ANALYSIS OF RACE MAKING must address both racial ordering from above and opposition from below. Neither alone can be understood without the other, for the two emerge in an ongoing dialogue. Racial domination is shaped by its subject population, and that population's beliefs and actions are shaped by rules impinging upon it. Out of such continual contestation, identities, discourse, and practice are reinterpreted and reconfigured. But acknowledging this dynamic does not in itself tell us very much about why and how race making proceeds. I here turn to specifying this process from below, having outlined the process from above. The order of this analysis is not meant to suggest that the racial identity, ideology, and mobilization of blacks can be reduced to a mere response to racial ordering from above. Such identity and action is self-determined, evident before racial domination is fully established, and continuing after such rules are abandoned. For the purposes of this book, this placement of analysis allows an assessment of the relationship between the two sides of race making with the framework of officially imposed racial ordering clearly established.

Racial identity among blacks has deep historical and cultural roots. Much as white prejudice existed before modern political and racial orders were constructed, and helped shape them, so a degree of black solidarity and mobilization predates the modern era. Early black identity and activism informed later processes, though it was not itself fully determinant of varying outcomes.