This article reviews theoretical developments in the sociology of the US racial state since the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States. After briefly outlining their theory, it surveys the still diminutive literature and concludes by pointing to promising future directions, drawing on insights from other disciplines and incipient stirrings from within sociology. Destabilizing the unquestioned assumption that the United States is and has been a nation‐state, the article reconceptualizes it as an empire‐state. This turn establishes a firmer footing for the claim that the United States is intrinsically a racial state and yields a generative framework for reconsidering and stimulating scholarship toward more effective analysis and critique.

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The author examines the process of racial knowledge creation within the context of U.S. empire and its military occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948. The author uses a postcolonial sociohistorical approach to analyze archival sources authored by U.S. military occupation administrators, advisers, and journalists. The author argues that the U.S. military occupation was in practice colonialism, and that the United States pulled racial knowledge gained through previous colonial experiences and from British and Japanese empires to construct the racial script of the “Irish of the Orient.” Through this script, the United States justified the need for a military occupation by reading Koreans through colonial constructions of Irish drunkenness and joviality as well as Filipino immaturity. Conversely, the script signaled the potential of Koreans to eventually become democratic subjects. Through the metaphor of the “Irish of the Orient,” the author finds that the racial formation of Koreans during the U.S. military occupation exemplified the relational, nonlinear, and transcolonial process of racial formation.