Racial Formation

A concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies

(1) Sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, + destroyed; (2) racialization, racial projects, + racial politics

(1) Racialization is the process of imparting meaning to previously racially unclassified relationships, practices, or groups; (2) a racial project is simultaneously an interpretation of racial identities/meanings and an effort to organize and distribute resources along racial lines; (3) racial politics (the political structure of race relations; shifted from a racial despotism based on coercion to a racial hegemony based on consent)

(1) Resistance by White parents to changes in school policies or practices that would limit their children's advantages, justified by appeal to the "ostensive" aspect of organizational routines (Lewis & Diamond 2015); (2) New York state lawsuit in the 1990s alleging minority students in public schools receive lesser expenditures per pupil than White students, and the state's response that the "real" problem is poverty + troubled families (Lopez 2003); (3) the shift in the criterion for citizenship + rights in the early U.S. from property ownership to legal recognition of Whiteness (Harris 1993)

(1) Manifestation of racism across key institutional domains, (2) unjustly gained resources/power of whites, (3) ideologies/attitudes of white supremacy that rationalize the system ("white racial frame")

The set of racial fields across structural, cultural, and collective-emotional matrices of relations, which organize conflict over the conservation or transformation of relations of domination

The social field comprises a structured space of positions determining (and determined by) volume and types of capital possessed by position-holders; racial fields are a kind of social field in which "racial capital" (the capacity to determine the relative value of all resources in a field) operates at nested levels (groups, nations, global system)

(1) 2-D plane with one axis running from low-to-high economic/political power and one from low-to-high black capital, whereby positions high in each form of capital tend to be unstable; (2) in a subordinate position within the "field of power," characterized by a structural antagonism b/t holders of economic/political privilege vs. those w/ educational/cultural preeminence

(1) Racial fields organize symbolic position-takings (or places within universes of meaning) + (2) affective emotion-takings (or sentiments of attachment/solidarity and hostility/aggression); each are structured according to binary schemes between dominated/dominating poles within "races as fields" and "fields of races"

Dispositional or habitual (routine), the projective (purpose), and the practical evaluative (judgment)

(1) Hierarchy of racial categories which structures resource allocation + relations b/t groups (thereby shaping their dissimilar interests), (2) the distinct racial character of some conflicts or "racial contestation," (3) "racism" or segment of the ideological structure that crystallizes racial ideas and performs practical functions

(1) Conflating categories w/ groups [but social groups do not need to be conscious of their status in order to exist], (2) reifying race [but fluidity of boundaries does not negate existence nor interests of racial groups b/c, once constructed, real hierarchical relations of opposition emerge], and (3) assuming essential distinction b/t "race" + "ethnicity" [but distinction b/t them is warranted given their unique histories, typical attribution, and relationship to power]

(1) Compared w/ their darker-skinned counterparts, lighter-skinned Latinos + Asians are attaining higher SES, more likely to identify as White, and more likely to marry and reside in neighborhoods w/ Whites; (2) race conflict will be buffered by the intermediate group, color gradations within groups will grow in salience, and Americans will begin making nationalist appeals and claiming they are "beyond race"

(1) Tribal: blood quantum, descendant of tribal member, residency, community participation, or tribal vote; consequences: rights to participate in tribal politics, cultural life, and/or access to residence on tribal land; (2) gov: blood quantum, residency, land ownership, or tribal citizenship; consequences: economic resource distribution or rights, applicability of legal protections, religious freedoms, and right to market artwork as authentically Indian-made

(1) Insufficient attention to whites' role in perpetuating racial domination; (2) overemphasis on the ideological dimension of race and the state as a site of racial conflict; (3) assumption of a transition from racial dictatorship based on domination/coercion to racial democracy based on consent/hegemony; and (4) rejection of the black 'radical' tradition and black counter-framing scholarship

(1) Racial identity (self-identification), (2) racial self-classification (category chosen among a limited set of options), (3) observed race (race others believe you to be), (4) reflected race (an individual's belief of how others classify them), (5) phenotype (aspects of a person's physical appearance socially understood as relevant to racial classification), and (6) ancestry (known or genetic)

(1) Racial fluidity, or fluctuation within one dimension over time or across contexts; and (2) racial boundaries, which can be "bright" or "blurred" but only change over longer periods of time than most dynamism in dimensionality or fluidity is observed