America Becoming Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001) / Chapter Skim
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8. The Changing Meaning of Race
8. The Changing Meaning of Race
Pages 243-263
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From page 243... ...
But merely asserting that race is socially constructed does not get at how specific racial concepts come into existence, what the fundamental determinants of racialization are, and how race articulates with other major axes of stratification and "difference," such as gender and class. Each of these topics would require an extensive treatise on possible variables 243
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From page 244... ...
Scholarly projects in genetics, cultural anthropology, and history, among others, were fundamentally rethought, and antiracist initiatives became a crucial part of democratic political projects throughout the world. In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in challenging and subsequently dismantling patterns of Jim Crow1 segrega1The original "Jim Crow" was a character in a nineteenth-century minstrel act, a stereotype of a Black man.
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From page 245... ...
The civil rights establishment confronts a puzzling dilemma formal, legal equality has been significantly achieved, but substantive racial inequality in employment, housing, and health care remains, and in many cases, has deepened. All this provides an historical context in which to situate evolving racial meanings.
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From page 246... ...
Some try to defy racial classification as "Black Americans" by strategically asserting their ethnic identity in specific encounters with Whites. Others simply see themselves as "Americans." Panethnic organization and identity constitute one distinct political/ cultural response to increasing heterogeneity.
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From page 247... ...
Conflicts often occur over the precise definition and boundaries of various racially defined groups and their adequate representation in census counts, reapportionment debates, and minority set-aside programs. The increasing heterogeneity of racial categories raises several questions for research to answer.
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From page 248... ...
to add a "multiracial" category to the 2000 Census form (Mathews, 1996~. This was opposed by many civil rights organizations (e.g., Urban League, National Council of La Raza)
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From page 249... ...
· What effects do multiracial identity and classification have on existing "race-based" public policies? Although most forms of race-based policies are under attack, a vast structure of bureaucracies, policies, and practices exists within government, academic, and private sectors that relies on discrete racial categories.
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From page 250... ...
Such biracial theorizing misses the complex nature of race relations in post-Civil Rights Movement America. Complex patterns of conflict and accommodation have developed among multiple racial/ethnic groups.
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From page 251... ...
cities, Whites have fled to suburbia, leaving the inner city to the turf battles among different racial minorities for housing, public services, and economic development. The dominant mode of biracial theorizing ignores the fact that a range of specific conditions and trends such as labor-market stratification and residential segregation cannot be adequately studied by narrowly assessing the relative situations of Whites and Blacks.
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From page 252... ...
Opponents claim that multiculturalists devalue or relativize core national values and beliefs, shamelessly promote "identity politics," and unwittingly increase racial tensions. One of problems of the multicultural debate is the conflation of "race" and "culture." I take seriously Hollinger's (1995)
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From page 253... ...
But things aren't that simple. In the postCivil Rights era, some racial minority groups have carved out a degree of power in select urban areas particularly with respect to administering social services and distributing economic resources.
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From page 254... ...
An examination of both these topics reveals the fundamental instability of racial categories, their historically contingent character, and the ways they articulate with other axes of stratification and "difference." Extending this understanding, it is crucial to relate racial categories and meanings to concepts of racism. The idea of "race" and its persistence as a social category is only given meaning in a social order structured by forms of inequality economic, political, and cultural that are organized, to a significant degree, along racial lines.
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From page 255... ...
Abolishing data-collection efforts that use racial categories would make it more difficult for us to track specific forms of discrimination with respect to financial loan practices, health-care delivery, and prison-sentencing patterns among other issues (Berry et al., 1998~. The current debate about police "profiling" of Black motorists illustrates the issues involved in racial record keeping (Wilgoren, 1999~.
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From page 256... ...
explores the ways in which White women experience, reproduce, and/or challenge the prevailing racial order. In so doing, she reveals how the very notion of racial privilege is experienced and articulated differently by women and men.
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From page 257... ...
Current work in cultural studies looks at the often implicit and unconscious structures of racial privilege and racial representation in daily life and popular culture. All this suggests that more precise terms are needed to examine racial consciousness, institutional bias, inequality, patterns of segregation, and the distribution of power.
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From page 258... ...
Since the end of World War II, there has been an epochal shift in the logic, organization, and practices of the centuries-old global racial order. Opposition to fascism, anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States facilitated the rupture with biologic and eugenic concepts of race.
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From page 259... ...
believe that increasing Asian-White marriage rates, along with positive trends in income, education, and residential patterns, suggest that Asian Americans are becoming "White" as the very category of "Whiteness" is being expanded. Such a conclusion draws on a troublesome aspect of the traditional assimilationist paradigm, namely, its lack of attention to differences in group power.
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From page 260... ...
The Asian campaign finance controversy (Wang, 1998; Nakanishi, 1998) and the recent Chinese spy scandal provide illustrations of this.
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From page 261... ...
New York Times Magazine (Sept.
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From page 262... ...
The New York Times Magazine (August 18~:38-39. Lopez, D., and Y
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From page 263... ...
Omi, M., and H Winant 1996 Contesting the meaning of race in the post-civil rights movement era.
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