Racial Formation

Kiljoong Kim & Casey Oberlin

In the United States, race and racial categories have long been at the focus of numerous social, academic, and political debates. Historically, race was studied through the paradigm of biology; physiological differences (color, hair, and bone) were the basis for racial categorization. This biological grounding of racial difference gave way to three new conceptualizations of racial difference in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one based on the concept of ethnicity, the second on class, and the third on the concept of nation. During the 1970s and 1980s, issues of class, country, and multiculturalism became highly contested terrains. In response to these socio-politico-economic trends, Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s argued that all of these trends reduced race to ethnicity, class, or nation. These reductionstic models became proxies for race, but race as an analytically distinct category Against ...

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