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

Throughout Racial Formation in the United States, the authors do not deny the importance of other identity categories like class and gender for understanding oppression and its history. Instead, they suggest that race is “a master category, a kind of template for patterns of inequality, marginalization, and difference throughout U.S. history” (viii). They argue that race and racism have intersected with other forms of discrimination and oppression like sexism and have influenced how other identities are understood.

One example the authors give is how in the antebellum South, enslaved women were either seen through the maternal “Mammy” stereotype or as seductresses (248). The authors argue that anti-racist activism provided a model for other civil rights movements, like the feminist and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s: “While race is a template for the subordination and oppression of different social groups, we emphasize that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginalization and domination” (108). In other words, race has influenced how systems of oppression and “othering” have developed in the course of the history of the United States. The authors illuminate how under President Reagan’s administration,