U.S. racial and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century: are old divisions prevailing?

In this response to Valdez and Golash-Boza’s article, U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the twenty-first century, I commend the authors for raising critical issues about the traditional lack of integration of race and ethnicity paradigms. However, I argue that, in an effort to make their claim about the distinction between the ethnicity and race paradigms, they end up oversimplifying some of the literature and overlook the ways in which race and ethnicity scholarship from the twenty-first century has made important advances towards paradigm integration. In my response I provide an alternate reading of some of the literature that the authors critique, focusing on the Mexican middle-class case. I then highlight scholars who are working towards race–ethnicity integration, moving past old paradigm divides. I conclude my response by introducing the concept of the “ethnoracial core”, which I believe moves us in the direction that Valdez and Golash-Boza are proposing.     

U.S. racial and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century

The study of U.S. racial and ethnic relations is often reduced to the study of racial or ethnic relations. This article reveals the limitations of a focus on ethnicity or race, in isolation, and instead urges a new framework that brings them together. We consider three cases that have been conceptualized by the ethnicity paradigm as assimilation projects and by the race paradigm as structural racism projects, respectively: (1) African-American entrepreneurs; (2) the Mexican middle class; and (3) black immigrant deportees. We reveal the shortcomings of the ethnicity paradigm to consider race as a structural force or to acknowledge that structural racism conditions incorporation in marked ways; and the limitations of the race paradigm to take seriously group members’ agency in fostering social capital that can mediate racial inequality. Instead, we offer a unifying approach to reveals how ethnicity and race condition members’ life chances within the U.S. social structure.     

Mexican Americans as a paradigm for contemporary intra-group heterogeneity

Abstract

Racialization and assimilation offer alternative perspectives on the position of immigrant-origin populations in American society. We question the adequacy of either perspective alone in the early twenty-first century, taking Mexican Americans as our case in point. Re-analysing the child sample of the Mexican American Study Project, we uncover substantial heterogeneity marked by vulnerability to racialization at one end but proximity to the mainstream at the other. This heterogeneity reflects important variations in how education, intermarriage, mixed ancestry and geographic mobility have intersected for Mexican immigrants and their descendants over the twentieth century, and in turn shaped their ethnic identity. Finally, based on US census findings, we give reason to think that internal heterogeneity is increasing in the twenty-first century. Together, these findings suggest that future studies of immigrant adaptation in America must do a better job of accounting for heterogeneity, not just between but also within immigrant-origin populations.     

The racial formation of medieval Jews: a challenge to the field

Social science discourse on race and racism has limited itself through processes of periodization and temporal constructions of racial differences, and recent scholars continue to posit race and racism as effects of modernity rather than investigating its development prior to modernity. This article looks to present a challenge to contemporary understandings of the phenomena of race and racism through a historical investigation of Jews' relationship to medieval Christendom. Through the framework of racial formation (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994) I look to show how race as a marker of both corporeal difference and socio-political consequence was formulated over time through a rearticulation of Church doctrine which first positioned the inferiority of the Jew within their religious practices, to one which located their inferiority as inherently part of their soul and manifest upon their bodies – from fixable through conversion to incurable and diseased.     

Property relations: alien land laws and the racial formation of Filipinos as aliens ineligible to citizenship

Because Filipino Americans are racially categorized as Asians today, many scholars presume that they were automatically included within the provisions of the alien land laws at the time of their legislation. The following article suggests that the racial status of Filipino Americans, during this early period, was much more ambiguous. Instead, most Americans perceived Filipinos in relation to Native and African-Americans. The Alien Land Laws (1913–1952) were, together with anti-miscegenation laws and the Tydings-McDuffie Act, a regime of legal policies that eventually transformed Filipinos into Asians by 1934. Meanwhile, their racial ambiguity provided early Filipino immigrants with significant opportunities to challenge their exclusion in American society, and especially the alien land laws.     

Dynamics of ethnic and racial self-identification in contemporary Peru

This study has sought to analyse how the social and cultural dynamics of the population are expressed in the recent processes of ethnic self-identification in Peru. Data from 2012 to 2016 Peru National Household survey was used to investigate specifically: (a) on the contribution of the questions about ethnic and racial self-identification included in the National Household Survey to the visibility of indigenous and Afro-Peruvian populations; (b) on the individual and local characteristics related with certain self-identification categories; and (c) if the self-identification patterns have remained stable or have varied during the survey period. Results show that the number of persons who identifies as indigenous varies according to the question used. Likewise, it was found that characteristics such as age, migratory experience, education, and income level influence on the self-identification. Finally, modest but significant changes over time were registered, which could be shedding light on some processes of social transformations.     

Formation of ethnic and racial identities: narratives by young Asian-American professionals

This article examines Asian-American professionals’ ethnic and pan-ethnic attachments and identities through fifteen autobiographical essays. Classical assimilation theory predicts that well-educated Asian-American professionals will be highly acculturated into the white middle class, with little retention of their ethnic subculture; yet many of our essayists had strong, bicultural orientations. Their high level of social assimilation, reflected in their friendships and intimate relationships with whites, indicates that Asian Americans can socially assimilate without relinquishing their culture. Most of the 1.5 and second-generation essayists tried to hide their ethnic culture and non-white characteristics during their early school years. Yet, they experienced a painful but gradual establishment of an ethnic identity, usually beginning in their college years. Some contributors also expressed varying degrees of pan-Asian identity and a moderate level of Third World racial identity.     

Teaching ethnic and racial relations: some comments on Michael Banton

Banton's critique of race and ethnic relations highlights differences between the U.K. and the U.S.A. The interplay between ethnic politics and the teaching of the subject in the universities reflects differing reactions to the demise of Marxism, the impact of globalization and the growth of transnationalism. In America, anthropology, economics, cultural studies and conflict resolution have had a mixed impact on the field, but an examination of textbooks over the past thirty years - as well as Banton's prolific scholarship - suggests that most of the core problems remain the same.     

Towards a theory of ethnic separatism

In the decades between 1896 and the mid-1960s it was unusual for the federal government to act to defend or advance Black Americans' interests. In this article two such rare instances are analysed. Both occurred in the 1920s, a decade with a distinctive political complexion. In 1923 Black Americans called upon the federal government's Veterans Bureau [VB] to make good its assurance that African Americans would staff a newly opened hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, for blacks. At the end of the decade, the Superintendent of Prisons was petitioned to abrogate the new practice at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, of leasing out exclusively Black American prisoners to local governments for contract work. Each case was formulated and justified within the prejudicial framework of segregated race relations, but Black Americans sought fair treatment within its unsalubrious confines. The cases demonstrate the capacity of the federal government to act on racial issues when political circumstances permitted.     

Bringing culture back in: the class origins and ethnoracial destinations of culture and achievement

ABSTRACT

Notably absent from assimilation scholarship are analyses that seriously engage, rather than dismiss, cultural explanations for differences in group outcomes. That dismissal has left the assimilation scholars ill-equipped to thoroughly respond to popular and quasi-academic explanations that rely on an all-encompassing view of culture to explain immigrant group differences in socioeconomic outcomes. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s The Asian American Achievement Paradox embraces the cultural explanation, but traces the root of an ethnoracial culture to its class origins. In so doing, Lee and Zhou force scholars to contend seriously with ‘culture’ as part of a larger explanation for group outcomes.     

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.     

Addressing racial inequalities in higher education: equity,inclusion and social justice

Inequalities in higher education continue to exist in access to certain types of universities and in degree attainment. Despite significant changes in policy making and the student body such inequalities remain pervasive. In this essay, I explore how inequalities in access to elite universities continue to exist for those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, in both the UK and the USA. I suggest that gaining a place at an elite university is related to access to social and cultural capital. In order to address these inequalities, we must question and challenge a system that values class and status which continues to serve the needs of the few rather than the many.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

Will the new second generation experience ‘downward assimilation’? Segmented assimilation re-assessed

Research on the “new second generation” in the United States has been deeply influenced by the hypothesis of “segmented assimilation”, which contends that the children of immigrants are at risk of downward mobility into a “new rainbow underclass”. This article seeks to assess that assertion, focusing on the experience of Mexicans, the overwhelmingly largest of today’s second-generation groups, and a population of predominantly working- or lower-class origins. The empirical component of this article rests on analysis of a combined sample of the 1996–2001 Current Population Survey.     

Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity formation: the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu

This paper proposes a new understanding of race as an artifact constructed from racist violence and the trauma it engenders. The paper applies Jeffrey Alexander's concept of ‘cultural trauma’, i.e. when ‘members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness’, to the case of Korean immigrant merchants who were victims of violence during the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of four white police officers charged with violently assaulting a black motorist. Though the violence was contained to distinct neighbourhoods, the larger society experienced the terror because of the mass media. Over time this media-event led to the construction of a new identity rooted in violence and trauma. Through an examination of various texts, this paper argues that the Korean-American collective consciousness shifted discursively from an identity rooted in nationality to one incorporating race.     

Associations of serum CRP levels with demographics,health behaviors,and risk of cancer among the Mexican American Mano A Mano Cohort

C-Reactive protein (CRP) is a well-known inflammatory marker, and elevated CRP levels has been reported to be associated with the risk of various cancers. To date, no study has investigated the association between elevated CRP and incidents of cancer among Mexican Americans. In the current prospective cohort study, we measured pre-diagnostic CRP levels in serum samples and evaluated their relationships with demographic characteristics and health behaviors associated with cancer risk among 2753 Mexican Americans selected from the Mano-A-Mano Mexican American Cohort Study. At baseline, median levels of serum CRP significantly differed by demographics (sex, age category, marital status, and education levels) and health behaviors (cigarette smoking status, alcohol drinking status, BMI category, and physical activity levels). In the multivariable analysis, the study participants who were women, older, never drinking alcohol, overweight or obese, and physically inactive had increased likelihood of having high CRP levels (≥ median levels among all study participants) compared to their counterparts. A total of 177 cancer cases were identified during the follow-up with a median follow-up time of 127 months. In the quartile analysis, study participants in the 4^th quartile with highest CRP levels had significantly 1.88 fold increased risk of cancer (hazard ratio (HR) = 1.88, 95%CI: 1.12, 3.13) compared to those in the 1^st quartile with lowest CRP levels. The association was further confirmed in analyses using clinical CRP levels. In summary, our findings suggested that serum CRP levels have potential to serve as a predictive marker of cancer risk in Mexican Americans.     

Type 2-diabetes is associated with elevated levels of TNF-alpha, IL-6 and adiponectin and low levels of leptin in a population of Mexican Americans: a cross-sectional study

The goal of the study was to determine the association between diabetes and inflammation in clinically diagnosed diabetes patients. We hypothesized that low-grade inflammation in diabetes is associated with the level of glucose control. Using a cross-sectional design we compared pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines in a community-recruited cohort of 367 Mexican Americans with type 2-diabetes having a wide range of blood glucose levels. Cytokines (IL-6, TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-8) and adipokines (adiponectin, resistin and leptin) were measured using multiplex ELISA. Our data indicated that diabetes as whole was strongly associated with elevated levels of IL-6, leptin, CRP and TNF-α, whereas worsening of glucose control was positively and linearly associated with high levels of IL-6, and leptin. The associations remained statistically significant even after controlling for BMI and age (p = 0.01). The association between TNF-α, however, was attenuated when comparisons were performed based on glucose control. Strong interaction effects between age and diabetes and BMI and diabetes were observed for IL-8, resistin and CRP. The cytokine/adipokine profiles of Mexican Americans with diabetes suggest an association between low-grade inflammation and quality of glucose control. Unique to in our population is that the chronic inflammation is accompanied by lower levels of leptin.     

Anterior femoral curvature: Its probable basis and utility as a criterion of racial assessment

Stewart ('62) and Walensky ('65) indicated that while the metrical expression of anterior femoral curvature alone will not always differentiate between Whites, American Negroes, and North American Indians, it was very useful as a racial criterion in combination with observed traits such as torsion, pilastry, and cross-sectional shape. Seven additional North American Indian groups reported here, representing both pre-Columbian and post-contact times, upheld the observation that anterior femoral curvature is a useful feature of racial assessment for Negroes, Whites and North American Indians. However, two South American groups studied (Ecuador and Peru) were only slightly more curved than American Negroes, and were less curved than Whites and North American Indians. The metrical expression of anterior femoral curvature therefore is not a useful feature of racial assessment for separating these two South American Indian groups from Whites and American Negroes. Femora of American Negro and White individuals with low ponderal indices were found to be less bowed than the norms for their race; individuals with high ponderal indices were more bowed than the norm for their race. The assumed genetic basis for expression of anterior femoral curvature suggested by Stewart ('62) and Walensky ('65) seems to be a feature of human plastic response to body weight rather than to temporal, clinal, postural or equestrian influences.     

Community,mobility and racism in a semi-rural area: Comparing minority experience in East Kent

Much research into community, racism and racialization has been conducted in metropolitan urban settings. It is only recently that race in rural areas has received some attention. A key theme of existing research on race in rural areas has focused on the issue of racial violence. Drawing on interviews with a variety of ethnic minority groups in East Kent the article will focus on broader issues of race and ethnicity in a semi-rural area. The study explores the meaning of race, ethnicity and belonging in the partially rural setting of East Kent, UK. The article will raise issues around the intersection of the regional and global, the problematic notion of “community”, and the fluidity of racialization in a setting in which many ethnic minorities were transitory and mobile. We conclude by highlighting the ways in which community, racism and racialization are embedded in differentiated discourses and processes.     

Reflections on classic papers in Ethnic and Racial Studies

This paper provides an overview of this Special Issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ethnic and Racial Studies. We discuss some of the themes that are covered in this issue in the context of the wider history of the journal. We argue that the journal has worked over the years both to publish the highest quality original research and to feature scholarship in emerging subfields that have helped to broaden both our scope and reach across the globe. In addition we highlight some of the contribution that the journal has made to the development of both established and new areas of scholarship in its field throughout the world.