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

The authors address the theory that race and racism are shaped by economic class or market relationships. There are three ways class is understood as driving race: “market, stratification, and class conflict” (53). These theories, which downplay the significance of race in and of itself and see race as starting with economic forces, are shared by different political groups, including Marxists and neoliberals.

According to the market theory of race, the practice of granting special economic privileges to certain groups or competition over economic resources gives the incentive for maintaining racist practices. The theory also holds that prejudice and government interventions are forces that interfere with the market, keeping capitalist markets from naturally economically discouraging racist practices and discrimination. The authors point out that in such theories, racism is either seen as something people directly economically benefit from or as fundamentally “irrational” (57).

Under stratification theory, it is believed that society is organized in a strict hierarchy of economic classes. This hierarchy is reinforced through social networks and barriers. According to this theory, even an apparently racist hierarchy is determined by class and economic interests. One example the authors give is William J. Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (1978). Wilson argues that deindustrialization drastically increased economic inequalities. The civil rights victories of the 1960s freed Black people from being denied economic opportunities because of discrimination, only for them to face the economic problems and class hierarchy created by deindustrialization. In sum, Wilson suggests that “class divides have superseded racial ones within the black community” (60).

However, the authors counter that the US government, far from building on the reforms of the civil rights movement, enacted conservative policies, such as Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996. Nor did the government enact expansions of the welfare state like Wilson advocated, such as offering state-funded day care services. Instead, the authors argue that the United States has seen middle-class and working-class Black people negatively impacted by cuts to, and restrictions on, welfare and public education, health, and social security benefits.

By contrast, Douglas S. Massey in the 2008 book Categorically Unequal asserted that the United States has long had a system of racial stratification. Rather than seeing race as something socially and historically constructed, Massey finds “that prejudice derives from ineluctable features of human biology and evolution, rather than patterns of socialization, however deeply ingrained over multiple generations” (64). The authors reject this view. They also criticize both Massey and Wilson for discounting the historical agency of minority groups and how they achieve political and social change through their activism.

The class conflict view on racism draws heavily on Marxism, which never really addressed race, although Marxists were involved in anti-racism activism. In the Marxist view, racism is a tool used by employers to justify their exploitation of the working class. Some Marxists embraced split labor market theory, where white workers support discrimination in order to compete less with Black workers, even for low-wage jobs. With exceptions like the conflict between Black auto workers and a white union (67), however, the authors argue that ongoing struggles since the 1980s have mostly not involved both race and class intertwined together. These struggles include deindustrialization, growing income gaps and the decline of wealth held by minority groups, and the erosion of the power of labor unions.

According to the authors, the problem with the Marxist view of race is that racial tensions are just an aspect of class conflict, which the authors describe as “economic determinism” (67). With the rise of neoliberalism and worsening economic inequality, the authors explain, “intra-class conflict along racial lines became less central to inequality” (69).

With the theory of nation, the central idea is that whiteness is conceived of as a core part of the identity of the United States. The authors note, though, that concepts of American national identity and whiteness have changed over time. Even so, both before and after the American Revolution, what would become the United States “has always been riven by racial conflict” (76). White nationalism both unified the United States and created divisions between races as the United States depended on the enslavement of Black people and expanded into territories populated by people of non-Anglo descent. Over time, changing demographics and civil rights movements have made the United States “less white and less patriarchal” (78).

Early in the history of the United States, Black people and Native Americans were dehumanized. Irish migrants to the United States in the 19th century were also exploited and subjected to discrimination. However, following the US Civil War and the involvement of many Irish soldiers in the conflict, the Irish came to be seen as white. Following the conquest of what is now the western United States from Mexico after the Mexican-American War, the native population was disenfranchised and stripped of their land. Industrialization brought with it large numbers of migrants from eastern and southern Europe. By “whitening” these workers and making them part of the nation (80), conflict with the large populations of new industrial workers could be avoided. Gender also played a role in the history of the United States with practices like mixed-race relationships affecting the development of US racial categories and practices.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, dissatisfaction with civil rights moderates and with United States politics led to the rise of Black nationalism, a movement seeking to create a separate nation for the African American community. It represented a broader rejection of the idea of assimilationism. Instead, it identified “colonized” communities as opposed to colonizers. However, Black nationalism sprung from several movements that existed before the 1960s civil rights movement, such as Pan-Africanism, a movement by African Americans to support the causes and political independence of Black people in Africa.

Another was cultural nationalism, which has also existed among Asian American, Native American, and Latino communities. These movements pushed for ethnic studies programs at universities, arts movements, and media recognition of the history of prominent individuals and minority communities. Although the authors criticize cultural nationalism for focusing on culture over political action, such movements add an “immense amount of interpretive and expressive work, [while] community organization based on culturally grounded themes such as music and art, has burst onto the American scene in recent decades” (89).

Another line of thought was the Marxist “Black Nation Thesis,” which argued that Black people in the Southern United States “constituted a nation” while Black people in the Northern United States were a minority who could and should unite with white workers in the region (90). Combining elements of these views is internal colonialism. In this view, groups like African Americans and Latin Americans are treated like colonized populations by being pressured to live in certain areas, a “dynamic of cultural domination and resistance” and a system of exploitation (91), and being subjected to control.

In the book Racial Oppression in America (1972), Robert Blauner distinguishes between forced migrants, with African Americans and Latinos who lived in California before the Mexican-American War comprising that group, and voluntary migrants. However, the authors question this argument, pointing out that the Irish and Russian Jewish migrants of the late 19th/early 20th century were fleeing extreme poverty, famine, and brutal persecution. The authors note that internal colonization does not explain riots in ghettos, which can fit with normal expressions of political resistance by any repressed group, and that it ignores the political differences within minority groups.

The authors conclude that the nation-based explanation for race is also flawed. Specifically, “extra-economic coercion […] is a general feature of neoliberalism” (94). By reducing race to “peoplehood” (95), the authors argue that the nationalist theory of race reduces race’s complexity in the United States. The failure to address race’s complexity is the same flaw the authors see in ethnicity theory, which reduces race to just cultural differences, and class, which sees race as just a manifestation of economic inequality.