LING55AC Lecture 11 - Racial Formation in the US (Guest Lecture/Omi & Winant 2015 Chp. 4)

Racial Formation (Omi & Winant)

The socio-historical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed through ongoing political struggles and institutional practices

The Five Processes of the Racial State

• Conquest

• Colonization

• Dispossession

• Slavery

• Environmental Destruction

Racial Capitalism

A system where capital accumulation relies on leveraging and intensifying racial distinctions, and where race serves as a tool to naturalize and rationalize unequal distributions of resources, power, and rights

Racial Project

An effort or initiative to organize and distribute resources and social power along particular racial lines

The Afterlife of Slavery (Saidiya Hartman / Christina Sharpe)

The concept that historical slavery is not just a bygone event, but an ongoing "singularity" or weather-like condition—reflecting skewed life chances, institutional inequality, and anti-blackness that persist long past legal emancipation