took me awhile to find this, ended up with a stomach virus yesterday, but it's one of the things that irritated me about the way Michaels' paints with an extremely broad brush. Here's an overview of racial formation theory which is elaborated in the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_formation_theory
This is what Michaels actually writes about it. The book contains a complex sociological theory about the social, political, AND economic formation of race and Michaels completely ignores all that to zero in on something I think he's badly misinterpreted from pg 6 and 62 of Omi and Winant's book:
"Either race is a physical fact, dividing human beings into biologically significant differences, or there is no such thing as race, whatever it's called.
The American version of Sartre's "the Jew is one who others consider a Jew" was produced...by WEB Du Bois in 1940 when he wrote that "the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia." But the beliefs about race that underlay the Jim Crow laws have turned out to be mistaken; we no longer believe them, and we no longer have Jim Crow. So the true meaning of Du Bois's definition should now be clear; if a black man is a man who has to ride Jim Crow; now that no one has to ride Jim Crow, there is no such thing as a black man. Or a white man either. There are people with different colors of skins, different textures of hair, different heights and different weights, different kinds of abilities and different kinds of abilities. But there are no people of different races.
Which is a conclusion that no one wants to accept. Even those (the vast majority) who are critical of racism and who do not believe in the biology of racial identity have continued to insist that race is a central and even desirable factor in American life. Thus in what is certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race, Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that there are two "temptations" to be avoided in thinking about race. The first is the temptation to think of it as something "fixed, concrete and objective, " that is, a physical fact. The second is the temptation to thin ko of it as a "mere illusion," which "an ideal social order would eliminate." "Race," they say, "will always be at the center of the American experience," and it's a good thing too because "without a racial identity, one is in danger of having no identity." What we've seen in this chapter are some of the ways in which people have gone about trying to make sure that Omi and Winant's prediction comes true and to guarantee that even if people can't belong to concrete and objective races, they can still have (social and cultural) racial identities. 947-48)