Rebecca Borrero
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Chapter 1. Racial Formation in the United States. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Summary:
In this chapter, Omi and Winant trace the development of the ethnicity paradigm, which
challenged the biologistic view of race by defining race as a social construct, part of a larger
concept called ethnicity, rather than as an inherited trait. They describe the main divide in the
ethnicity paradigm, between those who thought that group identity could be maintained over
time and those who thought that racial minorities, like European groups such as Jews and
Italians, would eventually be assimilated into the “majority” culture. At the end of the chapter,
they offer a critique of the ethnicity paradigm, avoiding the common criticism of the theory that
it ignores race as a reason for discrimination. Instead they focus on the way that the “bootstraps
model” applies the European immigrant experience to all groups, regardless of whether or not
the analogy applies, and the implicit racism of viewing all blacks (and all Native Americans, and
all Latin Americans, and all Asian Americans) as a single ethnic group.
I.
Ethnicity
A. Three major stages of the ethnicity paradigm
1. Pre-1930s: new approach to race, challenging the accepted “biologistic” view
2. 1930s – 1965: the accepted approach of the progressives/liberals; defined
themes of assimilation and cultural pluralism
3. Post-1965: defends “conservative egalitarianism” against a perceived attack
on “group rights”
B. “Biologistic” view explained racial inferiority as “a natural order” after the end of
race-based slavery: intelligence, temperament, sexuality, and other traits were
attributed to race
C. Horace Kallen led the Progressive attack on biologism and introduced cultural
pluralism, while the “Chicago school” of sociology, led by Robert E. Park,
focused on assimilationism
D. The ethnicity paradigm treated race as a “social category”
E. Many factors contributed to ethnic group identity (ethnicity – “the result of a
group formation process based on culture and descent”): race, religion, language,
“customs,” nationality, political identification, etc.
F. At first the group attachment necessary for ethnic identity was thought to be
partially determined by biology, but later it was thought of as a social construct
G. The ethnic paradigm triumphed over biologism after the New Deal (vaguely
racially egalitarian) and World War II (antiracist on the Atlantic front, racist on
the Pacific front)
II.
III.
H. Consensual shift in 1948 when integrationists won the Democratic Party from the
segregationists
Theoretical Dominance
A. Chief debate between assimilationists and cultural pluralists: is it possible to
maintain ethnic group identity over time, and is ethnicity viable in the presence of
a supposedly majority culture (“Anglo-conformity”)?
B. Park and Kallen both focused on white European immigrants, not the racial
minorities of Afro-Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Asian
Americans
C. Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) raised ethnicity paradigm to the
dominant theory, calling for the “American Creed” to be extended to blacks
D. Myrdal was optimistic about the prospects of the assimilation of blacks – viewed
it as the most logical response to racism
E. 1960s: Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to link cultural
pluralism with political pluralism and close the gaps between assimilation and
cultural pluralism and between incorporation and preservation
F. They argued that assimilation takes place, but this creates a separate identity that
must sustain itself and deliver gains to the group: ethnic groups become interest
groups
G. The civil rights movement, seen through the ethnicity paradigm, was an attempt to
obtain “for blacks the same conditions that white ethnics had found”
H. Ethnicity theory was more successful in the South, fighting formal discrimination,
than it was in the North, where the problem was attitudinal prejudice
I. Racial minorities did not follow the “American ethnic pattern” of developing a
“postimmigration cultural identity” and “engagement in mainstream pluralist
politics” – many developed racial identity instead of ethnic identity
J. Ethnicity theory no longer worked for the demands of racial minorities, and so its
proponents began arguing that the state should avoid granting group rights with
“affirmative antidiscrimination policies” and restrict itself to “guarantees of
equality for individuals”
Some Critical Remarks on the Ethnicity Paradigm
A. Ethnicity paradigm is often criticized for ignoring race as a reason for exclusion,
discrimination, and extirpation
B. Two other problems: methodological issues created by reducing race to a part of
ethnicity and the paradigm’s inability to handle the particular traits of racial
minorities
C. “Bootstraps Model”: the success of an ethnic group is due to the group’s values;
the “European immigrant analogy applied to all without reservation”
1. “Common circumstances”: the universal conditions to which each ethnic
group must accommodate
D. “They All Look Alike”: can racial minorities be described in ethnic terms?
E. Ethnicity theory views blacks as a single ethnic group, as opposed to the various
subgroupings (Haitians, Jamaicans, Georgians, etc.) – whites are seen as diverse
(Italians, Irish, Germans, English, French, etc.) but all blacks “look alike”
F. Similar problems exist for Native Americans, Latin Americans, and Asian
Americans