Answer:Racial formation was coined by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant in the first edition of their book Racial Formation in the United States in 1986 – now in its third edition (Omi and Winant 2014). The theory has become a dominant perspective within sociology and has contributed to understanding the role of race in the contemporary United States during the latter half of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries. Racial formation highlights the ways that “race” is socially constructed. That is, how do processes connected to social, economic, and political forces shape how racial categories and hierarchies are formed? This question forces us to focus on both the historical context of race categorization, as well as where our current social contexts are positioned.