Racial Formations in the United States
Constructing Racial Categories
The article delves into the social construction of race using the 1982-83 Susie Guillory Phipps case as a focal point.
Phipps sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records to change her racial classification from black to white.
This was due to a 1970 state law stating anyone with at least "Negro blood" was black.
Phipps, who always identified as white, faced a catastrophic shift in her identity due to this legal definition.
The case highlights the complexities and contradictions inherent in defining race.
Legal and social implications of racial classification are examined.
Assistant Attorney General Ron Davis argued racial classification was necessary for federal record-keeping and genetic disease prevention programs.
Phipps’s attorney, Brian Begue, argued the classification was unconstitutional and inaccurate, citing research that most Louisiana whites have at least "Negro" ancestry.
The court ultimately upheld the state's right to classify racial identity.
The personal impact of racial classification is explored.
The article notes that while her social relationships might not change, she would have to grapple with her new "hybridized" condition.
What Is Race?
The article challenges essentialist and purely ideological views of race.
It argues against the notion of race as fixed, concrete, and objective, as well as the idea that it is a mere illusion.
Race is defined as an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings.
It is constantly transformed by political struggle.
Race signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.
The selection of human features for racial signification is a social and historical process.
Unlike gender, there is no biological basis for racial distinctions.
The article addresses the question of whether we can dispense with the concept of race.
It acknowledges the practical difficulties of discarding widely held beliefs.
It argues that race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world.
The authors propose understanding race as an element of social structure rather than an irregularity within it.
It should be seen as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion.
This perspective informs the theoretical approach of racial formation.
Racial Formation
Racial formation is defined as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.
The theory of racial formation is elaborated in two steps.
Racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.
Racial formation is linked to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled.
The racial formation perspective views race as a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.
Efforts to explain racial inequality as a purely social structural phenomenon are insufficient.
Examinations of racial difference as a matter of cultural attributes also fall short.
Racial projects link structure and representation.
A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.
Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized.
Racial Formation as a Macro-Level Social Process
Interpreting the meaning of race frames it socially and structurally.
Charles Murray's statement on welfare reform exemplifies a neoconservative racial project: he advocates for the repeal of legislation that requires differential treatment according to race, promoting a color-blind approach.
Murray argues that race is "not a morally admissible reason for treating people differently."
Recognizing the racial dimension in social structure interprets the meaning of race.
Justice Thurgood Marshall’s statement on minority set-aside programs exemplifies a liberal racial project: he argues that government actions should remedy the effects of prior racism.
Marshall emphasizes that the government cannot retreat from its policy responsibilities and declare itself "color-blind" without perpetuating differential treatment.
The Political Spectrum of Racial Formation
Examples of racial projects exist across the political spectrum.
Neoconservative racial projects deny the significance of race, leading to a color-blind politics.
Liberal racial projects affirm the significance of race, leading to egalitarian state policies.
Far-right projects uphold biologistic and racist views of difference, advocating for white supremacist policies.
New-right projects overtly claim to hold color-blind views but covertly manipulate racial fears for political gains.
Radical democratic projects invoke notions of racial difference in combination with egalitarian politics and policy.
Nationalist projects stress the incompatibility of racially defined group identity with the legacy of white supremacy, advocating for separation.
Racial Formation as Everyday Experience
At the micro-social level, racial projects link signification and structure as applications of common sense.
People often unconsciously "notice" race, using it to provide clues about who a person is."
Encountering someone who cannot be easily racially categorized can be a source of discomfort.
Interpreting racial meanings depends on preconceived notions of a racialized social structure.
Comments such as, "Funny, you don’t look black,” betray an underlying image of what black should be.
People are expected to act out their apparent racial identities.
Stereotypes shape racial experience and condition meaning.
Examples include the black banker harassed by police, the Latino or white kid rapping in Afro patois, and the assumption that non-white colleagues are less qualified.
Interpreting experience in racial terms shapes relations to institutions and organizations.
Differences in skin color are expected to explain social differences.
Temperament, sexuality, intelligence, athletic ability, and aesthetic preferences are presumed to be fixed and discernible from race.
Confidence and trust in others, sexual preferences and romantic images, tastes in music, films, dance, and sports, and ways of talking, walking, eating, and dreaming become racially coded.
Despite calls for color-blind attitudes, skin color differences continue to rationalize distinct treatment of racially identified individuals and groups.
Society is suffused with racial projects, large and small, to which all are subjected.
Everybody learns some version of the rules of racial classification and their own racial identity.
Race becomes common sense--a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world.
A vast web of racial projects mediates between the discursive or representational means in which race is identified and signified and the institutional and organizational forms in which it is routinized and standardized.
Racial formation is a synthesis of the interaction of racial