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1960s to the 1980s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant offered what might be described as a first draft of the racial politics of the post–civil rights era. Omi and Winant define “race” as “an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings” that is at once foundational to, and made and remade in the course of, political struggles (Omi and Winant 1986, 68). This way of describing race marked a salutary theoretical development that expressly worked against an incipient, neoconservative discourse of “colorblindness” that sought to undermine (with increasing success) normative, legal, and political claims about the racial inequality in the United States in the wake of advances toward civil rights and formal equality by erasing positivist racial classification from law and social policy. Omi and Winant acknowledge naturalistic reference to differentiated human embodiment as the ideological kernel of race (a notion …