 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. It is imperative that we achieve this understanding for two reasons. First, because today as in the past racial minorities pay a heavy price in human suffering as a result of their categorization as "other" by the dominant racial ideology; this is true not only in the United States, but across the world. Second, because racial politics are emblematic, we believe, of a new stage of US politics as a whole, a new socially based politics.
The crucial task, then, is to suggest how the widely disparate circumstances of individual and group racial identities, and of the racial institutions and social practices with which these identities are intertwined, are formed and transformed over time. This takes place, we argue, through political contestation over racial meanings. Such contestation occurs today throughout American society: it takes place at the level of "personal" relationships (indeed it arises within individuals whose very identities and racial "beliefs" are necessarily contradictory); it exists in "objective" relationships such as work or political activity; and it occurs in cultural representation. (66-69)
