Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America - Hardcover

Hochschild, Jennifer L.; Weaver, Vesla M.; Burch, Traci R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691152993 ISBN 13: 9780691152998

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

A groundbreaking exploration of how race in America is being redefined

The American racial order―the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation's races and ethnicities―is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama's election―not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer L. Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, professor of African and African American studies, and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. Vesla M. Weaver is an assistant professor in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Traci R. Burch is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University and research professor at the American Bar Foundation.

From the Back Cover

"This is a wide-ranging exploration of how America looks, thinks, and lives in terms of race as we go into this new millennium. Bridging political science, sociology, and the burgeoning study of DNA, the authors show us that racial order remains one of the most reliable ways of organizing our past and present as Americans, even as that order is dynamic and indeed transformed over time."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"It is not often that one reads a book that changes how we think the world works.Creating a New Racial Order is replete with original, and sometimes surprising, insights and evidence on the forces that are generating rising racial heterogeneity in the United States. The authors' compelling analysis of the ongoing transformation of America's racial order is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Showing how historical trends have produced an unprecedented complexity and fluidity in racial meanings, classifications, and identities in the United States, this book argues that the American racial order is changing for the better and explains why this is happening. Bold and provocative, this book is a game changer."--Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine

"With an in-depth analysis of changing definitions of race, this compelling and absorbing book presents evidence that the American racial order is in the middle of a historic transformation. It marshals a spectacular amount of research and sophisticated detail, and will stir considerable debate and discussion. In my reading in this subject area, I haven't encountered a book equal to this one."--Raphael J. Sonenshein, California State University, Fullerton

From the Inside Flap

"This is a wide-ranging exploration of how America looks, thinks, and lives in terms of race as we go into this new millennium. Bridging political science, sociology, and the burgeoning study of DNA, the authors show us that racial order remains one of the most reliable ways of organizing our past and present as Americans, even as that order is dynamic and indeed transformed over time."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"It is not often that one reads a book that changes how we think the world works.Creating a New Racial Order is replete with original, and sometimes surprising, insights and evidence on the forces that are generating rising racial heterogeneity in the United States. The authors' compelling analysis of the ongoing transformation of America's racial order is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Showing how historical trends have produced an unprecedented complexity and fluidity in racial meanings, classifications, and identities in the United States, this book argues that the American racial order is changing for the better and explains why this is happening. Bold and provocative, this book is a game changer."--Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine

"With an in-depth analysis of changing definitions of race, this compelling and absorbing book presents evidence that the American racial order is in the middle of a historic transformation. It marshals a spectacular amount of research and sophisticated detail, and will stir considerable debate and discussion. In my reading in this subject area, I haven't encountered a book equal to this one."--Raphael J. Sonenshein, California State University, Fullerton

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creating a New Racial Order

HOW IMMIGRATION, MULTIRACIALISM, GENOMICS, AND THE YOUNG CAN REMAKE RACE IN AMERICABy Jennifer Hochschild Vesla Weaver Traci Burch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15299-8

Contents

List of Figures and Tables.....................................xiIntroduction...................................................xiiiPART I: THE ARGUMENT...........................................11. Destabilizing the American Racial Order.....................3PART II: CREATING A NEW ORDER..................................192. Immigration.................................................213. Multiracialism..............................................564. Genomics....................................................835. Cohort Change...............................................1136. Blockages to Racial Transformation..........................139PART III: POSSIBILITIES........................................1657. The Future of the American Racial Order.....................167Notes..........................................................183References.....................................................213Index..........................................................255

Chapter One

Destabilizing the American Racial Order

There are many ... variables that are not matters of degree. And it is these variables that define what it means to be black in America.... Police do not stop whites for "driving while black," but police do stop blacks, particularly wealthy blacks, for this offense.... Thus, it would be wiser to regard "driving while black" and being black not as two variables but, instead, as part of the same condition. It is this second type of variable that forces one to conclude that by definition blacks and whites do not occupy the same social space. —Samuel Lucas

Does race exist? Of course it does. We see it every day. Guy steals a purse, the cop asks, What did he look like? You say, He was a six-foot-tall black guy, or a five-and-a-half-foot-tall Asian man, or a white guy with long red hair.... We hold these vague blueprints of race in our heads because, as primates, one of the great tools of consciousness we possess is the ability to observe patterns in nature. It's no surprise that we'd train this talent on ourselves. —Jack Hitt

It is possible that, by 2050, today's racial and ethnic categories will no longer be in use. —Migration News, 2004

Many Americans, like the first two people quoted above, believe that we must recognize, and should perhaps celebrate, clear differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Even if race is "merely" a social construct with no biological basis, it has a huge impact on the quality and trajectory of individual lives and on American society and politics more generally. Whether group boundaries are intended to include or exclude, everyone apparently knows where to draw the lines and what the lines imply.

But group boundaries that seem fixed, even self-evident, at a given moment are surprisingly unstable across a period of years. A Harvard anthropologist's 1939 textbook titled The Races of Europe showed eighteen races spread across the continent. In an elaborately overlapping swarm of lines and hashmarks, Carleton Coon showed how the "Partially Mongoloid," "Lappish," "Brünn strain, Tronder etc., unreduced, only partly brachycephalized," "Pleistocene Mediterranean Survivor," "Neo-Danubian," Nordic, and (separately) Noric, and a dozen other groups were distributed among those whom we now designate as "White."

This is not how we now view Europe, nor was this image itself stable. As Jack Hitt points out, "the number of races has expanded and contracted wildly" over the past few hundred years, "growing as high as Ernst Haeckel's thirty-four different races in 1879 or Paul Topinard's nineteen in 1885 or Stanley Garn's nine in 1971." One hundred and thirty years earlier, Charles Darwin had made the same point in some exasperation:

Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.

And the number and nature of what we call races may again change, as the third epigraph reminds us.

What constitutes a race or ethnic group has been no more stable over time than how many there are. People in the nineteenth century spoke of the race of Yankees, the "criminal race," or the "race of Ushers" (in Edgar Allen Poe's famous ghost story). The concept of ethnicity emerged early in the twentieth century, but in 1936 the chair of Yale University's board of admissions rejected an increase in the freshman class on the grounds that Yale might admit "too large a proportion of candidates who are undesirable either racially or scholastically." He was referring in the first instance to Jews. One author of this book is the child of what was once an interracial marriage—between an immigrant German Jew and a New England Congregationalist descended from the Puritans.

Nor is the concept of race or ethnicity coherent even at one moment in time. One of us used to teach undergraduates that Asians were a single race with many ethnicities and that Latinos were a single ethnicity with many races—but scholars now dispute whether race is best understood as distinct from ethnicity (as that lesson implies), a subset of it, or a synonym. Consider the U.S. census, typically thought of (if at all) as the epitome of neutral bureaucratically inflected science. Figure 1.1 shows the two key questions on the 2010 census.

The first question implicitly asks about ethnicity—but only for Hispanics and, curiously, Spaniards. Swedes, Koreans, Arabs, or Nigerians, never mind the Portuguese or Brazilians, have no official ethnicity. The second question first defines race as a color—"White" or "Black." But there is no Brown, Yellow, or Red; instead the answer category shifts to race as a tribe—but only for Native Americans. Race then appears as a nationality—but only for nations that are, roughly speaking, in South or Pacific-rim Asia. Finally, the question gives up, allowing the respondent to declare "Some other race," defined only by the person filling out the form. And since a respondent may now "mark one or more boxes" (as well as choosing a Latino ethnicity), one's official race can be a combination of color, nationality, tribe, and "some other" thing. There are, in fact, 63 possible racial combinations and 126 possible combinations including ethnicity. Through all of this, the word "race" appears seven times on the document. As one highly knowledgeable statistician puts it (though not for attribution), "race on the census is a rat's nest."

Incoherence in census categories simply reflects the realities of American racial and ethnic politics. In fact, given the opportunity people define themselves in even more ways. Asked on a 2007 survey to indicate their "ancestry, nationality, ethnic origin, or tribal affiliation," about 40,000 American citizen students at several dozen selective colleges and universities provided over 3,200 responses. Many chose what we think of as conventional categories: African American, English, European American, Chicano, Chinese, and so on. But others hinted at ways in which group boundaries get blurred—"gay Jewish Cuban American," "adopted Chinese into an Indonesia and Filipino Family," "Mixed between American slave descendants and native Liberians, Liberian," or "usually Black, sometimes biracial."

The American racial order is unsettled substantively as well as conceptually. It used to be easy to identify groups' relative positions. On a vertical dimension of more to less, Whites held the overwhelming share of desirable resources and statuses and Blacks were at the bottom of most distributions (although other groups were occasionally worse off). On a horizontal dimension of insiders to outsiders, Whites and possibly Blacks held the status of quintessential insiders, while Asian Americans seemed to be perpetual foreigners and Latinos were admitted to the United States only temporarily or instrumentally. (Native Americans were so much insiders that they had to be pushed out to make room for the new insiders.)

Those relative positions persist, but new patterns and trajectories are beginning to bend the rule to the point where it may become overwhelmed by the exceptions. Asian Americans still lack positions at the center of the political or economic mainstream, but—with crucial exceptions—most nationalities have on average more education and higher incomes than do White Americans. A man plausibly understood to be either multiracial, Black, or a second-generation immigrant defeated an array of White candidates for the American presidency. "A Mexican middle class is thriving in Southern California and ... this population defied the range of predicted outcomes for the children of Mexican immigrants." Young Asian Americans marry Whites at very high rates. African Americans remain the most residentially segregated of all conventionally defined groups, but in 2010 one newspaper headline read, "Black Segregation in US Drops to Lowest in Century." According to the 2010 census, "for the first time, a majority of all racial/ethnic groups in large metro areas live in the suburbs." If it continues, this sort of structural change could generate a society in which group identification predicts less and less about status or life chances.

Social relations among and within groups are also being transformed. Almost all Americans claim to be willing to vote for a Black, Hispanic, or woman presidential candidate, though they remain skeptical of Mormons, atheists, and Muslims. Two-thirds of teens in California have dated someone of another race or ethnicity and almost all would consider marrying someone of another group. Of the 3.7 million people newly registered to vote in California from 1990 to 2010, only 400,000 were non- Hispanic Whites. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system publishes a recruitment brochure in nine languages. Gallup Poll's "life evaluation index" found not only that young adults and the affluent became more optimistic from 2008 to 2009, and again by 2010, than did older or poorer respondents, but also that in all three years Blacks and Asians showed more optimism than did Whites, Hispanics, or "Others." Genomic science is both demonstrating that human beings share almost all of their genetic inheritance and enabling research on the tiny fraction of genetic difference in search of group-specific diseases or aptitudes.

Not all recent changes in the racial order indicate progress toward a more fair society; some undermine it. Young, poor Black men are much more likely to be stopped by police, arrested, convicted, and imprisoned than under legal segregation or in the post–civil rights decades. Even government agencies charge that a federal program deputizing local police officers to enforce immigration law, while perfectly legal, facilitates discrimination against dark-skinned or "foreign-looking" Americans. New Yorkers carry signs at protests against a Muslim community center and mosque with the slogan, "Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11." Protestors at Tea Party rallies carry other signs depicting Barack Obama as a monkey or announcing that "The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin' African." As William Faulkner, and later Thomas Sugrue, put it, the United States' racist past is "not even past."

Making Sense of Change

These facts and trends give the sense that something is afoot. Many scholars, politicians, journalists, and commentators seek to characterize the growing sense of racial and ethnic change in American society. Depictions range from claims that the United States is now a post-racial society, in which group-based identification no longer shapes life chances and racial identity should be abandoned, to claims that the United States is developing a more subtle and therefore even more pernicious regime of racism than existed through the twentieth century. In this book, we aim to make sense of this debate, harnessing theory and evidence to show what is changing, what is not, and how Americans might create a new order that retains the best features of their racial and ethnic history while jettisoning the worst.

Our core argument is that Americans are creating a new racial order as a consequence of increasing heterogeneity in the constituent racial and ethnic groups of the United States. When groups' salient features remain fairly homogenous, or when heterogeneity within groups is not salient, a given racial order is more likely to remain stable. However, increasing and increasingly important differences within groups, and the entrance of new groups, can over time put pressure on existing understandings of which groups exist, who fits into them, how they relate to one another, and how their members are characterized. Increasing and salient differences within groups and the entrance of new groups can also generate changes in voters' willingness to elect people from another race or ethnicity, investors' or clients' willingness to put economic control in the hands of people from another group, people's willingness to live and work near members of other groups, and other changes in access to power, resources, and status.

During the late twentieth century, racial or ethnic groups remained largely homogenous in their level of economic well-being, amount of political power, and presentation to outsiders. They also remained fairly separated from one another in neighborhoods, schools or universities, social interactions, and jobs. That relative stasis enabled the racial order that developed after the upheavals of the 1960s to remain quite stable. But the turn of the twenty-first century witnessed four new drivers of rising heterogeneity: high levels of immigration, public recognition of multiracialism, the growth of genomic science, and the emergence of a distinctive cohort of young adults with new memories, new attitudes, and new behaviors. Through these four forces, American racial and ethnic groups are becoming more internally differentiated by class, ideology, political attitudes, ancestry, perceptions of discrimination, nationality, social connections, political and economic power, levels of optimism or cynicism, and even genes. They are also becoming more linked to other groups in personal interactions, schooling and jobs, residence, culture and attitudes, and organizations. As a result, the race or ethnicity with which a person identifies or is identified is becoming less and less predictive of his or her views, behaviors, and, eventually, life chances.

Increasing heterogeneity will lead to long-term and lasting transformation of the American racial order only if societal structures and conditions change to promote the new understandings and practices rather than reinforce old ones. Thus we examine laws, governmental policies and practices, and actions of important institutions for evidence of behavior that does or does not reinforce other sorts of transformation. We find that, despite many policies and practices that accord with the existing racial order and inhibit change, other powerful forces encourage instability and heterogeneity. Innovations in policy are enabling a new fluidity in the meaning and practice of race; institutional actors from employers to politicians to real estate agents are acting in ways that lower segregative barriers; immigration laws and local institutions sometimes permit newcomers to join and thereby transform the American racial order; and findings in genomic science are creating new structures and practices for mediating among race, medicine, law, and self-definition. Demographic shifts do not themselves create social or political transformation, but in conjunction with changes in attitudes, behaviors, laws, and policies, demography is a powerful force for change. How much structural change is actually occurring and whether it is cumulating—along with demographic, attitudinal, and resource change—into a coherent and intelligible transformation of the American racial order is the subject of the next five chapters. Whether the creation of a new racial order is fully desirable and whether it is on a firm path to completion is the subject of the final chapter.

The American Racial Order

Our analysis of the forces leading to the new heterogeneity is organized through the concept of the American racial order. As we use the term, a society's racial order is the widely understood and accepted system of beliefs, laws, and practices that organize relationships among groups defined as races or ethnicities. We derive this basic concept and its more specific components from research by Brenna Powell. She argues that boundary rigidity and status distance between groups structure any society's racial or ethnic stratification system and determine the opportunities for coordinated action within it. From that starting point and her further development of it, we identify five components of any racial order: an authoritative typology of the society's racial categories, classification of individuals within those categories, relative positions of the racial and ethnic groups, permissions or prohibitions created and controlled by the state, and social relations within and among groups.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Creating a New Racial Orderby Jennifer Hochschild Vesla Weaver Traci Burch Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691152993
• ISBN 13: 9780691152998
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280