Gregory Young

Reading Journal
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960 to the
1980s, (New York: Routledge, 1986).
Thesis, Key Questions, and Project Goals:
Among the central key points of Omi and Winant is that race, though it is continually being
reformed via political struggles, is and has been at the center of Americas social and political
history and has been significant in the creation of mass movements, in the formation of state
policy, and in the acting out of foreign policy as well (ix). Each [nonwhite] race has been
subject to oppressions up to and including the paradigm of the colorblind society that has
responded to the push for civil rights.
Their three main concerns are to assess new social movements, locate race at the center of
American history at both micro- and macro- levels, and to suggest a broader paradigm of state
activity. They argue that race has been subordinated in all dominant paradigms since biological
approaches in the early twentieth century, neglecting the reality of race as a fundamental axis of
social organization within the US (13).
Historiographical Fit/Contribution to Literature:
The authors clearly lay out their place in literatures on race in the first part. They argue that
through the late nineteenth century, scholars paid little attention to rice, considering it either to be
biologically determined or a remnant of preindustrial life, until Robert Parks race-relations
cycle, which under-estimated the centrality of race to American society. Their challenges to the
three dominant paradigms are described in the Synopsis below.
Synopsis:
There are three main sections in Racial Formation; recent theories on race and their flaws, an
alternative conception, and its application to the postwar period. After an introduction mapping
out the theoretical contours of their work, Omi and Winants first section, Paradigms of Race:
Ethnicity, Class, and Nation, which, in the first chapter, examines ethnicity theory, which
equates race with ethnicity and group identity more broadly, and the European immigrant
experience. The first phase of ethnicity theory was a 1920s insurgent approach challenging the
implicit racism of biological bases in which racial differences in intelligence, temperament, and
sexuality were racialized. Consisting of cultural pluralism and assimilationism, this approach
posited that race was one of many determinants of ethnic group identity and gained prominence
after WWII and drew heavily from the experience of white immigrants. Scholars such as
Myrdal, Moynihan, [and Sowell] argued for a pathological black culture that could only be
cured through assimilation. Moynihan and Glazer advanced ethnicity theory in the 1960s by
merging its two key strains by arguing that immigrant groups transformed, rather than melted,
being unique from both other cultures and their prior identities, and that these labels were
maintained for political advantage (i.e. interest groups) (18). Given that many blacks rejected
ethnic identity for group recognition, the paradigm of neoconservatism emerged in order to

defend egalitarianism. Omi and Winant critique the bootstrap model of this paradigm, which
argued that group norms serve as detriments to mainstream incorporation (22), as well as the
they all look alike critique, in which all blacks are lumped together regardless of ethnic origin
(though, with the legacies of slavery, this is difficult to determine).
In the second and third chapters, the authors examine the more radical class and nation- based
theories on race. Roughly, the class theory of race argues that race can be subsumed into
Marxian or Weberian discussions of economic structures and processes with the market,
stratification, and class-consciousness approaches. The market approach blames irrational
prejudice, monopolist priviledges, and disruptive state practices prevent capitalism from
allowing blacks equality. The stratification approach, as advanced by William J. Wilsons The
Declining Significance of Race, among others, looks at the status order and elite domination and
argues that since the elimination of state-enforced inequality in 1965, blacks are now subject to
society-wide, classed inequality and require social services to ameliorate this (29). However,
racial contestation continues and the black middle class remain linked to Wilsons underclass.
Finally, class conflict looks at the Marxian concept of exploitation such as the one by Cox and
Rice in which capitalists divide and rule workers with constructs such as race to segment the
working class or exclusionism, which leaves black out of the labor market. As Omi and
Winant note, however, the call for class unity has amounted to an argument that nonwhites
give up their racially based demands in favor of class unity on white terms (33).
Finally, the emergence of Black Nationalism in the 1960s undergirds the formation of a nationbased theory. This theory, stemming from a variety of traditions, is rooted in the practice of
colonialism [and post-colonialism] and includes such divergent paradigms as Pan-Africanism,
cultural nationalism, Marxist National Question debates and theories of internal colonialism.
Originating in the early twentieth century, Pan-Africanism linked the continent with the
Diaspora. Likewise, cultural nationalism argues that black American life is unique and that this
cultural life should be community owned. However, these paradigms fail to explain what
exactly is national about [US] racial oppression (50).
The second section opens with chapter four, in which the authors lay out their paradigm of racial
formation, followed by a chapter on the trajectory on racial politics.
This paradigm is applied to the contemporary period in the third part as Omi and Winant look at
the processes of racial upsurge, failed consolidation, and reaction.
Connections, Linkages, & Ties:

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Lingering Questions: