180 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself
as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of mean-
ness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial
dominance on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to
think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [But] a
“white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we
approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate,
but cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen
dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool
here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting un-
earned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most
talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal op-
portunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of
dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about
male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain
the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.
Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a
small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the
hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me
and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the per-
quisites of being light-s kinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know
from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned
advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of
our a rbitrarily-a warded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
10 My Class Didn’t Trump My
Race: Using Oppression to
Face Privilege
Robin J. DiAngelo
I was born to working class parents; my father was a construction worker and my
mother was a switchboard operator. When I was 2, my parents divorced and my
mother began to raise us on her own; at that point we entered into poverty. I have
never understood people who say, “we were poor but we didn’t know it because we
had lots of love.” Poverty hurts. It isn’t romantic, or some form of “living simply.”
Poor people are not innocent and child-like. The lack of medical and dental care, the
hunger, and the ostracization, are concrete. The stress of poverty made my household
much more chaotic than loving.
We were evicted frequently, and moved four to five times a year. There were pe-
riods when oatmeal was the only food in our house. I had no health or dental care
during my childhood, and today all of my front teeth are filled because by the time I
was 10 they were rotten. If we got sick, my mother would beat us, screaming that we
could not get sick because she could not afford to take us to the doctor. We occasion-
ally had to live in our car, and I was left with relatives for 8 months while my mother
tried to secure housing for us. My teacher once held my hands up to my fourth-g rade
class as an example of poor hygiene and with the class as her audience, told me to go
home and tell my mother to wash me.
I used to stare at the girls in my class and ache to be like them; to have a father,
to wear pretty clothes, to go to camp, to be clean and get to sit with them. I knew we
didn’t have enough money and that meant that I couldn’t join them in school or go
to their houses or have the same things they had. But the moment the real meaning
of poverty crystallized for me came when we were visiting another family. As we were
leaving I heard one of their daughters ask her mother, “What is wrong with them?” I
stopped, riveted. I too, wanted to know. Her mother held her finger to her lips and
whispered, “Shhh, they’re poor.” This was a revelatory moment for me. The shock
came not just in the knowledge that we were poor, but that it was exposed. There was
something wrong with us, indeed, and it was something that was obvious to others
and that we couldn’t hide, something shameful that could be seen but should not be
named. It took me many years to gain a structural analysis of class that would help
shift this sense of shame.
I begin this narrative with my class background because it so deeply informs my
understanding of race. From an early age I had the sense of being an outsider; I was
DiAngelo, Robin.“My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege”from
Multicultural Perspectives by Robin DiAngelo. © 2006. Reproduced by permission of the N ational
Association for Multicultural Education (www.nameorg.org) and the author.
181
182 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
acutely aware that I was poor, that I was dirty, that I was not normal, and that there
was something “wrong” with me. But I also knew that I was not Black. We were at the
lower rungs of society, but there was always someone on the periphery, just below us.
I knew that “colored” people existed and that they should be avoided. I can remember
many occasions when I reached for candy or uneaten food laying on the street and
was admonished by my grandmother not to touch it because a “colored person” may
have touched it. The message was clear to me; if a colored person touched something
it became dirty. The irony here is that the marks of poverty were clearly visible on
me: poor hygiene, torn clothes, homelessness, hunger. Yet through comments such as
my grandmother’s, a racial Other was formed in my consciousness, an Other through
whom I became clean. Race was the one identity that aligned me with the other girls
in my school.
I left home as a teenager and struggled to survive. As I looked at what lay ahead, I
could see no path out of poverty other than education. The decision to take that path
was frightening for me; I had never gotten the message that I was smart and academia
was a completely foreign social context. But once I was in academia, I understood
that a college degree is not conferred upon those who are smarter or who try harder
than others, it comes through a complex web of intersecting systems of privileges
that include internal expectations as well as external resources. In academia, racism,
a key system that I benefit from, helped to mediate my class-b ased disadvantages. . . .
Since those early days, I have led dialogues on race with police officers, social
workers, teachers, and in both the private and government sectors. I recently com-
pleted my dissertation on how White student teachers reproduce racism in interracial
dialogues about race. As I look at the world now, I see racism as e ver-p resent and
multidimensional. I realize that poor and working class White people don’t necessar-
ily have any less racism than middle or upper class White people, our racism is just
conveyed in different ways and we enact it from a different social location than the
middle or upper classes.
As I reflect back on the early messages I received about being poor and being
White, I now realize that my grandmother and I needed people of color to cleanse and
realign us with the dominant White culture that our poverty had separated us from.
I now ask myself how the classist messages I internalized growing up lead me to col-
lude in racism. For example, as a child who grew up in poverty, I received constant
reminders that I was stupid, lazy, dirty, and a drain on the resources of hardworking
people. I internalized these messages, and they work to silence me. Unless I work
to uproot them, I am less likely to trust my own perceptions or feel like I have a
“right” to speak up. I may not attempt to interrupt racism because the social context
in which it is occurring intimidates me. My fear on these occasions may be coming
from a place of internalized class inferiority, but in practice my silence colludes with
racism and ultimately benefits me by protecting my White privilege and maintaining
racial solidarity with other White people. This solidarity connects and realigns me
with White people across other lines of difference, such as the very class locations
that have silenced me in the first place. I am also prone to use others to elevate me,
10 DiAngelo / My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege 183
as in the example with my grandmother. So although my specific class background
mediated the way I learned racism and how I enact it, in the end it still socialized me
to collude with the overall structure.
It is my observation that class dictates proximity between Whites and people of
color. Poor Whites are most often in closest proximity to people of color because
they tend to share poverty. I hear the term “White trash” frequently. It is not without
significance that this is one of the few expressions in which race is named for Whites.
I think the proximity of the people labeled as White trash to people of color is why;
race becomes marked or “exposed” by virtue of a closeness to people of color. In a
racist society, this closeness both highlights and pollutes Whiteness. Owning class
people also have people of color near them because people of color are often their do-
mestics and g ardeners—their servants. But they do not interact socially with people
of color in the same way that poor Whites do. Middle class Whites are generally the
furthest away from people of color. They are the most likely to say that, “there were
no people of color in my neighborhood or school. I didn’t meet a Black person until I
went to college” (often adding, “so I was lucky because I didn’t learn anything about
racism”). Looking specifically at how class shaped my racial identity has been very
helpful to me in attempting to unravel the specific way I manifest my internalized
racial superiority.
I am no longer poor. Although I still carry the marks of poverty, those marks are
now only internal. But these marks limit me in more than what I believe I deserve
or where I think I belong; they also interfere with my ability to stand up against in-
justice, for as long as I believe that I am not as smart or as valuable as other White
people, I won’t challenge racism. I believe that in order for Whites to unravel our
internalized racial dominance, we have two interwoven tasks. One is to work on our
own internalized oppression—the ways in which we impose limitations on ourselves
based on the societal messages we receive about the inferiority of the lower status
groups we belong to. The other task is to face the internalized dominance that results
from being socialized in a racist society—the ways in which we consciously or un-
consciously believe that we are more important, more valuable, more intelligent, and
more deserving than people of color. I cannot address the interwoven complexity of
other White people’s social locations. However, after years facilitating dialogues on
race with thousands of White people from a range of class positions (as well as var-
ied gender, sexual orientation, religious, and ability positions), and bearing witness
to countless stories and challenges from people of color about my own racism and
that of other Whites, I have come to see some very common patterns of internalized
dominance. These patterns are shared across other social positions due to the bottom
line nature of racism: Regardless of one’s other locations, White people know on some
level that being White in this society is “better” than being a person of color, and this,
along with the very real doors Whiteness opens, serves to mediate the oppression
experienced in those other social locations. In the next section of this article, I will
identify several of these patterns of internalized dominance that are generally shared
among Whites.
184 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
We Live Segregated Lives
Growing up in segregated environments (schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, media
images, historical perspectives, etc.), we are given the message that our experiences
and perspectives are the only ones that matter. We receive this message day in and
day out, and it is not limited to a single moment, it is a relentless experience. Virtually
all of our teachers, history books, role models, movie and book characters, are White
like us. Further, as White people, we are taught not to feel any loss about the absence
of people of color in our lives. In fact, the absence of people of color is what defines
our schools and neighborhoods as “good.” And we get this message regardless of
where we are oppressed in other areas of our lives. Because we live primarily segre-
gated lives in a W hite-d ominated society, we receive little or no authentic informa-
tion about racism and are thus unprepared to think critically or complexly about it.
Although segregation is often mediated somewhat for poor urban (and other) Whites
who may live near and have friendships with people of color on the microlevel, seg-
regation is still operating on the macrolevel and informing our collective perspectives
and what is deemed the most valuable or “official” knowledge.
Whites from the lower classes who may have more integrated lives on the mi-
crolevel still receive the message that achievement means moving out of poverty
and away from the neighborhoods and schools that define us. Upward mobility is
the great class goal in the United States, and the social environment gets tangibly
Whiter the higher up one goes, whether it be in academia or management. Whiter
environments, in turn, are marked as the most socially and economically valuable.
Reaching towards the most valuable places in society thus entails leaving people of
color behind. . . .
We Are Raised to Value the Individual
and to See Ourselves as Individuals,
Rather Than as Part of a Socialized Group
Individuality allows us to present ourselves as having “just arrived on the scene,”
unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial
messages we receive. This also allows us to distance ourselves from the actions of our
group and demand that we be granted the benefit of the doubt (because we are indi-
viduals) in all cases. Thus we get very irate when we are “accused” of racism, because
as individuals, we are “different” from other White people and expect to be seen as
such. We find intolerable any suggestion that our behavior or perspectives are typical
of our group as a whole, and this ensures that we cannot deepen our understanding
of racism.
Seeing ourselves as individuals erases our history and hides the way in which
wealth has accumulated over generations and benefits us, as a group, today. Further,
being an individual is a privilege only afforded to White people. By focusing on
ourselves as individuals, Whites are able to conceptualize the racist patterns in our
10 DiAngelo / My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege 185
behavior as “just our personality” and not connected to intergroup dynamics. For
example, I might be an extrovert and cut people off when I am engaged in a dis-
cussion. I can say, “that is just my personality, I do that to everyone. That is how we
talked at the dinner table in my family.” But the moment I cut off a person of color,
it becomes racism because the history and the impact of that behavior for both of
us is different. The freedom to remain oblivious to that fact, with no sense that this
obliviousness has any consequences of importance, is White privilege (racism).
If we use the line of reasoning that we are all individuals and social categories such
as race, class, and gender don’t matter and are just “labels” that stereotype us, then it
follows that we all end up in our own “natural” places. Those at the top are merely
a collection of individuals who rose under their own individual merits, and those at
the bottom are there due to individual lack. Group membership is thereby rendered
inoperative and racial disparities are seen as essential rather than structural. Thus
the discourse of individuality is not only connected to the discourse of meritocracy,
but also with the Darwinism of the “bell curve.” It behooves those of us oppressed
in other places to understand group membership, for the discourse of individuality
may benefit us in terms of racial privilege but ultimately holds all of our oppressions
in place. . . .
We Feel That We Should Be Judged by Our
Intentions Rather Than the Effects of Our Behavior
A common White reasoning is that as long as we didn’t intend to perpetuate racism,
then our actions don’t count as racism. We focus on our intentions and discount the
impact, thereby invalidating people of color’s experiences and communicating that
the effects of our behavior on them are unimportant. We then spend great energy
explaining to people of color why our behavior is not racism at all. This invalidates
their perspectives while enabling us to deny responsibility for making the effort to
understand enough about racism to see our behavior’s impact in both the immediate
interaction and the broader, historical context.
We Believe That if We Can’t Feel Our Social Power,
Then We Don’t Have Any
White social power is so normalized that it is outside of our conscious awareness.
Yet we often expect that power is something that one can feel, rather than something
one takes for granted. The issue of social power is where a lower class location often
becomes confused with a lack of racial privilege. For example, in discussions on race
I often hear White working class men protest that they don’t have any social power.
They work long and grueling hours, often in jobs in which they have no long-term
security, and come home feeling beaten and quite disempowered. These men can
often not relate to the concept of holding social power. But if being able to feel racial
186 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
privilege is required before Whites can acknowledge its reality, we will not be able to
see (and thus change) it. The key to recognizing power is in recognizing normalcy—
w hat is not attended to or in need of constant navigation. These men are indeed
struggling against social and economic barriers, but race is simply not one of them;
in fact, race is a major social current running in their direction and not only moving
them along, but helping them navigate their other social struggles. Not feeling power
is not necessarily aligned with how others perceive or respond to us, or our relation-
ship to social and institutional networks.
We Think It Is Important Not to Notice Race
The underlying assumption of a colorblind discourse is that race is a defect and it
is best to pretend that we don’t notice it. But if we pretend we don’t notice race, we
cannot notice racism. If we don’t notice racism, we can’t understand or interrupt it
in ourselves or others. We have to start being honest about the fact that we do notice
race (when it isn’t White) and then pay attention to what race means in our everyday
lives. White people and people of color do not have the same racial experience, and
this has profound and tangible consequences that need to be understood if we want
to stop colluding with racism. . . .
Racism Has Been Constructed as Belonging to
Extremists and Being Very Bad
Racism is a deeply embedded, multidimensional, and internalized system that all
members of this society are shaped by. Yet dominant culture constructs racism as pri-
marily in the past and only currently occurring as isolated acts relegated to individual
bad people (usually living somewhere in the South, or “old”). Although many White
people today sincerely believe that racism is a bad thing, our abhorrence of racism
coupled with a superficial conceptualization of it causes us to be highly defensive
about any suggestion that we perpetuate it. Many Whites (and liberal Whites in par-
ticular) think that we can deal with racism in our heads (and without ever interacting
with people of color) by deciding that we have not been affected because we don’t
want to have been affected.
A superficial understanding of racism coupled with a desire to distance ourselves
from being perceived as “bad” is further complicated by resentments we may feel
about places in our lives where we suffer from other forms of social injustice. It is
often very difficult for Whites who have not been validated for the oppression they
experience elsewhere to keep their attention on a form of oppression from which they
benefit. But I have found that when I explore how classism and other oppressions I
experience set me up to participate in racism, I am more able to interrupt the mani-
festation of both in my life. By placing racism in the center of my analysis, I have been
able to begin to unravel my other group socializations and how they work together
to support social hierarchies.
10 DiAngelo / My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege 187
Interrupting Internalized Dominance
I have found that a key to interrupting my internalized racial dominance is to defer to
the knowledge of people whom I have been taught, in countless ways, are less know-
ledgeable and less valuable than I am. I must reach for humility and be willing to not
know. I may never fully understand the workings of racism, as I have been trained my
entire life to perpetuate racism while denying its reality. I do not have to understand
racism for it to be real, and my expectation that I could is part of my internalized
dominance. Reaching for racial humility as a White person is not the same for me as
being mired in class shame.
My class position is only one social location from which I learned to collude with
racism. For example, I have also asked myself how I learned to collude with racism
as a Catholic and a woman. How did it shape my sense of racial belonging, of racial
correctness, to be presented with God, the ultimate and universal authority, as White?
How did the active erasure of Jesus’ race and ethnicity shape my racial consciousness?
How did the universalization of Catholicism as the true religion for all peoples of
the world engender racial superiority within me when all the authorities within that
religion were White like myself? At the same time, how did my conditioning under
Catholicism not to question authority lead me to silently collude with the racism of
other Whites?
As a White woman, how did I internalize racial superiority through the culture’s
representation of White women as the embodiment of ultimate beauty? What has it
meant for me to have a key signifier of female p erfection—W hiteness—a vailable to
me? How have images of White women in the careers deemed valuable for woman
shaped my goals? How has mainstream feminism’s articulation of White women’s
issues as universal women’s issues shaped what I care about? At the same time, what
has it meant to live under patriarchy and to be taught that as a woman I am less in-
telligent, that I should not speak up, that I should defer to others, and at all times be
nice and polite? How have all of these messages ultimately set me up to collude in the
oppression of people of color? By asking questions such as these I have been able to
gain a much deeper and more useful analysis of racism, and rather than finding that
centering racism denies my other oppressions, I find that centering racism has been
a profound way to address the complexity of all my social locations.
188 PART II Understanding Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Class Privilege
Suggestions for Further Reading
Baird, Robert M., and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds. Bigotry, Prejudice, and Hatred, 2nd ed. Buffalo, NY:
P rometheus Press, 1999.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in
the U.S. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
———. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Rienner, 2001.
Brandt, Eric, ed. Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality. New York: New Press, 1999.
Brown, Michael K., et al. Whitewashing Race in America: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2005.
Chang, Jeff. Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post–Civil Rights America. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2014.
Cose, Ellis. The Rage of a Privileged Class. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
Against Women of Color.” In The Feminist Philosophy Reader, edited by Alison Bailey and Chris
Cuomo, 279–309. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Currah, Paisley, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, eds. Transgender Rights. Minneapolis:
U niversity of Minnesota Press, 2006.
DeMott, Benjamin. The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
Dusky, Lorraine. Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth About Women and Justice in America. New York: Crown
Books, 1996.
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, 15th anniversary ed. New York:
Broadway, 2006.
———. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000.
Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Freedman, Estelle B., ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Harris, Leonard. Racism. New York: Humanities Books, 1999.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, eds. The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2006.
Johnson, Allan G. Privilege, Power, and Difference, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.
Kadi, Joanne. Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker. Boston: South End Press, 1996.
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in T wentieth-
Century America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011.
Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Rev. ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2006.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd
ed. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Perry, Barbara. In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crimes. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Pharr, Suzanne. Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism. Inverness, CA: Chardon Press, 1988.
Suggestions for Further Reading 189
Rhode, Deborah L. Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
Ronai, Carol R., et al. Everyday Sexism in the Third Millennium. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Shipler, David K. A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Sue, Derald Wing. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Williams, Lena. It’s the Little Things, the Everyday Interactions That Get Under the Skin of Blacks and Whites.
New York: Harcourt, 2000.
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PA R T IIISelectionTitle 191
Complicating Questions of
Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and
Immigration
The United States has always been a nation of diverse immigrants, but recent
waves of immigration bringing more than the expected number of Asians and
Latinos to these shores are dramatically changing the racial/ethnic mix in this
country. According to recent estimates, by the year 2050 whites will no longer be
a majority. And in many parts of the country, whites are already the minority pop-
ulation. Selection 2, Mae Ngai provides an overview of U.S. immigration policy and
a look at the changing picture of U.S. demographics. What are the implications of
these changes for the way we think about the categories of race and ethnicity and
how we define “minority”? What kinds of racial/ethnic categories are adequate
to capture the identities of such a rich mix of peoples and cultures, a mix that is
often embodied in the multiethnic heritage that individuals in the U.S. increasingly
want to claim?
As Ngai explores, the United States has a long, complex history with regard to
both legal and illegal immigration. Her piece traces the many ways immigration
has informed not just the American legal system and the concept of “citizen” but
also the very fabric of the United States. As each new wave of immigrants arrives
on our shores, the systems we have in place in this country struggle to expand
and adapt to account for these new identities.
The difficulty of coming up with adequate categories and paradigms gained
national attention in 2000 when the Census Bureau set out to survey the U.S
191
192 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
p opulation, as it does every ten years. Until the 2000 census, respondents had
been asked to identify with one and only one race when filling out the census
questionnaire. Beginning with the 2000 census, respondents were given the
option of identifying with up to six different racial groups. Although the new
categories and the ways in which the data is now interpreted continue to be
met with criticism, the change reflects the indisputably multicultural nature of
the U.S. population and gives an indication of how complicated the project of
defining racial/ethnic identity adequately and appropriately has become. Evelyn
Alsultany grapples with this complexity in Selection 3.
While it is common today for many people to identify themselves as “Hispanic,”
before that category was created by the U.S. government and appeared in the
census in 1980, very few people in the United States thought of themselves as
such. This is a good example of the ways in which race/ethnicity is socially con-
structed. Currently, the census asks respondents to select a race by choosing one
or more racial categories from among 15 options (plus the w rite-in “some other
race”), such as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, Chinese, Other
Asian, Other Pacific Islander, Black, or White. In addition, respondents are given
the option of choosing “Hispanic” as their ethnicity. According to this approach to
classification, there can be white Hispanics, black Hispanics, and Asian Hispanics.
But what is the basis for assigning or choosing this ethnic identity? By common
language? Many but not all Hispanics speak Spanish. By physical characteristics?
As articles in this part point out, people who identify as Hispanic come in every
shade of skin color. By shared culture? There is significant cultural diversity among
people in this category. National origin? Some point to ancestry in a Spanish-
speaking country as the basis for this categorization, but this too is not without
complications. Some Mexican Americans, like authors Sandra Cisneros and Luis
Rodriguez, reject the term “Hispanic” and prefer to be identified as Latino/a or
Chicano/a. They contend, as do many people from the Americas and the Car-
ibbean, that the term “Hispanic” is associated with predominantly white Spain
and Portugal, whereas “Latino” preserves the connection with the darker-s kinned
indigenous Indian population of the Americas that was conquered by those Euro-
pean nations centuries ago. In Selection 4, Mireya Navarro explores some of the
complexities involved in articulating a Latina/o or Hispanic racial/ethnic identity.
Because for the most part it is white people and a largely white power struc-
ture that have had the ability to create racial/ethnic categories and apply them,
people of color from very different ethnic backgrounds have often been lumped
together with a total disregard for the important cultural, social, and economic
differences associated with their individual ethnic and class backgrounds and
their places of origin. People born in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Spain may all be
grouped together by white people as Latinos or Hispanics even though this
c ategorization ignores important differences among them. In the same way,
through white eyes people from Ethiopia, Namibia, and Haiti may all look “black,”
but this simplistic categorization leaves out vastly different histories and herit-
ages. In Selection 5, Christina M. Greer looks at these distinctions of race and
PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration 193
ethnicity in black communities. Greer shows the complexity of racial formation
by focusing on the relationships between native-b orn black Americans and black
ethnic immigrants.
In Selection 6, Noy Thrupkaew examines the failure of the U.S. government and
of many people in the United States to recognize the unique situations and chal-
lenges faced by various populations lumped together as “Asian Americans.” She
finds the concept of Asians as a “model minority” more than problematic. Quoting
Frank Wu, Thrupkaew suggests that the model minority myth is kept alive by polit-
ical conservatives who use it to rationalize and obscure the unequal distribution of
wealth, opportunity, and privilege in this county. By idealizing the success of Asian
Americans, conservatives imply that African Americans and Latinos who do not
succeed do not work hard enough. Further, although in reality many Southeast
Asians in the United States (largely from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) have an
extremely high rate of poverty, by grouping them within the broad category of
“Asians,” the model minority myth is kept alive and the needs of this particular
population are largely ignored.
Part III concludes with a selection from Moustafa Bayoumi, who chronicles the
experiences of Arab and Muslim Americans in the period immediately follow-
ing September 11, 2001, when they were deemed threatening and/or suspicious.
Bayoumi places this discussion in a historical context, tracing both the ways that
Muslim communities have been perceived over time as well as how other racial/
ethnic groups have been designated “a problem.”
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1 I mmigration in the United States:
New Economic, Social, Political
Landscapes with Legislative
Reform on the Horizon
Faye Hipsman and Doris Meissner
Immigration has shaped the United States as a nation since the first newcomers
arrived over 400 years ago. Beyond being a powerful demographic force responsible
for how the country and its population became what they are today, immigration has
contributed deeply to many of the economic, social, and political processes that are
foundational to the United States as a nation.
Although immigration has occurred throughout American history, large-scale immi-
gration has occurred during just four peak periods: the peopling of the original colonies,
westward expansion during the middle of the 19th century, and the rise of cities at the
turn of the 20th century. The fourth peak period began in the 1970s and continues today.
These peak immigration periods have coincided with fundamental transformations
of the American economy. The first saw the dawn of European settlement in the Amer-
icas. The second allowed the young United States to transition from a colonial to an
agricultural economy. The industrial revolution gave rise to a manufacturing economy
during the third peak period, propelling America’s rise to become the leading power
in the world. Today’s large-s cale immigration has coincided with globalization and the
last stages of transformation from a manufacturing to a 21st century k nowledge-b ased
economy. As before, immigration has been prompted by economic transformation,
just as it is helping the United States adapt to new economic realities. . . .
Early History
In the decades prior to 1880, immigration to the United States was primarily European,
driven by forces such as industrialization in Western Europe and the Irish potato fam-
ine. The expanding frontiers of the American West and the United States’ industrial
revolution drew immigrants to U.S. shores. Chinese immigrants began to arrive in large
numbers for the first time in the 1850s after gold was discovered in California in 1848.
Federal oversight of immigration began in 1882, when Congress passed the Im-
migration Act. It established the collection of a fee from each noncitizen arriving at
a U.S. port to be used by the Treasury Department to regulate immigration. Arriv-
ing immigrants were screened for the first time under this act, and entry by anyone
“Immigration in the United States: New Economic, Social, Political Landscapes with Legislative
Reform on the Horizon.”Originally published by the Migration Policy Institute, an independent,
nonpartisan think tank dedicated to the study of the movement of people worldwide.
195
196 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
deemed a “convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself
without becoming a public charge” was prohibited.
As the mining boom in the West began to subside, animosity toward the large
populations of Chinese laborers and other foreigners surged, and so began a series
of legislative measures to restrict immigration of certain racial groups, beginning
with nationals of China. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first such law.
It halted immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, barred Chinese naturaliza
tion, and provided for the deportation of Chinese in the country illegally. In a follow-o n
bill, Congress passed the 1888 Scott Act and banned the return of Chinese nation-
als with lawful status in the United States if they departed the country. In 1892, the
Geary Act extended the ten-y ear ban on Chinese labor immigration, and e stablished
restrictive policies toward Chinese immigrants with and without legal status.
Between 1880 and 1930, over 27 million new immigrants arrived, mainly from
Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and Sweden. This
peak immigration p eriod—the last large-s cale immigration wave prior to the current
period—a lso led to new restrictions.
In an expansion of racial exclusion, and by overriding a presidential veto, Congress
passed the 1917 Immigration Act which prohibited immigration from a newly drawn
“Asiatic barred zone” covering British India, most of Southeast Asia, and nearly all of
the Middle East. It also expanded inadmissibility grounds to include anarchists, persons
previously deported within the past year, and illiterate individuals over the age of 16.
Nativist and restrictionist sentiment continued through the 1920s, prompting the
United States to introduce numerical limitations on immigration for the first time. The
Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924 established the national-o rigins quota sys-
tem, which set a ceiling on the number of immigrants that could be admitted to the
United States from each country. It strongly favored northern and western European
immigration. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act continued the n ational-o rigins
quota system but for the first time allocated an immigration quota for Asian countries.
The P ost-1965 Era
Although the discriminatory nature of the national-o rigins quota system had become
increasingly discredited, it took until the Kennedy era and the ripple effects of the
nation’s civil-rights movement for a new philosophy guiding immigration to take
hold. The resulting Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 repealed
the n ational-o rigins quota system and replaced it with a seven-c ategory preference
system based primarily on family unification. Overall, the legislation set in motion
powerful forces that are still shaping the United States today.
The year before the 1965 Act, Congress terminated the Bracero program, which
it had authorized during World War II to recruit agricultural workers from Mexico
to fill farm-labor shortages in the United States. In the wake of these and other
sweeping changes in the global economy, immigration flows that had been E uropean-
dominated for most of the nation’s history gave way to predominantly Latin American
and Asian immigration.
1 Hipsman and Meissner / Immigration in the United States 197
Today’s large-s cale immigration began in the 1970s, and has been made up of both
legal and illegal flows. Prior periods of large-s cale immigration occurred before visas
were subject to numerical ceilings, so the phenomenon of “illegal immigration” is a
relatively recent element of immigration policy history and debates.
The largest source country of legal admissions, Mexico, has also accounted for
the largest share of illegal immigrants who cross the southwest land border with the
United States to seek the comparatively higher wages available from U.S. jobs.
By the m id-1 980s, an estimated 3 to 5 million noncitizens were living unlawfully in
the country. To address illegal immigration, Congress passed the Immigration Reform
and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which was intended to act as a “three-legged stool.” . . .
Four years later, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 to revamp the
legal immigration system and admit a greater share of highly-skilled and educated
immigrants. . . .
Overall, IRCA and its enforcement mechanisms were no match for the powerful
forces that drive illegal migration. Both IRCA and the 1990 Act failed to adequately
foresee and incorporate measures to provide and manage continued flows of tempo-
rary and permanent immigrants to meet the country’s labor market needs, especially
during the economic boom years of the 1990s.
As a result, illegal immigration grew dramatically and began to be experienced not
only in the six traditional immigration destination states of New York, New Jersey, Flor-
ida, Texas, Illinois, and California, but also in many other areas across the southeast,
midwest, and mountain states that had not had experience with large-scale immigra-
tion for up to a century. Although immigration served as a source of economic produc-
tivity and younger workers in areas where the population and workforces were aging,
a large share of the immigration was comprised of illegal immigration flows. Thus, the
challenge to d eeply-h eld rule-o f-law principles and the social change represented by
this immigration generated progressively negative public sentiment about immigration
that prompted Congress to pass a set of strict new laws in 1996, as follows:
■ The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PR-
WORA), commonly known as the Welfare Reform Act, denied access to fed-
eral public benefits, such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI),
and food stamps to categories of authorized and unauthorized immigrants.
Some states later chose to reinstate some of these benefits for authorized im-
migrants who lost eligibility under PRWORA.
■ The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
(IIRIRA) bolstered immigration enforcement, increased penalties for
immigration-related crimes, provided for expedited removal of inadmis-
sible noncitizens, barred unlawfully present immigrants from re-e ntry for
long periods of time, and set income requirements for immigrants’ family
sponsors at 125 percent of the federal poverty level. IIRIRA also required the
government to track foreign visitors’ entries and exits, which became a key
element in the government’s security strategy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
■ The Anti-T errorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) made it easier
to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens.
198 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
Subsequently, Congress returned to shoring up legal immigration measures in
2000 by enacting the American Competitiveness in the T wenty-F irst Century Act to
meet demand for skilled immigrants—e specially in science, math, and engineering
s pecialties—a nd enable employers to fill technology jobs that are a critical dimension
of the post-industrial, information age economy. . . .
The Lasting Impact of 9/11 on Immigration Policy
No recent event has influenced the thinking and actions of the American public and
its leaders as much as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. . . .
Because the 9/11 hijackers obtained valid visas to travel to the United States, de-
spite some being known by U.S. intelligence and having been encountered by law
enforcement agencies, the immigration system came under particular scrutiny. The
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which had been part of the Depart-
ment of Justice since 1941, was dissolved and its functions were transferred to three
newly created agencies within DHS, as follows:
■ Customs and Border Protection (CBP) oversees the entry of all people and
goods at all ports of entry and enforces laws against illegal entry between the
ports.
■ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is responsible for enforcement
of immigration and customs requirements in the interior of the United States,
including employer requirements, detention, and removals.
■ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjudicates immigrant
benefit applications, such as visa petitions, naturalization applications, and
asylum and refugee requests, and administers the E -V erify program.
An additional new p ost-9 /11 immigration entity has been U S-V ISIT, which is
housed in the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) of DHS. It man-
ages the IDENT biometric fingerprint information system used by all immigration
a gencies—including consulates abroad in visa s creening—to confirm the identity of
noncitizens entering the country. . . .
In June 2002, the U.S. Attorney General began the National Security E ntry-E xit
Registration System (NSEERS), a program that placed extra travel screening require-
ments on nationals from a list of 25 countries associated with an Al Qaeda presence
(and North Korea). Additionally, males over the age of 16 who were nationals of
designated NSEERS countries and already living in the United States were required to
register with the federal government and appear for “special registration” interviews
with immigration officials. The program was discontinued in 2011.
In 2005, the REAL ID Act prohibited states from issuing driver’s licenses to un-
authorized individuals, and expanded terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility,
removal, and ineligibility for asylum. One year later, the Secure Fence Act of 2006
authorized the completion of 700 miles of fencing along the southwest border with
Mexico. . . .
1 Hipsman and Meissner / Immigration in the United States 199
One immediate result of tightened screening procedures was a dramatic drop in
the number of visas the government issued to individuals wishing to visit, work, and
live in the United States. Between 2001 and 2002, the number of nonimmigrant visas
fell by 24 percent. Present visa issuances have returned to p re-9 /11 levels, but it has
taken ten years to rebound.
A Profile of Today’s Immigrant Population
The U.S. foreign-b orn population (legal and illegal) is 40.4 million, or 13 percent
of the total U.S. population of 311.6 million, according to 2011 American Com-
munity Survey estimates. Although this is a numerical high historically, the foreign
born make up a smaller percentage of the population today than in 1890 and 1910
when the immigrant share of the population peaked at 15 percent. The foreign-b orn
share fell to a low of 5 percent (9.6 million) in 1970. About 20 percent of all inter-
national migrants reside in the United States, which, as a country, accounts for less
than 5 percent of the world’s population.
The foreign-b orn population is comprised of approximately 42 percent natural-
ized citizens, 31 percent permanent residents (green card holders), and 27 percent
unauthorized immigrants. Roughly 11.7 million, or 29 percent of the immigrant pop-
ulation is from Mexico, the largest immigration source country. Chinese and Indian
immigrants make up the second and third largest immigrant groups, with 1.9 million
or 5 percent of the foreign-b orn population each. In 2010, India replaced the Philip-
pines as the third largest source country (see Table 1). The top three regions of origin
of the foreign-b orn population are Latin America, Asia, and Europe (see Figure 1).
TABLE 1 I mmigrant Population by Country of Birth Residing in the
United States, 1960 to 2011
Sending Country Estimate Percentage
Mexico 11.7 million 29
China (inc. Hong Kong) 1.9 million 5
India 1.9 million 5
Philippines 1.8 million 4
El Salvador 1.3 million 3
Vietnam 1.3 million 3
Cuba 1.1 million 3
Korea 1.1 million 3
Dominican Republic 2
Guatemala 900,000 2
851,000
Source: MPI Data Hub, available online.
200 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
Figure 1: Foreign Born Population by Region of Origin, 2011
Asia
28.6%
Europe
12.1%
Latin America Africa
52.7% 4.1%
N. America
Oceana 2.0%
0.5%
Note: Latin America includes South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean; Northern
America includes Canada, Bermuda, Greenland, and St. Pierre and Miquelon.
The foreign-born population is geographically concentrated, with 65 per-
cent residing in the six states that have long been the country’s main immigrant
destinations—a bout 25 percent in California alone (in 2011). The other immigrant-
heavy states are New York (11 percent of all foreign born), Texas (10 percent), Florida
(9 percent), Illinois (4 percent), and New Jersey (5 percent). The proximity of s everal
of these states to Mexico and longstanding, continuous immigration to traditional
metropolitan destinations in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois created strong
networks that have grown over time.
While these states continue to draw and represent the bulk of the foreign-b orn pop-
ulation, n ewcomers—p articularly unauthorized immigrants from M exico—b egan to
settle in many additional destinations during the 1990s. Employment o pportunities—
particularly in agriculture, food manufacturing and construction—m ainly fueled the
new settlement patterns. They combined with lower costs of living and “hollowing out”,
i.e. depopulation of certain areas of the country due to aging and internal migration. As
a result, states like Georgia, Nevada, and many others have become known as the “new
growth” or “new destination” immigration states.
Ten states, mostly in the south and west, have experienced over 270 percent im-
migrant population growth since 1990. They are North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee,
Arkansas, Nevada, South Carolina, Kentucky, Nebraska, Utah, and Alabama. These
changes and patterns help to explain why immigration has become an issue of na-
tional political concern and debate. . . .
Over the past 150 years, the levels of legal immigration have varied, from over
1 million people per year during the early 20th century to a trickle during the Great
Depression and World War II (see Figure 2). Immigrants legalized under IRCA caused
Figure 2: Legal Immigration to the United States, FY 1820 to 2011 1 Hipsman and Meissner / Immigration in the United States 201
2,000,000
1,800,000
1,600,000
1,400,000
1,200,000
1,000,000
800,000
600,000
400,000
200,000
0
1820 1828 1836 1844 1852 1860 1868 1876 1884 1892 1900 1908 1916 1924 1932 1940 1948 1956 1964 1972 1980 1988 1996 2004
Immigration
Note: The 1990 spike in LPR admissions reflects the one-t ime adjustment of newly legalized immigrants under IRCA.
Note: These data represent persons admitted for legal permanent residence during the 12-month fiscal year ending September 30
of the year designated. The total for 1976 includes both the fiscal year and transitional quarter data.
Source: Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (various years).
202 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
the number of authorized immigrants to peak in the late 1980s. The 1990s and 2000s,
until the recession, have registered historic highs in overall immigration levels. . . .
Unauthorized Immigrants
Unauthorized immigrants enter the United States by crossing the land border clan-
destinely between formal ports of entry, using documents fraudulently for admission
at a port of entry, or overstaying a valid temporary visa.
Illegal immigration began to build and reach relatively high levels in the early
1970s. Immigration policymaking in the United States has been preoccupied with
the issues it represents for much of the four decades since. The numbers of unau-
thorized immigrants who were not eligible for IRCA’s legalization but remained in the
United States, in addition to immigration spurred by rapid job creation in the 1990s
and early 2000s, combined with powerful push factors in Mexico, have caused the
unauthorized population to grow by 300,000 to 500,000 per year between 1990
and 2006. After reaching an estimated peak of 12 million in 2007, the unauthorized
population has declined in recent years, to 11.1 million in 2011, according to the
Pew Hispanic Center.
Illegal immigration is a bellwether of economic conditions, growing substantially
in a strong economy with high demand for low-skilled labor (the 1990s and early
2000s), and tapering off with economic contraction (since 2008) (see Figure 3). The
arrival of unauthorized immigrants in large numbers has revitalized certain com-
munities and contributes to local economic growth. At the same time, rapid and un-
checked social change and pressure on public services brought about by individuals
Figure 3: Estimated Unauthorized Population, 1990 to 2011 (millions)
14.0 9.3 9.4 9.7 10.411.111.312.011.611.111.2 11.1
7.8 8.4
12.0
10.0
8.0 3.5 4.1 4.6 4.9 5.3 5.7 6.3 6.8 7.1
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
1221222222212212111111009900000000999009999900009910001909009999991030462157124309788569
Unauthorized population
Source: Pew Hispanic Center, Bob Warren
1 Hipsman and Meissner / Immigration in the United States 203
here illegally has sparked anger and resentment, making immigration a hotly con-
tested issue of national concern.
DHS estimates that 59 percent of unauthorized residents are Mexican born; with
El Salvador accounting for 6 percent, Guatemala 5 percent, Honduras 3 percent, and
China 2 percent. The ten leading countries of origin also include the Philippines,
India, Korea, Ecuador, and Vietnam, which represented 85 percent of the unauthor-
ized immigrant population in 2011.
Roughly 46 percent of unauthorized adult immigrants are parents of young chil-
dren. As of 2010, there were 5.5 million minors with at least one unauthorized
parent. While 1 million of these minors are also unauthorized, the vast m ajority—
4.5 m illion—a re U.S.-born, and are, therefore, American citizens.
Immigrant Integration
While the public debate tends to focus disproportionately on questions of who, how
many, and what kind of noncitizens should be admitted to the United States, many
see immigrant integration as the true test of a successful immigration system. Unlike
other traditional immigration countries, such as Canada and Australia, for example,
the United States does not have a federally-d riven immigrant integration policy or an
agency responsible for making sure immigrants effectively become part of U.S. society.
Instead, integration policies are limited, underfunded, largely ad hoc, and often target
narrow immigrant groups, such as refugees or migrant workers.
Historically, schools, churches, employers, and community-b ased groups have
taken the lead at the local level to spearhead immigrant integration efforts that in-
clude English classes, job training, and health care clinics. In recent years, several
states and cities have launched integration initiatives aimed at improving opportuni-
ties and services available to immigrants.
Federal policies that affect immigrant integration outcomes include the No Child
Left Behind Act passed in 2001 that required schools and funding for states to ensure
that limited English proficient (LEP) children become proficient in English. In 2009,
the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was expanded to cover authorized
immigrant children. Additionally, the federal Adult Education program funds English
education and GED preparation.
Access to basic rights and mainstream institutions in American society like most
jobs in the labor market, public education, community and emergency health care
systems, and citizenship have been the pillars of successful integration, despite that
fact that they do not represent explicit, formal policy efforts. Integration is commonly
measured by comparing indicators such as income, education, health, and living
standards for foreign and n ative-b orn populations. Despite the absence of broad im-
migrant integration policies, the foreign born have historically become well integrated
in the United States. At the same time, today’s large numbers of foreign born, espe-
cially the sizable unauthorized population who may gain legal status if CIR is enacted,
pose substantial immigrant integration challenges for all levels of government and
s ociety—a s well as for the individuals themselves—in the years ahead.
204 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
Immigration Enforcement
As illegal immigration intensified during recent decades, immigration enforcement
has been the dominant focus of the federal government’s response to immigration
for at least 25 years. Enforcement involves visa screening; land border enforcement
between ports of entry; land, air, and sea ports of entry admissions, employer enforce-
ment, detention and removal of criminals and others who have violated immigration
laws, and immigration administrative courts. Nonetheless, the dominant focus of
immigration enforcement has been the southwest land border enforcement.
The U.S.-Mexico border is a diverse area that spans more than 1,900 miles. For
most of the period since the Border Patrol was created in 1924, chronic lack of fund-
ing and adequate resources prevented it from carrying out its mission of preventing
illegal border crossings. That began to change with stepped up border enforcement
during the 1990s.
Since then, the federal government has invested billions of dollars into personnel,
infrastructure, and technology on the border. The Border Patrol now has more than
21,000 agents, having doubled in size since just 2005; 651 miles of border fencing
has been built (mandated in the 2006 Secure Fence Act); and a vast array of cameras,
ground sensors, aircraft, and drones are in place. More than $11 billion was spent on
border enforcement in FY 2011.
As a result, crossing points that were traditionally used by people entering il-
legally into the country have been largely closed off, making it difficult, dangerous,
and expensive to cross. The number of apprehensions the Border Patrol makes has
decreased from nearly 1.7 million in 2000 to 365,000 in 2012.
Immigration enforcement capabilities in the country’s interior have also been sig-
nificantly strengthened. Deportations, federal partnerships with state and local law
enforcement agencies, and efforts to discourage hiring of unauthorized immigrants
are all parts of the equation.
Since 1986, the government has carried out more than 4 million deportations (or
removals). Almost half have occurred since 2007. Annual removals have climbed
steeply for the last 15 years, from roughly 30,000 in 1990 to 188,500 in 2000, to
over 400,000 in 2012. Deportation levels are largely governed by Congress, which
provides the enforcement agencies with levels of funding that specify the numbers to
be detained and removed each year. . . .
A New Era of Lower Levels of Immigration?
Despite the large numbers of unauthorized immigrants residing in the United States,
numerous indicators suggest that changing migration dynamics have set in that will
reduce levels of illegal immigration in the future, even as the U.S. economy rebounds.
After growing annually for several decades, the size of the unauthorized population
has begun to decline since 2007. Furthermore, the number of migrants arrested
while attempting to cross the border has fallen dramatically during the last decade,
1 Hipsman and Meissner / Immigration in the United States 205
especially since 2008. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that immigration from
Mexico has reached net zero and has possibly reversed, meaning that inflows and
outflows are approximately equal or outflows are greater.
A combination of factors is responsible for the new trends. First, sectors that
typically employ unauthorized immigrants—including construction, hospitality, and
tourism—e xperienced deep job loss in the recession, so job demand for lower-s killed
workers has diminished. Second, the buildup of immigration enforcement at the
border and in the U.S. interior has raised the costs, risks, and difficulty of migrat-
ing illegally. Finally, structural changes in M exico—sustained economic growth, im-
proved rates of high school graduation, falling fertility rates, a decline in the size and
growth of the prime w orking-a ge population, and the emergence of a strong middle
c lass—have slowed emigration.
Taken together, these changes represent significant, lasting new developments that
are likely to remain in place during the n ear-term future.
SOURCES
Bergeron, Claire. 2013. Going to the Back of the Line. Washington, DC: Migration Policy
Institute.
Britz, Emma and Jeanne Batalova. 2013. Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants
and Immigration in the United States. Migration Information Source, January 2013.
Customs and Border Protection. 2013. U.S. Border Patrol Statistics.
Fix, Michael, ed. 2007. Securing the Future: U.S. Immigrant Integration Policy. Washington,
DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Gzesh, Susan. 2006. Central Americans and Asylum Policy in the Reagan Era. Migration
Information Source, April 2006.
Hoefer, Michael, Nancy Rytina, and Bryan Baker. 2012. Estimates of the Unauthor-
ized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2011. Washington, DC:
Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 2013. Removal Statistics.
Ji, Qingqing and Jeanne Batalova. 2012. Temporary Admissions of Nonimmigrants to the
United States. Migration Information Source, November 2012.
Office of Immigration Statistics. Various Years. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.
Washington, DC: Department of Homeland Security.
McCabe, Kristen and Doris Meissner. 2010. Immigration and the United States:
R ecession Affects Flows, Prospects for Reform. Migration Information Source,
January 2010.
Meissner, Doris, Deborah W. Meyers, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, and Michael Fix.
2006. Immigration and America’s Future: A New Chapter. Washington, DC: Migration Policy
Institute.
Meissner, Doris, Kerwin, Donald M., Chishti, Muzaffar, and Claire Bergeron. 2013.
Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery. W ashington,
DC: Migration Policy Institute.
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206 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
Migration Policy Institute. U.S. Historical Immigration Trends.
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in the United States, 2011. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center.
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2 Impossible Subjects:
Illegal Aliens and the
Making of America
Mae Ngai
In 2001 the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered Rosario
Hernandez of Garland, Texas, deported to his native Mexico. Hernandez, a 39-year-
old construction worker, had immigrated to Texas from Guadalajara, Mexico, when
he was a teenager. His removal was ordered on grounds that he had been convicted
three times for driving while intoxicated—twice nearly twenty years ago and once ten
years later. After the third conviction Hernandez served five weekends in jail, joined
Alcoholics Anonymous, and gave up drinking. However, according to laws passed by
Congress in 1996 the multiple convictions amounted to an “aggravated felony” and
made his removal mandatory, not subject to review by a judge. Hernandez considered
the deportation unfair: “I already paid for my mistakes,” he said. “How can they pun-
ish somebody two times for the same thing?”
Hernandez is married to a U.S. citizen and has two children, who are also Ameri-
can citizens. His wife Renee said, “I respect him for admitting to his mistakes and
changing his life. What people don’t realize is that this was a surprise attack on my
life, as well. We have a baby here whose whole person is forming. He changes every
day, and you want both parents to be a part of that.” Hernandez’s older son, Adrian,
asks, “Where is my daddy going to be?”1
When I read Hernandez’s story I was struck by its resemblance to another story. . . .
In the early 1930s the INS ordered Mrs. Lillian Joann Flake, a longtime resi-
dent of Chicago, deported to her native Canada. Like Hernandez, Flake was mar-
ried to an American citizen and had a daughter, also a citizen. She had a record
of theft and shoplifting, which the INS considered “crimes of moral turpitude.”
Flake’s deportation was canceled by an act of grace by Secretary of Labor Frances
Perkins. The 1996 laws, however, explicitly deny administrative relief in cases like
H ernandez’s.2
Then, as now, legal reformers and immigrant advocates publicized deportation
stories like these in order to call attention to what they believed was a problem in
American immigration policy. Reformers argued that the nation’s sovereign right to
determine the conditions under which foreigners enter and remain in the country
runs into trouble when the government expels people who have acquired families
and property in the United States. They found cases like Hernandez’s and Flake’s
Republished with permission of Princeton University Press from Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai,
Copyright © 2014; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
207
208 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
compelling because embedded in their narratives were normative judgments that
esteem the immigrant’s integration into society and the sanctity of the family.
D eportation, which devalues assimilation—indeed cancels it—and separates
families, seemed draconian punishment for crimes of drunk driving and petty
theft. In Flake’s time, reformers wrote almost exclusively about deportation cases
involving Europeans and paid scant attention, if any, to the deportation of Mexican
or Chinese criminal aliens. Nowadays, however, n on-E uropean cases like Her-
nandez’s also receive public sympathy, especially when they involve rehabilitated
criminals who are longtime permanent residents with families. This shift reflects
the increase in the number of immigrants from the third world over the last quar-
ter century and contemporary multicultural sensibilities.
We ought not rush to the conclusion, however, that race no longer operates in
either the practice or representation of deportation. Then, as now, few reformers
advocated for those aliens who entered the country by crossing the border without
authorization. That preoccupation has focused on the United S tates–M exico border
and therefore on illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, suggesting that
race and illegal status remain closely related.
But we might ask, first, what it is about the violation of the nation’s sovereign space
that produces a different kind of illegal alien and a different valuation of the claims
that he or she can make on society? Unauthorized entry, the most common form of
illegal immigration since the 1920s, remains vexing for both state and society. Undoc-
umented immigrants are at once welcome and unwelcome: they are woven into the
economic fabric of the nation, but as labor that is cheap and disposable. Employed
in western and southwestern agriculture during the middle decades of the twentieth
century, today illegal immigrants work in every region of the United States, and not
only as farmworkers. They also work in poultry factories, in the kitchens of restau-
rants, on urban and suburban construction crews, and in the homes of middle-c lass
Americans. Marginalized by their position in the lower strata of the workforce and
even more so by their exclusion from the polity, illegal aliens might be understood as
a caste, unambiguously situated outside the boundaries of formal membership and
social legitimacy.
At the same time, illegal immigrants are also members of e thno-racial communi-
ties; they often inhabit the same social spaces as their c o-e thnics and, in many cases,
are members of “mixed status” families. Their accretion engenders paradoxical effects.
On the one hand, the presence of large illegal populations in Asian and Latino com-
munities has historically contributed to the construction of those communities as
illegitimate, criminal, and unassimilable. Indeed, the association of these minority
groups as unassimilable foreigners has led to the creation of “alien citizens”—persons
who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the United States but who
are presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by
the state.
On the other hand, e thno-racial minority groups pursue social inclusion, making
claims of belonging and engaging with society, irrespective of formal status. Latino
studies scholars Williams Flores and Rena Benmayor, for example, argue that the
2 Ngai / Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America 209
mobilization of “cultural citizenship” by subordinate ethnic groups is “redressive” and
contributes to a multicultural society. From another angle, a nonjuridical concept of
membership suggests the production of collectivities that are not national but trans-
national, sited in borderlands or in diaspora.3 The liabilities of illegal alienage and
alien citizenship may thus be at least partially offset through individual and collective
agency, within and across nation-s tate boundaries. . . .
I focus on the years 1924 to 1965, which mark the tenure of the national origins
quota system put into place by the Johnson–R eed Immigration Act of 1924.4 The
Johnson–R eed Act was certainly not the nation’s first restrictive immigration law. The
exclusion of Chinese, other Asians, and various classes of undesirable aliens (paupers,
criminals, anarchists, and the like) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries signaled the beginnings of a legal edifice of restriction. But the 1924 act was the
nation’s first comprehensive restriction law. It established for the first time numerical
limits on immigration and a global racial and national hierarchy that favored some
immigrants over others. The regime of immigration restriction remapped the nation
in two important ways. First, it drew a new ethnic and racial map based on new cat-
egories and hierarchies of difference. Second, and in a different register, it articulated
a new sense of territoriality, which was marked by unprecedented awareness and state
surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders.
Most of the scholarship about immigration to the United States focuses on the
period before 1924, the era of open immigration from Europe, and the period since
1965, when the national origins quota system was abolished and immigration from
the third world increased. Thus, at one level, this study is an attempt to address a gap
in the historiography of American immigration. Although Americans long ago con-
cluded that the national origins quota system was an illiberal policy that blighted the
nation’s democratic tradition, we still know little about how that restriction a ctually
worked, how the nation was racially and spatially reimagined. To be sure, historians
have studied the consequence of the absence of immigration during these decades.
Most important, the cutoff of European immigration created conditions for the
s econd generation of those immigrants who had come to the United States from the
1890s to World War I to more readily assimilate into American society. The loosen-
ing of these ethnic groups’ ties to their homelands facilitated that process, as did the
spread of American popular culture and consumerism, industrial-c lass formation and
organization, and the nationally unifying experience of World War II.5
But restriction meant much more than fewer people entering the country; it
also invariably generated illegal immigration and introduced that problem into the
internal spaces of the nation. Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as
a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultane-
ously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship
and without rights. Moreover, the need of state authorities to identify and distin-
guish between citizens, lawfully resident immigrants, and illegal aliens posed en-
forcement, political, and constitutional problems for the modern state. The illegal
alien is thus an “impossible subject,” a person who cannot be and a problem that
cannot be solved.
210 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
16,000,000
14,000,000
12,000,000
10,000,000
8,000,000
6,000,000
4,000,000
2,000,000
0
1892– 1901– 1911– 1921– 1931– 1941– 1951– 1961– 1971– 1981– 1991–
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Total Admissions Formal Removals & Voluntary Departures
Even as Congress abolished quotas based on national origin in 1965, it preserved the
principle of numerically limiting immigration and, in fact, extended it to cover the
entire globe. Americans remain committed to the principle of numerical restriction
to the present day. The controversies over immigration policy taking place at the
beginning of the twenty-first century center on whether immigrants contribute posi-
tively or deleteriously to the nation’s economy and culture, but there is virtually no
political support for open or numerically unrestricted immigration. If the principle
of immigration restriction has become an unquestioned assumption of contemporary
politics, we need to ask how it got to be that way and to consider its place in the
historical construction of the nation.
Immigration and Citizenship
Immigration policy is constitutive of Americans’ understanding of national member-
ship and citizenship, drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion that articulate a desired
composition—imagined if not necessarily realized—o f the nation. The concept is
manifest in the titles of books on U.S. immigration policy: The Face of the Nation,
2 Ngai / Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America 211
Making Americans, A Nation by Design.6 In the United States immigration has always
been understood as a path that leads to citizenship, as sociologist Rogers Brubaker
has noted: “Admission to citizenship is viewed as the normal sequel to admission for
settlement.” Chinese exclusion, the exception that proves the rule, was another means
by which the nation defined itself.7
The telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship has been an endur-
ing narrative of American history, but it has not always been the reality of migrants’
desires or their experiences and interactions with American society and state. The
myth of “immigrant America” derives its power in large part from the labor that it
performs for American exceptionalism. As political theorist Bonnie Honig argues,
the myth “shores up the national narrative of liberal consensual citizenship, allow-
ing a disaffected citizenry to experience its regime as choiceworthy, to see it through
the eyes of still-enchanted newcomers whose choice to come here . . . reenact[s]
liberalism’s . . . fictive foundation in individual acts of uncoerced consent.”8
Yet if the iconic immigrant serves exceptionalist political culture, that narrative
is legally grounded in a relatively easy process of naturalization (five years residence
with no criminal record) and in the principle of jus soli, which confers citizenship
upon all those born on U.S. soil and, therefore, to the American-b orn children of im-
migrants. Moreover, in matters other than the admission and expulsion of aliens, the
Constitution protects all persons, not just citizens. Aliens do not enjoy all the privi-
leges of c itizenship—n otably the franchise—b ut outside the immigration domain,
and in civil society generally, they have the same rights as citizens to equal protection
under the Fourteenth Amendment.9 The capaciousness of the Constitution in this
regard is not unproblematic: critics have argued that aliens’ lack of substantive rights
in matters of immigration compromises their rights while they are present. Legal and
political theorists also dispute the implications of the Constitution’s protection of
aliens. While some cite it as evidence of the nation’s inclusive traditions, others worry
that the extension of so many rights to aliens diminishes the value of citizenship.10
Nevertheless, the line between alien and citizen is soft. At least in principle, ac-
cess to naturalization ensures that the condition of alienage, with its limited rights,
is temporary. This principle is important because it recognizes the moral and politi-
cal imperative of equality that is central to liberal democracy.11 Yet the promise of
citizenship applies only to the legal alien, the lawfully present immigrant. The illegal
immigrant has no right to be present, let alone embark on the path to citizenship.
The illegal alien crosses a territorial boundary, but, once inside the nation, he or she
stands at another juridical boundary. It is here, I suggest, that we might paradoxi-
cally locate the outermost point of exclusion from national membership.
Some readers might find this unproblematic, for, after all, the nation is bounded
and exclusion from citizenship would seem a logical consequence of illegal immi-
gration. But, as this [work] aims to show, illegal alienage is not a natural or fixed
condition but the product of positive law; it is contingent and at times it is unstable.
The line between legal and illegal status can be crossed in both directions. An illegal
alien can, under certain conditions, adjust his or her status and become legal and
hence eligible for citizenship. And legal aliens who violate certain laws can become
212 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
illegal and hence expelled and, in some cases, forever barred from reentry and the
possibility of citizenship. I suggest that shifts in the boundary between legal and il-
legal status might tell us a lot about how the nation has imagined and constructed
itself over time.
This line of inquiry intervenes in a burgeoning field of citizenship studies. Legal
scholar Linda Bosniak has observed that recent scholarship largely concerns not citi-
zenship as formal membership in the nation-state but issues of substantive citizen-
ship, such as civic virtue and group identities in a multicultural society. Many scholars
presume that as a formal status category, universal liberal citizenship in the United
States has been achieved, that its historical exclusions based on race and gender have
been overcome, and that the challenge, now, is to go beyond passive citizenship to
normative definitions of active citizenship.12 However, the presence of aliens within
the national community suggests that “citizenship’s threshold and its substantive
character are, in fact, deeply interwoven.” Illegal aliens, who comprise a caste that
lives and works outside of citizenship, pose an even greater predicament and chal-
lenge for liberal democratic society.13
Immigration Policy and the Production of
Racial Knowledge
A second, related theme of this [work] concerns how restrictive immigration laws
produced new categories of racial difference. The construction of racial hierarchies
has been, of course, an ongoing project in American history since the colonial period.
If we understand that race is not a biological fact but a socially constructed category
of difference, it should also be emphasized that, as Paul Gilroy states, “there is no
racism in general.”14 Race is always historically specific. At times, a confluence of
economic, social, cultural, and political factors has impelled major shifts in society’s
understanding (and construction) of race and its constitutive role in national identity
formation. The Civil War was obviously one of those times; the present multicultural
moment is another. I argue that the 1920s was also an extraordinary time when
immigration policy realigned and hardened racial categories in the law.
The national origins quota system classified Europeans as nationalities and as-
signed quotas in a hierarchy of desirability, but at the same time the law deemed all
Europeans to be part of a white race, distinct from those considered to be not white.
E uro-A merican identities turned both on ethnicity—t hat is, a n ationality-b ased cul-
tural identity that is defined as capable of transformation and assimilation—a nd on
a racial identity defined by whiteness.
The 1924 Johnson–R eed Act also excluded from immigration Chinese, Japanese,
Indians, and other Asians on grounds that they were racially ineligible for naturalized
citizenship, a condition that was declared by the Supreme Court in the 1920s.15 These
developments resolved the legal ambiguities and conflicts over the racial status of
Asians that had vexed the law since their arrival in the m id-n ineteenth century. They
also simultaneously solidified the legal boundaries of the “white race.”16
2 Ngai / Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America 213
The immigration laws during the 1920s did not assign numerical quotas to Mexi-
cans, but the enforcement provisions of restriction—n otably visa requirements and
b order-c ontrol p olicies—p rofoundly affected Mexicans, making them the single larg-
est group of illegal aliens by the late 1920s. The actual and imagined association of
Mexicans with illegal immigration was part of an emergent Mexican “race problem,”
which also witnessed the application of Jim Crow segregation laws to Mexicans in the
Southwest, especially in Texas, and, at the federal level, the creation of “Mexican” as
a separate racial category in the census.17
Thus, unlike E uro-A mericans, whose ethnic and racial identities became uncou-
pled during the 1920s, Asians’ and Mexicans’ ethnic and racial identities remained
conjoined. The legal racialization of these ethnic groups’ national origin cast them as
permanently foreign and unassimilable to the nation. I argue that these racial forma-
tions produced “alien citizens”—Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in
the United States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of
the nation.
Alien citizenship was not a new phenomenon, nor was it just the consequence of
immigration legislation. Indeed, alien citizenship flowed directly from the histories
of conquest, colonialism, and semicolonialism that constituted the United States’
relations with Mexico and in Asia. Those histories indelibly stamped the social experi-
ences and subordination of Mexicans and Asians with racisms that were, as cultural
critic Lisa Lowe described, the “material trace of history.” For Chinese and other
Asians, alien citizenship was the invariable consequence of racial exclusion from
immigration and naturalized citizenship. For Mexicans, the concept of alien citizen-
ship captured the condition of being a foreigner in one’s former native land. The
immigration experiences and racial formations of Asians and Mexicans in twentieth-
century America cannot be understood apart from these legacies of conquest and
colonialism.18
In one sense alien citizenship spoke to a condition of racial otherness, a badge
of foreignness that could not be shed. But alien citizenship was not only a racial
metaphor. While not strictly a legal term, the concept underwrote both formal and
informal structures of racial discrimination and was at the core of major, official race
policies, notably the repatriation of 400,000 persons of Mexican descent during the
Great Depression (of which half were estimated to be U.S. citizens) and the intern-
ment of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II (two-thirds of
them citizens).19
The racial formations of Asians and Mexicans in the 1920s were particularly sig-
nificant because they modified a racial map of the nation that had been marked prin-
cipally by the contours of white and black and that had denoted race as a sectional
problem. But that changed with the Great Migration of African Americans, and to a
lesser extent, Mexicans, to northern cities during the World War I era. Immigration
law was part of an emergent race policy that was broader, more comprehensive, and
national in scope. In addition to immigration law, that policy involved the legal justi-
fication for de facto segregation in the North and the completion of the legal process
of forced assimilation of American Indians.20
214 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
In this period the concept of race itself also changed, from late-n ineteenth-c entury
race science, which centered on physiognomic difference and hierarchy, to twentieth-
century racial ideas that linked race to both physiognomy and nationality. Modern
racial ideology depended increasingly on the idea of complex cultural, national, and
physical difference more than on simple biological hierarchy.21
The system of racial classification and regulation that emerged in the 1920s should
be seen in the context of a longer historical process of legal configuring within the
national state, which had struggled since the late nineteenth century to find a racial
logic capable of circumventing the imperative of equality established by the Four-
teenth Amendment. That process involved a double move. On the one hand the law
separated public and private spheres, prohibiting racial discrimination by the state
but permitting it in private relations. On the other hand Congress and the courts
sneaked racial distinctions into public policy through doctrinal rationalizations like
“separate but equal.”22 During the 1920s the legal traditions that had justified racial
discrimination against African Americans were extended to other ethnoracial groups
in immigration law through the use of euphemism (“aliens ineligible to citizenship”)
and the invention of new categories of identity (“national origins”). . . .
The interactions, conflicts, and negotiations between migrants, the state, and so-
ciety that animate the history in this [work], I argue, are integral to the historical
processes that define and redefine the nation. I do not believe that immigrants are
external to the nation but that, as Homi Bhabha wrote, “the migrants, the minorities,
the diasporic come to change the history of the nation.”23
NOTES
1. “Immigrant Ex-Cons Fight Deportation,” Houston Chronicle, May 6, 2001, sec. A,
1. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (Division C of
Public Law 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009); Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of
1996 (Public Law 104-132, 110 Stat. 1214). Since 1996, immigration law no longer refers
to deportation but calls the procedure removal . I use deportation for purposes of histori-
cal continuity. In June 2001 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the IIRIRA’s provisions
that applied deportation retroactively to crimes that were not deportable offenses when
they were committed. INS v. St. Cyr, 121 S. Ct. 2271 (2001).
2. Letter, James Houghterling to Sen. James Lewis, April 20, 1938, file 55819/402B, box
75, accession 58A734, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG (Record Group) 85,
National Archives, Washington, DC.
3. William Flores and Rina Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Iden-
tity, Space, and Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 267. For other perspectives on cultural
citizenship, see Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negoti-
ate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States,” Current Anthropology 35 (1996):
737–62; Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds., Undergrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics
of Modern Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); Lok Siu, “Diasporic Cultural
C itizenship: Chineseness and Belonging in Panama and Central America,” Social Text
69, no. 19 (Winter 2001): 7–28. On transnational communities, see, for example, Linda
Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects,
Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-S tates (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and
2 Ngai / Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America 215
Breach, 1993); Robert C. Smith, “Transnational Localities: Community, Technology and the
Politics of Membership within the Context of Mexico and U.S. Migration,” in Transnational-
ism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1998).
4. Act of May 25, 1924 (43 Stat. 153); named for its sponsors, Rep. Albert Johnson
( R -Wash.) and Sen. David Reed (R-P enn.).
5. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free Press,
1988); Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia
of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Therstrom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980), 31–58; Kathleen Neils Conzen, et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspec-
tive from the USA,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41; Russell Kazal,
“Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall and Reappraisal of a Concept in American History,”
American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 437–71; Gary Gerstle, Working-Class
Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2002 [1989]); James Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigra-
tion and the Remaking of the Working Class in the U.S., 1880–1930,” Journal of American
History 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 996–1020; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Indus-
trial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
6. Keith Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigra-
tion, Race, and the Origins of Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design? Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
7. Rogers Brubaker, “Citizenship and Naturalization: Politics and Policies,” in Immigra-
tion and the Politics of Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies, ed. Rogers Brubaker (Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1989), 121; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 6–7, 13–14.
8. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 75.
9. The residency requirements for naturalization varied during the first years of the re-
public; the five-y ear period was set by the Naturalization Act of 1802. See James Kettner, The
Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1978), 245–46. However, eligibility for citizenship was limited to “free white persons”
(Nationality Act of 1790) and to “persons of African nativity and descent” (Nationality Act
of 1870) until the McCarran-W alter Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 repealed
all racial requirements for citizenship. National citizenship to all those born in the United
States was granted by the Fourteenth Amendment and upheld in United States v. Wonk Kim
Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898); equal protection for all persons was upheld in Yick Wo v. Hopkins,
118 U.S. 356 (1886).
10. Hiroshi Motomura, “The Curious Evolution of Immigration Law: Procedural
Surrogates for Substantive Constitutional Rights,” Columbia Law Review 92 (1992):
1625–1704; Linda Bosniak, “Membership, Equality, and the Difference That Alienage
Makes,” New York University Law Review 69 (1994):1047–1149; Alexander Bickel, The
Morality of Consent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 54; Peter Schuck, “Member-
ship in the Liberal Polity: The Devaluation of American Citizenship,” in Brubaker, Immigra-
tion and the Politics of Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies, 62–63.
11. Brubaker, “Citizenship and Naturalization,” 99, 109.
216 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
12. Linda Bosniak, “Universal Citizenship and the Problem of Alienage,” Northwestern
University Law Review 94, (2000): 963–1147. On citizenship scholarship, see, for example,
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books,
1983); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Civil Citizen-
ship against Social Citizenship?: On the Ideology of Contract-v ersus-C harity,” in The Condi-
tion of Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (London: Sage, 1994), 90–107; David Hollinger,
Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Lauren Berlant,
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997); Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and P ost-n ational Mem-
bership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See also Will Kymlicka and
Wayne Norman, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,”
Ethics 104 (1994): 352–81. On achievement of universal citizenship, see Judith Shklar,
American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Charles Kesler, “The Promise of American Citizenship,”
in Immigration and Citizenship in the Twenty-F irst Century, ed. Noah M. J. Pickus (Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1998), 3–39.
13. Bosniak, “Universal Citizenship,” 965.
14. Paul Gilroy, “One Nation under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and R acism
in Britain,” in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (New York: Routledge,
1990), 265.
15. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), and United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204
(1923). Related cases in 1923 upheld state laws proscribing agricultural land ownership
by aliens ineligible to citizenship (Terrance v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197; 263 U.S. 326); also
in this period Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) upheld a Mississippi law that deemed
Chinese ineligible to attend white schools.
16. Ian H aney-L ópez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York
University Press, 1995).
17. David Montenajo, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1987); David Gutíerrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans,
Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995). The “Mexican” race category in the census was short lived.
18. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 26; George Sánchez, “Race, Nation and Culture in Recent Im-
migration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 1999); 66–83. U.S. relations
with Japan were not colonial but, rather, relations of competing colonialisms.
19. For discussion on racialization of Asian Americans in law, see also Neil T. Gotanda,
“Citizenship Nullification and the Impossibility of Asian American Politics,” in Asian
A mericans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang (Washington,
DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Robert S. Chang, Disoriented (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
20. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the
1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55. The United States Supreme Court
would not sanction de jure segregation in the North, but it did legitimate de facto segrega-
tion based on free market principles in Corrigan v. Buckley, which upheld the use of racial
covenants in real property. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917), Corrigan v. Buckley,
2 Ngai / Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America 217
271 U.S. 323 (1926). See Gilbert Orofsky, Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York,
1890–1930 (New York, 1968); Donald Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid:
S egregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993). The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which declared all Native American Indians to
be American citizens, completed the process of “assimilation” that stripped Native American
Indians of their sovereignty. Citizenship in the case of Indians, however, was circumscribed
by their continued status as wards, a legal status that codified their presumed racial back-
wardness. Act of June 2, 1924 (43 Stat. 253). See Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The
Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995
[1984]), 236–37.
21. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992),
9–11. See also John Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes towards Racial Inferiority,
1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
22. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896);
Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is C olor-B lind,’” Stanford Law Review
44 (1991): 1–68.
23. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 169–70.
3 Los Intersticios: Recasting
Moving Selves
Evelyn Alsultany
Ethnicity in such a world needs to be recast so that our moving selves can be
acknowledged. . . . Who am I? When am I? The questions that are asked in the street,
of my identity, mold me. Appearing in the flesh, I am cast afresh, a female of color—
skin color, hair texture, clothing, speech, all marking me in ways that I could scarcely
have conceived of.
—Meena Alexander
I’m in a graduate class at the New School in New York City. A white female sits next
to me and we begin “friendly” conversation. She asks me where I’m from. I reply that
I was born and raised in New York City and return the question. She tells me she is
from Ohio and has lived in New York for several years. She continues her inquiry:
“Oh . . . well, how about your parents?” (I feel her trying to map me onto her nar-
row cartography; New York is not a sufficient answer. She analyzes me according to
binary axes of sameness and difference. She detects only difference at first glance, and
seeks to pigeonhole me. In her framework, my body is marked, excluded, not from
this country. A seemingly “friendly” question turns into a claim to land and belong-
ing.) “My father is Iraqi and my mother Cuban,” I answer. “How interesting. Are you
a U.S. citizen?”
I am waiting for the NYC subway. A man also waiting asks me if I too am Pakistani.
I reply that I’m part Iraqi and part Cuban. He asks if I am Muslim, and I reply that I
am Muslim. He asks me if I am married, and I tell him I’m not. In cultural camara-
derie he leans over and says that he has cousins in Pakistan available for an arranged
marriage if my family so desires. (My Cubanness, as well as my own relationship to
my cultural identity, evaporates as he assumes that Arab plus Muslim equals arranged
marriage. I can identify: he reminds me of my Iraqi relatives and I know he means
well.) I tell him that I’m not interested in marriage but thank him for his kindness.
(I accept his framework and respond accordingly, avoiding an awkward situation in
which he realizes that I am not who he assumes I am, offering him recognition and
validation for his [mis]identification.)
I am in a New York City deli waiting for my bagel to toast. The man behind the
counter asks if I’m an Arab Muslim (he too is Arab and Muslim). I reply that yes, I am
by part of my father. He asks my name, and I say, “Evelyn.” In utter disdain, he tells
me that I could not possibly be Muslim; if I were truly Muslim I would have a Muslim
name. What was I doing with such a name? I reply (after taking a deep breath and
Copyright © 2002. From This Bridge We Call Home, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds.
Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.
218
3 Alsultany / Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves 219
telling myself that it’s not worth getting upset over) that my Cuban mother named me
and that I honor my mother. He points to the fact that I’m wearing lipstick and have
not changed my name, which he finds to be completely inappropriate and despicable,
and says that I am a reflection of the decay of the Arab Muslim in America.
I’m on an airplane flying from Miami to New York. I’m sitting next to an Ecuadorian
man. He asks me where I’m from. I tell him. He asks me if I’m more Arab, Latina, or
American, and I state that I’m all of the above. He says that’s impossible. I must be more
of one ethnicity than another. He determines that I am not really Arab, that I’m more
Latina because of the camaraderie he feels in our speaking Spanish.
I am in Costa Rica. I walk the streets and my brown skin and dark hair blend in
with the multiple shades of brown around me. I love this first-time experience of
blending in! I walk into a coffee shop for some café con leche, and my fantasy of
belonging is shattered when the woman preparing the coffee asks me where I’m from.
I tell her that I was born and raised in New York City by a Cuban mother and an Arab
father. She replies, “Que eres una gringa.”
I am shocked by the contextuality of identity: that my body is marked as gringa in
Costa Rica, as Latina in some U.S. contexts, Arab in others, in some times and spaces
not adequately Arab, or Latina, or “American,” and in other contexts simply as other.
My body becomes marked with meaning as I enter public space. My iden-
tity fractures as I experience differing dislocations in multiple contexts. Some-
times people otherize me, sometimes they identify with me. Both situations can
be equally problematic. Those who otherize me fail to see a shared humanity
and those who identify with me fail to see difference; my Arab or Muslim iden-
tity negates my Cuban heritage. Identification signifies belonging or home, and
I pretend to be that home for the mistaken person. It’s my good deed for the day
(I know how precious it can be to find a moment of familiarity with a stranger).
The bridge becomes my back as I feign belonging, and I become that vehicle for
others, which I desire for myself. Although it is illusory, I do identify with the
h umanity of the situation—the desire to belong in this world, to be understood.
But the frameworks used to (mis)read my body, to disconnect me, wear on me.
I try to develop a new identity. What should I try to pass for next time? Perhaps I’ll
just say I’m Cuban to those who appear to be Arab or South Asian. A friend sug-
gests I say I’m an Italian from Brooklyn. I wonder if I could successfully pass for
that. Ethnicity needs to be recast so that our moving selves can be acknowledged.
NOTES
I would like to thank Marisol Negrón, Alexandra Lang, María Helena Rueda, Ericka
Beckman, Karina Hodoyan, Sara Rondinel, Jessi Aaron, and Cynthia María Paccacerqua for
their feedback in our writing seminar at Stanford University with Mary Pratt. I would espe-
cially like to thank Mary Pratt for her invaluable feedback, and AnaLouise Keating and Gloria
Anzaldúa for their thoughtful editing.
4 F or Many Latinos, Racial Identity
Is More Culture than Color
Mireya Navarro
Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of
thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among
the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some
other race.”
More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up
from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how
Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos
argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception
of identity—d o not fit them.
The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which
typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this
country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of
cultural traits, like language or customs.
So when they encounter the census, they see one question that asks them whether
they identify themselves as having Hispanic ethnic origins and many answer it as
their main identifier. But then there is another question, asking them about their race,
because, as the census guide notes, “people of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin may
be of any race,” and more than a third of Latinos check “other.”
This argument over identity has gained momentum with the growth of the Latino
population, which in 2010 stood at more than 50 million. Census Bureau officials
have acknowledged that the questionnaire has a problem and say they are wrestling
with how to get more Latinos to pick a race. In 2010, they tested different wording in
questions and last year they held focus groups, with a report on the research sched-
uled to be released by this summer.
Some experts say officials are right to go back to the drawing table. “Whenever
you have people who can’t find themselves in the question, it’s a bad question,” said
Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor at Harvard who specializes in the challenges of
measuring race and ethnicity.
The problem is more than a cademic—the census data on race serves many purposes,
including determining the makeup of voting districts, and monitoring discriminatory
practices in hiring and racial disparities in education and health. When respondents do
not choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on factors like the racial
makeup of their neighborhood, inevitably leading to a less accurate count.
From The New York Times, January 14, 2012. Copyright © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
220
4 Navarro / For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color 221
Latinos, who make up close to 20 percent of the American population, generally
hold a fundamentally different view of race. Many Latinos say they are too racially
mixed to settle on one of the government-sanctioned standard races—w hite, black,
American Indian, Alaska native, native Hawaiian, and a collection of Asian and Pacific
Island backgrounds.
Some regard white or black as separate demographic groups from Latino. Still
others say Latinos are already the equivalent of another race in this country, defined
by a shared set of challenges.
“The issues within the Latino community—language, immigration status—d o not
take into account race,” said Peter L. Cedeño, 43, a lawyer and native New Yorker
born to Dominican immigrants. “We share the same hurdles.”
At a time when many multiracial Americans are proudly asserting their m ixed-r ace
identity, many Latinos, an overwhelmingly blended population with Indian, Euro-
pean, African and other roots, are sidestepping or ignoring questions of race.
Erica Lubliner, who has fair skin and green e yes—legacies of her Jewish father and
her Mexican m other—said she was so “conflicted” about the race question on the
census form that she left it blank.
Ms. Lubliner, a recent graduate of the medical school at the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles, in her m id-3 0s, was only 9 when her father died, and she grew up
steeped in the language and culture of her mother. She said she has never identified
with “the dominant culture of white.” She believes her mother is a mix of white and
Indian. “Believe me, I am not a confused person,” she said. “I know who I am, but I
don’t necessarily fit the categories well.”
Alejandro Farias, 23, from Brownsville, Tex., a supervisor for a freight company,
sees himself simply as Latino. His ancestors came from the United States, Mexico and
Portugal. When pressed, he checked “some other race.”
“Race to me gets very confusing because we have so many people from so many
races that make up our genealogical tree,” he said.
Yet race matters. How Latinos identify themselves—a nd how the census counts
them—a ffects the political clout of Latinos and other minority groups. Some stud-
ies have found that A frican-L atinos tend to be significantly more supportive of
g overnment-sponsored health care and much less supportive of the death penalty
than Latinos who identify as white, a rift that is also found in the broader white and
black populations.
This racial effect “weakens the political effectiveness of Latinos as a group,” said
Gary M. Segura, a political science professor at Stanford who has conducted some
of the research.
A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A.
Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because
“I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican
Republic.
But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white major-
ity in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white
222 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do
with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”
Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Ital-
ian immigrants before them—d rop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.”
A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents
of more than a quarter of third-g eneration children with Mexican ancestry do not
identify their children as Latino on census forms.
Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents
married to non-M exicans, usually n on-H ispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have
high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that
many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic
and social progress across generations, hence many studies show little or no progress
for third-g eneration Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the
University of Texas at Austin and co-a uthor of the study.
And a more recent study by University of Southern California researchers
found that more than two million people, or 6 percent of those who claimed any
type of Latin American ancestry on census surveys, did not ultimately identify as
Latino or Hispanic. The trend was more prevalent among those of mixed parentage,
who spoke only English and who identified as white, black or Asian when asked
their race.
James Paine, whose father is half Mexican-A merican, said it never occurred to
him to claim a Latino identity. Mr. Paine, 25, the owner of a real estate investment
management company in La Jolla, Calif., spent summers with his M exican-A merican
aunt and attends his father’s big family reunions every year (his mother is white of
Irish and French descent). But he says he does not speak Spanish or live in a Latino
neighborhood.
“If the question is ‘What’s your heritage?’ I’d say Irish-M exican,” he said. “But the
question is ‘What are you?’ and the answer is I’m white.”
On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting
of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging
among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and orga-
nizations.
Miriam Jimenez Roman, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says
that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and d ark-skinned Latinos led
her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census
encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you
sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the
treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as
black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population.
Over the decades, the Census Bureau has repeatedly altered how it asks the
race question, and on the 2010 form, it added a sentence spelling out that “His-
panic origins are not races.” The change helped steer 5 percent more Latinos
away from “some other race,” with the vast majority of those choosing the white
category.
4 Navarro / For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color 223
Still, critics of the census questionnaire say the government must move on from
racial distinctions based on 18th-c entury binary thinking and adapt to Americans’
sense of self.
But Latino political leaders say the risk in changing the questions could create
confusion and lead some Latinos not to mark their ethnicity, shrinking the overall
Hispanic numbers.
Ultimately, said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy
and chairman of the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population, this is
not just a tussle over identity, it is a political battle, too.
“It comes down to what yields the largest numbers for which group,” he said.
5 Black Ethnics
Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit
of the American Dream
Christina M. Greer
A Theory of Black Elevated Minority Status
Before Barack Obama exploded onto the national political scene in 2004, the Repub-
licans, as some may remember, were giddy with excitement over their own spe-
cial potential candidate for the presidency. In 1992, Colin Powell’s name was being
thrown around as a possible running mate for then president George H. W. Bush, and
in 1995, his name was mentioned as a possible GOP presidential candidate. Powell
seemed to have stepped out of a GOP’s dream. He was a general in the US Army, and
for many whites, he transcended race. Not only had he been quoted on the record as
saying, “I ain’t that black” (Gates 1997: 84), but he seemed to be the antithesis of Jesse
Jackson, the most recent serious black candidate for a party’s nomination. Jackson
had run for the Democratic nomination for presidency in 1984 and 1988 and was
what many in white America viewed as a quintessential African American: descendant
of US slavery and the South, a student of the Baptist preaching tradition, a product
of a broken home, and a social agitator.1 General Powell, for many, was a product of
arguably one of the most established institutions of American patriotism. He was fair
skinned, “articulate,” a product of the US military, and a leader in what many viewed
as a successful Gulf War. But Powell possessed something else that made him special:
In the eyes of some of his supporters, he was not African American. For many, it was
his Jamaican heritage that made him different, that explained his discipline, profes-
sional excellence, and supreme intellect.
Fast forward to 2008, when Barack Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a
woman from Kansas, captivated the hearts of so many Americans. Many of the same
conversations began linking Obama and Powell as an ideal presidential candidate,
despite not being really African A merican—that is, not a descendant of US slavery
and therefore possessing a different relationship with America. I wondered if Obama
would have been as attractive to American voters, white voters in particular, if his
background were that of a man from Detroit and a woman from Duluth, or a man
from Newark and a woman from Nebraska, or a man from Oakland and a woman
from Omaha. You see where I am going with this line of thought. The subtle but
significant message of his n on–A frican American heritage was a variable both black
Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream by Christina M. Greer (2013):
pp. 11–12, 20–21, 21–22, 22–23, 24–25, 25–26. © Oxford University Press 2013.
224
5 Greer / Black Ethnics 225
and white voters initially discussed, debated, and ultimately digested. Many voters
saw Obama as black, whether his dad was from Kenya or Kentucky. For some voters,
when presented with ethnic diversity, Obama’s lack of “authenticity” complicated their
sense of racial attachment. For others, though, the comparisons to Jesse Jackson were
endless. Whereas Jackson was portrayed as obsessed with race and racial politics, spe-
cifically black politics, Obama was presented as a “postracial” candidate. Obama had a
racial identity that linked him to the black population, but he was different. For many,
he did not have the same “racial baggage” as ninth-g eneration African Americans—the
Jesse Jacksons of the w orld—thus begging the question, what does racial identity and
ethnic distinction mean for blacks living in America? . . .
The Blurred Color Line
. . . Over one hundred years ago, caste systems were recognized as “natural” ways of
organizing individuals in American society. Rigid castelike systems no longer exist in
the United States, but a new type of caste system threatens the country today. It is not
one imposed by overt white power subjugating people of color into slave and inden-
tured servant positions; rather, the new caste system that now threatens American
democracy comes from within the deeply seated m ind-sets of those who were once
held in subservient positions. This mind-set is even shared by newly arriving immi-
grants who possess a knowledge of America’s past practices and who strive to position
themselves as far from the “bottom” caste as possible. The modern-d ay caste struggle
is most poignantly played out in some of the interactions between n ative-b orn black
Americans and their black ethnic counterparts who understand the continued burden
of the color line and the weight of race in the United States. . . .
At the core, all discussions of race and ethnicity for blacks in America must
emphasize the duality that exists for these diverse groups of blacks. Afro-C aribbean
and African immigrants living in America have experienced forms of oppression,
racism, and subjugation as blacks, even by blacks. For example, residential segre-
gation of blacks has often swiftly introduced black immigrant ethnic groups to the
inequities still faced by blacks in the United States. However, this forced integra-
tion of native-born blacks and foreign-b orn blacks, due to segregation, has also pro-
duced tensions, mistrust, and competition among black groups (Kasinitz, Battle, and
Miyares 2001; Massey and Denton 1988). The historically racist black-w hite para-
digm has extended to black immigrants in many ways. However, this black-w hite
paradigm has also manifested itself in more positive ways for foreign-b orn blacks.
The historical racism and oppression in the United States seems to have either placed
A fro-C aribbean and African populations with black Americans, both literally and
symbolically, or have treated Afro-C aribbean and African immigrants as different,
that is, harder working, smarter, and/or “better” than n ative-b orn blacks, what Rogers
(2006) defines as “good blacks.”
The understanding of race for black newcomers is that racial formation and
construction is a largely unique phenomenon applicable to the United States.
New immigrants may not easily or readily accept or adhere to the racial categories
226 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
a scribed to them upon their arrival in the country and therefore cannot (or should
not) be expected to automatically accept or identify with the larger black Ameri-
can racial category or group as a whole. Studies have documented A fro-C aribbean
populations expressing disillusionment with assimilation in the United States and
thereby becoming “black Americans” as opposed to just “Americans,” like their white
immigrant counterparts (Rogers 2000; Waters 1994; Foner 1987).2 . . . Once black
immigrants arrive in the United States, they become black American, not just Ameri-
can. The concepts of race, identity, and national origin have created a complex set of
issues for the individual and for the larger group. . . .
Many immigrant groups share similar obstacles when arriving in the United States.
Some scholars have argued that African and Caribbean immigrants may have more
in common with other immigrants from across the globe than with n ative-b orn black
Americans (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). F irst-generation black immigrants in the
United States have faced overwhelming pressures to identify only as “blacks” ( Kasinitz
1992; Foner 1987). In fact, they have been described as “invisible immigrants” (Bryce-
Laporte 1972), because rather than being contrasted with other immigrants (for
example, evaluating Jamaican successes as compared with Chinese), they have been
compared most often to black Americans.3 Because racial phenotype seems to link
black ethnics into one racial group, can and will substantive coalitions form? Black
groups are clearly grouped together in the United States. However, whether their fates
are ultimately linked is part of a larger and constantly changing black ethnic puzzle.
Linked Fates and Coalition Building
Over the past several decades, significant strides have been made by blacks achieving
educational success, attaining occupational advancements, and being incorporated
into the middle class. However, dark skin is still correlated with poverty in the United
States and throughout the globe (Segura and Rodrigues 2006); therefore, class pos-
ition, societal status, and opportunities for political and economic advancement are
in many ways racially assigned in the United States. Race is obviously a physical char-
acteristic that has been used in this country to distinguish a certain group of people
with similar phenotypes. This color distinction has led to widespread discrimination
and inequities, as Rogers (2006) analyzed, thus lumping phenotypically similar indi-
viduals together based on outward identity, without accounting for the existence of
differing s elf-identifications and belief systems.
The racial socialization of people of African descent living in the United States
has had distinguishing effects on black populations, one of a “blended” cul-
tural heritage (Larkey, Hecht, and Martin 1993) that emphasizes and connects to
A frican ancestry and representation, as well as subjugation in American culture
(Anglin and Whaley 2006). Due to shared skin color with native-b orn popula-
tions, foreign-b orn black phenotype serves as a basis for discrimination in America
(Deaux et al. 2007).
New black immigrants also discover the inequities present in America and the
subsequent negotiations with race and identity that directly affect their pursuits of
5 Greer / Black Ethnics 227
b ecoming “American” without the mandatory modifier “black.” For foreign-b orn
blacks, their American status has a permanent “black” modifier attached to it. The
permanent prefix aids in preventing native-b orn and foreign-b orn populations from
attaining the same American incorporation experienced by other nonblack immi-
grants. Black racial classification has affected first and second-g eneration black eth-
nics in that they did not experience the same processes of assimilation as previous
white immigrant populations (Waters 1998; Kinder and Sanders 1996). . . . Thus,
black immigrants seek ways to reduce and possibly diminish the negative effects of
the minority status imposed on their American status. It is because of this linking
of black immigrants to native-b orn blacks that in-g roup fighting and competition
decreases opportunities for substantive coalition building. As A fro-C aribbean and
African black populations are occasionally promoted to elevated minority status over
n ative-b orn black populations by whites, coalitional efforts are severely jeopardized
and undermined within the larger black group. In that, one group is promoted and
their interests are advanced at the expense and exclusion of others.4 . . .
All of the Blacks Are American. All of the
Immigrants Are Latino. But Some of Us Are . . . ?
Black Americans have largely been categorized in comparison to whites, based on
region, political affiliation, class, and education levels. Segura and Rodrigues (2006:
376) argued that the “historical construction of a racial dynamic that is almost exclu-
sively binary, i.e., black and white . . . [and] racial and ethnic interactions between
Anglos and other minority groups are assumed to m imic—to some d egree—the
black-w hite experience.” Simply put, Segura and Rodrigues argued that the “black-
white paradigm is no longer sufficient to provide genuine understanding of the politi-
cal circumstances and experiences of all nonwhite groups” (ibid.: 391). . . .
Several nonblack and nonwhite immigrant groups have expressed feelings of an
“in-b etween” status in which they are “not Black but not White” (Perlmann and
Waldinger 1997: 905) or “native born, and not black” (Cordero-G uzman, Smith,
and Grosfoguel 2001: 6; Smith 1996). This in-b etween status for nonblack and non-
white immigrants extends to black immigrants as well, thereby creating a complex
duality in defining race, place, and status in American society.5 Relationships pertain-
ing to electoral behaviors, partisanship, group mobilization, and other group politics
cannot necessarily easily translate into similar black immigrant experiences and rela-
tionships with whites and other nonblack populations (Leighley and Vedlitz 1999).
According to the US census, the face of black America now includes over 1.5 million
immigrants from African nations and over 3.5 million black immigrants from the
Caribbean, representing close to 10 percent of the total black population (US Census
Bureau 2010).
How blacks in America imagine and create black ethnic coalitions directly relates to
how scholars can apply these multifaceted relationships to numerous other ethnic com-
munities. The physical characteristics that seem to link native-b orn and immigrant
228 PART III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
blacks and the inequities of resources that continue to affect black peoples in America
have led to what Bobo and Hutchings (1996) label as in-g roup superiorities, elements
of ethnocentrism, and overall group hostilities. The limited access to larger political and
economic goals creates intraracial tensions and resentments between n ative-b orn and
newcomer populations. However, the competition among black groups jockeying for
anything but last place in the social order has also created a link, bond, or even an un-
derstanding of the role of blackness in A merican society. Descriptive representation—
that is, shared characteristics along racial and ethnic (and gender) lines—h elps
promote feelings of “solidarity, familiarity, and self-esteem among members of that
respective group” (Junn and Masuoka 2008: 731; see also Dovi 2002; Mansbridge
2003; Pitkin 1967). The jockeying for economic and political placement in civil soci-
ety is intraracial (between black ethnic groups) as well as extraracial (between other
minority, immigrant, and ethnic groups). It is because of the systemic racism that has
occurred, and (to the surprise of many black immigrants) still occurs, that a sense of
black racial alliance can be measured. . . .
NOTES
1. This label was applied to Jackson for his many protests pertaining to civil rights,
equal rights, corporate divestment from South Africa, housing equity, etc.
2. There is a host of literature that outlines how Jewish, Italian, Irish, and other white
ethnic populations became “white.” However, although their paths to incorporation may
have begun with an identification with blacks during the early stages of assimilation, these
immigrant groups were able to transcend ethnicity and identify racially, thus shedding light
on the fluidity of ethnicity and the permanence of race. Whites are grouped into a homoge-
neous category. Sipress (1997: 181) comments: “The ‘whitening’ of Irish-A mericans provides
an example of a marginal social group that embraced a racial identity to advance its own in-
terests.” The “whitening” of the Irish race is discussed by Ignatiev (1995: 1), who notes that
“whites” are “those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most
wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted
persons excluded from it.” Similar assimilation tactics were used by Italian and Jewish immi-
grants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well (Fears 2003). These ethnic groups
often used party politics and coalition building to bridge the cultural divide (Logan 2003).
However, the political inclusion, participation, and ultimate assimilation of Irish, Italian,
and Jewish immigrants has also been largely due to the color line in America. Whereas these
immigrants were not considered white at some point in time, the color line shifted, and in-
clusion followed suit.
3. Multiracial coalitions primarily focus on the issues of racial and ethnic equality
(Hochschild and Rogers 2000). However, this emphasis on equality in the face of diverse
histories and negotiations with assimilation and incorporation, often leading to groups
fragmenting into competitive factions. Thus, biracial and multiracial coalitions are thought
to be unattainable due to past political disagreements, individual attitudes about other
groups, and fears among minority groups within the larger group (Tedin and Murray 1994).
Intraracial distrust exists among black ethnic populations and has thus contributed to ethnic
factions and decreased rates of collective actions (Okamoto 2003). However, possibilities for
coalition building will still be greater among groups with a shared racial classification even if
5 Greer / Black Ethnics 229
cross-racial migratory narratives may appear more similar. See also Hochschild, Weaver, and
Burch 2012.
4. Betancur and Gills (2000) also argue that coalitional efforts are undermined when
influential leaders advance only the interests of one group to the exclusion of others. This is
most clearly demonstrated in Miami when observing the NAACP and the loss of significant
numbers of members of Haitian descent. The defection of Haitian members from the NAACP
as well as the National Urban League signaled a disconnect between the black American
leadership and predominantly black American membership within these two organizations,
and a small but growing population who felt their needs and wants (i.e., increased attention
to international issues, specifically issues affecting Haitians both in Haiti and in Florida) were
not being addressed by the organization elite.
5. Okamoto (2003) argued that the construction of pan-e thnic boundaries and a p an-
ethnic identity affect collective action efforts. Similarly, Padilla (1985) stated that d ifferences
in language, culture, and immigration histories also affect organizing capabilities and under-
standings of a common fate.
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Race, Class, and Gender in the United States An Integrated Study
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