Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s

Racial thinking, the authors argue, is mostly a “modern concept” (245). Aside from a few earlier precedents, its historical origins were with the displacement and mass murder of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the beginnings of the use of enslaved African people as free labor: “Slavery rapidly acquired a racial logic as the European settlement of North American colonies developed a tremendous need for mass labor” (247). Physical traits like skin color and hair texture were taken as physical proof of inherent differences in characteristics between races that justified enslavement or conquest. This physical, observable evidence is described by the authors as race’s “ocularity” (247). The very physicality and ocularity of race allowed for its “politicization” in what would become the United States (248).

Gender and class intersect with race in many ways. However, race provides a model or complicates the boundaries. The authors describe how the politicization of race continues to this day, with the media’s focus on minority crime and police violence against Latinos and Black people. The three approaches to race—ethnicity theory, Marxism, and nation theory—all failed to ultimately resolve the problems created by the politicization of race. Still, the authors credit the three paradigms as contributing to their own analysis (253).