Racial Formation in the United States Racial Formation in the United States is appearing here in an entirely new edition, 20 years since its last publication. Authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant have maintained the structure and vision of their classic work, but have completely revised and rewritten every chapter. The ambitious purpose of the book remains the same: to develop a theory of race and racism adequate to their complexity, historical depth, and ongoing political impor- tance. Racial Formation explains how concepts of race are created and transformed, how race shapes U.S. society, and how it permeates both identities and institutions. Some of the contemporary themes that Omi and Winant discuss are: the steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite population, the creativity and political legacy of post-World War II anti-racism, the linkage between colorblind racial ideology and neoliberalism, the new racial genomics, the emergence of “implicit bias” accounts of race, the rise of a mass immigrants rights movement, the achievement of race/class/gender intersectionality theories, and the election and reelection of a black president of the United States. In Part I the authors review and critique the main theories of race—the ethnicity-, class-, and nation-based paradigms—examining the main contemporary trends and limits in racial theory. In Part II they off er their own advanced theory of racial formation, placing the racialized body much more front and center in the analysis, without diminishing in any way their commitment to a social constructionist account of race. Omi and Winant argue that throughout U.S. history race has provided a “template” for patterns of inequal- ity, marginalization, and diff erence; this is a new claim for their book. In their view no other social confl ict—not class, not sex/gender, not colonialism or imperialism—can ever be understood without taking race into account. The new Part III treats U.S. racial history up to 2013. Omi and Winant look anew at the radi- cal challenge presented by the black movement in the post-World War II years. They stress the movement’s alliances (and sometimes confl icts) with other racial justice, gender justice, and anti-imperialist movements. They argue that because it virtually reinvented U.S. poli- tics and greatly expanded the horizons of democracy and equality, its containment became the top priority of the U.S. power structure. Part III therefore treats the dynamics of racial reaction at greater length than did earlier editions of Racial Formation, exploring not only the Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes’ years in power, but also the accommodations of Clinton and Obama to colorblind racial ideology and to the regime of neoliberalism. Omi and Winant continue to see race as a fundamental organizing principle of social life, one that deeply structures politics, economics, and culture in the United States. They rethink race as intersectional, ubiquitous, and unstable, continually operating at the crossroads of social structure and identity. Because race is socially constructed and historically confl ictual, it is continually being made and remade in everyday life. Race is constantly in formation. Test questions and a range of additional instructor support materials, prepared by Cameron Lippard, Associate Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, are available on a password-protected website, www.routledge.com/cw/omi to faculty and administrative staff who have been approved to request Review Copies by Routledge. Titles of Related Interest from Routledge Middle Class Meltdown in America: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies Kevin T. Leicht and Scott T. Fitzgerald Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment Patricia Hill Collins Race, Law, and American Society: 1607–Present, Second Edition Gloria J. Browne-Marshall The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants Edited by John S.W. Park and Shannon Gleeson Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, Third Edition Joe Feagin The Enduring Color Line in U.S. Athletics Krystal Beamon and Chris Messer The Pains of Mass Imprisonment Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Jamie Longazel Racial Formation in the United States Third Edition MICHAEL OMI AND HOWARD WINANT Test questions and a range of additional instructor support materials, prepared by Cameron Lippard, Associate Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, are available on a password-protected website, www.routledge.com/cw/omi to faculty and administrative staff who have been approved to request Review Copies by Routledge. Third edition published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Michael Omi & Howard Winant The right of Michael Omi and Howard Winant to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 1986 Second edition published by Routledge 1994 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Omi, Michael. Racial formation in the United States / by Michael Omi & Howard Winant. — Third edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States--Race relations. 2. United States—Social conditions—1960–1980. 3. United States—Social conditions—1980– I. Winant, Howard. II. Title. E184.A1O46 2014 305.800973—dc23 2014002651 ISBN: 978-0-415-52098-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-52031-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-07680-4 (ebk) Typeset in Ehrhardt MT by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Author Biographies vi Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Racial Formation in the United States 1 PART I Paradigms of Race: Ethnicity, Class, and Nation 19 chapter 1 Ethnicity 21 chapter 2 Class 53 chapter 3 Nation 75 PART II Racial Formation 103 chapter 4 The Theory of Racial Formation 105 chapter 5 Racial Politics and the Racial State 137 PART III Racial Politics Since World War II 159 chapter 6 The Great Transformation 161 chapter 7 Racial Reaction: Containment and Rearticulation 185 chapter 8 Colorblindness, Neoliberalism, and Obama 211 Conclusion: The Contrarieties of Race 245 Works Cited 271 Index 315 v Author Biographies Michael Omi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Howard Winant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Winant is the founding director of the University of California Center for New Racial Studies (UCCNRS), a MultiCampus Research Program Initiative. vi Preface and Acknowledgments This book has been a long time coming. It has been nearly 30 years since the initial publication of Racial Formation in the United States (1986), and 20 years since the appearance of the second edition (1994). Over the years, much has changed and much has remained the same in the overall patterns, structures, discourses, and individual/ collective experiences of race and racism in the United States. Legally sanctioned forms of racial discrimination may have receded, but racial inequality and racial injustice have stubbornly persisted. In many ways racism has proliferated, adopted new guises, and deepened. Continuity and change are also apparent in racial theory: how race and racism are recognized, defi ned, and narrated keeps changing too. Racial politics, both state-based and experiential, have shifted as new understandings of race and racism are applied in the public sphere and in everyday life. Given the continuing instability of the concept of race and the uncertainty and anxiety about its meaning, a reworking and restatement of the racial formation perspective was long overdue. But what should be retained from the earlier editions of Racial Formation? What ideas required further elaboration, what should be revised, and what updating was needed in order to account for new and emergent issues of racial theory and politics? We deliberated deeply, read widely, and argued passionately with one another about these questions as we prepared this third edition of the book. Racial Formation has been our intellectual “home” for decades. So we initially saw this revision as a “home remodeling” project. Our visions of what we wanted to do initially clashed. Scale was a big issue. One of us saw the project as a modest renovation. Imagining the chapters as rooms, he wanted simply to update each room, freshen the paint, rearrange the furniture, and bring in some new pieces to comple- ment the revised décor. The other author wanted to knock down the walls, change the plumbing and electrical work, install new windows and insulation, and perhaps shore up the foundation. The final product represents a synthesis of both our desires and plans. Because so much had changed over the two decades since the second edition of Racial Formation, a lot more than remodeling was required. The steady journey of the United States towards a majority nonwhite population, the ongoing evisceration of the political legacy of the early post-World War II civil rights movement, the initiation of the “war on terror” with its attendant Islamophobia, the rise of a mass immigrants rights movement, the formulation of race/class/gender “intersectionality” theories, and the election and reelection of a black president of the United States were some of the vii viii preface and acknowledgments many new racial conditions we had to address.