Placing Race: an Exploration of the Asian American Racial Formation Process

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Placing Race: An Exploration of the Asian American Racial Formation Process Though the concept of race seems everyday and simple, when analyzed fully, it extremely difficult to define. While almost everyone knows essentially which race(s) they are, most people would have a hard articulating the process racial identification. Throughout history, Asian American immigrants have had to struggle with racial identification. The Asian American racial formation process was defined by three factors: biological characteristics, legislative actions by the American government, and social relationships with other races. In “On the Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race,” Michael Omi and Howard Winant explore the different perspectives of the racial formation process. First, they look at the concept of race as an ideological construct, an illusory idea used to “meet an ideological need.” Omi and Winant refer to another historian, Barbara Fields, and how she interprets race as a tool used to solidify the boundary between freedom and slavery. They criticize the interpretation of race as an illusory construct by saying that it does not consider race-thinking’s salient and ever-present effects on social reality and also ignores the fact that race is an integral part of overall identity. Second, Omi and Winant analyze the interpretation of race as an objective condition, as a biological and scientific order. Overall, they criticize this opinion about race for three reasons: 1) it does not recognize the connection between race classification and racial meaning, which is a social (rather than biological) connection; 2) it does not consider the social and historical implications of the concept of race; and 3) it does not consider the social struggle to define ambiguous racial meanings and identifications. After criticizing two common perspectives of the concept of race, Omi and

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