Reducing race to ethnicity erases the body as a marker of domination and resistance

Evidence

This was a reductionist view of race, one that neglected the importance of the body as a signifier of status, and as signifier of group belonging (Blumer 1958) in its own right. 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 how the body/somatics reappear in discussions of race, stigma, and social control — echoes Irving Goffman’s stigma work and contemporary work on bodily difference. — connects to: The apparent erasure of race and the ongoing racial ordering are one process — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 958; Race functions as a master status tied to oppression rather than demographic mixing — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 53
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘ocular’/‘phenomic’ dimension of race — what the body shows — as opposed to culture-based ethnicity.