Vicissitudes and Victories

Understanding Race

"There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate . . . The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle."

(Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Routledge: New York, 1994), 54-55)

posted by Joel @ 11:40 PM