Racial bodies operate as tools for domination and resistance that ethnicity theory ignores

Evidence

The racial body had served from the earliest days of conquest, and still serves today, as an imperfect but effective tool and marker: for both domination and resistance, for the assignment of identity and the recognition of difference, for the maintenance of social control and the drawing of boundaries among groups, and for claims of solidarity made both by the powerful and the powerless. To understand race as a variety of ethnicity, then, was to neglect stigma, exclusion, privilege, and violence, all characteristics inherent in “the mark of race,” the phenomic, “ocular” dimension (Van DeBurg 1992; Joseph 2006), as well as to such related radical and nationalist organizations as the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, and the Partido de la Raza Unida. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s existing racial-formation and CRT claims, and to Ferguson’s phenomic/ocular reading of the body as a signifier of status.
• DEFINE: Defines what gets lost when race is reduced to ethnicity: the visible body as a signifier of status and group belonging.