Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
While sociologists generally do not deign to assume such a rhetorical mantle, Michael Omi and Howard Winant Suffuse the first edition of Racial Formation with the language of prophecy that they at once fear to articulate and hope to imagine otherwise. “What does the immediate future hold?” they anxiously wonder.
It is unlikely that we shall experience a period of racially based mobilization such as “the great transformation.” The conjuncture in which the 1960s racial upsurge occurred was almost certainly unique. The sophistication of the contemporary racial state and the transformed political landscape as a whole seem to thwart any short-term radical political initiative based in opposition to the racial order. (143)