In Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formations text, they define race and discussed race as a social concept, race ideology and racial identity and the historical development of race. Through Omi and Winant’s writing, I looked at the concept of race through different perspectives. In the beginning, the authors explain that the “race consciousness…is largely a modern phenomenon” as it has been an issue in the current politics. The text included that when the Europeans, considered to be the white race, saw the natives when they first came into the New World, they, “Europeans wondered if the natives of the New World were indeed human being with redeemable souls”. To the Europeans, the natives that were much darker and looked different than them led them to questions if the they were even “human…show more content… Weber focused his basis of defining race through social and political factors rather than biological explanations that many people define race as. The authors touch upon the racial split in the United States between the black and the white color in which historically, the white race as always been seen as the “pure” race while “any racial intermixture makes one ‘nonwhite’’. One statement that was in the text that I found interesting was when the authors discussed what race is and how its determined in different countries. In the United States there are many races not just black in white but it was stated that “In contemporary British politics the term black is used to refer to all nonwhites”. According to Omi and Winan’ts analysis, there were only two racial groups, you were either the white race or black even if your skin color wasn’t, you would still be considered black which was odd for what I am used
