Your Racial Identity Does Not Belong to You: Assessing Omi and Winant's Theory Noah Bader - Fourney College

Racial identity resides at an unfortunate intersection between social construction and real-life consequences. That is, while the concept of race—Black, White, Asian, Latino, etc.—may be nothing more than labels assigned to groups of varying ethnicities, one’s association with these categories has real ramifications, such as accessibility to well-paid jobs, education, and economic and social privileges. In their work Racial Formation, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that such consequences are an unavoidable product of the societal framework created by the state and social institutions. These consequences are unique to historical circumstances and inform racial identities not only at the level of society and nation—the macro level—but at the level of the individual—the micro level. Ideas related to race, then, are not static and essential qualities; rather, their definition is beholden to the current sociohistorical context. The same is true for racism. It is widely accepted that while overt and passionate racist aggression in the United States has largely dissipated, we continue to occupy an inherently racist society (Burns, 2). Omi and Winant argue that to understand racism, it is vital we understand how racial identities...