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

Racial thinking, the authors argue, is mostly a “modern concept” (245). Aside from a few earlier precedents, its historical origins were with the displacement and mass murder of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the beginnings of the use of enslaved African people as free labor: “Slavery rapidly acquired a racial logic as the European settlement of North American colonies developed a tremendous need for mass labor” (247). Physical traits like skin color and hair texture were taken as physical proof of inherent differences in characteristics between races that justified enslavement or conquest. This physical, observable evidence is described by the authors as race’s “ocularity” (247). The very physicality and ocularity of race allowed for its “politicization” in what would become the United States (248).

Gender and class intersect with race in many ways. However, race provides a model or complicates the boundaries. The authors describe how the politicization of race continues to this day, with the media’s focus on minority crime and police violence against Latinos and Black people. The three approaches to race—ethnicity theory, Marxism, and nation theory—all failed to ultimately resolve the problems created by the politicization of race. Still, the authors credit the three paradigms as contributing to their own analysis (253). Next, the authors discuss the idea of the historical trajectory of the recent era, which was from “the standpoint of the black movement and its allies […] a rising and then falling arc” (253). By this, the authors mean that the ultimate goal of the post-WWII civil rights movement, as envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr., was “a substantive reorganization of the U.S. social system” (254).

While ending legalized, official discrimination was something civil rights activists could achieve under the system, they were not allowed to “create racial equality through positive state action” or to end US overseas aggression, such as the Vietnam War (254). The United States system dealt with the more radical demands of the civil rights movement by incorporating its more moderate ideas. This began what the authors call the downward trajectory, which saw the rise of a “racial ideology” drawing from neoliberalism and colorblindness that “repudiated the civil rights agenda of state-enforced equality and state-based extension of democratic rights, without regressing to explicit white supremacy or reverting to explicit policies of Jim Crow segregation” (256).

The colorblindness partially driving present-day racial politics represents a “partial dismemberment” of the racist system (257). Explicitly racist laws and practices are disallowed, but more subtle forms of discrimination and structural forms of racism like racial inequality, racial profiling, and de facto school segregation are still tolerated in many places. Furthermore, 2013 saw one of the victories of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, weakened, which allowed states and local governments to enact discriminatory voter ID laws. Colorblindness is both a way of understanding race and is “aspirational” (259). This means colorblindness depends on a belief that there is both less discrimination and will continue to be less discrimination in the future.

However, the authors argue that race continues to be a powerful and constantly present force in society and politics. The authors propose that the best response to colorblindness and the fact that race remains a master category in the United States is to “recognize […] the contradictions” (262). In this way, racism can be addressed by understanding it as something that is constantly changing and being remade. At the same time, the authors recommend “extending the reach of anti-racism in workplace, politics, family, school, cultural life, and indeed every interaction” as another strategy (266). Through such approaches, the authors predict that it is possible that there could one day be another, more productive realignment in United States thought.