3.6: Racial-Ethnic Relations in the United States

Racial-Ethnic Relations in the United States

The importance of race and ethnicity is variable both across space and across time. Historically, divisions in the United States along ethnic or racial lines have been the norm. but now these divisions based on race or ethnicity are not as prevalent as they have previously been. From the earliest days of the country and codified in the US Constitution, slavery created a profoundly divided society, particularly between the free, white population and the enslaved Black population. Free people of color provided a small degree of linkage between the groups.

These were not the only divisions in the US, however. The dominant group were people of English descent. In geographical terms, we refer to them as a charter group. The charter group does not refer to the first people to come to a place; they are people with the first effective settlement. This is an academic way of saying that they are the first group with political dominance. English settlers produced laws that furthered their own interests. They promoted their own language (English), religion (Protestant Christianity) and governance. Groups coming in later found themselves in a place where many of the cultural questions had already been answered. The pressure to assimilate in the United States applies to everyone. There can be political pressure; for example, during World War One German Americans largely stopped speaking German. The pressure can be social; for example, young children at school can feel isolated when they cannot speak the majority language. Particularly, the pressure can be economic. Without conforming to general social (majority) norms, it can be difficult to navigate the employment market. A lack of English, unawareness of the norms of formal dress or behavior, or just the inability to recognize social cues can make life difficult for those who have not acculturated.

The charter group also changed. For example, the definitions of “whiteness” and “blackness” have not been historically constant. Consider the history of the United States. Initially, the U.S. population was made largely of Protestant British white people and African black people. Adding people from other places required that definitions be amended.

Would Catholic Italians be considered “White?” In the past, many Americans would have said no. For that matter, neither would the Irish (because of their Catholicism) or Jews (because they aren’t Christian), but over time, these groups were generally included into the white category. Whiteness broadened to include more people. It became less of an ethnic category and more of a racial category.

Definitions of blackness evolved as well. In the American South, there eventually arose a legal framework that defined blackness as having any African ancestry. It would be possible (and relatively common) to be phenotypically white and legally black. Historically, mixed-race Creole people in Louisiana did not consider themselves to be black or white; they were another category altogether.

People attempting to emigrate from Asia, particularly China, were subject to their own set of exclusionary laws, which severely limited their migration to the United States. As late as World War II, it was considered acceptable for the government to intern (imprison) American citizens of Japanese descent over questions of their racial origins and loyalty.

One of the current interesting ethnic questions in the United States is the status of Hispanic people in the existing racial categories. Since Hispanic is not itself a racial category, people within this ethnicity can choose what label they feel is most appropriate. It appears now that Hispanics are identifying themselves as white in the U.S. census. This has an impact on projections for the future U.S. population. If Hispanics identify as white, then the U.S. will remain majority white for quite some time. If they do not, the U.S. will have no racial majority in a few decades.

Although race and ethnicity in the U.S. were largely associated with state mandated identification, restrictive laws, and onerous obligations, today both race and ethnicity are self-identified for the census. Whereas at one time being Irish could be enough to deny someone employment, now it is a slogan to place on your welcome mat and celebrate once a year in March.

Ethnic diversity in the United States

Like all predominantly immigrant countries, the United States is ethnically diverse, but the range of ethnicities has varied over time as new groups arrive and previous groups acculturate and eventually assimilate. A male of Italian descent in the United States will sometimes just say, “I’m Italian.” This may be a person who speaks no Italian, isn’t Catholic, and never been in Italy in his entire life. What then, does this statement mean? It just signals an historic connection with an ethnicity, even if the connection has faded over time. This isn’t to single out Italian Americans. Generally, as groups assimilate, their distinctive ethnic markers fade. Comparing Polish-Americans with Mexican-Americans may involve people who speak the same language (English), have the same Catholic religion, and live very similar lifestyles. The label has faded to a marker, with food being the one of the last cultural elements.

One of the ways groups demonstrate ethnicity is through food. One of the most obvious hallmarks of the arrival of an ethnicity into the United States, or any other country, is the diffusion of a food from the group of origin. Pizza in the United States, curry in the United Kingdom, and doner kebab in Germany all exemplify the degree to which a food brought by immigrants can reach the status of adopted national cuisine. Food is also the cultural element that is most accessible to outsiders. Foodways are used to construct a spatial sense of one location as a reflection of the entire world.

Foodways refer to the types of food that people eat, the ways they are prepared, and the cultural factors that surround and contextualize the food. Food is the most resilient cultural artifact. In countries undergoing language unification, foods can define ethnic groups. In mostly monolingual countries like the United States, foods may indicate geographical origins or social class. Food is easily bought, tried and accepted, or rejected. As such, it is the most accessible cultural element.

In many ways, the consumption of a food and its production have been divorced from its roots by the modern restaurant industry and international food conglomerates. Americans have eaten foods they consider Chinese or Mexican for generations, while few know the histories of said foods. Questions of whether or not a food is authentic are difficult to answer when the cooks in a restaurant are of a completely different ethnicity from the stated cuisine.

We can compare foodways between places and groups. Quantities of food, the ratio of prepared foods, and consumption of tobacco and alcohol all help us get inside the lives of people in different places, at different states of technological development, and different socioeconomic classes.

Hispanic Ethnicity in the United States

Since 1976, the United States government has required the collection and analysis of data for only one ethnicity: “Americans of Spanish origin or descent.” The term used to designate this ethnicity is Hispanic. It is a reference to the Roman name for what is now modern Spain. Hispanics, however, are generally not Spanish; they are people who originate in one of the former colonies of Spain. Another term that is used is Latino, which is another reference to the Roman Empire. Both of these labels are very vague. Generally, people identify with the country of their ancestors (Mexico, Thailand), and not with a label generated by the Census Bureau for the purposes or recordkeeping.

Hispanics can be of any race. It is important to note that all racial and ethnic information is self-reported. This means that the person who decides if you are African American, Hispanic, or any other category is you. One final detail is that native people of hispanophone countries, even if they themselves do not speak Spanish, will often be considered Hispanic.

Figure | The Distribution of the Hispanic Population 4 Author | David Dorrell Source | Original Work License | CC BY SA 4.0

"La Fiesta: Camp Zama celebrates HIspanic American Heritage Month" by usarjnco is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

African Americans in the United States

African Americans in the United States are still heavily southern. Their distribution (Figure 7.3) dates to the beginning of the United States and the forced importation of millions of Africans. Starting in the early twentieth century, many African Americans migrated out of this region, but most did not. In the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, there has even been a reverse migration of African Americans back to Southern cities and suburbs.

Figure | The Distribution of the African American Population 3 Author | David Dorrell Source | Original Work License | CC BY SA 4.0

Blackness in America

In the US, the two main ethnic categories are black and white, though these categories have evolved. Early on, and in some regions of the US, there were multiple ideas about what made a person black or white. For example, racial categories such as octoroon, mulatto, and high yellow, once commonly used in the 19th century to describe Americans of mixed ethnic or racial backgrounds, are unused today. During the late 19th and early 20th century, at the height of the Jim Crow era, new “blood laws” were enacted that redefined “blackness”. Some states declared specific percentages (one-fourth, one-eighth) of ancestry as a legal limit to be considered legally white or black. In some places, there was an official policy that ruled that any person with any ancestry from Africa was considered African-American, regardless of their physical appearance. These were known as “one drop” rules. It is interesting to note that before the great period of European migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a large percentage of Americans were of mixed African, European, and Native ancestry. In 1930, the US Census Bureau even stopped using the designation “mulatto” to indicate people of mixed ancestry. Subsequent censuses (1940-1960), black (“negro” back then) and white were the only options, officially eliminating the mixed-race options from earlier eras.

Figure Cumberland Posey, a famous baseball and basketball player from Homestead, Pennsylvania was considered "black" because local people knew of his family’s African ancestry. He played baseball in the "Negro Leagues" and basketball in the Black Fives league. His first cousins, (right) moved to Ohio in the 1920s, and passed for “white” in another town where their family history was less well known. The younger men in the photo fought in World War II in all-white units and attended white schools. They moved and became white. Mr. Posey did not move and stayed black.

Many Jim Crow laws remained intact until the late 1960s when the Supreme Court struck them down. These laws were necessary back then because other laws and regulations required people to be categorized as either black or white. For example, the US military was segregated by race until 1948. Blood rules forced the military to render a judgment on each soldier or sailor so the military could assign each individual into a race-based unit. Similar laws, known as blood quantum rules may still be applied to determine membership in various American Indian tribes. It wasn’t until the 2000 census that the government again allowed people of mixed heritage to identify by more than a single category.

The effect of these laws remains strong in the United States. Persons of mixed ancestry generally are pressured by society to identify themselves with a single heritage, especially if they have even an identifiable percentage of African ancestry. This is probably because black people were the group most often targeted by the old blood laws. Those definitions linger. According to DNA tests, African-Americans are on average about 20% “white”. About 10 percent of African-Americans are more than half white in terms of ancestry, yet they still identify (or are identified) as “black”. Even very well-known people of mixed ancestry, like President Barack Obama and golfer Tiger Woods, are forced to identify as a single ethnic category, sometimes over their very public objections. Woods is considered black in America, but he calls himself Cablinasian, a word he made-up to characterize his ancestry that includes Caucasians, Black, American Indian, and Asian. In Thailand, Tiger Woods is embraced as “Thai”, the home country of his mother. The unfortunate lesson here is that it frequently doesn’t matter what you think you are if everyone else insists that you are something different.

Figure Born of a European mother and an African father, Barack Obama is widely considered simply "black". It shows that even the "most powerful man on the planet" is unable to overcome the cultural notions of race in the US. Source: Wikimedia

In South Africa, where race-based apartheid government policies lasted until the mid-1990s, officials devised a variety of tests to determine an individual’s inclusion as a white, coloured or black. Consider, for example, the so-called pencil test in which a pencil was stuck in an individual’s hair. If the pencil did not fall out easily, the individual might be classified as black. In one famous case, a girl, whose parents were both legally recognized as white, was reclassified as coloured, and subsequently removed from her all-white school, though her parents remained white.

Light-skinned black people could move from the United States or South Africa and suddenly find themselves white. For example, in many places in Latin America or the Caribbean, light-skinned persons of African ancestry who would be black in the US are considered white in the Caribbean or South America. Brazilians who were considered white in their home country often find themselves black once they move to the United States. Such migrants must navigate a potential minefield of bigotry. Americans may simply consider these immigrants “black” without reflecting much about the way the person from Brazil might self-identify. Discrimination could ensue. If the immigrants deny their African heritage by claiming that they are white, then American blacks may be off-put or upset because the metrics for determining who is “black” is different here.

Race Counts.org

This cool website has a load of stats and graphics about inequity in California and beyond, comparing different ethnicities' quality of life.

Asian Americans in the United States

Asian Americans also have a distinctive distribution based on history. The western United States, and in particular, Hawaii, are physically the parts of the United States that are closest to Asia. A proximity effect similar to that of Hispanics is in play here. Figure 7.5 shows their distribution.

Figure | The Distribution of the Asian American Population 5 Author | David Dorrell Source | Original Work License | CC BY SA 4.0

American Indian and Alaska Natives

At one time, all of the current territory was occupied by Native Americans. Due to the influence of disease, genocidal wars, and poverty they have been reduced to roughly 2 percent of the overall population of the United States. Some live on reservations, but most do not (Figure 7.6).

Figure | The Distribution of the American Indian Population 6 Author | David Dorrell Source | Original Work License | CC BY SA 4.0

Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander

Hawaii at one time had been an independent kingdom. Other territories in the Pacific were taken during wars with other dominant regional powers. Many of these groups have migrated to the mainland of the United States (Figure 7.7). In the same way that American Indians are a minority in every state, Native Hawaiians are a minority in Hawaii.

Figure | The Distribution of the Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander Population 7 Author | David Dorrell Source | Original Work License | CC BY SA 4.0

American-American?

Some people reject inclusion in one of the numerous hyphenated American identities. What do people call themselves who would rather not be classified or those who think they’re being left out? What about the millions who aren’t sure what to check off on the “ethnicity” or “national origin” question? What about the people whose ancestry is mixed? The simple identity “American”is an option that a lot of white people chose on the US Census form, especially in the Appalachian South. This could be interpreted as an act of xenophobia, but for families from that region (the author included), many of whom trace their American roots back to the 1600s, the number of ethnicities, and national origins represented in the family tree is so numerous, so varied, and generally lost to time, to call oneself anything other than simply “American” defies logic. Anyone living in the United States with a complex family tree is perhaps best defined simply as “American”.

During the 2000 and 2010 census, there was an effort by small, politically-motivated groups in some southern states to make Confederate-American or Southern White as an official ethnic designation. This effort seems an outgrowth of the racially charged, anti-Federal politics still quite common in the South, but there may be a less nefarious logic to doing so as well. Groups of people who share a common identity should perhaps be allowed to label themselves as they see fit. Certainly, many of the official and unofficial strategies we use to place people in an ethnic category are illogical and unhelpful. One could argue that because many people in the American South share a unique dialect, religious beliefs, politics, and social customs that they may indeed be entitled to call themselves whatever they want.