Abstract
Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century celebrates, extends, and criticizes the pathbreaking formulations presented two decades ago by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their Racial Formation in the United States (1994). Where liberals at the time proclaimed the overcoming of racism with the forward march of the civil rights movements, and leftists all too often reduced race to class and labor, in 1994 Omi and Winant proclaimed the centrality of race to all social and political life in the United States and race’s changing, social construction over time. Two conceptions proved to be formative and of long-lasting influence: racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (1994: 55), and racial project as the “interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (1994: 56). Building outward from this basis, Omi and Winant offered scholars of race a vision of how they might move beyond, on the one hand, structural analysis with its fixed racial categories, and a purely discursive analysis that restricted race to meanings and identities. Insisting on the centrality of the state and political struggle further married these concepts to concerns with social justice and social movements.
While the thirteen essays collected by editors Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett and Laura Pulido, cover a wide range of topics, times, and locations—from the courts of seventeenth-century Lima to the cell blocks of Abu Ghraib—each author closely adheres to setting their work against Omi and Winant’s original text. In so doing, they reveal, as does the editors’ succinct and trenchant introduction, the ongoing strengths and weaknesses of the racial formation project itself. This narrow focus on the 1994 text does impose its own limitations: the consideration of allied and alternative constructs of race over the course of the last two decades is largely left to be noted within but not across the chapters. This holds true even for Winant’s own monograph The World is a Ghetto (2001) which sought to expand the racial formation conception to a global scale, not to mention work in the fields of critical race theory, coloniality studies, and neo-racism.
Within these constraints the text does assess a wide body of work that shares a common vocabulary and a commitment to the centrality of race and its transient character. In moving along these lines the concept of “racial formation” parallels the attractions and diffuse spread of gendered “intersectionality” across the social sciences and (in James Lee’s chapter here) the humanities. Essays by Priya Kandaswamy and Roderick Ferguson tackle this nexus, highlighting in turn the felicitous possibilities inherent when treating both race and gender as socio-historical constructs, and the absence in racial formation discussions of women and queers of color and their movements.
The differentiation and dispersal of American racial categories in the last 20 years provides the subject matter for a far more historically-concrete group of chapters, following in very different paths the collapse of past racial projects and today’s destabilized understanding of racial categories, identities, and struggles. Here the parallel development of multiracial categories emerges and coalesces across the early and late modern epochs, from colonial Latin America (Michelle McKinley) to the remaking of Asian formations among California’s grape growers (Matthew Garcia), through the racialized operation of legally mandated “colorblind” college admission regimes (Devon Carbado and Cheryl Harris), to contemporary inter-racialization among Latinos in general and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in particular (Tomás Almaguer).
The broader spatial and historical importance of the political struggles and racial projects that are embedded in these more tightly framed and richly detailed studies is made explicit in additional chapters that cover the continuities of white settler colonialism (Andrea Smith), the dilemmas of race-making amidst today’s claims of meritocracy (Gary Delgado), and chapters that cover the post-9/11 era and the militarization and violence of the U.S. state at home and abroad (Sherene Razack on Abu Ghraib, Nicholas De Genova on the “war on terror,” and Nikhil Singh in a revealing chapter on the imperial era of permanent war and violence). The still elusive and contested meaning of “racial formation” reveals itself in these essays as the authors grapple to define the content and operation of meanings, identities, and constructs circulating around the possibilities of a “colorblind,” “mestizaje,” “multicultural” or “post-racial” project emanating from the U.S. state.
There is much that enlightens here, but also much that remains diffuse and contested. Tied most explicitly to political projects at the state level, it is difficult to ground, for example, a common understanding or periodization of the racial project in the Obama era. Given the volume’s focus on the United States, it is striking that so little attention (with the exception of Singh’s essay) is given to the mass incarceration and policing of the last thirty years; here surely is one of those elusive social processes by which race is forged and institutionalized. Undergirding the most trenchant chapters, however, is a common grounding in the transnational racial project of a declining U.S. hegemon. Whether this remakes the liberal imperial project or marks the failure of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative project remains very much an open question here.
These ambiguities are revealed in Omi and Winant’s concluding chapter, where readers remain curiously tethered to a consideration—and in many ways, a defense—of the gains of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. This is at times difficult to grasp given the fierce abandonment by the left and right, Democrats and Republicans alike, of the postwar liberal and social democratic racial project. Still, as the authors in this collection repeatedly emphasize, uncertainty and fluidity in racial conceptions, identities, and movements for justice mark the present and near future—and this is a remarkable advance from the scholarship of a generation ago. Confronting the inability of past structural formations and discourses to explicate racial meanings and hierarchies as they are being remade by today’s movements, migrations, and states is still a bracing tonic. Even more problematic, and yet to be unearthed here, is the ongoing impact of the replacement of the Third World/U.S. racial binaries of the mid-twentieth century by the rise of Asian/Global South relations in the decades to come.
These observations only serve to underline the importance and value of this anthology to students and scholars of race in the twenty-first century. Written in accessible language for undergraduate as well as graduate classes on race, ethnicity, and stratification, it marks the summation of almost a generation of engaged work undertaken during the collapse of liberal hopes and dreams for racial reconciliation. Living as we do in an unstable interregnum as a new, global racial regime is being forged, this collection and the questions its authors grapple with are all the more pressing.