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

The authors argue that “colorblindness” has become the dominant way of thinking about race in the 21st-century United States. According to the theory of colorblindness, most if not all major problems with racism have been addressed through political reforms; it is therefore better to treat race as something that is no longer a major problem that requires further reforms to address but is something that is an individual problem or struggle.

This is one of the three approaches to understanding race in the history of the United States examined by the authors. Ethnicity theory holds that race is based on the existence of ethnic groups that are each culturally distinct. Ethnicity theory proposed that, in the United States, racism could be combatted through the assimilation of ethnic groups into the dominant culture.

The Great Society is a general term for a number of political reforms expanding the welfare state proposed in the years 1964 and 1965 during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. These include federal funding for education, Medicare (which gave health insurance to Americans who are disabled or are older than the age of 65), and Medicaid (which offers health insurance to Americans who live in a certain degree of poverty).

“Jim Crow” is a slang term for a number of laws enacted throughout the Southern United States after the US Civil War. These laws forced segregation in various places, including schools, businesses, public restrooms, and buses. They were repealed as a result of a series of Supreme Court decisions pushed for by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Class theory is based on Karl Marx’s argument that society is shaped by the conflict between the working classes and the middle and upper classes. Even race is ultimately a product of class conflict.

As the authors define it, neoconservatism, like neoliberalism, promotes ideas of individualism and the free market. Neoconservatism is favorable toward colorblind treatments of race, arguing that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s resolved most, if not all, major discriminatory issues in the United States. Instead, in the present day, members of minority groups are able to access the same economic opportunities as any other group and are only held back by flaws in their own communities’ cultures.

NAFTA was a major trade agreement reached between the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada under Bill Clinton’s presidential administration in 1992. The authors argue that it had a negative impact on the agricultural industry in northern Mexico and had similar repercussions in the United States itself (224). The authors present it as an example of the growing influence of neoliberalism over the politics of the United States and especially the Democratic Party.

Neoliberalism is a term for a political-economic philosophy that came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s into the present day. The authors describe neoliberalism as focusing on the individual and the belief that after the victories of the 20th-century civil rights movement, any individual has access to economic opportunity, regardless of race. Neoliberalism includes support for the market and finance as the dominant forces in politics and society and opposes government regulations and the welfare state.

The New Deal was a set of policy reforms enacted under the presidential administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1938 in response to the Great Depression. Although many of the New Deal reforms were rolled back in the decades since, the New Deal established the United States’ welfare state. Its most lasting reforms include Social Security, a government payment program for the elderly, and the establishment of the Federal Housing Association.

The term “ocularity” refers to the visibility of race, specifically that race is identified and defined through physical characteristics that are readily visible.

When the authors write about progressives, they are writing specifically about an early 20th-century intellectual and political movement in the United States. Progressives supported social reforms and expansions in people’s rights and opposed the theory that race was biological.

Emerging out of Marxist theories of class and class conflict, the split labor-market theory argues that racism emerges out of white workers’ desire to protect their jobs and wages from minority workers.

Subaltern refers generally to the subordinate or “othered” groups in a society or political system.

Unlike overt racism, such as bathroom and school segregation, systemic racism is the covert racism that can exist in social and political institutions. For example, a health insurance company may give better coverage to a white customer than to a Black customer.