From Julia N.
What exactly is race? This the first question that Omi and Winant’s come to address in their introduction to their article, “On the Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race.” They bring up two proposed explanations for the definition of race and provide further assessment on why the two explanations fail to represent what race is. The first proposed idea is that race is an ideological construct. The historian Barbara Fields writes this position in her article, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” An ideological construct is something that really does not exist in reality. Fields defines race to be an illusion that over time has become a reality. “An ideological explanation for certain distinct types of social inequality...transform an illusion into a reality.” After presenting this position Omi and Winant come to attack Fields’ explanation for race for two reasons. For one, Fields does not answer how race came to survive after the abolition of slavery. Also, race is imbedded in each one of us and for that reason has to exist in reality for it is a part of who we are. “Our society is so throughly racilized that to be without racial identity is to be in danger of having no identity...to be raceless is akin to being genderless.”
The second proposed explanation to explain race is to define it as an objective condition. This is leaning toward a biological fact that “one simply is one’s race.” Omni and Winant criticize this definition for it categories people into sections that may not signify who they are really are at all. “Nobody really belongs in these boxes; they are patently absurd reductions of human variation...many people don’t fit anywhere.”
Omi and Winant then come forward to bring their theory on the concept of race to be racial formation. Racial formation is defined to be a “process by which these socio-historical designations of race are created and manipulated.” That race does not have a constant definition for it continuously has changed and will continue change over time. This is done due to social pressures.
Based on this article which theory do you agree with: race as an ideological construct, an objective condition, or as a racial formation?
How can Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory be critized; does it really fit to serve to be the clear explanation for race?
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2 comments:
barbra is totally wrong, in my opinion
but omi and what's his name dont really define anything, it's like they say she's wrong, but we dont know what's right...
it's not cool
but it's a very well written summary
have a great day
It's true that Omi and Winant don't provide a clear definition, but they do provide a three-pronged approach (political relationships/global context/historical time), describing how a definition might be made.
They are somewhat ambiguous about their racial theories because they are describing something that would ideally be applied across all space and time.
Maybe it's somewhat presumptuous of them to discount Fields without replacing her with a better, clearer theory. Still, their ideas might open doors for the formation of a better theory.
I also agree -- it's a well-written summary.
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