Michael Omi, Howard Winant — Racial Formation in the United States

162 published claims from this book.

• A significant immigrant rights movement is historically unprecedented
• Anti-racist gains that cannot be reversed must instead be rearticulated by opponents.
• Antiracist movements politicized everyday racial experience once considered nonpolitical
• Antiracist resistance has been a central engine of democratic politics for five centuries.
• Black and Latino people exceed 60 percent of the US prison population.
• Black insurgency reveals fundamental limits of US democracy
• Black intellectual theory entered mainstream academia only when reframed by white scholars
• Black power emerged amid disillusionment with nonviolence and integration
• Black Seminoles marched from Florida to freedom in Mexico in 1850
• Both post-war Reconstruction eras failed to dismantle white supremacy.
• Bush framed Social Security privatization as anti-racist
• Chicago sociology framed racial inequality as civil society rather than state policy
• Civil rights legislation reshaped but did not end black class stratification.
• Civil rights reform fortified structural racism rather than undermining it
• Civil rights victories benefitted only middle-class blacks by 1967
• Class-based racial remedies were structurally unwelcome to the postwar U.S. racial state.
• Classifying humans by attributes is universal but never benign
• Collective racial subjectivity unified diverse movement demands at peak influence
• Colorblind ideology presents the ability to forget race as progress.
• Colorblind ideology reframes race consciousness itself as the racism to be ended.
• Colorblind ideology works only because it partly reflects real post-civil-rights gains
• Colorblind racial ideology and neoliberalism are mutually dependent political projects
• Colorblindness and neoliberalism rose together as mutually reinforcing hegemonies
• Colorblindness has become the hegemonic racial common sense in 21st-century America.
• Colorblindness ideology rearticulated civil rights gains into a new racism
• Community control rhetoric can serve conservative demobilization as readily as liberation
• Competing racial projects either uphold or challenge the racial order.
• Cruse judged the civil-rights movement non-revolutionary for lack of new ideas
• Direct-action civil rights politics already depended on identity politics and rearticulation
• Domestic antiracism has long been linked to Third World anti-imperial struggles.
• Each of the three movement currents failed in distinctive ways
• Ending de jure segregation stranded urban blacks in an underclass amid capital flight.
• Enslaved people claimed the masters’ own ideals more seriously than their masters did
• Ethnicity approaches treat race as voluntary culture rather than imposed corporeal status
• Ethnicity theories of race assume whiteness is the normalized standard
• Ethnicity theorists read the civil rights movement as a push for black assimilation
• Ethnicity theory blamed people of color rather than structural injustice for failed reform
• Ethnicity-based race theories presuppose whiteness as the unmarked norm, now eroding.
• European immigrants held an intermediate racial status and were induced to become white
• Failing race paradigms left a vacuum that neoconservatism and colorblind ideology filled
• FBI surveillance shifted from communist to black movement targets
• Formal citizenship rights trailed legal amendments by decades for nonwhites
• Formal civil rights gains can mask persistent structural racial disadvantage.
• Full citizenship need not require abandoning a distinct racial identity
• Full integration without distinct aims would erase black identity
• Garveyism linked black US economic strength to the redemption of Africa
• Gender categories divide humans into female objects and male subjects
• Great Society programs functioned as top-down incorporation rather than radical empowerment
• Highly despotic regimes cannot dominate too deeply and rely on indirect rule
• Human categorization is a universal navigational tool for social worlds
• Ideological rearticulation outperformed repression in defusing the civil rights movement.
• Ideological rearticulation was more effective than repression at containing the radical black movement.
• Immigrant labor undercuts black labor because reproduction costs are externalized
• Internal colonialism categories fail to capture contemporary reorganized racial structures
• Internal colonialism theory framed US racial subordination as domestic colonialism
• Interracial sex and hybridity marked U.S. nationbuilding from its start
• Japanese Americans could not naturalize as citizens until 1952
• Jewish left-liberal intellectuals were the key theorists of ethnicity
• Mainstream social science historically treated race as a static independent variable.
• Market theories fail to account for racial stratification.
• Marshall theorized rights as progressing from economic to political to social.
• Marx held that capitalism heightens rather than dissolves national antagonisms
• Marxist theory reduces racial conflict to class conflict within production relations
• Mass incarceration’s tools derived from slavery-era controls on blacks
• Merit is a socially constructed concept masking group-based allocation
• Mid-century civil rights gains remain uncontrolled by decades of backlash.
• Mid-century sociology framed racial problems as cultural dysfunctions amenable to value reform
• Migrants hold and strategically deploy multiple racial frameworks across transnational space.
• Moderate racial reform permitted ending legal inequality but forbade positive state action creating equality.
• Movement struggles over race’s social meaning, not just its material effects, drive its transformation.
• Myrdal attributed black inequality partly to black cultural pathology requiring assimilation
• National citizenship was historically assigned and withheld by race
• Neither Reconstruction era dismantled white supremacy’s basic patterns
• Neoclassical economics framed racial inequality as three forms of market disequilibrium.
• Neoconservatism began as a rightward racial realignment breaking with the civil rights movement
• Neoconservatism rebranded as imperial foreign-policy hawkishness by 2003.
• Neoconservatism rejected group rights by defending opportunity over outcome equality
• Neoliberalism emerged partly to contain postwar black and anti-imperial insurgencies.
• Neoliberalism functioned as a racial regime in the United States
• Neoliberalism produces a vast disenfranchised black and brown subaltern stratum in the US
• Neoliberalism required white supremacy to dismantle the welfare state
• Nineteenth-century law forced new immigrant groups into three state-recognized racial categories
• No one can stand outside race because society and identities are constituted by it
• Omi and Winant claim race is a master category of domination and inequality
• Only two brief U.S. periods allowed open democratic mobilization for people of color
• Open democratic mobilization by people of color was exceptional in US history
• Oppositional movements win by rearticulating common sense, not by armed insurrection
• Pan-Africanism persists by recognizing the ongoing exploitation of Africa
• Post-1970 radical movements of color traced directly to civil rights breakdown
• Post-1970 radical organizations of color grew from US-global racial policy linkages
• Post-apartheid citizenship replaced racial birthright with formal qualification.
• Post-civil-rights reform failure forced ethnicity theory toward blaming people of color
• Postwar paradigms each reduced race to a single category
• Postwar racial nationalist movements linked local resistance to global antiimperialism
• Postwar racial paradigms each relied on a single explanatory category.
• Postwar U.S. racial history reversed from despotism transformation to containment
• Prevailing social science wrongly treated race as static and merely correlational
• Race and gender are mutually defining relational concepts, not separate categories
• Race and gender interlock as socially constructed relational categories
• Race as a concept can overarch class, gender, and region to unify a nation
• Race consciousness can serve either democratic or despotic ends.
• Race consciousness survived through nation-based racial movements
• Race functioned as an organizing principle tying bodies to social statuses
• Race functions as an organizing glue binding national unity to racial division
• Race is a modern concept barely existing before the Enlightenment
• Race is a modern concept tied to early global capitalism and colonial conquest.
• Race is actively constructed through the ongoing act of defining groups.
• Race is an unstable, fully-fledged social fact like class or gender
• Race is not fixed but is perpetually reinvented through historical conflict
• Race is one among several constructed categories used to justify inequality
• Race must be analyzed as both structure and representation simultaneously.
• Race served as ideological glue binding an otherwise divided nation
• Race structures all major US institutions from the colonial era onward
• Racial bodies operate as tools for domination and resistance that ethnicity theory ignores
• Racial categories are unstable and shift through contested definition
• Racial code words yielded to reverse-racism allegations as a mass strategy
• Racial formation results from societywide interaction of racial projects across all scales and eras.
• Racial inequality is far deeper than class inequality in the United States.
• Racial minority movements split into entrists, socialists, and nationalists that overlapped
• Racial reaction mobilized via code words instead of repression alone
• Racial reform requires state response to movements that arise amid institutional decay
• Racial theory emerges in response to historical upheavals, not abstract curiosity.
• Racial theory rationalized conquest only after the founding violence was complete.
• Racial theory reduces to ethnicity, class, and nation paradigms
• Racialization extends racial meaning to previously unclassified groups or practices.
• Racialized mass violence recurs transnationally, from slavery through apartheid to mass incarceration
• Reagan’s backlash rhetoric repudiated civil rights through coded attacks
• Reducing race to ethnicity erases the body as a marker of domination and resistance
• Resistance to oppression also creates social categories of difference
• Resistance to racial domination has powered democratic politics for five centuries
• Right-wing politics rearticulated white supremacy into code words rather than overt racism
• Social movements succeed by offering adherents a new self-understanding
• Southern segregationists mounted insurrection-level obstruction after Brown
• Southern Strategy repositioned white supremacy as mainstream politics
• State policy, not market exchange, institutionalized US racial labor subordination.
• State racial classification shapes social status, opportunity, rights, and identity.
• Structural barriers drove minorities to reject ethnic identity for radical racial identity
• Structural racism built over historical time can be rebuilt by choice.
• Successful racial reforms fragmented protest movements into reformist and radical currents
• Symbolic racism is moralized resistance to racial change, not open hostility
• Tea Party ranks were permeated with racial and national-identity anxieties
• The 1960s civil rights era structurally recapitulated the earlier Reconstruction period
• The 1960s expansions of democratic rights were driven by popular mobilization
• The black movement’s lasting effect was creating new racial subjects, not legal wins
• The black movement’s legacy lay in creating new racial subjects, not legislative wins
• The Holocaust’s discrediting of eugenics, not prior scholarship, ended biological race science.
• The oppressed embraced the masters’ ideals more sincerely than the masters did
• The racial state operates through internalized identity, not just formal institutions
• The state contained black movements by both incorporating demands and repressing radicals.
• The state contained black protest through joint incorporation and repression
• The subprime crisis was the largest regressive racial redistribution in US history
• The tax revolt used coded racism against poor black people as its base
• The United States constituted itself as a racialized white nation from its origin
• U.S. communities of color are too internally stratified for nationhood claims
• US Marxists substituted national categories for racial ones out of theoretical necessity
• US national identity was constitutively constructed as a white nation
• US racial history oscillates between rare radical challenges and long reactionary periods
• Voting and citizenship rights were withheld from people of color until the mid-twentieth century
• White suffragists abandoned black allies to win southern ratification
• White supremacy shifted from explicit defense to coded euphemism after the 1960s.
• Whites are simultaneously privileged by and harmed by racism
• Wilson treats black poverty as cultural adaptation to structure, minimizing the role of race