In their classic work Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant declared, “The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (2nd ed., 1994, 55). More than a quarter century after the book’s first appearance in 1986, Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation enjoys wide influence. Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, takes stock of that influence and considers how the theory must be elaborated and revised to meet new challenges.

Thirteen essays in this collection assess Omi and Winant’s theory and chart new paths for its application. The book is organized into three parts—I: “Racial Formation Theory Revisited,” II: “Racial Projects and Histories of Racialization,” and III: “War and the Racial State”—bracketed by an editors’ introduction and a conclusion by Omi and Winant. The collection grew out of conference proceedings, and as we should expect, the quality of the individual chapters varies. Some are riveting, fully elaborated research studies; some are more provisional thought pieces, and consequently less satisfying. I focus on the book’s highlights.

Priya Kandaswamy’s “Gendering Racial Formation” criticizes Omi and Winant’s undertheorization of gender, and through a fascinating comparison of the the Freedmen’s Bureau in the 1860s and the U.S. Welfare State in the 1990s, shows how black women in the United States are recurrently “placed in a position in which they are simultaneously seen as racially inferior because they do gender wrong and as doing gender wrong because of their racial inferiority” (p. 39). Kandaswamy thus illustrates how gender and race are mutually imbricated, requiring them to be theorized together rather than apart.

Andrea Smith’s “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy” argues for greater integration of indigenous and critical race studies and activism. By “neglecting the analytics of race,” native peoples “have come to normalize white supremacist ideologies within the legal frameworks by which they struggle for ‘sovereignty’” (p. 78). At the same time, “nonindigenous peoples of color are set up to take part in a politics of genocide . . . because [of] their displacement onto indigenous lands” (pp. 80–81). Smith puts forward a provocative new framework for unifying the study of racial domination, identifying three interlocking pillars of white supremacy: “(1) slaveability/anti-Black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war” (p. 68).

Matthew Garcia’s “The Importance of Being Asian” focuses on Harry Kubo, a Japanese American farmer whose family fell victim to the Japanese internment but later established a mildly prosperous farm through hard work, pooling of resources, and disciplined saving. In the 1970s, Kubo cofounded the Nissei Farmers League to oppose César Chávez’s efforts to unionize field workers. In 1976, he became the face of opposition to Proposition 14, which would have permitted union organizers to come onto grower property “one hour before work, one hour after work, and at lunchtime” (p. 105). Kubo’s hardscrabble speech and disadvantaged background made him a politically appealing spokesman for the “Protect Private Property—No on 14” campaign. “Perhaps the most enduring and effective image of the ‘No on 14’ campaign,” writes Garcia, “was a poster of Kubo standing in front of his home with the following message in bold letters: ʻ34 years ago, I gave up my personal rights without a fight. . . . IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN’” (p. 109). Garcia’s study of Kubo shows how white power exploits nonwhite success to prove—against the balance of evidence—“the inherent equality of the U.S. system and the perseverance of the American dream” (p. 114).

Tomás Almaguer’s “Race, Racialization, and Latino Populations in the United States” examines the crucial but relatively neglected issue of the ways in which nonwhite populations “racialize one another” (p. 143). In their competing efforts to claim “the privileges and entitlements of ‘whiteness’,” Mexicans and Puerto Ricans—for example—racialize each other “by drawing on the most stigmatizing ways that race is defined in both Mexico and Puerto Rico. Mexicans largely denigrate Puerto Ricans on the basis of their African ancestry, while Puerto Ricans denigrate Mexicans based on their putative Indianness” (p. 159).

Devon W. Carbado and Cheryl I. Harris’s “The New Racial Preferences” critically analyzes colorblind college admissions. They dissect hypothetical college-admission essays from Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas to show how color-blind admissions prevent applicants from racially disadvantaged backgrounds from discussing significant aspects of personal experience. In so doing, color-blind admissions systematically privilege applicants for whom racial identity is not a pressing concern—that is, applicants who do not routinely suffer racial exclusion and whose families are not haunted by the legacies of slavery, segregation, discrimination, conquest, or internment.

The most cutting-edge essays in the volume are Sherene Razack’s “‘We didn’t kill’em, we didn’t cut their head off’: Abu Gharib Revisited” and Nicholas De Genova’s “The ‘War on Terror’ as Racial Crisis.” These essays are most valuable because they map how the intensified anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment of the past decade marks a new frontier of racialization in the United States.

Razack brilliantly exposes how both pro-torture and anti-torture narratives of Abu Gharib effectively exonerated “rank and file soldiers” to secure “a national innocence for Americans” (p. 218). Pro-torture forces exonerated them by insisting that the infliction of pain was militarily necessary. Anti-torture forces did so by framing the rank and file as victims of power-hungry higher-ups. What gets lost is the agency of the rank and file themselves—their decision to follow orders and thus their responsibility for torturing Iraqis. What also gets lost is the humanity of Iraqis themselves. “Torture has . . . an almost built-in connection to race,” Razack writes. “[T]orture is permissible against those we have evicted from personhood. . . . Cultural difference, the enemy’s ‘innate barbarism,’ is an important element in the eviction of the tortured . . . from humanity” (pp. 238–39).

De Genova provides a devastating critique of President Obama’s “war on terror” and argues that the price of his political ascendance has been his consent to empire. De Genova even suggests that the general price of inclusion for nonwhite citizens is “docile and willing servitude” to the national security state (p. 250). He furthermore explains the ways that American racialization of Arabs and Muslims draws on preexisting imagery of “Savage Indians”: “[I]t is a standard and long-established convention of U.S. militarism to refer to the theater of warfare or colonial occupation, always and everywhere, as ‘Indian Country’” (p. 269). The result is a spellbinding exposé of the intersecting logics of race, nation, war, and empire in American historical imagination. Razack’s and De Genova’s chapters are the two that should be incorporated into college and university syllabi with the most urgency. They will help students cast a critical eye on current history and perhaps even inspire them to take action.

Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century is a beautifully constructed volume that can be taught alongside Omi and Winant or on its own. Every scholar of race, ethnicity, and empire will find it eye-opening.