4.10: The Theory of Racial Formation

Michael Omi and Howard Winant initiated new work in the 1980s that would have the social sciences rethinking just about everything. They argued that race is not a fixed biological or cultural category but an ‘unstable’ and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (Omi and Winant 1986:66). This framework focused on the processes by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.

In their 1986 book, Racial Formation in the United States, Omi and Winant presented a powerful new framework for understanding race, moving beyond older ideas that saw it as either a biological essence or a simple illusion. They argued that race is not a thing a person is, but rather an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings that are constantly being created, transformed, and destroyed through political struggle. This means that what race means—which groups are considered races, how they are categorized, and the attributes assigned to them—has changed dramatically throughout history. For example, the ‘Irish race’ was once considered a separate and inferior biological group in the U.S., but today, Irishness is an ethnicity within the White racial category. This shift wasn’t natural; it was the result of social and political conflict, demonstrating that race is a product of history and power, not biology.

Omi and Winant coined the term racial projects to describe the mechanism of this ongoing change. A racial project is any attempt to define, organize, or distribute resources along racial lines. It can be as vast as a government policy like slavery or segregation, as concrete as a Hollywood stereotype, or as personal as an individual’s act of discrimination or resistance. Crucially, racial projects work by simultaneously creating racial meanings (representations) and organizing social structures (institutions). For instance, the “War on Drugs” was a racial project that created a meaning linking Blackness with criminality, while its policies—like harsher sentencing for crack cocaine—structured a reality of mass incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black communities.

The overarching process by which these countless racial projects clash and combine over time is what Omi and Winant call racial formation. They see race not as a fixed element of the social structure but as a master category of American society that is perpetually being “formed” through political and cultural struggle. From the Civil Rights Movement to debates over immigration policy and affirmative action, society is engaged in a continuous battle over the definition and significance of race. This theory empowers us to see that because race is socially constructed through struggle, it is also something that can be deconstructed and challenged. There is nothing inevitable about racial hierarchies; they are the temporary outcomes of ongoing conflicts, meaning they can be changed through new movements, new ideas, and new racial projects that fight for a more just and equal society.