Movement struggles over race’s social meaning, not just its material effects, drive its transformation.

Evidence

Emerging from the territory of the everyday, lived experience of racism, and indeed embedded with that experience, the antiracist movement was all about the ways race was conceived, constructed, and practiced at both the macrolevel of institutional arrangements and social structure and the microlevel of everyday social relationships. The modern civil rights movement, and its allied antiracist movements, were struggles over these concepts, practices, and structures; they were conflicts about the social meaning of race. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 152

Categorization

• DEFINE: This states the core racial-formation thesis — that race’s social meaning is itself a contested political terrain.
• XREF: Anchors existing vault racial-formation and CRT claims by stating the conflict-over-meaning thesis that frames Omi-Winant’s model.