The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society, in both
collective action and personal practice. In the process, racial categories
themselves are formed, transformed, destroyed and reformed. We use the
term racial formation to refer to the process by which social, economic and
political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories,
and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings.
Crucial to this formulation is the treatment of race as a central axis of social
relations which cannot be subsumed under or reduced to some broader
The continuing persistence of racial ideology suggests that these racial myths and
stereotypes cannot be exposed as such in the popular imagination. They are, we think, too
essential, too integral, to the maintenance of the US social order. Of course, particular
meanings, stereotypes and myths can change, but the presence of a system of racial
meanings and stereotypes, of racial ideology, seems to be a permanent feature of US
Film and television, for example, have been notorious in disseminating images of racial
minorities which establish for audiences what people from these groups look like, how they
behave, and "who they are.” The power of the media lies not only in their ability to reflect
the dominant racial ideology, but in their capacity to shape that ideology in the first place.
D. W. Griffith's epic Birth of a Nation, a sympathetic treatment of the rise of the Ku Klux
Klan during Reconstruction, helped to generate, consolidate and "nationalize" images of
blacks which had been more disparate (more regionally specific, for example) prior to the
film's appearance.1 In US television, the necessity to define characters in the briefest and
most condensed manner has led to the perpetuation of racial caricatures, as racial
stereotypes serve as shorthand for scriptwriters, directors and actors, in commercials, etc.
Televisions tendency to address the "lowest common denominator" in order to render
programs "familiar" to an enormous and diverse audience leads it regularly to assign and
reassign racial characteristics to particular groups, both minority and majority.
Racialization: The Historical Development of Race
In the United States, the racial category of "black" evolved with the consolidation of racial
slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo,
Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered "black" by an ideology of exploitation based on racial
logic—the establishment and maintenance of a "color line." This of course did not occur
overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded
the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding
of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not
only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed:
"From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward
the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of
self-identification appeared—white."19
We employ the term racialization to signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously
racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Racialization is an ideological
process, an historically specific one. Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
conceptual (or, if one prefers, "discursive") elements and emerges from the struggles of
competing political projects and ideas seeking to articulate similar elements differently. An
account of racialization processes that avoids the pitfalls of US ethnic history remains to
Racialization: The Historical Development of Race
In the United States, the racial category of "black" evolved with the consolidation of racial
slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo,
Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered "black" by an ideology of exploitation based on racial
logic—the establishment and maintenance of a "color line." This of course did not occur
overnight. A period of indentured servitude which was not rooted in racial logic preceded
the consolidation of racial slavery. With slavery, however, a racially based understanding
of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not
only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed:
"From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward
the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of
self-identification appeared—white."
We employ the term racialization to signify the extension of racial meaning to a previously
racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group. Racialization is an ideological
process, an historically specific one. Racial ideology is constructed from pre-existing
conceptual (or, if one prefers, "discursive") elements and emerges from the struggles of
competing political projects and ideas seeking to articulate similar elements differently. An
account of racialization processes that avoids the pitfalls of US ethnic history remains to
Particularly during the nineteenth century, the category of "white" was subject to
challenges brought about by the influx of diverse groups who were not of the same Anglo-
Saxon stock as the founding immigrants. In the nineteenth century, political and ideological
struggles emerged over the classification of Southern Europeans, the Irish and Jews,
among other "nonwhite" categories. Nativism was only effectively curbed by the
institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within,
By stopping short of racializing immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, and by
subsequently allowing their assimilation, the American racial order was reconsolidated in
the wake of the tremendous challenge placed before it by the abolition of racial slavery.22
With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, an effective program for limiting the emergent
class struggles of the later nineteenth century was forged: the definition of the working
class in racial terms—as "white." This was not accomplished by any legislative decree or
capitalist maneuvering to divide the working class, but rather by white workers themselves.
Many of them were recent immigrants, who organized on racial lines as much as on
traditionally defined class lines. The Irish on the West Coast, for example, engaged in
vicious anti-Chinese race-baiting and committed many pogrom-type assaults on Chinese
in the course of consolidating the trade union movement in California.
Thus the very political organization of the working class was in important ways a racial
project. The legacy of racial conflicts and arrangements shaped the definition of interests
and in turn led to the consolidation of institutional patterns (e.g., segregated unions, dual
labor markets, exclusionary legislation) which perpetuated the color line within the working
class. Selig Perlman, whose study of the development of the labor movement is fairly
Exclusion Law passed by Congress in 1882, was doubtless the most important single factor in the
labor and the labor movement might have become a conflict of races instead of one of classes.
More recent economic transformations in the US have also altered interpretations of racial
identities and meanings. The automation of southern agriculture and the augmented labor
demand of the postwar boom transformed blacks from a largely rural, impoverished labor
force to a largely urban, working-class group by 1970. When boom became bust and
liberal welfare statism moved rightwards, the majority of blacks came to be seen,
increasingly, as part of the "underclass," as state "dependents." Thus the particularly
deleterious effects on blacks of global and national economic shifts (generally rising
unemployment rates, changes in the employment structure away from reliance on labor
intensive work, etc.) were explained once again in the late 1970s and 1980s (as they had
been in the 1940s and mid-1960s) as the result of defective black cultural norms, of
familial disorganization, etc.26 In this way new racial attributions, new racial myths, are
affixed to “blacks.”27 Similar changes in racial identity are presently affecting Asians and
Latinos, as such economic forces as increasing Third World impoverishment and
indebtedness fuel immigration and high interest rates, Japanese competition spurs
resentments, and US jobs seem to fly away to Korea and Singapore.
Once we understand that race overflows the boundaries of skin color, super-exploitation,
social stratification, discrimination and prejudice, cultural domination and cultural
resistance, state policy (or of any other particular social relationship we list), once we
recognize the racial dimension present to some degree in every identity, institution and
social practice in the United States—once we have done this, it becomes possible to
speak of racial formation. This recognition is hard-won; there is a continuous temptation to
think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objective, as (for example)
one of the categories just enumerated. And there is also an opposite temptation: to see it
as a mere illusion, which an ideal social order would eliminate.
In our view it is crucial to break with these habits of thought. The effort must be made to
understand race as an unstable and "decentered" complex of social meanings constantly
being transformed by political struggle.
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