Racial Formation Michael Omi And Howard Winant

The Current Racial Project: Post Racial America Racial formation is a theory created by Michael Omi and Howard Winant and published in their book, Racial Formation in the United States, in 2008. The theory was an attempt to look at race as a social construct and how society categorized people based on race. The theory of racial formation can be broken into four steps: racialization, racial projects, the problem of racism, and racial politics (109). These steps comprise the major premises of racial formation. Throughout the explanation of the theory, the authors attempted to define what race truly means. It was found that race is fluid and changes based on the history and political climate of the time (112). Racial formation suggests that

Though its powers of racial classification, the state fundamentally shapes one’s social status, access to economic opportunities, political rights, and indeed one’s identity itself” (121). This can be seen in multiple areas of the control of the state. The first and most evident example of the role of the state in racial formation is the U.S. Census. The census takes data on many aspects of the population, age, marital status, income, and other information. But the census also collects what race you are (121). The census was established to collect data for statistical needs of the state but also classifies people based on race to the point where there has become a gap between state definitions and how a group or an individual identifies themselves (121). “The social and cultural impact of these categories is readily apparent. They inordinately shape both group identities and community formation patterns” (122). “Black” is the only category in the census which is defined by a specific racial designator (122). Omi and Winant believe that “projects take shape not only at the macro-level of racial policy-making, state activity, and collective action, but also at the level of everyday experience and personal interaction. Both dominant and subordinate groups and individual actors, both institutions and persons, carry out racial projects” (125). Based on what the state defines as race allows for it to allocate different resources to whom the state feels that it needs it. The way in which the state defines and understands racism is often defined very narrowly, were as it uses old definitions of racism that were very explicit (128). Now it is more common to see implicit or unconscious racism which allows institutions like the Supreme Court to permit and even encourage the denial and concealment of racist practices (129). “This is the situation that has allowed U.S. courts and mainstream