US racial history oscillates between rare radical challenges and long reactionary periods

Evidence

We have argued that the U.S. racial regime is fundamentally despotic; radical challenges to it occur only rarely. The postWorld War II political trajectory of race that preoccupies this book was only the second such challenge in U.S. history; the first full-scale confrontation with racial despotism, of course, came a century earlier with the Civil War and Reconstruction. From the vantage point of the 21st century we can see that the political trajectory of race that we study in this book consists of a vital and radical democratic interruption of U.S. racial despotism, followed by an extended racial reaction. The all-too-brief Great Transformation, we argue, set in motion permanent political and cultural shifts that 40 years of racial reaction have been required to control. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 10

Categorization

• XREF: The Great Transformation/reaction cycle parallels Gramscian hegemony-interruption accounts and the vault’s existing racial-state claims.