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Rethinking Panethnicity and the Race-immigration Divide: An Ethnoracialization Model of Group Formation
Abstract
Although demographic shifts continue to spark interest in the racially transformative effects of immigration, researchers routinely lament the lack of dialogue between race and immigration scholarship. We use recent research on panethnicity to illustrate the conceptual divides that exist between the two subfields. Panethnicity research has shed new light on the formation of group identities and political mobilization, but we contend that it is problematically divorced from research on racialization. Panethnicity scholars largely view racialization and panethnic group formation as separate processes, with the latter sequentially following the former. In this article, we argue that this analytical distinction both reflects and reifies the divide between race and immigration research and yields an incomplete understanding of the group formation process. We propose an ethnoracialization model to show how the concept of panethnicity can be reconfigured to develop a robust account of group formation and to bridge the much-lamented divide between race and immigration research.
... They have the capacity to explore various cultural aspects and make informed choices about how these aspects contribute to their national identity. This may involve selecting values, traditions, or languages they perceive as integral to their desired national identity [9]. Meanwhile Krampen [22], added that a positive assessment of an event related to oneself in the social environment will create trust in oneself. ...
... Maximum likelihood estimation is used for this method. The model's fit is assessed using several indices, including the Chi-square statistic (> 0,05) [2], Comparative Fit Index (CFI) (> 0, 9) [44], Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) (< 0,06) [29], and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) (< 0,08) [18; 31]. This process concludes with interpreting the direct and indirect effects of independent variables on outcome variables, mediated by mediator variables. ...
... From the analysis results that the model match is tested using several indices. Chisquare statistic = 0,077( > 0,05), CFI = 1 (> 0, 9), RMSEA= 0,024 (< 00,06), and SRMR = 0,026 (< 0,05). The available data has been analyzed using various indices, and based on the results, it has been determined that the model is fit for the given data. ...
p style="text-align: justify;"> Objective. This study examines how an individual's self-competence is related to their national identity. Additionally, the study investigates how the self-concept of own competence mediates in that relationship.
Background. People with a high internal locus of control frequently think that hard work and wise choices can produce favorable results. Self-competence can be favorably impacted by decision-making skills and self-assurance in one's ability to make personal decisions. People see themselves as special individuals with the capacity to achieve goals and overcome challenges in a variety of spheres of life. Having a positive self-image of one's own competence can have a significant effect on a person's life, including their feeling of national identity. Self-perception of one's own skill and aptitude can enable people to make positive contributions to the prosperity and advancement of their country. The self-concept of one's own competence serves as a bridge between locus of control and national identity. People who believe they are competent and capable are more inclined to participate in national identity-building activities.
Study Design . The research adopts a quantitative approach using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test a theoretical mediation model. The study investigates whether self-concept of competence mediates the relationship between internal locus of control and national identity.
Participants . The study sample consists of 504 university students (176 men and 328 women), aged between 18 to 25 years, recruited from 20 public and private universities in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Measurements . Internal locus of control and self-concept of competence were assessed using the general control beliefs scale, while national identity was measured with the National Identity Scale. Data were analyzed using SEM to assess the proposed relationships between these variables.
Results . The results revealed a significant relationship between internal locus of control and national identity, with self-concept of competence acting as a partial mediator. The findings indicate that individuals with higher internal locus of control tend to perceive themselves as competent and are more likely to strongly identify with their nation. Model fit indices demonstrated good fit (Chi-square = 0,077, CFI = 1,00, RMSEA = 0,024, SRMR = 0,026).
Conclusions. The study highlights the importance of internal locus of control and self-concept of competence in the development of national identity. Interventions aiming to foster national cohesion and engagement can benefit from focusing on enhancing individuals' self-perception of competence and empowering them to take active roles in their communities. These findings provide practical implications for psychological and educational strategies to strengthen national identity formation.</p
... Racial and ethnic boundaries are blurry and shift with time and place, are both influenced by ascription and self-identification, and rely on connected indications of culture and appearance (H. Brown & Jones, 2015;Syed & Mitchell, 2013;Wimmer, 2008). Generally, those with more than one racial or ethnic ancestry must manage multiple racial and ethnic identities (in addition to other identities such as gender or political affiliation). ...
... Understanding racial selfidentification separate from feeling a part of one or more racial groups is important because understanding where people feel a sense of belonging can have implications for our understanding of group formation-panethnic or otherwise (H. Brown & Jones, 2015). For instance, if divergence between racial selfidentification and group belonging is similar to the concept of "racial contestation," then this could mean that the overall racial identity of a person experiencing this divergence could become weaker over time. ...
... In addition, despite differences in the definitions of Latino and Hispanic, I use the term Latino throughout this article to maintain consistency, unless Hispanic is specifically noted by a respondent. For more research on panethnicity and racialization, see H. Brown and Jones (2015). 2. When I discuss racial ancestry and whether someone is mixed race, multiracial, or biracial, I do so not to imply that there is a pure form of racial ancestry (monoracial) and those that are multiracial are somehow less than (Gullickson & Morning, 2011). ...
Emerging adulthood is a time of active identity exploration. Exploration of racial and ethnic identity is common in college and formational for adulthood. In this study, I use data from Latino, Asian, and multiracial emerging adults to explore the complexities of racial/ethnic self-identification and group belonging. I find that—when allowed to differentiate between the race with which one most identifies and the racial group one most feels a part—respondents’ choices don’t always align along a single racial or ethnic identity. This is true for those who are connected to just one or multiple racial/ethnic groups through ancestry or adoption, highlighting how elements of racial/ethnic identification may diverge even for those with only one reported racial or ethnic heritage. I use responses to open-ended questions to understand the discrepancies in some students’ self-identification and identify the factors that contribute to these different constituent parts of their identity.
... Ethnoracialization theory underscores the simultaneous and dialectical relationship of external ascription and self-identification in the process of constructing ethnoracial understandings and categories (Brown and Jones, 2015). This paper draws on ethnoracialization theory to describe the identity-formation processes of Latino college students. ...
... Hana Brown and Jennifer Jones (2015) challenge the separate and disparate treatment of panethnic and racial categories in both mainstream and scholarly texts. They introduce the concept of "ethnoracialization" to describe how racial and panethnic categories are constituted by similar processes: both through external ascription and self-identification (p. ...
... This study provides a rich portrait of the interactive components of ethnic identity formation and how these play out in the racial climates of three different colleges. By focusing on colleges in particular, I am able to consider how organizational context might influence identity formation at a unique and significant stage of development when identities are refashioned or "discursively reinterpreted" (Brown and Jones, 2015). ...
This paper compares the identity-formation processes of Latino students in three different college contexts (a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university). Drawing on ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and surveys of members of Latino student organizations, I chart the distinct ways in which Latino students interact with one another and arrive at particular ethnic identities on different campuses. By applying ethnoracialization theory to mesolevel settings, I examine how students respond to external ascription as they co-construct and negotiate their ethnic-racial understandings. I identify three different patterns by which students deploy panethnic boundaries, specifically, as they adopt and define identity labels: inclusive Latino identification signifying solidarity above all, qualified Latino identification mediated through specific organizational membership, and the rejection of panethnic identities. I consider how the organizational context of each campus provides a distinct racial climate that mediates student interactions and potentially shapes the disparate identity outcomes that result. The findings suggest that, beyond providing academic experiences, colleges also provide Latino students with disparate lessons regarding who they are and where they fit in the ethnoracial hierarchy.
... From the above discussion, we know that ethnic identity is the result of a dialectical process involving internal self-identifications and external outsiders' ascriptions (Brown & Jones, 2015;Nagel, 1994). Other scholars (Jiménez, 2008;Soto-Márquez, 2018;Waters, 1994) have also pointed out that immigrants constantly shift their identities between a national-based identity and an immigrant/ethnic identity according to different perceptions of race relations and of opportunities in different settings. ...
... As this article points out, however, that ethnicity can be framed as a racial category as well, in the sense that it may be difficult to distinguish between PRC-Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Konger, or Singaporean from their physical appearances. Ethnic groups may also suffer similar forms of racial discrimination as those endured by Blacks and other racial minorities, so that they may perceive themselves as a marginalized racial group and initiate political responses to racial categorization (Cornell & Hartmann, 2007;Brown & Jones, 2015;Espiritu, 2016). ...
Research on race and ethnicity has focused on conditions under which solidarity will be developed to consolidate collective benefits. For example, facing racial discrimination can bring large‐scale affiliations (e.g., people of color, Latinos, or Asians) to fight against racial injustice. Focusing on the negotiation and struggle between ethnicity and nationalism among Taiwanese migrants in Australia—a politicizing context associated with a prior definition of Chinese category, despite inherent differences within it, this article shows the complexity of ethnicity when ethnic identity/solidarity intersects with nationalism and racial discrimination. I argue that Taiwanese migrants attach specific meanings to the ethnic (Chinese) category and constantly connect to and shift its boundaries in different contexts. Meanwhile, they also make a distinction between racial discrimination from white Australians and political hostility from PRC‐Chinese. This article proposes a procedural and contextual understanding of ethnic identity, solidarity, nationalism, and boundary making/unmaking within the Chinese category as it is enacted in Taiwanese migrants' everyday lives. It also examines situational variability in the salience of ethnic identifications, racialization of the ethnic category, and people's interpretation of ethnic and national identity when facing racial discrimination.
... These uses of moral justifications to draw symbolic boundaries between immigrant groups, to seek state recognition, rights, and resources by differentiating one group for another, are also deeply racialized in the USA (Abrajano & Hajnal, 2017;Brown & Jones, 2015;Jiménez & Horowitz, 2013). Moral value is distributed unequally between ethnoracial and religious groups (Byng, 2013;Hill, 2008;Omi & Winant, 1994). ...
This chapter extends a bridge between the sociology of morality and the sociology of migration. A sociology of the morality of migration examines both the moral underpinnings that shape our analytic conceptions of borders, policies, and immigrants, and the social constructions of morality that shape immigration debates. I lay out three conceptual domains that would benefit from an integrated theory of morality and migration: the morality of borders, the morality of immigration policy, and the morality of immigrants. I conclude by offering directions for future studies in three realms: (1) examining structures, resources, and power as constitutive of the moral constructs of migration; (2) analyzing socio-historically patterned complexes of meaning and how they matter for processes and consequences of migration; and (3) examining how moral judgment, action, and discourse are evoked in the day-to-day lives of migrants and their stakeholders.
... While there are studies of panethnicity among Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and white Americans (see Cornell, 1990;Espiritu, 1992;Lopez & Espiritu, 1990;Mora, 2014aMora, , 2014bOkamoto & Mora, 2014;Roediger & Barrett, 2004), there is little systematic research on black panethnicity (Brown & Jones, 2015;Hester, 2017;Kapoor, 2016;Lewis & Forman, 2017). Does black panethnicity exist? ...
Unlike studies of Asian, Hispanic, Indian, and white panethnicity, systematic research on black panethnicity is lacking. To fill this lacuna, this study examines the origins of black panethnicity in colonial America and follows its evolution through U.S. historical periods. Comparative-historical methods are used to assess the creation and development of black panethnicity and to compare it with other types of panethnicity. The analysis focuses on two periods of black panethnicity. In the first stage, black panethnicity emerged from the racialization of black Africans during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the black slavery era. The second stage revealed how black panethnicity evolved during the historical periods of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights. The similarities and differences between black panethnicity and panethnicities of other groups are also discussed.
... Whereas research on assimilation has traditionally overlooked or minimized the role of racialization on immigrant integration 4 (see Brown and Jones 2015;Sanchez and Romero 2010;Treitler 2015), my research 4 Even though segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Rumbaut 2001;Portes and Zhou 1993) helped refocus the attention to immigrants from Latin America and Asia, it still did not fully address the influence of racialization on the assimilation process (see Golash-Boza 2006:30). focuses squarely on racialization and illegality. ...
Based on interviews with thirty‐five Hispanic young adults in northwest Arkansas, this research investigates experiences of social and emplaced community belonging as contradictory, liminal, and influenced by racial, locational, and legal factors. Through this analysis, I articulate and develop the concept of “liminal belonging” to capture Hispanic young adults' geographically contingent and unsteady or fluctuating sense of belonging that is shaped by oscillating experiences of exclusion and inclusion. This study contributes to social science research on immigration, race/ethnicity, place, and rurality/urbanity by revealing how race, place, legal status, belonging, and symbols of safe and unsafe places are intimately intertwined within the daily experiences of 1.5 and second‐generation Hispanic young adults.
... Focalizing how these tensions between processes of structural ascription and group-based processes of identification and mobilization are consequential for the construction of panethnic categories, the theory of ethnoracial formation helpfully bridges the insights of racial formation theory with migration theory (Brown and Jones 2015). Elaborated by Hana Brown and Jennifer Jones, this approach lays out three central propositions. ...
Answering longstanding questions about the relationship between immigrant identity, collective action, and societal incorporation requires a dynamic theory that integrates these micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. I propose a Du Boisian framework of immigrant incorporation that centers immigrants’ subjectivities, accounting for variation in immigrants’ perceptions of their relational social positions and subsequent strategies for shifting these positions. In this conceptualization of collective identity and collective action, macro-contexts enable and constrain collective identities through the process of ethnoracial formation, but immigrants negotiate competing perceptions of these identities and the political context, shaping divergent strategies to negotiate group position. I illustrate this framework by drawing on focus groups with Muslim American immigrants, identifying three central couplings of perceived identity and collective action strategy: 1) a perception of an integrating, “model citizen” collective identity that is aspirationally white, shaping assimilationist strategies for incorporation; 2) a perception of temporarily stigmatized identity with corresponding “identity-improvement” strategies for incorporation; and 3) a perception of racialized identity that rejects aspirational whiteness coupled with coalition-building with Black and Brown communities to target racialized systems altogether. Following Du Bois’ legacy, this framework expands our understanding of the dialectic between macro-contexts and micro-dynamics in immigrant incorporation and builds upon growing research that questions whether the quest for societal inclusion is necessarily a process of integration into the dominant category.
... Each of these three stories oversimplified the complex realities of Mexican lives. We have described how Mexican experiences and pathways in Marshall exceeded these stories, and other work on race and ethnicity in similar towns has described further complexity (Brown & Jones, 2015;Jones, 2012;Rodríguez, 2012;Smith, 2014). However appealing one might find stories about migrant assimilation and success, resistance and solidarity, or emerging hybrid communities, many individuals and migrant groups do not travel any of these three simple pathways. ...
... Each of these three stories oversimplified the complex realities of Mexican lives. We have described how Mexican experiences and pathways in Marshall exceeded these stories, and other work on race and ethnicity in similar towns has described further complexity (Brown & Jones, 2015;Jones, 2012;Rodríguez, 2012;Smith, 2014). However appealing one might find stories about migrant assimilation and success, resistance and solidarity, or emerging hybrid communities, many individuals and migrant groups do not travel any of these three simple pathways. ...
This book describes an American town that became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, where the Mexican population increased by over 1000% and Mexicans became almost a third of the town. We explore how the descendants of earlier migrants interacted with Mexican newcomers, describing how experiences of and stories about migration unfolded across institutional spaces—residential neighborhoods, politics, businesses, public spaces, churches, schools, community organizations. We emphasize the ongoing changes in prior migrant communities and the interactions these groups had with Mexicans, showing how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways. The book richly represents the voices of Irish, Italian, African American and Mexican residents.
The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and traveled pathways from struggle to success—“up and out” of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods. We trace how these stories were often inaccurate, but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant life.
The town in which this ethnography took place represents similar communities across the United States and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. We must document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience in towns like this if we hope to respond intelligently to the politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.
... Much of this literature now recognizes that receptivity toward immigrants largely depends on existing racialized dynamics in the host society; moreover, it readily acknowledges that anti-Black racism is a central largely agrees with its quantitative counterpart that Whites often resist immigrants out of a sense of racialized group position and entitlement, whereas Blacks' resistance to immigrants, when it arises, comes out of an "historical context of racial exclusion and exploitation" vis-à-vis Whites (Smith 2009; see also Ribas 2016;Stuesse 2009). Thus, differences in status between U.S.-born Whites and Blacks, which are derived from past and present patterns of economic and political inequality, should be taken into account when interpreting attitudes among the U.S.-born toward immigrants (Brown and Jones 2015;Jung 2009;Kasinitz et al. 2008). ...
A notable increase in immigration into the United States over the past half century, coupled with its recent geographic dispersion into new communities nationwide, has fueled contact among a wider set of individuals and groups than ever before. Past research has helped us understand Whites’ and Blacks’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, and even how contact between Blacks and Whites have shaped their attitudes toward one another. Nevertheless, how contact between Blacks and Whites may correspond with attitudes toward immigrants is not as well understood. Drawing on an original representative survey, we examine U.S.-born Whites’ and Blacks’ attitudes toward Mexican and South Asian Indian immigrants within the context of ongoing relations between the former two U.S.-born communities. Informed by research on the secondary transfer effect (STE), we model how the frequency of contact between U.S.-born Whites and Blacks predicts each group’s receptivity toward two differentially positioned immigrant groups, first-generation Mexicans and South Asian Indians. Multivariate analysis indicates that, among Whites, more frequent contact with Blacks is positively associated with greater receptivity toward both immigrant outgroups, even after controlling for Whites’ individual perceptions of threat, their direct contact with the two immigrant groups, and the perceived quality of such contact. Among Blacks, however, we find less consistent evidence that frequent contact with Whites is associated with attitudes toward either immigrant group. While varied literatures across multiple disciplines have suggested that interracial relations among the U.S.-born may be associated with receptivity toward immigrant newcomers, our results uniquely highlight the importance of considering how U.S.-born groups are positioned in relation to immigrants and to each other when examining such effects.
... 19). Beaman thus provides an insightful model for how to fruitfully examine identity formation within an ethnic group without ignoring racialization (see Brown and Jones 2015). ...
Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. Edited By Jean Beaman. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 170 pp., $34.95 (paper) - Akasemi Newsome
... and the perception that diverse Aboriginal groups share some cultural attributes and beliefs (Frideres, 2008;Wilson & Peters, 2005). This phenomenon is not unique to Aboriginal peoples, and a broad literature in sociology has described the construction of such "panethnic" identities (e.g., Asian-Americans, Latino/a, etc.) as a process whereby heterogeneous ethnic groups are categorized homogeneously by a dominant outgroup, and the category then becomes politically useful as a tool for collective mobilization in resistance to shared oppression (Brown & Jones, 2015;Lopez & Espiritu, 1990). ...
Superordinate identities formed around shared oppression provide political and psychological resources for marginalized groups. However, superordinate identities can also threaten the identities of the subgroups they attempt to bring together. We examined how a superordinate identity was constructed to protect subgroup identities using data from 31 urban Aboriginal participants who strongly identified with both their subgroup (heritage cultures) and superordinate Aboriginal identities. Participants defined the superordinate Aboriginal identity as a fundamentally diverse category where no one subgroup was more representative of the wider category than others. Participants also put their respect for subgroup diversity into practice by regularly engaging with Aboriginal (subgroup) cultures other than their own. Finally, participants felt that representations of the superordinate Aboriginal category should prioritize local cultures. We discuss these findings in relation to research in social psychology on superordinate and subgroup identities, multiculturalism, and collective resistance and provide some suggestions for how this work may be extended.
... Our exploration of authenticity and its use in immigrant dance draws on and contributes to the sociological literature on ethnicity, race, and immigration. We echo the critique that sociological study of immigration has overwhelmingly focused on ethnicity and assimilation and underdeployed the lens of race and racism (Brown and Jones 2015;Saenz and Douglas 2015;Treitler 2015). We find it useful to distinguish ethnicity and race analytically: Ethnicity emphasizes peoplehood constructed through perpetuation of origin narratives and through interaction with institutions and other groups in society; race is a socially constructed category highlighting certain phenotypes that lead to stereotypes and systemic inequalities. ...
We investigate how Chinese and Peruvian immigrants in the United States construct the idea of authenticity through dance and what roles the discourse and practice surrounding authenticity play in the formation of racialized ethnic identities. This inquiry reveals that “authenticity” in the context of immigrant dance has two distinct but related dimensions; it is both a descriptor of cultural practice and a quality of individual subjectivities by which immigrants recognize the importance of dance for both cultural preservation and individual self-actualization. Additionally, through so-called authentic cultural practices such as dance, immigrants in the United States preserve their before-migration national identities. They do so in the institutional context of multiculturalism, where the host society’s demands for authenticity converge with immigrants’ desire for belonging and where immigrants experience racial formation and ethnic construction simultaneously.
Black women’s beauty experiences are deeply connected to their social and political locations. This study uses photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviewing with Black women in the United States to explore how they understand and express Black beauty. Participants’ embodied sense-making around beauty is grouped into three themes: ‘embodied resistance’, ‘Black feminisms and intersectionality’ and ‘Black pan-ethnicity’. Together, their insights reveal a new perspective on the meaning of Black beauty that I theorize as ‘ontological beauty’. Ontological beauty conceptualizes beauty as the culmination of a number of factors related to the nature of existence and being human. Further, ontological beauty can be applied to the body, fashion, aesthetics and other elements of embodiment. Ultimately, notions of Black beauty come into clearer legibility as inseparable from Black social and political experiences, locations and positionalities.
Using a relational perspective of ethnoracial formation, this article argues that ethnoracial identity is co-constructed in everyday interactions between the individual, their experiences of racialization, and the expectations of the ethnoracial community. Drawing on 49 interviews with transnational East and Southeast Asian adoptees, I explore how constructions of Asianness from different ethnoracial groups affect individual ethnoracial identity formation. I find that parents and non-Asian peers engage in ethnoracial socialization that teaches adoptees that they are disconnected and viewed outside of the Asian American community because they are adopted. This messaging shapes interactions with Asians and Asian Americans, where adoptees felt discomfort because they lacked ethnic cultural knowledge. However, positive interactions with co-ethnics, who affirmed that adoptees were Asian, helped Asian adoptees construct a new understanding of Asian identity that they could claim. Yet, adoptees saw this identity as conditional and felt they needed to disclose their adoption status to be accepted as Asian. This research highlights the centrality of ethnicity in the construction of Asianness and illustrates how ethnoracial groups inform, challenge, and renegotiate their identities in everyday life.
We conceptualize racialized and geopolitical contexts of reception as a comprehensive framework for understanding the incorporation of recent immigrants in new destinations. Racialization is the fluid assignment of racial meanings to physical characteristics, religion, cultural presentation, and language. Geopolitics encompasses national boundaries, border security, regulation of border crossers, and populist–nativist anxieties about identity. We use data derived from a documentary film depicting the 2001 contact between Somali immigrants and a host community in Maine. The reception of these immigrants was profoundly racialized due to their sudden arrival and stark differences in phenotypic, cultural, religious, and linguistic characteristics, all of which were racialized by the host community. The context was geopolitically charged by local memories of the US intervention in Somalia and by the aftermath of 9/11. This study underscores the importance of racialization and geopolitics as intertwined factors that significantly shape immigrant contexts of reception.
The historically dominant ideology, racial ambiguity, has structured Brazilian beliefs, opinions, and worldviews. Its antithesis, racial affirmation, has gained wider acceptance on a national scale due to Brazil’s Black movement and affirmative action policies. Which racial ideology do Brazilians employ within the context of police killings of Afro-Brazilians? Do Brazilians emphasize racial stories and ethnoracial categories of ambiguity or affirmation? I use computational text analysis and qualitative interpretation of Twitter data in Portuguese from 2019 to 2021 to analyze five prominent Brazilian cases of racial violence—Pedro Gonzaga, Ágatha Félix, João Pedro, João Alberto, and Kathlen Romeu. These cases create opportunities to examine the contours and tensions of Brazilian racial ideologies on social media. Across the five cases, I find Brazilians primarily use the ethnoracial category negro and foreground stories of racial affirmation. These racial stories align with the frames and identities the Black movement has struggled to promote for generations. In contrast to earlier scholarship that notes the ineffectiveness of the Black movement in Brazil to create a mass movement or a popular negro identity, I find the Black movement’s framing and ethnoracial category resonate with urban Brazilian Twitter users.
One of the central issues in the study of race and ethnicity is ontology. That is, after decades of scientific inquiry, we continue to debate definitions for race and ethnicity. Broadly speaking, the questions that frame this debate are: what is race, what is ethnicity, are they the same, or are they different? As this debate continues, many are using an amalgamated term— ethnoracial. However, there is yet no formal definition or ontology for this term. Indeed, most seem to use it to avoid getting entangled in the often contentious and still ongoing debate on ontologies for race and ethnicity. That is, most seem to use this term to avoid questions and concerns associated with the underlying ‘nature’ of these group formations and, instead, seek to focus the readers’ attention on their descriptions of and explanations for the associated intergroup identities, conflicts and disparities. Within this context, and given certain anomalies I have come across in my studies of the relative positioning of African Americans and Black immigrants in the United States, I am calling for the formal development of a new ontology for the study of race and ethnicity. The crux of my argument is that, since processes of racialization and/or ethnogenesis emerge in the wake of human migrations—to include international migration, internal migration, colonialism, and slavery—they yield a single underlying ontology— ethnoraciality.
Few studies of romantic unions focus on interethnic preferences among Asians and Latinos to discern the salience of panethnicity in dating. Using unique mixed-methods data, which disaggregates the ethnic identity of respondents and their preferred partners, we examine patterns of panethnic and non-panethnic dating choices among Asian and Latino college students and their explanations for their preferences. We find that Asian college students, except for Filipinos, desire co-panethnic partners more than Latinos do, although only certain co-panethnics are preferred. Students use narratives about culture, phenotype, family, and familiarity in different ways to justify their preferences. In some cases, these criteria guide them to preferences in line with common understandings of where panethnic boundaries lie. In others, preferences reveal alternative conceptions of group boundaries based on phenotypic and cultural differences with co-panethnics or similarities across panethnic lines. These findings complicate existing understandings of panethnicity and challenge the durability of panethnic boundaries.
The national movement for Asian American Studies (AASs) curriculum at the K‐12 level has burgeoned during the COVID‐19 pandemic and the subsequent surge of anti‐Asian hate. Seventeen states proposed legislation requiring AAS content in their public schools and ten states have now mandated it. Using case studies of two states, Illinois and New Jersey, this article details how community activists and elected legislators framed their campaigns to successfully pass their bills. In both states, the campaigns utilized diagnostic frames from the broader Asian American movement. However, they also incorporated and developed prognostic frames and motivational frames more resonant with the current moment. Notably, stakeholders focused on organizing around a winnable issue, with an emphasis on racial bullying in New Jersey and multiracial solidarity and inclusion in Illinois.
Recent studies on political attitude formations have developed the ethnoracialization framework, which emphasizes the roles of racial hierarchies and ethnic identities interconnected with national origins. However, existing research has not established analytical strategies to incorporate this framework, leaving a gap between theory and practice. We propose an alternative analytical model to examine ethnoracialized political attitudes using the case of Asian Americans’ support for race-conscious college admissions. Using data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey, our effect coding reveals how Asian Americans’ race-conscious admissions attitudes vary by ethnicity. Then, we investigate whether this variation can be attributed to theoretical predictors of such attitudes, including the mention of previously supportive Supreme Court decisions on race-conscious admissions, through regression modeling. Most ethnic groups’ mean support scores significantly vary from the grand mean of Asian Americans, and those gaps remain significant even after controlling for socioeconomic backgrounds and general predictors. As an exception, redistributionism accounted for some ethnic variations. Certain predictors such as individual experiences of the U.S. opportunity structure and the racial justice frame shaped overall race-conscious admissions attitudes but did not reduce ethnic variations. These findings highlight the need for increased attention to the analysis of ethnic communities when studying ethnoracialized political attitudes, as our current theories appear insufficient in explaining variations observed between ethnic groups. Thus, conducting research that explores the interplay between Asian Americans, racialization, and ethnic communities will provide a more comprehensive understanding of Asian Americans and potentially other ethnoracialized groups.
Arab Americans are fertile ground for scholars interested in studying processes of racialization and race-making. The ambiguous, or “in-between,” racial status of this population has caused some obstacles for scholars attempting to theorize the source and persistence of discrimination against this group. This article attempts to address these paradoxes by examining the history of Arab ethnic and racial activism in the civil rights/Cold War period and uses this empirical case to argue for an historical interpretation of Arab racialization. Specifically, this article asks two questions: “What international and historical contexts shaped the development of Arab ethnic identity in the United States?” and “How do these historical mechanisms inform and amend current theories of Arab racialization?” To answer these, the article employs a “theoretical frontier” analytic architecture to analyze archival sources documenting Arab ethnic advocacy and organizing strategies during the critical civil rights/Cold War period. The article finds that prominent Arab organizations and their leaders navigated a hostile American public that levied both politically and ethnically motivated attacks against their advocacy, and argues that this historical context in turn shaped later Arab organizations’ approach to formal recognition as an ethnic and racial group. Ultimately, the article argues that racialization—in this case, the decision by Arab organizations beginning in the mid-1970s to pursue a project of Arab ethnic advocacy disarticulated from its political origins—was an historical development that requires reckoning with within the theoretical literature on Arab ethnic formation.
Because of the Republican Party’s racist rhetoric, Latinx Republicans are considered paradoxes as their partisanship contradict perceptions of Latinxs’ sociopolitical interests. Methodologically departing from prior Latinx politics research, this study employs qualitative methods to understand how Latinx Republicans interpretively link ethnoracial and partisan identities. Drawing on original interviews with Latinx Republicans, I argue that respondents are not paradoxes but strategic actors engaging in politics that align with respondents’ interpretations of their social identities. Specifically, I develop the concept of “assimilated consciousness”—how Latinx Republicans politicize ethnoracial identity by disaggregating Latinx groupness and positioning themselves in opposition to other racialized people. I show how most respondents reject seeing racism as systemic, perceive themselves as assimilated, and subsequently use interpretive tools to distance themselves from other Latinxs and Black Americans; minimize racist Republican rhetoric; and maximize problematic Democratic rhetoric. In doing so, respondents reconcile the relationship between their ethnoracial and partisan identifications. I further employ the concept of assimilated consciousness to show how a minority of respondents rejected the Republican Party due to Trump’s and Trump supporters’ racist rhetoric. Overall, I contend my findings provide a better understanding of how racialized immigration processes shape ethnoracial and political identities.
Far-right politics has gained significant support across Europe in recent decades. Previous literature has investigated the conditions that lead to immigrants being perceived as “threats”, leading to increased support for anti-immigrant parties. However, how certain “shock events” – times of dramatic change – mobilize far-right support around anti-immigrant sentiment has been understudied. Drawing on social movement literature, I examine how support for anti-immigrant politics was driven by demographic change during the “refugee crisis” in Sweden. I use a unique dataset on Swedish municipalities (N = 290) between 2014 and 2018 to examine the relationship between immigration and far-right outcomes. I show that increases in Syrian immigrants during the “refugee crisis” led to significant gains in support for anti-immigrant politics at the municipal level. I suggest that the “refugee crisis” constituted a politicized ethno-racial shock that lead to increases in far-right support, as political actors seized on increased immigration to mobilize around threat perceptions.
As immigrant rights movements and anti-immigrant mobilizations engage in contentious battles for public support, it is increasingly essential to understand how these opposing political forces develop strategic alliances, garnering power, and shaping larger debates around immigration. Using newspaper data, this study compares case studies of immigrant rights and nativist battles in two mobilizations—the 2012 “No Papers, No Fear Ride for Justice” during the Obama Era and the 2018 “Family Separation Protests” during the Trump Era—to analyze how movements and counter-movements strategically deploy frames to generate or disrupt strategic alliances. Findings identify strategic racial frame deployment as a mechanism that can either amplify or obfuscate racial meanings, enabling, and constraining counter-frames by rival movements. I highlight patterns in how these racial frames are used in framing contests to bring groups together in alliances or wedge groups apart, illuminating the underlying system of racialization as it shapes intergroup boundaries, its limits, and its radical possibilities for transformation.
In this article, we investigate the role that pro-immigrant organizations play in immigrant racialization. Drawing on a critical case study from the longest standing immigrant rights organization in North Carolina, we demonstrate how immigrant rights organizations can racialize new Latinx arrivals even as they advocate for them. We interrogate the organization’s multi-year, state-wide campaign to counteract mounting public characterizations of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Analyzing a critical juncture in this campaign, we demonstrate how El Pueblo, in their effort to contest the mainstream racialization of Latinxs, unintentionally doubled down on that same racialization, buying into respectability politics and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes of Latinxs. We outline three central maneuvers that grounded this particular respectability politics campaign and demonstrate the utility of respectability politics as a framework for understanding organizational racialization processes. These findings suggest the need to shift focus toward community organizations as key sites of immigrant racialization and highlight the need for inquiry into the racialized assumptions of pro-immigrant forces.
Asian American panethnicity was conceptualized to unify ethnic groups and represent their sociopolitical interests. Increasingly however, scholars have questioned whether panethnicity accurately reflects the diversity of different ethnic groups’ experiences and identities. In mainstream culture, “Asian American” has become synonymous with East Asian Americans and stereotypes—albeit biased ones—of their affluence, thus erasing the realities of working-class, South, and Southeast Asian Americans (SEAAs). I focus on the last group and join other scholars in emphasizing how ethnic groups’ unique historical relationships with the United States differentially impact their racial identities and attachments to panethnicity. Using 62 interviews with Southeast Asian refugees and service providers in North Carolina, I explore how a term I call “quiet neglect”—the U.S. institutionalized silence around the Vietnam and Secret Wars that has led to an erasure of SEAAs’ needs—shape their connections to Asian American panethnicity and decision to align with alternative identities. At stake in this study is our capacity to recognize individuals’ agency to challenge racial boundaries and assert identities that they find meaningful. In addition, I examine how SEAAs situate themselves within our broader racial structure and harness their identities to connect with other people of color.
Sociologists recognize that symbolic boundaries may be activated and reinforced through the production and consumption of cultural objects. Less attention, however, has been paid to the role of advertising as an ascriptive boundary-making mechanism in the life cycles of objects. Using the case of the electric guitar, this study examines how a cultural object-pioneered and popularized by Black celebrity guitarists became homologous with White masculinity through the production and circulation of visual images featured in advertising materials. Data come from product catalogs circulated by the two preeminent electric guitar brands during the instrument’s large-scale production and consumption in the United States (1955–1982). I conduct a content analysis of annual product catalogs focusing on the proportional representation of visual images of Black and White celebrity guitarists. Findings indicate that Black celebrity guitarists were rarely featured in advertising materials despite their exclusive use of both brands’ instruments. Consistent with segregationist logics embedded in modern advertising, Black celebrity guitarists were rendered non-existent and replaced with images of White celebrity guitarists and depictions of middle-class White masculinity. I interpret my findings as evidence of the prevalence of segregationist era logics in the advertising and construction of the electric guitar as a racialized and gendered cultural object. I conclude by discussing how this study advances recent scholarship concerning racial inequities in the consumer marketplace and the significance of ascriptive boundaries in the production and consumption of cultural objects.
This paper aims to explore attitudes toward immigration among two non-White groups, Asian Americans and Black Americans. For more than a decade, individuals from Asia have comprised the majority of immigrants entering the United States each year. Today, the majority of the Asian American U.S. population remains foreign-born. Yet using data collected from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey and the 2016 National Asian American Survey—a time period marked by high levels of saliency with regard to immigration issues—we find that Black Americans, the majority of whom are U.S.-born, exhibit even more progressive attitudes towards immigration, both legal and undocumented, than mostly foreign-born Asian Americans. Our research challenges economic and material theories related to immigration attitudes and suggests that political connections to and “linked fate” with other minorities better explain why Black Americans exhibit more progressive attitudes toward immigration than Asian Americans.
Recent scholarship on ethnoracial identity formation documents the growth of panethnic and regionalised identities in the United States, which individuals express in response to both external racialisation processes as well as meta-group identity assertions by multiple ethnic groups. Yet how are panethnic identities shaped by organisational contexts, and how might the way individuals enact these group identities contribute to exclusionary processes? Examining the case of Local identity in Hawai’i, this study explores how third and fourth-generation Japanese and Chinese workers articulate a panethnic identity within a white-collar office. They do so by drawing racialized boundaries against Haoles (whites) as well as internal group hierarchies informed by ethnicity and class. The panethnic boundaries that workers enact ultimately reinforce the dominant position of Japanese and Chinese workers within the workplace, and within this region more broadly. I close by elaborating on how panethnic boundary-making reconfigure symbolic ethnoracial hierarchies within institutional settings while simultaneously serving as exclusionary criteria towards panethnic subgroups.
Through the lens of racialized incorporation, this paper draws upon three decades of surveys and interviews to analyze the initial experiences of young adult Hmong migrants in the United States. The first part describes the aspirations and understandings of these young adults as adolescents (circa 1989–1994). Early in resettlement, they, like their parents, stressed education and mobility; however, in contrast to traditional assimilation theory and model minority stereotypes, their aspirations were oriented toward family, traditions, and ethnic identification. The second section (2002–2007) documents how they came to embrace a distinctive bicultural identity during the transition to adulthood even as they became increasingly aware of its tenuousness, the constraints of racism, and their own complicated place in American racial hierarchies. Focused on ethnic identity and the complexity of racialization, the Hmong case provides the foundation for theorizing varied patterns of incorporation and the value of multi-method, life-course approaches.
Introduction:
Filipinxs are the second-largest Asian subgroup in the USA. While Filipinxs are most often considered Asian when constructing aggregate ethnic categories, recent research has identified a trend of a small portion of Filipinxs identifying as Latinx or multiracial. However, little research had addressed how identification with different aggregate ethnic categories may have implications for identifying health disparities among Filipinxs and how these compare to non-Hispanic whites.
Methods:
Bivariate and multivariable regression analyses using 2011-2018 California Health Interview Survey data, comparing Asian Filipinxs, Latinx Filipinxs, and multiracial Filipinxs.
Results:
In bivariate analyses, Asian Filipinxs had a higher prevalence of diabetes than Latinx or multiracial Filipinxs. After controlling for sociodemographics, Latinx Filipinxs had significantly lower odds of having diabetes or heart disease than Asian Filipinxs. Compared to non-Latinx Whites, Asian Filipinxs reported higher odds of being in fair/poor health, obese or overweight, high blood pressure, and diabetes, multiracial Filipinxs reported higher odds of being obese or overweight, and Latinx Filipinxs reported lower odds of heart disease.
Discussion:
These findings suggest emerging differences in health linked to identification with different ethnic categories, underscoring the need to investigate nuances among Filipinxs in future research as well as highlighting the utility of emerging sociological insights in health research.
Of course, ensuring safe environments in the U.S. educational system is paramount. It is also evident, however, inequalities associated with immigration, race/ethnicity, and situational context can impede school safety pursuits. Although prior research has revealed a pattern between “downward” assimilation and increased experiences with student-level violence and disorder for the children of racial/ethnic immigrants (i.e., first- and second-generation), investigations about school-level rates of violence and disorder associated with the context of reception remain uncertain. Our study seeks to contribute to the research about immigration, racial/ethnic inequality, education, and violence by examining the associations between context, school violence, and crime, and the schooling of children of immigrants by drawing on a context of reception conceptual framework to address three research questions. First, is there an association between an increasing proportion of children of immigrants and school crimes (i.e., violence, property damage, and substance use)? Second, are there differences linked to the context of reception (i.e., urban, suburban, town, and rural) in the association between the increasing proportion of children of immigrants and school crime? Third, are there racial/ethnic differences in the association between the increasing proportion of children of immigrants and school crimes in distinct contexts? Findings indicate that the children of racial/ethnic minority immigrants have significantly distinct associations with rates of school violence and crime across all contexts; however, there are important and distinctive nuances that are presented and examined.
This paper compares the identity formation processes of Latinx 1.5 undocumented and 2nd generation young adults in a new immigrant-receiving community. Drawing on life narrative interviews, I apply the nested contexts of reception framework to examine how processes of racialized immigrant incorporation shape variation in Latinx identity development. The findings show, first, how changes in the national legal context via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) matter for inclusion and as a result, shifts in Latinx identities. Second, among a subset of 2nd generation respondents, the local societal hostility toward the Latinx community shaped the continual pride in their Latinx identities. Lastly, the local postsecondary institutions contributed to empowered Latinx identities. The implications of the findings suggest that, by centring the role of nested contexts in one new Latinx immigrant community we can understand the extent to which incorporation is occurring and how it shapes changes in ethnoracial identities.
This article examines Latino students’ experiences within two elite educational contexts: an elite liberal arts college and an elite law school. Drawing on combined data of 42 in‐depth interviews, we interrogate how elite institutional spaces reify and shape panethnic identities. In the face of marginalization in predominantly white, elite spaces Latino students strategically search for new community and comfort, which in turn influence how they perceive their identities, encouraging a broadening of boundaries to include both panethnic and minority alliances. By documenting the experiences of Latino students in two stages of the educational pipeline, we show how elite institutions influence identity talk lead students to cultivate a sense of shared fate with other Latino‐origin individuals and at times, people of color in general.
This article reveals how Nigerians in the U.S. negotiate their multiple forms of Black racialization. They incorporate both local and global social scripts within their intersected subjectivities as part of the following communities: Black American, Black immigrant, and post-independence Black African (Nigerian). I use a historically-informed ethnography of Nigerian middle-class communities in Houston, Texas to convey the distinct but overlapping sociohistorical realities that makeup definitions of Blackness for my interlocutors. I argue that Nigerians in Houston, Texas embody global intersecting modalities of Blackness where race and ethnicity are interconnected, existing within a global frame, and grounded in contemporary Nigeria. I demonstrate how “localized Blackness” as a politics of solidarity confines race and Blackness to the U.S., which limits post-independence Nigerians’ racialized reality. This article moves from police brutality to U.S. anti-Black immigration laws and the Nigeria-Biafra war (genocide) to help us think about racialization globally and across time and space.
Scholarship on Jewishness has often assumed that race, ethnicity, and religion are discrete categories. This review article surveys the place of Jewishness within race literature, ethnicity literature, and sociological religion literature, and offers a new theoretical framework for considering Jewishness as sui generis – of its own unique quality. The categories of race, ethnicity, and religion must be theorized as a system of interconnected frames and processes that overlap, interact, and are co-constituted. This web of frames and processes must be situated within the larger social system and meanings that construct Jewishness alongside other subjectivities.
Existing paradigms of immigrant incorporation fruitfully describe immigrants’ upward or downward mobility across generations. Yet we know very little about intragenerational change. Drawing on a case in which upwardly mobile Latino immigrants see their gains reversed, I model what I call intragenerational reverse incorporation. In doing so, I theorize how incorporation gains can be undone through institutional closure and shifts in reception attitudes spurred by securitization and intensified immigration enforcement. Drawing on data gathered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I show how these changes both marginalized and racialized Latino immigrants, who in turn internalized and politicized their new status.
This study’s motivating premise is that the ideological context around race, ethnicity, and nationhood shapes the immigration politics of Mexican Americans in distinct eras of U.S. history. To examine this proposition we identify two cohorts of Mexican Americans—those who came of age in the World War II era and those who grew up during and after the Civil Rights movement—and examine whether there are systematic differences in how members of these cohorts interpret immigration issues. In line with our expectations, group consciousness predicts the attitudes of the Civil Rights cohort, but not of those in the World War II cohort. Furthermore, the predictive power of generational status—a centerpiece of assimilation-based analyses of Latinos’ immigration attitudes—ceases after the second generation. Together, these findings support our argument that Mexican Americans’ position on the immigration debate is not simply a function of varied levels of assimilation or group attachments, but is also shaped by the national ideological context around immigration in the United States. Our work provides the most comprehensive analysis of Mexican Americans’ immigration attitudes to date, filling gaps for scholars interested in the effects of assimilation, group consciousness, and temporal effects on Latino public opinion. This work also highlights the need to incorporate temporal measures into research on Latinos’ complex relationship to co-ethnic immigrants.
National civic integration programs for non-European migrants have become increasingly common across Europe. While the official purpose of these programs is to facilitate migrants’ entry into society, scholars argue that they may actually reinforce the boundaries that separate migrants from the national community. To address this potential paradox, I propose a theoretical framework that combines the concepts of racialization and symbolic boundaries and effectively locates integration programs in the long historical relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans. In applying this framework, this article draws on an ethnography of the French civic integration program – the “Reception and Integration Contract” – and interviews with program staff. I find that the program represents the French nation as modern, secular, and striving towards gender equality, and immigrants as traditional with patriarchal gender relations and public religious practices that conflict with the values of the French Republic. Using these representations, the program discursively draws racialized boundaries between the French nation and participating migrants based on language, culture, and religion. While program personnel with immigrant origins challenge and blur these boundaries, they also often reinforce them and facilitate this process of racialization. Overall, the essentialist and hierarchical representations within the program discourses appear to reproduce the historical contrast between European and non-European and limit the possibilities for boundary crossing and entry into the nation.
This article explores how Africans born or raised in the United States employ ethnicity to understand their racial and cultural identities. I argue that African immigrants engage positive narratives about Africa along with their experiences of anti-black racism to articulate identities as “Africans of the world”. I call this articulation of identity Afropolitan projects. The Afropolitan as an ethnicity is not meant to shield Africans from anti-black racism, but instead helps articulate a particular relationship to this form of inequality. The following analysis derives from a qualitative case study of a voluntary association comprising Ghanaians primarily raised in the United States. I find that the group’s identity is as much about being black, African, and American as it is about being middle-class, Christian, and heterosexual. Through their Afropolitan projects, this group emphasizes solidarities with a global middle-class heterosexual patriarchy while foreclosing solidarities with working class, queer, and other people of colour.
Educational research indicates that teachers revealing and utilizing students’ prior knowledge supports students’ academic learning. Yet, the variation in students’ prior knowledge is not fully known. To better understand students’ prior knowledge, I drew on sociocultural learning theories to examine racially and ethnically diverse college students’ sociopolitical prior knowledge, a component of sociopolitical consciousness. In this qualitative study, I interviewed 18 first-generation college students in the U.S. who were enrolled in two introductory undergraduate sociology courses. Study participants identified as African-American, Latino, and/or White. The study reveals that students’ sociopolitical prior knowledge is comprised of awareness and understanding and it varies by topic of discussion. Further, college students’ sociopolitical prior knowledge is informed by lived experiences and can relate to subject-matter content. Implications for teaching and learning include having a deepened sense of novice learners’ modes of thinking.
What role does skin color play in the racial experiences of new immigrant groups as they settle in the U.S.? To answer this question, I systematically examine the role of skin color in structuring experiences of race and ethnicity for second generation South Asians, a group characterized as doing well economically and thus seen as a model for�contemporary�assimilation. Through 120 in-depth interviews and supplemental ethnographic observations, I find that skin color is central to the routine racial experiences of the second generation. South Asian racial formation is dually impacted by both the U.S. racial classification system and transnational colorism based on class and caste stratification from South Asia. Previous research on Latino/as demonstrates that transnational systems of stratification have impact on the lives of first generation immigrants. This study reveals the enduring impact of such systems in the racial formation even for the second generation. Early on South Asian women hear comments about their skin color from first generation family members. These comments are deployed as policing strategies influenced by the transnational South Asian colorism system. South Asian men are less policed about their bodies with the exception of men on the darker end of the spectrum. The skin color of South Asians also has significance under the regime of a U.S. racial system in the post-9/11 era. The racialization extremes they experience from “model minority” to “terrorist” due to their skin color can occur daily with a shift in social settings. As such, South Asians are routinely mistaken for a wide variety of other racial groups such as Latino or Middle Eastern due to their skin color. The outcomes indicate the formation of a racial middle and a tri-racial system. Racial ambiguity may be a characteristic feature of the racial middle. The formation of the racial middle is not just an outcome of Black and White relations in the U.S. but also due to the impact of transnational colorism. The United States is not only going through Latin Americanization but also Asianization of its racial system.
Panethnicity has become a significant form of identification across the globe. Categories, such as Latino and Asian American, but also identities, such as Yoruba and European, have been embraced by a growing number of individuals and institutions. In this article, we focus on three main issues: panethnic identification, the conditions under which panethnic categories are constructed, and recent directions in the field. We argue that panethnicity is characterized by a unique tension inherent in maintaining subgroup distinctions while generating a broader sense of solidarity. This tension distinguishes panethnicity as a form of ethnic expression because it places questions of subgroup diversity and cultural legitimacy at the forefront. As such, the study of panethnicity encourages researchers to take intragroup dynamics seriously and explore how conflicts between subgroups are often negotiated or muted in ethnic mobilization and categorization processes. We call for more research that moves beyond the US case study design and makes panethnic processes explicit in international research on race, ethnicity, and nationalism.
This study examines how race and generational status shape self-employment propensities and industry-sector prestige among the self-employed in the U.S. It draws on theories of assimilation, racialization, and a combined framework, racialized incorporation, to guide the analysis and interpret the results. It uses data from the U.S. March Current Population Survey (2000–2010) offering the first nationally representative examination of second-generation self-employment in the U.S. This study investigates three questions. First, do the odds of being self-employed decline in the second and third generations? Second, do generational patterns in self-employment propensities vary by race? And finally, do race and generational status affect the odds of being self-employed in low-, medium-, and high-prestige industry sectors? Results offer some support for the assimilation perspective: Immigrants are generally more likely than third-generation groups to be self-employed with the exception of Asians, where second-generation Asians have the greatest odds of being self-employed. However, results also reveal that generational patterns in self-employment propensities vary by race and industry-sector prestige. Accordingly, first- and second-generation Whites have the greatest odds of being self-employed (across all levels of industry-sector prestige), and third-generation Whites are more likely than all generations of Blacks and Hispanics to be engaged in high-prestige self-employment. These findings suggest that immigrants, their offspring, and native-born groups undergo a racialized incorporation in which self-employment is organized along hierarchical and racial lines associated with uneven levels of prestige.
In Census 2000, approximately 15 percent of all Latinos identified panethnically: that is, they did not mark whether they were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or another national group but rather identified themselves in general terms such as “Hispanic” or “Latino.” This was a 200 percent increase over the 1990 Census. Scholars have pointed to two explanations for Latino panethnic identification: first, that panethnicity is a meaningful identity stemming from shared backgrounds and structural commonalities and the need to unite politically and, second, that Latino panethnicity is a methodological artifact of the way that racial and ethnic data are currently collected. In this paper, we describe past research on Latino ethnic identity, document contemporary expressions of Latino panethnicity, and assess whether panethnicity is a genuine, meaningful identity for some Latinos and stems from methodological factors. Our assessment of Census 2000, the Census 2000 Supplementary Survey, the 2002 National Survey of Latinos, and the Alternative Questionnaire Experiment is that Latino panethnicity is both a substantive and a methodological phenomenon. Consequently, we encourage researchers to acknowledge the complexity and fluidity of Latino ethnicity, to recognize the influence of substantive and methodological factors on Latino panethnicity, and to incorporate multiple data sources in their research.
This analysis extends theoretical models of ethnic boundary formation to account for the shifting and layered nature of ethnic boundaries. It focuses on the underlying structural conditions that facilitate the expansion of ethnic boundaries or the con- struction of a pan-national identity, and explores how organizing along an ethnic boundary affects collective efforts at the panethnic level. Two processes could be occurring: (1) Competition with other ethnic or racial groups could lead groups with different national origins to engage in collective action based on a pan-na- tional boundary, or (2) occupational segregation could foster pan-national interests and networks that lead groups to participate in pan-national collective action. Using a new longitudinal data set of collective action events involving Asian Americans, the analyses indicate that the segregation of Asians as a group raises the frequency of pan-national collective action, while the segregation among Asian subgroups depresses the rate of pan-Asian collective action. The results also show that intra- group competition discourages pan-Asian collective action, and organizing along ethnic lines generally facilitates it. Overall, these findings are consistent with the cultural division of labor theory, which suggests that segregation processes influ- ence panethnic collective action due to intragroup interaction, common economic interests, and membership in a community of fate.
In the wake of the civil rights movement, new organizations formed which were based on the collective interests and identities
of their constituencies. Some of these organizations brought together national origin groups who often differed by ethnicity,
language, culture, religion and immigration history. In this paper, I focus on the conditions that facilitate the institutionalization
of a socially constructed panethnic community. Using a new longitudinal data set of Asian American organizations, I draw upon
a theory of panethnicity which emphasizes the structured relations between groups at different boundary levels to understand
panethnic organizational foundings. When controlling for resource availability, political opportunities and organizational
dynamics, the boundary formation variables remain important in explaining new organizational activity.
Over the past four decades, immigration has increased the racial and ethnic diversity in the United States. Once a mainly biracial society with a large white majority and relatively small black minority—and an impenetrable color line dividing these groups—the United States is now a society composed of multiple racial and ethnic groups. Along with increased immigration are rises in the rates of racial/ethnic intermarriage, which in turn have led to a sizeable and growing multiracial population. Currently, 1 in 40 persons identifies himself or herself as multiracial, and this figure could soar to 1 in 5 by the year 2050. Increased racial and ethnic diversity brought about by the new immigration, rising intermarriage, and patterns of multiracial identi-fication may be moving the nation far beyond the traditional and relatively persistent black/white color line. In this chapter, we review the extant theories and recent findings concerning immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification, and consider the implications for America's changing color lines. In particular, we assess whether racial boundaries are fading for all groups or whether America's newcomers are simply cross-ing over the color line rather than helping to eradicate it.
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Ethnic renewal is the reconstruction of one's ethnic identity by reclaiming a discarded identity, replacing or amending an identity in an existing ethnic identity repertoire, or filling a personal ethnic void. Between 1960 and 1990, the number of Americans reporting an American Indian race in the U.S. Census more than tripled. This increase cannot be accounted for by simple population growth (increased births, decreased deaths, immigration), or by changing enumeration definitions or techniques. Researchers have concluded that much of this growth in the American Indian population results from "ethnic switching," where individuals who previously identified themselves as "non-Indian" changed their race to "Indian" in a later census. The question posed here is: Why does such ethnic switching occur? Drawing on historical analyses and interview data, I argue that this growth in the American Indian population is one instance of ethnic renewal. I identify three factors promoting individual ethnic renewal: (1) federal Indian policy, (2) American ethnic politics, and (3) American Indian political activism. These three political factors raised American Indian ethnic consciousness and encouraged individuals to claim or reclaim their Native American ancestry, contributing to the observed Indian census population increase. American Indian ethnic renewal contributes to our general understanding of how ethnicity is socially constructed.
Patterns of racial classification in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health are examined. The survey's large sample size and multiple indicators of race permit generalizable claims about patterns and processes of social construction in the racial categorization of adolescents. About 12 percent of youth provide inconsistent responses to nearly identical questions about race, context affects one's choice of a single-race identity, and nearly all patterns and processes of racial classification depend on which racial groups are involved. The implications of the findings are discussed for users of data on race in general, and for the new census data in particular.
The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.
In this article, I investigate how race is produced by looking at the reception experiences of Afro and Mestizo Mexican migrants to the new South. Despite the fact that Afro and Mestizo Mexicans are both phenotypically and culturally distinct from one another, they assert a shared racial identity as minorities and as Latinos. On the basis of ethnographic field work in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I argue that their perceived similarities with African Americans and pervasive discrimination owing to status drives Afro-Mexicans to assert a race-based Latino identity that is shaped by their understanding of African American experiences.
This article examines how second-generation Filipinos understand their panethnic identity, given their historical connection with both Asians and Latinos, two of the largest panethnic groups in the USA. While previous studies show panethnicity to be a function of shared political interests or class status, I argue that the cultural residuals of historical colonialism in the Philippines, by both Spain and the USA, shape how Filipinos negotiate panethnic boundaries with Asians and Latinos, albeit in different ways. Filipinos cite the cultural remnants of US colonialism as a reason to racially demarcate themselves from Asians, and they allude to the legacies of Spanish colonialism to blur boundaries with Latinos. While the colonial history of Filipinos is unique, these findings have implications for better understanding racialization in an increasingly multiethnic society – namely, how historical legacies in sending societies interact with new racial contexts to influence panethnic identity development.
Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context, and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building through ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that over time, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity. In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.
Panethnicity ‐ the development of bridging organizations and the generalization of solidarity among ethnic subgroups ‐ is important theoretically because it focuses attention on ethnic change, and allows one to assess the relative importance of structural and cultural factors. In this article we present a framework for the study of panethnicity, generate research questions from this framework, and then test these questions by examining panethnicity within four broad racial/ethnic groupings: Asian Americans, Native Americans, Indo Americans and Latinos in the United States. A review of these four cases demonstrates that those groups with the greatest cross‐subgroup structural similarity (Asian Americans and Indo Americans) also display the greatest panethnic development and potential, despite their considerable cultural diversity. This suggests that structural factors are more important for understanding the development of panethnicity and, by extension, for understanding ethnic change generally.
In an electoral system governed by the plurality rule, those groups who wield the greatest amount of power in the United States are those who vote as a cohesive bloc. Although the size of the Latino population is growing, it is unclear whether all Latinos perceive a shared collective identity that will be exercised in the political realm. This study uses the Latino National Survey, a nationally representative telephone survey of 8,600 Latino adults, to examine how individual Latinos perceive their personal fates and the fate of their national origin group with the larger panethnic community. The authors utilize ordered logistic regression analysis to test their hypotheses regarding the impact of immigration experiences, race, and socioeconomic status on Latino linked fate. Results suggest that linked fate for Latinos may be a temporary phenomenon, as linked fate for Latinos appears to be based on marginalization derived from economic status and immigration experiences.
Although studies of minority political participation often emphasize the link between socioeconomic variables or between mobilization and political participation, little empirical research has investigated the effects of group consciousness on Latino political participation. This article examines this relationship using a multidimensional conception of group consciousness. Specifically, I argue that Latinos who self-identify using a pan-ethnic identifier, express dissatisfaction with access to political and material resources, and credit failure to succeed to systemic inequity are more likely to participate in political activities. The results of ordinary least squares models suggest that group consciousness increases Latino political participation; however, the components of group consciousness that increase political participation vary for each Latino subgroup. These findings raise serious questions about what can motivate specific Latino subgroups to participate in a wide range of political activities.
Primordialist and constructivist authors have debated the nature of ethnicity "as such" and therefore failed to explain why its characteristics vary so dramatically across cases, displaying different degrees of social closure, political salience, cultural distinctiveness, and historical stability. The author introduces a multilevel process theory to understand how these characteristics are generated and transformed over time. The theory assumes that ethnic boundaries are the outcome of the classificatory struggles and negotiations between actors situated in a social field. Three characteristics of a field - the institutional order, distribution of power, and political networks determine which actors will adopt which strategy of ethnic boundary making. The author then discusses the conditions under which these negotiations will lead to a shared understanding of the location and meaning of boundaries. The nature of this consensus explains the particular characteristics of an ethnic boundary. A final section identifies endogenous and exogenous mechanisms of change.
This article explores the contested meanings of the ‘Asian American’ concept in the US today. Since its emergence in the late 1960s, ‘Asian American’ has been defined by pan-Asian groups and organizations in the US as a collectivity bound by shared racial interests. Contemporary conditions have sharpened and highlighted the inherent contradictions and ambiguities of this conception of ‘Asian American’ as a racial interest group. Especially important have been the shifts in the composition of the Asian American population that followed the immigration reforms of 1965. Contestations of ‘Asian American’ also reflect larger uncertainties about the meaning of race in the US today, in particular, the nature of racial boundaries and racial disadvantage.
The study of race and ethnic conflict historically has been hampered by in- adequate and simplistic theories. I contend that the central problem of the various approaches to the study of racial phenomena is their lack of a struc- tural theory of racism. I review traditional approaches and alternative ap- proaches to the study of racism, and discuss their limitations. Following the leads suggested by some of the alternative frameworks, I advance a struc- tural theory of racism based on the notion of racialized social systems. "The habit of considering racism as a men- tal quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned." -Frantz Fanon (1967:77) he area of race and ethnic studies lacks a _ sound theoretical apparatus. To compli- cate matters, many analysts of racial matters have abandoned the serious theorization and reconceptualization of their central topic: rac- ism. Too many social analysts researching racism assume that the phenomenon is self- evident, and therefore either do not provide a definition or provide an elementary definition (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985; Sniderman and Piazza 1993). Nevertheless, whether im- plicitly or explicitly, most analysts regard rac- ism as a purely ideological phenomenon.
This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates through social movement abeyance structures. Five characteristics of movement abeyance structures are identified and elaborated: temporality, purposive commitment, exclusiveness, centralization, and culture. Thus, social movement abeyance structures provide organizational and ideological bridges between different upsurges of activism by the same challenging group.
Over the past 25 years, since the publication of Omi & Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, the statement that race is socially constructed has become a truism in sociological circles. Yet many struggle to describe exactly what the claim means. This review brings together empirical literature on the social construction of race from different levels of analysis to highlight the variety of approaches to studying racial formation processes. For example, macro-level scholarship often focuses on the creation of racial categories, micro-level studies examine who comes to occupy these categories, and meso-level research captures the effects of institutional and social context. Each of these levels of analysis has yielded important contributions to our understanding of the social construction of race, yet there is little conversation across boundaries. Scholarship that bridges methodological and disciplinary divides is needed to continue to advance the racial formation perspective and demonstrate its broader relevance.
Recent work on second-generation immigrants posits that racial discrimination and a restructuring economy are likely to create different paths of assimilation for recent non-white immigrants than earlier European immigrants followed, and may even decouple acculturation and economic mobility. But while these discussions have considered the minority lower class as a possible destination for assimilation, middle-class minorities have been largely ignored. This article considers how the experiences of middle-class minorities might alter our models of second-generation incorporation. We propose that the minority middle classes share a minority culture of mobility, a set of cultural elements responsive to distinctive problems that usually accompany minority middle-class status, including problems of interracial encounters in public settings and inter-class relations within the minority community. We illustrate this minority culture of mobility with a brief case study of the African-American middle class, and discuss its implications for immigrants.
In this article I argue that the bi-racial order (white vs non-white) typical of the United States is undergoing a profound transformation. Because of drastic changes in the demography of the nation as well as changes in the racial structure of the world-system, the United States is developing a complex, Latin America-like racial order. Specifically, I suggest that the new order will have two central features: three loosely organized racial strata (white, honorary white, and the collective black) and a pigmentocratic logic. I examine some objective, subjective, and social interaction indicators to assess if the Latin Americanization thesis holds some water. Although more refined data are needed to conclusively make my case, the available indicators support my thesis. I conclude this article by outlining some of the potential implications of Latin Americanization for the future of race relations in the United States.
When students of race and racism seek direction, they can find no single comprehensive source that provides them with basic analytical guidance or that offers insights into the elementary forms of racial classification and domination. We believe the field would benefit greatly from such a source, and we attempt to offer one here. Synchronizing and building upon recent theoretical innovations in the area of race, we lend some conceptual clarification to the nature and dynamics of race and racial domination so that students of the subjects—especially those seeking a general (if economical) introduction to the vast field of race studies—can gain basic insight into how race works as well as effective (and fallacious) ways to think about racial domination. Focusing primarily on the American context, we begin by defining race and unpacking our definition. We then describe how our conception of race must be informed by those of ethnicity and nationhood. Next, we identify five fallacies to avoid when thinking about racism. Finally, we discuss the resilience of racial domination, concentrating on how all actors in a society gripped by racism reproduce the conditions of racial domination, as well as on the benefits and drawbacks of approaches that emphasize intersectionality.
In the past two decades, migration scholars have revised and revitalized assimilation theory to study the large and growing numbers of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean and their offspring in the United States. Neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories seek to make sense of the current wave of migration that differs in important ways from the last great wave at the turn of the twentieth century and to overcome the conceptual shortcomings of earlier theories of assimilation that it inspired. This article examines some of the central assumptions and arguments of the new theories. In particular, it undertakes a detailed critique of their treatment of race and finds that they variously engage in suspect comparisons to past migration from Europe; read out or misread the qualitatively different historical trajectories of European and non-European migrants; exclude native-born Blacks from the analysis; fail to conceptually account for the key changes that are purported to facilitate “assimilation”; import the dubious concept of the “underclass” to characterize poor urban Blacks and others; laud uncritically the “culture” of migrants; explicitly or implicitly advocate the “assimilation” of migrants; and discount the political potential of “oppositional culture.” Shifting the focus from difference to inequality and domination, the article concludes with a brief proposal for reorienting our theoretical approach, from assimilation to the politics of national belonging.
Little controversy remains about how the United States has changed demographically since the mid-1960s. Far more controversial is whether this change is bringing about a new politics of race. This article argues that a key to settling this debate is a clearer specification of the identity-to-politics link - the nexus from a population defined by shared racial and ethnic labels to a collective group politics based on those definitions. The article articulates some potential pitfalls in how this nexus is commonly specified in empirical research. It then proposes that researchers should be mindful of five processes that are typically lumped together in linking shared demographic categories to common political destinies: definition, identification, consciousness, venue selection, and choice. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential utility and limitations of unpacking these five processes in our analysis of the identity-to-politics link.
In this paper we explore the racial and ethnic self-identification of Dominican immigrants in the United States. This issue is central in understanding how immigrants experience the process of incorporation into American society. We argue that as Dominican immigrants incorporate to American life, they adopt a Hispanic or Latino identity. This identity serves both as a form of racial identification within the American racial stratification system and as a form of assertive panethnic identity. This identity, however, does not supersede national identification, which remains the anchoring identity.
Objective. This article examines panethnic consciousness as it applies to the two fastest‐growing minority groups in the United States: Asian Americans and Latinos. Given the challenges of diversity and immigration faced by these two communities, I examine the individual‐level factors that help strengthen their panethnic group identity.
Methods. Drawing from data provided by the 2000 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey and the 1999 National Survey on Latinos, I use ordered probit models to determine the predictors of panethnic consciousness among both Asian Americans and Latinos.
Results. The models confirm that for Asian Americans, high income, involvement in Asian‐American politics, being a Democrat, and the role of racial discrimination encourage panethnic consciousness. For Latinos, the important factors are higher levels of education, gender, being foreign born, involvement in Latino politics, and perceptions of discrimination.
Conclusions. The findings here stress the importance of social contextual factors such as racial discrimination on the formation of panethnic identity.
Blocking Racial Intermarriage Laws in 1935 and 1937: Seattle’s First Civil Rights Coalition
- Johnson Stefanie