Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s

“The concept of race, developing unevenly in the Americas from the arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere down to the present, has served as a fundamental organizing principle of the social system. Practices of distinguishing among human beings according to their corporeal characteristics became linked to systems of control, exploitation, and resistance.”

A central part of the authors’ argument is that race is socially constructed. In fact, the authors suggest that the history of the concept of race itself is intertwined with that of the United States and/or North America (245-46). The authors also define Race as a Master Category, one that set the template for other forms of discrimination and oppression.

“A cursory glance at American history reveals that far from being colorblind, the United States has always been an extremely race-conscious nation. From the very inception of the republic to the present moment, race has been a profound determinant of one’s political rights, one’s location in the labor market, and indeed one’s sense of identity.”

The authors emphasize that race has always been a central part of the history of the United States. Even though they argue that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a major turning point, race and racism remain central to the American experience in the present day.

“To treat race as a matter of ethnicity is to understand it in terms of culture.”

For the authors, what defines race as ethnicity is the idea that race/ethnicity is something cultural. Each ethnicity represents its own distinct culture.

“Ethnicity theory began as a liberal challenge to religious and biologistic accounts of race. It operated on cultural territory, between the parameters of assimilationism and pluralism.”

Ethnicity theory replaced the more conservative and racist theory that race was determined by biology. At the same time, ethnicity theory suggested that, eventually, different ethnicities would become assimilated into the dominant ethnicity and culture.

“Either U.S. society was unwilling to tackle the endemic racial injustices that prevailed within it, or people of color were unwilling to grasp the opportunities newly becoming available. Ethnicity-based approaches could not accept the former view; was this not what the Panthers and other radicals were claiming?”

The authors argue that ethnicity theory began as the liberal or progressive perspective on race. However, over time, it became the basis of the neoconservative view on race—that one’s community’s culture, not systemic racism, is what holds back individuals from minority communities. These shifting conceptions on race and racial discrimination reflect The Role of Historical Trajectories.

“Market approaches conceive of racial phenomena rather monolithically in terms of (in)equality and discrimination in exchange. Racial interests are either cast in these terms or assumed to be irrational.”

According to the authors, this is the major problem with both the Marxist and neoliberal views on race: Racism is simply either a way for the white working class to protect their interests against workers from other racial groups or is just an irrational action that can be potentially resolved through the free market (67).

“From a Marxist standpoint, the key relationship in capitalism is that of production, the social relationship between the capitalist class and the working class, the owners and the producers. Marxism explains racial conflict as occurring within the ‘social relations of production,’ that is, in terms of class conflict.”

Marxist theory sees all historical processes and conflicts as springing from conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie. For the authors, this is an oversimplification of what gives meaning to race and leads to racism and racial conflict (67-69).

“White rule in North America, before and after 1776, has always been riven by racial conflict. The centrality of white/male/property-holders’ rule has been both taken for granted and unstable. There have continually been two contradictory principles at work: national unity and racial division.”

The authors assert throughout the book that racism and white supremacy have long been powerful forces in the politics and society of the United States, both before and after the American Revolution. However, the process is not a simple and straightforward one, but one filled with “[c]ontradictions” (2), such as the contradiction between racial conflict and national unity highlighted here.

“[Race] cannot be reduced to cultural differences—as the ethnicity-based paradigm suggests. And it cannot be reduced to a type of inequality either—as the class-based paradigm suggests. Although race contains all these dimensions, it exceeds them all as well.”

The authors reject the theories that race in the history of the United States is driven by ethnicity, culture, class, or nationalism. Instead, they propose that race contains all of these elements while also going beyond them. This is what the authors mean when they propose Race as a Master Category that influenced other categories of difference like gender, sexuality, and class, rather than race being influenced by ethnicity, class, and nation.

“The very act of defining racial groups is a process fraught with confusion, contradiction, and unintended consequences. Concepts of race prove to be unreliable as supposed boundaries shift, slippages occur, realignments become evident, and new collectivities emerge.”

Even though race has remained a dominant and influential force in the history of the United States, the authors point out here that the way race is understood and expresses itself and how anti-racist activists react to it are constantly changing.

“Race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”

By the authors’ definition, race is based on physical characteristics shared by certain groups, like skin color or hair texture (13). These characteristics become seen as demonstrating deeper, inborn traits shared by the entire racial community.

“Race is both a social/historical structure and a set of accumulated signifiers that suffuse individual and collective identities, inform social practices, shape institutions and communities, demarcate social boundaries, and organize the distribution of resources.”

This is the authors’ definition of race. By “accumulated signifiers,” the authors refer to physical and stereotypical characteristics attributed to racial groups that take on greater significance and provide evidence for assumptions about the racial community as a whole.

“The racial regime is enforced and challenged in the schoolyard, on the dance floor, on talk radio, and in the classroom as much as it is in the Supreme Court, electoral politics, or on the battlefield of Helmand province.”

A key point here is that both racism and anti-racist action are not simply matters of politics and the law. They also affect and are affected by everyday interactions, reflecting an important aspect of the theme of Historical Change and Activism.

“What is despotic, and what is democratic, about the U.S. racial state? Despite several historical ‘breaks’—when abolition of slavery, decolonization, and large-scale extensions of citizenship and civil rights took place—the contemporary world is still mired in the same racial history from which it originally sprang.”

There have been significant changes in race and racism over the course of the history of the United States, most notably the “Great Transformation” that took place with the civil rights movement (ix). Still, just because racism in recent decades has become more covert and subtle, this does not mean racism is no longer a problem.

“The forging of new collective racial identities during the 1950s and 1960s has been the enduring legacy of the new social movements pioneered by the black movement. Even though many anti-racist movement victories were rolled back, even though many movement organizations were marginalized by the combined powers of the racial state and racial reaction, the politicization of the social during this rising phase of the political trajectory of race has persisted.”

The significance of the civil rights movement or the “Great Transformation” is, in the authors’ point of view, not in the legislative victories the movement achieved. Instead, it is in the fact that the civil rights movement extended politics to the realm of everyday social interactions. This paved the way for later rights movement of the later 20th century, such as the feminist and the gay rights movements, reflecting Historical Change and Activism.

“The black movement redefined the meaning of racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society.” 

Just as the civil rights movement brought politics into social relationships and interactions, so too did it change the meaning of politics. With the civil rights movement, politics and political reform could include issues of race.

“Like the black movement it followed, racial reaction was a combination of initiatives; it contained disparate ‘racial projects.’ Over time, some of these would succeed and others would fail; some would develop and others would atrophy. The racial reaction was by no means driven by a unified political orientation, ideology, or strategic approach.”

While understandings of race and the strategies of anti-racism activists change over time, so too do the approaches of the opponents of anti-racism activists. Even though it is not always a conscious agenda, changing historical circumstances also affect the forces and language that maintain racist systems.

“Wallace’s right-wing politics were aimed squarely at white working-class voters who were threatened both by economic crisis and by the social upheavals of black liberation, feminism, the student and antiwar movements, and other manifestations of the ‘counterculture.’”

This is an example of what the authors mean when they say they still accept other explanations behind racial history, like nation, class, and ethnicity (253). Class conflict and economic resentment, according to Marxist theory, are still intertwined with racism.

“Racial discrimination and racial equality—in the neoconservative model—were problems to be confronted only at an individual level, once legal systems of discrimination such as de jure segregation had been eliminated.”

In both the neoconservative and neoliberal view of racial politics, racism is a matter of individual struggle. Race is only a problem that emerges from the cultural backgrounds of certain ethnicities.

“Reagan sought as far as possible to lessen government regulation of the economy, to reduce taxes, and to abandon the ‘social safety net’ in favor of an ‘individual responsibility’ ethos.”

The downward historical trajectory following the civil rights movement in the 1960s is, in the authors’ view, defined by neoliberalism and colorblindness. In terms of US politics since the Reagan administration, neoliberalism has come to dominate in terms of policies reducing the welfare state and ending government regulations over businesses and the financial industry.

“In its abandonment of the social, in its repudiation of the welfare state, in its passionate embrace of market rationality, neoliberalism gives its adherents permission to ignore the others, the darker nations, the poors, of the United States and the entire planet. Though harnessed to greed, neoliberalism is also about exercising unfettered power, both throughout the economy, the marketplace; and through the state.”

Here, the authors further define neoliberalism. While its effects are mainly economic, it is also closely related to race and racism, especially in how it impacts racial minorities in the United States and certain countries around the world.

“But from Obama’s point of view, he is ‘normalizing race,’ leading the United States, and socializing the nervous/racist white masses, to the ‘majority-minority’ demographic that is coming their way.”

The Obama administration did not represent a major turning point in the downward historical trajectory. Instead, the authors suggest that in important ways, Obama continued the historic trajectory of colorblindness and neoliberalism, once more reflecting The Role of Historical Trajectories in racial dynamics in the United States.

“Our aim in this book has been to provide a theoretically informed examination of the United States as a racially organized social and political system […] Race is certainly a modern concept: It is linked to the conquest of the Americas, the rise of capitalism, the circumnavigation of the globe, the Atlantic slave trade, and the rise of European and then United States domination of the Middle East, Indian Ocean, and Pacific rim as well.”

This passage summarizes the overall view of US history presented by the authors. Race is not just an influential category of identity that has provided a “template” (107). Instead, it is a product of historical trends and circumstances unique to the history of the United States.