Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century by Daniel Martinez Hosang

Author:Daniel Martinez Hosang [Hosang, Daniel Martinez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520953765
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

THE APPLICANT: CONSTRUCTING THE PERSONAL STATEMENT

While the specific question can differ from school to school, the personal statement generally calls on applicants to provide a personal narrative in which they describe something unique about themselves. Others call on applicants to provide information regarding “disad vantage overcome.”

In this section, we take autobiographical statements from President Barack Obama to construct a hypothetical personal statement. We do so for four principal reasons: (1) to identify the burdens imposed on applicants by “anti-preference initiatives” like Proposal 2 and Proposition 209 that are interpreted to require that applicants not include references to race in their personal statements; (2) to explain how racial erasure does not make the application process racially neutral; (3) to illustrate some of the subtle but significant ways in which racial advantages and disadvantages can persist in formally race-free admissions environments; and (4) to reveal that racial formation occurs not only at the level of social structures but also at the level of identity expression. This last point is particularly important given Omi and Winant’s definition of racial formation as a “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 1994, 55).

In a way, our interest lies in demonstrating how the discursive self-representational choices an individual makes in the context of writing her personal statement can create a particular racial persona, signal specifically how she inhabits her racial identity, effectuate a transformation of that identity, and effectively destroy core parts of her racial sense of self. Understood in this way, the personal statement becomes a significant site for the enactment or performance of race, which is to say, a site for racial formation.

The foregoing raises the question of whether Omi and Winant recognize the performative dimensions of race. And indeed they do. They rightly observe that “we expect people to act out their apparent racial identities; indeed, we become disoriented when they do not” (Omi and Winant 1994, 59). Yet Omi and Winant do not explore the implications of this insight for their theory, perhaps because their analysis is largely superstructurally oriented. In this respect, one might read our engagement with how applicants inscribe themselves in their personal statements as an effort to broaden the theoretical terms on which racial formation is understood. We begin this engagement with a “personal statement” based on Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.7

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