Herbert Gans Assignment | Essay Help Services

Gans argues that current United States racial categories may eventually collapse into two categories: black and nonblack. Using Omi and Winant’s racial formation process, describe and analyze any two reasons Gans presents for this possible changeHerbert Gans (1927- ) was born in Köln, Germany and came to America
in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He has sometimes described
his scholarly work as an immigrant’s attempt to understand America. He
trained in sociology at the University of Chicago and in social planning
at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his PhD.
In this selection, Gans explores the contours of a possible bimodal racial
hierarchy in which the two salient groups are nonblacks and blacks.
The Possibility of a New Racial
Hierarchy in the Twenty-
First-Century United States
Herbert Gans
Over the last decade, a number of social scientists writing
on race and ethnicity have suggested that the country may
be moving toward a new racial structure (Alba 1990;
Sanjek 1994; Gitlin 1995). If current trends persist, today’s
multiracial hierarchy could be replaced by what I think of
as a dual or bimodal one consisting of “nonblack” and
“black” population categories, with a third ”residual”
category for the groups that do not, or do not yet, fit into
the basic dualism.1
More important, this hierarchy may be based not just on
color or other visible bodily features, but also on a
distinction between undeserving and deserving, or
stigmatized and respectable, races.2 The hierarchy is new
only insofar as the old white/nonwhite dichotomy may be
replaced by a nonblack/black one, but it is hardly new for
blacks, who are likely to remain at the bottom once again.
I fear this hierarchy could develop even if more blacks
achieve educational mobility, obtain professional and
managerial jobs, and gain access to middle-class incomes,
wealth, and other “perks.” Still, the hierarchy could also
end, particularly if the black distribution of income and
wealth resembles that of the then-dominant races, and if
interracial marriage eliminates many of the visible bodily
features by which Americans now define race.
Since no one can even guess much less model the many
causal factors that will influence the future, the
observations that follow are not intended to be read as a
prediction but as an exercise in speculative analysis. The
weakness of such an analysis is its empirical reliance on
the extrapolation of too many current trends and the
assumed persistence of too many current phenomena. The
analysis becomes a justifiable exercise, however, because
it aims only to speculate about what future “scenarios” are
possible, and what variables might shape these.
Obviously, the observations about such a hierarchy are
not meant to suggest that it is desirable. Indeed, I wrote
the paper with the hope that if such a future threatens to
become real, it can be prevented.
The remainder of this paper elaborates the basic scenario,
adds a set of qualifications, and considers the variables
and alternative scenarios now most likely to be significant
for the future. The paper concludes with observations
about the contemporary construction of race in the United
States raised by my analysis about a possible future.
The Dual Racial Hierarchy
Before what is now described, somewhat incorrectly, as
the post-1965 immigration, the United States was
structured as a predominantly Caucasian, or white,
society, with a limited number of numerically and
otherwise inferior races, who were typically called
Negroes, Orientals, and American Indians—or blacks,
yellows, and reds to go with the pinkish-skinned people
called whites. There was also a smattering of groups
involving a huge number of people who were still
described by their national or geographic origins rather
than language, including Filipinos, Mexicans and Puerto
Ricans, Cubans, etc.3
After 1965, when many other Central and Latin American
countries began to send migrants, the Spanish-speaking
groups were all recategorized by language and called
Hispanics. Newcomers from Southeast Asia were
classified by continental origin and called Asians, which
meant that the later Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan
newcomers had to be distinguished regionally, and called
South Asians.
At the end of the twentieth century, the country continues
to be dominated by whites. Nevertheless, both the
immigrants who started to arrive after the end of World
War II and the political, cultural, and racial changes that
took place in the wake of their arrival have further
invalidated many old racial divisions and labels. They
have also set into motion what may turn out to be
significant transformations in at least part of the basic
racial hierarchy.
These transformations are still in an early phase but one of
the first has been the elevation of a significant, and mostly
affluent, part of the Asian and Asian-American population
into a model minority that also bids to eradicate many of
the boundaries between it and whites. Upward
socioeconomic mobility and increasing intermarriage with
whites may even end up in eliminating the boundary that
now constructs them as a separate race. Thus, one
possible future trend may lead to all but poor Asians and
Asian-Americans being perceived and even treated so
much like whites that currently visible bodily differences
will no longer be judged negatively or even noticed,
except when and where Asians or Asian-Americans
threaten white interests (e.g., Newman 1993). The same
treatment as quasi whites may spread to other successfully
mobile and intermarrying immigrants and their
descendants, for example Filipinos and white Hispanics.4
What these minorities have in common now with Asians,
and might have in common even more in the future, is
that they are all nonblack, although not as many are
currently as affluent as Asians. Nonetheless, by the middle
of the twenty-first century, as whites could perhaps
become, or will worry about becoming, a numerical
minority in the country, they might cast about for political
and cultural allies.5 Their search for allies, which may not
even be conscious or deliberate, could hasten the
emergence of a new, nonblack racial category, whatever
it is named, in which skin color, or in the case of
“Hispanics,” racially constructed ethnic differences, will
be ignored, even if whites would probably remain the
dominant subcategory.
The lower part of the emerging dual hierarchy will likely
consist of people classified as blacks, including African-
Americans, as well as Caribbean and other blacks, darkskinned
or black Hispanics, Native Americans, and
anyone else who is dark skinned enough and/or possessed
of visible bodily features and behavior patterns, actual or
imagined, that remind nonblacks of blacks. Many of these
people will also be poor, and if whites and other
nonblacks continue to blame America’s troubles on a lowstatus
scapegoat, the new black category will be
characterized as an undeserving race.
In effect, class will presumably play nearly as much of a
role in the boundary changes as race, but with some
important exceptions. For example, if a significant number
of very poor whites remain as the twenty-first-century
equivalent of today’s “while trash,” they will probably be
viewed as less undeserving than equally poor blacks
simply because they are whites.6
Furthermore, the limits of class are indicated, at least for
today, by the continued stigmatization of affluent and
otherwise high-status blacks, who suffer some of the same
indignities as poor blacks (Feagin and Sykes 1994).7 So, of
course, do moderate- and middle-income members of the
working class, who constitute the majority of blacks in
America even if whites do not know it. The high visibility
of “black” or Negroid physical features renders class
position invisible to whites, so that even affluent blacks
are suspected of criminal or pathological behavior that is
actually found only among a minority of very poor blacks.
Despite continuing white hatreds and fears of blacks that
continue almost 150 years after the Civil War, racial
classification systems involving others have been more
flexible. When the first Irish immigrants came to New
York, they were so poor that they were perceived by
Anglo-Saxon whites as the black Irish and often treated
like blacks. Even so, it did not take the Irish long to
separate themselves from blacks, and more important, to
be so separated by the city’s Anglo-Saxons. A generation
later, the Irish were whites (Roediger 1991; Ignatiev
1995).
Perhaps their new whiteness was reinforced by the arrival
of the next set of newcomers: people from Eastern and
Southern Europe who were often described as members of
“swarthy races.” Even though the word race was used the
way we today use ethnicity, the newcomers were clearly
not white in the Anglo-Saxon sense, and Southern Italians
were sometimes called ”guineas” because of their dark
skin. Nonetheless, over time, they too became white,
thanks in part to their acculturation, their integration into
the mainstream economy, and after World War II, their
entry into the middle class. Perhaps the disappearance of
their swarthiness was also reinforced by the arrival in the
cities of a new wave of Southern blacks during and after
World War II.
A less typical racial transformation occurred about that
time in Mississippi, where whites began to treat the
Chinese merchants who provided stores for poor blacks as
near whites. As Loewen (1988) tells the story, increased
affluence and acculturation were again relevant factors.
Although whites neither socialized nor intermarried with
the Chinese, they accorded them greater social deference
and political respect than when they had first arrived.
They turned the Chinese into what I previously called a
residual category, and in the process created an early
version of the nonblack/black duality that may appear in
the United States in the next century.
As the Mississippi example suggests, changes in racial
classification schemes need not require racial or class
equality, for as long as scarce resources or positions
remain, justifications for discrimination also remain and
physical features that are invisible in some social settings
can still become visible in others. Glass ceilings supply
the best example, because they seem to change more
slowly than some other hierarchical boundaries. Even
ceilings for Jews, non-Irish Catholics, and others long
classified as whites are still lower than those for WASPs in
the upper reaches of the class and prestige structures.
I should note that the racial hierarchy I have sketched
here, together with the qualifications that follow, are
described both from the perspective of the (overtly)
detached social scientist, and also from the perspective of
the populations that end up as dominant in the structure.
A longer paper would analyze how very differently the
people who are fitted into the lower or residual parts of
the hierarchy see it.8
Qualifications to the Dual Hierarchy
Even if the country would someday replace its current set
of racial classifications, the result would not be a simple
dual structure, and this model needs to be qualified in at
least three ways.
Residuals
The first qualification is the near certainty of a residual or
middle category that includes groups placed in a waiting
position by the dominant population until it becomes
clear whether they will be allowed to become nonblack,
face the seemingly permanent inferiority that goes with
being black, or become long-term residuals.
If such a structure were to develop in the near future,
those likely to be placed in a residual category would
include the less affluent members of today’s Asian,
Hispanic and Filipino, Central and South American
Indian, and mixed Indian-Latino populations. The future
of the dark-skinned members of the South Asian
newcomers is harder to predict. Indeed, their treatment
will become an important test of how whites deal with the
race-class nexus when the people involved are very dark
skinned but are not Negroid—and when their class
position is so high that in 1990 it outranked that of all
other immigrants (Rumbaut 1997, Table 1.4).9
Who is classified as residual will, like all other
categorizations, be shaped by both class and race. To
borrow Milton Gordon’s (1964) useful but too rarely used
notion of “ethclass,” what may be developing are “raceclasses,”
with lower-class members of otherwise racially
acceptable groups and higher-class members of racially
inferior ones being placed in the residual category.
It is also possible for two or more residual categories to
emerge, one for nonwhite and Hispanic populations of
lower- and working-class position, and another for
nonwhites and Hispanics of higher-class position, with the
latter more likely to be eligible eventually to join whites in
the nonblack portion of a dual hierarchy. Yet other
variations are conceivable, however, for white America
has not yet given any clues about how it will treat middleclass
Latinos of various skin colors and other bodily
features. Perhaps today’s ad hoc solution, to treat
nonblack Hispanics as a quasi-racial ethnic group that is
neither white nor black, may survive for another
generation or more, particularly if enough Hispanics
remain poor or are falsely accused of rejecting linguistic
Americanization.
Being placed in a residual classification means more than
location in a middle analytic category; it is also a socially
enforced, even if covert, category, and it will be
accompanied by all the social, political, and emotional
uncertainties that go with being placed in a holding
pattern and all the pains these create (Marris 1996). True,
residuals may not know they are waiting, but then the
second-generation white ethnic “marginal men” identified
by Stonequist (1937) did not know they were waiting for
eventual acculturation and assimilation.
Multiracials
A second qualification to the dual model is created by the
emergence of biracials or multiracials that result from the
rising intermarriage rates among Asian, Hispanic, and
black and white immigrants as well as black and white
native-born Americans.10 Interracial marriages increased
from 1 percent of all marriages in 1960 to 3 percent in
1990 (Harrison and Bennett 1995, 165).11 They are
expected to increase much faster in the future, particularly
Asian-white ones, since even now, about a third of all
Asian marriages, and more than half of all Japanese ones,
are interrnarriages.12 If Hispanic-white marriages were
also counted, they would exceed all the rest in current
number and expected growth, but these are usually
treated as ethnic rather than racial intermarriages.
Another set of recruits for a residual position includes the
light-skinned blacks, once called mulattos, who today
dominate the African-American upper class, some of
whom may be sufficiently elite and light-skinned to be
viewed as nonblack. Even now, the most prominent
among the light-skinned black-white biracials, including
business and civic leaders, celebrities and entertainers, are
already treated as honorary whites, although many refuse
this option and take special pride in their blackness and
become “race leaders.”13
Meanwhile, “multiracial” is in the process of slowly
becoming a public racial category, and someday it could
become an official one codified by the US Census.14 At
this writing, however, many people of mixed race are not
ready to define themselves publicly as such, and those
who can choose which racial origin to use are sometimes
flexible on instrumental grounds, or may choose different
racial origins on different occasions.15 How people of
various racial mixtures construct themselves in the longer
run is impossible to tell, since issues of their identification
and treatment by others, their own identity, and the social,
occupational, financial, and political benefits and costs
involved cannot be predicted either.
As far as the country’s long-term future racial structure is
concerned, however, what matters most is how whites
will eventually view and treat multiracial people. This will
be affected by the variations in class and visible physical
features among multiracial people—for example, how
closely they resemble whites or other deserving races.
Another question is the future of the traditional
identification of race with “blood,” which counts all
nonwhites in halves, quarters, or even eighths, depending
on how many and which ancestors intermarried with
whom.16 If the late twentieth-century belief in the power
of genes continues, blood might simply be replaced by
genes someday.
Mixed race is a particularly complex category, for several
reasons. In any racial intermarriage with more than one
offspring, each sibling is likely to look somewhat different
racially from the others, ranging from darker to lighter or
more and less nonwhite. Thus, one black-white sibling
could be viewed as black and another as nonblack—even
before they decide how they view themselves. What
happens in subsequent generations is virtually
unimaginable, since even if mixed-race individuals marry
others of the same mixture, their children will not
resemble their grandparents and some may barely
resemble their parents. Eventually, a rising number will be
treated as, and will think of themselves as, white or
nonblack, but this is possible only when people of
multiracial origin can no longer bear children who
resemble a black ancestor.
Empirical evidence about the effects of racial
intermarriage from countries where it has taken place for a
long time is unfortunately not very relevant. The closest
case, the Caribbean islands, are for the most part, tiny.
They are also former plantation societies, with a small
number of white and light-skinned elites, and a large
number of nonwhites-and a differential conception of
white and nonwhite from island to island.17 Caribbean
nonwhites appear to intermarry fairly freely but skin color
does count and the darkest-skinned peoples are invariably
lowest in socioeconomic class and status (Mintz 1989;
Rodriguez 1989).
The only large country, Brazil, also began as a plantation
society, and it differs from the United States particularly in
that the Brazilian slate eschewed racial legislation. As a
result, Brazil never passed Jim Crow laws, but as of this
writing (January 1998) it has not passed civil rights
legislation either. Racial stratification, as well as
discrimination and segregation, has persisted nonetheless,
but it has been maintained through the class system.
Drastic class inequalities, including a high rate of illiteracy
among the poor, have enabled whites to virtually
monopolize the higher class and status positions.
The absence of state involvement has given Brazil an
undeserved reputation as a society that encourages
intermarriage but ignores racial differences, a reputation
the state has publicized as ”racial democracy.” The reality
is not very different from that of the United States,
however, for while there has been more intermarriage, it
appears to have taken place mainly among blacks and
black-white biracials, who together make up about half
the country’s population. Moreover, biracials gain little
socioeconomic advantage from their lighter skins, even as
the darkest-skinned blacks are kept at the bottom, forced
into slums and prisons as in the United States.18
In effect, the Brazilian experience would suggest an
empirical precedent for my hypothesis that blacks will
remain a separate, and discriminated-against, population
in the United States of the future. Indeed, in just about
every society in which blacks first arrived as slaves, they
are still at the bottom, and the political, socioeconomic,
and cultural mechanisms to keep them there remain in
place. Although blacks obtain higher incomes and
prestige than Asians or white Hispanics in a number of
American communities, the descendants of nonblack
immigrants are, with some notable exceptions, still able to
overtake most blacks in the long run.
Since parts of the United States were also a plantation
society in which the slaves were black, the leftovers of the
racial stratification pattern will likely continue here as
well. Thus, children of black-white intermarriages who
turn out to be dark skinned are classified as blacks, even if
the United States is on the whole kinder to light-skinned
biracials than Brazil.
The future of Asian-white biracials remains more
unpredictable, in part because no empirical data exist that
can be used to shore up guesses about them. The same
observation applies to the endless number of other
multiracial combinations that will be created when the
children of multiracial parents intermarry with yet other
multiracials. There will be few limits to new variations in
bodily features, though which will be visible or noticed,
and which of the latter will be stigmatized or celebrated
as exotic cannot be guessed now.19 Most likely, however,
the larger the number of multiracials and of multiracial
variations, the more difficult it will be for nonblacks to
define and enforce racial boundaries, or to figure out
which of the many darker-skinned varieties of rnultiracials
had black ancestors. In that case, an eventual end to racial
discrimination is possible.
If future racial self-identification patterns will also
resemble today’s ethnic ones, the racial equivalent of
today’s voluntary white ethnicity and its associated lack of
ethnic loyalty may mean that many future triracial,
quadriracial, and other multiracial people may eventually
know little, and care even less, about the various racial
mixtures they have inherited. It is even conceivable that
this change will extend to black multiracials, and should
race become voluntary for then, as well, the possibility of
an end to racial discrimination will be increased.
Unfortunately, at the moment such extrapolations are far
closer to utopian thinking than to sociological
speculation.
Regional Variations
A third qualification to the dual model is that the portrait I
have drawn is national, but given the regional variations
in old racial groups and new immigrant populations, it fits
no single US region. Moreover, some parts of the country
are now still so devoid of new immigrants, with the
exception of the handful who come to establish “ethnic”
restaurants, that the present racial hierarchies, categories,
and attitudes, many of them based on stereotypes
imported from elsewhere, could survive unchanged for
quite a while in such areas. Furthermore, some areas that
have experienced heavy immigration from Asia and Latin
America are currently seeing an outmigration of whites,
especially lower-income ones (Frey 1996). Thus, even
current patterns in the racial makeup of US regions could
change fairly quickly.
In addition, regional differences remain in the
demography of the lowest strata. The racial hierarchy of
the Deep South will probably continue to bear many
direct marks of slavery, although the de facto black
experience elsewhere in the country has so far not been
totally different. Moreover, in some regions, Latin
American and other poor non-black immigrants have
already been able to jump over the poor black population
economically and socially, partly because whites,
including institutions such as banks, are less hostile—or
less necessary—to them than they are to blacks.
In the Southwest, Mexicans and other Hispanics remain at
the socioeconomic bottom, although in California, they
may be joined by the Hmong, Laotians, and other very
poor Asians. And Native Americans still occupy the
lowest socioeconomic stratum in the handful of mostly
rural parts of the country where they now live, although
tribes with gambling casinos may be able to effect some
changes in that pattern.
Even though some of the new immigrants can by now be
found just about everywhere in America, the Los Angeles
and New York City areas not only remain the major
immigrant arrival centers but also contain the most diverse
populations. As a result, a number of the issues discussed
in this paper will be played out there, even as they are
barely noticeable in the many smaller American cities that
may have attracted only a handful of the newcomers.
Since these two cities are also the country’s prime creators
of popular culture, however, their distinctive racial and
ethnic characteristics will probably be diffused in subtle
ways through the country as a whole.
Alternative Scenarios
Speculating about the future also requires some explicit
consideration of the variables that could affect the guesses
I have made here, which in turn could lead to alternative
scenarios. Generally speaking these variables are
macrosociological—major changes in the economy,
demographic patterns including internal migration and
immigration, as well as political realignments and racial
divisions of labor, among others. These in turn can result
in changes in racial and ethnic relations as well as in
classification systems.
As noted earlier, dominant groups can alter racial
categories and constructions. Model minorities are
“chosen” by the dominant population precisely because
they appear to share, and thereby to uphold, that
population’s behavior or values. If new behavior or values
need to be upheld, new model minorities may be
recruited. Scapegoats are populations that can be blamed
for social problems, although the dominant populations
choose, or even create, the social problems for which
scapegoats will be blamed. Scapegoats, or targets for
blame, generally come in two varieties: higher scapegoats,
usually recruited from higher-status minority groups that
can be blamed for obtaining too much economic or
cultural power; and lower ones, typically the undeserving
poor, who can be accused of deviant behavior or values
said to hold back economic growth, require public
expenditures that could bankrupt governmental budgets,
threaten familial and sexual norms, or impair the moral
fabric of the rest of society. Blaming both types of
scapegoats is a politically easy way of responding to a
crisis, particularly one for which immediate and feasible
solutions are lacking.
During the long Cold War, the Soviets and other foreign
scapegoats could be blamed for American problems, but
now, domestic scapegoats have again become the primary
target. While illegal and even legal American immigrants
are once again joining poor blacks as the country’s
principal lower scapegoats, only a few states have
sufficient immigrants to serve as targets for blame, which
may help to explain why conservative politicians,
particularly Republicans, have more often demonized
poor blacks.
The most likely candidates for change in current racial
categories, other than of model minorities, are the people
whites now call Hispanics, as well as descendants of
some now officially nonwhite populations in the new
immigration. They will have to be allowed into the higherstatus
occupations in larger number if and when the
supply of whites runs out, and in that case, today’s forms
of racial and ethnic discrimination against them,
particularly those shaped by class considerations, would
have to give way. In fact, by the middle of the twenty-first
century, demographers and journalists may be amazed
that fifty years earlier, whites expected to be swamped in
2050 by an aggregate of diverse peoples then all called
Hispanics.
Two macrosocial factors are probably most important in
thinking about alternative scenarios. One is the set of
geopolitical and economic demographics that can be
produced by cross-national population movements,
including the one that has fueled the immigration from
Central and Latin America, as well as Russia, Asia, and
now Africa, during the last half century. These movements
were controlled at least in part by US government
legislation, but world catastrophes could take place that
could force even the United States to open its borders to
much larger numbers of people who might alter the racial
distribution significantly.
National demographics can also be changed by domestic
political considerations, however, which could lead to a
new search for white—and non-Hispanic—immigrants.
The United States found its late-nineteenth-century
industrial work-force in white Europe rather than among
the newly freed slaves in the South. Likewise, Australia
has recently looked for European immigrants to
discourage the arrival of further Asians.
The second major factor is the state of the domestic
economy. If late-twentieth-century trends in the world
economy and on Wall Street continue in their present
forms, the further disappearance of American firms, jobs,
and high wages, as well as related changes in the
country’s economy, would persist too.
Suppose, for example, that unemployment, or the decline
of real income, or both, worsened in the first quarter of
the twenty-first century, and Americans in large numbers
conclude that the country’s economy can never again
supply full-time jobs paying a living wage for everyone.
While the descendants of the poorer immigrants would be
the first to experience what I once called “second
generation decline” (Gans 1992), other immigrants can
also be dispatched into persistent poverty when not
enough jobs are available, with the appropriate racial
stereotypes invented or reinvented to justify their
downward mobility. Even some middle-class descendants
of Asian, Russian, and other newcomers could be
transformed into lower scapegoats. Then, the dual racial
hierarchy I have described would look very different or
might not come to pass at all.
Should economic crises result in political crises as well, or
raise religious and culture “wars” to more feverish pitches,
the current movement toward a dual racial structure could
also end quickly. Then, a modern version of the
nineteenth-century American monoracial pattern might
reappear, with the children of white newcomers joining
older white ethnics and WASPs as the only acceptable
race. Some members of the newly scapegoated races
would probably react in turn, inaugurating political
protest, intensifying identity politics and slowing down on
intermarriage and other forms of acculturation and
assimilation. Some descendants of today’s newcomers
might return to the old country.
What if a very different economic scenario were assumed,
involving a return of old-style economic growth
accompanied by a stronger US position in the global
economy, a shortage of domestic workers, and an upward
trend in real income? In that case, the trend toward a dual
structure might be hastened, and the erosion of perceived
racial differences speeded up as well.
At that point, the now still visible bod-ily differences of
Asian-Americans and their descendants might no longer
be noticed, and these groups would repeat the post-World
War II pattern by which Southern and Eastern European
“races” were redefined as “ethnic groups.” The
reclassification of Hispanics, including the treatment of
third-generation Central and Latin Americans, would
probably move in the same direction.
The fate of blacks is more difficult to imagine. If the
economy created a seller’s market for people with job
skills at all levels from blue collar to professional and
managerial, all poverty would decline sharply, including
that of blacks. Moreover, blacks would be able to enter
the upper middle and middle classes in such numbers as
to disturb white America’s long association of poverty
with blackness. Indeed, in an economy with enough
decent jobs for all, private and public affirmative action
policies to assure the spread of blacks at all levels of the
occupational and socioeconomic structure would be
likely as well.
Under such conditions, those aspects of white racism due
to fear of and anger at black poverty would begin to
decline, and if the federal government was committed to
fight racial discrimination and segregation, so would the
construction of blacks as an undeserving race. Blackwhite
intermarriage rates might also rise more quickly.
If the prosperity were long term, and it as well as other
events in the society and the world reduced the country’s
resort to domestic scapegoats, a dual racial hierarchy
might be replaced by the beginnings of a multiracial
structure in which the boundaries of all races would
become fuzzier and weaker. Since now-stigmatized
visible bodily differences would then lose their negative
connotations, they might not only be ignored but even
come to be celebrated as positive contributions to
American diversity, just as current ethnic differences
among Europeans provide the country with
non-threatening cultural diversities.
Prosperity alone does not necessarily solve a society’s
other problems, however, and political, cultural, and
religious conflicts could remain, encouraging dominant
groups to choose and stigmatize an undeserving race,
even if it is not a poor one. Anti-Semitic activities, for
example, have occurred in prosperous times and societies,
and in nations with minuscule Jewish populations.
Likewise, more economic prosperity and other positive
economic tendencies alone do not necessarily produce
more acculturation and assimilation of immigrants. Even
the acculturation of large numbers of immigrants and their
descendants does not automatically preclude identity
politics, for today’s college and university campuses are
rife with rapidly acculturating newcomers who
nevertheless feel strongly enough about their racial
identity to become active in identity politics.
It is even possible that in a multiracial America, some
latter-day descendants of WASPs and white ethnics will
resort to identity politics as an attempt to retain or restore
their political and cultural dominance.20 And if a global
economy also produced pressures toward global cultural
and political homogeneities, nation-states or their
successors might develop now unimagined forms of
national identity politics or cultural revivals to maintain
some kind of national distinctiveness. Immigrants and
their descendants might be victimized by such
developments more than blacks, however.
Three Tendencies in the Contemporary Construction of Race
Biological Constructions
The first tendency is the continuing construction of race
from biological as well as social building blocks. Most
scientific experts agree that there are no biologically
definable races, and that race is therefore not a useful
biological concept. The lay public, however, which is not
ready to accept expert opinion, sees differences in visible
bodily features, mostly facial, between people and treats
them as racial differences caused by differences in
“blood.” People also racialize differences in personality
traits such as “soul”—and national character in the case of
immigrants.
The visible bodily differences are not imaginary, for
people do differ by skin color, and the shapes or other
characteristics of various body parts, including heads,
eyelids, noses, hair, and others. To cite just a few
examples, even in third-generation white: ethnic America,
one can find Irish and Welsh (or “Celtic”) faces, southern
Italian and Sicilian ones, and Slavic as well as
Scandinavian ones.
What people notice are not scientifically defined races or
subraces, but the descendants of once-isolated peoples
who had been inbreeding for centuries.21 Since most have
now stopped doing so as a result of rural to urban and
other migrations, their distinctiveness is disappearing with
each new generation, but it has by no means disappeared.
Some of the variations in personality and social
characteristics that laypeople correlate with race or
“blood” can undoubtedly be traced in part to the societies
and economies, as well as the racial hierarchies, in which
these once-isolated peoples lived. The occupational and
other social roles that immigrants play in their new
societies also play a part, one reason why immigrant
shopkeepers in “middlemen” roles are often seen as
“clannish” by the populations they serve, for example.
Some visible bodily features that distinguish people are
noticed and judged; some are noticed but not judged one
way or another; and yet others are not even noticed,
seeming to be virtually invisible. Although how features
are judged can be traced in part to the popular
Darwinisms of the last two centuries, in general, the
bodily features of the most prestigious peoples are usually
adopted as ideals of physical perfection, while features
found among the lower social classes are judged
pejoratively.22
Variations in skin color, as well as in head shapes, noses,
eyes, lips, and hair, have been noticed in many societies,
but differences in some bodily parts have been ignored,
for example, the size of fingers and the shapes of ears and
earlobes.23 Yet other bodily features are not noticed
because they are hidden by clothes; while a few are not
noticed because people wear clothes to hide them. These
often spur fantasies, for example about black penis size
and other imagined racial differences in reproductive and
other organs.24
A major ingredient of the social construction of race is the
determination of which visible bodily features are noticed
and used to delineate race and which remain unnoticed.
In the process shaping that construction, various social
constructors, including laypersons, experts, and, when
relevant, commercial and political decision makers, take
part. Unless explicit ideological, commercial, or political
reasons are involved, the constructors may not be aware
of the process in which they are involved, or the causes
that shape the final determination. usually, whites are the
major constructors, but increasingly, representatives of the
racial minorities to be constructed participate when they
can politicize the process, or can frighten manufacturers
or advertisers of national consumer goods.25
Strictly speaking, a biological construction should make
racial characteristics and classifications relatively fixed,
but lay biological construction is almost as flexible as
social construction. The reason for the lack of fixity is not
hard to find, for the choice of which visible bodily
features are to be noticed has almost nothing to do with
race and everything to do with stratification.
As the Brazilian and United States experiences indicate,
the race of the lowest class became the lowest race
because slaves were almost by definition the lowest class
and race. That captured blacks were the only population
economically and otherwise powerless to prevent their
becoming enslaved in recent centuries led whites to use
their distinguishable skin color and facial features to
translate their class inferiority into a racial one (Fields
1990). Similarly, the stigmatization of “yellow” skin
resulted from the serflike status of Chinese ”coolies” on
railroad construction gangs; the stigmatization of
“swarthiness” followed from the low status of the Southern
and Eastern European newcomers; and a century later,
white Hispanic immigrants are sometimes called a race
because of their low class position.26 That the ancestors of
now-respected Americans were once damned for their
swarthy skins has been quietly forgotten, both among their
descendants and among the peoples who “invented” the
original stigma.
Ethnicity as Racial
The second, and related, tendency is the continuing lay
practice of identifying ethnic and national differences as
racial, particularly in private self-naming. Census analysts
have discovered that in the 1990 census, respondents to
open-ended questions claimed membership in nearly
three hundred races or ethnic groups, including seventy
Hispanic categories (Morganthau 1995, 64). In many
instances, they equated their race with their nationality—
or with their tribes in the case of Native Americans.27 As
Eleanor Gerber and Manuel de la Puente pointed out in
reporting on a study of test questions for the 2000 census:
“Most respondents recognized the term ‘ethnic group’ but
… would indicate it was ‘the same thing’ as race … [and]
often coined the term ‘ethnic race’ during our discussions”
(Gerber and de la Puente 1996, 21).
The two Bureau of Census researchers suggest lack of
education as the causal factor in this conflation, indicating
that only the college educated could distinguish ethnic
group from race. However, as long as Americans notice
visible bodily differences among people of the same
official race, they will hold on to private constructions of
race that differ from the official definitions.28 Even among
the third- and fourth-generation white multiethnics whose
“ethnic options” Mary Waters (1990) studied, some chose
their ethnicities on the basis of racial conceptions of
national origin.29 In effect, ethnicity continues to be a
matter of “blood.”30
Racial Tolerance
The third and perhaps most important tendency is the
apparently increasing white tolerance for racial
differences, except with respect to blacks. At the same
time, whites seem to use race less often as an indicator of
class, except when they are considering poor blacks. This
trend may become more widespread as racial
intermarriage among people of similar class increases
further. Today, class homogamy is apparently outranking
racial homogamy among college-educated young people
(Kalmijn 1991).
If this pattern spreads to other Americans of the same age
and if it becomes permanent, and if whites were willing
and able to see that their hatreds and fears of blacks and
other very poor nonwhites are so often reactions to their
extreme and persistent poverty rather than their race, class
could become more important and more overt as a
boundary and a principle of stratification in the future. If
Americans could also realize that class is more than a
matter of “lifestyle” differences among near equals, class
stratification might someday become a matter of general
public discussion. In that case, the myth of a classless
America might eventually be laid to rest.31
Even a more modest increase in awareness of class would
be desirable, because class is after all an achieved status,
while race is not, even in its reasonably flexible lay
construction. However, the shift from race to class would
also require Americans to develop a more fundamental
understanding of the United States and to invent a new
conception of the American dream and its underlying
myth to replace that of the classless society. So far, there is
no indication of this happening.
In fact, it would probably not happen until events in the
political economy make it possible to achieve a drastic
reduction of joblessness and poverty, so that the
correlation of poverty with blackness is significantly
lowered. If and when blacks become roughly equal
economically to nonblacks, blacks can no longer be
treated as an undeserving race.
If poverty and inequality are not lessened, however, and if
more poor blacks are condemned to work for nothing but
their welfare benefits, they could be treated as an ever
more undeserving race, and other populations who
cannot enter, or stay in, the middle class, including poor
Hispanics and Asians, might join them. In that case, the
racial hierarchy of the next century’s United States would
look very different from the one I have sketched here.
Conclusion
A society’s reconstruction of racial categories appears to
require at least the following conditions: (1) an influx of
immigrants who do not fit the existing racial categories
and their associated class backgrounds; (2) a healthy
economy with sufficient opportunity for upward mobility
even for poorer immigrants; (3) a lack of demand for new
lower (and higher) racial scapegoats; and (4) an at least
temporary demand for model minorities.
If these conditions are met, existing racial definitions and
categories will be altered, sometimes even quickly if there
is a proliferation of interracial marriages. However, in a
society with a history of slavery, one possible effect is a
dual racial hierarchy, in which one part consists mostly of
ex-slaves. However, since even the effects of slavery
should eventually be eliminated, at least in theory, the
United States could become a predominantly interracial
or multiracial society someday.
Even then, the more prestigious racial mixtures are apt to
remain somewhat whiter for a while than the rest, and the
less prestigious ones darker. But if the country’s racial
mixing ever became so thorough that skin color and other
currently used bodily features were sufficiently
unrecognizable or no longer of sufficient interest to be
noticed, race would no longer be associated with social
ranking. If Americans then still needed to rank each other,
new criteria would have to be found.
Endnotes
1. These categories are constructions, but they also contain populations
experiencing all the pleasures and pains of being located in a
hierarchy. And although I am often discussing constructions, I will
forgo the practice of putting all racial, national, and related names
and labels between quotes, except for unusual racial stereotypes.
2. The two races may not be called that openly, but ambiguous
pejoratives have long been part of the American vocabulary, for
example underclass now, and pauper a century earlier (Gans 1995).
Since races are social constructions, their names will depend in large
part on who does the naming—and whose names become dominant
in the public vocabulary.
3. Puerto Ricans are still often described as immigrants, even though
they have been American citizens for a long lime and their move
from the island to the mainland is a form of interstate mobility.
Racial, class, and linguistic considerations have undoubtedly
influenced this labeling.
The same dominant-race thinking led Irving Kristol and other
neoconservatives to argue in the 1960s that blacks were similar
enough to the white European immigrants to be able to adopt and
act on immigrant values. They also assumed that blacks would then
assimilate like immigrants, ignoring such facts as that blacks had
originally come as slaves, not immigrants; had been here several
centuries; and had not yet been allowed by whites to assimilate.
Thirty years later, many whites ignore the same facts to propose the
newest immigrants as role models for blacks.
4. Much less is said about black Hispanics, including Puerto Ricans,
who suffer virtually all of the discriminatory and other injustices
imposed on African-Americans.
5. Some highly placed whites are already worrying, for example in a
Time cover story by William Henry III (1990), but then similar whites
worried a century earlier what the then arriving Catholic and Jewish
newcomers would do to their country. The current worries are as
meaningless as the old ones, since they are based on extrapolations
of current patterns of immigration, not to mention current
constructions of (nonwhite) race and (Hispanic) ethnicity.
6. Hacker (1996) notes, for example, that the term “white trash” is no
longer in common use. Indeed, for reasons worth studying, the more
popular term of the moment is “trailer trash,” which nonetheless
seems to be applied solely to poor whites.
7. In this respect, the United States differs from many other countries in
the Western hemisphere, where blacks who have managed to
become affluent are treated, within limits, as whites.
8. Not only might they perceive it more angrily than I am here doing,
but they might be angrier about it than about the present hierarchy,
simply because it is new but no great improvement. One result could
be their constructions of new racial identities for themselves that
depart drastically from the ones future nonblacks consider
reasonable.
9. Being far fewer than Asians in number, South Asians are nationally
not very visible now. Moreover, for religious and other reasons,
South Asian immigrants have so far often been able to discourage
their children from intermarrying.
10. My observations on multiracial constructions and people have
benefited from many conversations with Valli Rajah.
11. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of people in interracial
marriages grew from 676,000 to more than three million (Fletcher
1997). In 1990, biracial children made up 4 percent of all children,
increasing from half a million in 1970 to about two million that year.
The largest number were Asian-white children, followed by Native
American-white and African American-white ones (Harrison and
Bennett 1995).
12. Some observers currently estimate that 70 percent of all Japanese
and Japanese-Americans are intermarried, mostly with whites. Since
they came to the United States as families long before 1965, this
estimate may supply a clue about what will happen to second-,
third-, and later-generation descendants of other Asian-American
populations.
13. Presumably class position will affect how other descendants of old
Southern mulatto and creole populations (Dominguez 1986) will be
classified.
14. In the political debates over the racial categories to be used in the
Year 2000 Census, vocal multiracials preferred to be counted as and
with various people of color. African-Americans and other officially
recognized racial groups also indicated their opposition to a
multiracial category, being reluctant to reduce the power of their
numbers or the federal benefits that now go to racial minorities (e.g.,
Holmes 1996).
15. Kohne (1996) reports that light-skinned biracial Columbia University
students who identify as whites also apply for scholarships as blacks.
But then, four decades earlier, I met Italian-Americans in Boston’s
West End who took Irish names in order to obtain jobs in Irishdominated
city hall.
16. The practice of quantifying racial bloods has a long history in Europe
and the United States, thanks to both eugenics and slavery. Perhaps
it will disappear when enough people have to start counting three or
more races. However, people also still use blood fractions when they
marry across religions, so that the notion of racial, ethnic, or
religious “blood” is by no means obsolete.
17. They are also different, for “one and the same person may be
considered white in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico …
‘colored’ in Jamaica, Martinique, or Curacao … (and) a ‘Negro’ in
Georgia” (Hoetink 1967, xii).
18. This account is based mainly on the data summarized in Fiola 1990
and Skidmore 1992, the classic analysis of the Brazilian racial system
in Skidmore 1993, Adamo’s 1983 case study of race and class in Rio
de Janeiro, and the sociopolitical analyses by Marx (1995, 1996). I
am indebted to Anthony Marx for guiding me into the literature or
Brazil, although there is still precious little social research, especially
with current data, in English.
19. No one has so far paid much attention to who is constructed as
exotic and why, except the multiracial people, mostly women, to
whom it is applied. Some of them benefit because they are sought by
industries that hire workers with exotic facial features; but women
without these occupational interests resent such labeling because it
turns them into sexual objects.
Industries that employ workers with exotic features, facial and
otherwise, such as the fashion and entertainment industries, play an
interesting, and probably unduly influential, role in the country’s
public racial construction.
20. Even now, at the close of the twentieth century, whites who argue
that America is a “Christian” nation are pursuing a politics of identity
as much as of religious dominance.
21. I am indebted to my Columbia University colleague, biologist Robert
Pollack, for my understanding of this phenomenon.
22. Originally, people drew on nineteenth-century and earlier
comparisons of apes and humans, with those determined to be closer
to apes in facial appearance being thought inferior. Brain size was
also used, at least until scientific research debunked its relevance,
and the researchers also discovered that it did not correlate with
status. The final blow was the discovery that the much maligned
Neanderthalers had larger brains than Homo sapiens.
23. Ears have served mainly as anchors for adornment, although
protruding ones have sometimes been brought surgically closer to
the head.
24. Now that some young women show their navels or wear bathing
suits with uncovered buttocks, these could become eligible for racial
typing.
25. Constructionists in the social sciences and the humanities have so far
mainly emphasized that races, like other human notions, are socially
constructed, but social scientists have paid little attention to the
actual construction process and its participants. What we know
about that process comes mostly from scholars who analyze racial
images over time, in literature or the popular culture, and have
collected process information as part of their work.
26. Forced Chinese labor was also recruited for the cotton plantations,
but the Chinese workers turned out to be inefficient cotton pickers
and thus managed to avoid becoming slaves.
27. I am indebted to Roderick Harrison and especially Manuel de la
Puente of the US Bureau of the Census for materials that clarified this
set of responses.
28. Social scientists on the staff of the Census Bureau and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics spend part of their time analyzing the large number
of private races that people supply in answer to open-ended
questions to produce the small number of public ones reported by
the federal government.
29. For some similar practices by Jews in post-Holocaust Germany, see
Rapaport 1997, 166-67.
30. For example, one of Waters’ respondents explained that she traced
her bad moods to “the Irish in me,” while “all of the good things”
were Italian (Waters 1990, 25). Embryo clinics are asked by some of
their customers to supply sperm and egg donors of similar ethnic
origin, in one case to obtain an “Irish background, or at least light
hair and light eyes” (Kolata 1997, 34). As a result, ethnicity may be
so racialized that it is not very voluntary, although voluntary
ethnicity may also be used to achieve voluntarily chosen racial
features.
31. Needless to say, traumatic and long-lasting economic decline is a
more likely cause for a public recognition of class in America.
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Glossary
acculturation – the process of cultural change and
psychological change that results following meeting
between cultures
model minority – a demographic group whose members
are perceived to achieve a higher degree of
socioeconomic success than the population average
residual – a group placed in a waiting position by the
dominant population until it becomes clear whether
they will be allowed to become nonblack
undeserving poor – those who are poor because of
laziness or personal problems/choices … not deserving
of charity or support
Reference
Gans, Herbert J. 1999. “The Possibility of a New Racial
Hierarchy in the Twenty-First-Century United States.”
Pp. 371-390 in Cultural Territories of Race, Michele
Lamont, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago