Howard Winant

Winant was the founder and director of the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, a multidisciplinary program that was active on all ten UC campuses of the UC from 2010 to 2015. The UCCNRS was not renewed in 2015, for reasons that remain unclear.

Winant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2002; where he is also affiliated with the Black Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and Asian American Studies departments.

Winant's most influential work has been his ongoing collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States (1986-2015). The theory draws upon Gramsci's conception of hegemony to describe the social construction of the race concept in contemporary US society. Noting the concept's origins in European settler colonialism and in the enslavement of Africans (see Slavery in the United States), Omi and Winant also follow Du Bois (see W. E. B. Du Bois) in arguing that race has always operated as an organizing factor in society. In their account the meaning of race is constantly contested through political conflict that takes the form of racial projects. Racial projects are at work throughout society, making race an unstable social category that is embedded in all identities and social structures. Taking the form of White Supremacy and shaped as well by ongoing resistance to it, race has been so foundational in the United States that it serves as a "template" for all social conflict. At key moments like the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and during the Civil Rights Movement, the meaning and sociopolitical structure of race has been transformed. Still, as both Gramsci and Du Bois would predict, the reforms secured during crisis periods like the Civil Rights era have contradictory effects: for democratic and egalitarian movements, they simultaneously represent both victory and defeat. Civil Rights, Black Power, Immigrants Rights, and other anti-racist movements have both extended democracy and demobilized resistance. Political project seeking racial equality and justice remain incomplete and are indeed threatened by racial reaction in numerous ways. Thus, the fundamental dynamics of race, such as institutional racism, nativism (anti-immigrant racism), heterophobia, and enforced inequality along racialized lines remain formidable today, constantly subject to political struggle, according to Omi and Winant.

Howard Winant (born 1946) is an American sociologist and race theorist. Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Winant is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Michael Omi. Winant's research and teachings revolve around race and racism, comparative historical sociology, political sociology, social theory, and human rights.

Howard Winant was born in 1946 in the United States. He received his B.A. degree from Brandeis University in 1968; and Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980. He has worked and taught in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.