Racial Formations: Paradigms of Race
This brief summarizes and discusses the introduction to Part I of the book Racial Formation in the United States in which the authors, Omi and Winant, explore how “ethnicity theory” has shaped American racial concepts and values. A concise summary of the main ideas introduced in this introduction is followed by personal analysis on a single idea introduced by the authors.
The existing race relations of any given era are responsible for shaping the racial theory of that time. The 19th and early 20th centuries were strongly influenced by the emergence of Social Darwinist thought, creating a “biologistic” (p.12) conception of race. In the 1920s Robert E. Park introduced his “race relations cycle” (p. 10) which defined four stages of race relations: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, and became the basis for ethnicity theory. Ethnicity theory guided public policy into the mid-1960s before being challenged by class and nation based theories of race, but has reemerged as the dominant paradigm (p.12).
In contrast with most contemporary theories that attempt to understand and interpret race and racial dynamics in the United States by relying on the paradigms of ethnicity, class and nation, Omi and Winant present a racial formation theory that takes into account the “social nature of race, the absence of essential racial characteristics, the historical flexibility of racial meanings, and the political aspect of racial dynamics” (p.4). This framework for discussing and exploring race is interesting because it presents the idea that race is not inherent nor is it socially constructed. This approach creates a broad understanding of race and presents the idea that race is a continually evolving category of its own, which is contrary to historically accepted approaches of discussing racial dynamics, which treat race as a manifestation of social and political relationships (p.2). Such theories attempting to reduce race to a problem of policy creates an evolutionary model suggesting that the importance of race will decline as progress is made in political and economic arenas (p. 3). However, such theories fail to grasp the uniqueness of race and the changing nature of race relations.
The assertion made by the authors that “race will always be at the center of the American experience” (p.5) is an interesting idea to explore. The United States upholds the ideology of equality for all, yet will never achieve racial equality because racial identities and meanings will continually change over time. The idea of creating a society that has “opportunities for all and guarantees success for none” (p. 1) is a utopian ideal because historically, race has been linked to access to political rights, economic status and personal identity. Although it is tempting to believe racial oppression no longer occurs in the United States this is not the case, as race is still at the forefront of the American consciousness. This edition of the book looks as racial formation from the 1960s to the 1990s but even today, almost two decades later, racial issues are still shaping, and are shaped by, all aspects of American life.
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