Civil debate

THE MEANING OF DIFFERENCE
American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity, Sex and
Gender, Social Class, Sexuality, and Disability
A Text/Reader

Seventh Edition

Karen E. Rosenblum
George Mason University

Toni-Michelle C. Travis
George Mason University

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THE MEANING OF DIFFERENCE: AMERICAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE AND ETHNICITY, SEX AND

GENDER, SOCIAL CLASS, SEXUALITY, AND DISABILITY, SEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2016 by McGraw-Hill Education.

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The meaning of difference: American constructions of race and ethnicity, sex and gender, social class, sexuality, and disability /

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iii

KAREN E. ROSENBLUM is a professor of sociology at George Mason

University in Fairfax, Virginia. She has served as the university’s vice

president for university life, was the founding director of its women’s studies

program, and was a Fulbright Lecturer in Japan and South Korea. Professor

Rosenblum received her PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado,

Boulder. Her areas of research and teaching include sex and gender, language,

and deviance.

TONI-MICHELLE C. TRAVIS is a professor of government and politics at

George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Travis received her PhD in

political science from the University of Chicago. Her areas of research and

teaching include race and gender dimensions of political participation,

Virginia politics, and American government. She is a former chair of the

African American Studies program and has served as the president of the

National Capital Area Political Science Association and the Women’s Caucus

of the American Political Science Association. In addition, Professor Travis

has been a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University.

A political analyst, she is a frequent commentator on Virginia and national

politics.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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v

Preface xi

SECTION I— CONSTRUCTING CATEGORIES
OF DIFFERENCE

FRAMEWORK ESSAY 2

WHAT IS RACE? WHAT IS ETHNICITY?

1. “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity

Audrey Smedley 51

2. Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition

F. James Davis 61

3. The Evolution of Identity

The Washington Post 70
Personal Account: A Loaded Vacation

Niah Grimes 71

4. Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America

Eva Marie Garroutte 71

5. An Interlocking Panethnicity: The Negotiation of Multiple Identities among

Asian American Social Movement Leaders

Dana Y. Nakano 80

Personal Account: I Thought My Race Was Invisible

Sherri H. Pereira 89

6. Latino Racial Choices: The Effects of Skin Colour and

Discrimination on Latinos’ and Latinas’ Racial Self-Identifi cations

Tanya Golash-Boza and William Darity, Jr. 89

CONTENTS

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vi Contents

7. Whiteness as an “Unmarked” Cultural Category

Ruth Frankenberg 101

8. Plus Ça Change . . . ? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of

Race Relations in the United States

Frank D. Bean and Jennifer Lee 107

Personal Account: The Price of Nonconformity

Julia Morgenstern 114

Personal Account: Basketball

Andrea M. Busch 115

WHAT IS SEX? WHAT IS GENDER?

9. The Olympic Struggle over Sex

Alice Dreger 115

10. All Together Now: Intersex Infants and IGM

Riki Wilchins 117

11. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society,

and Neurosexism Create Difference

Cordelia Fine 123

WHAT IS SOCIAL CLASS?

12. What’s Class Got to Do with It?

Michael Zweig 127

13. The Silver Spoon: Inheritance and the Staggered Start

Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller Jr. 131

Personal Account: I Am a Pakistani Woman

Hoorie I. Siddique 135

14. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality

Crisis and What We Can Do about It

Timothy Noah 137

WHAT IS SEXUALITY?

15. Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire

Lisa M. Diamond 142

16. The Biology of the Homosexual

Roger N. Lancaster 147

17. The Heterosexual Questionnaire

Martin Rochlin 158

WHAT IS DISABILITY?

18. Disability Defi nitions: The Politics of Meaning

Michael Oliver 159

Personal Account: Invisibly Disabled

Heather L. Shaw 163

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Contents vii

19. What Wounds Enable: The Politics of Disability and Violence

in Chicago

Laurence Ralph 163

20. Ethnicity, Ethics, and the Deaf-World

Harlan Lane 176

SECTION II— EXPERIENCING DIFFERENCE

FRAMEWORK ESSAY 194

RACE AND ETHNICITY

21 . Formulating Identity in a Globalized World

Carola Suárez-Orozco 225

Personal Account: Hair

Sarah Faragalla 236

Personal Account: The Americanization of a Reluctant Vietnamese-American

Hoai Huong Tran 239

22 . Latinos and the U.S. Race Structure

Clara E. Rodríguez 242

23 . Everybody’s Ethnic Enigma

Jelita McLeod 248

Personal Account: My Strategies

Eric Jackson 249

24 . From Friendly Foreigner to Enemy Race

John Tehranian 251

Personal Account: Master Status: Pride and Danger

Sumaya Al-Hajebi 258

SEX AND GENDER

25 . The Privilege of Teaching about Privilege

Michael A. Messner 261

26 . Proving Manhood

Timothy Beneke 267

Personal Account: Just Something You Did as a Man

Francisco Hernandez 271

27 . “I’m Not a Feminist, But . . .”: Popular Myths about Feminism

Penny A. Weiss 272

SEXUALITY

28 . Dude, You’re a Fag: Adolescent Male Homophobia

C. J. Pascoe 277

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29 . Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood: Double Binds and

Flawed Options

Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong 287

Personal Account: Living Invisibly

Tara S. Ellison 297

30 . Sexual Orientation and Sex in Women’s Lives: Conceptual and

Methodological Issues

Esther D. Rothblum 297

SOCIAL CLASS

31 . Cause of Death: Inequality

Alejandro Reuss 303

32 . Why Are Droves of Unqualifi ed, Unprepared Kids Getting into

Our Top Colleges? Because Their Dads Are Alumni

John Larew 307

Personal Account: That Moment of Visibility

Rose B. Pascarell 312

33 . The Myth of the “Culture of Poverty”

Paul Gorski 313

DISABILITY

34 . Public Transit

John Hockenberry 317

35 . “Can You See the Rainbow?” The Roots of Denial

Sally French 325

36 . Not Blind Enough: Living in the Borderland Called Legal Blindness

Beth Omansky 331

Personal Account: A Time I Didn’t Feel Normal

Heather Callender 337

SECTION III— THE MEANING OF DIFFERENCE

FRAMEWORK ESSAY 340

RACE AND ETHNICITY

37 . Fourteen Key Supreme Court Cases and the Civil War Amendments 359

38 . Blink in Black and White

Malcolm Gladwell 390

Personal Account: Just Like My Mama Said

Anthony McNeill 395

39 . Safe Haven in America? Thirty Years after the Refugee Act of 1980

David W. Haines 395

viii Contents

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40 . Hispanics Are Forgotten in Civil Rights History

Nicholas Dauphine 398

41 . Balancing Identities: Undocumented Immigrant Asian American

Students and the Model Minority Myth

Tracy Poon Tambascia, Jonathan Wang, Breanne Tcheng,

and Viet T. Bui 399

Personal Account: Let Me Work for It!

Isabelle Nguyen 402

42 . Segregated Housing, Segregated Schools

Richard Rothstein 403

SEX AND GENDER

43 . Many Faces of Gender Inequality

Amartya Sen 405

Personal Account: He Hit Her

Tim Norton 410

44 . The Not-So-Pink Ivory Tower

Ann Mullen 411

45 . The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled

Paula England 415

SEXUALITY

46 . Sex Education and the Promotion of Heteronormativity

Tanya McNeill 424

Personal Account: Learning My Own Privilege

Mireille M. Cecil 432

47 . Gaga Relations: The End of Marriage

J. Jack Halberstam 432

48 . Queers without Money: They Are Everywhere. But We Refuse

to See Them

Amber Hollibaugh 439

SOCIAL CLASS

49 . Rethinking American Poverty

Mark R. Rank 443

50 . Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide

in American Education

Peter Sacks 447

51 . Wealth Stripping: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor

James H. Carr 452

Contents ix

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DISABILITY

52 . Disability Trouble

Bradley A. Areheart 456

53 . Learning Disabilities: The Social Construction of a Special

Education Category

Christine E. Sleeter 468

54 . (Re)Creating a World in Seven Days: Place, Disability, and Salvation

in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Emily Askew 473

SECTION IV— BRIDGING DIFFERENCES

FRAMEWORK ESSAY 482

55 . Adolescent Masculinity in an Age of Decreased Homohysteria

Eric Anderson 492

56 . What Can We Do? Becoming Part of the Solution

Allan G. Johnson 502

Personal Account: Parents’ Underestimated Love

Octavio N. Espinal 506

57 . In Defense of Rich Kids

William Upski Wimsatt 507

Personal Account: Where Are You From?

C.C. 511

58 . Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice

Paul Kivel 511

Credits C-1

Index I-1

x Contents

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xi

The Meaning of Difference is an effort to understand how difference is con-
structed in contemporary American culture: How do categories of people come to

be seen as “different”? How does being different affect people’s lives? What does

difference mean at the level of the individual, social institution, or society? What

difference does “difference” make? What is shared across the most signifi cant
categories of difference in America—race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, social

class, and disability? What can be learned from their commonalities? That The
Meaning of Difference is now in its seventh edition makes us hopeful that this
comparative approach can be useful in understanding American conceptions and

constructions of difference.

ORGANIZATION AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The Meaning of Difference is divided into four sections. Each section includes an
opening Framework Essay and a set of readings, with the Framework Essay pro-

viding the conceptual structure by which to understand the readings. Thus, the

Framework Essays are not simply introductions to the readings; they are the “text”

portion of this text/reader.

The fi rst section’s Framework Essay and readings describe how categories of

difference are created; the second considers the experience of difference; the third
examines the meanings that are assigned to difference, focusing especially on
education, ideology, law, and public policy; and the fourth describes what people

can do to challenge and change these constructions of difference.
Each of the readings included in the volume has been selected by virtue of its

applicability to multiple categories of difference. For example, F. James Davis’s

conclusions about the construction of race (Reading 2) could be applied to a

PREFACE

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xii Preface

discussion of sexual identity or disability. How much of “x” does it take to locate

someone as gay or straight, disabled or nondisabled, Middle-Eastern or American?

Carola Suárez-Orozco’s discussion of identity formation in a globalized world

(Reading 21) can be applied toward an understanding of racial identity formation

and even to the formation of identities tied to sexuality. Similarly, Michael Oliver’s

rendering of an alternative Survey of Disabled Adults (Reading 18)—which

parallels Martin Rochlin’s classic Heterosexual Questionnaire (Reading 17)—

serves as an example of the insights that can be gained by a change of perspective.

In all, our aim has been to select readings that help identify both what is unique

and what is shared across our experiences of difference.

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES
Five features make The Meaning of Difference distinctive:

• First, it offers a conceptual framework by which to understand the common-

alities among these categories of difference. This encompassing conceptual

approach makes The Meaning of Difference unique.
• Second, no other book provides an accessible and historically grounded discus-

sion of the Supreme Court decisions critical to the structuring of these categor-

ical differences.

• Third, The Meaning of Difference has been designed with an eye toward the
pedagogic diffi culties that often accompany this subject matter. In our experi-

ence, when the topics of race, sex and gender, social class, sexual orientation,

and disability are treated simultaneously , as they are here, no one group can be
easily cast as victim or victimizer.

• Fourth, no other volume includes a detailed discussion and set of readings on

how to challenge and change the constructions of difference.

• Finally, The Meaning of Difference is the fi rst book of its kind to incorporate
disability as a master status functioning in ways analogous to the operation of

race and ethnicity, sex and gender, sexual orientation, and social class.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SEVENTH EDITION
This edition includes twenty-seven new readings, one new personal account,

and, in Reading 37, a discussion of two important new Supreme Court Cases:

U.S. v. Windsor (2013), which established federal recognition of the rights of
married same-sex couples and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affi rmative
Action, Integration and Immigration Rights and Fight for Equality By Any
Means Necessary (BAMN) (2013), in which the Court upheld an amendment
to the Michigan state constitution banning affi rmative action in public employ-

ment, education, or contracting.

New to this volume are several readings that focus on education as a key site

for the construction of difference and inequality. Paul Gorski considers how the

myth of the culture of poverty affects teachers; Tracy Poon Tambascia , Jonathan
Wang, Breanne Tcheng, and Viet T. Bui refl ect on the impact of the model minority

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Preface xiii

myth on undocumented immigrant Asian American university students; Tanya

McNeill details the promotion of heterosexual monogamy in the policies of pub-

lic schools; Peter Sacks describes the processes by which, over the last thirty

years, American higher education has come to exclude poor and working-class

students; and Christine Sleeter places the emergence of the idea of learning

disability in the context of the educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. In

combination with John Larew’s timeless article on legacy admissions at elite

universities and coverage of several Supreme Court cases about affi rmative action

in higher education, we believe the volume now allows faculty the opportunity

for concentrated focus on education should they choose that.

Several readings new to this edition focus on the dramatic increase of economic

inequality in the United States and the still-unfolding outcomes of the Great

Recession. In “The Great Divergence,” Timothy Noah describes the nature and

extent of U.S. inequality; in “Wealth Stripping,” James Carr details the effect of

predatory “alternative” lending such as pay-day and auto-title loans; in “ Rethinking

American Poverty,” Mark Rank considers the structural factors that shape relatively

high rates of American poverty; and in “(Re)Creating a World in Seven Days,”

Emily Askew analyzes the messages about social class and disability embedded

in ABC’s hit television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition .
In addition to the inclusion of new readings, we have, as always, concentrated

on updating the Framework Essays, as these are the “text” portion of this text/

reader. We aim for essays that offer a conceptual structure for thinking about (and

teaching) this material, but in this edition in particular we thought of the essays

as a place in which to grapple with how, increasingly, American constructions of

difference appear to be both fl uid and stable.
To highlight some of the changes in this edition, the fi rst framework essay now

considers the effects of our 21st century mapping of the human genome—an

accomplishment that many predicted would be the death knell of the idea of race.

What we see instead is that race is surprisingly resilient in both popular opinion

and science, albeit now framed and profi tably marketed as “geographic ancestry.”

In contrast to this persistence, however, the essay also examines the ways that

ideas about race have broadened, especially as revealed by the use of multi-racial

self-identifi cations. As discussed in this essay, increased breadth and fl uidity also

appears to characterize gender and sexuality categorizations, for example in the

increased visibility and acceptance of those who identify as transgender and the

emergence of bisexuality as a viable scientifi c and self-identifi cation category.

In this edition, the second Framework Essay gives special attention to the idea

of intersectionality, that is, the interaction of stigmatized statuses. Long a topic
in women’s studies scholarship, we have tried to make this complicated idea more

accessible to students while also showing the practical consequences of

acknowledging, or failing to acknowledge, intersectionality. Updates to the third

Framework Essay have included the topics of intermarriage and residential

segregation. The readings in the third section—focused on education, ideology,

law, and public policy—are now organized into the master-status subsections used

throughout the book.

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Several readings from the previous edition have been retained not only because

of their wide popularity among students and faculty, but also because they are

classics in the fi eld. Included in this category are F. James Davis’s “Who Is Black?

One Nation’s Defi nition”; Ruth Frankenberg’s “Whiteness as an ‘Unmarked’

Cultural Category”; Michael Oliver’s “Disability Defi nitions”; Sally French’s

“Can You See the Rainbow?”; John Hockenberry’s “Public Transit”; C. J. Pascoe’s

“Dude You’re a Fag”; and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink in Black and White.” We

also believe several readings new to this edition will become classics: Cordelia

Fine’s “Delusions of Gender”; Lisa Diamond’s “Sexual Fluidity”; Laurence

Ralph’s “What Wounds Enable”; David Haines’s “Safe Haven in America?”;

Amartya Sen’s “The Many Faces of Gender Inequality”; and Eric Anderson’s

“Adolescent Masculinity in an Age of Decreased Homohysteria” all have this

potential.

SUPPLEMENTS

Instructor’s Manual/Test Bank

An Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank accompany this volume. In this edition,

we have added a special section of advice on how to teach this material. Instructors

can access this password-protected material on the website that accompanies the

seventh edition of The Meaning of Difference at www.mhhe.com/rosenblum7e .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many colleagues and friends have helped us clarify the ideas we present here.

David Haines has been unfailing in his willingness to help Karen think through

conceptual, technical, and ethical dilemmas. She could not imagine a colleague

more supportive or wise. Theodore W. Travis provided insight on Supreme Court

decisions, their relationship to social values, and their impact on American society.

Since this project fi rst emerged, Victoria Rader has been generous in sharing her

knowledge as a teacher and writer. Her wisdom especially guided our develop-

ment of the “Bridging Differences” section. We are also grateful to our colleague

and friend Beth Omansky for helping us understand the critical relationship of

disability to our work. As a friend and friendly editor, none could be better than

Sheila Barrows. Finally, we owe thanks to our students at George Mason University

for sharing their experiences with us.

For this edition, we again convey our appreciation to Joan Lester and the Equity

Institute of Emeryville, California, for their understanding of the progress that can

be made through a holistic analysis.

Jamie Daron of McGraw-Hill and Melanie Lewis of ansrsource shepherded this

volume to completion. Fred Courtright’s work on acquiring permissions was espe-

cially appreciated. As in previous editions, McGraw-Hill proved itself committed

to a thorough review process by putting together a panel of accomplished scholars

xiv Preface

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with broad teaching expertise. All offered detailed and insightful critiques, and

we are much in their debt:

Naomi Greyser, University of Iowa

Shepherd M. Jenks, Jr., Central New Mexico Community College

Earnest Perry, University of Missouri

Gloria L. Rowe, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College.

Karen Rosenblum

Toni-Michelle Travis

George Mason University

Preface xv

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1

S E C T I O N I

CONSTRUCTING CATEGORIES

OF DIFFERENCE

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2 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

FRAMEWORK ESSAY
In this book we consider how difference is constructed in contemporary American
society. We explore how categories of people are seen as signifi cantly different

from one another and how people’s lives are affected by these conceptions of

difference. The four sections of the book are organized around what we consider

to be the key questions about difference: how it is constructed, how it is experi-

enced by individuals, how meaning is attributed to difference, and how differences

can be bridged.

We believe that race, sex, social class, sexuality, and disability are currently

the primary axes of difference in American society—they are also what social

scientists would call master statuses. In common usage, the term status means
prestige or esteem. But for social scientists, the term status refers to positions in
a social structure. In this sense, statuses are like empty slots (or positions) that

individuals fi ll. The most obvious kinds of statuses are kinship, occupation, and

age. At any time an individual occupies multiple statuses, including those of race,

sex, social class, sexuality, and disability.

This latter set of statuses—the ones we focus on in this book—are signifi cantly

more powerful than most other social statuses. Social scientists refer to these as

master statuses because they so profoundly affect a person’s life: “in most or all
social situations master status will overpower or dominate all other statuses. . . .

Master status infl uences every other aspect of life, including personal identity.”
1

These master statuses may be said to “frame” how people are seen by others—

especially strangers—as well as how they see themselves and much of what they

experience in the world.
2
This does not mean, however, that people always under-

stand the impact of the master statuses or “frames” that they occupy. Indeed, much

of this book is about recognizing that impact.

This text will explore similarities in the operation of these master statuses.

Although there are certainly differences of history, experience, and impact, we

believe that similar processes are at work when people “see” differences of

color, sex and gender, social class, sexuality, and disability, and we believe

that there are similarities in the consequences of these master statuses for

individuals’ lives. Nonetheless, there are risks in our focus on similarities

across master statuses, not the least of which is the assumption that similarity

is a better ground for social change than a recognition of difference.
3
Thus,

our focus on similarities across master statuses is literally only one side of

the story.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, and diversity have been pervasive topics for dis-

cussion in American society for at least the last fi fty years. Although the substance

of these conversations has changed in many ways—for example, the term diversity
once fl agged the need for equal opportunity but now functions more as a market-

ing tool—the intensity around most of these topics persists. Many Americans have

strong opinions on these subjects, and that is probably also the case for readers

of this text. Two perspectives—essentialism and constructionism—are core to this

book and should help you understand your own reaction to the material.

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Framework Essay 3

The Essentialist and Constructionist Perspectives

The difference between the constructionist and essentialist perspectives is illus-
trated in the tale of the three umpires, fi rst apparently told by social psychologist

Hadley Cantril:

Hadley Cantril relates the story of three baseball umpires discussing their profession.

The fi rst umpire said, “Some are balls and some are strikes, and I call them as they are.”

The second replied, “Some’s balls and some’s strikes, and I call ’em as I sees ’em.” The

third thought about it and said, “Some’s balls and some’s strikes, but they ain’t nothing

’till I calls ’em.”
4

The fi rst umpire in the story can be described as an essentialist. When he says,

“I call them as they are,” he assumes that balls and strikes exist in the world

regardless of his perception of them. For this umpire, balls and strikes are easily

identifi ed, and he is merely a neutral observer; he “regards knowledge as objective

and independent of mind, and himself as the impartial reporter of things ‘as

they  are.’”
5

Thus, the essentialist perspective presumes that items in a category all share

some “essential” quality, their “ball-ness” or “strike-ness.” For essentialists, race,
sex, sexual orientation, disability, and social class identify signifi cant, empirically
verifi able differences among people. From the essentialist perspective, each of

these exists apart from any social processes; they are objective categories of real

differences among people.

The second umpire is somewhat removed from pure essentialism. His statement,

“I call ’em as I sees ’em,” conveys the belief that while an independent, objective

reality exists, it is subject to interpretation. For him, the world contains balls and

strikes, but individuals may have different perceptions about which is which.

The third umpire, who says “they ain’t nothing ’till I calls ’em,” is a construc-

tionist. He operates from the belief that “conceptions such as ‘strikes’ and ‘balls’

have no meaning except that given them by the observer.”
6
For this constructionist

umpire, reality cannot be separated from the way a culture makes sense of

it; strikes and balls do not exist until they are constructed through social processes.

From this perspective, difference is created rather than intrinsic to a phenomenon.

Social processes—such as those in political, legal, economic, scientifi c, and

religious institutions—create differences, determine that some differences are

more important than others, and assign particular meanings to those differences.

From this perspective, the way a society defi nes difference among its members

tells us more about that society than the people so classifi ed. The Meaning of
Difference operates from the constructionist perspective, since it examines how
we have arrived at our race, sex, disability, sexuality, and social class categories.

Few of us have grown up as constructionists. More likely, we are essentialists

who believe that master statuses such as race or sex entail clear-cut, unchanging,

and in some way meaningful differences. Still, not everyone is an essentialist.

Those who grew up in multiple racial or religious backgrounds are familiar with

the ways in which identity is not clear-cut. They grow up understanding how

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4 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

defi nitions of self vary with the context; how others try to defi ne one as belong-

ing in a particular category; and how, in many ways, one’s very presence calls

prevailing classifi cation systems into question. For example, the experience Jelita

McLeod describes in Reading 23 of being asked “What are you?” is a common

experience for multiracial people. Such experiences make evident the social con-

structedness of racial identity.

Most of us are unlikely to be exclusively essentialist or constructionist. As

authors of this book, although we take the constructionist perspective, we have

still relied on essentialist terms we fi nd problematic. The irony of questioning

the idea of race but still talking about “blacks,” “whites,” and “Asians,” or of

rejecting a dualistic approach to sexual identity while still using the terms gay
and straight, has not escaped us. Indeed, we have sometimes used the cur-
rently favored essentialist phrase sexual orientation over the more construc-
tionist sexual preference because sexual preference is an unfamiliar phrase to
many people.

a

Further, there is a serious risk that a text such as this falsely identifi es people on

the basis of either their sex, race, sexuality, disability, or social class, despite the
fact that master statuses are not parts of a person that can be broken off from one

another like the segments of a Tootsie Roll.
7
All of us are always simultaneously

all of our master statuses, an idea encompassed by the concept of intersectionality
(a topic to which we will return in the Framework Essay for Section II).

While the readings in this section may make it seem as if these were separable

statuses, they are not. Indeed, even the concept of master status could mislead us

into thinking that there could be only one dominating status in one’s life.

Both constructionism and essentialism can be found in the social sciences.

Indeed, social science research routinely operates from essentialist assumptions:

when researchers report the sex, race, or ethnicity of their interviewees or

experimental subjects they are treating these categories as “real,” that is, as existing

independent of the researchers’ classifi cations. Both perspectives also are evident

in social movements, and those movements sometimes shift from one perspective

to the other over time. For example, some feminists and most of those opposed

to feminism hold the essentialist belief that women and men are inherently dif-

ferent. The constructionist view that sexual identity is chosen dominated the gay

rights movement of the 1970s,
8
but today, the essentialist view that sexual identity

is something one is born with appears to dominate. By contrast, some of those

opposed to gay relationships now take the constructionist view that sexuality is

chosen and could therefore be changed. In this case, language often signals which

perspective is being used. For example, sexual preference conveys active, human
decision making with the possibility of change (constructionism), while sexual

orientation implies something fi xed and inherent to a person (essentialism).
Americans are now about equally split between those who hold essentialist and

constructionist views on homosexuality—40 percent of those who responded to a

a
The term sexual identity seems now to be replacing sexual orientation . It could be used in either

an essentialist or a constructionist way.

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Framework Essay 5

2012 Gallup Poll answered that being gay was something a person was born with,

compared to 37 percent who said that being gay was the result of upbringing or

other social factors. Thirty-fi ve years ago those opinions were the reverse, with

56 percent saying sexuality was the result of upbringing or other environmental

factors.
9
This shift toward a more essentialist view of sexuality began in the late

1990s, when, as Roger Lancaster describes in Reading 16, the media focused on

the biological (i.e., essentialist) research on the origin of homosexuality, much of

which has now been discredited. Later in this chapter we will describe what

appears to be another change in attitudes about sexuality, which is a turn toward

a constructionist approach, at least among college students.

This example from journalist Darryl Rist shows the appeal that essentialist

explanations might have for gay rights activists:

[Chris Yates’s parents were] Pentecostal ministers who had tortured his adolescence with

Christian cures for sexual perversity. Shock and aversion therapies under born-again doctors

and gruesome exorcisms of sexual demons by spirit-fi lled preachers had culminated in a

plan to have him castrated by a Mexican surgeon who touted the procedure as a way to

make the boy, if not straight, at least sexless. Only then had the terrifi ed son rebelled.

Then, in the summer of 1991, the journal Science reported anatomical differences
between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men. . . . The euphoric media—those

great purveyors of cultural myths—drove the story wildly. Every major paper in the country

headlined the discovery smack on the front page. . . . Like many others, I suspect, Chris

Yates’s family saw in this newly reported sexual science a way out of its wrenching impasse.

After years of virtual silence between them and their son, Chris’s parents drove several

hundred miles to visit him and ask for reconciliation. Whatever faded guilt they might have

felt for the family’s faulty genes was nothing next to the reassurance that neither by a per-

verse upbringing nor by his own iniquity was Chris or the family culpable for his urges and

actions. “We could never have condoned this if you could do something to change it. But

when we fi nally understood that you were born that way, we knew we’d been wrong. We
had to ask your forgiveness.”

10

Understandably, those who are discriminated against would fi nd essentialist

orientations appealing, just as the expansiveness of constructionist approaches

would be appealing in more tolerant eras. Still, either perspective can be used to

justify discrimination, since people can be persecuted for the choices they make

as well as for their genetic inheritance. As Lisa Diamond concludes in Reading 15,

on a topic as politicized as sexuality, there are no “safe” scientifi c fi ndings—any

fi nding can be used for just about any purpose.

Our inclusion here of disability as a social construction may generate an intense

reaction—many will want to argue that disability is about real physical, sensory,

or cognitive differences, not social constructs. However, two factors are at work

here. One involves impairment, that is, “the physical, cognitive, emotional or
sensory condition within the person as diagnosed by medical professionals.”

11
The

second is “the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in the normal life

of the community on an equal level with others due to physical and social barri-

ers.”
12

This latter dimension, called disability, has been the emphasis of what is
called the “social model” of disability, which contends that disability is created

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6 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

by social, political, and environmental obstacles—that is, that social processes

such as discrimination or lack of access to corrective technologies turn impair-

ments into disabilities.
13

This form of discrimination is sometimes called ableism.
In the historic words of Britain’s Union of the Physically Impaired against Seg-

regation (UPIAS), one of the fi rst disability liberation groups in the world and

the fi rst run by disabled people themselves:
14

It is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on

top of our impairment by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full

participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society.
15

That perspective is refl ected in the 2007 United Nations Convention on the

Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which reads in part:

[D]isability should be seen as the result of the interaction between a person and his or her

environment. Disability is not something that resides in the individual as the result of some

impairment. . . . Disability resides in the society, not in the person. [For example,] in a

society where corrective lenses are available for someone with extreme myopia (nearsight-

edness), this person would not be considered to have a disability, however someone with
the same condition in a society where corrective lenses were not available would be con-
sidered to have a disability, especially if the level of vision prevented the person from

performing tasks expected of this person. . . .
16

For example, John Hockenberry (Reading 34) describes how mass transit sys-

tems that are inaccessible to wheelchair users “disable” them by making it diffi cult

or impossible to work, attend school, or be involved in social activities. Beyond

architectural, educational, and occupational barriers, disability is also constructed

through cultural stereotypes and everyday interactions in which difference is

defi ned as undesirable. We once heard a student with spina bifi da tell a story

addressing this point: In her fi rst day at elementary school, other students kept

asking what was “wrong” with her. As she put it, she had always known she was

different, but she hadn’t thought she was “wrong.”

Not only can disability be understood as the result of disabling environments

and cultural stereotypes, the categories of impairment and disability are also them-

selves socially constructed through medical and legal processes. “[I]llness, dis-

ease, and disability are not ‘givens’ in nature . . . but rather socially constructed
categories that emerge from the interpretive activities of people acting together in

social situations.”
17

Learning disabilities are an example of this process.

Before the late 1800s when observers began to write about “word blindness,” learning dis-

ability (whatever its name) did not exist, although the human variation to which it ambiguously

refers did—sort of! People who today might be known as learning disabled may have formerly

been known as “slow,” “retarded,” or “odd.” But mostly they would not have been known as

unusual at all. The learning diffi culties experienced today by learning disabled youth have not

been experienced by most youth throughout history. For example, most youth have not been

asked to learn to read. Thus, they could not experience any reading diffi culties, the most com-

mon learning disability. As we have expected youth to learn to read and have tried to teach

them to do so, many youth have experienced diffi culty. However, until the mid-1960s we

typically did not understand those diffi culties as the consequences of a learning disability.
18

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Framework Essay 7

The social model of disability fi rst emerged out of the disabled people’s move-

ment in the 1970s in opposition to the “medical model,” which approached dis-

ability as a matter of individual defi ciencies or defects, rather than societal

responses. From the perspective of the medical model, individuals have problems

that need to be treated by medical specialists; from that of the social model, indi-

vidual problems are the result of social structures that need to be changed. Thus,

for adherents of the social model, the important questions are about civil rights

such as equal access. The survey questions posed by Mike Oliver in Reading 18

show how the world is perceived differently from these two perspectives. Still, as

Laurence Ralph describes in Reading 19, the social model of disability becomes

less relevant when we consider the numbers of young black and Hispanic men

disabled by gun violence (second to car accidents, gunshot wounds are the most

common source of disability in urban areas). Ralph describes the case of a group

of Chicago ex-gang members, now paralyzed by spinal cord injuries from gunshots.

Although the social model would argue that society has disabled these young men,

the men themselves operate from the medical model—in their mission to save

teenagers from a similar fate, they focus on the defects of their bodies.

Why have we spent so much time describing the essentialist and construction-

ist perspectives? Discussions about race, sex, disability, sexual identity, and social

class generate great intensity, partly because they involve the clash of essentialist

and constructionist assumptions. Essentialists are likely to view categories of

people as “essentially” different in some important way; constructionists are likely

to see these differences as socially created and arbitrary. An essentialist asks what

causes people to be different; a constructionist asks about the origin and conse-

quence of the categorization system itself. While arguments about the nature and

cause of racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty are disputes about power and

justice, from the perspectives of essentialism and constructionism they are also

disputes about the meaning of differences in color, sexuality, and social class.

In all of this, the constructionist approach has one clear advantage. From that

perspective, one understands that all this talk has a profound signifi cance. Such

talk is not simply about difference; it is itself the creation of difference. In the
sections that follow, we examine how categories of people are named, dichoto-

mized, and stigmatized—all toward the construction of difference.

Naming

Difference is constructed fi rst by naming categories of people. Therefore, con-

structionists pay special attention to the names people use to refer to themselves

and others—the times at which new names are asserted, the negotiations that

surround the use of particular names, and those occasions when people are grouped

together or separated out.

Asserting a Name Both individuals and categories of people face similar issues
in the assertion of a name. A change of name involves, to some extent, the claim

of a new identity. For example, one of our colleagues no longer wanted to be called

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8 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

by her nickname because it had come to seem childish to her, so she asked people

to use her “real” name instead. It took a few times to remind people that this was

her new name, and with most that was adequate. One colleague, however, argued

that he could not adapt to the new name; she would just have to tolerate his con-

tinued use of the nickname. This was a small but public battle about who had the

power to name whom. Did she have the power to enforce her own naming, or did

he have the power to name her despite her wishes? Eventually, she prevailed.

A more disquieting example was a young woman who wanted to keep her

maiden name after she married. Her fi ancé agreed with her decision, recognizing

that he would be reluctant to give up his name were the tables turned. When his

mother heard of this possibility, however, she was outraged. In her mind, a rejec-

tion of her family’s name was a rejection of her family. She urged her son to

reconsider getting married.

Thus, asserting a name can create social confl ict. On both a personal and soci-

etal level, naming can involve the claim of a particular identity and the rejection

of others’ power to impose a name. For example, is one Native American,

American Indian, or Sioux; African American or black; girl or woman; Asian,

Asian American, Korean, or Korean American; gay or homosexual; Chicano,

Mexican American, Mexican, Latino/a, or Hispanic? For instance,

[j]ust who is Hispanic? The answer depends on whom you ask.

The label was actually coined in the mid-1970s by federal bureaucrats working under

President Richard M. Nixon. They came up with it in response to concerns that the government

was wrongly applying “Chicano” to people who were not of Mexican descent, and otherwise

misidentifying and underserving segments of the population by generally classifying those with

ancestral ties to the Spanish cultural diaspora as either Chicano, Cuban, or Puerto Rican.

Nearly three decades later, the debate continues to surround the term Hispanic and its

defi nition. Although mainly applied to people from Latin American countries with linguistic

and cultural ties to Spain, it also is used by the U.S. government to refer to Spaniards

themselves, as well as people from Portuguese-speaking Brazil.
19

Comedian Carlos Mencia (a Honduran-born American) captures this confusion

in a story about talking to college students twenty years ago, but its substance

applies just as easily today: “I said ‘Latinos,’ and they said, ‘We’re not Latin!’

And then I said ‘Chicano,’ and they said, ‘We’re not of Mexican descent.’ So I

said ‘I don’t know what to say—Hispanic? And they said, ‘There’s no such coun-

try as Hispania!’ ”
20

As of 2011, 33 percent of Hispanic/Latinos preferred His-
panic, 14 percent preferred Latino, but 53 percent had no preference. 21

Deciding what name to use for a category of people is not easy. It is unlikely

that all members of the category use the same name; the name members use for

one another may not be acceptable for outsiders to use; nor is it always advisable

to ask what name a person prefers. We once saw an old friend become quite angry

when asked whether he preferred the term black or African American. “Either one
is fi ne with me,” he replied, “ I know what I am.” To him, the question meant that
he was being seen as a member of a category, not as an individual.

Because naming may involve a redefi nition of self, an assertion of power, and

a rejection of others’ ability to impose an identity, social change movements often

claim a new name, while opponents may express opposition by continuing to use

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Framework Essay 9

the old name. For example, in the 1960s black emerged in opposition to Negro as
the Black Power movement sought to distinguish itself from the Martin Luther

King–led moderate wing of the civil rights movement. The term Negro had itself
been put forward by infl uential leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T.

Washington as a rejection of the term colored that had dominated the mid- to late
19th century: “[D]espite its association with racial epithets, ‘Negro’ was defi ned to

stand for a new way of thinking about Blacks.”
22

Similarly, in 1988, Ramona H.

Edelin, president of the National Urban Coalition, proposed that African American
be substituted for black. Now both terms are used about equally. b Among blacks
who have a preference, Gallup polls suggest a gradual trend toward the label “Afri-

can American.” Still, “a clear majority of blacks say they don’t care which label is

used”
23

and some still prefer the term Negro. “The immediate reason the word
Negro is on the [2010] Census is simple enough: in the 2000 Census, more than
56,000 people wrote in Negro to describe their identity—even though it was already
on the form. Some people, it seems, still strongly identify with the term, which

used to be a perfectly polite designation,” but is now considered by many an insult.
24

Each of these name changes—from Negro to black to African American —was
fi rst promoted by activists as a way to demonstrate their commitment to a new

social order. A similar theme is refl ected in the history of the terms Chicano and
Chicanismo. Although the origin of the terms is unclear, the principle was the
same. As reporter Ruben Salazar wrote in the 1960s, “a Chicano is a Mexican-

American with a non-Anglo image of himself.”
25

( Anglo is a colloquialism for
white used in the southwestern and western United States.)

Similarly, the term homosexual was fi rst coined in 1896 by a Hungarian physi-
cian hoping to decriminalize same-sex relations between men. It was incorporated

into the medical and psychological literature of the time, which depicted nonproc-

reative sex as pathological. In the 1960s, activists rejected the pathological char-

acterization along with the name associated with it, turning to the terms gay c and
lesbian rather than homosexual (and using gay to refer to men, or both men and
women). Later, the 1990s group Queer Nation transformed what had been a com-

mon epithet into a slogan—“We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”

Well, yes, “gay” is great. It has its place. . . . [But] using “queer” is a way of reminding

us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t

have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the

straight world.  . . . Queer, unlike gay, doesn’t mean male. . . . Yeah, queer can be a rough

word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and

use against him.
26

b
Thus, one can fi nd Black Studies, Afro-American Studies, and African American Studies programs

in universities across the country.
c
In the 17th century, gay became associated with an addiction to social dissipation and loose moral-

ity, and was used to refer to female prostitutes (e.g., gay girl ). The term was apparently fi rst used in
reference to homosexuality in 1925 in Australia. “It may have been both the connotations of feminin-
ity and those of immorality that led American homosexuals to adopt the title ‘gay’ with some self-
irony in the 1920s. The slogan ‘Glad to Be Gay,’ adopted by both female and male homosexuals,
and the naming of the Gay Liberation Front, which was born from the Stonewall resistance riots
following police raids on homosexual bars in New York in 1969, bear witness to a greater self-
confi dence.”

27

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10 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Now, all terms—homosexual, gay and lesbian, gay as including both women
and men or just men, queer, and the acronyms GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, and questioning) and LGBTQ—appear to be in common use. People

who identify as asexual, that is, not experiencing sexual attraction, also appears

to be a growing category, with the likelihood that the LGBTQ umbrella will

someday expand to LGBTQA. While “queer” maintains some of its history as

both pejorative and defi ant, it was apparently acceptable enough to serve as the

title of a popular reality show, Queer Eye, that aired from 2003 to 2007.
Just as each of these social movements has involved a public renaming that

proclaims pride, the women’s movement has asserted woman as a replacement for
girl. A student who described a running feud with her roommate illustrates
the  signifi cance of these terms. The student preferred the word woman, arguing
that girl, when applied to females past adolescence, was insulting, almost as if
one could never grow up. Her female roommate just as strongly preferred the term

girl and regularly applied it to the females she knew. Each of them had such
strong feelings on the matter that it was clear they would not last as roommates.

How could these two words destroy their relationship? It appears that English

speakers use the terms girl and woman to refer to quite different qualities. Woman
is understood to convey adulthood, power, and sexuality; girl connotes youth,
powerlessness, and irresponsibility. (The same qualities of age, power, responsibil-

ity, and sexuality operate in the choice between boy and man. ) The two roommates
were asserting quite different places for themselves in the world. One claimed

adulthood; the other saw herself as not having achieved that yet. This explanation

is offered by many females: It is not so much that they like being girls, as that
they value youth and/or do not yet feel justifi ed in calling themselves women.

But  the effort to remain a “girl” can create its own inconsistencies. We once

overheard a woman describe a friend as a “girl”—the friend was fi fty and about

to adopt a child.

It seems to us that college students now often refer to themselves as “girls”

and “boys.” Sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that the use of boys, but more
importantly, guys, speaks to the development of a new age demographic for
American males, specifi cally an extended period in which they are neither depen-

dent (like boys) or responsible (like men). On the use of woman, some of our
students have said that they avoid the word because it is associated with feminism,

and they are right to conclude that it is. After all, it is called the women’s move-
ment, not the girls’ movement! The name conveys an identity: “we cannot be girls
anymore, we must be women.” In a now classic essay, political philosopher Penny

Weiss (Reading 27) “diagnoses” the phrase that has been used by women for at

least the last fi fty years: “I’m not a feminist, but. . . .”

In all, different categories of people may claim a wide range of names for

themselves. A name may refl ect the analysis and aspirations of a social movement,

and it may be the battleground for competing conceptions of the world. The name

invoked by movement activists may have no immediate bearing on the language

used by people in the streets, or everyday language may come to be shaped

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Framework Essay 11

by policymakers external to the social movement. Sometimes, a variety of names

may be in use—each with a constituency that feels strongly that only some words

are appropriate.

Of all the master statuses we are considering in this book, the naming of those

with disabilities is perhaps the least settled. The term handicapped, which pre-
dominated in the period following World War II, shifted to disabled with the
emergence of the disability rights movement in the 1970s. As we have seen,

theorists from the British social model draw a distinction between impairment,
referring to “the physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory condition within the

person as diagnosed by medical professionals,” and disability, which is reserved
for the social processes that disable a person

28
—but the U.S. disability rights

movement uses disability to cover both of these features. The style guide for the
American Psychological Association urges a “people fi rst” approach, as in “people

with disabilities” rather than “disabled people,” and “people fi rst” terminology has

been formally authorized by some state and local governments. By contrast, one

of the founders of the British disability rights movement—Mike Oliver—argued

that disabled people is ultimately more appropriate:

It is sometimes argued, often by [nondisabled] professionals and some disabled people, that

“people with disabilities” is the preferred term, for it asserts the value of the person fi rst

and the disability then becomes an appendage. This liberal and humanist view fl ies in the

face of reality as it is experienced by disabled people themselves who argue that far from

being an appendage, disability is an essential part of the self. In this view, it is nonsensical

to talk about the person and the disability separately, and consequently, disabled people are

demanding acceptance as they are, disabled people.
29

In all, the names that we call ourselves and others are rarely a matter of indif-

ference; they are often carefully chosen to refl ect worldview and aspirations, and

they can materially shape our lives.

Creating Categories of People While individuals and groups may assert
names for themselves, governments also have the power to categorize. The history

of the race and ethnicity questions asked in the U.S. Census illustrates this process.

Every census since the fi rst one in 1790 has included a question about race.

By 1970, the options for race were white, Negro or black, American Indian (with
a request to print the name of the enrolled or principal tribe), Japanese, Chinese,
Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, and Other with the option of specifying. The 1970
census began the practice of allowing the head of the household to identify the

race of household members: before that, the census taker had made that decision.

Thus, in 1970 the Census Bureau began treating race as primarily a matter of

self -identifi cation. Still, it was assumed that a person could only be a member
of one racial group, so respondents were allowed only one option for each house-
hold member.

The 1970 census also posed the fi rst ethnicity question, asking whether the

individual was of Hispanic or non-Hispanic ancestry. (Ethnicity, which generally

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12 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

refers to national or cultural ancestry, is a subject we will return to shortly.) The

Hispanic/non-Hispanic question was added at the recommendation of the Census

Bureau’s Hispanic Advisory Committee as a way to correct for the differential
undercount of the Hispanic population. A differential undercount means that
more people are undercounted in one category than in another; for example, the

census yields a larger undercount of those who rent their homes than of those

who own them. Undercounting primarily affects the data on low-income residents

of inner cities. This is the case because the poor often move and are thus diffi cult

to contact; are more likely to be illiterate or non-English speakers (there was no

Spanish-language census form until 1990); and are more likely to be illegal

immigrants afraid to respond to a government questionnaire. (The Constitution

requires a count of all the people in the United States, not just those who are
citizens or legal residents.) Because census data affect the distribution of billions

of dollars of federal aid, undercounting has a signifi cant impact. Apart from the

apportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the census helps

“determine how more than $400 billion dollars of federal funding each year [will

be] spent on infrastructure and services like hospitals, job training centers,

schools, senior centers, bridges, tunnels and other-public works projects, and

emergency services.”
30

Most important for our purposes, census data can be used to identify patterns

of discrimination and support the enforcement of civil rights. Thus, to improve

the collection of this data, in the 1970s the Commission on Civil Rights reviewed

the race categorization practices of federal agencies, concluding that while “the

designations do not refer strictly to race, color, national or ethnic origin,” the

categories were nonetheless what the general public understood to be minority
groups who were subject to discrimination. 31

This understanding of the meaning of “minority group” was part of a remark-

able bipartisan consensus that characterized the decade following the 1964 Civil

Rights Act.

It was a bipartisan project, including from both parties liberals and conservatives. . . . In

the signature minority rights policy, affi rmative action, the federal government went

beyond African Americans and declared that certain groups were indeed “minorities”—an

undefi ned term embraced by policymakers, advocates, and activists alike—and needed new

rights and programs for equal opportunity and full citizenship. In the parlance of the

period, minorities were groups seen as “disadvantaged” but not defi ned by income or

education. African Americans were the paradigmatic minority, but there were three other

ethnoracial minorities: Latinos, Asian Americans, and American Indians. Immigrants,

women, and the disabled of all ethnic groups were also included and won new rights

during this revolutionary period.
32

In this context, in 1977, the Offi ce of Management and Budget (OMB)

issued Statistical Directive No. 15, “Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal

Statistics and Administrative Reporting,” which established standard categories

and defi nitions for all federal agencies, including the Bureau of the Census.

Directive No. 15 defi ned four racial and one ethnic category: American Indian

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Framework Essay 13

or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacifi c Islander, Negro or Black, White, and

Hispanic. “The questions [on the census] follow the categories required by

the  federal Offi ce of Management and Budget for federal statistics.”
33

Thus,

the question about Hispanic origin remains the only ethnicity question on the

decennial census. (A question asking respondents to identify their “ancestry

or national origin” is, however, included in the Census Bureau’s annual

American Community Survey, which samples U.S. households). Reading 3,

“The Evolution of Identity,” shows how census questions on race and ethnicity

changed between 1860 and 2000.

Figure  1 shows the relevant questions in the

2010 census.

F I G U R E 1
Questions from the 2010 Census.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census.

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14 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

For our purposes, the most notable recent change in the census has been

recognition that a person may identify himself or herself as being a member of

more than one racial group, although the census did not include a category called

multiracial. This change was one outcome of a comprehensive review and revision
of OMB’s Directive No. 15 that included public hearings, sample surveys of

targeted populations, and collaboration among the more than thirty federal agen-

cies that collect and use data on race and ethnicity. While this change was spurred

by activists who identifi ed themselves as multiracial, the Bureau’s pretesting also

indicated that less than 2 percent of respondents would mark more than one race

for themselves, and thus the historical continuity with previous censuses would

not be compromised. The Bureau’s expectation was close to the mark for the 2000

census—2.4 percent of the population, 6.8 million people, marked two or more

races for themselves. But by the 2010 census, that fi gure had risen to 2.9 percent,

or 9 million people.
34

One change that has not been made in the census, however, is the inclusion of

an ethnic category called Arab or Middle Eastern, because public comment did
not indicate agreement on a defi nition for this category. For census purposes, white
“refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the

Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicated their race(s)[on

the Census] as “white” or reported entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese,

Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.”
35

As in previous censuses, undercounting remains an important fi scal and polit-

ical issue, given the disproportionate undercounting of people of color and the

poor. Still, gay couples may well be the most undercounted population. Since

the 1990 census, the form has provided unmarried partner as a possible answer
to the question of how the people in the household are related to one another.

The 2010 census showed 131,729 same-sex couples who identifi ed as spouses
(which is a rate of 2.3 same-sex spouses per 1,000 male/female spouses) and

514,735 same-sex couples who identifi ed themselves as unmarried partners (a
rate of 70 same-sex, unmarried partners for every 1,000 unmarried male/female

partners).
36

Certainly the unmarried, same-sex partner category is a signifi cant

undercount, attributable to respondents’ reluctance to report.

We end this phase of our discussion with three cautions. First, on a personal

level, many of us fi nd census categorizations objectionable. But as citizens, we
still seek the benefi ts and protections of the laws and policies based on these

data—and as citizens we share the goal of eliminating discriminatory practices.

For example, in the case of racial discrimination,

[r]eliable racial data are crucial to enforcing our basic laws against intentional racial dis-

crimination, which enjoy broad public support. For example, in order to demonstrate that

an employer is engaging in a broad-based “pattern or practice” of discrimination in viola-

tion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a plaintiff must rely on statistical proof that goes

beyond the plight of an individual employee. Supreme Court precedent in such cases

requires plaintiffs to show a statistically signifi cant disparity between the proportion of

qualifi ed minorities in the local labor market and the proportion within the employer’s

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Framework Essay 15

work force. A disparity of more than two standard deviations creates a legal presumption

that intentional discrimination is occurring, since a disparity of that magnitude almost never

occurs by accident.

Demographic information, in other words, provides the “big picture” that places indi-

vidual incidents in context. Voting rights cases require similar proof, as do many housing

discrimination cases and suits challenging the discriminatory use of federal funds. Without

reliable racial statistics, it would be virtually impossible for courts or agencies to detect

institutional bias, and antidiscrimination laws would go unenforced. More fundamentally,

we simply cannot know as a society how far we’ve come in conquering racial discrimination

and inequality without accurate information about the health, progress and opportunities

available to communities of different races.
37

Second, we need to remember that although the census is a fairly direct count

of how people classify themselves, many other “counts” are taking place that may

not be consistent with census categorization. For example, a student who describes

herself as of multiple race and ethnic ancestry will be considered “Hispanic” by

the federal Department of Education if even one of those categories can be classed

as that, but she will be classifi ed as Asian and Hispanic by the National Center

for Health Statistics. Her birth certifi cate may have no racial designation or an

option for multiple designations; these designations may be assigned by her

mother or by the attending nurse or doctor. In all, we cannot expect consistency

across data collection instruments.
38

Last, when considering offi cial counts of the population, we must be careful

not to assume that what is counted is real. Although census data contribute to the

essentialist view that the world is populated by distinct, scientifi cally defi ned

categories of people, this brief history demonstrates that not even those who

collect the data make that assumption. As even the Census Bureau notes, “The

concept of race as used by the Census Bureau refl ects self-identifi cation by people

according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. These

categories are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as being

scientifi c or anthropological in nature. Furthermore, the race categories include

both racial and national-origin groups.”
39

Aggregating and Disaggregating

The federal identifi cation policies we have been describing collapse nonwhite

Americans into three categories—American Indians, Blacks, and Asian or Pacifi c

Islanders—and recognize one “ethnic group,” that is, Hispanics. In effect, this

process aggregates categories of people; that is, it combines, or “lumps together,”
different groups. For example, the ethnic category Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish
origin includes 28 different census categories. d While census data distinguishes

d
The Census Bureau’s Hispanic or Latino origin categories are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban,

Dominican; Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Panamanian, Salvadoran, and Other
Central American; Argentinian, Bolivian, Chilean, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Paraguayan, Peruvian,
Uruguayan, Venezuelan, and Other South American; and fi nally Other Hispanic or Latino, including
Spaniard, Spanish, Spanish American, and All other Hispanic or Latino.

40

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16 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

many of these groups, in public discussion the more common reference is to

“Hispanics and Latinos,” which both aggregates all those categories and masks

which groups predominate. (The Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community

Survey found that 65 percent of U.S. Hispanics identify themselves as of Mexican

origin, 9 percent as of Puerto Rican origin, 4 percent as of Salvadoran origin,

4 percent as of Cuban origin, and 3 percent as of Dominican origin.)
41

On top of

that, the category “Hispanic and Latino” is used to encompass recent immigrants,

Puerto Ricans (who are U.S. citizens), and those from some of the earliest settle-

ments in what is now the United States.

The diffi culty with determining who counts as Hispanic is that Hispanics do not appear to

share any properties in common. Linguistic, racial, religious, political, territorial, cultural,

economic, educational, social class, and genetic criteria fail to identify Hispanics in all

places and times. . . .

[Nonetheless], we are treated as a homogeneous group by European Americans and

African Americans; and even though Hispanics do not in fact constitute a homogeneous

group, we are easily contrasted with European Americans and African Americans because

we do not share many of the features commonly associated with these groups.
42

The groups that are lumped together in this aggregate have historically regarded

one another as different, and thus in people’s everyday lives the aggregate cate-

gory is likely to disaggregate, or fragment, into its constituent national-origin
elements. For example, a 2013 survey of adults found that “when describing their

identity, more than half (54%) of Hispanics say they most often use the name of

their ancestors’ Hispanic origin (such as Mexican, Dominican, Salvadoran or

Cuban).” Only 20 percent said they most often described themselves as “Hispanic”

or “Latino.” (Twenty-three percent reported most often describing themselves as

“American.”)
43

Not surprisingly, 69 percent of Latinos surveyed in the 2011 Cen-

sus Bureau’s American Community Survey said that they do not share a common

culture with other Latinos.
44

And how do “Hispanics” identify themselves by race? In 2011, census data

showed that 36 percent identifi ed themselves as white, 10 percent identifi ed them-

selves as black, 26 percent identifi ed themselves as some other race, and 25  percent

identifi ed their race as Hispanic/Latino.
45

Indeed, most of those who choose “some

other race” on the Census are Latinos.
46

Nonetheless, as Tanya Golash-Boza and

William Darity, Jr. write in Reading 6, the way that Latinos describe their race is

changeable, because it is responsive to their skin color and experiences of dis-

crimination, and—for those who are recent immigrants—also responsive to defi ni-

tions of race in their home country. All of these factors interact, and not

necessarily in predictable ways.

In the same way that many differences are masked by the terms Latino and
Hispanic, the category Asian Pacifi c American or Asian American includes groups
with different languages, cultures, and religions, and sometimes centuries of mutual

hostility. Like Hispanic / Latino, the category Asian American is based more on geog-
raphy than on any cultural, racial, linguistic, or religious commonalities. “Asian

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Framework Essay 17

Americans are those who come from a region of the world that the rest of the world
has defi ned as Asia.”

47

e

Much the same can be said for the terms Middle East and Middle Eastern. As
John Tehranian writes in Reading 24, the term Middle East emerged at the begin-
ning of the 20th century as part of political strategies. As a region that encom-

passes multiple continents, languages, ethnic groups, and religions, “the term is

riddled in ambiguity, sometimes encompassing the entire North African coast,

from Morocco to Egypt and other parts of Africa, including the Sudan and

Somalia, the former Soviet Caucasus Republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and

Armenia, and occasionally Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkistan. The Middle East

is therefore a malleable geopolitical construct of relatively recent vintage.”

Aggregate classifi cations have also been promoted by social movements; terms

such as Latino or Asian American were not simply the result of federal classifi ca-
tions. Student activists inspired by the Black Power and civil rights movements

fi rst proposed the terms. Asian American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Latino
are examples of panethnic terms, that is, classifi cations that span national-origin
identities. Student activists inspired by the Black Power and civil rights move-

ments supported (and sometimes initiated) these panethnic classifi cations as a way

to highlight the experiences of discrimination that groups within each classifi ca-

tion shared. Thus, panethnic terminology often signaled the development of bridg-

ing organizations and other forms of solidarity across groups.

The concept of panethnicity is useful at many levels, but unstable in practice.

“The elites representing such groups fi nd it advantageous to make political demands

by using the numbers and resources panethnic formations can mobilize. The state,

in turn, can more easily manage claims by recognizing and responding to large

blocs as opposed to dealing with the specifi c claims of a plethora of ethnically

defi ned interest groups.”
50

At the same time, competition and historic antagonisms

make such alliances unstable. “At times it is advantageous to be in a panethnic

bloc, and at times it is desirable to mobilize along particular ethnic lines.”
51

The disability movement is similar to panethnic movements in that it has

brought together people with all types of impairments. This approach was a

e
In census classifi cation, the category Asian includes Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese,

Korean, Vietnamese; Other Asian includes Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Burmese, Cambodian, Hmong,
Indo-Chinese, Indonesian, Iwo Jiman, Laotian, Malaysian, Maldivian, Mongolian, Nepalese,
Okinawan, Pakistani, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Taiwanese. The category Pacifi c Islander
includes Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan; Other Pacifi c Islander includes
Carolinian, Chuukese, Fijian, Kirabati, Kosraean, Mariana Islander, Marshallese, Melanesian,
Micronesian, New Hebridian, Palauan, Papua New Guinean, Pohnpeian, Polynesian, Saipanese,
Solomon Islander, Tahitian, Tokelauan, Tongan, and Yapese.

48

In 1980, Asian Indians successfully lobbied to change their census classifi cation from white to

Asian American by reminding Congress that historically, immigrants from India had been classed as
Asian . With other Asians, those from India had been barred from immigration by the 1917 Immigra-
tion Act, prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens until 1946, and denied the right to own land
by 1920 Alien Land Law. Indeed, in 1923 the U.S. Supreme Court (in U.S. v. Thind ) ruled that Asian
Indians were nonwhite, and could therefore have their U.S. citizenship nullifi ed.

49
Thus, for most of

their history in the United States, Asian Indians had been classed as Asian .

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18 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

historic “fi rst,” running counter both to the tradition of organizing around specifi c

impairments and to the fact that the needs of people with different impairments

are sometimes in confl ict. For example, some of the curb cuts that make wheel-

chair access possible can make walking more diffi cult for blind people who need

to be able to feel the edges of a sidewalk with their canes. The aggregating of

disabled people that began with the disability rights movement was reinforced in

the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The terms Native American and African American are also aggregate classifi ca-
tions, but in this case they are the result of conquest and enslavement.

The “Indian,” like the European, is an idea. The notion of “Indians” was invented to distin-

guish the indigenous peoples of the New World from Europeans. The “Indian” is the person

on shore, outside of the boat. . . . There [were] hundreds of cultures, languages, ways of

living in Native America. The place was a model of diversity at the time of Columbus’s

arrival. Yet Europeans did not see this diversity. They created the concept of the “Indian”

to give what they did see some kind of unifi cation, to make it a single entity they could

deal with, because they could not cope with the reality of 400 different cultures.
52

f

Conquest made “American Indians” out of a multitude of tribes and nations

that had been distinctive on linguistic, religious, and economic grounds. It was

not only that Europeans had the unifying concept of Indian in mind—after all,
they were suffi ciently aware of cultural differences to generate an extensive body

of specifi c treaties with individual tribes. It was also that conquest itself—

encompassing as it did the appropriation of land, the forging and violation of

treaties, and policies of forced relocation—structured the lives of Native Ameri-

cans along common lines. Whereas contemporary Native Americans still identify

themselves by tribal ancestry, rather than “Native American” or “American Indian,”

their shared experience of conquest also forged the common identity refl ected in

the collective name, Native American.
Similarly, the capture, purchase, and forced relocation of Africans, and their

experience of forcibly being moved from place to place as personal property, cre-

ated the category now called African American. This experience forged a single
people out of a culturally diverse group; it produced an “oppositional racial con-

sciousness,” that is, a unity-in-opposition. “Just as the conquest created the ‘native’

where once there had been Pequot, Iroquois, or Tutelo, so too it created the ‘black’

where once there had been Asante or Ovimbundu, Yoruba or Bakongo.”
53

Even the categories of gay and straight, male and female, people of color,
and poor and middle class are aggregations that presume a commonality by
virtue of shared master status. For example, the category gay and lesbian assumes
that sharing a sexual identity binds people together despite all the issues that

f
The idea of Europe and the European is also a constructed, aggregate category. “Physically, Europe
is not a continent. Where is the water separating Europe from Asia? It is culture that separates Europe
from Asia. Western Europe roughly comprises the countries that in the Middle Ages were Latin
Christendom, and Eastern Europe consists of those countries that in the Middle Ages were Eastern
Orthodox Christendom. It was about A.D. 1257 when the Pope claimed hegemony over the secular
emperors in Western Europe and formulated the idea that Europeans, Christians, were a unifi ed
ethnicity even though they spoke many different languages.”

54

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Framework Essay 19

might divide them as men and women, people of color, or people of different

social classes. And, just as in the cases we have previously discussed, the forma-

tion of alliances between gays and lesbians will depend on the circumstances

and specifi c issues.

Still, our analysis has so far ignored one category of people. From whose

perspective do the categories of Native American, Asian American, African
American, Middle Eastern American, Arab American, and Latino / Hispanic exist?
Since “difference” is always “difference from, ” from whose perspective is “dif-
ference” determined? Who has the power to defi ne “difference”? If “we” are in

the boat looking at “them,” who precisely are “we”?

Every perspective on the social world emerges from a particular vantage point,

a particular social location. Ignoring who is in the boat treats that place as if it

were just the view “anyone” would take. Historically, the people in the boat were

European; at present, they are white Americans. As Ruth Frankenberg frames it

in Reading 7, in the United States “whites are the nondefi ned defi ners of other

people,” “the unmarked marker of others’ differentness.” Failing to identify the

“us” in the boat means that “white culture [becomes] the unspoken norm,” a

category that is powerful enough to defi ne others while itself remaining invisible

and unnamed.

Thus,

[F]or most whites, most of the time, to think or speak about race is to think or speak about

people of color, or perhaps, at times, to refl ect on oneself (or other whites) in relation to

people of color. But we tend not to think of ourselves or our racial cohort as racially distinc-

tive. Whites’ “consciousness” of whiteness is predominantly unconsciousness of whiteness.
55

Because whites do not usually identify themselves by race, they do not easily

understand the signifi cance of racial identities.
56

In all, those with the most power

in a society are best positioned to have their own identities left unnamed, thus

masking their power.

The term androcentrism describes the world as seen from a male-centered
perspective. For example, if we defi ne a good employee as one who is willing to

work extensive overtime, we are thinking from a male-centered perspective, since

women’s child-care responsibilities often preclude extra work commitments. We

may also describe Eurocentric and physicalist 57 perspectives, that is, viewpoints
that assume everyone is of European origin or physically agile. Similarly, the term

heteronormativity turns our attention to the ways that heterosexuality is built into
the assumptions and operation of all aspects of daily life, both sexual and non-

sexual.
58

Heteronormativity is one of a set of terms that has emerged to describe

individual- and societal-level treatment of homosexuality. In 1972, in Society and
the Healthy Homosexual, psychologist George Weinberg offered the term
homophobia to describe the aversion to homosexuals that he found among people
at the time. As he said later, “It was a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be

associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought

for—home and family. . . . [I]t led to great brutality as fear always does.”
59

The

term was a watershed; it defi ned the problem as heterosexual intolerance, not

homosexuality.

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20 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Weinberg was not thinking of homophobia in clinical terms,
60

for example, pho-

bias are usually experienced as “unpleasant and dysfunctional,” which is not the

case with “homophobia.” Nonetheless, the term is now pervasive and routinely

identifi ed as part of the triumvirate, “sexism, racism, and homophobia.” One prob-

lem with that, however, is that homophobia focuses on individual prejudices rather

than societal structures. Thus, in 1990, psychologist Gregory Herek offered the word

heterosexism to describe “an ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigma-
tizes any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship or community.”

61

A decade later, he suggested that the term sexual prejudice replace homophobia. 62
The more recent concept of heteronormativity turns our attention to all the ways

in which heterosexuality is presumed to be the natural, normal, and inevitable

structure of society. It is the “view from the boat.” First put forward by English

professor Michael Warner, heteronormativity describes heterosexuality as akin to

an “offi cial national culture”;
63

a “sense of rightness—embedded in things and

not just in sex—is what we call heteronormativity.”

People are constantly encouraged to believe that heterosexual desire, dating, marriage, repro-

duction, childrearing, and home life are not only valuable to themselves, but the bedrock

on which every other value in the world rests. Heterosexual desire and romance are thought

to be the very core of humanity. It is the threshold of maturity that separates the men from

the boys (though it is also projected onto all boys and girls). It is both nature and culture.

It is the one thing celebrated in every fi lm plot, every sitcom, every advertisement. It is the

one thing to which every politician pays obeisance, couching every dispute over guns and

butter as an effort to protect family, home, and children. What would a world look like in

which all these links between sexuality and people’s ideas were suddenly severed? Nonstan-

dard sex has none of this normative richness, this built-in sense of connection to the mean-

ingful life, the community of the human, the future of the world.
64

. . . [F]rom senior proms to conjugal rights in prison, from couples’ discounts at hotels to

the immediate immigration rights of foreign marital partners, from a nonchalant goodbye

kiss at the airport to incessant male-female couples grinning down from billboards, to fairy

tales with princes rescuing princesses. It is, indeed, diffi cult to fi nd any aspect of modern

life that does not include men desiring women and women desiring men as a premise, as

necessary to being human as thinking and breathing.
65

In all, naming andocentrism, Eurocentrism, physicalism, and heteronormativity

helps us recognize them as particular social locations, like the other master sta-

tuses we have considered. Indeed, it is possible to argue that, no matter what their

master statuses, all Americans operate from these particular biases because they

are built into the basic fabric of our culture.

Dichotomizing

Many forces promote the construction of aggregate categories of people. Frequently,

these aggregates emerge as dichotomies. Sociologists have argued that the creation
of dichotomized categories is a regular feature of social life because it is a way

to resolve life’s routine problems, for example, allocating tasks by gender. More

important, dichotomization inevitably yields categories that will be unequally

valued and rewarded; in social life, the two parts of a dichotomy will never be

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Framework Essay 21

“equal.” Categorical inequalities emerge and persist because some benefi t from

them and because there is a societal cost to transitioning out of their use. Thus,

inequality between categories of people becomes “durable” over interactions, time,

space, and lifetimes. The extent of inequality between dichotomous pairs may

vary, the grounds on which categories are established may differ, and the efforts

directed at reducing such inequalities may change, but dichotomized categorical

inequalities are likely a constant of social life.
66

But to dichotomize is not only to divide something into two parts; it is also to

see those parts as mutually exclusive and in opposition. Dichotomization encourages

the sense that there are only two categories, that everyone fi ts easily in one or the

other, and that the categories stand in opposition to each other. In contemporary

American culture, we appear to treat the master statuses of race, sex, class, sexual

identity, and disability as if each embodied “us” and “them”—as if for each master

status, people could be easily sorted into two mutually exclusive, opposed groupings.
g

Dichotomizing Race Perhaps the clearest example of the historic and continu-
ing dichotomization of race is provided by the “one-drop rule,” which is described

by F. James Davis in Reading 2. This “rule” became a law but now operates only

as an informal social practice, holding that people with any traceable African

heritage should classify themselves as black. President Barack Obama’s identifi ca-
tion of himself as African American on the 2010 census is consistent with this

practice. The rule, which is unique to the United States and South Africa, grew

out of the efforts of southern whites to enforce segregation after the Civil War,

but over time came to be endorsed by both blacks and whites. Consistent with
this practice, only about 4 percent of black Americans identify themselves as

having ancestry from more than one race, even though a much larger percentage

have Native American and/or white ancestry.
67

While the one-drop rule applied to the identifi cation of who was black, the

three racial categories identifi ed by the census throughout the 19th century—

White, Negro, and Indian— were functionally collapsed into a white/nonwhite
binary. For example, in 1854, the California Supreme Court in People v . Hall held
that blacks, mulattos, Native Americans, and Chinese were “not white” and there-

fore could not testify for or against a white man in court. (Hall, a white man, had

been convicted of killing a Chinese man on the testimony of one white and three

Chinese witnesses; the Supreme Court overturned the conviction.) The same

dichotomization can be seen in the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896) described in Reading 37.

At the insistence of the Mexican government, Mexican residents of the south-

west territories ceded to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo were placed on the “white” side of the ledger, and accorded the political-

legal status of “free white persons.”
68

European immigrants such as the Irish were

initially treated as nonwhite, and lobbied for their inclusion in American society

on the basis of the white/nonwhite distinction.

g
Springer and Deutsch (1981) coined the term dichotomania to describe the belief that there are male

and female sides of the brain. We think that term also fi ts our discussion.

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22 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

[Immigrants struggled to] equate whiteness with Americanism in order to turn argu-

ments  over immigration from the question of who was foreign to the question of who was

white. . . .

Immigrants could not win on the question of who was foreign. . . . But if the issue

somehow became defending “white man’s jobs” or “white man’s government” . . . [they]

could gain space by defl ecting debate from nativity, a hopeless issue, to race, an ambiguous

one. . . . After the Civil War, the new-coming Irish would help lead the movement to bar

the relatively established Chinese from California, with their agitation for a “white man’s

government,” serving to make race, and not nativity, the center of the debate and to prove

the Irish white.
69

Thus, historically, American has meant white, as many contemporary Americans
of Asian ancestry learn when they are complimented on their English—a compli-

ment that presumes that someone who is Asian could not be a native-born

American.
h
A story from the 1998 Winter Olympics illustrates the same point. At

the conclusion of the fi gure skating competition, MSNBC posted a headline that

read “American Beats Out Kwan for Women’s Figure Skating Title.” The refer-

ence was to Michelle Kwan, who won the silver medal, losing the gold to Tara

Lapinsky. But both Kwan and Lapinsky are Americans. While Kwan’s parents

immigrated from Hong Kong, she was born and raised in the United States, is a

U.S. citizen, and was a member of the U.S. team. The network attributed the

mistake to overworked staff and apologized. But for Asian American activists, this

was an example of how people of Asian descent have remained perpetual foreign-

ers in American society.

African American novelist Toni Morrison would describe this as a story about

“how American means white ”:

Deep within the word “American” is its association with race. To identify someone as South

African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” or “black” or “colored” to make

our meaning clear. In this country it is quite the reverse. American means white, and

Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with . . . hyphen after

hyphen after hyphen.
70

Insofar as American means white, those who are not white are presumed to be
recent arrivals and often told to go “back where they came from.” Thus, we appear

to operate within the dichotomized racial categories of American / non – American —
these are racial categories, because they effectively mean white / nonwhite.

Yet it is possible that the “white/nonwhite dichotomy” is in the midst of an

ironic transformation, into what Lee and Bean in Reading 8 characterize as a

“black/nonblack” dichotomy. Unlike Latinos and Asian Americans who, with suc-

cess, have come to be seen as similar to whites, African Americans are seen by

whites as dissimilar no matter what their success, just as the children of black-

white parentage are perceived by both blacks and whites as black. This black/

h
Since the historic American ban on Asian immigration remained in place until 1965, it is the case

that a high proportion of Asian Americans—about 75 percent—are foreign born (although the
percentage who are foreign-born varies by national origin).

71

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Framework Essay 23

nonblack dichotomy argues for an “African American exceptionalism” to the

incorporation of minority groups into whiteness.

Defi ning Race and Ethnicity But what exactly is race? First, we need to
distinguish race from ethnicity. Social scientists defi ne ethnic groups as categories
of people who are distinctive on the basis of national origin or heritage, language,

or cultural practices. “Members of an ethnic group hold a set of common memo-

ries that make them feel that their customs, culture, and outlook are distinctive.”
72

Indeed, in Reading 20, Harlan Lane argues that there is a Deaf-World ethnic group

distinct from those for whom deafness is a hearing impairment.

Thus, ethnicity is very much about the intensity of people’s feelings, and
these may be inconsistent, as well as, change over time. For example, being an

Italian American in the 1920s involved much more intensity of feeling, interac-

tion, and political organization than it does now, and being a Jew has become

an ethnic, rather than a religious, identity for many. For others, such as Bosnian

refugees, ethnic identity can involve a painful choice between religion and

nationality—are they Bosnian, Bosnian Muslim, or Muslim, or do they reject

ethnic identity altogether since “ethnic cleansing” made them refugees in the

fi rst place?
73

Finally, even though ethnic identity is often more important to people than race,

it can be obscured by race. For example, focusing only on race would hide the

important differences between African Americans, Haitians, Somalis, Ethiopians,

or Jamaicans—all black American ethnic groups. Similarly, Americans with

Middle Eastern heritage (who are classifi ed as white in the census) are often
misdescribed as Arabs, which includes only those from Arabic-speaking countries.
A scene in the movie Crash made this point: in vandalizing the store of an Iranian
grocer, the looters left behind graffi ti about “Arabs,” but Iranians speak Farsi and

do not consider themselves Arabic. In all, beneath panethnic terms such as Middle
Eastern, Arab American, Latino, or Asian American, one will fi nd strong ethnic
attachments based on national origin or religion.

The term race fi rst appeared in the Romance languages of Europe in the
Middle Ages to refer to breeding stock. A race of horses described common

ancestry and a distinctive appearance or behavior. Race appears to have been fi rst
applied to New World peoples by the Spanish in the 16th century. Later it was

adopted by the English, again in reference to people of the New World, and it

generally came to mean people, nation, or variety. By the late 18th century,
“when scholars became more actively engaged in investigations, classifi cations,

and defi nitions of human populations, the term race was elevated as the one
major symbol and mode of human group differentiation employed extensively

for non-European groups and even those in Europe who varied in some way from

the subjective norm.”
74

Though elevated to the level of science, the concept of race continued to refl ect

its origins in animal breeding. Farmers and herders had used the concept to

describe stock bred for particular qualities; scholars used it to suggest that human

behaviors could also be inherited. “Unlike other terms for classifying people . . .

ros27020_sec01_001-050.indd 23ros27020_sec01_001-050.indd 23 01/08/15 7:23 AM01/08/15 7:23 AM

24 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

the term ‘race’ places emphasis on innateness, on the inbred nature of whatever

is being judged.”
75

Like animal breeders, scholars also presumed that appearance

revealed something about potential behavior. Just as the selective breeding of

animals entailed the ranking of stock by some criteria, scholarly use of the concept

of race involved the ranking of humans. Differences in skin color, hair texture,

and the shape of head, eyes, nose, lips, and body were developed into an elaborate

hierarchy of merit and potential for “civilization.”

As described by Audrey Smedley in Reading 1, the idea of race emerged

among all the European colonial powers, although their conceptions of it varied.

However, only the British in colonizing North America and South Africa con-

structed a system of rigid, exclusive racial categories and a social order based on
race , a “racialized social structure.” 76 “[S]kin color variations in many regions of
the world and in many societies have been imbued with some degree of social

value or signifi cance, but color prejudice or preferences do not of themselves

amount to a fully evolved racial worldview.”
77

This racialized social structure—which in the United States produced a race-

based system of slavery and subsequently a race-based distribution of political, legal,

and social rights—was a historical fi rst. “Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and

enslavement have characterized much of human history over the past fi ve thousand

years or so, but none of these events before the modern era resulted in the develop-

ment of ideologies or social systems based on race.”
78

Although differences of color

had long been noted, societies had never before been built on those differences.

The sciences that emerged from this racialized social structure were also racial-

ized; because scientists presumed that “race” involved more than just color, they

sought the biological distinctivness of race categories. Their belief that they had

found such differences followed from their fl awed assumptions and research meth-

ods. By the early 20th century, anthropologists discovered that the physical fea-

tures that had been used to distinguish the races such as height, stature, and head

shape could be changed by environment and nutrition. Thus, the certainties about

“race” and what it meant—at least in the sciences—began to be questioned.
79

In effect, science was confronting a kind of “bottom line” about race: while

there are many ways humans can be grouped, those do not correspond to tradi-

tional notions of race.

If our eyes could perceive more than the superfi cial, we might fi nd race in chromosome 11:

there lies the gene for hemoglobin. If you divide humankind by which of two forms of the

gene each person has, then equatorial Africans, Italians and Greeks fall into the “sickle-cell

race”; Swedes and South Africa’s Xhosas (Nelson Mandela’s ethnic group) are in the healthy

hemoglobin race. Or do you prefer to group people by whether they have epicanthic eye

folds, which produce the “Asian” eye? Then the !Kung San (Bushmen) belong with the

Japanese and Chinese. . . . [D]epending on which traits you pick, you can form very surpris-

ing races. Take the scooped-out shape of the back of the front teeth, a standard “Asian” trait.

Native Americans and Swedes have these shovel-shaped incisors, too, and so would fall in

the same race. Is biochemistry better? Norwegians, Arabians, north Indians and the Fulani

of northern Nigeria . . . fall into the “lactase race” (the lactase enzyme digests milk sugar).

Everyone else—other Africans, Japanese, Native Americans—form the “lactase-deprived

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Framework Essay 25

race” (their ancestors did not drink milk from cows or goats and hence never evolved the

lactase gene). How about blood types, the familiar A, B, and O groups? Then Germans and

New Guineans, populations that have the same percentages of each type, are in one race;

Estonians and Japanese comprise a separate one for the same reason. . . . The dark skin of

Somalis and Ghanaians, for instance, indicates that they evolved under the same selective

force (a sunny climate). But that’s all it shows. It does not show that they are any more
closely related in the sense of sharing more genes than either is to Greeks. Calling Somalis

and Ghanaians “black” therefore sheds no further light on their evolutionary history and

implies—wrongly—that they are more closely related to each other than either is to some-

one of a different “race.”
80

As one anthropologist has put it, “Classifying people by color is very much

like classifying cars by color. Those in the same classifi cation look alike . . . but

the classifi cation tells you nothing about the hidden details of construction or

about how the cars or people will perform.”
81

By the late 1960s, a “no race” position came to be widely accepted in physical

anthropology and human genetics. This perspective argues that “(1) Biological

variability exists but this variability does not conform to the discrete packages

labeled races. (2) So-called racial characteristics are not transmitted as complexes.

(3) Races do not exist because isolation of groups has been infrequent; popula-

tions have always interbred.”
82

Yet while there is a kind of “commonsense” under-

standing in the social sciences that race is a social construction, that recognition

has not especially shaped the substance of social science research.

[I]t will suffi ce to point out that virtually all scholars who write about “race and intelligence”

assume that the “races” which they study are distinguished on the basis of biologically

relevant criteria. So accepted is this fact that most scholars engaged in such research never

consider it necessary to justify their assignment of individuals to this or that “race.” . . .

[Thus], the layman who reads the literature on race and racial groupings is justifi ed in

assuming that the existent typologies have been derived through the application of theories

and methods current in disciplines concerned with the biological study of human variation.

Since the scientifi c racial classifi cations which a layman fi nds in the literature are not too

different from popular ones, he can be expected to feel justifi ed in the maintenance of his

views on race.
83

The complexities of incorporating a “no race” position into social science

research is highlighted by how the professional associations in anthropology and

sociology treat the concept. In 1998, the American Anthropological Association

(AAA) adopted an unambiguous “Statement on Race”: “Racial beliefs constitute

myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior

of people homogenized into ‘racial’ categories.” But for the American Sociological

Association (ASA), that does not mean we should stop collecting data on race: its

2002 statement, “The Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientifi c

Research on Race,” urges the continued study of race as a social phenomenon
because it affects major aspects of social life—including employment, housing,

education, and health. The title of the ASA’s press release on the topic reads,

“Would ‘Race’ Disappear if the United States Offi cially Stopped Collecting Data

on It?” Their answer to that is clearly “no”; anthropologists would certainly agree.

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26 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Still, the assumption that racial categories are biologically distinctive has not

disappeared—indeed, it gathered strength with the mapping of the human genome

at the beginning of the 21st century. Completion of the Human Genome Project

was met with pronouncements that, fi nally, our notions of race could be put to

rest since humans were found to share shared 99.9 percent of all genetic material.

Yet attention quickly shifted to fi nding groupings within that genetic material and

determining the signifi cance of the 0.1 percent difference. (Because humans and

chimpanzees share 98.7 percent of their genes, for example, that 0.1 percent dif-

ference could make a difference.)

By 2002, in a landmark article published in Science, “researchers announced
that they had ‘identifi ed six main genetic clusters, fi ve of which correspond to

major geographic regions.’” Although race was not mentioned, the “major geo-
graphic regions” that matched the genetic clusters they discovered—Africa,

Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania, and America—were quickly translated into tradi-

tional racial divisions.”
84

Other research along this line followed, using similar

sampling techniques and contributing to a burgeoning data set. Thus, as legal

scholar Dorothy Roberts frames it, “geographic ancestry” emerged as a proxy

for race.

Yet each decision in this research—sampling isolated (and thereby “pure”)

populations rather than regions like India where people are not easily classifi able,

“cherry picking” population samples that fi t preexisting conceptions of race rather

than pursuing a random sample of the global population, deciding that the statis-

tical analysis of a huge data set is best captured by a model of six rather than

twenty geographic regions, as in the Science article—draws on preexisting con-
ceptions of race.

[R]emember, the number of genetic clusters is dictated by the computer user, not the com-

puter program. . . . Rosenberg [lead author of the Science article] later revealed that his
team also analyzed the data set using six to twenty clusters. . . . The larger number of

clusters identifi ed by the study could just as easily have been highlighted to demonstrate

the diffi culty of dividing human beings into genetic races. There is nothing in the team’s

fi ndings to suggest that six clusters represent human population structure better than ten, or

fi fteen, or twenty.
85

The six groupings mapped onto conventional notions of race—indigenous people

from fi ve continents plus one isolated group in Northern Pakistan. Instead of talk-

ing about race, we could talk about ancestry.

New marketing opportunities for “ancestry” fl ourish; each reinforces the idea

of biological races. For example, many students in high school learn about DNA

by sending a sample to a company that analyzes it for the geographic origins of

the student’s family (using the same questionable sampling and data sets described

earlier). Because those geographic groupings are broken down into the continents

we associate with race, it is not surprising that the results are read as being one’s

“racial” composition, as if there were “pure” racial groups and we are some mix

of these (“I am 43 percent European, 26 percent Sub-Saharan African, and

31  percent East Asian,” sounds very much like white, black, and Asian).

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Framework Essay 27

But many more lucrative opportunities exist in the realm of race-specifi c med-

ications, the fi rst of which was BiDil, a 2004 drug for heart disease and the fi rst

race-targeted medication approved by the FDA. (BiDil is a combination of two

generic drugs and thus could be patented as something new.) If race were not

“real,” how could the drug be more effective for African Americans, as the man-

ufacturer claimed? Actually, whether BiDil has a differential effect by race remains

unknown. The fi rst clinical trial of the drug found that a small subsample of

African Americans did better than whites. On that basis, the drug went to a full-

scale clinical trial, but only on self-identifi ed African Americans; there was no

comparison with other groups. Why not? Because the drug’s manufacturer,

NitroMed, “had a fi nancial disincentive for fi nding that BiDil worked regardless

of race—its patent (and market monopoly) applied only to its use by African

American patients.”
86

Ultimately, BiDil was neither especially prescribed nor

used; NitroMed went out of business in 2009.
87

Certainly, the search for “race”-based drugs continues. These efforts to fi nd the

biological distinctiveness of racial categories function much as earlier efforts did,

that is, as a distraction from the social factors that affect the quality and length
of people’s lives.

By looking at what’s in the blood, [geneticists] avoid the messy stuff that happens when

humans interact with each other. It’s easier to look inside the body because genes, proteins,

and SNP [single nucleotide polymorphisms] patterns are far more measurable than the com-

plex dynamics of society. . . .

When you’re talking about genetic diseases, there’s usually something in the environment

that triggers their onset. Shouldn’t we be talking about the trigger?

Take the case of black men and prostate cancer. African-American males have twice

the prostate cancer rate that whites do. Right now, the National Cancer Institute is search-

ing for cancer genes among black men. They’re not asking, How come black men in the

Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa have much lower prostate cancer rates than all

American men?

A balanced approach might involve asking, Is there something in the American environ-

ment triggering these high rates? Is it diet, stress or what?
88

The primary signifi cance of race is as a social concept. We “see” race; we
expect it to tell us something signifi cant about a person, and we organize social

policy, law, and the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige around it. From

the essentialist position, race is assumed to exist independently of our perception

of it; it is assumed to signifi cantly distinguish one group of people from another.

From the constructionist perspective, race exists because we have created it as a

meaningful category of difference among people.

Race has been characterized as a biological fiction, but a social fact. Yet

the strength of this fiction suggests that it functions like a contemporary folk

story.

Most Americans do not deduce that biological races exist from sound scientifi c evidence

and reasoning. They are inculcated with this belief in the same way a child is raised in a

religion. Children in the United States learn to divide all people into racial groups and come

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28 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

to have faith in race as a self-evident truth, like a traditional creation story that explains

how the world works.

According to folklorist Judith Neulander, for a folk story to persist it must contain “ele-

ments that can be modifi ed without changing what the tale is about,” enabling it “to dodge

later discreditation” Science has been responsible for giving racial folklore its superfi cial

plausibility by updating its defi nitions, measurements, and rationales without changing what

the tale is about: once upon a time human beings all over the world were divided into large

biological groups called races.

Believing in race can be compared to believing in astrology. People who have faith in

astrology fi nd constant confi rmation that horoscope predictions are reliable and that astro-

logical signs determine personality types.
89

Dichotomizing Sexuality Many similarities have existed in the construction of
race and sexuality categories. First, historically both have been dichotomized—

into black/white, white/nonwhite, or gay/straight—and individuals have been

expected to fi t easily into one category or the other. Scientists have also sought

biological differences between gay and straight people just as they have looked

for such differences between the “races.” Usually the search has been for what

causes same-sex attraction, rather than for what causes heterosexuality—the point

made by Martin Rochlin’s Heterosexual Questionnaire (Reading 17). But, as with

investigations of race difference, the research is suspect here as well, because we

are unlikely to fi nd any biological structure or process that all gay people share
but no straight people have. Still, as Roger Lancaster describes in Reading 16,
the conviction that such differences must exist propels the search and leads to the

popularization of questionable fi ndings.

As with race, sexual identity appears more straightforward than it really is.

Because sexuality encompasses physical, social, and emotional attraction, as

well as fantasies, self-identity, and actual sexual behavior over a lifetime, deter-

mining one’s sexual “identity” may require emphasizing one of these features

over the others. Further, there is no necessary correspondence between identity

and sexual behavior (which Esther Rothblum explores for women in Reading 30).

Someone who self-identifi es as gay is still likely to have had some heterosexual

experience; someone who self-identifi es as straight may have had some same-sex

experience; and even those who have had no sexual experience may lay claim
to being gay or straight. Identity is not always directly tied to behavior. Indeed,

a person who self-identifi es as gay may have had more heterosexual experience
than someone who self-identifi es as straight. Yet just as the system of racial

classifi cation asks people to pick one race, the sexual-identity system has so far
required that all the different aspects of sexuality be distilled into one of two

options.

For example, an acquaintance described the process by which he came to self-

identify as gay. In high school and college he had dated and been sexually active

with women, but his relationships with men had always been more important to

him. He looked to men for emotional and social gratifi cation, as well as for relief

from the “gender games” he felt required to play with women. He had been

engaged to be married, but when that ended, he spent his time exclusively with

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Framework Essay 29

other men. Eventually, he established a sexual relationship with another man and

came to identify himself as gay. His experience refl ects the varied dimensions of

sexuality and shows the resolution of those differences by choosing a single sex-

ual identity.

Until recently, “gay” and “straight” would have been his only real options.

Despite commonplace use of the term, bisexuality has rarely been taken seriously

by sex researchers or those in the gay and lesbian communities, where bisexual-

ity has been demeaned as a phase, a form of homophobia, or simple promiscuity.

The possibility of male bisexuality has especially been discounted by self- identifi ed

gay men.

Describing “biphobia” and “bi erasure,” a newly emerging movement of self-

identifi ed bisexuals has been supported by survey and sexuality research. In 2011,

the Williams Institute, which specializes in LGBT research, reported on their

review of eleven surveys, fi nding that “among adults who identify as L.G.B.,

bisexuals comprise a slight majority.”
90

Indeed, one of the larger surveys the

Williams Institute reviewed found that more American adults identifi ed them-
selves as bisexual than as gay/lesbian (3.1 percent compared to 2.5 percent).

Similarly, as population sampling and sexuality research methods have broad-

ened, it has become possible to demonstrate patterns of arousal that are bisex-

ual,
91

with one possibility that “what makes a bisexual person may be less about

what they’re strongly attracted to and more about what they’re not averse to.”
92

While sexual fl uidity has long been seen as a characteristic of women but not

men, even the author of one of our readings, Lisa Diamond, has revised her

opinion. Five years after the publication of her 2009 book (from which our read-

ing is taken), she presented a paper titled “I Was Wrong! Men are Pretty Darn

Sexually Fluid, Too!”
93

Why has bisexuality been so systematically “erased”? The convenience of

dichotomous thinking, fear of prejudice (people who identify as straight appear

to have more negative attitudes about those who are bisexual than about those

who are gay or lesbian);
94

lack of visible bisexuals (only 28 percent of people

who identify as bisexual say they are open about it);
95

and the very contentious

debate about whether sexuality is fi xed and innate or changeable, would all have

contributed to the invisibility of bisexuality. Finally, people may simply want to

reduce the complexity of their lives: “To come out as bisexual now would be like

starting over in a way. My mom and dad would fall over. It was hard enough to

convince them that I was gay.”
96

To return to our initial comparison of sexual identity and race, one last analogy

bears discussion. Most Americans would not question the logic of this sentence:

“Tom has been married for 30 years and has a dozen children, but I think he’s

really gay.” In a real-life illustration of the same logic, a young man and woman
were often seen kissing on our campus. When this became the subject of a class

discussion, a suggestive ripple of laughter went through the room: Everyone

“knew” that the young man was really gay.

How could they “know” that? For such conclusions to make sense, we

must believe that someone could be gay irrespective of his or her actual behavior.

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30 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Just as it is possible in this culture for one to be “black” even if one looks “white,”

apparently one may be gay despite acting straight. Just as “black” can be estab-

lished by any African heritage, “gay” is apparently established by displaying any

behavior thought to be associated with gays, especially for men. Indeed, “gay”

can be “established” by reputation alone, by a failure to demonstrate heterosexu-

ality, or even by the demonstration of an overly aggressive heterosexuality. There-

fore, “gay” can be assigned no matter what one does. In this sense, “gay” can

function as an essential identity, 97 that is, an identity assigned to an individual
irrespective of his or her actual behavior, as in “I know she’s a genius even
though she’s fl unking all her courses.” Because no behavior can ever conclusively

prove one is not gay, this label is an extremely effective mechanism of social
control.

In all, several parallels exist between race and sexuality classifi cations. At least

until recently, we have assumed there are a limited number of possibilities—

usually two, but no more than three—and we have assumed individuals can easily

fi t into one option. We have treated both race and sexuality as encompassing

populations that are internally homogeneous and profoundly dissimilar from each

other. In both cases, this presumption of difference has prompted a wide-ranging

search for the biological distinctiveness of the categories. Different races and

sexualities have been judged superior and inferior to one another, and members

of each category historically have been granted unequal legal and social rights.

Finally, we have assumed that sexual orientation, like skin color, tells us some-

thing meaningful about a person.

You may notice we used the past tense in the previous paragraph. This is

because it seems to us that the traditional race and sexuality systems are undergo-

ing change, although probably not to the same extent. As with the increasing

presence of people who identify as multiracial, bisexuality has emerged as a

category around which people organize. The outstanding question, however, is

whether bisexuality will emerge as a “third” option, or upend our notions of

sexuality altogether. College students and perhaps young people generally appear

to have an increasing desire to move away from gender and sexuality labels.

Accompanying the increased visibility and acceptance of both gay and transgen-

der people—and the conceptual system that understands these as separate deci-

sions, one about sexuality and the other about sex—there is a case that youth

especially are less inclined to sexuality/gender classifi cations and more open in

their own sexual behavior. We are not sure how widespread this change is, but

have included in the readings an article by Eric Anderson (Reading 55), who

contends that we are now past the era of “homohysteria.” Anderson’s conclusions

are at odds with other readings in this volume, but we think this speaks to the

real lack of clarity about the future of American sexuality and gender systems.

We turn now to the topic of dichotomies in gender.

Dichotomizing Sex and Gender As is the case for sexuality, the meanings of
the terms sex and gender have also become destabilized. Traditionally, research in
the social sciences used sex to refer to females and males—that is, to chromosomal,

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Framework Essay 31

hormonal, anatomical, and physiological differences—and gender to describe the
socially constructed roles associated with each sex, that is, masculinity and femi-

ninity. Over the last thirty or so years, however, gender has come to be used in
popular culture to encompass both biological differences and social behavior. For

example, it has become common to see descriptions of male and female voting

patterns as gender differences, rather than as sex differences. In this same period,
many scholars in the humanities and social sciences began conceptualizing sex in

ways similar to gender, that is, they came to the conclusion that biological sex,

like masculinity and femininity, was socially created. Thus, the language of schol-

arship also turned toward gender and away from sex.
Like sexuality, even physiological/biological sex refers to a complex set of

attributes that may sometimes be inconsistent with one another or with individu-

als’ sense of their own identity. As Alice Dreger in Reading 9 describes, even

those on the Olympic Committee who want to use a hormone-based system to

identify the sex of athletes (rather than letting the athletes self-identify), under-

stand that determining sex is very complicated. As Dreger writes, “There’s no one

magical gene, chromosome, hormone, or body part that can do for us the hard

work of sharp division into male and female leagues.” Ultimately, biological/

physiological sex is the product of a decision.
But in day-to-day life, rather than recognize the complexity of sex, we have

commonly assumed that there are two and only two sexes and that people can be

easily classifi ed as one or the other. Despite the popularity of the word gender,
apart from scholars the language of gender has not signaled a move away from

the idea of biological sex as fi xed and dichotomous. Rather, just as with race and

sexuality categories, people are assigned as male or female irrespective of incon-

sistent or ambiguous evidence. Indeed, as Riki Wilchins describes in Reading 10,

we have tried to make bodies “at the margins” fi t into our existing categories. Out

of the imperative that there be consistency between the physical and the psycho-

logical, some people pursue sex change surgery to produce a body consistent with

their self-identity. Others pursue psychotherapy to fi nd a self-identity consistent

with their body. In either case, it has made more sense to use surgery and/or

therapy to create consistency than to accept inconsistency.

All of this now seems up for discussion. A move away from the idea of bio-

logical sex as unitary, binary, and fi xed has been spurred by transgender activism,

which encompasses people who live as a gender different from their birth assign-

ment, who identify with neither of the currently available biological sexes, who

feel themselves to be both genders simultaneously or sequentially, whose biologi-

cal/physiological sex is inconsistent, who have undergone sex reassignment hor-

mone treatment or surgery, and/or who cross dress occasionally or regularly.

Since the early 1990s when the term was coined, the category trans-gender has come to be

understood as a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of male-

and female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been understood as distinct

kinds of persons, including self-identifi ed transexuals and transvestites. . . . In its collectiv-

ity, the capacity of transgender to incorporate all gender variance has become a powerful

tool of activism and personal identifi cation. And, even more remarkably, in the period since

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32 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

the early 1990s it has already become institutionalized in a vast range of contexts, from

grassroots activism, social service provision, and individual identifi cation, to journalistic

accounts. . . . Most importantly, transgender identifi cation is understood across these

domains to be explicitly and fundamentally different in origin and being from homosexual

identifi cation. . . . In short, “transgender” has changed the terms by which U.S. Americans

understand and differentiate between gendered and sexual variance.
98

Although it is not yet “mainstream” to treat sex as neither fi xed nor dichoto-

mous, it is not marginal either. For example, in 2014 Facebook added an option

that provided about fi fty different terms people could use to identify their sex;

advertisements run by luxury retailer Barneys New York featured transgender

models; newspaper space was devoted to the experience of parents whose young

children rejected gender binaries; and courts ruled on which bathrooms transgen-

der elementary students may use. Perhaps most important, “transgender” (rather

than transgender ed , which connotes directionality) has become a way to identify
oneself. Intrinsic to that self-identifi cation is movement beyond the simple gender/

sex binary that has predominated until now.

Dichotomizing Class Any discussion of social class in the United States must
begin with the understanding that Americans “almost never speak of themselves

or their society in class terms. In other words, class is not a central category of

cultural discourse in America.”
99

Indeed, considering the time and attention

Americans devote to sexual orientation, sex/gender, or race, it is hard not to con-

clude that discussion of social class is “the last taboo.”
100

Because social class is

so seldom discussed, the vocabulary for talking about it is not well developed.

Class analyses . . . are not curricular themes covered in schools at the primary or secondary

level and are seldom included in university-level courses. . . . Every major U.S. daily news-

paper includes a separate business section, but none includes a separate “class” or even

“labor” section. . . . Politicians typically avoid class-based rhetoric, especially the use of

language and policy labels that might openly emphasize or reveal the confl icting economic

and political interests of working-class versus privileged-class members. . . . [P]olitical

candidates, especially presidential candidates, who violate what amounts to an unwritten

rule against framing class inequalities as legitimate public policy issues, risk being accused

of promoting divisive and disruptive “class warfare” by privileged-class-based mainstream

media pundits. . . . Only two exceptions exist to the taboo on public discussions of class

issues. First, it is acceptable to discuss the “middle class” and problems faced by this class.

Because large numbers of Americans identify themselves as middle class, references to

this  group actually serve to disguise and mute class differences because the term is so

inclusive. . . . The second exception to avoidance of class issues includes mass media

glimpses into the lives of the privileged class, as well as tours of the excluded class. . . .

The glamour of life at the top is routinely showcased on both conventional and tabloid style

TV news magazines. . . . The grim realities of life-at-the-bottom experiences turn up most

often on occasional PBS or cable TV documentaries. . . .
101

Despite its relative invisibility, as Michael Zweig notes in Reading 12, social

class operates in ways quite similar to race and sex. That is, just as American culture

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Framework Essay 33

offers interpretations of what differences in color or sex mean, it also provides

interpretations about what differences in income, wealth, or occupation might mean.

As sociologists Perrucci and Wysong noted in the quote above, social class is also

often dichotomized, usually into those called poor and those called middle class.
What is especially interesting about this language of “poor” and “middle class”

is the degree to which it masks the real polarization of income in American society,

which now can be described as between the rich and everyone else. As Timothy

Noah writes in Reading 14, the share of total income going to the top earners

increased steadily after the 1970s, while the share going to middle- and low-

earners shrank. Social scientists have been aware of this change for some time; it

is especially signifi cant since it reverses the closing of the income gap that took

place between the 1930s and 1970s. As Noah notes, no one would have expected

an advanced industrial democracy to become more unequal over time. The growth
of this gap seems to have been unaffected by the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009:

from 2009 to 2011 the income of the top 1 percent of families grew by 11.2  percent,

while the income of the bottom 99 percent shrunk by 0.4 percent.
102

Thus, “In simple but stark terms, by the end of the twentieth century all of the

declines in inequality achieved in the New and Fair Deals had been wiped out

and the United States had unambiguously returned to levels of inequality not seen

since the laissez-faire era of the 1920s.”
103

Despite the recent Great Recession,

the fl eeting Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and the fact that the vast

majority of Americans have been negatively affected by change in income distri-

bution over the last thirty years, it still can be argued that class is not a central

category of cultural discourse in America. How can this be the case?

Just as American culture offers interpretations of what differences in color or

sex mean, it also provides interpretations about what differences in income,

wealth, or occupation might mean. In the Framework Essay for Section III we

will more thoroughly discuss the concept of ideology —culturally dominating
beliefs which, though widely shared, refl ect the experience of only a few—but

ideology certainly helps understand why social class remains an underdeveloped

concept in American culture.

For example, it is a commonplace American belief that social class refl ects a

person’s merit rather than social or economic forces. Surveys show that over half

of the American public believes “that lack of effort by the poor was the principal

reason for poverty, or a reason at least equal to any that was beyond a person’s

control. . . . Popular majorities did not consider any other factor to be a very

important cause of poverty—not low wages, or a scarcity of jobs, or discrimina-

tion, or even sickness.”
104

The belief that merit is rewarded—and, conversely, that the lack of merit is

punished—stands as a uniquely American belief. As Noah writes, surveys consis-

tently show that Americans— more than people of any other country —believe that
people are rewarded for their intelligence, skill, and effort. The American attach-

ment to this belief is particularly ironic, since, as Noah discusses, virtually every

developed nation in the world has more income mobility than the United States.

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34 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

That Americans could persist in a belief so detached from reality speaks to the

power of ideology.

But Americans have not always thought this way. In the early part of the 20th

century, those who were poor were more likely to be considered hardworking,

economically productive, constrained by artifi cial barriers, and probably in the

majority. Today, however, “many of the least well off are not regarded as produc-

tive in any respect”
105

; popular opinion and even social science research are more

likely to explain social class standing in terms of individual attributes and values

rather than economic changes or discrimination.
106

Although it is beyond the scope

of this text, these ideologies changed in response to new economic assumptions

and policies (generally called neoliberalism). Thus, while ideologies are embed-

ded in social context, but they are not outside historical change.

This attribution of poverty and wealth to individual merit hides not only the

complex reality of American social class, it is an essentialist myth that legitimates

the dramatic and increasing inequality of American society.

Dichotomization and Disability Our discussion of race, sexuality, sex and
gender, and social class has emphasized that each of these categories encompasses

a continuum of behavior and characteristics rather than a fi nite set of discrete or

easily separated groupings. It has also stressed that difference is a social creation—

that differences of color or sex, for example, have no meaning other than what is

attributed to them.

Can the same be said about disability? It is often assumed that people are eas-

ily classed as disabled or nondisabled, but that is no more true in this case than

it is for the other master statuses. Sociologist Irving Zola provided the classic

critique of how our use of statistics contributes to this misconception.

The way we report statistics vis-à-vis disability and disease is generally misleading. If we

speak of ratio fi gures for a particular disease as 1 in 8, 1 in 14, etc., we perpetuate what

Rene Dubos (1961) once called “The Mirage of Health.” For these numbers convey that if

1 person in 10 does get a particular disease, that 9 out of 10 do not. This means, however,

only that those 9 people do not get that particular disease. It does not mean that they are

disease-free, nor are they likely to be so. . . .

Similarly deceptive is the now-popular fi gure of “43 million people with a disability” . . .

for it implies that there are over 200 million Americans without a disability. . . . But the

metaphor of being but a banana-peel slip away from disability is inappropriate. The issue

of disability for individuals . . . is not whether but when , not so much which one but how
many and in what combination. 107

Apart even from how we count the disabled, how do we determine the dis-

ability of any particular person, on any particular day? Zola describes his experi-

ence of being able to work longer hours than others on an assembly line because

his torso was in a brace;
108

although he was “disabled,” on the line he was also

less disabled than others. This situation, where impairment is relative, is more the

rule than the exception and thus undermines notions about fi xed distinctions

between disability and nondisability.

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Framework Essay 35

Constructing the “Other”

We have seen how the complexity of a population may be reduced to aggregates

and then to a simplistic dichotomy. Aggregation assumes that those who share a

master status are alike in “essential” ways. It ignores the multiple and confl icting

statuses any individual inevitably occupies. Dichotomization especially promotes

the image of a mythical other who is not at all like us. Whether in race, sex,
sexuality, social class, or disability, dichotomization yields a vision of “them” as

profoundly different. Ultimately, dichotomization results in stigmatizing those

who are less powerful. It provides the grounds for whole categories of people to

become the objects of contempt.

Constructing “Others” as Profoundly Different The expectation that “others”
are profoundly different can be seen most clearly in the signifi cance that has been

attached to sex differences. In this case, biological differences between males and

females have been the grounds from which to infer an extensive range of nonbio-

logical differences. Women and men are assumed to differ from each other in behav-

ior, perception, and personality, and such differences are used to argue for different

legal, social, and economic roles and rights. The expectation that men and women

are not at all alike is so widespread that we often talk about them as members of the

“opposite” sex; indeed, it is not unusual to talk about the “war” between the sexes.

While this assumption of difference undergirds everyday life, few signifi cant

differences in behavior, personality, or even physical ability have been found

between men and women of any age. Indeed, there are more differences within
each sex than between the sexes. Psychologist Susan Basow illustrates this point
in the following:

The all-or-none categorizing of gender traits is misleading. People just are not so simple

that they either possess all of a trait or none of it. This is even more true when trait dispo-

sitions for groups of people are examined. Part [a] of Figure 2 [next page] illustrates what

such an all-or-none distribution of the trait “strength” would look like: all males would be

strong, all females weak. The fact is, most psychological and physical traits are distributed

according to the pattern shown in Part [b] of Figure 2 with most people possessing an aver-

age amount of that trait and fewer people having either very much or very little of that trait.

To the extent that females and males may differ in the average amount of the trait they

possess (which needs to be determined empirically), the distribution can be characterized by

overlapping normal curves, as shown in Part [c] of Figure 2 . Thus, although most men are
stronger than most women, the shaded area indicates that some men are weaker than some

women and vice versa. The amount of overlap of the curves generally is considerable. Another

attribute related to overlapping normal curves is that differences within one group are usually

greater than the differences between the two groups. Thus, more variation in strength occurs

within a group of men than between the average male and the average female.
109

The lack of difference between women and men is especially striking given

the degree to which we are all socialized to produce such differences. Thus, while

boys and girls, and men and women, are often treated differently as well as social-

ized to be different, this does not mean they inevitably become different. Yet, even

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36 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

though decades of research have confi rmed few sex differences, the search for

difference continues and some suggest it may even have been intensifi ed by the

failure to fi nd many differences.

The same expectation that the “other” differs in personality or behavior emerges

in race, class, and sexuality classifi cations. Race differences are expected to

involve more than just differences of color, those who are “gay” or “straight” are

expected to differ in more ways than just their sexual orientation, and social

classes are expected to differ in more than their income. In each case, scientifi c

research is often directed toward fi nding such differences.

Sanctioning Those Who Associate with the “Other” There are also simi-
larities in the sanctions against those who cross race, sex, class, or sexual orien-

tation boundaries. Parents sometimes disown children who marry outside of their

racial or social class group, just as they often sever connections with children who

are gay. Those who associate with the “other” are also in danger of being labeled

a member of that category.

For example, during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the fear

of invisible black ancestry was pervasive among southern whites, because that

heritage would subject them to a restricted life based on de jure segregation.
“Concern about people passing as white became so great that even behaving like

blacks or willingly associating with them were often treated as more important

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b. Normal distribution

c. Overlapping normal curves

Females

females

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F I G U R E 2
Three types of distribution for the trait “strength.” (Basow, 1992:8; Figure 1 )

ros27020_sec01_001-050.indd 36ros27020_sec01_001-050.indd 36 01/08/15 7:23 AM01/08/15 7:23 AM

Framework Essay 37

than any proof of actual black ancestry.”
110

Thus, southern whites who associated

with blacks ran the risk of being defi ned as black.

A contemporary parallel can be found in gay/straight relations. Those who

associate with gays and lesbians or defend gay rights are often presumed—by

gays and straights alike—to be gay. Many men report that when they object to

homophobic remarks, they simply become the target of them. Indeed, the prestige

of young men in fraternities and other all-male groups often rests on a willingness

to disparage women and gays.

Similarly, few contemporary reactions are as strongly negative as that against

men who appear feminine. Because acting like a woman is so disparaged, boys

learn at an early age to control their behavior or suffer public humiliation. This

ridicule has its greatest effect on young men; the power and prestige usually

available to older men reduces their susceptibility to such accusations. Young men

must avoid a long list of behaviors for fear of being called feminine or gay: don’t

be too emotional, watch how you sit, don’t move your hips when you walk, take

long strides, don’t put your hands on your hips, don’t talk too much, don’t let

your voice show emotion, don’t be too compliant or eager to please, and so on.

Because boys and men who exhibit such traits are often assumed to be gay,

they become targets for verbal and physical abuse. In Reading 28, for example,

C.J. Pascoe describes the ubiquity and function of the “fag trope” in an American

high school:

Fag talk and fag imitations serve as a discourse with which boys discipline themselves and

each other through joking relationships. Any boy can temporarily become a fag in a given

social space or interaction. This does not mean that boys who identify as or are perceived

to be homosexual aren’t subject to intense harassment. Many are. But becoming a fag has

as much to do with failing at the masculine tasks of competence, heterosexual prowess, and

strength or in any way revealing weakness or femininity, as it does with a sexual identity.

This fl uidity of the fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a powerful disci-

plinary mechanism. It is fl uid enough that boys police their behaviors out of fear of having

the fag identity permanently adhere. . . .

The popular linkage of effeminate behavior with gay sexuality is so strong that

it may be the primary criterion most Americans use to decide who is gay:

A  “ masculine” man must be straight; a “feminine” man must be gay. But gender

and sexual orientation are separate phenomena. Knowing that someone is a mas-
culine man or a feminine woman does not tell us what that person’s sexual ori-

entation is—indeed, our guesses are most likely to be “false negatives”; that is,

we are most likely to falsely identify someone as straight. Because we do not

know who among us is gay, we cannot accurately judge how gay people behave.

In the world of mutual “othering,” being labeled one of “them” is a remarkably

effective social control mechanism. Boys and men control their behavior so that

they are not called gay. Members of racial and ethnic groups maintain distance

from one another to avoid the criticism that might be leveled by members of their

own and other groups. These social controls are effective because all parties con-

tinue to enforce them.

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38 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Stigma

The term stigma comes from ancient Greece, where it meant a “bodily sign
designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of [an

individual].” Such signs were “cut or burnt into the body to advertise that the

bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be

avoided, especially in public places.”
111

Stigmatized people are those “marked”

as bad, unworthy, and polluted because of the category they belong to: for exam-

ple, because of their disability, or their race, sex, sexuality, or social class category.

The core assumption behind stigma is that internal merit is revealed through

external features—for the Greeks, that a brand or a cut showed a person’s lack

of moral worth. This is not an unusual linkage. For example, physically attractive

people are often assumed to possess a variety of positive attributes. We often

assume that people who look good must be good.
Judgments of worth based on membership in certain categories have a self-

fulfi lling potential. Those who are judged superior by virtue of their membership

in some category are given more opportunity to prove themselves; those who are

judged less worthy by virtue of membership in a stigmatized category have dif-

fi culty establishing their merit no matter what they do. For example, social psy-

chology experiments show that many whites perceive blacks as incompetent,

regardless of evidence to the contrary: white subjects were “reluctant or unable

to recognize that a black person is higher or equal in intelligence compared to

themselves.”
112

This would explain why many whites react negatively to affi rma-

tive action programs. If they cannot conceive of black applicants being more
qualifi ed than whites, they will see such programs as mandates to hire the less

qualifi ed.

Stigma involves objectifi cation and devaluation. Objectifi cation means treating
people as if they were objects, members of a category rather than possessors of

individual characteristics. In objectifi cation, the “living, breathing, complex indi-

vidual” ceases to be seen or valued.
113

In its extreme, those who are objectifi ed

are “viewed as having no other noteworthy status or identity. When that point is

reached, a person becomes nothing but ‘a delinquent,’ ‘a cripple,’ ‘a homosexual,’
‘a black,’ ‘a woman.’ The indefi nite article ‘a’ underlines the depersonalized

nature of such response.”
114

Examples of Stigmatized Master Statuses: Women, Poor People, and Disabled
People Sociologist Edwin Schur argues that because women are subject to both
objectifi cation and devaluation, they are discredited, that is, stigmatized. First, con-

sidering objectifi cation, Schur argues that women are seen

as all alike, and therefore substitutable for one another; as innately passive and objectlike;

as easily ignored, dismissed, trivialized, treated as childlike, and even as a non-person; as

having a social standing only through their attachments to men (or other non-stigmatized

groups); and as a group which can be easily victimized through harassment, violence, and

discrimination.
115

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Framework Essay 39

Objectifi cation occurs when women are thought of as generally indistinguish-

able from one another; for example, when someone says, “Let’s get the woman’s

angle on this story.” It also occurs when women are treated as nothing more than

their body parts, for example, when young girls are assumed to be sexually pro-

miscuous because they are big-breasted; they are nothing more than their cup size;

they are objects.

The T-shirt designed for a 2012 fraternity party at Amherst College exemplifi es

both objectifi cation and devaluation:

[W]hen a fraternity at self-described “elite” Amherst College in Massachusetts (not a big

university in the South where we stereotypically assume these things occur) designed a

T-shirt for their pig roast party of a pig smoking a cigar and watching a naked woman roast

on a spit with the words ROASTING FAT ONES SINCE 1847, the guys didn’t understand

why that was such a problem. Here’s Dana Bloger, a female student at Amherst, explaining

why the T-shirt is a problem:

The woman on the shirt is depicted as an animal—or rather, as inferior to an animal,

since she has not only replaced the pig on the spit but is being roasted by it. She is

objectifi ed as a literal piece of meat, whose thoughts, feelings, and humanity are rendered

nonexistent and her consent therefore irrelevant. The hypersexualization of her body links

violence with sex, thus perpetuating the notion that violence is sexy and sexuality violent.

While I am not suggesting that this image would ever directly cause the infl iction of

violence on any individual woman, dehumanization is always the fi rst step toward justi-

fying such violence.
116

African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and gay/lesbian people are often

similarly treated as indistinguishable from one another. Indeed, hate crimes have

been defi ned by precisely this quality of interchangeability, such as an attack on

any black family that moves into a neighborhood or the assault of any woman or
man who looks gay. Hate crimes are also marked by excessive brutality and per-

sonal violence rather than property destruction—all of which indicate that the

victims have been objectifi ed.

Some members of stigmatized categories objectify themselves in the same

ways that they are objectifi ed by others. Thus, women may evaluate their own

worth or the worth of other women in terms of physical appearance. In the process

of self-objectifi cation, a woman “joins the spectators of herself”; that is, she views

herself as if from the outside, as if she were nothing more than what she looked

like.
117

While young men are also objectifi ed in terms of their bodies, over their

lifetime they are likely to be objectifi ed in terms of wealth and power.

There is a strong case that American women as a category continue to remain

devalued, a conclusion drawn from the characteristics most frequently attributed

to men and women. Research conducted over the last forty years has documented

a remarkable consistency in those attributes. Both sexes are described as possessing

valued qualities, but the characteristics attributed to men are more valued in the

culture as a whole. For example, the female-valued characteristics include being

talkative, gentle, religious, aware of the feelings of others, security oriented, and

attentive to personal appearance. Male-valued traits include being aggressive,

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40 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

independent, unemotional, objective, dominant, active, competitive, logical,

adventurous, and direct.
118

i
(Remember that these attributes are only people’s

beliefs about sex differences.)
In many ways, the characteristics attributed to women are inconsistent with

core American values. Although American culture values achievement, individual-

ism, and action—all understood as male attributes—women are expected to sub-

ordinate their own desires for individual achievement to the needs of their family.

Therefore, “women are asked to become the kind of people that this culture does

not value.”
120

Thus, it is more acceptable for women to display masculine traits,

since these are culturally valued, than it is for men to display the less-valued

feminine characteristics.

Much of what we have described about the stigmatization of women applies

to people who are poor as well. Indeed, being poor is a much more obviously

shameful status than being female. The category poor is intrinsically devalued.
As Paul Gorski describes in Reading 33, it is presumed that there is little com-

mendable to be said about people who are poor; “they” are primarily constructed

as a “problem.” Poor people are also objectifi ed; they are described as “ the poor,”
as if they were all alike, substitutable for and interchangeable with one another.

Most of the writing about poor people, even by sympathetic observers, tells us that they are

different, truly strangers in our midst: Poor people think, feel, and act in ways unlike

middle-class Americans. . . .

We can think about poor people as “them” or as “us.” For the most part, Americans have

talked about “them.” Even in the language of social science, as well as in ordinary conver-

sation and political rhetoric, poor people usually remain outsiders, strangers to be pitied or

despised, helped or punished, ignored or studied, but rarely full citizens, members of a larger

community on the same terms as the rest of us. They are . . . “those people,” objects of

curiosity, analysis, prurience, or compassion, not subjects who construct their own lives and

history. Poor people seem cardboard cutouts, fi gures in single dimension, members of infe-

rior categories, rarely complex, multifaceted, even contradictory in the manner of other

persons.
121

And, like women, those who are poor are not expected to display attributes valued

in the culture as a whole.

Everything that we have described about stigma also applies directly to the expe-

rience of disabled people. The concept of stigma was initially developed by soci-

ologist Erving Goffman with disabled people in mind, and there are so many ways

that the term applies that it is diffi cult to select a single focus. From assumptions

that one is pitiable, sick, unhappy, incompetent, dependent, childlike, unattractive,

i
“Compared with White women, Black women are viewed as less passive, dependent, status conscious,
emotional and concerned about their appearance. . . . Hispanic women tend to be viewed as more
‘feminine’ than White women in terms of submissiveness and dependence. . . . [A] similar stereotype
holds for Asian women, but with the addition of exotic sexuality. . . . Native-American women
typically are stereotyped as faceless . . . drudges without any personality. . . . Jewish women are
stereotyped as either pushy, vain ‘princesses’ or overprotective, manipulative ‘Jewish mothers’ . . .
working-class women are stereotyped as more hostile, confused, inconsiderate and irresponsible than
middle-class women . . . and lesbians are stereotyped as possessing masculine traits.”

119

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Framework Essay 41

and sexually undesirable, to notions that disability is a punishment for sin, disabled

people are cast as essentially unworthy.

In addition to the stigma, those who are disabled—like many others in stigma-

tized categories—must also manage the paternalism of those who are not disabled.

Taken from the position of a father toward his children, paternalism is the auto-

matic assumption of superiority.

Paternalism is often subtle in that it casts the oppressor as benign, as protector. . . . Paternal-

ism often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities. . . .

Paternalism is experienced as the bystander grabs the arm of a blind person and, without

asking, ‘helps’ the person across the street. . . . It is most of all, however, the assumption

that people with disabilities are intrinsically inferior and unable to take responsibility for

their own lives.
122

For those of us outside the stigmatized group, a paternalistic attitude is

dangerous because it keeps us from actually seeing the person in front of us:

“A person who cannot see or is using a wheelchair for mobility may be a happy,

prosperous, well-adjusted person, but most people encountering him or her

immediately feel pity.”
123

Stereotypes About People in Stigmatized Master Statuses Finally, in an
effort to capture the general features of what “we” say about “them,” let us con-

sider fi ve common stereotypes about individuals in stigmatized master statuses.

First, they are presumed to lack the values the culture holds dear. Neither

women nor those who are poor, disabled, gay, black, Asian American, or Latino

are expected to be independent, unemotional, objective, dominant, active, com-

petitive, logical, adventurous, or direct. Stigmatized people are presumed to lack

precisely those values that nonstigmatized people are expected to possess.

Second, stigmatized people are likely to be seen as a problem. Certainly black,

Latino, and Native American men and women, gay and lesbian people of all

colors, white women, all disabled people, and people living in poverty are con-

structed as having problems and being problems. Often the implication is that
they are also responsible for many of our national problems. While public celebra-

tions often highlight the historic contributions of such groups to the culture, little

in the public discourse lauds their current contributions. Indeed, those in stigma-

tized categories are often constructed as nothing but a problem, as if they did not
exist apart from those problems. This was once illustrated by a black student who

described her shock at hearing white students describe her middle-class neighbor-

hood as a “ghetto.”

Ironically, this depiction of stigmatized people as nothing but a problem is often

accompanied by the trivialization of those problems. For example, there is a sig-

nifi cant gap between black and white assessments of the persistence of race dis-

crimination. The same gap holds in terms of the perception of sex discrimination:

On the one hand, men and women largely agree that discrimination against women was

much greater in the past compared to the present. . . . [On the other hand], men perceive

the discrimination gap (the relative degrees of discrimination facing women versus men) to

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42 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

be smaller at all time periods than women do. Moreover, men believe that there is now

relatively little difference in the amount of discrimination facing men versus women.
124

Similarly, despite the participation of thousands of people in annual Gay Pride

marches throughout the country, images from the parades typically trivialize par-

ticipants by focusing on the small number in drag or leather. Indeed, much of

what is disparaged as “gay lifestyle” has been forged by gay and lesbian people

who have been excluded from mainstream, heterosexual society. Finally, despite

dramatic federal reductions in the cash assistance programs to poor people begun

in 1994 under President Bill Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it,”

stereotypes about poor people getting government “handouts” persist. In all, the

problems that stigmatized categories of people create for those in privileged sta-

tuses are highlighted, while the problems they experience are discounted, espe-

cially those problems created by “us.”

Third, people in stigmatized master statuses are often stereotyped as lacking

self-control; they are characterized as being lustful, immoral, and carriers of dis-

ease.
125

Currently, such accusations hold center stage in the depiction of gay men,

but historically such charges have been leveled at African American, Latino, and

Asian American men (e.g., Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century). Poor

women and women of color have been and continue to be depicted as promiscu-

ous, while poor men and women are presumed to be morally irresponsible.

Fourth, people in stigmatized categories are often marked as having too much

or too little intelligence, and in either case as tending to deception or criminality.

Many stigmatized categories of people have been assumed to use their “excessive”

intelligence to unfair advantage. This was historically the charge against Jews,

and now appears to be a characterization of Asian Americans.

[T]he educational achievement of Asian American students was, and continues to be,

followed by a wave of reaction. The image of Asian Americans as diligent super-students

has often kindled resentment in other students. Sometimes called “damned curve raisers,” a

term applied fi rst to Jewish students at elite East Coast colleges during the 1920s and 1930s,

Asian American students have increasingly found themselves taking the brunt of campus

racial jokes.
126

Fifth, people in stigmatized categories are depicted as both childlike and

savagely brutal. Historically, characterizations of Native Americans, enslaved

Africans, and Chinese immigrants refl ected these conceptions. Currently, the same

is true for the poor in their representation as both pervasively violent and

irresponsible. A related depiction of women as both “virgins and whores” has

been well documented in scholarship over time.

Perhaps because people in stigmatized master statuses are stereotyped as devi-

ant, it appears that those who commit violence against them are less severely

punished. For example, “most murders in the USA are intra-racial, that is, the

alleged perpetrator and the victim are of the same race. . . . Yet of the 845

prisoners executed between 17 January 1977 and 10 April 2003, 53 percent were

whites convicted of killing whites and 10 percent were blacks convicted of killing

blacks.”
127

Although a number of factors are operating here, one conclusion is

that  stigmatized minority victims are valued less than white victims. The same

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conclusion could be reached in terms of the punishment meted out to those

accused of sexual assault. “Major offenses against women, which we profess to
consider deviant, in practice have been responded to with much ambivalence.”

128

Indeed, some have argued that one way to recognize a stigmatized category of

people is that the violence directed at them is not treated seriously.

Overall, individuals in stigmatized master statuses are represented not only as

physically distinctive but also as the antithesis of the culture’s desired behaviors

and attributes. Such characterizations serve to dismiss claims of discrimination and

unfair treatment, affi rming that those in stigmatized categories deserve such treat-

ment, that they are themselves responsible for their plight. Indeed, many of these

stereotypes are also applied to teenagers, whom the media depict as violent, reck-

less, hypersexed, ignorant, out of control, and the cause of society’s problems.
129

A Final Comment

It is disheartening to think of oneself as a member of a stigmatized group, just

as it is disheartening to think of oneself as thoughtlessly perpetuating stigma. Still,

there are at least two important points to bear in mind. First, the characteristics

attributed to stigmatized groups are similar across a great variety of master

statuses. They are not tied to the actual characteristics of any particular group; in

a way, they are quite impersonal. Second, people who are stigmatized have often

formed alliances with those who are not stigmatized to successfully lobby against

these attributions.

As we said at the outset of this essay, our hope is to provide you with a frame-

work by which to make sense of what sex, disability, race, social class, and

sexuality mean in contemporary American society. Clearly, these categorizations

are complex; they are tied to emotionally intense issues that are uniquely American;

and they have consequences that are both mundane and dramatic. From naming,

to aggregating, to dichotomizing, and ultimately to stigmatizing, difference has a

meaning for us. The readings in Section I will explore the construction of these

categorizations; the readings in Section II examine how we experience them; the

readings in Section III address the meaning that is attributed to difference; and

the readings in Section IV describe how we can bridge these differences.

KEY CONCEPTS

ableism Analogous to racism and sexism, a  system of
cultural, institutional, and individual discrimination

against people with impairments. Disablism is the

British term; disability oppression is  synonymous.

(page 6)

aggregate To combine or lump together (verb); some-
thing composed of different elements (noun).

(pages  15)

-centrism or -centric Suffi x meaning centered around,
focused around, taking the perspective of. Thus,

androcentric means focused around or taking the
perspective of men; heterocentric means taking the
perspective of heterosexuals; and Eurocentric means
having a European focus. (page 19)

constructionism The view that reality cannot be sepa-
rated from the way a culture makes sense of it—that

meaning is “constructed” through social, political,

legal, scientifi c, and other practices. From this per-

spective, differences among people are created

through social processes. (page 3)

Framework Essay 43

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44 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

dichotomize To divide into two parts and to see those
parts as mutually exclusive. (page 20)

differential undercount In the census, undercounting
more of one group than of another. (page 12)

disability The loss or limitation of opportunities to
take part in the normal life of the community on an

equal level with others because of physical and

social barriers (page 3)

disaggregate To separate something into its constitu-
ent elements. (pages 16)

essential identity An identity that is treated as core
to a person. Essential identities can be attributed to

people even when they are inconsistent with actual

behavior. (page 30)

essentialism The view that reality exists independently
of our perception of it, that we perceive the meaning

of the world rather than construct that meaning. From

this perspective, there are real and important (essential)

differences among categories of people. (page 3)

ethnic group, ethnicity Those who share a sense of
being a “people,” usually based on national origin,

language, or religion. (page 23)

gender Masculinity and femininity; the acting out of
the behaviors thought to be appropriate for a particu-

lar sex. (page 30)

heteronormativity All the beliefs, norms, and social
structures that contribute to the presumption that

heterosexuality is the natural, normal, and inevitable

structure of society (page 19)

impairment Physical, cognitive, emotional, or sensory
conditions within the person as diagnosed by medi-

cal professionals (page 5)

intersectionality Consideration of the ways that mas-
ter statuses interact and mutually construct one

another. (page 4)

master status A status that has a profound effect on
one’s life, that dominates or overwhelms the other

statuses one occupies. (page 2)

objectifi cation Treating people as if they were
objects, as if they were nothing more than the attri-

butes they display. (page 38)

Other A usage designed to refer to those considered
profoundly unlike oneself. (page 11)

panethnic A classifi cation that spans ethnic identities.
(page 17)

race The conception that people can be classifi ed into
groups based on skin color, hair texture, shape of

head, eyes, nose, and lips. (pages 3)

sex The categories of male and female. (page 3)
status A position in society. Individuals occupy mul-

tiple statuses simultaneously, such as occupational,

kinship, and educational statuses. (page 2)

stigma An attribute for which someone is
considered bad, unworthy, or deeply discredited.

(pages 38)

transgender People who systematically ignore or vio-
late gender expectations; sometimes includes people

who are transsexual. (page 32)

NOTES

1. Scott and Marshall, 2009:452–53.

2. Ridgeway, 2011. Ridgeway argues that gender “fram-

ing,” i.e., the processes by which behavior is interpreted

through the “lens” of gender, accounts for the contem-

porary inability to fully eliminate inequalities between

women and men.

3. For example see Janet Jacobsen, “Queers Are Like Jews,

Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” in Queer
Theory and the Jewish Question edited by Daniel Boya-
rin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 2003, 64–90; Tina Grillo and

Stephanie M. Wildman. “Obscuring the Importance of

Race: The Implication of Making Comparisons between

Racism and Sexism or other Isms,” in Critical Race
Feminism edited by Adrien Katherine Wing. New York:
NYU Press, 1997; Barbara F. Reskin, “Including Mech-

anisms in Our Models of Ascriptive Inequality,” Ameri-
can Sociological Review, 2003, v. 68 Feb: 1–21.

4. Henshel and Silverman, 1975:26.

5. Pfuhl, 1986:5.

6. Ibid.

7. Spelman, 1988.

8. Faderman, 1991; Armstrong, 2002.

9. Saad, 2012.

10. Rist, 1992: 425–26.

11. Omansky, 2006:27.

12. Disabled People’s International, 1982.

13. Barnes and Mercer, 2003; Oliver, 1990, 1996, 2009.

14. Hunt, 2001.

15. Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 1973:4.

16. United Nations, 2007.

17. Schneider, 1988:65.

18. Higgins, 1992:53.

19. Schmidt, 2003.

20. Grigsby Bates, 2014.

21. Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, 2013.

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22. Smith, 1992:497–98.

23. Gallup, 2007.

24. Kiviat, 2010.

25. Shorris, 1992:101.

26. Queer Nation Manifesto, 1990.

27. Mills, 1989:102.

28. Omansky, 2006:27.

29. Oliver, 1990:xiii.

30. U.S. Census, 2010.

31. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973:39.

32. Skrentny, 2002:2.

33. U.S. Census, 2010.

34. U.S. Census, 2012.

35. Ibid.

36. Gates and Cook, nd.

37. Jenkins, 1999:15–16.

38. Saulny, 2011.

39. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2010a.

40. U.S. Census Bureau, 2006–2008, American Community

Survey.

41. Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, 2013.

42. Gracia, 2000:204–5.

43. Lopez, 2013.

44. Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, 2013.

45. Ibid.

46. Cohn, 2012.

47. Hu-Dehart, 1994.

48. U.S. Census Bureau, 2001.

49. Espiritu, 1992:124–25.

50. Omi, 1996:180.

51. Omi, 1996:181.

52. Mohawk, 1992:440.

53. Omi and Winant, 1994:66.

54. Mohawk, 1992:439–40.

55. Flagg, 1993:970.

56. Okizaki, 2000:483.

57. Russell, 1994.

58. Warner, 1993.

59. Herek, 2004:7.

60. Ibid.

61. Herek, 1990:316.

62. Herek, 2000.

63. Berlant and Warner, 1998:547.

64. Warner, 1999:47.

65. Dennis, 2004:383.

66. Tilly, 1999.

67. Lee and Bean, 2004.

68. Omi and Winant, 1994.

69. Roediger, 1994:189–90.

70. Morrison, 1992:47.

71. Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, 2012.

72. Blauner, 1992.

73. Haines, 2007.

74. Smedley, 1993:39.

75. Ibid.

76. Omi and Winant, 1994.

77. Smedley, 1993:25.

78. Ibid.

79. Gould, 1981.

80. Begley, 1995:67, 68.

81. Cohen, 1998:12.

82. Lieberman, 1968:128.

83. Marshall, 1993:117, 121.

84. Roberts, 2011:59 Emphasis added.

85. Ibid., p. 60.

86. Ibid., p. 172.

87. Zuger, 2012.

88. Dreifus, 2005.

89. Roberts, 2011:78.

90. Gates, 2011.

91. Rosenthal, et al, 2011:112–115.
92. Denizet-Lewis, 2014.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Pew Research Center, 2013.

96. Denizet-Lewis, 2014.

97. Katz, 1975.

98. Valentine, 2007:80.

99. Ortner, 1991:169.

100. Perrucci and Wysong, 2008.

101. Perrucci and Wysong, 2008:48–50.

102. Saez, 2013.

103. Massey, 2007:35–6.

104. Schwarz and Volgy, 1992:11.

105. Arrow, Bowles, and Durlauf, 2000:x.

106. Kahlenberg, 1997; Mincey, 1994.

107. Zola, 1993:18.

108. Ibid.

109. Basow, 1992:8.

110. Davis, 1991:56.

111. Goffman, 1963:1.

112. Gaertner and Dovidio, 1986:75.

113. Allport, 1958:175.

114. Schur, 1984:30–1.

115. Ibid., 33.

116. Wiseman, 2013:20.

117. Berger, 1963:50.

118. Baron and Byrne, 2004; Sczesny et al., 2008.
119. Basow, 1992:4.

120. Richardson, 1977:11.

121. Katz, 1989:6, 126.

122. Charlton, 2000:53.

123. Ibid., 55.

124. Bosson, Vandello, Michniewicz & Lenes,

2012:228–9.

125. Gilman, 1985, 1991.

126. Takagi, 1992:60

127. Amnesty International, 2003.

128. Schur, 1984:7.

129. Males, 1994.

Framework Essay 45

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46 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

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Framework Essay 49

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50 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

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READING 1: “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity 51

new social identities, and ethnic identity itself was

fl uid and malleable.

Until the rise of market capitalism, wage labor,

the Protestant Ethic, private property, and posses-

sive individualism, kinship connections also oper-

ated as major indices that gave all peoples a sense

of who they were. Even in the technologically and

politically most advanced societies of the ancient

world such as in Rome, kinship was the important

diacritic of connectedness to the social system. In

all of the mostly patrilineal societies of the Middle

East. Africa, and the Mediterranean, the normal

person was identifi ed by who his or her father was.

The long list of names of who begat whom in the

Old Testament (Book of Genesis) attests to the

importance, especially at the tribal and chiefdom

levels, of genealogical identity.

Another important diagnostic of identity was

occupation. Whether one was a farmer, carpenter,

fi sherman, tanner, brass worker, herdsman, philoso-

pher, government offi cial, senator, poet, healer,

warrior, or harlot, was signifi cantly salient in the

eyes of the ancient world to require the label.

Occupations determined to some extent how people

were viewed and treated, as well as underscored

their contribution to the society.

Throughout much of the period of the early im-

perial states, numerous groups were in contact with

one another, and individuals often traveled from

one region to another as traders, warriors, crafts-

men, travelers, geographers, teachers, and so forth.

From one end of the Mediterranean to another, in

spite of the lack of modern forms of transportation,

many men and women were interacting in an inter-

ethnic melange that included a wide range of cul-

tures and peoples. From time to time, a conquest

state would expand outward and incorporate some

or most of this great variety. Populations did not

necessarily lose any form of ethnic identity, but

change was clearly understood as virtually inevita-

ble as each society learned something new from the

cultures of others. . . .

R E A D I N G 1

“Race” and the Construction
of Human Identity

Audrey Smedley

HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS
OF IDENTITY
Historical records, including the Old and New

Testaments of the Bible, evince scenarios of inter-

ethnic interaction that suggest some very different

principles in operation throughout much of human

history.
1
Ethnic groups have always existed in the

sense that clusters of people living in demarcated

areas develop lifestyles and language features that

distinguish them from others and they perceive

themselves as being separate societies with distinct

social histories. Although some confl icts among

different groups have been characteristic from the

earliest recorded histories, hostilities were usually

neither constant nor the basis on which long-term

relationships were established.

One factor separates many in the contemporary

world, at least some of our understandings of it,

from earlier conceptions of human identity. That

is that “ethnic” identity was not perceived as in-

eluctably set in stone. Individuals and groups of

individuals often moved to new areas or changed

their identities by acquiring membership in a dif-

ferent group. People of the ancient world seemed

to have understood that cultural characteristics

were external and acquired forms of behavior, and

that “barbarians” could learn to speak the lan-

guage of the Romans or the Greeks and become

participants in those cultures, and even citizens of

these states. Languages were indeed avenues to

WHAT IS RACE? WHAT IS ETHNICITY?

Audrey Smedley is professor emeritus of anthropology at

Virginia Commonwealth University.

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52 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

When Alexander conquered peoples and lands all

the way to the Indus Valley in India, interacting with

“civilized” populations, nomadic pastoralists, settled

villagers, and a variety of hunting and fi shing peo-

ples, he exhorted his warriors to intermarry with the

peoples they conquered in order to learn their lan-

guages and cultures. Garrisons of military men were

stationed all over the Roman world, from Brittany to

the Danube and the Black Sea, from Gibraltar to the

Tigris/Euphrates valley and the Indian Ocean, and

soldiers often took local women as wives. When

the armies of the Moroccan king brought down the

Songhai empire in 1591, his soldiers stayed on the

Western Sudan frontier area and intermarried with

the local people. Most of northern Africa, including

Egypt of the Delta, has been periodically invaded

and ruled by outsiders for the last three thousand

years or so. Hittites and Hyksos from the mountainous

areas of Turkey, Assyrians, Persians, Syrians, Phoe-

nicians, Greeks, Babylonians, Romans, and various

more recent Turkish and Arabian groups have settled

in the towns of the coasts and interacted with the in-

digenous Berbers and other peoples like the Libyan

groups, the Garamantes, the Carthaginians, Syngam-

brians, and many others. Less well known is the fact

that both the Greeks and the Romans used mercenar-

ies from inner Africa ( Nubians, Ethiopians, Kushites,

among others) in confl icts such as the Persian and

Peloponnesian wars (Herodotus, in Godolphin

1942).
2

Peoples of different cultures coexisted for the

most part without strife, with alien segments often

functioning in distinct roles in the larger cities.

One-third of the population of Athens were

foreigners as early as the Classical period, fi ve

hundred years before the Christian era (Boardman

et al. 1986:222). And the city of Alexandria was

(and still is) a heterogeneous, sophisticated, and

complex community under the Greeks, Romans,

Christians, and Arabs. Carthage was founded in

North Africa by Phoenicians, but peoples from all

over the Mediterranean world and other parts of

Africa made their residence, or served as slaves, in

this great trading city. Moreover, men and women

of different ethnic groups intermarried frequently,

largely because marriage was often used as a

political or economic strategy. Men gave their

daughters and sisters to other men, the historians

tell us, because they desired political and/or eco-

nomic alliances with powerful and wealthy men,

without regard to ethnic origins. Timotheus was the

son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father. Samson

married a Philistine woman; Moses married an

Ethiopian woman; and many leaders, and lesser

men, of the Greeks and Romans married women

not from their own societies.

Different societies and localized segments of

larger societies were known either by their ethnic

name for themselves or by the region, town, or vil-

lage of their origins. That identities of this type

were fl uid is indicated by the depictions of indi-

vidual lives. Paul of Tarsus traveled and preached

extensively throughout much of the known Medi-

terranean world during the early Christian era and

encountered individuals of different ethnic back-

grounds. He even identifi ed himself as a Roman on

occasion when it was useful to do so. There are

other examples of individuals in ancient writings

who changed their ethnic identities for personal or

private reasons.

Scholars who have studied African societies, es-

pecially African history, have also been aware of the

malleability of ethnic identity on that continent. New

ethnic groups have emerged out of the colonial pe-

riod, and individuals have been known to transform

themselves according to their ethnic or religious mi-

lieus. One may be a Christian in one context, and a

Muslim in another, with no sense of ambivalence or

deception. I have encountered this phenomenon

myself. Most Africans spoke several different lan-

guages, and this facilitated the molding of multiple

ethnicities by providing immediate access to cultural

knowledge. In situations of potential or real confl ict,

allegiances could be fi rmly established without de-

nial of the extrinsic nature of social/ethnic identities

(Connah 1987; Davidson 1991).

In addition to identities that are predicated on

place of birth, membership in kin groups, or descent

in the male or female line from known ancestors,

language spoken, and lifestyle to which individuals

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READING 1: “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity 53

have been conditioned, another feature critical to

individual identity in the state systems was social

position. Aristocrats seemed to have been recog-

nized even beyond the boundaries of their immedi-

ate societies. And certain men were widely famed

for their specialized skills or crafts that set them

above others. Every society had its large body of

commoners and usually a great number of slaves

captured in war or traded in when this enterprise

became a common regional feature. Slaves were

usually outsiders, but slavery was not considered

by law and custom a permanent condition as slaves

could be manumitted, redeemed by kinspeople,

or  could purchase their own freedom (Smedley

[1993]1999: ch. 6). While enslavement was consid-

ered an unfortunate circumstance and most slaves

did the menial and onerous tasks of society, the

roles of slaves varied widely. There are numerous

examples of slaves rising to political power in the

ancient states of the Mediterranean and in the

Muslim world. Often they held positions as gener-

als who led armies of conquest and were frequently

rewarded for their successes. Whole slave dynasties

like the Mamluks in Egypt reigned in various areas

of the Muslim world (Hitti 1953).

With the appearance of the proselytizing univer-

sal religions, Christianity and later Islam, that be-

came competitors with one another for the souls of

all human groups, a new focus of identity was grad-

ually and increasingly placed on membership in a

religious community. During the Middle Ages of

Europe, Christians and Muslims were competing

not only for land and souls, but for political power

and infl uence. And various sects that developed

within each large religious community complicated

matters by fostering internal dissension and even

warfare inter alia . Whether one was Sunni or Shiite,
Protestant or Catholic, was a critical determinant of

one’s identity locally and in the wider world. As with

other aspects of ethnicity and ethnic differences,

individuals often changed their religious affi liation

under circumstances prompted by self-interest, or

self-preservation, as in the case of the 300,000 or

more Jews who were forced to convert to Catholi-

cism in Medieval Spain during the Inquisition

(Castro 1971). Yet Christians, Jews, and Muslims

had lived together in relative amity, and even inter-

married, for several hundred years after the Muslim

conquests and before the rise of the Christian king-

doms to challenge Muslim power.

What was absent from these different forms of

human identity is what we today would perceive as

classifi cations into “racial” groups, that is, the orga-

nization of all peoples into a limited number of un-

equal or ranked categories theoretically based on

differences in their biophysical traits. There are no

“racial” designations in the literature of the ancients

and few references even to such human features as

skin color. Frank Snowden has demonstrated that

ever since at least the second millennium b.c. the

peoples of the Mediterranean world have interacted

with other groups having a variety of physical traits

that differed from the Italians and Greeks. Artistic

depictions of Africans of clear “negroid” features

have been found, and numerous statues and paint-

ings throughout the classical era show that physical

variations in different populations were recognized

and accurately depicted (Snowden 1983).

Except for indigenous Americans, members of

all three of the large geographic areas that came to

be categorized as “races” in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries (Mongoloid, Negroid, and

Caucasoid) interacted in the ancient world. Chinese

porcelain vases have been found widely distributed

in the East African coastal trading cities, indicating

trade between these peoples at least two thousand

years old. The peoples of the Malagasy Republic

represent a mixture of African and Asian (Indone-

sian) ancestry dating back several thousand years.

Greek sailors sailed down the Red Sea into the

Indian Ocean and met East Africans long before the

Christian era. The peoples of the Mediterranean

regularly traded with dark-skinned peoples of the

upper Nile valley (and all those in between) north-

west Africa, and the contrasting lighter-skinned

peoples of Northern Europe. Various states of the

Mediterranean called upon and used Ethiopian

warriors as mercenaries in their armies, as we have

seen. Some of the more desired slaves were very

fair-skinned Slavs (from whom the term slave was

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54 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

external physical features. We have been socialized

to an ideology about the meaning of these differ-

ences based on a notion of heredity and perma-

nence that was unknown in the ancient world and in

the Middle Ages.

RACE: THE MODERN
CONCEPTION OF HUMAN
DIFFERENCES AND HUMAN
IDENTITY
In the eighteenth century this new mode of structur-

ing inequality in human societies evolved in the

American colonies and soon was present through-

out the overseas territories of the colonizing coun-

tries of Western Europe. “Race” was a form of

social identifi cation and stratifi cation that was

seemingly grounded in the physical differences of

populations interacting with one another in the

New World, but whose real meaning rested in so-

cial and political realities. The term race had been
used to refer to humans occasionally since the six-

teenth century in the English language but was

rarely used to refer to populations in the slave trade.

It was a mere classifi catory term like kind, type, or
even breed, or stock, and it had no clear meaning
until the eighteenth century. During this time, the

English began to have wider experiences with var-

ied populations and gradually developed attitudes

and beliefs that had not appeared before in Western

history and which refl ected a new kind of under-

standing and interpretation of human differences.

Understanding the foundations of race ideology is

critical to our analysis.

English settlers in North America failed to as-

similate the peoples whom they conquered; indeed

they generally kept them at great length and social

distance from themselves (Morgan 1975; Nash

1982). Indigenous Indians were different in both

cultural and biological features, but this was not the

necessary and suffi cient reason for the English hab-

its and policies of separateness. They had had

a  long history of enmity with earlier peoples,

especially the Irish, on their very borders and had

derived) who were traded down the Danube by

German tribesmen. Northern European slaves were

shipped as far away as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia,

and the Muslim capital at Baghdad (Davis 1966).

What seems strange to us today is that the bio-

logical variations among human groups were not

given signifi cant social meaning. Only occasionally

do ancient writers ever even remark on the physical

characteristics of a given person or people. Herodo-

tus, in discussing the habits, customs, and origins

of different groups and noting variations in skin

color, specifi cally tells us that this hardly matters.

The Colchians are of Egyptian origin, he wrote, be-

cause they have black skins and wooly hair “which

amounts to but little, since several other nations are

so too.”
3
Most writers explained such differences as

due to natural environmental factors such as the hot

sun causing people to be dark skinned. No structur-

ing of inequality, whether social, moral, intellec-

tual, cultural or otherwise, was associated with

people because of their skin color, although all
“barbarians” varied in some ways from the somatic

norm of the Mediterranean world. But barbarians

were not irredeemably so, and, as we have seen,

nothing in the values of the public life denied

the transformability of even the most backward of

barbarians.

We in the contemporary Western world have

often found it diffi cult to understand this phenom-

enon and assume that differences in skin color must

have had some important meaning. Historians have

tried to discover “racial” meanings in the literature

of the ancients, assuming that these writers had the

same attitudes and beliefs about human differences

found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North

America. The reason for our myopia has to do with

our deeply entrenched conditioning to the racial

worldview (Smedley 1993, 1998). When “race” ap-

peared in human history, it brought about a subtle

but powerful transformation in the world’s percep-

tions of human differences. It imposed social mean-

ings on physical variations among human groups

that served as the basis for the structuring of the

total society. Since that time many people in the

West have continued to link human identity to

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READING 1: “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity 55

“Race” emerged as a social classifi cation that re-

fl ected this greatly expanded sense of human separ-

ateness and differences. Theodore Allen (1997)

argues that the “invention” of the white race took

place after an early, but unsuccessful, colonial revolt

of servants and poor freedmen known as Bacon’s

Rebellion in 1676. Colonial leaders subsequently de-

cided it would be useful to establish a division among

the masses of poor to prevent their further collabora-

tion against the governmental authorities. As African

servants were vulnerable to policies that kept them in

servitude indefi nitely, and European servants had the

protection of English law, colonial leaders developed

a policy backed by new laws that separated African

servants and freedmen from those of European back-

ground. Over the next half century, they passed nu-

merous laws that provided resources and benefi ts to

poor, white freedmen and other laws that restricted

the rights of “Africans,” “mulattoes,” and “Indians.”

Calling upon the model of the Chain of Being, and

using natural differences in physical features, they

created a new form of social identity. “Race” devel-

oped in the minds of some Europeans as a way to

rationalize the conquest and brutal treatment of Na-

tive American populations, and especially the reten-

tion and perpetuation of slavery for imported

Africans. As an ideology structuring social, eco-

nomic, and political inequality, “race” contradicted

developing trends in England and in Western Euro-

pean societies that promoted freedom, democracy,

equality, and human rights. Europeans justifi ed this

attitude toward human differences by focusing on

the physical features of the New World populations,

magnifying and exaggerating their differences, and

concluding that the Africans and Indians and their

descendants were lesser forms of human beings, and

that their inferiority was natural and/or God-given.

The creation of “race” and racial ideology im-

posed on the conquered and enslaved peoples an

identity as the lowest status groups in society.

Myths about their inferior moral, intellectual, and

behavioral features had begun to develop and these

facilitated proscription of any competition with

Europeans. By the mid-eighteenth century, Negroes

had been segregated from poor whites in the laws

generated out of their hostility with the Irish an

image of “savagery” that became institutionalized

as a major part of public consciousness about “the

other.” The policies and practices of the English in

Ireland functioned to keep those Irish who refused

to accept English domination segregated from

themselves. Failing to even attempt an understand-

ing of Irish customs and institutions, the English

expressed an abiding contempt and hatred for both

Irish culture and people that reached a crescendo

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

when the English were also settling in the New

World. It was an extreme form of ethnocentrism or

ethnic chauvinism that some historians believe

came close to being racial (Allen 1994; Canny

1973; Liggio 1976).

“Savagery” was an image about human differ-

ences that became deeply embedded in English life

and thought and provided a foil against which they

constructed their own identity as “civilized” Eng-

lishmen. They brought this image of what savagery

was all about with them to the New World where it

was soon imposed on the native populations when

they, too, began to resist English encroachment.

Savagery carried with it an enormous burden of

negative and stereotypic characteristics grotesquely

counterposed against the vision that the English

had of themselves as a civilized people. Every new

experience, along with a growing technological su-

periority, widened the differences and denigrated

all other peoples who were not part of the civilized

world. The concept of “civilized” polities in con-

trast to savagery and barbarism was beginning to

take hold in much of Western Europe, and in this

sense Englishmen were not much different from the

rest of the Western world. But English notions of

their own superiority were enhanced by their tech-

nological, material, and political successes, by their

earlier successful split from the Catholic realm, by

the early rise of merchant capitalism, the develop-

ment of new forms of wealth, notions about indi-

vidual freedom, property rights, and self-suffi ciency,

and by a growing sense of their own uniqueness

even among other Europeans. This was summed up

in the myth of Anglo-Saxonism (Horsman 1981).

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56 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

longer possible. American society had made “race”

(and the physical features connected to it) equiva-

lent to, and the dominant source of, human identity,

superseding all other aspects of identity.

The problems that this has entailed, especially for

the low-status “races,” have been enormous, im-

mensely complex, and almost intractable. Constant

and unrelenting portrayals of their inferiority condi-

tioned them to a self-imagery of being culturally

backward, primitive, intellectually stunted, prone to

violence, morally corrupt, undeserving of the benefi ts

of civilization, insensitive to the fi ner arts, and (in the

case of Africans) aesthetically ugly and animal-like.

Because of the cultural imperative of race ideology,

all Americans were compelled to the view that a ra-

cial status, symbolized by biophysical attributes, was

the premier determinant of their identity. “Race”

identity took priority over religion, ethnic origin,

education and training, socioeconomic class, occupa-

tion, language, values, beliefs, morals, lifestyles, geo-

graphical location, and all other human attributes that

hitherto provided all groups and individuals with a

sense of who they were. The dilemma for the low-

status races was, and still is, how to construct a posi-

tive identity for themselves in the light of the “racial”

identity imposed on them by the dominant society.

In recent decades, one response to this dilemma

on the part of some African Americans has been

Afrocentrism (which is not the same as an older

version of “Negritude” that black intellectuals had

developed earlier in this century). And for some

Indians a new form of “Nativism” has emerged, har-

kening back to a Native American lifestyle. Afro-

centrism seeks to reidentify with the peoples and

cultures of Africa and to elevate Africans to a posi-

tion of esteem by emphasizing valuable aspects of

African cultures. Some Afrocentrists also make

assertions about the positive qualities of African

people and seek to recognize and objectify African-

isms in the behavior of African-descended peoples

who have been scattered all over the New World.

Many assume or operate on the premise that all

peoples who descended from Africans during the

diaspora maintain certain behaviorisms that mark

them off from other peoples. Their arguments seem

of most colonies and transformed into property as

slaves in a state of permanent bondage.

Edmund Morgan (1975) also interpreted the ac-

tions of the early colonists in the process of estab-

lishing “racial” identities as stemming from the

propertied colonists’ fear of poor whites and pos-

sibly slaves engaging in rebellions together. Colo-

nial leaders consciously formulated policies that

would separate poor whites from Indians, blacks,

and mulattoes and proceeded to provide the white

poor, whom they had hitherto treated with contempt

and hatred, with some privileges and special advan-

tages.
4
In time, class divisions diminished in the

minds of poor whites and they saw themselves as

having something in common with the propertied

class, symbolized by their light skins and common

origins in Europe. With laws progressively

continuing to reduce the rights of blacks and

Indians, it was not long before the various European

groups coalesced into a white “racial” category

whose high-status identity gave them access to

wealth, power, opportunity, and privilege.
5

By the mid-nineteenth century virtually all

Americans had been conditioned to this arbitrary

ranking of the American peoples, and racial ideol-

ogy had diffused around much of the world, includ-

ing to the colonized peoples of the Third World and

among Europeans themselves.

“RACE” AS IDENTITY
In the United States the biophysical features of

different populations, which had become markers

of social status, were internalized as sources of

individual and group identities. After the Civil War,

although slavery ended, race and racial ideology re-

mained and were strengthened. African Americans

particularly had to grapple with the reality of being

defi ned as the lowest status group in American soci-

ety and with the associated stereotyping that be-

came increasingly part of the barriers to their

integration into American society (Conrad 1969).

And Native Americans had to try to reinvent their

identities, whether in towns or isolated on remote

reservations where traditional lifestyles were no

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READING 1: “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity 57

Historically, “race” was grounded in the myth of

biologically separate, exclusive, and distinct popu-

lations. No social ingredient in our race ideology

allowed for an identity of “mixed-races.” Indeed

over the past century and a half, the American pub-

lic was conditioned to the belief that “mixed-race”

people (especially of black and white ancestry)

were abnormal products of the unnatural mating of

two species, besides being socially unacceptable in

the normal scheme of things. The tragedy for

“mixed” people is that powerful social lie, the as-

sumption at the heart of “race,” that a presumed

biological essence is the basis of one’s true identity.

Identity is biology, racial ideology tells us, and it is

permanent and immutable. The emphasis on and

signifi cance given to “race” precludes any possibil-

ity for establishing our premier identities on the

basis of other characteristics. In this sense it may be

argued that the myth of “race” has been a barrier to

true human identities.

The unfortunate consequence of race ideology

is  that many of the people with this “mixed-race”

background have also been conditioned to the

belief in the biological salience of “race.” Their

efforts to establish a “Mixed-Race” category in the

American census forms show a total misunder-

standing of what “race” is all about, and this is, of

course, a major part of the tragedy. Their arguments

imply a feeling of having no identity at all because

they do not exist formally (that is, socially) as a

“biological” category.

The fact is that from the standpoint of biology,

there have been “mixed” people in North America

ever since Europeans fi rst encountered indigenous

Americans and the fi rst Africans were brought to

the English colonies in the 1620s. The average

African American has about one-quarter of his or

her genes from non-African (nonblack) ancestors,

although most estimates are likely to be conserva-

tive (cf. Marks 1995; Reed 1969). There is a greater

range of skin colors, hair textures, body sizes, nose

shapes, and other physical features among black

Americans than almost any other people identifi ed

as a distinct population. Virtually all of them could

identify as of “mixed-race.” But the physical

similar to that of the biological determinists in the

dominant society, but most would probably not go

so far as to assert a genetic basis to certain “African”-

originated behaviors. Those who take the position

asserting a common African personality or behavior

refl ect the degree to which the ideology of “race”

has been implanted in them. Like most Americans,

they fi nd it diffi cult to think beyond the racial world-

view and draw upon the same strategies as white

racists in claiming superior features for “African”

people. At the same time, there are many Afrocen-

trists who are very conscious of the fact that theirs is

a political position and that they are using the same

biological arguments as racists, the people whom

they theoretically oppose. They fail to realize that

operating within the racial worldview, accepting its

premises that biologically distinct races exist, each

with unique cultural/behavioral features, and simply

denying inferiority while asserting African superior-

ity does nothing to change the racism in our society.

However, we also must understand that what

Afrocentrism is really intended to do is to restore a

sense of pride and dignity to ordinary African

Americans, regardless of how whites and others

regard their positions. By looking to the “real”

Africa, studying her history, learning about and

being involved in certain rituals and festivals that

focus on African arts, dance, dress, music, and so

on, some activists feel that they are engendering

this pride and helping to remove the contempt and

denigration that has accompanied our ideas about

Africa in the past. They understand that for too long

African Americans have been conditioned to the

same negative beliefs about Africa and Africans as

have whites and others and that there is a need to

eliminate the self-deprecation and self-hatred that

black Americans have experienced with regard to

their African ancestry. . . .

THE NON-PROBLEM OF
“MIXED-RACE” PEOPLE
One of the more tragic aspects of the racial world-

view has been the seeming dilemma of people

whose parents are identifi ably of different “races.”

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58 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

including American culture, have changed, some

of them drastically, during that time. Cultures con-

stantly change without any corresponding changes

in biological features.

Americans should understand clearly that hu-

mans learn cultural features from one another all the

time because that has been one of the most profound

experiences of human, and especially American,

history. What prevents us from understanding this is

that component in the ideology of “race,” as we

have seen, that holds that each race has separate,

biologically determined patterns of cultural behav-

ior. The racial worldview, with its emphasis on as-

sumptions of innateness and immutability, makes it

possible to interpret all forms of human behavior as

hereditary. In fact, it almost mandates such a per-

spective because of powerful forces within our cul-

ture that preserve and promote hereditarian ideas.

The belief in racially determined cultural behavior,

despite all evidence to the contrary, is perpetuated in

American society by the popular media and as a part

of folk wisdom about human differences. Witness

the inordinate attention to and sales of Herrnstein

and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994). This belief has
been a necessary component of the ideology of

“race,” because it helps to perpetuate the notion that

major differences between “races” exist.

People who consider themselves of “mixed race”

and experience some form of psychic stress be-

cause they feel they have no identity in American

society, perhaps more than most, need to have un-

derstanding of this history. . . .

TRANSCENDING
THE RESTRICTIONS OF
“RACIAL” IDENTITY
Today scholars are beginning to realize that “race”

is nothing more and nothing less than a social in-

vention. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic, or

potential, qualities of the physically differing popu-

lations, but much to do with the allocation of power,

privilege, and wealth among them. This conceptual
separation of actual physical variations within the

markers of race status are always open to interpre-

tation by others. “Race” as social status is in the eye

of the beholder. “Mixed” people will still be treated

as black if their phenotypes cause them to be so

perceived by others. Insistence on being in a sepa-

rate classifi cation will not change that perception or

the reaction of people to them.

What compounds and complicates matters is an-

other lie that is one of the basic tenets, or constitu-

ent components, of the racial worldview: the myth

that biology has some intrinsic connection to cul-

ture. Some advocates of a new “mixed-race” cate-

gory have argued that they want to recognize the

“culture” of their other parent. For example, in a

black/white mixed marriage, a black parent pre-

sumably has “black” culture, and the white parent

has “white” culture. These advocates fail to realize

what anthropologists have long known, that there is

no relationship between one’s culture or lifestyle

and one’s genes or biological features. All native-

born Americans share some basic cultural similari-

ties, and the ancestors of modern African Americans

have been “American” longer than the ancestors of

most European Americans.
6
It is the ideological

myths of the racial worldview that prevent us from

seeing how very much alike culturally black and

white Americans are. (This is not to suggest that

there are not differences in the way blacks and

whites experience our culture and lifestyle varia-

tions that refl ect social-class differences and the

isolation of inner-city populations.)

On the other hand, if one parent did come from

a very different cultural background (e.g., recently

emigrated from Asia), a child does not automati-

cally have that culture because of the biology of

the parent. Humans acquire culture; it is learned

behavior. In order for Tiger Woods (a golfi ng star)

to have Thai culture, he would have to learn the
language and the elements of Thai culture. One can

learn these without having a single gene from a

Thai parent. Moreover, there is no reason why one

should learn the cultures of ancestors merely

because of some genetic or genealogical connec-

tions. None of us have the cultures of any of our

ancestors two centuries ago because all cultures,

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READING 1: “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity 59

Hazel O’Leary (just appointed as U.S. Secretary of

Energy) and Thurgood Marshall, Justice of the

United States Supreme Court, identifi ed as “black”

in American society when it was obvious that they

were not. I explained some of the history of the

idea of “race” and the interactions among peoples

in the New World. I also pointed out that there is a

great deal more to the identifi cation of African

Americans than similarities in physical traits, that

in fact, biological variations have little to do with

the social categories of race. Indeed the people of

the African Diaspora are a biogenetically diverse

category of people who have an identity derived

from common experiences of exploitation and rac-

ism. It is far more accurate and more fruitful to

scholarship, and possibly to the future of human-

kind, to defi ne African American people by their

sense of community, consciousness, and commit-
ment than by some mystical “racial” essence. It is
the Community into which they were born and

reared, a Consciousness of the historical realities

and shared experiences of their ancestors, and a

Commitment to the perspectives of their “black-

ness” and to the diminishing of racism that is criti-

cal to the identities of the Thurgood Marshalls and

Hazel O’Learys of our society. The social catego-

ries of “race” have always encompassed more than

mere physical similarities and differences. Theo-

dore Allen tells us in the acknowledgements to his

two-volume excoriation of white racism that he has

learned to say, “I am not white” (1994).

Even without all of the intermixtures of peoples,

some Americans have already experienced a high

level of uncertainty about the “racial” status of indi-

viduals with whom they have had some interaction.

Many peoples in the world, from Morocco to the

Persian Gulf, to the islands in the South Pacifi c

Ocean, have physical features that cause them to be

“mistaken” for black Americans. In that broad band

of the earth called the tropics we fi nd indigenous

peoples with tan to brown to dark brown skins, and

hair that may be frizzly, kinky, curly, or straight. As

more and more of these peoples either travel to the

United States or are encountered by Americans on

missions abroad, Americans must deal with their

species from the socially invented characterizations
of them represents a major paradigm shift in how
many scholars now think about the human experi-
ence. Anthropologists and biologists no longer see
“races” as discrete populations defi ned by blood-

group patterns or “types” defi ned by averages of

statistical measurements. Biophysical variations

are seen as continuous and gradual, overlapping

population boundaries, fl uid, and subject to evolu-

tionary changes. In like manner, scholars honestly

examining the history of American attitudes toward

human differences have concluded that “race” was

a social invention of the eighteenth century that

took advantage of the superfi cial physical differ-

ences among the American population and the so-

cial roles that these peoples played, and transposed

these into a new form of social stratifi cation. The

symbols of race identity became the substance.

Recognizing the reality of the racial worldview

and how it developed as a sociocultural reality re-

quires a whole new way of looking at human diver-

sity in all of its many forms. It means that (1) we

can better recognize and comprehend accurately

and objectively the natural causes of human physi-

cal variations around the world without attempting

to homogenize people into limited “racial” catego-

ries; (2) we can liberate ourselves from the need to

utilize physical differences in apprehending human

identities; (3) freed from the myths of racial deter-

minism, we can now improve our understanding of

the true nature of culture and cultural differences

and begin to view the processes of cultural change

in a more accurate light; and (4) we can begin to

understand the real nature of “race” as a social con-

struct and to deal with the problems that racial

identities have imposed on people.

For example, using this new perspective, we

would be able to avoid the problems encountered

when scholars examine the African Diaspora and

attempt to determine which peoples are legiti-

mately black products of this massive process of

displacement. Several years ago, two Asian stu-

dents who had recently immigrated to the United

States came to me confi dentially after class with a

puzzle. They wanted to know why were people like

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60 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

found around the world. Fast foods, music, dance,

dress, Hollywood fi lms, whole industrial complexes

(including the world of computers), and a wide

range of political, religious, and social beliefs have

diffused around the world. Few cultures have not

experienced the impact of such massive infusion of

new traits.

The peoples who have resulted from all this con-

tinuous blending of genetic features and cultural

traits are truly “universal” human beings, regard-

less of what languages they speak or cultures they

participate in. The concept of “universal” human

beings might very well in time obviate racial cate-

gories (but not ethnic identities) and may help to

bring about the elimination of all such designa-

tions. Many persons will come to recognize them-

selves as “universal” human beings, and there

should be perhaps an early census category that

proclaims this reality. What anthropologists must

do is to make sure that the ideas of “ethnicity” and

“ethnic identity” do not become perceived as

hereditary, permanent, and unalterable, but remain

fl uid forms of identity that will make us all

“ multicultural.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why was the social classifi cation of race

invented?

2. Is Afrocentrism a response to racism?

NOTES
1. Reference materials for this section were taken largely

from the following: Boardman et al. (1986), Godolphin

(1942), and Snowden (1983). But I have read widely in

ancient history and am aware that such materials are not

generally considered part of the anthropological reper-

toire. We need to realize that historical materials are

widely available to all, and we should encourage stu-

dents to avail themselves of them, especially since

American students have been shown to be woefully ig-

norant of history and geography.

2. Herodotus lists more than two dozen different nations

that fought on the different sides in the  Persian wars:

Arabians, Ethiopians, Armenians, Thracians, Libyans,

and many others.

3. The Persian Wars, Book II, p. 130, in Godolphin (1942).

perceptions of these peoples. Some time ago, in the

space of about eight months, I met a Samoan, a

person from the New Guinea area, and a number of

Arabs who in the course of conversations have indi-

cated that they have been “mistaken” for blacks.
7

Many peoples from the southern regions of Saudi

Arabia look very much like their neighboring

Africans across the Red Sea, having evolved in the

same climate and latitude (and having intermingled

over eons of time). To try to maintain racial catego-

ries based on physical features in the face of the

real world of human biological diversity, I suspect,

will be increasingly diffi cult.

There is another option, one that we have not

yet claimed in the establishing and referencing of

our human identities. We cannot ignore the fact

that since the fi fteenth century, what has happened

in the Americas, and to varying degrees in many

parts of the Third World, has been the fusion of

genetic materials from all of the great continents.

So-called “racial” mixture has occurred exten-

sively in Latin America, and to a lesser extent in

North America, so that most people are descen-

dants of ancestors from Europe, Africa, and the

Americas, and in many places like the Caribbean,

from Asia also (Graham 1990: Morner 1967).

Throughout the colonial world, complex genetic

mixtures among various peoples have taken place;

and increasingly Europeans at home are partici-

pants in, and products of, new genetic combina-

tions with individuals absorbed into their societies

from distant lands.

In addition to the increasing genetic heterogene-

ity of individuals and groups, there is the obvious

fact that cultural features have traveled all over the

world independently of the spread of genetic mate-

rial. In the midst of the Sahara desert, signs pro-

claim “Coca-Cola,” everyone from the Siberian

tundra to the Melanesian forests wears “jeans,”

African clothing and designs are found from Paris

to Sydney, Australia, and Americans eat more piz-

zas and tacos (burritos, tortillas, etc.) than almost

any other people outside of Italy and Mexico. White

boys wear dreadlocks, and Chinese and other Asian,

and increasingly African, ethnic restaurants are

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READING 2: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition 61

Morgan, Edmund S. 1975 American Slavery: American
Freedom . New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

Mörner, Magnus 1967 Race Mixture in the History of Latin
America. Boston: Little, Brown.

Morsy, Soheir 1994 Beyond the Honorary “White”

Classifi cation of Egyptians: Societal Identity in Historical

Context. In Race . S. Gregory and R. Sanjek, eds. Pp. 175–
198. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Nash, Gary 1982 Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of
Early America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Reed, T.E. 1969 Caucasian Genes in American Negroes.

Science 165 (3,895): 762–768.
Smedley, Audrey [1993]1999 Race in North America: Origin

and Evolution of a Worldview. 2nd edition, revised and
enlarged. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Snowden, Frank M., Jr. 1983 Before Color Prejudice. Revised
edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

R E A D I N G 2

Who Is Black? One Nation’s
Defi nition

F. James Davis

In a taped interview conducted by a blind, black

anthropologist, a black man nearly ninety years old

said: “Now you must understand that this is just a

name we have. I am not black and you are not black

either, if you go by the evidence of your eyes. . . .

Anyway, black people are all colors. White people

don’t look all the same way, but there are more dif-

ferent kinds of us than there are of them. Then too,

there is a certain stage [at] which you cannot tell

who is white and who is black. Many of the people

I see who are thought of as black could just as well

be white in their appearance. Many of the white

people I see are black as far as I can tell by the way

they look. Now, that’s it for looks. Looks don’t

mean much. The things that makes us different is

how we think. What we believe is important, the

ways we look at life” (Gwaltney, 1980:96).

How does a person get defi ned as a black, both

socially and legally, in the United States? What is

4. Morgan claims that the Virginia Assembly “deliberately

did what it could to foster the contempt of whites for

blacks and Indians” (1975:331).

5. For insightful analysis of this process, see also Allen

(1994, 1997).

6. Bohannan and Curtin (1995:13) have observed that half

the ancestors of African Americans were already here in

the United States by 1780 while the median date for the

arrival of European ancestors was “remarkably late,

1890s.” We need more of this kind of honesty in recog-

nizing historical realities on the part of scholars in all

disciplines.

7. See Morsy (1994). When Arabs began to migrate to the

Detroit area several generations ago, many were fre-

quently mistaken for blacks. This became an acute prob-

lem in the area around Dearborn, Michigan, where many

of them settled. There had long been a law in Dearborn

that prohibited blacks from being in the city after sun-

down. The Dearborn police, among others, were often

very confused.

REFERENCES
Allen, Theodore W. [1994]1997 The Invention of the White

Race , vols. 1 and 2, London: Verso.
Boardman, John, J. Griffi n, and O. Murray, eds. 1986 The

Oxford History of the Classical World . Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Canny, Nicholas P. 1973 The Ideology of English Colonial-

ization: From Ireland to America. William and Mary
Quarterly (3rd ser.) 30:575–598.

Castro, Americo 1971 The Spaniards . Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Connah, Graham 1987 African Civilizations. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Conrad, Earl 1969 The Invention of the Negro. New York:
Paul S. Erikson.

Davidson, Basil 1991 African Civilization Revisited.
Trenton, NJ: African World Press.

Davis, David Brion 1966 The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture . Middlesex, England: Penguin.

Godolphin, Francis R. B., ed. 1942 The Greek Historians ,
vols. 1 and 2. New York: Random House.

Graham, Richard, ed. 1990 The Idea of Race in Latin
America, 1870–1940 . Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hitti, Phillip 1953 History of the Arabs. London: Macmillan
Publishing Co.

Horsman, Reginald 1981 Race and Manifest Destiny . Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Liggio, Leonard P. 1976 English Origins of Early American

Racism. Radical History Review 3(1):1–26.
Marks, Jonathan 1995 Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race,

and History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
F. James Davis (1920–2012) was professor emeritus of sociol-

ogy at Illinois State University.

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62 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

In his autobiography, Powell recounts some ex-

periences with racial classifi cation in his youth that

left a lasting impression on him. During Powell’s

freshman year at Colgate University, his roommate

did not know that he was a black until his father,

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was invited to give a

chapel talk on Negro rights and problems, after

which the roommate announced that because

Adam was a Negro they could no longer be room-

mates or friends.

Another experience that affected Powell deeply

occurred one summer during his Colgate years. He

was working as a bellhop at a summer resort in

Manchester, Vermont, when Abraham Lincoln’s

aging son Robert was a guest there. Robert Lincoln

disliked blacks so much that he refused to let them

wait on him or touch his luggage, car, or any of his

possessions. Blacks who did got their knuckles

whacked with his cane. To the great amusement of

the other bellhops, Lincoln took young Powell for a

white man and accepted his services (Powell,

1971:31–33).

Lena Horne’s parents were both very light in

color and came from black upper-middle-class fam-

ilies in Brooklyn (Horne and Schickel, 1965;

Buckley, 1986). Lena lived with her father’s parents

until she was about seven years old. Her grandfather

was very light and blue-eyed. Her fair-skinned

grandmother was the daughter of a slave woman and

her white owner, from the family of John C.

Calhoun, well-known defender of slavery. One of

her father’s great-grandmothers was a Blackfoot

Indian, to whom Lena Horne has attributed her

somewhat coppery skin color. One of her mother’s

grandmothers was a French-speaking black woman

from Senegal and never a slave. Her mother’s father

was a “Portuguese Negro,” and two women in his

family had passed as white and become entertainers.

Lena Horne’s parents had separated, and when

she was seven her entertainer mother began placing

her in a succession of homes in different states. Her

favorite place was in the home of her Uncle Frank,

her father’s brother, a red-haired, blue-eyed teacher

in a black school in Georgia. The black children in

that community asked her why she was so light and

the nation’s rule for who is black, and how did it

come to be? And so what? Don’t we all know who

is black, and isn’t the most important issue what

opportunities the group has? Let us start with

some  experiences of three well-known American

blacks—actress and beauty pageant winner Vanessa

Williams, U.S. Representative Adam Clayton

Powell, Jr., and entertainer Lena Horne.

For three decades after the fi rst Miss America

Pageant in 1921, black women were barred from

competing. The fi rst black winner was Vanessa

Williams of Millwood, New York, crowned Miss

America in 1984. In the same year the fi rst

runner-up—Suzette Charles of Mays Landing, New

Jersey—was also black. The viewing public was

charmed by the television images and magazine

pictures of the beautiful and musically talented

Williams, but many people were also puzzled. Why

was she being called black when she appeared to be

white? Suzette Charles, whose ancestry appeared to

be more European than African, at least looked like

many of the “lighter blacks.” Notoriety followed

when Vanessa Williams resigned because of the im-

pending publication of some nude photographs of

her taken before the pageant, and Suzette Charles

became Miss America for the balance of 1984.

Beyond the troubling question of whether these

young women could have won if they had looked

“more black,” the publicity dramatized the nation’s

defi nition of a black person.

Some blacks complained that the Rev. Adam

Clayton Powell, Jr., was so light that he was a

stranger in their midst. In the words of Roi Ottley,

“He was white to all appearances, having blue eyes,

an aquiline nose, and light, almost blond, hair”

(1943:220), yet he became a bold, effective black

leader—fi rst as minister of the Abyssinian Baptist

Church of Harlem, then as a New York city council-

man, and fi nally as a U.S. congressman from the

state of New York. Early in his activist career he led

6,000 blacks in a march on New York City Hall. He

used his power in Congress to fi ght for civil rights

legislation and other black causes. In 1966, in

Washington, D.C., he convened the fi rst black

power conference.

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READING 2: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition 63

perseverance did Jane White make her debut as the

educated mulatto maid Nonnie in the stage version

of Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944). . . .

THE ONE-DROP RULE DEFINED
As the above cases illustrate, to be considered black

in the United States not even half of one’s ancestry

must be African black. But will one-fourth do, or

one-eighth, or less? The nation’s answer to the

question “Who is black?” has long been that a black

is any person with any known African black ances-
try (Myrdal, 1944:113–18; Berry and Tischler,

1978:97–98; Williamson, 1980:1–2). This defi ni-

tion refl ects the long experience with slavery and

later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it be-

came known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a

single drop of “black blood” makes a person a

black. It is also known as the “one black ancestor

rule,” some courts have called it the “traceable

amount rule,” and anthropologists call it the “hypo-

descent rule,” meaning that racially mixed persons

are assigned the status of the subordinate group

(Harris, 1964:56). This defi nition emerged from the

American South to become the nation’s defi nition,

generally accepted by whites and blacks alike

(Bahr, Chadwick, and Stauss, 1979:27–28). Blacks

had no other choice. This American cultural defi ni-

tion of blacks is taken for granted as readily by

judges, affi rmative action offi cers, and black pro-

testers as it is by Ku Klux Klansmen.

Let us not be confused by terminology. At pres-

ent the usual statement of the one-drop rule is in

terms of “black blood” or black ancestry, while not

so long ago it referred to “Negro blood” or ances-

try. The term “black” rapidly replaced “Negro” in

general usage in the United States as the black

power movement peaked at the end of the 1960s,

but the black and Negro populations are the same.

The term “black” is used [here] for persons with

any black African lineage, not just for unmixed

members of populations from sub-Saharan Africa.

The term “Negro,” which is used in certain histori-

cal contexts, means the same thing. Terms such as

“African black,” “unmixed Negro,” and “all black”

called her a “yellow bastard.” She learned that

when satisfactory evidence of respectable black

parents is lacking, being light-skinned implies ille-

gitimacy and having an underclass white parent and

is thus a disgrace in the black community. When

her mother married a white Cuban, Lena also

learned that blacks can be very hostile to the white

spouse, especially when the “black” mate is very

light. At this time she began to blame the confused

color line for her childhood troubles. She later en-

dured much hostility from blacks and whites alike

when her own second marriage, to white composer-

arranger Lennie Hayton, was fi nally made public in

1950 after three years of keeping it secret.

Early in Lena Horne’s career there were com-

plaints that she did not fi t the desired image of a

black entertainer for white audiences, either physi-

cally or in her style. She sang white love songs, not

the blues. Noting her brunette-white beauty, one

white agent tried to get her to take a Spanish name,

learn some Spanish songs, and pass as a Latin

white, but she had learned to have a horror of pass-

ing and never considered it, although Hollywood

blacks accused her of trying to pass after she played

her fi rst bit part in a fi lm. After she failed her fi rst

screen test because she looked like a white girl try-

ing to play black-face, the directors tried making

her up with a shade called “Light Egyptian” to

make her look darker. The whole procedure embar-

rassed and hurt her deeply. . . .

Other light mulatto entertainers have also had

painful experiences because of their light skin and

other caucasoid features. Starting an acting career is

never easy, but actress Jane White’s diffi culties in

the 1940s were compounded by her lightness. Her

father was NAACP leader Walter White. Even with

dark makeup on her ivory skin, she did not look like

a black person on the stage, but she was not allowed

to try out for white roles because blacks were barred

from playing them. When she auditioned for the

part of a young girl from India, the director was

enthusiastic, although her skin color was too light,

but higher management decreed that it was

unthinkable for a Negro to play the part of an

Asian  Indian (White, 1948:338). Only after great

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64 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

American children in recent decades have them-

selves been racially mixed, but often the fractions

get complicated because the earlier details of the

mixing were obscured generations ago. Like so

many white Americans, black people are forced to

speculate about some of the fractions—one-eighth

this, three-sixteenths that, and so on. . . .

PLESSY, PHIPPS, AND OTHER
CHALLENGES IN THE COURTS
Homer Plessy was the plaintiff in the 1896

precedent-setting “separate-but-equal” case of

Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537). This case
challenged the Jim Crow statute that required

racially segregated seating on trains in interstate

commerce in the state of Louisiana. The U.S.

Supreme Court quickly dispensed with Plessy’s

contention that because he was only one-eighth

Negro and could pass as white he was entitled to

ride in the seats reserved for whites. Without ruling

directly on the defi nition of a Negro, the Supreme

Court briefl y took what is called “judicial notice”

of what it assumed to be common knowledge: that

a Negro or black is any person with any black an-

cestry. (Judges often take explicit “judicial notice”

not only of scientifi c or scholarly conclusions, or of

opinion surveys or other systematic investigations,

but also of something they just assume to be so,

including customary practices or common knowl-

edge.) This has consistently been the ruling in the

federal courts, and often when the black ancestry

was even less than one-eighth. The federal courts

have thus taken judicial notice of the customary

boundary between two sociocultural groups that

differ, on the average, in physical traits, not be-

tween two discrete genetic categories. In the ab-

sence of proof of a specifi c black ancestor, merely

being known as a black in the community has usu-

ally been accepted by the courts as evidence of

black ancestry. The separate-but-equal doctrine es-

tablished in the Plessy case is no longer the law, as

a result of the judicial and legislative successes of

the civil rights movement, but the nation’s legal

defi nition of who is black remains unchanged.

are used here to refer to unmixed blacks descended

from African populations.

We must also pay attention to the terms

“ mulatto” and “colored.” The term “mulatto” was

originally used to mean the offspring of a “pure

African Negro” and a “pure white.” Although the

root meaning of mulatto, in Spanish, is “hybrid,”

“mulatto” came to include the children of unions

between whites and so-called “mixed Negroes.”

For example, Booker T. Washington and Frederick

Douglass, with slave mothers and white fathers,

were referred to as mulattoes (Bennett, 1962:255).

To whatever extent their mothers were part white,

these men were more than half white. Douglass was

evidently part Indian as well, and he looked it

(Preston, 1980:9–10). Washington had reddish hair

and gray eyes. At the time of the American Revolu-

tion, many of the founding fathers had some very

light slaves, including some who appeared to be

white. The term “colored” seemed for a time to

refer only to mulattoes, especially lighter ones, but

later it became a euphemism for darker Negroes,

even including unmixed blacks. With widespread

racial mixture, “Negro” came to mean any slave or

descendant of a slave, no matter how much mixed.

Eventually in the United States, the terms mulatto,

colored, Negro, black, and African American all

came to mean people with any known black African

ancestry. Mulattoes are racially mixed, to whatever

degree, while the terms black, Negro, African

American, and colored include both mulattoes and

unmixed blacks. These terms have quite different

meanings in other countries.

Whites in the United States need some help

envisioning the American black experience with

ancestral fractions. At the beginning of miscegena-

tion between two populations presumed to be

racially pure, quadroons appear in the second

generation of  continuing mixing with whites, and

octo roons in  the third. A quadroon is one-fourth

African black and thus easily classed as black in the

United  States,  yet three of this person’s four

grandparents  are white. An octoroon has seven

white great- grandparents out of eight and usually

looks white or almost so. Most parents of black

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READING 2: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition 65

widely disseminated during the Phipps trial in

1983 (discussed below), fi led as Jane Doe v. State of
Louisiana. This case was decided in a district court
in May 1983, and in June the legislature abolished

its one thirty-second statute and gave parents the

right to designate the race of newborns, and even to

change classifi cations on birth certifi cates if they

can prove the child is white by a “preponderance of

the evidence.” However, the new statute in 1983 did

not abolish the “traceable amount rule” (the one-

drop rule), as demonstrated by the outcomes when

the Phipps decision was appealed to higher courts in

1985 and 1986.

The history in the Phipps (Jane Doe) case goes as

far back as 1770, when a French planter named Jean

Gregoire Guillory took his wife’s slave, Margarita,

as his mistress (Model, 1983:3–4). More than two

centuries and two decades later, their great-great-

great-great-granddaughter, Susie Guillory Phipps,

asked the Louisiana courts to change the classifi ca-

tion on her deceased parents’ birth certifi cates to

“white” so she and her brothers and sisters could be

designated white. They all looked white, and some

were blue-eyed blonds. Mrs. Susie Phipps had been

denied a passport because she had checked “white”

on her application although her birth certifi cate des-

ignated her race as “colored.” This designation was

based on information supplied by a midwife, who

presumably relied on the parents or on the family’s

status in the community. Mrs. Phipps claimed that

this classifi cation came as a shock, since she had

always thought she was white, had lived as white,

and had twice married as white. Some of her rela-

tives, however, gave depositions saying they consid-

ered themselves “colored,” and the lawyers for the

state claimed to have proof that Mrs. Phipps is three

thirty-seconds black (Trillin, 1986:62–63, 71–74).

That was more than enough “blackness” for the dis-

trict court in 1983 to declare her parents, and thus

Mrs. Phipps and her siblings, to be legally black.

In October and again in December 1985, the

state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the

district court’s decision, saying that no one can

change the racial designation of his or her parents

or anyone else’s (479 So. 2d 369). Said the majority

State courts have generally upheld the one-drop

rule. For instance, in a 1948 Mississippi case a

young man, Davis Knight, was sentenced to fi ve

years in jail for violating the antimiscegenation

statute. Less than one-sixteenth black, Knight said

he was not aware that he had any black lineage, but

the state proved his great-grandmother was a slave

girl. In some states the operating defi nition of black

has been limited by statute to particular fractions,

yet the social defi nition—the one-drop rule—has

generally prevailed in case of doubt. Mississippi,

Missouri, and fi ve other states have had the criterion

of one-eighth. Virginia changed from one-fourth to

one-eighth in 1910, then in 1930 forbade white

intermarriage with a person with any black ances-

try. Persons in Virginia who are one-fourth or more

Indian and less than one-sixteenth African black are

defi ned as Indians while on the reservation but as

blacks when they leave (Berry, 1965:26). While

some states have had general race classifi cation

statutes, at least for a time, others have legislated a

defi nition of black only for particular purposes,

such as marriage or education. In a few states there

have even been varying defi nitions for different

situations (Mangum, 1940:38–48). All states re-

quire a designation of race on birth certifi cates, but

there are no clear guidelines to help physicians and

midwives do the classifying.

Louisiana’s latest race classifi cation statute be-

came highly controversial and was fi nally repealed

in 1983 (Trillin, 1986:77). Until 1970, a Louisiana

statute had embraced the one-drop rule, defi ning a

Negro as anyone with a “trace of black ancestry.”

This law was challenged in court a number of times

from the 1920s on, including an unsuccessful at-

tempt in 1957 by boxer Ralph Dupas, who asked to

be declared white so that a law banning “interracial

sports” (since repealed) would not prevent him from

boxing in the state. In 1970 a lawsuit was brought

on behalf of a child whose ancestry was allegedly

only one two-hundred-fi fty-sixth black, and the

legislature revised its law. The 1970 Louisiana

statute defi ned a black as someone whose ancestry

is more than one thirty-second black (La. Rev.

Stat. 42:267). Adverse publicity about this law was

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66 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

the one accepted by the general public and by the

courts. The Census Bureau counts what the nation

wants counted. Although various operational in-

structions have been tried, the defi nition of black

used by the Census Bureau has been the nation’s

cultural and legal defi nition: all persons with any

known black ancestry. Other nations defi ne and

count blacks differently, so international compari-

sons of census data on blacks can be extremely mis-

leading. For example, Latin American countries

generally count as black only unmixed African

blacks, those only slightly mixed, and the very

poorest mulattoes. If they used the U.S. defi nition,

they would count far more blacks than they do, and

if Americans used their defi nition, millions in the

black community in the United States would be

counted either as white or as “coloreds” of different

descriptions, not as black.

Instructions to our census enumerators in 1840,

1850, and 1860 provided “mulatto” as a category

but did not defi ne the term. In 1870 and 1880,

mulattoes were offi cially defi ned to include “qua-

droons, octoroons, and all persons having any

perceptible trace of African blood.” In 1890 enu-

merators were told to record the exact proportion
of the “African blood,” again relying on visibility.

In 1900 the Census Bureau specifi ed that “pure

Negroes” be counted separately from mulattoes,

the latter to mean “all persons with some trace of

black blood.” In 1920 the mulatto category was

dropped, and black was defi ned to mean any per-

son with any black ancestry, as it has been ever

since.

In 1960 the practice of self-defi nition began,

with the head of household indicating the race of

its  members. This did not seem to introduce any

noticeable fl uctuation in the number of blacks,

thus indicating that black Americans generally

apply the one-drop rule to themselves. One ex-

ception is that Spanish-speaking Americans who

have black ancestry but were considered white, or

some designation other than black, in their place

of origin generally reject the one-drop rule if they

can. American Indians with some black ancestry

also generally try to avoid the rule, but those who

of the court in its opinion: “That appellants might

today describe themselves as white does not prove

error in a document which designates their parents

as colored” (479 So. 2d 371). Of course, if the par-

ents’ designation as “colored” cannot be disturbed,

their descendants must be defi ned as black by the

“traceable amount rule.” The court also concluded

that the preponderance of the evidence clearly

showed that the Guillory parents were “colored.”

Although noting expert testimony to the effect that

the race of an individual cannot be determined with

scientifi c accuracy, the court said the law of racial

designation is not based on science, that “individ-

ual race designations are purely social and cultural

perceptions and the evidence conclusively proves

those subjective perspectives were correctly re-

corded at the time the appellants’ birth certifi cates

were recorded” (479 So. 2d 372). At the rehearing

in December 1985, the appellate court also affi rmed

the necessity of designating race on birth certifi –

cates for public health, affi rmative action, and other

important public programs and held that equal pro-

tection of the law has not been denied so long as the

designation is treated as confi dential.

When this case was appealed to the Louisiana

Supreme Court in 1986, that court declined to re-

view the decision, saying only that the court “con-

curs in the denial for the reasons assigned by the

court of appeals on rehearing” (485 So. 2d 60). In

December 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court was

equally brief in stating its reason for refusing to re-

view the decision: “The appeal is dismissed for

want of a substantial federal question” (107 Sup.

Ct. Reporter, interim ed. 638). Thus, both the fi nal

court of appeals in Louisiana and the highest court

of the United States saw no reason to disturb the

application of the one-drop rule in the lawsuit

brought by Susie Guillory Phipps and her siblings.

CENSUS ENUMERATION
OF BLACKS
When the U.S. Bureau of the Census enumerates

blacks (always counted as Negroes until 1980),

it  does not use a scientifi c defi nition, but rather

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READING 2: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition 67

race with ethnicity. They consider miscegenation

with any “inferior” people to be the ultimate danger

to the survival of their own group and have often

seen the one-drop rule as a crucial component in

their line of defense. Americans in general, how-

ever, while fi nding other ways to discriminate

against immigrant groups, have rejected the appli-

cation of the drastic one-drop rule to all groups but

blacks.

UNIQUENESS OF THE
ONE-DROP RULE
Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other

group than American blacks, but apparently the

rule is unique in that it is found only in the United

States and not in any other nation in the world. In

fact, defi nitions of who is black vary quite sharply

from country to country, and for this reason people

in other countries often express consternation

about our defi nition. James Baldwin relates a re-

vealing incident that occurred in 1956 at the Con-

ference of Negro-African Writers and Artists held

in Paris. The head of the delegation of writers and

artists from the United States was John Davis. The

French chairperson introduced Davis and then

asked him why he considered himself Negro, since

he certainly did not look like one. Baldwin wrote,

“He is a Negro, of course, from the remarkable
legal point of view which obtains in the United

States, but more importantly, as he tried to make

clear to his interlocutor, he was a Negro by choice

and by depth of involvement—by experience, in

fact” (1962:19).

The phenomenon known as “passing as white”

is diffi cult to explain in other countries or to for-

eign students. Typical questions are: “Shouldn’t

Americans say that a person who is passing as

white is white, or nearly all white, and has previ-

ously been passing as black?” or “To be consis-

tent, shouldn’t you say that someone who is

one-eighth white is passing as black?” or “Why is

there so much concern, since the so-called blacks

who pass take so little negroid ancestry with

them?” Those who ask such questions need to

leave the reservation are often treated as black.

At  any rate, the 1980 census count showed that

self-designated blacks made up about 12 percent

of the population of the United States.

No other ethnic population in the nation,

including those with visibly non-caucasoid

features, is defi ned and counted according to a

one-drop rule. For example, persons whose ances-

try is one-fourth or less American Indian are not

generally defi ned as Indian unless they want to be,

and they are considered assimilating Americans

who may even be proud of having some Indian

ancestry. The same implicit rule appears to apply

to Japanese Americans, Filipinos, or other peoples

from East Asian nations and also to Mexican

Americans who have Central American Indian

ancestry, as a large majority do. For instance, a

person whose ancestry is one-eighth Chinese is

not defi ned as just Chinese, or East Asian, or a

member of the mongoloid race. The United States

certainly does not apply a one-drop rule to its

white ethnic populations either, which include

both national and religious groups. Ethnicity has

often been confused with racial biology and not

just in Nazi Germany. Americans do not insist that

an American with a small fraction of Polish

ancestry be classifi ed as a Pole, or that someone

with a single remote Greek ancestor be designated

Greek, or that someone with any trace of Jewish

lineage is a Jew and nothing else.

It is interesting that, in The Passing of the Great
Race (1916), Madison Grant maintained that the
one-drop rule should be applied not only to blacks

but also to all the other ethnic groups he considered

biologically inferior “races,” such as Hindus, Asians

in general, Jews, Italians, and other Southern and

Eastern European peoples. Grant’s book went

through four editions, and he and others succeeded

in getting Congress to pass the national origins

quota laws of the early 1920s. This racist quota leg-

islation sharply curtailed immigration from every-

where in the world except Northern and Western

Europe and the Western Hemisphere, until it was

repealed in 1965. Grant and other believers in the

racial superiority of their own group have confused

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68 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

participation for blacks are still formidable, and a

fractionally black person cannot escape these ob-

stacles without passing as white and cutting off all

ties to the black family and community. The pain of

this separation, and condemnation by the black

family and community, are major reasons why

many or most of those who could pass as white

choose not to. Loss of security within the minority

community, and fear and distrust of the white world

are also factors.

It should now be apparent that the defi nition of a

black person as one with any trace at all of black

African ancestry is inextricably woven into the his-

tory of the United States. It incorporates beliefs

once used to justify slavery and later used to but-

tress the castelike Jim Crow system of segregation.

Developed in the South, the defi nition of “Negro”

(now black) spread and became the nation’s social

and legal defi nition. Because blacks are defi ned ac-

cording to the one-drop rule, they are a socially

constructed category in which there is wide varia-

tion in racial traits and therefore not a race group in

the scientifi c sense. However, because that category

has a defi nite status position in the society it has

become a self-conscious social group with an eth-

nic identity.

The one-drop rule has long been taken for

granted throughout the United States by whites and

blacks alike, and the federal courts have taken “ju-

dicial notice” of it as being a matter of common

knowledge. State courts have generally upheld the

one-drop rule, but some have limited the defi nition

to one thirty-second or one-sixteenth or one-eighth

black ancestry, or made other limited exceptions for

persons with both Indian and black ancestry. Most

Americans seem unaware that this defi nition of

blacks is extremely unusual in other countries, per-

haps even unique to the United States, and that

Americans defi ne no other minority group in a sim-

ilar way. . . .

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Is black a color category or a status?

2. Do you think passing still occurs?

realize that “passing” is so much more a social

phenomenon than a biological one, refl ecting the

nation’s unique defi nition of what makes a person

black. The concept of “passing” rests on the one-

drop rule and on folk beliefs about race and misce-

genation, not on biological or historical fact.

The black experience with passing as white in

the United States contrasts with the experience of

other ethnic minorities that have features that are

clearly non-caucasoid. The concept of passing ap-

plies only to blacks—consistent with the nation’s

unique defi nition of the group. A person who is

one-fourth or less American Indian or Korean or

Filipino is not regarded as passing if he or she inter-

marries and joins fully the life of the dominant

community, so the minority ancestry need not be

hidden. It is often suggested that the key reason for

this is that the physical differences between these

other groups and whites are less pronounced than

the physical differences between African blacks

and whites, and therefore are less threatening to

whites. However, keep in mind that the one-drop

rule and anxiety about passing originated during

slavery and later received powerful reinforcement

under the Jim Crow system.

For the physically visible groups other than

blacks, miscegenation promotes assimilation,

despite barriers of prejudice and discrimination

during two or more generations of racial mixing.

As noted above, when ancestry in one of these

racial minority groups does not exceed one-fourth,

a person is not defi ned solely as a member of that

group. Masses of white European immigrants have

climbed the class ladder not only through education

but also with the help of close personal relation-

ships in the dominant community, intermarriage,

and ultimately full cultural and social assimilation.

Young people tend to marry people they meet in the

same informal social circles (Gordon, 1964:70–81).

For visibly non-caucasoid minorities other than

blacks in the United States, this entire route to full

assimilation is slow but possible.

For all persons of any known black lineage, how-

ever, assimilation is blocked and is not promoted

by  miscegenation. Barriers to full opportunity and

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READING 2: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Defi nition 69

Horne, Lena, and Richard Schickel. 1965. Lena. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday & Co.

Mangum, Charles Staples, Jr. 1940. The Legal Status of the
Negro in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.

Model, F. Peter, ed. 1983. “Apartheid in the Bayou.”

Perspectives: The Civil Rights Quarterly 15 (Winter–
Spring), 3–4.

Myrdal, Gunnar, assisted by Richard Sterner and Arnold M.

Rose. 1944. An American Dilemma. New York: Harper &
Bros.

Ottley, Roi. 1943. New World A-Coming. Cleveland: World
Publishing Co.

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. 1971. Adam by Adam: The Autobi-
ography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. New York: Dial Press.

Preston, Dickson J. 1980. Young Frederick Douglass: The
Maryland Years. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Trillin, Calvin. 1986. “American Chronicles: Black or

White.” New Yorker, April 14, 1986, pp. 62–78.
White, Walter. 1948. A Man Called White: The Autobiogra-

phy of Walter White. New York: Viking Press.
Williamson, Joel. 1980. New People: Miscegenation and

Mulattoes in the United States. New York: The Free Press.

REFERENCES
Bahr, Howard M., Bruce A. Chadwick, and Joseph H. Stauss.

1979. American Ethnicity. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath & Co.
Baldwin, James. 1962. Nobody Knows My Name. New York:

Dell Publishing Co.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr. 1962. Before the Mayfl ower: A History
of the Negro in America 1619–1962. Chicago: Johnson
Publishing Co.

Berry, Brewton. 1965. Race and Ethnic Relations. 3rd ed.
Boston: Houghton Miffl in Co.

Berry, Brewton, and Henry L. Tischler. 1978. Race and
Ethnic Relations. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Miffl in Co.

Buckley, Gail Lumet. 1986. The Hornes: An American
Family. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Grant, Madison. 1916. The Passing of the Great Race. New
York: Scribner.

Gwaltney, John Langston. 1980. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait
of Black America. New York: Vintage Books.

Harris, Melvin. 1964. Patterns of Race in the Americas. New
York: W. W. Norton.

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R E A D I N G 3

The Evolution of Identity

The Washington Post

Decade to decade, the U.S. census has changed its classifications of race and ethnicity. Partially, this reflects the growing diversity of the country. It also
reveals the nation’s evolving politics and social mores. When the first census was taken in 1790, enumerators classified free residents as white or “other,”
while slaves were counted separately. By 1860, residents were classified as white, black, or mulatto. Hispanic origin first became a category in 1970. Here
are the categories used in the decennial counts from 1860 to 2000, as presented by AmeriStat ( www.ameristat.org ).

1860 1870 1880 1890 1 1900 2 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

White

Black

Mulatto

White

Black

Mulatto

Chinese

Indian

White

Black

Mulatto

Chinese

Indian

White

Black

Mulatto

Chinese

Indian

Quadroon

Octoroon

Japanese

White

Black
(Negro descent)

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

White

Black

Mulatto

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

Other

White

Black

Mulatto

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Hindu

Korean

Other

White

Black

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Hindu

Korean

Mexican

Other

White

Black

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Hindu

Korean

Other

White

Negro

Chinese

Amer.

Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Other

White

Negro

Chinese

Amer. Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Aleut

Eskimo

Hawaiian

Part Hawaiian

Other

E

T

H

N

I

C

I

T

Y

White

Negro or Black

Chinese

Indian (Amer.)

Japanese

Filipino

Korean

Hawaiian

Other

Mexican

Puerto Rican

Central/So.

American

Cuban

Other Spanish

(None of these)

White

Black or Negro

Chinese

Indian

Japanese

Filipino

Asian Indian

Korean

Aleut

Eskimo

Hawaiian

Vietnamese

Guamanian

Samoan

Other

Mexican,

Mexican Amer.

Chicano

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other Spanish/

Hispanic

Not Spanish/

Hispanic

White

Black or Negro

Chinese

Indian (Amer.)

Japanese

Filipino

Asian Indian

Korean

Aleut

Eskimo

Hawaiian

Vietnamese

Guamanian

Samoan

Other Asian

Pacific

Islander

Other race

Mexican,

Mexican Amer.

Chicano

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other Spanish/

Hispanic

Not Spanish/

Hispanic

White

Black, African

American or

Negro

Chinese

Amer. Indian or

Alaska Native

Japanese

Filipino

Asian Indian

Korean

Native Hawaiian

Vietnamese

Guamanian or

Chamorro

Samoan

Other Asian

Other Pacific

Islander

Some other race

Mexican,

Mexican Amer.

Chicano

Puerto Rican

Cuban

Other Spanish/

Hispanic/Latino

Not Spanish/

Hispanic/Latino

1 In 1890, mulatto was defined as a person who
was three-eighths to five-eighths black. A
quadroon was one-quarter black and an
octoroon one-eighth black.

2 American Indians have been asked
to specify their tribe since the 1900
Census.

Bold letters indicate first usage
since 1860.

NOTE: Before the 1970 Census, enumerators wrote in the race of individuals using the
designated categories. In subsequent censuses, respondents or enumerators filled in circles
next to the categories with which the respondent identified. Also beginning with the 1970
Census, people choosing American Indian, other Asian, other race, or for the Hispanic
question, other Hispanic categories, were asked to write in a specific tribe or group. Hispanic
ethnicity was asked of a sample of Americans in 1970 and of all Americans beginning with
the 1980 Census. The 2000 Census allowed Americans to select more than one race.

Sources: AmeriStat, “200 Years of U.S. Census Taking: Population and Housing Questions 1790–1990,” U.S. Census Bureau.
FROM: The Washington Post; Federal Page, August 13, 2001.

70

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READING 4: Real Indians 71

P E R S O N A L A C C O U N T

A Loaded Vacation

Every summer since I can remember, I go on vacation

with my aunt and uncle. Last summer, my aunt took my

cousin, brother, and me to Florida. My aunt grew up in

Maryland along with my mother. She was college edu-

cated and until recently worked in corporate America.

Now she owns her own daycare center.

I rarely thought about how my background was differ-

ent from my aunt’s until one night in Florida. We were all

in the hotel suite when she asked me about my plans for

the future and what I wanted to do with my degree, since

I was entering college in the fall. I told her I wanted to be

a lawyer. She told me that was going to be a hard goal to

reach for a black female, but then again she said that

I wasn’t really black. I didn’t understand. She went on to

say that if I make it anywhere in life, it would be because

I talk white. She said, “Just remember that, even though

everything about you is white—your clothes, the way you

talk, your friends—doesn’t mean when they look at you

they don’t still see black.”

I didn’t know what to say. I sat there silently taking it all

in. Was this the same aunt I’d known all my life? She told

my brother that anything he accomplished would be due

to his skin complexion, and that if he had been dark

skinned “he wouldn’t have a shot in hell, because white

people determine how far we get in life.” This went

against everything I believed. I said, “What about my high

GPA and the fact that I’m intelligent? That means noth-

ing?” She said, “Exactly. Even with all of that, you’ll only

go as far as they let you.”

After she finished ranting about how far we would go

in life, she went on to say that we were foolish for having

so many white friends, because white people were the

devil. At that point I had to speak up. I told her that I’ve

never had a problem with any of my white friends and

that she shouldn’t talk about people she’s never met.

She replied by saying, “All white people are the same.

Some are just closet racists.” I said that my best friend

Monica is white. How could she be my best friend if she

was racist? My aunt said, “She may be your friend now,

but if the two of you got into any trouble she would throw

you right under the bus.” The conversation ended with

her telling me how naive I was, and that one day I would

learn the truth.

That day came, and soon. A few months after that

dreadful vacation Monica and I got into trouble. Monica

was only 17, whereas I was 18. Because of my age, I

would not be let off with a phone call home. Monica took

the blame and covered for me. Thanks to her, I don’t have

a criminal record. I thought about calling my aunt to tell

her how wrong she had been, but I decided that there

was no point in arguing. I knew the truth.
Niah Grimes

United States specify a minimum blood quantum in

their legal citizenship criteria, with one-quarter

blood degree being the most frequent minimum re-

quirement.
1
(In the simplest instance, an individual

has a one-quarter blood quantum if any one of her

four grandparents is of exclusively Indian ancestry

and the other three are non-Indian.) The remaining

one-third of Indian tribes specify no minimum
blood quantum. They often simply require that any

new enrollee be a lineal (direct) descendant of an-

other tribal member. . . .

Legal defi nitions of tribal membership regulate

the rights to vote in tribal elections, to hold tribal

offi ce, and generally to participate in the political,

and sometimes also the cultural, life of the tribe.

R E A D I N G 4

Real Indians: Identity and the
Survival of Native America

Eva Marie Garroutte

The most common tribal requirement for deter-

mining citizenship concerns “blood quantum,” or

degree of Indian ancestry. . . . About two-thirds of

all federally recognized tribes of the coterminous

Eva Marie Garroutte is a professor of sociology at Boston

College.

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72 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

comes immediately to the minds of many readers.

The legal situation of Indian people, and its atten-

dant opportunities and responsibilities, are the result

of historic negotiations between tribes and the fed-

eral government. In these, the government agreed to

compensate tribes in various ways for the large

amounts of land and other resources that the tribes

had surrendered, often by force.
6
Benefi ts available

to those who can satisfy federal defi nitions of Indian

identity are administered through a variety of agen-

cies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the

Indian Health Service, the Department of Agricul-

ture, the Offi ce of Elementary and Secondary Educa-

tion, and the Department of Labor, to name a few.
7

Legal defi nitions also affect specifi c economic

rights deriving from treaties or agreements that

some (not all) tribes made with the federal govern-

ment. These may include such rights as the use of

particular geographic areas for hunting, harvesting,

fi shing, or trapping. Those legally defi ned as Indi-

ans are also sometimes exempted from certain

requirements related to state licensure and state

(but not federal) income and property taxation.
8
. . .

“IF HE GETS A NOSEBLEED,
HE’LL TURN INTO A WHITE
MAN”
North American Indians who successfully negotiate

the rigors of legal defi nitions of identity at the fed-

eral level can achieve what some consider the dubi-

ous distinction of being a “card-carrying Indian.”

That is, their federal government can issue them a

laminated document (in the United States, a CDIB;

in Canada an Indian status card) that certifi es them

as possessing a certain “degree of Indian blood.”

. . . Canadian-born country music singer Shania

Twain has what it takes to be a card-carrying Indian:

she is formally recognized as an Anishnabe (Ojibwe)

Indian with band membership in the Temagami

Bear Island First Nation (Ontario, Canada). More

specifi cally, she is legally on record as possessing

one-half degree Indian blood. Given this informa-

tion, one might conclude that Twain’s identity as an

Indian person is more or less unassailable. It’s not.

One’s ability to satisfy legal defi nitions of identifi –

cation may also determine one’s right to share in

certain tribal revenues (such as income generated

by tribally controlled businesses). Perhaps most

signifi cantly, it may determine the right to live on a

reservation or to inherit land interests there.

The tribes’ power to determine citizenship al-

lows them to delimit the distribution of certain im-

portant resources, such as reservation land, tribal

monies, and political privileges. But this is hardly

the end of the story of legal defi nitions of identity.

The federal government has many purposes for

which it, too, must distinguish Indians from non-

Indians, and it uses its own, separate legal defi ni-

tion for doing so. More precisely, it uses a whole

array of legal defi nitions. Since the U.S. Constitu-

tion uses the word “Indian” in two places but de-

fi nes it nowhere, Congress has made its own

defi nitions on an ad hoc basis.
2
A 1978 congressio-

nal survey discovered no less than thirty-three sep-
arate defi nitions of Indians in use in different pieces

of federal legislation.
3
These may or may not cor-

respond with those any given tribe uses to deter-

mine its citizenship.

Most federal legal defi nitions of Indian identity

specify a minimum blood quantum—frequently

one-quarter but sometimes one-half—but others do

not. Some require or accept tribal citizenship as a

criterion of federal identifi cation, and others do not.

Some require reservation residency, or ownership

of land held in trust by the government, and others

do not. Other laws affecting Indians specify no def-
inition of identity, such that the courts must deter-

mine to whom the laws apply.
4
Because of these

wide variations in legal identity defi nitions and

their frequent departure from the various tribal

ones, many individuals who are recognized by their

tribes as citizens are nevertheless considered non-

Indian for some or all federal purposes. The con-

verse can be true as well.
5

There are a variety of contexts in which one or

more federal legal defi nitions of identity become

important. The matter of economic resource

distribution—access to various social services,

monetary awards, and opportunities—probably

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Twain’s case shows with uncommon clarity that

legal and biological defi nitions are conceptually

distinct. . . .

In their modern American construction, at least,

biological defi nitions of identity assume the cen-

trality of an individual’s genetic relationship to

other tribal members. Not just any degree of rela-

tionship will do, however. Typically, the degree of

closeness is also important. And this is the starting

point for much of the controversy that swirls around

issues of biological Indianness. . . .

Sociologist Eugeen Roosens summarizes such

common conceptions about the importance of

blood quantum for determining Indian identity:

There is . . . [a] principle about which the whites and

the Indians are in agreement. . . . People with more

Indian blood . . . also have more rights to inherit what

their ancestors, the former Indians, have left behind.

In addition, full blood Indians are more authentic than

half-breeds. By being pure, they have more right to
respect. They are, in all aspects of their being, more
integral . 12

Biological ancestry can take on such tremendous

signifi cance in tribal contexts that it overwhelms

all other considerations of identity, especially when

it is constructed as “pure.” As Cherokee legal

scholar G. William Rice points out, “Most [people]

would recognize the full-blood Indian who was en-

rolled in a federally recognized tribe as an Indian,

even if the individual was adopted at birth by a

non-Indian family and had never set foot in Indian

country nor met another Indian.”
13

Mixed-race in-

dividuals, by contrast, fi nd their identity claims

considerably complicated. Even if such an individ-

ual can demonstrate conclusively that he has some
Native ancestry, the question will still be raised: Is

the amount of ancestry he possesses “enough”? Is
his “Indian blood” suffi cient to distinguish him

from the mixed-blood individual spotlighted by an

old quip: “If he got a nosebleed, he’d turn into a

white man”?

Members of various tribes complain of factio-

nalism between these two major groups—full

bloods and mixed bloods—and they suggest that the

Controversy has engulfed this celebrity because

of an anonymous phone call to a Canadian newspa-

per a few years ago that led to the disclosure of an-

other name by which Shania was once known:

Eileen Regina Edwards. Eileen/Shania was adopted

by a stepfather in early childhood and took the sur-

name of Twain at that time. So far well and good—

except for one thing. Both sides of her biological
family describe themselves not as Indian but as

white. It is only Jerry Twain, her late stepfather,

who was Indian.

As the adopted child of an Anishnabe man,

Shania Twain occupies an unusual status. Though

the U.S. government allows for the assignment of

blood quantum only to biological descendants of

Indian people, Canada allows for the naturalization

of non-Native children through adoption.
9
Although

Twain has stated that her white mother (now de-

ceased) had told her, in childhood, that her biologi-

cal father (also deceased) had some Indian heritage,

his family denies the suggestion entirely. They say

they are French and Irish. Ms. Twain explains: “I

don’t know how much Indian blood I actually have

in me, but as the adopted daughter of my father

Jerry, I became legally registered as 50-percent

North American Indian. Being raised by a full-

blooded Indian and being part of his family and

their culture from such a young age is all I’ve ever

known. That heritage is in my heart and my soul,

and I’m proud of it.”
10

Twain has been sharply criticized, in both the

United States and Canada, for not making the full

details of her racial background clearer, especially

to awards-granting agencies such as the First Amer-

icans in the Arts (FAITA), which honored her in

February 1996 as a Native performer. FAITA itself

has made no such complaint. The group states that

it is satisfi ed that “Ms. Twain has not intentionally

misrepresented herself.” And more importantly, her

adopted family defends her. An aunt observes: “She

was raised by us. She was accepted by our band. If

my brother were alive, he’d be very upset. He raised

her as his own daughter. My parents, her grandpar-

ents, took her into the bush and taught her the

[ Native] traditions.”
11

READING 4: Real Indians 73

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74 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Given this standard of identifi cation, full bloods

tend to be seen as the “really real,” the quintessen-

tial Indians, while others are viewed as Indians in

diminishing degrees. The original, stated intention

of blood quantum distinctions was to determine the

point at which the various responsibilities of the

dominant society to Indian peoples ended. The ulti-

mate and explicit federal intention was to use the

blood quantum standard as a means to liquidate

tribal lands and to eliminate government trust re-

sponsibility to tribes, along with entitlement pro-

grams, treaty rights, and reservations. Through

intermarriage and application of a biological defi ni-

tion of identity Indians would eventually become

citizens indistinguishable from all other citizens.
17

Degree of blood is calculated, with reference to

biological defi nitions, on the basis of the immedi-

acy of one’s genetic relationship to those whose

bloodlines are (supposedly) unmixed. As in the

case with legal defi nitions, the initial calculation

for most tribes’ biological defi nitions begins with a

base roll, a listing of tribal membership and blood

quanta in some particular year. These base rolls

make possible very elaborate defi nitions of identity.

For instance, they allow one to reckon that the off-

spring of, say, a full-blood Navajo mother and a

white father is one-half Navajo. If that half-Navajo

child, in turn, produces children with a Hopi person

of one-quarter blood degree, those progeny will be

judged one-quarter Navajo and one-eighth Hopi.

Alternatively, they can be said to have three-eighths

general Indian blood.

As even this rather simple example shows, over

time such calculations can become infi nitesimally

precise, with people’s ancestry being parsed into so

many thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths, one-hundred-

twenty-eighths, and so on. . . .

For those of us who have grown up and lived

with the peculiar precision of calculating blood

quantum, it sometimes requires a perspective less

infl uenced by the vagaries of American history to

remind us just how far from common sense the con-

cepts underlying biological defi nitions of identity

are. I recall responding to an inquiry from a South-

east Asian friend about what blood quantum was

division arose historically because of mixed bloods’

greater access to the social resources of the domi-

nant society and their enhanced ability to impose

values and ideas upon others.
14

As Julie M., a citi-

zen of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indi-

ans, says: “For the Cherokee people, there’s been

this mixed blood/full blood kind of dynamic going

from before the removal [in 1838, also known as the

Trail of Tears]. . . . It’s kind of like us-and-them. . . .

It’s almost been like a war in some cases. . . . It’s a
‘who’s-really-going-to-be-in-control-of-the-tribe?’

kind of thing.” Many historians have similarly found

it logical that political allegiances would tend to

shift for those Indian people who formed alliances,

through intermarriage, with members of the domi-

nant society, and that this has made the division bet-

ween full bloods and mixed bloods politically

important.
15

Modern biological defi nitions of identity, how-

ever, are much more complicated than this historical

explanation can account for. This complexity did not

originate in the ideas and experiences of Indian

tribes. Instead, they closely refl ect nineteenth- and

early-twentieth-century theories of race introduced

by Euro-Americans. These theories (of which there

were a great many) viewed biology as defi nitive, but

they did not distinguish it from culture. Thus, blood

became quite literally the vehicle for the transmis-

sion of cultural characteristics. “‘Half-breeds’ by

this logic could be expected to behave in ‘half-

civilized,’ i.e., partially assimilated, ways while

retaining one half of their traditional culture, accoun-

ting for their marginal status in both societies.”
16

These turn-of-the-century theories of race found

a very precise way to talk about amount of ancestry
in the idea of blood quantum, or degree of blood.

The notion of blood quantum as a standard of Indi-

anness emerged with force in the nineteenth cen-

tury. Its most signifi cant early usage as a standard

of identifi cation was in the General Allotment

(Dawes) Act of 1887, which led to the creation of

the Dawes Rolls [the “base roll” or written record

of tribal membership in a specifi c year]. It has been

part of the popular—and legal and academic—lore

about Indians ever since.

ros27020_rd01-20_051-192.indd 74ros27020_rd01-20_051-192.indd 74 01/08/15 7:32 AM01/08/15 7:32 AM

his or her own fi nancial affairs.
20

Blood quantum is

one of the criteria that determines eligibility for
citizenship in many tribes; it therefore indirectly

infl uences the claimant’s relationship to the same

kinds of rights, privileges, and responsibilities that

legal defi nitions allow.
21

But biological defi nitions of identity affect per-

sonal interactions as well as governmental deci-

sions. Indian people with high blood quanta

frequently have recognizable physical characteris-

tics. As Cherokee Nation principal tribal chief Chad

Smith observes, some people are easily recogniz-

able as Indians because they pass “a brown paper

bag test,” meaning that their skin is “darker than a

#10 paper sack.” It is these individuals who are

often most closely associated with negative racial

stereotypes in the larger society. Native American

Studies professor Devon Mihesuah makes a point

about Indian women that is really applicable to ei-

ther gender: “Appearance is the most visible aspect

of one’s race; it determines how Indian women de-

fi ne themselves and how others defi ne and treat

them. Their appearance, whether Caucasian, Indian,

African, or mixed, either limits or broadens Indian

women’s choices of ethnic identity and ability to

interact with non-Indians and other Indians.”
22

Every day, identifi ably Indian people are turned

away from restaurants, refused the use of public rest

rooms, ranked as unintelligent by the education sys-

tem, and categorized by the personnel of medical,

social service, and other vital public agencies as

“problems”—all strictly on the basis of their

appearance. As Keetoowah Band Cherokee full-

blood Donald G. notes, a recognizably Indian

appearance can be a serious detriment to one’s pro-

fessional and personal aspirations: “It seems the

darker you are, the less important you are, in some

ways, to the employer. . . . To some, it would be

discouraging. But I am four-fourths [i.e., full-blood]

Cherokee, and it doesn’t matter what someone says

about me. . . . I feel for the person who doesn’t like

my skin color, you know?”

There are circumstances, however, in which it is

diffi cult for the victims of negative racial stereotyp-

ing to maintain an attitude as philosophical as this.

and how it was calculated. In mid-explanation, I

noticed his expression of complete amazement.

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he burst

out. “Who ever thought of that ?”
The logic that underlies the biological defi nition

of racial identity becomes even more curious and

complicated when one considers the striking differ-

ence in the way that American defi nitions assign

individuals to the racial category of “Indian,” as op-

posed to the racial category “black.” As a variety of

researchers have observed, social attributions of

black identity have focused (at least since the end

of the Civil War) on the “one-drop rule,” or rule of

hypodescent.
18

. . .

Far from being held to a one-drop rule, Indians

are generally required—both by law and by popular

opinion—to establish rather high blood quanta in
order for their claims to racial identity to be ac-

cepted as meaningful, the individual’s own opinion

notwithstanding. Although people must have only

the slightest trace of “black blood” to be forced into
the category “African American,” modern American

Indians must (1) formally produce (2) strong evi-

dence of (3) often rather substantial amounts of

“Indian blood” to be allowed entry into the corre-
sponding racial category. The regnant biological

defi nitions applied to Indians are simply quite dif-

ferent than those that have applied (and continue to

apply) to blacks. Modern Americans, as Native

American Studies professor Jack Forbes ( Powhatan/

Lenape/Saponi) puts the matter, “are always fi nd-
ing ‘blacks’ (even if they look rather un- African),
and . . . are always losing ‘Indians.’ ” 19

BIOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS:
CONTEXTS AND CONSEQUENCES
Biological defi nitions of Indian identity operate, in

short, in some curious and inconsistent ways. They

are nevertheless signifi cant in a variety of contexts.

And they have clear relationships, both direct and

indirect, to legal defi nitions. The federal govern-

ment has historically used a minimum blood quan-

tum standard to determine who was eligible to

receive treaty rights, or to sell property and manage

READING 4: Real Indians 75

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76 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

want them to know this is an Indian person doing

this. Because I come from a background where if

you looked Indian, you were put in special education

because the schools said you couldn’t learn. And it

wasn’t true. We need Indian people today who look

Indian to show everyone the things we can do.”

A physical appearance that is judged insuffi –

ciently “Indian” can also act as a barrier to partici-

pation in certain cultural activities. Bill T., a Wichita

and Seneca minister in his mid-fi fties, recalls that,

in his youth, he witnessed light-skinned individuals

who attempted to participate in powwow dances

being evicted from the arena. “That kind of thing is

still happening today,” he added sadly, and other

respondents readily confi rmed this observation. A

more unusual instance of the relevance of physical

appearance to cultural participation was volun-

teered by Frank D., a Hopi respondent. His tribe’s

ceremonial dances feature the appearance of pow-

erful spirit beings called kachinas, which are em-

bodied by masked Hopi men. Ideally, the everyday,

human identity of the dancers remains unknown to

observers. Frank commented on the subject of

tribal members whose skin tone is noticeably either

lighter or darker than the norm:

Frank D .: Say, for instance, if a Hopi marries a
black person . . . [and] you get a male child . . . it’s

gonna be darker skinned. It might even be black. A

black kachina just wouldn’t fi t out here [at Hopi].

You see, everybody’d know who it is. He’d be very

visible [in the ceremonial dances]. . . . It’d be very

hard on that individual. Kids don’t work the other

way, too—if they’re real light. . . . Kachinas gotta be

brown.
Author: So there are certain ceremonial roles that

people could not fi ll because of their appearance?

Frank D.: Well, they could, but it would be
awful tough. A lot of these [ceremonial] things are

done with secrecy. No one knows who the kachinas

are. Or at least, the kids don’t. And then, say you

get somebody who really stands out, then every-

body knows who that [dancer] is, and it’s not good.

For the ceremony—because everybody knows who

that person is. And so the kids will start asking

In one interview, a Mohawk friend, June L., illus-

trated the potential consequences of public judg-

ments based on skin color. She reminded me of a

terrifying episode that had once unfolded while I was

visiting at her house. Our conversation was inter-

rupted by a phone call informing this mother of fi ve

that her college-student son, who had spent the sum-

mer day working on a roof, had suddenly become ill

while driving home. Feeling faint, he had pulled up

to a local convenience store and made his way inside,

asking for a drink of water. The clerk refused. Dan-

gerously dehydrated, the young man collapsed on the

fl oor from sunstroke. “The worst thing about it,” June

recalled, “was that I have to keep wondering: What

was the reason for that? Did that clerk refuse to help

my son because she was just a mean person? Or was

it because she saw him stumble into the store and

thought, ‘Well, it’s just some drunken Indian’?” Anx-

iety about social judgments of this kind are a fact of

daily life for parents of children whose physical ap-

pearance makes their Indian ancestry clearly evident.

At the same time, June’s remarks showed the

opposite side to the coin of physical appearance. In

some contexts, not conforming to the usual notions

of “what Indians look like” can also be a liability:

My aunt was assistant dean at a large Ivy League uni-

versity. One day she called me on the phone. She had

one scholarship to give out to an Indian student. One

of the students being considered was blonde-haired

and blue-eyed. The other one was black-haired and

dark-skinned, and she looked Indian. The blonde

girl’s grades were a little better. My aunt didn’t know

what to do. She said to me, “Both these girls are tribal

members. Both of them are qualifi ed [for the scholar-

ship]. They’re sitting outside my offi ce. What would

you do?” I told her that, as an Indian person, there was
only one thing I could say. Which was to give the
money to the one with the dark skin. As Indian peo-

ple, we do want to have Indian people that look like
they’re Indian to represent us.

Readers may be surprised by such a candid state-

ment. But June’s pragmatic reasoning takes account

of certain historical realities. As she explained

further, “We like people to know who’s doing those
accomplishments, like getting scholarships. We

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matter how frequently I was blamed by strangers

for not resembling their image of some Hollywood

Sitting Bull, I was still defensive and vulnerable.

‘I’m part Indian,’ I explained.”
23

Even his tragic death has not safeguarded Dorris

from insinuations about inadequate blood quan-

tum. Shortly after his 1997 suicide, a story on his

life and death in New York magazine reported that
the author’s fair complexion had always caused

some observers to wonder about his racial identity

and archly repeated a rumor: “It is said he . . .

[eventually] discovered tanning booths.”
24

In short, many Indian people, both individually

and collectively, continue to embrace the assump-

tion that close biological connections to other

Indian people—and the distinctive physical appear-

ance that may accompany those connections—

imply a stronger claim on identity than do more

distant ones. As Potawatomi scholar of Native

American Studies Terry Wilson summarizes, “Few,

if any, Native Americans, regardless of upbringing

in rural, reservation, or urban setting, ignore their

own and other Indians’ blood quantum in everyday

life. Those whose physical appearances render their

Indian identities suspect are subject to suspicious

scrutiny until precise cultural explanations, espe-

cially blood quantum, are offered or discovered.”
25

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. As Garroutte describes them, what are the vari-

ous ways that one might be defi ned as a “real”

Indian? When might these different defi nitions

of “Indianness” confl ict?

2. Thinking about June’s description of her son

being refused a drink of water and her advice

about who should receive the Indian scholar-

ship, do you see any consistencies or inconsis-

tencies in her approach?

NOTES
1. Thornton surveyed 302 of the 317 tribes in the lower

forty-eight states that enjoyed federal acknowledgment

in 1997. He found that 204 tribes had some minimum

blood quantum requirement, while the remaining 98 had

questions—“How come that kachina’s so dark, so

black?” or “How come that kachina’s white?” They

start asking questions and it’s really hard. So I

think, if you’re thinking about kids, it’s really better

if kachinas are brown.

Finally, the physical appearance borne by mixed

bloods may not only create barriers to tribal cul-

tural participation; it may also offer an occasion for

outrightly shaming them. Cornelia S. remembers

her days at the Eufala Indian School:

You had to be Indian to be [allowed admission]
there. . . . But . . . if [certain students] . . . didn’t look

as Indian as we did, or if they looked like they were

white, they were kind of looked down upon, like

treated differently because [people would say] “oh,

that’s just a white person.” . . . They just [would] tease

’em and stuff. Say “oh, whatcha doin’ white boy” or

“white girl”—just stuff like that.

Nor is the social disapproval of light-skinned mixed

bloods strictly the stuff of schoolyard teasing. The

same respondent added that even adults confront

questions of blood quantum with dead seriousness:

Us Indians, whenever we see someone else who is

saying that they’re Indian . . . or trying to be around

us Indians, and act like us, and they don’t look like

they’re Indian and we know that they’re not as much

Indian as we are, yeah, we look at them like they’re
not Indian and, ya know, don’t really like why

they’re acting like that. . . . But you know, I’m not

that far off . . . into judging other people and what
color [they are].

The late author Michael Dorris, a member of the

Modoc tribe (California), has written that humilia-

tions related to his appearance were part of his daily

experience. He describes (in his account of his

family’s struggle with his son’s fetal alcohol syn-

drome, The Broken Cord ) an encounter with a hos-
pital admissions staff, to whom he had just identifi ed

himself and his son as Indians. “They surveyed my

appearance with curiosity. It was an expression I

recognized, a reaction, familiar to most people of

mixed-blood ancestry, that said, ‘You don’t look
like an Indian.’ No matter how often it happened, no

READING 4: Real Indians 77

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78 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

details on the special, political-economic relationship of

Indians to the federal government in relation to taxation

and licensure, see Gary D. Sandefur, “Economic Devel-

opment and Employment Opportunities for American

Indians,” in American Indians: Social Justice and Public
Policy, ed. Donald E. Green and Thomas V. Tonneson,
Ethnicity and Public Policy Series, vol. 9 (Milwaukee:

University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and

Ethnicity, 1991), 208–22.

9. Aside from the issue of adopted children, the legal re-

quirements for establishing legal status as Indian in

Canada have been even more complicated and peculiar

than the U.S. ones, and the tensions related to them even

more severe. Until 1985, a Canadian Indian woman who

married a legally non-Indian man lost her legal status as

an Indian, and her children (who might have a blood

quantum of one-half) could never be recognized as

Indian under Canadian law. A non-Indian woman who

married an Indian man, however, gained Indian status

for herself and her children. Men could neither gain nor

lose Indian status through marriage. When a 1985 bill

amended the Indian Act, which governed such matters,

the issue of “real Indianness” came to a head. Many

Canadian Indian women and children sought and re-

ceived Indian legal status, but when they attempted to

return to the reservations, they often got a chilly wel-

come from Indian communities already overburdened

with fi nancial obligations to their existing population.

Like their American counterparts, Canadian Indian

bands continue to struggle with the issue of how to con-

ceive the boundaries of their membership. For a good

discussion of Canadian Indian identifi cation policies,

see Eugeen Roosens, Creating Ethnicity: The Process of
Ethnogenesis ( Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989).

10. Shania Twain quoted in Jackie Bissley, “Country Star

Shania Twain’s Candor Is Challenged,” Indian Country
Today, 9–16 April 1996.

11. Quoted in Jackie Bissley, “Country Singer Says Stories

Robbing Her of Her Native Roots,” Indian Country
Today, 16–23 April 1996. Even Twain’s unusual
situation does not exhaust the intricate aspects of the

Canadian legal system as it struggles with matters of

Indian identity. Roosens describes other fi ne points of

Indian identity in force north of the border over a period

of several decades:

Since 1951, to be registered as an Indian one has to be

the legitimate child of an Indian father. The ethnic ori-

gin of the mother is irrelevant. . . . Furthermore, if the

grandmother on the Indian side of a mixed marriage

(the father’s mother) is a non-Indian by descent, then

the grandchild loses his or her status at the age of 21.

Thus, one can be offi cially born an Indian and lose

this  status at the age of maturity. (Roosens, Creating
Ethnicity, 24)

none. Russell Thornton, “Tribal Membership Require-

ments and the Demography of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Native

Americans,” Population Research and Policy Review 16
(1997): 37.

2. The two mentions of “Indians” in the Constitution ap-

pear in passages regarding the regulation of commerce

and the taking of a federal census. The word “tribe” also

appears once in the Constitution, in the Commerce

Clause.

3. Sharon O’Brien, “Tribes and Indians: With Whom Does

the United States Maintain a Relationship?” Notre Dame
Law Review 66 (1991): 1481.

4. One particularly important law that provides no defi ni-

tion of “Indian” is the Major Crimes Act of 1885 (23

Stat. 385, U.S.C. Sec. 1153). It subjects reservation Indi-

ans to federal prosecution for certain offenses for which

non-Indians would face only state prosecution.

5. For a detailed discussion of legal cases bearing on the

defi nition of “Indian,” see Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of
Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville, Va.: Michie/
Bobbs-Merrill, 1982).

6. Wilcomb E. Washburn, Red Man’s Land/White Man’s
Law: A Study of the Past and Present States of the Amer-
ican Indian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971).

7. These agencies administer resources and programs in

areas such as education, health, social services, tribal

governance and administration, law enforcement, nutri-

tion, resource management, tribal economic develop-

ment, employment, and the like. The most recently

published source describing various programs and the

requirements for participation is Roger Walk, Federal
Assistance to Native Americans: A Report Prepared for
the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs of the US
Senate (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce,
1991). In fi scal year 2001, recognized tribes and their

members had access to approximately four billion dol-

lars of federal funding for various social programs. U.S.

Government Accounting Offi ce, Indian Issues: Improve-
ments Needed in Tribal Recognition Process, Report to
Congressional Requesters, Washington D.C.: Govern-

ment Printing Offi ce, November 2001.

8. Non-Indian students in my classes sometimes tell me

that Indians also regularly receive such windfalls as free

cars and monthly checks from the government strictly

because of their race. It is my sad duty to puncture this

fantasy; there is no truth in it. The common belief that

Indians receive “free money” from the government

probably stems from the fact that the government holds

land in trust for certain tribes. As part of its trust respon-

sibility, it may then lease that land, collect the revenue,

and distribute it to the tribal members. Thus, some Indi-

ans do receive government checks, but these do not rep-

resent some kind of manna from heaven; they are simply

the profi ts derived from lands which they own. For

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classifi cations, but at differing rates. Popular conven-

tions of racial classifi cation in America tend to prevent

individuals with any discernible black ancestry from

identifying themselves as Indians. As an interview re-

spondent quoted by anthropologist Circe Sturm ob-

serves, “This is America, where being to any degree

Black is the same thing as being to any degree preg-

nant.” Sturm, Blood Politics, 188.
By contrast, individuals with discernible white an-

cestry are sometimes allowed by others to identify as
Indian. In their case the legitimacy of their assertion is

likely to be evaluated with reference to the amount of
white ancestry, and with beliefs about whether that

amount is enough to merely dilute or to entirely compro-
mise Indian identity. Other factors, such as culture and
upbringing, may also be taken into account. People of

partial white ancestry, in other words, are typically

somewhat more free (although not entirely free) to nego-

tiate a legitimate identity as Indian than are people of

partial black ancestry.

20. For further details on the historical impact of blood

quantum on individuals’ legal rights, see Felix S. Cohen,

Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottes-
ville, Va.: Michie/Bobbs-Merrill, 1982).

21. For a listing of the blood quantum requirements that dif-

ferent tribes require for tribal citizenship, see Edgar

Lister, “Tribal Membership Rates and Requirements,”

unpublished table (Washington, D.C.: Indian Health

Service, 1987). An edited version of the table appears

in  C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of
This Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989),
appendix.

22. Devon A. Mihesuah, “Commonality of Difference:

American Indian Women and History,” in Natives and
Academics: Researching and Writing about American
Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 42. For a fascinating and de-

tailed discussion of the signifi cance of appearance

among contemporary Cherokees in Oklahoma, see

Sturm, Blood Politics, 108–15.
23. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord (New York: Harper

Perennial, 1990), 22.

24. Eric Konigsberg, “Michael Dorris’s Troubled Sleep,”

New York Magazine, 16 June 1997, 33. For a related ar-
ticle, see Jerry Reynolds, “Indian Writers: The Good, the

Bad, and the Could Be, Part 2: Indian Writers: Real or

Imagined,” Indian Country Today, 15 September 1993.
25. Terry P. Wilson, “Blood Quantum: Native American

Mixed Bloods,” in Racially Mixed People in America,
ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage,

1992), 109.

12. Roosens, Creating Ethnicity, 41–42. Roosens is discuss-
ing the situation of Canadian Indians, but the same

remarks apply to American Indians.

13. G. William Rice, “There and Back Again—An Indian

Hobbit’s Holiday: Indians Teaching Indian Law,” New
Mexico Law Review 26, no. 2 (1996): 176.

14. Melissa L. Meyer, “American Indian Blood Quantum

Requirements: Blood Is Thicker than Family,” in Over
the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J.
Matsumoto and Blake Allmendiger (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1999).

15. Historians such as Grace Steele Woodward and Marion

Starkey have made this argument. But see also Julia

Coates, “None of Us Is Supposed to Be Here” (Ph.D.

diss., University of New Mexico, 2002) for a revisionist

understanding of Cherokee history.

16. C. Matthew Snipp, “Who Are American Indians? Some

Observations about the Perils and Pitfalls of Data for

Race and Ethnicity,” Population Research and Policy
Review 5 (1986): 249. For excellent and intriguing dis-
cussions of the evolution of ideas about blood relation-

ships among European and Euro-American peoples over

several centuries, and transference of these ideas into

American Indian tribal populations, see Meyer, “Blood

Quantum Requirements,” and Circe Sturm, Blood Poli-
tics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation
of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002). See further Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law,

Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘race’ in Twentieth Cen-

tury America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1
(June 1996): 44–69. For the processes by which some of

these theories were rejected by scientists, see Elazar

Barkan, Retreat of Scientifi c Racism: Changing Con-
cepts of Race in Britain and the United States between
the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).

17. Thomas Biolsi, “The Birth of the Reservation: Making

the Modern Individual among the Lakota,” American
Ethnologist 22, no. 1 (February 1995): 28–49; Patrick
Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past
of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

18. Naomi Zack, “Mixed Black and White Race and Public

Policy,” Hypatia 10, 1 (1995): 120–32; Ariela J. Gross,
“Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in

the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Journal 108
(1998): 109–88.

19. Jack D. Forbes, “The Manipulation of Race, Caste, and

Identity: Classifying AfroAmericans, Native Americans

and Red-Black People,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17,
no. 4 (1990): 24; original emphasis. Indians are “lost,”

in Forbes’ sense, both to black and to white racial

READING 4: Real Indians 79

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80 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Punjabi; Japanese Americans shouting in Chinese;

Korean Americans shouting in Vietnamese.

As a panethnic mobilization, the API contingent

and its linguistically diverse chant run counter to

sociological understandings where panethnicity is

conceptualized as largely subsuming and replacing

single-ethnic identifi cations and orientations de-

pending on context (Espiritu 1992; Itzigsohn and

Dore-Cabral 2000; Vo 2004; Waters 1999). To the

contrary, the multiple languages within this chant

exemplify a broader and persistent ethnic diversity

exercised within panethnic spaces. As such, the

rally’s API contingent raises questions about the re-

lationship between single-ethnic and panethnic

identities and the coexistence of solidarity and di-

versity within a cohesive social movement. . . .

Espiritu (1992:14), in her seminal study, defi nes

Asian American panethnicity as “the development

of bridging organizations and solidarities among

several ethnic and immigrant groups of Asian an-

cestry.” While Asian American panethnicity origi-

nated through the racial lumping of all Asian

ethnicities by outsiders, panethnicity has become a

political resource for insiders (Espiritu 1992).

Scholarship on identity work within panethnic

Asian American contexts describes the outcomes of

such negotiations in two ways: (1) panethnic iden-

tity subsuming single-ethnic identifi cation, and

(2) panethnic and single-ethnic identities coexist

but are situationally exercised depending on con-

text. The fi rst potential outcome places multiple

identities within a salience hierarchy. One identity

is privileged above all others. This rank ordering of

identity is applicable to many of the descriptions of

the earliest incarnations of Asian American paneth-

nic identity. In the late 1960s, activists sought to

construct a monolithic, politicized Asian American

collective consciousness that required a relinquish-

ing of single-ethnic orientations, as well as feminist

and class identities (Liu, Geron, and Lai 2008;

Louie and Omatsu 2006; Maeda 2009; Umemoto

1989; Wei 1993). From this perspective, single-

ethnic and panethnic identities are reconciled by

muting single-ethnic consciousness in favor of a

panethnic Asian American orientation.

R E A D I N G 5

An Interlocking Panethnicity:
The Negotiation of Multiple
Identities among Asian American
Social Movement Leaders

Dana Y. Nakano

Compromise bills—Down down!
Immigrant rights—Ho yea! (Chinese)
[or] Immigrant rights—Phai day! (Vietnamese)
[or] Immigrant rights—Zindabhad! (Punjabi)

Employer sanctions—Down down!
Workers rights—Mabuhay! (Tagalog)

Guest worker slavery—Down down!
Immigrant rights—Mansei! (Korean)

In the early afternoon of an April Sunday in 2006,

the Asian Pacifi c Islander (API) contingent marched

down San Francisco’s Market Street proudly chant-

ing their rallying call.
1
These API activists ad-

vanced in solidarity within a multicolor sea of

signs and people stretching multiple city blocks in

support of immigrant rights. Numbering in the hun-

dreds, the Asian American protestors came together

from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds advanc-

ing to the beat of Korean drums. The opening chant

is a tactic leaders of the API contingent utilized to

highlight both the collective investment of Asian

Americans in immigration reform debates contem-

poraneously occurring on the fl oor of the United

States Senate and the diversity within the Asian

American population. The inclusion of multiple

ethnic voices is evidence of panethnic solidarity

among discrete Asian American communities. This

solidarity is further underscored by how the chant

is recited. The whole contingent shouts the same

cry in unison, not just in an individual’s own ethnic

language. There are Filipino Americans shouting in

Dana Y. Nakano is a graduate student in sociology at the

University of California, Irvine.

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READING 5: An Interlocking Panethnicity 81

Crenshaw 1991). Anthias (1998) describes intersec-

tionality in identity as a series of different layers of

self and imposed defi nitions that can be worn in

different orders at different times. Rather than only

the top layer as a situational understanding of iden-

tity would predict, the sum of all layers positions
each individual, or group, in the social order

( Anthias 1998). In this way, an individual or group

may be at once Asian American, Chinese American,

female, and working class. Similar to the idea of

situational identity, an individual may differentially

exercise and emphasize one identity under different

circumstances. However, this ability to shift identi-

ties does not detract from the fact that this individ-

ual or group is still defi ned by and draws from all

facets of identity across all situations.

Glenn (2002) pushes the concept of intersec-

tionality further and introduces the concept of in-

terlocking systems of oppression to describe the

experiences of women of color that are starkly dif-

ferent than both white women and men of color

(also see Collins 2005; Crenshaw 1991). Glenn

(2002:7) focuses on the notion of interlockedness

in her assertion that race and gender are not expe-

rienced as “separate or additive” but, rather, are

“simultaneous and linked.” Women of color expe-

rience both race and gender simultaneously. Race

and gender are viewed as relational categories:

“they are positioned and therefore gain meaning in

relation to each other” (Glenn 2002:13). Gender

affects the way racial identity is conceptualized

and vice versa: “gender is racialized and race is

gendered” (Glenn 2002:7). Understanding single-

ethnic and panethnic identities as relational and

interlocking acknowledges the dynamic and shift-

ing understandings of both identities vis-à-vis one

another. As will be demonstrated in this study, un-

derstandings of what it means to be Filipino Amer-

ican, Indian American, or Chinese American are

informed by a panethnic Asian American identity

and how each distinct single-ethnic identity fi ts

under this broad umbrella category. Panethnic

Asian American identity is fundamentally shaped

by the varied single-ethnic groups and identities

that it claims to represent. . . .

In contrast to the fi ndings supporting a salience

hierarchy, studies of contemporary panethnic Asian

American organizing have largely found a situa-

tional exercise of panethnic versus single-ethnic

identity (Espiritu 1992; Kibria 2002; Vo 2004).

These scholars assert panethnic and single-ethnic

identities are utilized singularly, strategically, and

instrumentally according to specifi c contexts. For

example, Espiritu (1992) demonstrates how de-

pending on social, economic, or political situations,

individuals may mobilize themselves along single-

ethnic or panethnic lines. Vo (2004:225) posits “in-

dividuals may have multiple ethnic identities, but

these identities are salient according to constantly

shifting circumstances.” In Vo’s study, respondents

were often involved in both panethnic- and single-

ethnic–focused organizations. Within single-ethnic

contexts such as single-ethnically focused organi-

zations or personal ethnic networks, respondents

chose to deploy their single-ethnicity as their pri-

mary identifi cation. However, when working in pa-

nethnic organizations, Vo’s respondents spoke of

more freely exercising a panethnic Asian American

identity over single-ethnic identifi cation.

For Espiritu and Vo, both single-ethnic and pan-

ethnic identities exist as discrete identities and are

separately exercised at different times and in differ-

ent situations. While this interpretation speaks to

the continued presence of single-ethnic orientations

within the API contingent at the April 2006 march,

the framework is less apt to explain the simultane-
ous display of panethnic solidarity and single- ethnic
diversity within the chant and mobilization. Rather

than viewing single-ethnicity and panethnicity as

situational and separate, I look toward the possibil-

ity of continuous interplay between single-ethnic

and panethnic identities. . . . [This] study explores

the inner workings of single-ethnic and panethnic

coexistence, examining the ways individual leaders

negotiate an interlocking relationship between

single-ethnic and panethnic identities within their

respective organizations. . . .

The concept of interlocking identities, struc-

tures, or categories is strongly related to the concept

of intersectionality (Anthias 1998; Collins 2005;

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82 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

and Nationality Act of 1965, the legitimate reopen-

ing of immigration from Asia, began to impact the

population, the number of ethnic categories began

to show growth. The count of enumerated Asian ra-

cial subgroup categories grew slowly at fi rst to

seven in 1980, then rapidly to eighteen in 1990, and

reached twenty-two by the 2010 Census (Ruggles

et al. 2008; U.S. Census Bureau n.d.c).

Over the same time period, the Asian American

population in the San Francisco Bay Area and

across the nation also increased its diversity in

terms of income, place of residence, political orien-

tation, educational attainment, as well as nativity.

In 1960, the majority of Asian Americans were

native-born. Beginning with the 1970 Census, the

predominant nativity began to shift, with Filipino

Americans becoming a majority foreign-born pop-

ulation. By 1980, Asian Americans as a whole be-

came a majority foreign-born racial group and all

single-ethnic groups, with the exception of Japanese

Americans, were also predominantly foreign-born.

This pattern continues into the present day ( Ruggles

et al. 2008).

The number of ethnic groups and the size of each

group grew tremendously over the second half of

the twentieth century. Leaders of contemporary pa-

nethnic organizations mobilize an Asian American

community that must negotiate more differences

than their predecessors in creating and maintaining

a cohesive panethnic collective identity. If distinct

single-ethnic Asian American communities have

such disparate needs and issues and their individual

populations have grown, one must ask why paneth-

nic organizations continue to exist. As communities

reach critical mass, why not advocate for them-

selves and organize around single-ethnic identities?

The answer to this question is two-fold: First, while

the Asian American population has seen increases,

they remain a numerical minority in the 2010 U.S.

Census. The Asian American population accounted

for less than 6 percent of the total U.S. population

and 15 percent of California. In the San Francisco

Bay Area, Asian Americans constitute a much

higher percentage, 32, but remain a minority popu-

lation. Furthermore, no single-ethnic community

I locate my study in the greater San Francisco

Bay Area, a particularly apt site. The Bay Area

boasts the three continental United States metro-

politan areas with the highest percentage of Asian

American residents: Fremont, 39.8 percent; San

Francisco, 32.6 percent; and San Jose, 28.8 percent

(U.S. Census Bureau n.d.a). The Bay Area is also

home to a long Asian American political history

including the Third World Liberation Front and the

creation of a radical and progressive Asian Ameri-

can politics in the late 1960s (Maeda 2009). The

specifi cities of the Bay Area region speak to the

need to analyze racial identity formations in local

or regional terms (Pulido 2006; Rumbaut 2009;

Vo 2004).
2

As this project is particularly interested in the

identity work conducted by organizational leaders

and how identity affects organizational processes

and practices, I draw on data from in-depth, semis-

tructured interviews [conducted in 2006] with con-

temporary leaders of Asian American social

movement organizations.

My interview respondents pointed to the syn-

ergy of two social and historical factors in creating

the need for an interlocking panethnicity: (1) the

shifting demographics of an increasingly diverse

Asian American population and (2) the institution-

alization of panethnicity within organizations stem-

ming from the Asian American Movement of the

1960s and 1970s.

DEMOGRAPHY AND ASIAN
AMERICAN DIVERSITY
The story of Asian America is one of increasing di-

versity. When Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian

American” during the 1960s, the U.S. Census only

recorded three distinct Asian American ethnic

groups: Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino. By the

1970 Census, only four ethnic groups were enumer-

ated. While the Census may not accurately portray

the existence of smaller, and hence uncounted, pop-

ulations of other ethnic groups, it provides a sense

of visibility for various ethnic groups during each

Census period. As the effects of the Immigration

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in terms of ethnicity, nativity, and class, serves as a

causal factor for increased awareness of specifi c

issues of single-ethnic communities. This increased

demographic diversity impacts organizations di-

rectly through a diversifi cation of organizational

clients, members, staff, and leadership, forcing or-

ganizations to reconcile single-ethnic differences

under a reimagined panethnic collectivity. The

maintenance of panethnic identity within these

organizations is bolstered by the continued minor-

ity status, even in the San Francisco Bay Area, and

common racialized experiences of Asian Americans.

Panethnic orientations also continue within Asian

American activism due to the legacy of panethnic

organizing reaching back to the 1960s Asian Amer-

ican Movement. The preexisting panethnic organi-

zational forms serve as a model for contemporary

Asian American activism, dictating coalitional ef-

forts among single-ethnic communities, but not the

form those efforts take. As such, panethnicity is still

seen as an effective mobilizing strategy and organi-

zational form, but only if it takes into account the

diverse perspectives and issues facing distinct

single-ethnic communities. . . .

RECONCEPTUALIZING
PANETHNICITY AS
INTERLOCKING
The Asian American Movement, largely taking

place in the early 1970s, sought to expose the com-

mon racialized experience of American peoples of

Asian ancestry and create greater solidarity among

Asian ethnic groups. Wei (1993:272) claims the

identity emerging from the Asian American Move-

ment “transcended the communal and cultural lim-

its of particular Asian ethnic groups to identity with

the past experiences, present circumstances, and

future aspirations” of an Asian American collectiv-

ity. Panethnic Asian American identity is described

as “overcoming the separate ethnic nationalism

that  originally divided them” (Wei 1993:272). In

present-day San Francisco, I observe a contrasting

panethnicity that does not act independently or in

place of single-ethnic identity and mobilization.

accounted for more than 12 percent of the total Bay

Area population (U.S. Census Bureau n.d.c). Pan-

ethnicity continues to provide a competitive advan-

tage in the modern democratic state where there is

power in numbers (Espiritu 1992). Second, even if

certain single-ethnic groups reached critical mass

in the Bay Area, there remains a need to maintain a

panethnic orientation when building coalitions with

organizations in other regions that continue to rely

on panethnic formations due to smaller Asian

American populations. In addition, the panethnic

label continues to provide political recognition via

an institutionally recognized racial category: Asian

American (Espiritu 1992).

PANETHNICITY AS
ORGANIZATIONAL
INSTITUTION
Looking at historical trajectories, Espiritu (1992)

argues that among the early reasons Asian

Americans across diverse ethnic groups came

together in panethnic groupings was to secure gov-

ernment funding that favors multiethnic programs

and impacts the highest number of people possible.

Many of these organizations have been in existence

for more than 20 years and have maintained paneth-

nic orientations due to their organizational legacy

and funding realities. Speaking more specifi cally to

the institutionalization and reproduction of paneth-

nicity, some organizations in this study began as

single-ethnic organizations but have shifted toward

panethnic missions in large part due to the need to

attract public and private funds. In favoring multi-

ethnic programs, government agencies have helped

to institutionalize panethnic organizing and identity

among Asian Americans. As organizations have

structured themselves and their missions in accor-

dance with continuing panethnically oriented fund-

ing and service guidelines, they continue to promote

panethnic Asian American identity (Espiritu 1992).

Such panethnic institutionalization is evident in the

organizations represented in this study.

The increased diversity of the Asian American

population from 1960 to the present day, particularly

READING 5: An Interlocking Panethnicity 83

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84 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Despite their diverse backgrounds, participating

leaders hold strikingly similar views on the contem-

porary state of Asian American panethnicity. Lead-

ers felt that signifi cant progress had been made in

recognizing the importance of single- ethnic identi-

ties within the broader panethnic movement. Calvin,

for instance, shared:

I think it’s evolved to the point where an Asian

American identity can encompass people who identify

more as their own ethnic group. Whereas, maybe

20 years ago . . . there was more of this tension “Hey,

give up being Chinese , you should say you’re Asian
so we can have more people power as Asians. ” I think
the movement has gotten to this point where people

can identify primarily as a Vietnamese refugee but

also consider themselves part of the movement.

( emphasis added) . . .

MECHANISMS AND PRACTICES
OF INTERLOCKING
PANETHNICITY
. . . Understanding the reconceptualizations of an

interlocking panethnicity, I now turn to the mecha-

nisms and practices of this new panethnic

orientation within the organizations in this study.

Leaders demonstrate the interlocking nature of

single-ethnicity and panethnicity in the philosophy

and practices within their respective organizations.

In discussing how panethnicity is constructed as a

cohesive collective identity in the presence of dis-

tinct single-ethnic identifi cations, leaders spoke of

the mechanism of an interlocking panethnicity in

fi ve ways: (1) encouraging maintenance of single-

ethnic identities, (2) accounting for linguistic and

cultural diversity, (3) coming to terms with ethnic

and class privilege, (4) leveraging resources for the

panethnic good, and (5) building collaborative and

deliberative organizational frameworks and pro-

cesses. These practices demonstrate the diffi cult

identity work undertaken by leaders and the organi-

zational effect of a reconceptualized panethnic

identity.

Rather, panethnic orientations intersect and take

into consideration the diverse single-ethnic experi-

ences that exist within the population. Borrowing

from Glenn’s framework, panethnicity and single-

ethnicity are interlocking structures—simultaneous

and mutually affecting (Glenn 2002).

All leaders [I interviewed] shared a strong com-

mitment to panethnic coalitions and noted their ne-

cessity and effectiveness. As stated by Eleanor, a

Chinese American leader:

I think it’s necessary that we band together. I think we

always have to, bottom line, we have to unite in order

to disunite. . . . We have to unite as Asian Americans

in order to distinguish ourselves from one another.

Similar to the intentions and strategies leveraged

by Asian American activists in the 1960s and

1970s, Eleanor and other contemporary leaders

see panethnic organizing as an important way to

garner political power and visibility with greater

numbers. However, Eleanor’s statement also

demonstrates that panethnicity is not viewed as an

end, but rather as a means for increased recogni-

tion and social justice. The expanded notoriety

gained through panethnic organizing can serve as

a platform for single-ethnic concerns. If paneth-

nic organizing is important for single-ethnic com-

munities to have their claims heard and acted

upon in an overcrowded political fi eld, joining

panethnic coalitions and organizations cannot

erase or override single-ethnic identity. Rather,

leaders in this study note that single-ethnic identi-

ties must be voiced and present in panethnic

spaces.

Respondents lament and actively work to de-

construct the monolithic perception of, what

Wendy named, an “Asian American mainstream.”

Wendy, a 36-year-old Asian American leader of

mixed heritage, continued by posing a question that

seemed to weigh heavy on the minds of leaders

within this study’s sample: “How do we maintain

our specifi c heritages and identities at the same

time that we stand together as an Asian American

community?”

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equipped to fully and accurately represent the needs

and concerns of other single-ethnic communities.

Representation is understood as fundamentally tied

to a lived experience. Single-ethnic identities can

only be truly represented by individuals who come

from particular communities. In order to build pan-

ethnic organizations that are truly representative of

diverse Asian American populations, leaders often

spoke of the intentional invitations to and recruit-

ment of potential leaders from underrepresented

single-ethnic communities.

Accounting for Linguistic
and Cultural Diversity

Maintenance of interlocking single-ethnic identi-

ties and orientations in panethnic organizing are

also important in instrumental terms. . . .

Cultural and language capacities are particularly

important for Asian American community mobili-

zations, as over 37 percent of the Asian American

population in the four-county San Francisco Bay

Area is classifi ed as limited English profi cient

(LEP).
3
Furthermore, Asian Americans remain a

predominantly foreign-born population, approxi-

mately 70 percent in the four-county region (U.S.

Census Bureau n.d.a). Language and cultural com-

petencies provided by single-ethnically oriented

individuals, then, are instrumentally important and

must be maintained within panethnic organizations

to effectively outreach to and mobilize the large

LEP and foreign-born segments of the Asian

American population. Tristan, a Hapa American,

offers a more concrete description of a mechanism

used to address the linguistic and cultural diversity

of the Asian American population:

A Filipino TV station came and covered the press

conference, which was great, and we actually did

have somebody who spoke Tagalog, but we don’t

always and there are certainly other languages that we

just don’t have represented. And we really try to invite

the API press to these events and many of them cover

it in English and the article they produce may be in

another language. But many of them want to interview

Modeling Single-Ethnic Identity
Narration

. . . Leaders in this study speak of a panethnic identity

that encourages the maintenance of single- ethnicity

as integral to the ultimate success of the movement.

They see a need for diverse representation of single-

ethnic organizations within the Asian American or-

ganizational fi eld and within panethnic organizations

themselves. Maintained single-ethnic identity is

demonstrated within organizations as leaders dis-

cussed the strategic importance of “self” representa-

tion of single-ethnic community interests in

leadership and decision-making processes of paneth-

nic organizations. Leaders lead by example by

maintaining their own single-ethnic identity and en-

courage members to speak from the experience of

their particular ethnic communities. The mainte-

nance of single-ethnic identity among leaders is par-

ticularly salient as they discussed whom they feel

they represent within their leadership capacity. While

all study participants hold leadership positions that

engage in panethnic mobilization in some form, they

conceptualize their ability to truly represent in very

narrow terms. “A more progressive Vietnamese com-

munity,” “Chinatown woman activists,” “a hapa, bi-

racial experience,” “Filipino privileged people;” and

“an East Oakland, working class, immigrant, woman

experience” are some examples of this specifi city.

[Two respondents], Briana and Edwin, further ex-

plain the reason for such specifi city:

I don’t know that I feel I am representing any one

mass community because it is extremely diverse and

has a lot of different complexities and complications

to it. . . . I feel like I am representing part of the divi-

sions. (Briana, Indian American)

I hope I represent Asian Americans generally, but

I think I represent other East Asian people better than

other Asian Americans. Particularly, like South

Asians, because I just don’t know that  much about

their culture. (Edwin, Chinese American)

Leaders feel they are only able to represent their

own personal ethnic experience as they feel ill

READING 5: An Interlocking Panethnicity 85

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86 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

structure and privilege within the panethnic com-

munity is left intact. In their quest for racial equal-

ity, Asian American organizations may replicate

the system of oppression they seek to dismantle;

marginalized Asian American ethnic groups may

remain powerless to assert their own issues into

panethnic agendas. . . .

Leveraging Human and Social Capital
for the Panethnic Good

Leaders who hold privileged social positions due

to their ethnic or class background can also lever-

age their elevated human and social capital for

the benefi t of less privileged segments of the

Asian American population and Asian Americans

as a whole. [One respondent] spoke of an organi-

zational process of open dialogue, whereby indi-

viduals learn from those of other ethnic back

grounds and incorporate an understanding of the

issues that affect less visible and less privileged

Asian Americans. Importantly, individuals from

marginalized Asian American communities are

the ones who speak, teach, and lead on these less

familiar struggles. East Asian Americans are con-

fronted with the realities of other Asian American

ethnic groups within the panethnic formation,

which forces them to recognize their own privi-

leged position and alters their engagement with

the organization.

In the process of deconstructing divisive hierar-

chies of privilege, leaders leverage organizational

resources from across the panethnic spectrum to

uplift other less privileged segments of the Asian

American community. Ryan, for example, leads a

sizable and longstanding organization with roots in

the Japanese American community. Across its his-

tory, Ryan’s organization has been able to accrue

many resources, capacities, and connections that

are unavailable to more recently arrived ethnic

communities and recently formed organizations.

Rather than hoard such resources, Ryan expresses a

philosophy of sharing and empowerment:

Over time the organization has grown, its capacity has

increased and the bottom line is [we work with other

somebody in the language they are ultimately going

to write in. That is a big thing on our to-do list.

For Tristan, having linguistic and cultural diversity

represented within his organization and at organiza-

tional events is important for the dissemination of

information to a broader Asian American public.

Aside from communicative importance, a cul-

turally and linguistically competent staff is also

central to a panethnic organization’s ability to pro-

vide direct services to diverse Asian American

communities that continue to speak ethnic-specifi c

languages and practice ethnic-specifi c cultures. As

discussed earlier, demographic shifts in the Asian

American population have had a direct impact on

organizations by increasing the diversity of clients

served by various organizations as well as the

members and leaders who make up the organiza-

tion itself. As organizational clients have increased

in ethnic diversity, organizational leadership has

been forced to grapple with how to provide services

to largely immigrant communities with distinct lan-

guages and cultures. . . .

Coming to Terms with Privilege

. . . The experiences of a perceived homogenous

Asian American population are generally catego-

rized within the model minority paradigm and

therefore lay outside the boundary to “legitimate”

oppression. Asian American organizations may

champion the issues of less privileged segments of

the Asian American population in order to increase

political relevance.
4
When promoting panethnic

Asian American agendas externally, the issues of

these marginalized Asian Americans take center

stage. This agenda shift, however, is not always

accompanied by an equal shift in ethnic make-up

of decision-makers and visible leadership. While

placing marginalized Asian American concerns at

the forefront of a public panethnic agenda is

empowering and may achieve gains for a

marginalized segment of the population, it also

serves to obscure the ethnic privileges and power

positions held by Japanese and Chinese Americans

within  many panethnic mobilizations. The power

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of hierarchies that is explicitly racialized. Accord-

ing to leaders in this study, fostering collaboration,

open dialogue, and participation among distinct

single-ethnic communities are fundamental to the

success of panethnic Asian American collective ac-

tion. Leaders frequently discussed the need to create

an open atmosphere within their organizations in

order to foster collaboration among members. . . .

CONCLUSION
Taken together, the evidence drawn from my

interviews with organizational leaders shows that

single-ethnicities persist in panethnic mobilizations

and that this continued presence has mutual effects

on both single-ethnic and panethnic identities.

Building upon the works of panethnicity scholars

Espiritu and Vo, this study demonstrates that exer-

cise of single-ethnic and panethnic identities are

not simply driven by situations and contexts that

favor one identity over the other. Rather, single-

ethnic and panethnic identities are “both simultane-

ous and linked,” informing and altering one another

(Glenn 2002:7). It follows that panethnic identity,

in its contemporary form, may be better understood

as interlocking with single-ethnic identity, rather

than within a salience hierarchy or being situation-

ally determined. The identity negotiations that take

place lead to the coexistence and mutual effect of

multiple identities within a single movement. . . .

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What are ways to measure panethnic solidarity?

2. What are some of the problems of maintaining

single-ethnic identity when the larger goal is

panethnicity?

3. What are some of the mechanisms for creating

an interlocking panethnicity?

NOTES
1. For the majority of this article, I speak specifi cally about

the panethnic Asian American community, rather than
API. This is a conscious effort not to tokenize the Pacifi c
Islander experience in my analysis. This is not to say

that Pacifi c Islanders should not be included in panethnic

communities] because we can . . . and, in actuality, we

want to. We have been fortunate as an organization to

be able to evolve to do many things. I take a lot of pride

in the fact that there is a Japanese American youth or-

ganization in this country that can serve everybody.

. . . The skills and resources brought to organizations

by different leaders vary widely from accounting

skills and public speaking to network connections

and fundraising. The demographics of the leaders

participating in this study show that all inhabit a priv-

ileged social class position, which is often accompa-

nied by greater social and cultural capital. Leaders in

this study, regardless of ethnicity, are highly conscious

of their privileged positions within their organiza-

tions, within the community, and oftentimes within

society at large. A frequent assertion by study partici-

pants was an earnest interest in using their privileged,

educated positions, and the access to information and

networks that comes with it, for the betterment of the

panethnic community as a whole. In particular, lead-

ers wished to be a conduit of information and access

point for segments of the community that largely do

not have a voice. Privilege is not used as a tool

of  domination over the lower rungs of the class

hierarchy, but rather a means to uplift, educate, and

empower the broadest segment of the community

possible.

Collaborative Frameworks and
Privileging Marginalized Voices

In addition to acknowledging privilege and leverag-

ing the resources of privilege for a broader paneth-

nic community, leaders also foster collaborative

processes within their respective organizations to

give voice to the diversity within the Asian American

population. Such practices also stem from the non-

profi t orientation of the Asian American social

movement organizations in this study. Nonprofi t or-

ganizations often utilize nonhierarchical structures

and decision-making processes due to their service

and advocacy- oriented missions (DiMaggio and

Anheier 1990). However, Asian American social

movement organization leaders espouse an ap-

proach to the recognition of privilege and fl attening

READING 5: An Interlocking Panethnicity 87

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88 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Dominicans in the United States.” Sociological Forum
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Louie, Steve and Glenn Omatsu. 2006. Asian Americans:
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Maeda, Daryl J. 2009. Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian
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Pulido, Laura. 2006. Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical
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Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall,

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Paradigm Publishers.

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(February 15, 2012).

———. n.d.b. Census 2000, Summary File 1; generated by

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2012).

———. n.d.c. Census 2010, Summary File 1; generated by

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Outsider Perspective.” Pp. 17–37 in Cultural Compass:
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Asian American formations. Rather, I nod at the limita-

tions of my sample, which only includes one Pacifi c

Islander–identifi ed respondent. She is ethnically mixed

(Filipino, Chamorro, and Samoan) and is treated as a

person of mixed race. References to API are maintained

only in reference to the April 2006 rally and the nomen-

clature explicitly used by interview respondents.

2. While the San Francisco metropolitan area is an apt site

for a study of progressive race-based movement identi-

ties, it also produces some biases. A potentially skewed

conception of panethnic identity may arise as leaders

attempt to mobilize in the generally progressive political

environment of San Francisco. Additionally, the deep

history of panethnic organizing associated with the Bay

Area may create a more easily mobilized base and

heightened consciousness in the community. Lastly, the

high percentages of Asian Americans in the greater San

Francisco Bay Area may also infl uence panethnic iden-

tity formations and mobilization efforts.

3. LEP is defi ned as individuals who speak a language

other than English and have self-rated their profi ciency

in English as less than “very well.” All LEP and nativity

data are derived from the American Community Survey

2010 fi ve-year Aggregate dataset accessed through

American Factfi nder.

4. This is not to say that Chinese or Japanese Americans do

not have legitimate grievances deserving of attention.

Rather, the social position of Southeast Asian Americans

is more justifi able within the normative discourse of

racial inequalities.

REFERENCES
Anthias, Floya. 1998. “Rethinking Social Divisions: Some

Notes Towards a Theoretical Framework.” Sociological
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Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. “Black Feminist Thought.”

Pp. 404–20 in Theories of Race and Racism , edited by
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Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Inter-

sectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against

Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43:1241–99.
DiMaggio, Paul J. and Helmut K. Anheier. 1990. “The Soci-

ology of Nonprofit Organizations and Sectors.” Annual
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Espiritu, Yen Le. 1992. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridg-
ing Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2002. Unequal Freedom: How Race
and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Itzigsohn, Jose and Carlos Dore-Cabral. 2000. “Competing

Identities? Race, Ethnicity and Panethnicity among

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READING 6: Latino Racial Choices 89

INTRODUCTION
On 19 June 2003, an article in USA Today pro-
claimed that ‘Hispanics outnumber[ed] blacks as the

largest minority group in the USA’.
1
A few months

later, the US Census undertook a project to predict

what the US’s racial make-up would be in 2050.

The authors of this project, funded by the Minority

Business Development Agency of the US Depart-

ment of Commerce, predicted that non- Hispanic

whites will constitute only 53 per cent of the US

population in 2050, while Hispanic whites will make

up 22 per cent of the total population, Hispanic

blacks 2 per cent and non-Hispanic blacks 13 per cent.
2

These predictions are based on the problematic

assumption that current patterns of racial and ethnic

R E A D I N G 6

Latino Racial Choices: The Effects
of Skin Colour and Discrimination
on Latinos’ and Latinas’ Racial
Self-Identifi cations

Tanya Golash-Boza and William Darity , Jr

If you had a choice of colors, which one would you

choose, my brother? (Curtis Mayfi eld)

Tanya Golash-Boza is a professor of sociology at the University

of California, Merced. William Darity, Jr is a professor of public

policy, African and African American Studies, and economics at

Duke University.

P E R S O N A L A C C O U N T

I Thought My Race Was Invisible

In a conversation with a close friend, I noticed that I am,

to her, a representative of my entire racial category. To

put things in perspective, my friend Janet and I have

been friends for eight years. During this period, it has

come up that I am a third-generation Japanese- American

who has no ties to being Japanese other than a couple

of sushi dishes I learned how to make from my grand-

mother. Nonetheless, whenever a question regarding

“Asians” comes up, she comes to me as if I can provide

the definitive answer to every Asian mystery.

Yesterday Janet asked me if there is a cultural reason

why Asians “always drive so slow.” Not having noticed

that Asians drive slowly (in fact, I have noticed a number

of Asians who actually exceed the speed limit), I com-

mented that perhaps they are law-abiding citizens. She

said that must explain it: “They are used to following the

law.” I thought, “Am I one of ‘they’?” but didn’t comment

further. Before we switched subjects, she noted that she

“knew there had to be a cultural reason” for their driving.

Janet then told me about a Vietnamese woman at the

Hair Cuttery who cut her husband’s hair. As is normal, her

husband talked to the woman as she worked on his hair;

he asked her what she did before working at the Hair Cut-

tery. She said that she used to work in the fields in Califor-

nia (i.e., she was a field hand). Janet told me of the healthy

respect that she and her husband had for a woman who

worked in the fields, put herself through cosmetology

school, moved East, and became a professional hairstyl-

ist. She commented that “Blacks” should follow her exam-

ple and work instead of complaining of their lot in life.

This conversation was interesting and a bit startling.

Janet is a good friend who shares many interests with

me. What I realized from this conversation, and in re-

membering others that were similar, is that she feels that

I am a representative of the whole Asian race. Not only is

this unrealistic, but it is surprising that she would imagine

I could answer for my race given my lack of real cultural

exposure. In relaying the story of the Vietnamese woman,

I had a sense that she was complimenting me, and my

race, for the industriousness “we” demonstrate. It seems

to me that she approved of the “typically” Asian way of

working (quietly, so as not to insult or offend), even

though this woman was probably underpaid and over-

worked in her field hand job. While she approved of her

reticence, Janet did not approve of “Black” complaints.

I realize that to Janet, I will always be Asian. I had not

really thought about it before, but I never think of Janet as

White; her race is invisible to me. I had thought that my

race was invisible too; however, I realize now that I will

always be the “marked” friend. This saddens me a bit, but

I accept it with the knowledge that she is a close friend.

Nonetheless, it is unfortunate to think that even between

friends, race is an issue.

Sherri H. Pereira

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90 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

to answer both the race and ethnicity questions. For

this reason, data from the Census allow social sci-

entists to talk about white Hispanics versus black

Hispanics or to speculate on what it means for a

Hispanic to choose ‘other’ for his or her race.

Although the US Census considers ‘Hispanic’

to be an ethnic identifi er, this category differs in

important ways from other ethnic identifi ers such

as Italian-American or Irish-American. If Hispanic

were ‘merely’ an ethnic identifi er, we would not

expect for it to persist at the individual level for the

next two generations, or at least would expect that

it would dissipate to some extent. Thus, despite

evidence that ethnic identifi ers have generally be-

come less salient over the course of generations, the

current predictions about the future demographics

of the US expect the children of Hispanics also to

be Hispanics.

Most social scientists expect the category ‘His-

panic’ to persist because it is a racialized ethnic

label. (Notably, those who expect it to disappear,

such as Yancey (2003), treat Hispanic as an ethnic

label.) However, we take the position that Hispanic

is a racialized ethnic label because it is used and

applied in a very similar way to other racial labels

in the US – on the basis of physical appearance. In

daily interactions, people in the US do not label

people as Hispanic based on their ancestry, as it

would be diffi cult to conduct genealogical analyses

of people whom we encounter on a daily basis. We

do, however, react to symbolic markers of ancestry,

such as phenotype, accent and other cultural codes,

thereby racializing the category ‘Hispanic’. To the

extent that we, in the United States, associate Latin

American ancestry with a particular somatic image,

we give racial meaning to Latin American ancestry,

and treat people who fi t that somatic norm, not as

whites or blacks, but as Hispanics.

The US Census uses a defi nition of Hispanic

that includes all people whose origin can be traced

to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba or Central or South

America. Given the great diversity of people from

this area, combined with the social practice of as-

sociating a particular somatic norm image with

Hispanicity in the US, we can expect some Latin

identifi cation can be used to predict future identifi –

cation patterns without taking into account the

possibility that Hispanics’ racial and ethnic identi-

fi cations can and do change. Notably, the authors of

the Census project seem to expect the ethnic and

racial identifi cation patterns of Hispanics to remain

unchanged for the next fi fty years. This mode of

thinking runs contrary to the assimilation canon –

most theorists who study assimilation agree that

ethnic identifi cations can be expected to change

(see Alba and Nee (1997) for a discussion of the

assimilation canon and its merits). In addition, re-

cent works by Harris and Sim (2002) and Brown,

Hitlin and Elder (2006) suggest that racial self-

identifi cations can also be expected to change. This

paper takes on the question of what the future face

of the US will look like by developing a theoretical

framework that takes into account the viability of

racial and ethnic identifi ers for Latinos and Latinas

in the US.

. . . In this article, we address the changing struc-

ture of the US racial hierarchy, but also argue that it

is important to consider the factors that infl uence

how individual Latinos/as self-identify in order

better to predict how Latinos/as will identify in

the future.

Before continuing, we should clarify the distinc-

tion between Hispanic as a racial category and His-

panic as an ethnic category. On the 2000 US

Census, there were separate questions for race and

ancestry. The race question was not open-ended.

Respondents had to choose one or more of the fol-

lowing categories as their race: American Indian or

Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American;

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacifi c Islander; and

White. In addition, there was the option of selecting

‘other’. Ethnicity was a separate question, in which

there were two minimum categories: ‘Hispanic or

Latino’ and ‘Not Hispanic or Latino’. Respondents

were asked to choose between: ‘NO, I am not

Hispanic/Latino/Spanish’; ‘YES, Mexican’; ‘YES,

Cuban’; ‘YES, Puerto Rican’; and ‘YES, other’.

People who ethnically self-identifi ed as Hispanic or

Latino also could self-identify with any of the racial

categories, and respondents were asked explicitly

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Studies by Eschbach and Gomez (1998) and Brown,

Hitlin and Elder (2006) demonstrate that Hispanics

are quite likely to change their racial and ethnic

self-identifi cations from one survey to the next.

Predictions about the future racial make-up of the

US are based on self-reports of race and ethnicity,

yet often do not take into account the fl uid nature of

these identifi ers. In addition, it is not only impor-

tant to describe racial fl uidity as these studies have

done, but to develop a theoretical framework that

explains and potentially predicts Latinos’ racial

choices in order to predict what the future face of

America will look like. . . .

. . . We fi nd convincing the arguments that the

racial structure is changing in the United States,

and that Hispanic is emerging as a racial category

but, in this paper, ask the question: what factors in-

fl uence how people currently defi ned as Hispanic

racially self-identify on surveys? Knowing what

factors currently infl uence racial self-identifi cations

will provide us with tools to better predict how peo-

ple will self-identify in the future.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
RACIAL IDENTIFICATIONS IN
LATIN AMERICA AND THE U.S.
Before we can answer this question, it will be useful

briefl y to review the evidence that indicates that ra-

cial self-identifi cations are subject to change, spe-

cifi cally among Latin Americans. One reason for

this is that processes of racial categorization and

identifi cation in Latin America do not parallel those

of the United States (Rodríguez 1994; Duany 2005).

Scholars are not in full agreement on exactly how

these systems differ, yet it is worthwhile to set forth

some claims. First of all, ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’

are not common racial or ethnic descriptors in Latin

America. (This claim is perhaps the most widely

accepted.) Second, people of African or indigenous

descent in Latin America are more likely to self-

identify as white than similar people in the US

(Wade 1997: 14, 38). Third, the use of terminology

for mixed categories such as mulatto (white/black)

or mestizo (white/Indian) or zambo (black/Indian)

Americans and their descendants not to self- identify

as Hispanic. Specifi cally, we can expect those

Census-defi ned Hispanics who do not fi t this so-

matic norm image to be less likely to self-identify

as Hispanic. We can further speculate that the chil-

dren of this group of people who do not fi t this

somatic norm image will be even less likely to self-

identify as Hispanic, as their relative lack of ethnic

and racial identifi ers render them even less likely to
be identifi ed as Hispanic in daily interactions. As

such, some persons of Hispanic descent could po-

tentially opt out of the Latino category and become

non-Hispanic blacks or whites, while others could

disassociate themselves from both labels, black and

white, and adopt ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ as their ra-

cial identifi cation. The possibility of such a change

in racial and ethnic identifi cation patterns renders

predictions based on projected immigration pat-

terns and birth rates less useful. It means further

that social scientists need to consider how Latinos/

as racially self-identify and what factors affect

those choices.

Social scientists who have considered Latinos’

and Latinas’ racial self-identifi cation do not agree

as to how Latinos/as’ racial identifi cations work

presently or will work in the future. Clara Rodríguez

(2000) tells us that Latinos/as’ racial identifi cations

are fl uid and contextual; Yancey (2003) predicts

that the majority of Latinos/as will become white;

Bonilla-Silva (2004) predicts that the majority will

join the ‘collective black’ and Haney López (2005)

argues that some identify racially as white, others

as black and others as Latino or Latina. Without

understanding the processes that underlie racial

identifi cation for Hispanics, our predictions and

calculations about the future racial make-up of the

United States hold very little water.

Despite the numerous implications of Hispanics

actually becoming the ‘nation’s largest minority’,

social scientists have done remarkably little re-

search on patterns of racial identifi cation among

Latinos/as in the United States. Current research

indicates that racial and ethnic self-identifi ers are

fl uid, and can vary over the course of one’s life, or

even the course of one’s day (Rodríguez 2000).

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92 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

Bean posit that ‘changes in ethnic and racial

boundaries are a fundamental part of the immigra-

tion incorporation experience’ (2004, p. 226). One

way this could play out is that a person who consid-

ered herself to be ‘white’ in Peru may initially

identify as ‘white’ in the US. However, if she is not

seen as white in the US but as Latina, she may

begin to self-identify as a Latina. Alternatively, she

may resist these categorizations and insist on her

whiteness. It is also reasonable to suggest that this

hypothetical Peruvian immigrant would be able to

pass for white if she had the fi nancial and educa-

tional resources to downplay her ethnic origins.

She also may be able to marry a white American

and pass their collective whiteness on to their chil-

dren. In another scenario, she may not be able to be

classifi ed as white, but her US-born children may

be. At the other end of the spectrum, Bailey (2001)

found that second-generation Dominicans use their

knowledge of the Spanish language to ward off cat-

egorization as black. Given the rapid loss of

Spanish language use and ability across generations,

it is unlikely that their children will have the option

of using Spanish to avoid being categorized as

black. Will these third- (and later-) generation

Dominican-Americans continue to identify as

Hispanics, as black Hispanics, or will they consider

themselves to be simply African-Americans? How

likely are the descendants of immigrants from Peru

to self-identify as Hispanic after they have been in

the US for several generations?

It is important to point out that not only immi-

grants from Latin America might change their ra-

cial classifi cations, but also Latinos/as who are

born in the US. The racial self-identifi cations of

second- and third-generation immigrants from

Latin America may also change over the course of

their lives. As families move out of or into ethnic

enclaves, as students attend university, and as peo-

ple join political movements, it is reasonable to

suggest that their racial or ethnic self- identifi cations

may change. We currently consider Hispanics to be

those people who identify as such on the US Cen-

sus and other national surveys. In addition, social

scientists make predictions about the future ethnic

is more prevalent in Latin America than in the US,

although the use of an array of mixed categories

was also common in the US until the 1920s (Skid-

more 1993; Duany 2005). Fourth, people of African

descent are less likely to self-identify as black in

Latin America than in the US (Cruz-Jansen 2001;

Darity, Dietrich, and Hamilton 2005; Wade 1993).

Finally, many studies have shown that in Latin

America one’s racial status is determined, in part,

by one’s social status. This means that people of

higher economic or class status tend to classify

themselves as whiter than their counterparts in

lower strata, regardless of actual physical character-

istics. In Brazil, for example, non-whites may

change their racial identifi cation to a whiter classi-

fi cation as they move up the class hierarchy (Lovell

and Wood 1998). Notably, Telles (2004) and Wade

(1993) point out that this ability to whiten is limited

to people who hold a racially ambiguous status.

The reality of a distinct racialized social struc-

ture in Latin America has consequences for the ra-

cial self-identifi cations of immigrants from Latin

America who reside in the US. Since these immi-

grants encounter a different system of racial classi-

fi cations in the US, their racial self-identifi cations

may change as they adapt to the US. For example,

this distinct system of racial classifi cation means

that, in Latin America, there are people who self-

identify as white who may not be seen as white in

the United States. In addition, there are people who

could begin to self-identify as black in the US that

may not have considered themselves to be black in

Latin America. Thus, some Latin American immi-

grants to the United States are likely to self-identify

racially as something other than how they identifi ed

in their country of origin. For Dominicans in par-

ticular, Itzigshon, Giorguli and Vasquez (2005,

p. 51) found that Dominican immigrants ‘confront

a racial classifi cation system that classifi es many of

them as black’ despite the fact that many of these

Dominicans do not perceive themselves to be black.

As Latin American immigrants acculturate to

the United States, it is conceivable that they would

be infl uenced by the US system of racial classifi ca-

tion and may even begin to adapt to it. Lee and

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Puerto Rican women, found that about 30 per cent

of their Puerto Rican female respondents on the US

mainland racially identifi ed as Hispanic or Latina,

as compared to only about 10 per cent of their

Puerto Rican female respondents on the island. Sur-

prisingly, the island women were more likely to

choose ‘white’ or ‘black’ as a racial identifi er than

the mainland women. Their results indicate that

some Puerto Ricans may be adopting ‘Latino’ or

‘Hispanic’ as a racial identifi cation in the US, even

if they racially identifi ed as ‘white’ or ‘black’ on the

island. This is also in line with Duany’s (2005,

p.  182) argument that Puerto Ricans respond that

their race is neither white nor black, but ‘other’, be-

cause ‘other’ seems to be increasingly used as a ra-

cialized synonym for Hispanic. Itzigsohn, Giorguli

and Vasquez (2005) found that 21 per cent of the

fïrst-generation Dominicans in their New York City-

based study self-identifi ed racially as Hispanics and

that 5 per cent self-identifi ed as blacks. However,

they also found that 29 per cent thought that others

would racially identify them as Hispanic and that

35 per cent thought that others would identify them

as black. These studies indicate that many Domini-

cans and Puerto Ricans in the US understand

‘Hispanic’ as a racialized category that fi ts into the

US racial hierarchy somewhere between white and

black. What these studies do not provide us with is

an understanding of what factors affect the deci-

sions of that segment of the population that is

defi ned by the US Census as being ethnically Hispanic

to self-identify racially as white, black or ‘other’.

While Hispanic/Latino is in many ways an eth-

nic category, we cannot ignore Latinas/os’ and non-

Latinas/os’ perception of the category as a racial

identifi er. For example, in the 1989 Latino National

Political Survey (de la Garza et al . 1992), 18 per
cent of the 2807 respondents reported their race to

be Latino, Hispanic or their respective national ori-

gin. In addition, 46 per cent of the respondents to

the 2002 National Latino Survey reported their race

to be Hispanic or Latino, and not white or black.

This large increase over the course of twelve years

is in part indicative of the different survey mea-

sures, but is also in part due to the changing racial

and racial make-up of the US on the basis of these

self-reported data. However, we have very little in-

formation on the viability of the category ‘ Hispanic’

and on what factors affect Hispanics’ decision to

self-identify as such on surveys.

This paper is grounded in the theoretical work

on assimilation in the US. Whereas assimilation

traditionally meant that immigrants would become

part  of the Anglo-Saxon core in the US, thereby

abandoning their ethnic affi liations, recent work on

assimilation has contested this idea, and put forth

the notion that there is more than one path of as-

similation. Rumbaut and Portes (2001) and Zhou

(1997), for example, argue that, while some immi-

grants will embark on the traditional path of as-

similation towards the Anglo-Saxon core, others

will retain some of their traditional values and prac-

tices through selective acculturation, and still oth-

ers will experience downward assimilation and

identify with the experiences of non-whites in the

US. This paper builds on this work by highlighting

the importance of racialization for the process of

assimilation. We question the extent to which indi-

viduals who are non-white, even if they have the

necessary accoutrements of middle-class status, can

and will assimilate to the Anglo-Saxon core. . . .

WHAT ARE LATINOS’ AND
LATINAS’ RACIAL CHOICES?
Our current understandings of Latinos/as’ racial

identifi cations are largely based on two sources of

data – ethnographic and interview-based studies,

and small-scale statistical analyses of Puerto Rican

and Dominican racial identifi cations. Clara Rodrí-

guez (2000) found, in her interview-based study of

Latinos/as in New York, that some of her interview-

ees found themselves subject to external pressure to

self-identify as ‘white’ or ‘black’, and that many of

them recognized their whiteness or blackness in this

context but insisted that they were also Latino. Her

case studies demonstrate that many Latinos/as ra-

cially identify as white, black or other, but culturally

identify as Latinos/as or with their national origin.

Landale and Oropesa (2002), in their study of

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94 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

higher educational levels and higher incomes are

more likely to identify as white, especially those

who do not have very dark skin. This would also

serve as an indication of Latinos/as’ resistance to

US racial categorizations, which are not based on

social characteristics such as income or education.

Hypothesis 2 – identifi cational assimilation hypothe-
sis : Hispanics who are more assimilated are more
likely to self-identify as ‘white’.

The second hypothesis invokes assimilation as a

central theme. Early theorists of assimilation such as

Gordon (1964) and Park (1950) argued that, over the

course of generations, immigrants eventually would

lose their ethnic ties and fold into the American

melting pot. An outcome of this process, identifi ca-

tional assimilation, means that the immigrant no

longer considers himself to be an Italian-American,

an Irish-American or a Mexican-American, but an

American. This unmarked identity as ‘American’

could be interpreted as becoming ‘white’, since the

unmarked requisite precludes the entry of African-

Americans or Asian-Americans into this category.

For example, Feagin (2000) argues that the unhy-

phenated ‘American’ label refers to those people in

the US who have the luxury of acting as if they do

not have a racial or ethnic status. This category of

people thus includes only white Americans.

According to the traditional model, assimilation

involves upward socioeconomic mobility, residen-

tial integration and intermarriage (Hirschman

2001). In order to determine whether or not the

identifi cational assimilation hypothesis works in the

case of Latino-Americans, it will be necessary to

determine whether Latinos/as who have been in the

US longer, have intermarried with whites and speak

English are more likely to self-identify as white

than Latinos/as who are less acculturated. This anal-

ysis also will allow us to examine the argument

made by Yancey (2003) that nearly all Latino

Americans will eventually adopt a white racial iden-

tity. On the basis of his fi nding that Latinos/as are

likely to have opinions on racialized matters that are

more similar to European Americans than to African

Americans and previous evidence that some

structure in the US, where ‘Latino’ is emerging as a

racialized category. For example, in February 2006,

when there were riots inside a prison near Los

Angeles, the African-American and Latino prison-

ers formulated a written request to separate the in-

mates by ‘race’ to avoid more mayhem. In this

case, the Latinos/as and blacks involved in those

riots saw ‘Latino’ as a racial category that does not

include African-Americans. . . .

In this paper, we will consider three hypotheses

that could explain Latinos’ racial choices and that

could be useful for predicting future demographic

trends. Subsequently, we will test each of these hy-

potheses using two national datasets – the 1989 Latino

National Political Survey and the Pew Hispanic

Center/Kaiser Family Foundation 2002 National Sur-

vey of Latinos. Finally, we will make a case for incor-

porating ideas of racialization into understanding

Latinos’ and Latinas’ current and future racial choices.

Hypothesis 1 – the social whitening hypothesis : His-
panics with higher incomes and higher levels of edu-

cation are more likely to choose ‘white’ for their race,

and less likely to choose ‘black’.

The fi rst hypothesis is that Latinos/as of higher

class statuses are more likely to self-identify as

white. This hypothesis derives from social whiten-

ing arguments made by some scholars who study

Latin America. (For a full discussion of social whit-

ening in Latin America, see Nutini 1997; Wade

1997; Wright 1990; Whitten and Torres 1998; Telles

2004; Twine 1998.) According to these scholars, so-

cial class plays an important role in racial identifi ca-

tion in Latin America. Some of these scholars argue

that social class trumps skin colour insofar as a

dark-skinned person can self-identify as white if he

or she is of high class standing. Others, such as

Telles (2004) and Wade (1993), argue that only peo-

ple who are racially ambiguous are able to experi-

ence social whitening, while people who are clearly

black, such as the Brazilian soccer player Pele, will

be identifi ed as black, no matter their class standing.

It will be useful to understand whether or not this

process carries over to the United States. In the US

context, this would mean that Latinos/as who have

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in the US, while others will not, and that those that

belong to the former group are more likely to self-

identify as Latinos/as and, in this fashion, to

assimilate into the Latino category. This hypothesis

draws on Nagel’s (1994) argument that categoriza-

tions are dialectically related to identifi cations,

meaning that they are both subject to change, and

that they affect one another. In light of this and

other research, it is reasonable to suggest that

Latinos/as’ racial self-identifi cations will be af-

fected by external categorizations.

How do we know how Latinos/as are racially

classifi ed by people in the US? We suggest that

Latinos/as are categorized in the same way as non-

Latinos/as, on the basis of their skin colour. Brown,

Dane and Durham conducted a series of interviews

to fi nd out what features people use to determine

race. They found that ‘[s]kin color was rated the

most important feature, followed by hair, eyes,

nose, mouth, cheeks, eyebrows, forehead, and ears’

(1998, p. 298). In one of the datasets we will be

using, we fortunately have a measure of skin co-

lour, which is the feature that people in the US are

most likely to use to determine another person’s

race. Thus, to test this hypothesis, we will consider

the relationship between skin colour and racial self-

identifi cation among Latinos/as. While we cannot

use skin colour alone to predict how Latinos/as are

categorized racially in the US, it is reasonable to

suggest that skin colour is one of many indicators

that affects racial categorization in the US.

We can predict that skin colour will affect racial

categorization and thus identifi cation. However, we

can also use experiences of discrimination in our

analyses because categorization is a necessary con-

dition for discrimination. In order to discriminate

against a person based on one’s pre-conceived no-

tions about their group, it is fi rst necessary to cate-

gorize them as a member of that group. As such, if

a respondent reports experiences of racial discrimi-

nation, we can conclude that he or she has been

categorized as a member of a racial group. We as-

sume that this discrimination would be based on

the respondent being non-white, since whites are

much less likely to experience racial discrimination

Latinos/as are assimilating residentially and mari-

tally, Yancey contends that Hispanic Americans will

eventually adopt a white racial identity. Neverthe-

less, Yancey’s analyses do not take generational sta-

tus into account, thereby weakening his ability to

predict future trends. The analyses presented in this

paper allow us to test this prediction more directly.

Hypothesis 3 – racialized assimilation hypothesis :
Hispanics who have lighter skin and who have

not experienced discrimination are more likely to

self-identify as white, while Hispanics with darker

skin and who have experienced discrimination are

more likely to self-identify as black or Hispanic.

The third hypothesis draws on recent studies

that have highlighted the dynamic relationship be-

tween external racial categorization and racial self-

identifi cation, as well as on studies of assimilation.

Henry and Bankston (2001) argue that ethnic self-

identifi cation is affected by outsiders’ ethnic

designations. Specifi cally for Latinos/as, Clara

Rodríguez (2000: 140–1) found that dark-skinned

Dominicans in New York recognize a racial

categorization as black, while Ginetta Candelario

(2001) reported that the majority of Dominicans in

the predominantly black city of Washington, DC,

racially identified themselves as black. Steven

Ropp (2000, p. 24) tells us that Asian Latinos/as are

categorized as Asian in daily interactions. These

fi ndings indicate that Latinos/as experience a di-

verse array of experiences of racial categorization

in the US. Some people who fi t the Census’s defi ni-

tion of Hispanic/Latino are racially categorized in

everyday interactions as black, others as white,

others as Asian and still others as Hispanic.

Scholars of race in Latin America and the US are

not in full agreement about the extent to which ra-

cial categories differ in the US and in Latin America.

However, we can say with certainty that, at the very

least, there is one fundamental difference between

Latin America and the US, and that is that the cate-

gories ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ are not commonly

used in Latin America, while they are in the US.

The racialized assimilation hypothesis entails that

that some Latinos/as will be racialized as Latinos/as

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96 SECTION I: Constructing Categories of Difference

the LNPS, we were also interested in the unique

data on interviewer-coded skin colour.

The LNPS was conducted in forty standard met-

ropolitan statistical areas, and was representative

of 91 per cent of the Mexican, Puerto Rican and

Cuban populations in the United States. All respon-

dents were at least 18 years of age, and had at least

one parent solely of Mexican, Cuban or Puerto

Rican ancestry, or at least any two grandparents of

solely Mexican, Cuban or Puerto Rican ancestry.

The response rate was 74 per cent. . . .

Respondents to the LNPS survey were asked if

they consider themselves to be white, black or

something else, and were asked to specify if they

considered themselves neither white nor black. . . .

A substantial majority of respondents chose to

self-identify racially as white. About 2 per cent –

only fi fty-two respondents – chose to classify

themselves as black. The remainder typically

chose colour-oriented labels intermediate between

black and white or national group labels, either

collective labels like ‘Latino’ or country-specifi c

labels (e.g. ‘ Mi raza es Puertorriqueña ’). In what
follows, we will collapse the latter responses into

a single category, ‘other’, separate from white or

black. Using these three categories, 62 per cent of

respondents in the LNPS said they are racially

white, 2 per cent said they are black and 36 per

cent chose another category, neither black nor

white. The numbers do suggest that Latinos/as in

this sample were not following the dictates of a

‘one-drop rule’ or notions of hypodescent with re-

spect to black self- identifi cation, since it is clearly

the case that more than 2 per cent of the Cubans,

Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in the US have some

African ancestry. According to the conservative

estimates included in the 1992 NACLA Report on
the Americas , in Mexico, the African-descended
population is between 1 and 10 per cent; in Puerto

Rico, it is between 23 and 70 per cent; and in Cuba

it is between 34 and 62 per cent (Oveido 1992).

We do not have these sorts of data for the Latin

American population that resides in the United

States, but we are comfortable in assuming that it

than non-whites. As such, Latinos/as who are per-

ceived by others to be white are less likely to be

victims of racial discrimination than those who are

perceived by others to be non-whites. In this sense,

racial discrimination can be used as a proxy for

non- whiteness. Of course, Latinos/as who are per-

ceived to be white may have more access to white

spaces and thus may witness more subtle forms of

discrimination against other Latinos/as. Neverthe-

less, they would be less likely to experience racial

discrimination themselves.

DATA AND METHODS
For the analyses, we use two datasets—the 1989

Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) and the

Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation

2002 National Survey of Latinos (NSL). We

chose the LNPS (1989) because of its inclusion of

measures of skin colour and NSL (2002) because

of its recency and its extensive questions pertain-

ing to discrimination. The similarities in these

two datasets strengthen our claims, while the dif-

ferences allow us to put some of our claims into

perspective. Both of these datasets are unique in-

sofar as they are nationally representative sam-

plings of the English- and Spanish-speaking

Latino populations, in contrast with studies such

as the General Social Survey which include only

English-speaking adults.

1989 LATINO NATIONAL
POLITICAL SURVEY
The LNPS is a representative national sample of the

three largest Latino groups in the USA – Mexicans,

Cubans and Puerto Ricans. The LNPS includes

2,807 respondents, and the interviews were con-

ducted between 1989 and 1990. This dataset is par-

ticularly well suited to addressing the questions

posed in this paper because of the broad sample of

Latinos/as from all over the country and because of

the different generational statuses included. In ad-

dition to the representative sample population of

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