The Equity Report #3: The Canon of Ethnicity, Race, Class & Nation Formation in the United States

by Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.

Omi and Winant’s analysis of race in Racial Formation in the United States provides a foundational entry point for understanding the centrality of Ethnic Studies as both a discipline and a political project. Their argument that race is not a fixed biological category but a social construct shaped through historical struggle, political institutions, and everyday practices opened the door for a new grammar of power and identity (Omi & Winant, 2015). Through their three-part framework—paradigms of race and nation, racial formation, and the evolution of the Black Power movement—Omi and Winant trace how race functions as a system of meaning that organizes life chances, labor, and belonging in the United States. This shift from biologistic views of race to sociohistorical analysis reframed the study of difference itself. It is a cornerstone from which Ethnic Studies emerges: a discipline that refuses neutrality, insists on positionality, and links identity to structures of power.

Yet Omi and Winant are only one point in the constellation of thinkers who built the intellectual architecture of Ethnic Studies. The field itself was born from resistance—anchored in the 1968–69 BSU-led student strikes at San Francisco State College —and formed as a collective demand to center knowledge produced by communities of color. Ethnic Studies, in its broadest sense, interrogates empire, labor, gender, and nation through the eyes of the colonized. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) marks an early and enduring foundation of this decolonial consciousness. Fanon, writing from the crucible of Algerian revolution, framed colonialism as both material domination and psychological violence, arguing that liberation requires the decolonization of the mind. His call to transform the colonized subject from object to agent echoes through every Ethnic Studies classroom, reminding us that the struggle for liberation is both epistemic and existential (Fanon, 1961).

The mass European immigration of the early twentieth century—what Omi and Winant (2015) identify as the nucleus of ethnicity theory—spurred new paradigms that challenged religious and biologistic accounts of race. Ethnicity theory arose as a counter-narrative, yet often risked reductionism, focusing narrowly on “racially defined groups” without addressing power (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 41). Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) offers a radical intervention here. Freire’s insistence that education is never neutral but either liberatory or oppressive redefines how we think about “ethnicity” as consciousness. His concept of conscientização—critical awareness through dialogue—becomes a pedagogical backbone of Ethnic Studies classrooms, where knowledge production is an act of emancipation rather than compliance.

Class-based theories, as Omi and Winant outline, include market relations, stratification, and split labor market approaches—all illuminating the economic dimensions of racial inequality. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) expands this conversation by arguing that Western Marxism’s universalism erases the specificity of racial capitalism. Robinson contends that the Black radical tradition evolved not from European class struggle but from African ontologies of resistance, maroon communities, and anti-colonial insurgency. This perspective transformed how scholars understand labor, capitalism, and race—not as separate phenomena but as co-constitutive structures.

In the nation-based paradigm, as Omi and Winant (2015) note, race sits at the intersection of nation, class, and gender. The global movements of Pan-Africanism and the rise of cultural nationalism transformed the politics of belonging. Angela Davis’s Women, Race & Class (1981) builds on this by revealing how race, gender, and class are inseparable in the making of both oppression and liberation. Her analysis of the abolitionist and suffrage movements exposes how Black women were systematically excluded from dominant feminist and labor histories. In turn, Ethnic Studies inherited her intersectional lens, understanding that racial liberation is impossible without dismantling patriarchy and capitalism simultaneously.

Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) expanded the geography of Ethnic Studies. Writing from the literal and metaphorical border between the U.S. and Mexico, Anzaldúa envisioned a “new mestiza consciousness” that refuses rigid binaries—male/female, white/nonwhite, citizen/alien—and instead inhabits hybridity as resistance. Her work destabilized national boundaries and inspired Chicana feminist theory as a vital subfield within Ethnic Studies. Cherríe Moraga and Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) similarly redefined the canon by foregrounding lived experience as theory. Their call—“theory in the flesh”—insists that intellectual work grounded in the body and in community is not less rigorous, but more so.

The critique of empire within Ethnic Studies was also shaped by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which exposed how Western scholarship constructed the East as exotic, backward, and inferior to justify colonization. Said’s framework of cultural representation made visible how power operates through discourse, language, and images—a revelation that deeply influenced Asian American Studies and comparative Ethnic Studies alike. Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996) built upon Said’s analysis, showing how Asian immigrant labor was simultaneously exploited and erased from the national narrative. Lowe’s articulation of “the intimacies of four continents”—the interdependence of colonialism, slavery, and immigration—reframes the U.S. not as a nation of immigrants but as a racialized empire.

In tracing these lineages, Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993) provides a sweeping narrative of U.S. history through the voices of those historically silenced—Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian communities. Takaki’s text makes clear that Ethnic Studies is not about inclusion into an existing narrative but about reconstructing the narrative itself. His work aligns with the insurgent roots of the discipline, which emerged to contest Eurocentric curricula and redefine what counts as knowledge.

Thus, Ethnic Studies does not exist merely as a reactionary field, it is a reclamation. It emerged as a demand for self-definition in a society structured to deny it. If Omi and Winant teach us that race is a project under constant formation, then the collective Ethnic Studies canon teaches us that culture is not only reactive but creative. What, then, would culture look like if it were not born in resistance to domination? If not reactionary, perhaps culture would become pure articulation—a celebration of experience unburdened by survival. In that imagined future, Ethnic Studies would not simply be a discipline of critique but a discipline of becoming: a field that continues to map the architectures of equity, liberation, and belonging across the ever-evolving terrain of humanity.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

Davis, A. (1981). Women, race, & class. Random House.

Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniversary ed.; M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1970)

Lowe, L. (1996). Immigrant acts: On Asian American cultural politics. Duke University Press.

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (2015). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (4th ed.). SUNY Press. (Original work published 1981)

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2015). Racial formation in the United States (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Robinson, C. J. (2021). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition (3rd ed.). University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1983)

Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism (25th anniversary ed.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1978)

Takaki, R. (2008). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America (Rev. ed.). Back Bay Books. (Original work published 1993)