Like one of the family: race,ethnicity, and the paradox of US national identity

The tensions between individual rights promised to US citizens and group discrimination targeted against African Americans and similar racial/ethnic groups constitute one enduring paradox of US society. This essay examines this paradox by exploring how a gendered family rhetoric contributes to understandings of race and US national identity. Using African American women's experiences as a touchstone for analysis, the article suggests that African American women's treatment as second-class citizens reflects a belief that they are 'like one of the family', that is, legally part of the US nation-state, but simultaneously subordinated within it. To investigate these relationships, the article examines 1) how intersecting social hierarchies of race and ethnicity foster racialized understandings of US national identity; 2) how the gendered rhetoric of the American family ideal naturalizes and normalizes social hierarchies; and 3) how gendered family rhetoric fosters racialized constructions of US national identity as a large national family.     

Racialized political shock: Arab American racial formation and the impact of political events

This article explores significant factors influencing the process of Arab American racial formation. I bring into conversation theories of racial formation and ‘political shock’ in social movement scholarship to develop the notion of ‘racialized political shock’ as an important factor in how racial and ethnic groups mobilize and organize. Many moments of political shock are highly racialized and have the potential to reorder the racial and ethnic landscape in ways that can open opportunities or introduce constraints to mobilizations around racial formation. Drawing on existing studies of Arab Americans, this paper highlights how Arab American racial formation has been galvanized during moments of racialized political shock. In the Arab American case, these moments have led to a call for recognition outside the category of white. I conclude by outlining ways forward in the study of Arab Americans, who have been overlooked in studies of race and ethnicity in the US.     

Racialized national identity construction in the ancestral homeland: Japanese American migrants in Japan

This article examines Japanese Americans in Japan to illuminate how ‘Japanese American’ – an ethnic minority identity in the US – is reconstructed in Japan as a racialized national identity. Based on fifty interviews with American citizens of Japanese ancestry conducted between 2004 and 2007, I demonstrate how interactions with Japanese in Japan shape Japanese Americans’ racial and national understandings of themselves. After laying out a theoretical framework for understanding the shifting intersection of race, ethnicity, and nationality, I explore the interactive process of racial categorization and ethnic identity assertion for Japanese American transnationals in Japan. This process leads to what I call racialized national identities – the intersection of racial and national identities in an international context – and suggests that US racial minority identities are constructed not only within the US, but abroad as well.     

‘I'm American,not Japanese!’: the struggle for racial citizenship among later-generation Japanese Americans

Abstract

As one of the oldest Asian American groups in the USA, most Japanese Americans are of the third and fourth generations and have become well integrated in mainstream American society. However, they are still racialized as foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance. Their Asian phenotype continues to have a foreigner connotation because of large-scale immigration from Asia and an American national identity that is racially defined as white. This paper analyses how later-generation Japanese Americans are racialized as outsiders in their daily interaction with mainstream Americans, which is often accompanied by essentialized assumptions that they are also culturally foreign. In response, they engage in everyday struggles for racial citizenship by demanding inclusion in the national community as Americans despite their racial differences. It is uncertain whether such attempts to contest their racialization will cause current mono-racial notions of American identity to be reconsidered in more inclusive and multiracial ways.     

‘It is hard being the different one all the time’: gringos and racialized identity in lifestyle migration to Ecuador

This paper explores the identities that North American lifestyle migrants in Ecuador adopt as they adjust to life in a new racialized social environment. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants from North America, as well as ethnographic field notes. North Americans describe their growing community in racialized terms and adopt a series of practices that demonstrate anxiety about their position in the racialized social order of Ecuador. The paper discusses the strategies that North American migrants engage in to diminish the importance of their racialized identities in Ecuador. I identify two main practices that complicate North American incorporation in Ecuador: self-policing practices that aim to optimize Ecuadorians' perceptions of them; and desires for integration and ethnic mobility, which seek to erase their ‘Otherness’.     

Imagining race and nation in multiculturalist America

Post-1965 demographic changes in the United States [US] have brought blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans into direct conflict, raising the question of how and whether law and public policy should attempt to adjudicate conflicts among racialized minority groups. I argue in this article that for the past few decades, national political leaders in the US have promoted an official multiculturalist discourse that actually discourages Americans from naming and addressing these intergroup tensions. This discourse superficially reimagines race and nation – by moving from a biracial, black-white focus to a formal acknowledgment of multiracial difference – while refusing to acknowledge the complex interminority inequalities and antagonisms generated by this new diversity. How might we refocus national attention on the serious interminority conflicts and racial justice struggles unfolding around us? I consider resurrecting the traditional notion of racial hierarchy as a counter-narrative to official multiculturalist discourse before arguing instead for one which involves a more complex notion of “racial positionality”.     

Not black,but Habasha: Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in American society

In this article, I examine the identity choices of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants of Amhara, Tigrayan and Tigrinya ethnicity within the context of the larger debate on how non-white immigrants are being incorporated into American society. I argue that these immigrants resist racialization even while their actions and attitudes potentially reinforce America's racial divide. They implicitly challenge American racial categories by thinking of themselves as Habasha, which they view as a separate non-black ethno-racial category that emphasizes their Semitic origins. Meanwhile, they often distance themselves from American blacks through pursuing transnational connections, producing Habasha spaces, displaying the attributes of a ‘model minority’ and preserving Habasha beauty through endogamy. By remaining relatively isolated within their ethnic communities in Washington, DC, which is the focus of this study, they may succeed in differentiating themselves from American blacks, but they are not likely to join the American mainstream on a par with whites.     

Pondering Poi Dog: Place and racial identification of multiracial Native Hawaiians

Given the very large proportion of Hawaiians who are multiracial, our research examines Native Hawaiian identification in mixed-race Hawaiian families. We use the 1990 US Census, which affords a unique look at racial identification because multiracial people were required to choose one race over another. The results show support for our argument that place plays a central role in Pacific identity processes, illustrated in this case among Hawaiians. We find that strong ties to Hawai‘i – the spiritual and geographic home of the Hawaiian population – are vital to the intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian identification in both continental and island multiracial families. We compare our results for multiracial Native Hawaiians to prior studies of American Indians and Asian Americans to identify any general patterns in correlates of racial identification choices. In each group, we find that familial and geographic relationships to the cultural and ancestral lands are strongly linked to racial identification.     

Language, Race, and White Public Space

White public space is constructed through (1) intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African Americans for signs of linguistic disorder and (2) the invisibility of almost identical signs in the speech of Whites, where language mixing, required for the expression of a highly valued type of colloquial persona, takes several forms. One such form, Mock Spanish, exhibits a complex semiotics. By direct indexicality, Mock Spanish presents speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative racializing stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes "whiteness" as an unmarked normative order. Mock Spanish is compared to White "crossover" uses of African American English. Finally, the question of the potential for such usages to be reshaped to subvert the order of racial practices in discourse is briefly explored.     

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.     

Movement in spaces of liminality: Chinese dance and immigrant identities

This paper explores the roles of immigrant dance in ethnic construction. It is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a Chinese dance organization in the US Midwest. Chinese dance in the US, a transnational cultural practice, solidifies a sense of belonging among Chinese immigrants. As these immigrants make sense of what it means to be Chinese and to do Chinese dance in contemporary American society, they reinvent their collective identity while holding on to primordial understandings of ethnicity rooted in the constructed ideas of ancestry and homeland. A case study of the ethnic construction theory, this research sheds light on the paradox of embodied immigrant identities: they are constructed through cultural practices and yet often understood as primordial, transnational and yet necessarily place-bound.     

‘Minority’ as a sociological concept

This article considers how a Muslim cultural discourse of ‘propriety’ has influenced Muslim Arab Sudanese ethnic identity in two locations and time periods in an expanding diaspora. Focusing in particular on women and their embodied practices of whitening and propriety in Egypt in the nineties and the United Kingdom a decade later, I argue that the recent turn towards Muslim expressions of Sudaneseness is a form of resistance to racial labelling. While Sudanese have rejected being labelled ‘black’ in Egypt and in the UK, their renegotiation of a Muslim religious identity in the diaspora nevertheless confirms a racialized Sudanese ethnicity. This study contributes to the rethinking of ethnicity in a transnational space where ethnic nationalism and globalized Islamic discourse intersect with local histories and hierarchies of race and gender.     

Contested Citizenship and Social Exclusion: Adolescent Arab American Immigrants' Views of the Social Contract

Drawing from social contract theory, we explore how some adolescent Arab immigrants' (n = 99) sensitivity to the image of their ethnic group as enemies of America colors their interpretation of the social contract. Analyses of data collected in 1997 reveal that those youth who reported that the American media portray Arab people and nations as enemies of the United States are more attuned to personal experiences of prejudice based on their ethnic identity and are more dubious that the tenets of the social contract apply equally across groups. Negative images of Arab Americans were well in place prior to September 11, 2001, a pivotal moment that altered the lives of Arab Americans as well as the discourse on immigration and citizenship.     

An Exploration of Cultural Identity Patterns and the Family Context among Arab Muslim Young Adults in America

While many studies have explored cultural adaptation and development and its correlates among adult Arab immigrants to the United States (U.S.), little empirical work has focused on Arab youth who were raised in the U.S., particularly Arab Muslim young adults. The present study explores cultural identity patterns and the sociodemographic and family contexts of 150 Arab Muslim American young adults ages 18–25 who completed an Internet study. The participants fell into three cultural identity groups: High Bicultural, Moderate Bicultural, and High Arab Cultural. Although all three groups demonstrated positive general family functioning, the Moderate Bicultural group was distinct in that they were less likely to be engaged or married, and they experienced less family support and more family acculturative stressors. The results highlight the importance of the family context in contributing to a stronger sense of cultural identity for young adults who fall at the intersection of Arab and American culture and Muslim faith.     

‘I'm black and I'll always be that way’: black identities through the lens of interracial intimacy

Early research on black racial identity development cautioned that close relationships with whites signalled an alienation from blackness and a subconscious acceptance that ‘white is right’. These assumptions mirrored popular media and political discourse suggesting that romantic relationships outside of one's racial group reflect a devalued or inauthentic racial self. More recent scholarly research presents a mixed picture about the role of interracial intimacy on black racial identities. Using in-depth qualitative narratives with forty-two interracially partnered African Americans, this article explores whether interracial intimacy recasts the meaning or intensity of black racial identities. Findings affirm that black racial identities are heterogeneous – some partners experienced blackness as a central, fundamental identity while others possessed ambivalent attachments to blackness. Across these experiences, however, adult interracial intimacy had at most an incremental influence on racial identity. Interracial contact during adolescence was far more influential because it allowed blacks to develop dimensions of white cultural identity.     

Moral bricolage and immigrant identification: The case of Romanian Americans

Immigration historians have illuminated the institutional forces that made possible Eastern and southern European immigrants' inclusion in the white racial category in the early twentieth century, initiating their ascent into mainstream America. Sociologists have shown that their descendants assimilated into American society while maintaining symbolic attachments to their ethnic roots. But, whereas current studies of immigrant racialization have focused on the strategies of immigrants of colour for asserting a higher position in the American social hierarchy, scholars have generally overlooked such processes for phenotypically white immigrants. This paper highlights first and 1.5 generation Romanian immigrants' strategies for navigating their ambivalent relationship to Americanness. While they assumed their whiteness unproblematically, Romanian Americans sought to distinguish themselves from whites and non-whites on the basis of their ethnicity. Furthermore, they used American values to distance themselves from their former compatriots. Through moral bricolage, Romanians made strategic use of desirable traits they associated with being Romanian and American, melding them into a particularly worthy ethnic identity.     

Clubs of culture and capital: immigrant and second-generation incorporation in a new destination school

The influx of Latin American immigrants into the US South since the early 1990s has changed the demographic face of the region, particularly among school-aged populations where the rate of growth among Latinos has been the fastest. Despite an emerging literature addressing changing racial and ethnic relations in the New US South, relatively little research has addressed the incorporation of Latino youths within southern schools. Relying on data from a four-year ethnographic and in-depth interview study in one North Carolina town, findings suggest powerful benefits of ethnic-identity based clubs for Latino youths in new immigrant destination schools. While both Latino and African American respondents faced discrimination within their community, Latino students received more formal support at school, which helped shield them from the negative impacts of discrimination.     

Immigration,Christian faith communities,and the practice of multiculturalism in the U.S. South

Recent scholarship has declared multiculturalism to be in retreat, yet multiculturalist discourses and practices remain salient in many realms of social reproduction. This paper explores multiculturalism in predominantly white churches in the U.S. South, a region that has seen significant demographic transformations due to immigration. Church outreach to immigrants draws on theologies that reject racial prejudice and that call for the accommodation and celebration of cultural differences. Drawing on qualitative research with pastors and congregants, this article explores how multiculturalist practice is both re-working and reinforcing existing social relationships in Christian faith communities. Multiculturalist practices, we show, disrupt racialized hierarchies long embedded in white churches. But they simultaneously leave racialized distinctions and inequalities intact, in part by maintaining separation between immigrants and non-immigrants. This case illustrates the everyday politics of multiculturalism and the ways in which the boundaries of social membership take shape in ordinary, seemingly non-political spaces.     

Balancing stigma and status: racial and class identities among middle-class Haitian youth

This article examines the identity formation of middle-class Haitian youth. Segmented assimilation theory predicts that the Haitian second generation will integrate into the black American underclass or maintain strong ethnic group identities. The black middle class, however, is an unexplored pathway of cultural assimilation. This paper uses the literature on the racial and class experiences of the black American middle class as a departure point for understanding the boundary work of middle-class Haitian youth. Based on qualitative interviews and a focus group, we uncover the mechanisms of identity formation for this invisible population. Racial, ethnic and class boundaries compel Haitian youths to create strategies of either empowerment or distancing. They negotiate between their middle-class status and ethnoracial exclusion in a racially segregated neighbourhood, an ethnically homogenous church and a mixed-race school setting. This study's findings extend our theoretical understandings of middle-class immigrants and their identity work.     

Ethnicity,reception and the growth of American immigration

Deportation has always been a feature of the American political, social and economic discourse. A twin effect of immigration, deportation concerns who is granted the right to stay and who is removed from the country. Amid the growing debate on reform, this essay casts light on the changing nature of deportation law during the last century. Paying attention to the reception which immigrants receive and the perceptions of threat and economic competition which natives often perceive, this work evaluates how policy has shifted in response to the changing face of newcomers. As immigration law becomes intertwined with criminal law, so do the stipulations governing entry and exit. Within a politically charged social space, American immigration is a story punctuated with racialized and criminalized images of immigrants. Bridging ethnic and racial currents, this work seeks to understand how these effects continue to shape contemporary immigration policy.