The Meaning of Race

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how, according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, races are not born, but instead are fashioned out of societal constructions, historical needs and personal assumptions about what constitutes identity. The paper explains Omi's and Winant's view that race is a matter of history, current society and how people see themselves and have been taught to see themselves. The paper discusses the authors' term 'racial formation,' and their analysis of race's intersection with society on a macro and micro level.

From the Paper:

"This theory has political as well as personal implications. For example, Affirmative Action seeks "to overcome specific socially and historically constructed inequalities," not by creating race as a category, but by acknowledging the effects the categorization has had, previously, upon people's lives. (73) Omi and Winant first wrote their text during the 1980s, during the high tide of the Reagan conservative revolution, when the desire to forget America's negative racist past was often described as desiring to see people as just people, or just as Americans, rather than in terms of these American's racial categories. This supposed idealism, the authors suggest, merely creates more injustice, namely blindness to the social inequality created by racism because of past history."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Omi, Michael & Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1986/1994.

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