the concept of race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world. The task for theory is to explain the situation. . . . Thus we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion. . . . [We] define racial formation as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed (Omi & Winant, 1994, pp. 55-56).
The propensity to perceive other humans as belonging to racial groups may be a function of the way that the human perceptual and conceptual systems evolved. Perhaps the ability to recognize whether individuals were or were not members of one's local population once had survival value. On this point Omi and Winant comment, "One of the first things we notice about people when we meet them (along with their sex) is their race. We utilize race to provide clues about who a person is. This fact is made painfully obvious when we encounter someone whom we cannot conveniently racially categorize . . . Such an encounter becomes a source of discomfort and momentarily a crisis of racial meaning" (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 59).
Or perhaps racial categorization is a function of the fact that the human mind can handle only so many categories of information at a time. Apparently very few minds can have a separate "file" in memory for more than a relatively small number (probably no more than a few hundred) of individuals, consisting of family, close friends, workmates, other members of voluntary organizations, and so on; beyond that inner circle, persons are grouped together into categories that are culturally defined. Looked at in this way, racial categories clearly need not be inimical in themse
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