Racial Formation

Omi and Winant

Racial Calculus

• “Phipps was designated as ‘black’ in her birth certificate in accordance with a 1970 state law which declared anyone with at least one-thirty-second ‘Negro blood’ to be black” (1).

Racial Calculus

• By the nineteenth century, American law declared that “one drop” of African blood kept a person from being white.

To “wash the African stain from one’s blood” required…

• 1796: John Stedman: 1/16 African, or three generations of whites, erased “blackness”

• 1801: Julien-Joseph Virey: 1/32 still consituted “blackness”

• Moreau de Saint-Mery (Santo Domingo): any more than 1/512 African blood constituted “blackness”

Omi and Winant

• “Today, to assert that variations in human physiognomy are racially based is to enter a constant and intense debate” (1).

“Is Race Real?”

• Brian Sykes, Oxford geneticist: “There’s no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all” (1).

• New England Journal of Medicine: “race is biologically meaningless”

• Indians and Pakistanis are genetically white

• “African-Americans are, on average, about 17 percent white” (3).

And yet…

Jews are more likely to carry mutations for Tay-Sachs

Africans are more likely to have sickle-cell anemia

Osteologists can identify “race” from measurement of bones, particularly in the skull.

“Racial Formation”

• “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” (2).

• Race is the product of a process.• Race must be regarded as the “central

axis” of social relations: the most important category of identity.

A History of Racial Formation

• 1600s: “Christian” vs. “savage.” The important distinction was religious belief.

• At mid-century, the distinctions shifted to “English” and “free”

• After about 1680, a new term appeared: “white”

• By 1700, African slaves formally identified by tribe came to be known generally as “black”

Racialization:

• “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship” (2).

“slave and black became synonyms”

• After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “the presumption was that people with black skins were slaves unless they could prove they were free” (Kenneth Stampp).

• Work performed, social status, economic potential came to be defined in terms of color.

• Frederick Law Olmsted reports that “no white man would ever do certain kinds of work (such as taking care of cattle, or getting water or wood to be used in the house); and if you asked a white man you had hired, to do such things, he would get mad and tell you he wasn’t a nigger.”

• By the nineteenth century, white workers tried to distance themselves from black slaves.

• They rejected the terms “master” (once referring to a master craftsman) and “servant” (household help)

• In 1807, a New England maid protested, “none but negers are sarvents”

“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 slavery” (3).

The “tremendous challenge”

• Under slavery:

• White workingclass = free, ambitious, poor but upwardly mobile

• Black = slave, servile, forever poor

• After the Civil War:

• These immigrants had the choice of being “racialized”—considered some degree of not white—or of assimilating.

• Assimilation meant learning the behaviors and culture of the majority whites (Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

• Because of religion, culture, and economic pressures, such a transition was sometimes difficult.

Blackface minstrelsy• European immigrants

mocked African-American class pretensions by imitating slaves on stage

• These minstrel plays allowed immigrant to learn “white” behavior by mocking and rejecting the other (“black”).

Race riots and Race-baiting

* Poor Irish immigrants were called “white niggers”

• The Irish on the West coast “engaged in vicious anti-Chinese race-baiting and…assaults on Chinese” (3).

• In Philadelphia alone, at least nine race riots occurred between 1829 and 1841, with others in nearby towns.

Race in Identity(Omi and Winant)

• Micro-level: race as experienced individually—”in work and family, as citizens and thinkers” (4).

• Macro-level: race as a collectivity, as it applies to “economic, political, and cultural/ideological” structures (4).

Habits of thought

• Thinking of “race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objec[t]ive” (5).

• Thinking of race as a “mere illusion, which an ideal social order would eliminate” (5).

• Both, say Omi and Winant, must be broken.

• If we think of race as an essence, we run the risk of…

• If we think of race as a temporary illusion, we run the risk of…

• If we think of race as a product, something created to answer the needs we have regarding politics, money, behavior, we run the risk of…