omi and winant | Digifesto

August 11, 2018

“the politicization of the social” and “politics of identity” in Omi and Winant, Cha. 6

A confusing debate in my corner of the intellectual Internet is about (a) whether the progressive left has a coherent intellectual stance that can be articulated, (b) what to call this stance, (c) whether the right-wing critics of this stance have the intellectual credentials to refer to it and thereby land any kind of rhetorical punch. What may be true is that both “sides” reflect social movements more than they reflect coherent philosophies as such, and so trying to bridge between them intellectually is fruitless.

Happily, reading through Omi and Winant, which among other things outlines a history of what I think of as the progressive left, or the “social justice”, “identity politics” movement in the United States. They address this in their Chapter 6: “The Great Transformation”. They use “the Great Transformation” to refer to “racial upsurges” in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

They are, as far as I can tell, the only people who ever use “The Great Transformation” to refer to this period. I don’t think it is going to stick. They name it this because they see this period as a great victorious period for democracy in the United States. Omi and Winant refer to previous periods in the United States as “racial despotism”, meaning that the state was actively treating nonwhites as second class citizens and preventing them from engaging in democracy in a real way. “Racial democracy”, which would involve true integration across race lines, is an ideal future or political trajectory that was approached during the Great Transformation but not realized fully.

The story of the civil rights movements in the mid-20th century are textbook material and I won’t repeat Omi and Winant’s account, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. One reason why it is interesting is how explicitly influenced by Gramsci their analysis is. As the “despotic” elements of United States power structures fade, the racial order is maintained less by coercion and more by consent. A power disparity in social order maintained by consent is a hegemony, in Gramscian theory.

They explain the Great Transformation as being due to two factors. One was the decline of the ethnicity paradigm of race, which had perhaps naively assumed that racial conflicts could be resolved through assimilation and recognition of ethnic differences without addressing the politically entrenched mechanisms of racial stratification.

The other factor was the rise of new social movements characterized by, in alliance with second-wave feminism, the politicization of the social, whereby social identity and demographic categories were made part of the public political discourse, rather than something private. This is the birth of “politics of identity”, or “identity politics”, for short. These were the original social justice warriors. And they attained some real political victories.

The reason why these social movements are not exactly normalized today is that there was a conservative reaction to resist changes in the 70’s. The way Omi and Winant tell it, the “colorblind ideology” of the early 00’s was culmination of a kind of political truce between “racial despotism” and “racial democracy”–a “racial hegemony”. Gilman has called this “racial liberalism”.

So what does this mean for identity politics today? It means it has its roots in political activism which was once very radical. It really is influenced by Marxism, as these movements were. It means that its co-option by the right is not actually new, as “reverse racism” was one of the inventions of the groups that originally resisted the Civil Rights movement in the 70’s. What’s new is the crisis of hegemony, not the constituent political elements that were its polar extremes, which have been around for decades.

What it also means is that identity politics has been, from its start, a tool for political mobilization. It is not a philosophy of knowledge or about how to live the good life or a world view in a richer sense. It serves a particular instrumental purpose. Omi and Winant talk about the politics of identity is “attractive”, that it is a contagion. These are positive terms for them; they are impressed at how anti-racism spreads. These days I am often referred to Phillips’ report, “The Oxygen of Amplification”, which is about preventing the spread of extremist views by reducing the amount of reporting on them in ‘disgust’. It must be fair to point out that identity politics as a left-wing innovation were at one point an “extremist” view, and that proponents of that view do use media effectively to spread it. This is just how media-based organizing tactics work, now.

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August 7, 2018

Racial projects and racism (Omi and Winant, 2014; Jeong case study)

Following up on earlier posts on Omi and Winant, I’ve gotten to the part where they discuss racial projects and racism.

Because I use Twitter, I have not been able to avoid the discussion of Sarah Jeong’s tweets. I think it provides a useful case study in Omi and Winant’s terminology. I am not a journalist or particularly with-it person, so I have encountered this media event mainly through articles about it. Here are some.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – These informal notes were part of the process of writing “Racial categories in machine learning”, with Bruce Haynes.

To recap, for Omi and Winant, race is a “master category” of social organization, but nevertheless one that is unstable and politically contested. The continuity of racial classification is due to a historical, mutually reinforcing process that includes both social structures that control the distribution of resources and social meanings and identities that have been acquired by properties of people’s bodies. The fact that race is sustained through this historical and semiotically rich structuration (to adopt a term from Giddens), means that

“To identify an individual or group racially is to locate them within a socially and historically demarcated set of demographic and cultural boundaries, state activities, “life-chances”, and tropes of identity/difference/(in)equality.

“We cannot understand how racial representations set up patterns of residential segregation, for example, without considering how segregation reciprocally shapes and reinforces the meaning of race itself.”

This is totally plausible. Identifying the way that racial classification depends on a relationship between meaning and social structure opens the possibility of human political agency in the (re)definition of race. Omi and Winant’s term for these racial acts is racial projects.

A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines.

… Racial projects connect the meaning of race in discourse and ideology with the way that social structures are racially organized.

“Racial project” is a broad category that can include both large state and institutional interventions and individual actions, “even the decision to wear dreadlocks”. What makes them racial projects is how they reflect and respond to broader patterns of race, whether to reproduce it or to subvert it. Prevailing stereotypes are one of the main ways we can “read” the racial meanings of society, and so the perpetuation of subversion of stereotypes is a form of “racial project”. Racial projects are often in contest with each other; the racial formation process is the interaction and accumulation of these projects.

“Racial project” is a useful category partly because it is key to Omi and Winant’s definition of racism. They acknowledge that the term itself is subject to “enormous debate”, at times inflated to be meaningless and at other times deflated to be too narrow. They believe the definition of racism as “racial hate” is too narrow, though it has gain legal traction as a category, as in when “hate crimes” are considered an offense with enhanced sentencing, or universities institute codes against “hate speech”. I’ve read “racial animus” as another term that means something similar, though perhaps more subtle, than “racial hate”.

The narrow definition of racism as racial hate is rejected due to an argument O&W attribute to David Theo Goldberg (1997), which is that by narrowly focusing on “crimes of passion” (I would gloss this more broadly to “psychological states”), the interpretation of racism misses the ideologies, policies, and practices that “normalize and reproduce racial inequality and domination”. In other words, an adequate use of racism, as a term, has to reference the social structure that is race.

Omi and Winant define racism thus:

A racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significance and identities.

A key implication of their argument is that not all racial projects are racist. Recall that Omi and Winant are very critical of colorblindness as (they allege) a political hegemony. They want to make room for racial solidarity and agency despite the hierarchical nature of race as a social fact. This allows them to answer two important questions.

Are there anti-racist projects? Yes. “[W]e define anti-racist projects as those that undo or resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.”

Note that the two definitions are not exactly parallel in construction. To “create and reproduce structure” is not entirely the opposite of “undo or resist structure”. Given O&W’s ontology, and the fact that racial structure is always the accumulation of a long history of racial projects, projects that have been performed by (bluntly) both the right and the left, and given that social structure is not homogeneous across location (consider how race is different in the United States and in Brazil, or different in New York City and in Dallas), and given that an act of resistance is also an act of creation, implicitly, one could easily get confused trying to apply these definitions. The key word, “domination”, is not defined precisely, and everything hinges on this. It’s clear from the writing that Omi and Winant subscribe to the “left” view of how racial domination works; this orients their definition of racism concretely. But they also note that the political agency of people of color in the United States over the past hundred years or so has gained them political power. Isn’t the key to being racist having power? This leads O&W to the second question, which is:

Can Group of Color Advance Racist Projects? O&W’s answer is, yes, they can. There are exceptions to the hierarchy of white supremacy, and in these exceptions there can be racial conflicts where a group of color is racist. Their example is in cases where blacks and Latinos are in contest over resources. O&W do not go so far as to say that it is possible to be racist against white people, because they believe all racial relations are shaped by the overarching power of white supremacy.

Case Study: Jeong’s tweets

That is the setup. So what about Sarah Jeong? Well, she wrote some tweets mocking white people, and specifically white men, in 2014, which was by the way the heyday of obscene group conflict on Twitter. That was the year of Gamergate. A whole year of tweets that are probably best forgotten. She compared white people to goblins, she compared them the dogs. She said she wished ill on white men. As has been pointed out, if any other group besides white men were talked about, her tweets would be seen as undeniably racist, etc. They are, truth be told, similar rhetorically to the kinds of tweets that the left media have been so appalled at for some time.

They have surfaced again because Jeong was hired by the New York Times, and right wing activists (or maybe just trolls, I’m a little unclear about which) surfaced the old tweets. In the political climate of 2018, when Internet racism feels like it’s gotten terribly real, these struck a chord and triggered some reflection.

What should we make of these tweets, in light of racial formation theory?

First, we should acknowledge that the New York Times has some really great lawyers working for it (Jeong herself having a law degree). Their statement was that at the time of the tweets, (a) Jeong was being harassed, (b) that she responded to them in the same rhetorical manner of the harassment, that (c) that’s regrettable, but also, it’s long past and not so bad. Sarah Jeong’s own statement makes this point, acknowledges that the tweets may be hurtful out of context, and that she didn’t mean them the way others could take them. “Harassment” is actually a relatively neutral term; you can harass somebody, legally speaking, on the basis of their race without invoking a reaction from anti-racist sociologists. This is all perfectly sensible, IMO, and the case is pretty much closed.

But that’s not where the discussion on the Internet ended. Why? Because the online media is where the contest of racial formation is happening.

We can ask: Were Sarah Jeong’s tweets a racial project? The answer seems to be, yes, they were. It was a representation of racial identity (whiteness) “to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines”. Jeong is a journalist and scholar, and these arguments are happening in social media, which are always-already part of the capitalist attention economy. Jeong’s success is partly due to her confrontation of on-line harassers and responses to right-wing media figures. And her activity is the kind that rallies attention along racial lines–anti-racist, racist, etc.

Confusingly, the language she used in these tweets reads as hateful. “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” does, reasonably, sound like it expresses some racial animus. If we were to accept the definition of racism as merely the possession of ill will towards a race, which seems to be Andrew Sullivan’s definition, then we would have to say those were racist tweets.

We could invoke a defense here. Were the tweets satire? Did Jeong not actually have any ill will towards white people? One might wonder, similarly, whether 4chan anti-Semites are actually anti-Semitic or just trolling. The whole question of who is just trolling and who should be taken seriously on the Internet is such an interesting one. But it’s one I had to walk away from long ago after the heat got turned up on me one time. So it goes.

What everyone knows is at stake, though, is the contention that the ‘racial animus’ definition is not the real definition of racism, but rather that something like O&W’s definition is. By their account, (a) a racial project is only racist if it aligns with structures of racial domination, and (b) the structure of racial domination is a white supremacist one. Ergo, by this account, Jeong’s tweets are not racist, because insulting white people does not create or reproduce structures of white supremacist domination.

It’s worth pointing out that there are two different definitions of a word here and that neither one is inherently more correct of a definition. I’m hesitant to label the former definition “right” and the latter definition “left” because there’s nothing about the former definition that would make you, say, not want to abolish the cradle-to-prison system or any number of other real, institutional reforms. But the latter definition is favored by progressives, who have a fairly coherent world view. O&W’s theorizing is consistent with it. The helpful thing about this worldview is that it makes it difficult to complain about progressive rhetorical tactics without getting mired into a theoretical debate about their definitions, which makes it an excellent ideology for getting into fights on the Internet. This is largely what Andrew Sullivan was getting at in his critique.

What Jeong and the NYT seem to get, which some others don’t, is that comments that insult an entire race can be hurtful and bothersome even if they are not racist in the progressive sense of the term. It is not clear what we should call a racial project that is hurtful and bothersome to white people if we do not call it racist. A difficulty with the progressive definition of racism is that agreement on the application of the term is going to depend on agreement about what the dominate racial structures are. What we’ve learned in the past few years is that the left-wing view of what these racial structures are is not as widely shared as it was believed to be. For example, there are far more people who believe in anti-Semitic conspiracies, in which the dominant race is the Jews, active in American political life than was supposed. Given O&W’s definition of racism, if it were, factually, the case that Jews ran the world, then anti-Semitic comments would not be racist in the meaningful sense.

Which means that the progressive definition of racism, to be effective, depends on widespread agreement about white supremacist hegemony, which is a much, much more complicated thing to try to persuade somebody of than a particular person’s racial animus.

A number of people have been dismissing any negative reaction to the resurfacing of Jeong’s tweets, taking the opportunity to disparage that reaction as misguided and backwards. As far as I can tell, there is an argument that Jeong’s tweets are actually anti-racist. This article argues that casually disparaging white men is just something anti-racists do lightly to call attention to the dominant social structures and also the despicable behavior of some white men. Naturally, these comments are meant humorously, and not intended to refer to all white men (to assume it does it to distract from the structural issues at stake). They are jokes that should be celebrated, because the the progressives have already won this argument over #notallmen, also in 2014. Understood properly as progressive, anti-racist, social justice idiom, there is nothing offensive about Jeong’s tweets.

I am probably in a minority on this one, but I do not agree with this assessment, for a number of reasons.

First, the idea that you can have a private, in-group conversation on Twitter is absurd.

Second, the idea that a whole community of people casually expresses racial animus because of representative examples of wrongdoing by members of a social class can be alarming whether or not it’s Trump voters talking about Mexicans or anti-racists talking about white people. That alarm, as an emotional reaction, is a reality whether or not the dominant racial structures are being reproduced or challenged.

Third, I’m not convinced that as a racial project, tweets simply insulting white people really counts as “anti-racist” in a substantive sense. Anti-racist projects are “those that undo or resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.” Is saying “white men are bullshit” undoing a structure of domination? I’m pretty sure any white supremacist structures of domination have survived that attack. Does it resist white supremacist domination? The thrust of wise sociology of race is that what’s more important than the social meanings are the institutional structures that maintain racial inequality. Even if this statement has a meaning that is degrading to white people, it doesn’t seem to be doing any work of reorganizing resources around (anti-)racial lines. It’s just a crass insult. It may well have actually backfired, or had an effect on the racial organization of attention that neither harmed nor supported white supremacy, but rather just made its manifestation on the Internet more toxic (in response to other, much greater, toxicity, of course).

I suppose what I’m arguing for is greater recognition of nuance than either the “left” or “right” position has offered on this case. I’m saying that it is possible to engage in a racial project that is neither racist nor anti-racist. You could have a racial project that is amusingly absurd, or toxic, or cleverly insightful. Moreover, there is a complex of ethical responsibilities and principles that intersects with racial projects but is not contained by the logic of race. There are greater standards of decency that can be invoked. These are not simply constraints on etiquette. They also are relevant to the contest of racial projects and their outcomes.

Addendum, Mar. 1, 2019: I recently learned a (for me) surprising statistic via Chetty et al.‘s “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” (2018) work: that the median income of Asian-American households was about $17k higher than the median income of White households in 2016. I’m honestly not sure whether this matters to the preceding analysis or not. But it might, and I think it’s an interesting question whether or not it does. I add it with no further comment.

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July 6, 2018

On “Racialization” (Omi and Winant, 2014)

Notes on Omi and Winant, 2014, Chapter 4, Section: “Racialization”.

Summary

Race is often seen as either an objective category, or an illusory one.

Viewed objectively, it is seen as a biological property, tied to phenotypic markers and possibly other genetic traits. It is viewed as an ‘essence’.
Omi and Winant argue that the concept of ‘mixed-race’ depends on this kind of essentialism, as it implies a kind of blending of essences. This is the view associated with “scientific” racism, most prevalent in the prewar era.

View as an illusion, race is seen as an ideological construct. An epiphenomenon of culture, class, or peoplehood. Formed as a kind of “false consciousness”, in the Marxist terminology. This view is associated with certain critics of affirmative action who argue that any racial classification is inherently racist.

Omi and Winant are critical of both perspectives, and argue for an understanding of race as socially real and grounded non-reducibly in phenomic markers but ultimately significant because of the social conflicts and interests constructed around those markers.

They define race as: “a concept that signifies and symbolizes signifiers and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”

The visual aspect of race is irreducible, and becomes significant when, for example, is becomes “understood as a manifestation of more profound differences that are situated within racially identified persons: intelligence, athletic ability, temperament, and sexuality, among other traits.” These “understandings”, which it must be said may be fallacious, “become the basis to justify or reinforce social differentiation.

This process of adding social significance to phenomic markers is, in O&W’s language, racialization, which they define as “the extension of racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” They argue that racialization happens at both macro and micro scales, ranging from the consolidation of the world-system through colonialization to incidents of racial profiling.

Race, then, is a concept that refer to different kinds of bodies by phenotype and the meanings and social practices ascribed to them. When racial concepts are circulated and accepted as ‘social reality’, racial difference is not dependent on visual difference alone, but take on a life of their own.

Omi and Winant therefore take a nuanced view of what it means for a category to be socially constructed, and it is a view that has concrete political implications. They consider the question, raised frequently, as to whether “we” can “get past” race, or go beyond it somehow. (Recall that this edition of the book was written during the Obama administration and is largely a critique of the idea, which seems silly now, that his election made the United States “post-racial”).

Omi and Winant see this framing as unrealistically utopian and based on extreme view that race is “illusory”. It poses race as a problem, a misconception of the past. A more effective position, they claim, would note that race is an element of social structure, not an irregularity in it. “We” cannot naively “get past it”, but also “we” do not need to accept the erroneous conclusion that race is a fixed biological given.

Comments

Omi and Winant’s argument here is mainly one about the ontology of social forms.
In my view, this question of social form ontology is one of the “hard problems”
remaining in philosophy, perhaps equivalent to if not more difficult than the hard problem of consciousness. So no wonder it is such a fraught issue.

The two poles of thinking about race that they present initially, the essentialist view and the epiphenomenal view, had their heyday in particular historical intellectual movements. Proponents of these positions are still popularly active today, though perhaps it’s fair to say that both extremes are now marginalized out of the intellectual mainstream. Despite nobody really understanding how social construction works, most educated people are probably willing to accept that race is socially constructed in one way or another.

It is striking, then, that Omi and Winant’s view of the mechanism of racialization, which involves the reading of ‘deeper meanings’ into phenomic traits, is essentially a throwback to the objective, essentializing viewpoint.
Perhaps there is a kind of cognitive bias, maybe representativeness bias or fundamental attribution bias, which is responsible for the cognitive errors that make racialization possible and persistent.

If so, then the social construction of race would be due as much to the limits of human cognition as to the circulation of concepts. That would explain the temptation to believe that we can ‘get past’ race, because we can always believe in the potential for a society in which people are smarter and are trained out of their basic biases. But Omi and Winant would argue that this is utopian. Perhaps the wisdom of sociology and social science in general is the conservative recognition of the widespread implications of human limitation. As the social expert, one can take the privileged position that notes that social structure is the result of pervasive cognitive error. That pervasive cognitive error is perhaps a more powerful force than the forces developing and propagating social expertise. Whether it is or is not may be the existential question for liberal democracy.

An unanswered question at this point is whether, if race were broadly understood as a function of social structure, it remains as forceful a structuring element as if it is understood as biological essentialism. It is certainly possible that, if understood as socially contingent, the structural power of race will steadily erode through such statistical processes as regression to the mean. In terms of physics, we can ask whether the current state of the human race(s) is at equilibrium, or heading towards an equilibrium, or diverging in a chaotic and path-dependent way. In any of these cases, there is possibly a role to be played by technical infrastructure. In other words, there are many very substantive and difficult social scientific questions at the root of the question of whether and how technical infrastructure plays a role in the social reproduction of race.

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July 2, 2018

“The Theory of Racial Formation”: notes, part 1 (Cha. 4, Omi and Winant, 2014)

Chapter 4 of Omi and Winant (2014) is “The Theory of Racial Formation”. It is where they lay out their theory of race and its formation, synthesizing and improving on theories of race as ethnicity, race as class, and race as nation that they consider earlier in the book.

This rhetorical strategy of presenting the historical development of multiple threads of prior theory before synthesizing them into something new is familiar to me from my work with Helen Nissenbaum on Contextual Integrity. CI is a theory of privacy that advances prior legal and social theories by teasing out their tensions. This seems to be a good way to advance theory through scholarship. It is interesting that the same method of theory building can work in multiple fields. My sense is that what’s going on is that there is an underlying logic to this process which in a less Anglophone world we might call “dialectical”. But I digress.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – These informal notes were part of the process of writing “Racial categories in machine learning”, with Bruce Haynes.

I have not finished Chapter 4 yet but I wanted to sketch out the outline of it before going into detail. That’s because what Omi and Winant are presenting a way of understanding the mechanisms behind the reproduction of race that are not simplistically “systemic” but rather break it down into discrete operations. This is a helpful contribution; even if the theory is not entirely accurate, its very specificity elevates the discourse.

So, in brief notes:

For Omi and Winant, race is a way of “making up people”; they attribute this phrase to Ian Hacking but do not develop Hacking’s definition. Their reference to a philosopher of science does situate them in a scholarly sense; it is nice that they seem to acknowledge an implicit hierarchy of theory that places philosophy at the foundation. This is correct.

Race-making is a form of othering, of having a group of people identify another group as outsiders. Othering is a basic and perhaps unavoidable human psychological function; their reference for this is powell and Menendian (Apparently, john a. powell being one of these people like danah boyd who decapitalizes their name.)

Race is of course a social construct that is neither a fixed and coherent category nor something that is “unreal”. That is, presumably, why we need a whole book on the dynamic mechanisms that form it. One reason why race is such a dynamic concept is because (a) it is a way of organizing inequality in society, (b) the people on “top” of the hierarchy implied by racial categories enforce/reproduce that category “downwards”, (c) the people on the “bottom” of the hierarchy implied by racial categories also enforce/reproduce a variation of those categories “upwards” as a form of resistance, and so (d) the state of the racial categories at any particular time is a temporary consequence of conflicting “elite” and “street” variations of it.

This presumes that race is fundamentally about inequality. Omi and Winant believe it is. In fact, they think racial categories are a template for all other social categories that are about inequality. This is what they mean by their claim that race is a master category. It’s “a frame used for organizing all manner of political thought”, particularly political thought about liberation struggles.

I’m not convinced by this point. They develop it with a long discussion of intersectionality that is also unconvincing to me. Historically, they point out that sometimes women’s movements have allied with black power movements, and sometimes they haven’t. They want the reader to think this is interesting; as a data scientist, I see randomness and lack of correlation. They make the poignant and true point that “perhaps at the core of intersectionality practice, as well as theory, is the ‘mixed race’ category. Well, how does it come about that people can be ‘mixed’?” They then drop the point with no further discussion.

[Edit: While Omi and Winant do address the issue of what it means to be ‘mixed race’ in more depth later in the book, their treatment of intersectionality remains for me difficult. Race is a system of political categorization; however, racial categories are hereditary in a way that sexual categories are not. That is an important difference in how the categories are formed and maintained, one that is glossed over in O&W’s treatment of the subject, as well as in popular discourse.]

Omi and Winant make an intriguing comment, “In legal theory, the sexual contract and racial contract have often been compared”. I don’t know what this is about but I want to know more.

This is all a kind of preamble to their presentation of theory. They start to provide some definitions:

racial formation: The sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed.
racialization: How phenomic-corporeal dimensions of bodies acquire meaning in social life.
racial projects: The co-constitutive ways that racial meanings are translated into social structures and become racially signified.
racism: A property of racial projects that Omi and Winant will discuss in Chapter 4.
racial politics: Ways that the politics (of a state?) can handle race, including racial despotism, racial democracy, and racial hegemony.

This is a useful breakdown. More detail in the next post.

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June 25, 2018

Race as Nation (on Omi and Winant, 2014)

Today the people I have personally interacted with are: a Russian immigrant, three black men, a Japanese-American woman, and a Jewish woman. I live in New York City and this is a typical day. But when I sign onto Twitter, I am flooded with messages suggesting that the United States is engaged in a political war over its racial destiny. I would gladly ignore these messages if I could, but there appears to be somebody with a lot of influence setting a media agenda on this.

So at last I got to Omi and Winant‘s chapter on “Nation” — on theories of race as nation. The few colleagues who expressed interest in these summaries of Omi and Winant were concerned that they would not tackle the relationship between race and colonialism; indeed they do tackle it in this chapter, though it comes perhaps surprisingly late in their analysis. Coming to this chapter, I had high hopes that these authors, whose scholarship has been very helpfully thorough on other aspects of race, would shed light on the connection between nation and race that would help shed light on the present political situation in the U.S. I have to say that I wound up being disappointed in their analysis, but that those disappointments were enlightening. Since this edition of their book was written in 2014 when their biggest target was “colorblindness”, the gaps in their analysis are telling precisely because they show how educated, informed imagination could not foresee today’s resurgence of white nationalism in the United States.

Having said that, Omi and Winant are not naive about white nationalism. On the contrary, they open their chapter with a long section on The White Nation, which is a phrase I can’t even type without cringing at. They paint a picture in broad strokes: yes, the United States has for most of its history explicitly been a nation of white people. This racial identity underwrote slavery, the conquest of land from Native Americans, and policies of immigration and naturalization and segregation. For much of its history, for most of its people, the national project of the United States was a racial project. So say Omi and Winant.

Then they also say (in 2014) that this sense of the nation as a white nation is breaking down. Much of their chapter is a treatment of “national insurgencies”, which have included such a wide variety of movements as Pan-Africanism, cultural insurgencies that promote ‘ethnic’ culture within the United States, and Communism. (They also make passing reference to feminism as comparable kind of national insurgency undermining the notion that the United States is a white male nation. While the suggestion is interesting, they do not develop it enough to be convincing, and instead the inclusion of gender into their history of racial nationalism comes off as a perfunctory nod to their progressive allies.)

Indeed, they open this chapter in a way that is quite uncharacteristic for them. They write in a completely different register: not historical and scholarly analysis, and but more overtly ideology-mythology. They pose the question (originally posed by du Bois) in personal and philosophical terms to the reader: whose nation is it? Is it yours? They do this quite brazenly, in a way the denies one the critical intervention of questioning what a nation really is, of dissecting it as an imaginary social form. It is troubling because it seems to be subtle abuse of the otherwise meticulously scholarly character of their work. They set of the question of national identity as a pitched battle over a binary, much as is being done today. It is troublingly done.

This Manichean painting of American destiny is perhaps excused because of the detail with which they have already discussed ethnicity and class at this point in the book. And it does set up their rather prodigious account of Pan-Africanism. But it puts them in the position of appearing to accept uncritically an intuitive notion of what a nation is even while pointing out how this intuitive idea gets challenged. Indeed, they only furnish one definition of a nation, and it is Joseph Stalin’s, from a 1908 pamphlet:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture. (Stalin, 1908)

So much for that.

Regarding colonialism, Omi and Winant are surprisingly active in their rejection of ‘colonialist’ explanations of race in the U.S. beyond the historical conditions. They write respectfully of Wallerstein’s world-system theory as contributing to a global understanding of race, but do not see it as illuminating the specific dynamics of race in the United States very much. Specifically, they bring up Bob Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America as a paradigmatic of the application of internal colonialism theory to the United States, then pick it apart and reject it. According to internal colonialism (roughly):

There’s a geography of spatial arrangement of population groups along racial line
There is a dynamic of cultural domination and resistance, organized on lines of racial antagonism
Theirs systems of exploitation and control organized along racial lines

Blauner took up internal colonialism theory explicitly in 1972 to contribute to ‘radical nationalist’ practice of the 60’s, admitting that it is more inspired by activists than sociologists. So we might suspect, with Omi and Winant, that his discussion of colonialism is more about crafting an exciting ideology than one that is descriptively accurate. For example, Blauner makes a distinction between “colonized and immigrant minorities”, where the “colonized” minorities are those whose participation in the United States project was forced (Africans and Latin Americans) while those (Europeans) who came voluntarily are “immigrants” and therefore qualitatively different. Omi and Winant take issue with this classification, as many European immigrants were themselves refugees of ethnic cleansing, while it leaves the status of Asian Americans very unclear. At best, ‘internal colonialism’ theory, as far as the U.S. is concerned, places emphasis on known history but does not add to it.

Omi and Winant frequently ascribe theorists of race agency in racial politics, as if the theories enable self-conceptions that enable movements. This may be professional self-aggrandizement. They also perhaps set up nationalist accounts of race weakly because they want to deliver the goods in their own theory of racial formation that appears in the next chapter. They see nation based theories as capturing something important:

In our view, the nation-based paradigm of race is an important component of our understanding of race: in highlighting “peoplehood,” collective identity, it “invents tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds. 1983) and “imagined community” (Anderson, 1998). Nation-based understandings of race provide affective identification: They promise a sense of ineffable connection within racially identified groups; they engage in “collective representation” (Durkheim 2014). The tropes of “soul,” of “folk,” of hermanos/hermanas unidos/unidas uphold Duboisian themes. They channel Marti’s hemispheric consciousness (Marti 1977 [1899]); and Vasconcelo’s ideas of la raza cosmica (1979, Stavans 2011). In communities and movements, in the arts and popular media, as well as universities and colleges (especially in ethnic studies) these frameworks of peoplehood play a vital part in maintaining a sense of racial solidarity, however uneven or partial.

Now, I don’t know most of the references in the above quotation. But one gets the sense that Omi and Winant believe strongly that race contains an affective identifciation component. This may be what they were appealing to in a performative or demonstrative way earlier in the chapter. While they must be on to something, it is strange that they have this as the main takeaway of the history of race and nationalism. It is especially unconvincing that their conclusion after studying the history of racial nationalism is that ethnic studies departments in universities are what racial solidarity is really about, because under their own account the creation of ethnic studies departments was an accomplishment of racial political organization, not the precursor to it.

Omi and Winant deal in only the most summary terms with the ways in which nationalism is part of the operation of a nation state. They see racial nationalism as a factor in slavery and colonialism, and also in Jim Crow segregation, but deal only loosely with whether and how the state benefited from this kind of nationalism. In other words, they have a theory of racial nationalism that is weak on political economy. Their only mention of integration in military service, for example, is the mention that service in the American Civil War was how many Irish Americans “became white”. Compare this with Fred Turner‘s account of how increased racial liberalization was part of the United States strategy to mobilize its own army against fascism.

In my view, Omi and Winant’s blind spot is their affective investment in their view of the United States as embroiled in perpetual racial conflict. While justified and largely information, it prevents them from seeing a wide range of different centrist views as anything but an extension of white nationalism. For example, they see white nationalism in nationalist celebrations of ‘the triumph of democracy’ on a Western model. There is of course a lot of truth in this, but also, as is abundantly clear today when now there appears to be a conflict between those who celebrate a multicultural democracy with civil liberties and those who prefer overt racial authoritarianism, there is something else going on that Omi and Winant miss.

My suspicion is this: in their haste to target “colorblind neoliberalism” as an extension of racism-as-usual, they have missed how in the past forty years or so, and especially in the past eight, such neoliberalism has itself been a national project. Nancy Fraser can argue that progressive neoliberalism has been hegemonic and rejected by right-wing populists. A brief look at the center left media will show how progressivism is at least as much of an affective identity in the United States as is whiteness, despite the fact that progressivism is not in and of itself a racial construct or “peoplehood”. Omi and Winant believed that colorblind neoliberalism would be supported by white nationalists because it was neoliberal. But now it has been rejected by white nationalist because it is colorblind. This is a difference that makes a difference.

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June 19, 2018

Omi and Winant on economic theories of race

Speaking of economics and race, Chapter 2 of Omi and Winant (2014), titled “Class”, is about economic theories of race. These are my notes on it

Throughout this chapter, Omi and Winant seem preoccupied with whether and to what extent economic theories of race fall on the left, center, or right within the political spectrum. This is despite their admission that there is no absolute connection between the variety of theories and political orientation, only general tendencies. One presumes when reading it that they are allowing the reader to find themselves within that political alignment and filter their analysis accordingly. I will as much as possible leave out these cues, because my intention in writing these blog posts is to encourage the reader to make an independent, informed judgment based on the complexity the theories reveal, as opposed to just finding ideological cannon fodder. I claim this idealistic stance as my privilege as an obscure blogger with no real intention of ever being read.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – Ironically, I see now that these blog posts get a steady stream of traffic. For my formally published work on this topic, please see “Racial categories in machine learning”, coauthored with Bruce Haynes.

Omi and Winant devote this chapter to theories of race that attempt to more or less reduce the phenomenon of race to economic phenomena. They outline three varieties of class paradigms for race:

Market relations theories. These tend to presuppose some kind theory of market efficiency as an ideal.
Stratification theories. These are vaguely Weberian, based on classes as ‘systems of distribution’.
Product/labor based theories. These are Marxist theories about conflicts over social relations of production.

For market relations theories, markets are efficient, racial discrimination and inequality isn’t, and so the theory’s explicandum is what market problems are leading to the continuation of racial inequalities and discrimination. There are a few theories on the table:

Irrational prejudice. This theory says that people are racially prejudiced for some stubborn reason and so “limited and judicious state interventionism” is on the table. This was the theory of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who is not to be confused with the Chicago sociologist Howard Becker, whose intellectual contributions were totally different. Racial prejudice unnecessarily drives up labor costs and so eventually the smart money will become unprejudiced.
Monopolistic practices. The idea here is that society is structured in the interest of whites, who monopolize certain institutions and can collect rents from their control of resources. Jobs, union membership, favorably located housing, etc. are all tied up in this concept of race. Extra-market activity like violence is used to maintain these monopolies. This theory, Omi and Winant point out, is sympatico with white privilege theories, as well as nation-based analyses of race (cf. colonialism).
Disruptive state practices. This view sees class/race inequality as the result of state action of some kind. There’s a laissez-faire critique which argues that minimum wage and other labor laws, as well as affirmative action, entrench race and prevent the market from evening things out. Doing so would benefit both capital owners and people of color according to this theory. There’s a parallel neo-Marxist theory that says something similar, interestingly enough.

It must be noted that in the history of the United States, especially before the Civil Rights era, there absolutely was race-based state intervention on a massive scale and this was absolutely part of the social construction of race. So there hasn’t been a lot of time to test out the theory that market equilibrium without racialized state policies results in racial equality.

Omi and Winant begin to explicate their critique of “colorblind” theories in this chapter. They characterize “colorblind” theories as individualistic in principle, and opposed to the idea of “equality of result.” This is the familiar disparate treatment vs. disparate impact dichotomy from the interpretation of nondiscrimination law. I’m now concerned that this, which appears to be the crux of the problem of addressing contests over racial equality between the center and the left, will not be resolved even after O&W’s explication of it.

Stratification theory is about the distribution of resources, though understood in a broader sense than in a narrow market-based theory. Resources include social network ties, elite recruitment, and social mobility. This is the kind of theory of race an symbolic interactionist sociologist of class can get behind. Or a political scientist’s: the relationship between the elites and the masses, as well as the dynamics of authority systems, are all part of this theory, according to Omi and Winant. One gets the sense that of the class based theories, this nuanced and nonreductivist one is favored by the authors … except for the fascinating critique that these theories will position race vs. class as two dimensions of inequality, reifying them in their analysis, whereas “In experiential terms, of course, inequality is not differentiated by race or class.”

The phenomenon that there is a measurable difference in “life chances” between races in the United States is explored by two theorists to which O&W give ample credit: William J Wilson and Douglas Massey.

Wilson’s major work in 1978, The Declining Significance of Race, tells a long story of race after the Civil War and urbanization that sounds basically correct to me. It culminates with the observation that there are now elite and middle-class black people in the United States due to the uneven topology of reforms but that ‘the massive black “underclass” was relegated to permanent marginality’. He argued that race was no longer a significant linkage between these two classes, though Omi and Winant criticize this view, arguing that there is fragility to the middle-class status for blacks because of public sector job losses. His view that class divides have superseded racial divides is his most controversial claim and so perhaps what he is known best for. He advocated for a transracial alliance within the Democratic party to contest the ‘racial reaction’ to Civil Rights, which at this point was well underway with Nixon’s “southern strategy”. The political cleavages along lines of partisan racial alliance are familiar to us in the United States today. Perhaps little has changed.
He called for state policies to counteract class cleavages, such as day care services to low-income single mothers. These calls “went nowhere” because Democrats were unwilling to face Republican arguments against “giveaways” to “welfare queens”. Despite this, Omi and Winant believe that Wilson’s views converge with neoconservative views because he doesn’t favor public sector jobs as a solution to racial inequality; more recently, he’s become a “culture of poverty” theorist (because globalization reduces the need for black labor in the U.S.) and believes in race neutral policies to overcome urban poverty. The relationship between poverty and race is incidental to Wilson, which I suppose makes him ‘colorblind” in O&W’s analysis.

Massey’s work, which is also significantly reviewed in this chapter, deals with immigration and Latin@s. There’s a lot there, so I’ll cut to the critique of his recent book, Categorically Unequal (2008), in which Massey unites his theories of anti-black and anti-brown racism into a comprehensive theory of racial stratification based on ingrained, intrinsic, biological processes of prejudice. Naturally, to Omi and Winant, the view that there’s something biological going on is “problematic”. They (being quite mainstream, really) see this as tied to the implicit bias literature but think that there’s a big difference from implicit bias due to socialization vs. over permanent hindbrain perversity. This is apparently taken up again in their Chapter 4.

Omi and Winant’s final comment is that these stratification theories deny agency and can’t explain how “egalitarian or social justice-oriented transformations could ever occur, in the past, present, or future.” Which is, I suppose, bleak to the anti-racist activists Omi and Winant are implicitly aligned with. Which does raise the possibility that what O&W are really up to in advocating a hard line on the looser social construction of race is to keep the hope of possibility of egalitarian transformation alive. It had not occurred to me until just now that their sensitivity to the idea that implicit bias may be socially trained vs. being a more basic and inescapable part of psychology, a sensitivity which is mirrored elsewhere in society, is due to this concern for the possibility and hope for equality.

The last set of economic theories considered in this chapter are class-conflict theories, which are rooted in a Marxist conception of history as reducible to labor-production relations and therefore class conflict. There are two different kinds of Marxist theory of race. There are labor market segmentation theories, led by Michael Reich, a labor economist at Berkeley. According to this research, when the working class unifies across racial lines, it increases its bargaining power and so can get better wages in its negotiations with capital. So the capitalist in this theory may want to encourage racial political divisions even if they harbor no racial prejudices themselves. “Workers of the world unite!” is the message of these theories. An alternative view is split labor market theory, which argues that under economic pressure the white working class would rather throw other races under the bus than compete with them economically. Political mobilization for a racially homogenous, higher paid working class is then contested by both capitalists and lower paid minority workers.

Reflections

Omi and Winant respect the contributions of these theories but think that trying to reduce race to economic relations ultimately fails. This is especially true for the market theorists, who always wind up introducing race as an non-economic, exogenous variable to avoid inequalities in the market.

The stratification theories are perhaps more realistic and complex.

I’m most surprised at how the class-conflict based theories are reflected in what for me are the major lenses into the zeitgeist of contemporary U.S. politics. This may be because I’m very disproportionately surrounded by Marxist-influenced intellectuals. But it is hard to miss the narrative that the white working class has rejected the alliance between neoliberal capital and low-wage immigrant and minority labor. Indeed, it is arguably this latter alliance that Nancy Fraser has called neoliberalism. This conflict accords with the split labor market theory. Fraser and other hopeful socialist types argue that a triumph over identity differences is necessary to realize racial conflicts in the working class play into the hands of capitalists, not white workers. It is very odd that this ideological question is not more settled empirically. It may be that the whole framing is perniciously oversimplified, and that really you have to talk about things in a more nuanced way to get real headway.

Unless of course there isn’t any such real hope. This was an interesting part of the stratification theory: the explanation that included an absence of agency. I used to study lots and lots of philosophy, and in philosophy it’s a permissible form of argument to say, “This line of reasoning, if followed to its conclusion, leads to an appalling and untenable conclusion, one that could never be philosophically satisfying. For that reason, we reject it and consider a premise to be false.” In other words, in philosophy you are allowed to be motivated by the fact that a philosophical stance is life negating or self-defeating in some way. I wonder if that is true of sociology of race. I also wonder whether bleak conclusions are necessary even if you deny the agency of racial minorities in the United States to liberate themselves on their own steam. Now there’s globalization, and earlier patterns of race may well be altered by forces outside of it. This is another theme in contemporary political discourse.

Once again Omi and Winant have raised the specter of “colorblind” policies without directly critiquing them. The question seems to boil down to whether or not the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality can be mitigated better by removing those mechanisms that are explicitly racial or not. If part of the mechanism is irrational prejudice due to some hindbrain tick, then there may be grounds for a systematic correction of that tick. But that would require a scientific conclusion about the psychology of race that identifies a systematic error. If the error is rather interpreting an empirical inequality due to racialized policies as an essentialized difference, then that can be partially corrected by reducing the empirical inequality in fact.

It is in fact because I’m interested in what kinds of algorithms would be beneficial interventions in the process of racial formation that I’m reading Omi and Winant so closely in the first place.

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June 6, 2018

Notes on Omi and Winant, 2014, “Ethnicity”

I’m continuing to read Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (2014). These are my notes on Chapter 1, “Ethnicity”.

There’s a long period during which the primary theory of race in the United States is a theological and/or “scientific” racism that maintains that different races are biologically different subspecies of humanity because some of them are the cursed descendants of some tribe mentioned in the Old Testament somewhere. In the 1800’s, there was a lot of pseudoscience involving skull measurements trying to back up a biblical literalism that rationalized, e.g., slavery. It was terrible.

Darwinism and improved statistical methods started changing all that, though these theological/”scientific” ideas about race were prominent in the United States until World War II. What took them out of the mainstream was the fact that the Nazis used biological racism to rationalize their evilness, and the U.S. fought them in a war. Jewish intellectuals in the United States in particular (and by now there were a lot of them) forcefully advocated for a different understanding of race based on ethnicity. This theory was dominant as a replacement for theories of scientific racism between WWII and the mid-60’s, when it lost its proponents on the left and morphed into a conservative ideology.

To understand why this happened, it’s important to point out how demographics were changing in the U.S. in the 20th century. The dominant group in the United States in the 1800’s were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs. Around 1870-1920, the U.S. started to get a lot more immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Ireland. These often economic refugees, though there were also people escaping religious persecution (Jews). Generally speaking these immigrants were not super welcome in the United States, but they came in at what may be thought of as a good time, as there was a lot of economic growth and opportunity for upward mobility in the coming century.

Partly because of this new wave of immigration, there was a lot of interest in different ethnic groups and whether or not they would assimilate in with the mainstream Anglo culture. American pragmatism, of the William James and Jown Dewey type, was an influential philosophical position in this whole scene. The early ethnicity theorists, who were part of the Chicago school of sociology that was pioneering grounded, qualitative sociological methods, were all pragmatists. Robert Park is a big figure here. All these guys apparently ripped off W.E.B. Du Bois, who was trained by William James and didn’t get enough credit because he was black.

Based on the observation of these European immigrants, the ethnicity theorists came to the conclusion that if you lower the structural barriers to participation in the economy, “ethnics” will assimilate to the mainstream culture (melt into the “melting pot”) and everything is fine. You can even tolerate some minor ethnic differences, resulting in the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, and… the African-American. But that was a bigger leap for people.

What happened, as I’ve mentioned, is that scientific racism was discredited in the U.S. partly because it had to fight the Nazis and had so many Jewish intellectuals, who had been on the wrong end of scientific racism in Europe and who in the U.S. were eager to become “ethnics”. These became, in essence, the first “racial liberals”. At the time there was also a lot of displacement of African Americans who were migrating around the U.S. in search of economic opportunities. So in the post-war period ethnicity theorists optimistically proposed that race problems could be solved by treating all minority groups as if they were Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups. Reduce enough barriers and they would assimilate and/or exist in a comfortable equitable pluralism, they thought.

The radicalism of the Civil Rights movement broke the spell here, as racial minorities began to demand not just the kinds of liberties that European ethnics had taken advantage of, but also other changes to institutional racism and corrections to other racial injustices. The injustices persisted in part because racial differences are embodied differently than ethnic differences. This is an academic way of saying that the fact that (for example) black people often look different from white people matters for how society treats them. So treating race as a matter of voluntary cultural affiliation misses the point.

So ethnicity theory, which had been critical for dismantling scientific racism and opening the door for new policies on race, was ultimately rejected by the left. It was picked up by neoconservatives through their policies of “colorblindness”, which Omi and Winant describe in detail in the latter parts of their book.

There is a lot more detail in the chapter, which I found quite enlightening.

My main takeaways:

In today’s pitched media battles between “Enlightenment classical liberalism” and “postmodern identity politics”, we totally forget that a lot of American policy is based on American pragmatism, which is definitely neither an Enlightenment position nor postmodern. Everybody should shut up and read The Metaphysical Club.
There has been a social center, with views that are seen as center-left or center-right depending on the political winds, since WWII. The adoption of ethnicity theory into the center was a significant culture accomplishment with a specific history, however ultimately disappointing its legacy has been for anti-racist activists. Any resurgence of scientific racism is a definite backslide.
Omi and Winant are convincing about the limits of ethnicity theory in terms of: its dependence on economic “engines of mobility” that allow minorities to take part in economic growth, its failure to recognize the corporeal and ocular aspects of race, and its assumption that assimilation is going to be as appealing to minorities as it is to the white majority.
Their arguments about colorblind racism, which are at the end of their book, are going to be doing a lot of work and the value of the new edition of their book, for me at least, really depends on the strength of that theory.

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June 4, 2018

Notes on Racial Formation by Omi and Winant, 2014, Introduction

Beginning to read Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, Third Edition, 2014. These are notes on the introduction, which outlines the trajectory of their book. This introduction is available on Google Books.

Omi and Winant are sociologists of race and their aim is to provide a coherent theory of race and racism, particularly as a United States phenomenon, and then to tell a history of race in the United States. One of their contentions is that race is a social construct and therefore varies over time. This means, in principle, that racial categories are actionable, and much of their analysis is about how anti-racist and racial reaction movements have transformed the politics and construction of race over the course of U.S. history. On the other hand, much of their work points to the persistence of racial categories despite the categorical changes.

N.B. Sep. 17 2020 – These informal notes were part of the process of writing “Racial categories in machine learning”, with Bruce Haynes.

Since the Third Edition, in 2014, comes twenty years after the Second Edition, much of the new material in the book addresses specifically what they call colorblind racial hegemony. This is a response to the commentary and question around the significance of Barack Obama’s presidency for race in America. It is interesting reading this in 2018, as in just a few brief years it seems like things have changed significantly. It’s a nice test, then to ask to what extent their theory explains what happened next.

Here is, broadly speaking, what is going on in their book based on the introduction.

First, they discuss prior theories of race they can find in earlier scholarship. They acknowledge that these are interesting lenses but believe they are ultimately reductionist. They will advance their own theory of racial formation in contrast with these. In the background of this section but dismissed outright is the “scientific” racism and religious theories of race that were prevalent before World War II and were used to legitimize what Omi and Winant call racial domination (this has specific meaning for them). Alternative theories of race that Omi and Winant appear to see as constructive contributions to racial theory include:

Race as ethnicity. As an alternative to scientific racism, post WWII thinkers advanced the idea of racial categories as reducing to ethnic categories, which were more granular social units based on shared and to some extent voluntary culture. This conception of race could be used for conflicting political agendas, including both pluralism and assimilation.
Race as class. The theory attempted to us economic theories–including both Marxist and market-based analysis–to explain race. Omi and Winant think this–especially the Marxist theory–was a productive lens but ultimate a reductive one. Race cannot be subsumed to class.
Race as nationality. Race has been used as the basis for national projects, and is tied up with the idea of “peoplehood”. In colonial projects especially, race and nationality are used both to motivate subjugation of a foreign people, and is also used in resistance movements to resist conquest.

It is interesting that these theories of race are ambiguous in their political import. Omi and Winant do a good job of showing how multi-dimensional race really is. Ultimately they reject all these theories and propose their own, racial formation theory. I have not read their chapter on it yet, so all I know is that: (a) they don’t shy away from the elephant in the room, which is that there is a distinctively ‘ocular’ component to race–people look different from each other in ways that are hereditary and have been used for political purposes, (b) they maintain that despite this biological aspect of race, the social phenomenon of race is a social construct and primarily one of political projects and interpretations, and (c) race is formed by a combination of action both at the representational level (depicting people in one way or another) and at the institutional level, with the latter determining real resource allocation and the former providing a rationalization for it.

Complete grokking of the racial formation picture is difficult, perhaps. This may be why instead of having a mainstream understanding of racial formation theory, we get reductive and ideological concepts of race active in politics. The latter part of Omi and Winant’s book is their historical account of the “trajectory” of racial politics in the United States, which they see in terms of a pendulum between anti-racist action (with feminist, etc., allies) and “racial reaction”–right-wing movements that subvert the ideas used by the anti-racists and spin them around into a backlash.

Omi and Winant describe three stages of racial politics in United States history:

Racial domination. Slavery and Jim Crow before WWII, based on religious and (now discredited, pseudo-)scientific theories of racial difference.
Racial hegemony. (Nod to Gramsci) Post-WWII race relations as theories of race-as-ethnicity open up egalitarian ideals. Opens way for Civil Rights movement.
Colorblind racism. A phase where the official ideology denies the significance of race in society while institutions continue to reinforce racial differences in a pernicious way. Necessarily tied up with neoliberalism, in Omi and Winant’s view.

The question of why colorblind racism is a form of racism is a subtle one. Omi and Winant do address this question head on, and I am in particular looking forward to their articulation of the point. Their analysis was done during the Obama presidency, which did seem to move the needle on race in a way that we are still seeing the repercussions of today. I’m interested in comparing their analysis with that of Fraser and Gilman. There seem to be some productive alignments and tensions there.

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