Racial Formations by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in my eyes, successfully explained how we as a society view race and gives us a sense of how it is observed within social contexts. Omi and Winant used media, ideas, and everyday examples to portray their views about race. Omi and Winant’s article began with the Susie Guillory Phipps’s case about how she had (Omi and Winant 2014) “unsuccessfully sued the Louisiana Bureau of Vital Records” (p.13) because she wanted to change her racial distinction from black to white on her birth certificate. Phipps argument was that racial classifications were unconstitutional. However, the court had upheld the belief that classifying individuals based on race was indeed constitutional. The Phipps case demonstrated for many centuries, that the United States had always tried to define race and how it is to fit within our social context. Omi and Winant then goes on to say this struggle to define race is not only seen in the United States, but is seen in other locations around the world, such as Europe. With exploration of the new world, many Europeans had believed that anyone who was not white had to have lesser freedom, if any at all, because these non-white were seen as inferior and less fit for society. Even to this every day, many individuals try to discover the “scientific meaning” of race. These individuals want to argue that race in not (Omi and Winant 2014) “social, political, or economic determination” (p. 15) but instead race can be found within an individual’s underlying characteristics which can be identified through skin color or physical attributes. Omi and Winant further showed how race can be seen as a social concept as well. For example, they explained how many people in contemporary British politics use the term black to mean any nonwhites, which surprisingly has not lead to any retaliation by any people. As a matter of fact, some Asian and Afro-Caribbean youth are using the term for self…