Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Social Policy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
Full Inclusion ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of

The racial character of American society has shaped social policy-making in the United States and structured the American welfare state. At the same time, the structure of American social policy has affected the welfare state’s capacity to incorporate members of different racial and ethnic groups, shaping their access to social citizenship and their opportunities for full inclusion in (or isolation from) the American political economy. This dynamic relationship has increasingly been at the center of work on American social policy, and much recent research explores important new issues that reflect both the changing reality of race in American politics and society and trends in political science, particularly regarding the changing definition of “race” in American politics and society, the new contours of inequality in American life, and the urban crisis of the late twentieth century and its impact on broader transformations of American politics.

Introduction: Immigration and Incorporation

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén G. Rumbaut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Society

In at least one sense the “American century” is ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. But the diversity of the “new immigration” to the United States over the past three decades differs in many respects from that of the last period of mass immigration in the first three decades of the century. The immigrants themselves differ greatly in their social class and national origins, and so does the American society, polity, and economy that receives them—raising questions about their modes of incorporation, and challenging conventional accounts of assimilation processes that were framed during that previous epoch. The dynamics and future course of their adaptation are open empirical questions—as well as major questions for public policy, since the outcome will shape the future contours of American society. Indeed, as the United States undergoes its most profound demographic transformation in a century; as inexorable processes of globalization, especially international migrations from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, diversify still further the polyethnic composition of its population; and as issues of immigration, race and ethnicity become the subject of heated public debate, the question of incorporation, and its serious study, becomes all the more exigent. The essays in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives tackle that subject from a variety of analytical vantages and innovative approaches, covering a wide range of groups in major areas of immigrant settlement. Several of the papers focus specifically on Los Angeles and New York City, where, remarkably, fully a quarter of the total U.S. immigrant population resides.

“The Folk of the Nation”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gough ◽  
Peggy Seeger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Composition ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Federal Music Project ◽  
Academic Recognition ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter provides a definition of folk music. Precise definition of the term folk music has long confounded scholars and been the source of endless debate and controversy; general agreements, either popular or academic are rare, and misunderstandings abound. Folk music in the United States reflects the complex history and diverse ethnic composition of American society. Indeed, academic recognition of these native musical forms preceded the development of the Federal Music Project (FMP); in 1882, Theodore Baker published a scholarly study of American folk music, and in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a preface for John Lomax's groundbreaking Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads publication. Meanwhile, some scholars argue that if a song has a known author, it cannot be classified as folksong “because the original meaning of folk music was something ancient and anonymous.”

American Ethnic Geography

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Estaville ◽  
Susan W. Hardwick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Identification ◽  
Population Geography ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Ethnicity ◽  
Ethnic Geography

Because the American Ethnic Geography Specialty Group was established in 1992 and was, therefore, not a part of the original Geography in America anthology in 1989, we think it is beneficial to present briefly the development and context of American ethnic geography into which we can place more current work. In 2000 the American Ethnic Geography Specialty Group changed its name to the Ethnic Geography Specialty Group; but because almost the whole of this report deals with the decade of the 1990s, we use the specialty group’s original name throughout. American ethnic geography encompasses the geographic dimensions and experiences of ethnic groups in the United States and Canada. Its roots are in cultural-historical and population geography. As such, American ethnic geography reflects the epistemologies and methodologies of human geography. Like geographers in general, most American ethnic geographers are empirical and inductive in their research. Because ethnicity is a complex concept, scholars who research ethnicity have been troubled over the years by definitional conundrums. Although in his 1974 study Isajiw determined that most ethnic researchers never explicitly define the meaning of ethnicity, he examined twenty-seven characteristics of ethnicity to construct a definition of North American ethnicity as “an involuntary group of people who share the same culture or . . . descendants of such people who identify themselves and/or are identified by others as belonging to the same involuntary group” (ibid. 122). To Isajiw, then, a person is either born into an ethnic group and is therefore socialized as Anglo, Chinese, French, Polish, etc., or can decide at some point in her/his life which ethnic identity fits best, or other people can perceive a person’s ethnicity. As underscored in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980), these latter internal/external modes of ethnic identification have become increasingly more significant in North America. Paradoxically, in today’s multiethnic American society, many ethnic groups are celebrating their heritages with renewed vigor, while, simultaneously, many people are less bound by past ethnic loyalties and have either used innovative terms of self-identification to describe their multiethnicity or simply refused to be categorized ethnically.

Strange Whims of Crest Fiends: Marketing Heraldry in the United States, 1880–1980

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-611
Author(s):  
FORREST D. PASS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

Confronting Race and Ethnicity: Education and Cultural Identity for Immigrants and Students from Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 644-656
Author(s):  
Liping Bu
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Asian Country ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The Difference ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Minority People

Years ago at graduate school, a fellow student in the American Seminar class asked, “What is the difference between race and ethnicity?” The professor replied, “Asians usually find it hard to distinguish the two.” The student was from an Asian country and the professor did not elaborate the distinction between the concepts. It is no brainer for Americans to tell the difference; however, for people new to American society who have not lived in a racially conscious and divisive society, it is confusing to refer to a minority people as belonging to both a particular race and to a different ethnicity. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when millions of immigrants came to America in search of better life and supplied American industries with labor, they were labeled white, yellow, brown, or black. This skin-colored definition of people as different races reflected American racial views of people of different cultures. Even in current mainstream discourse, racial and ethnic minorities are still called people of color or colored people, instead of minorities.

Uniquely Okinawan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney A. Short
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Local Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Military ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Identity ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Definition Of

This study explores the planning considerations of the United States military in formulating and implementing policy for the occupation of Okinawa from April 1945 to July 1946. American soldiers, Marines, and sailors on Okinawa encountered not only a Japanese enemy, but a large local population. The Okinawans were ethically different from the Japanese, yet Okinawa shared politics with Japan as a legal prefecture. When devising occupation policies, the United States military analyzed practical military considerations such as resources, weapons capability and terrain, as well as attempted to ascertain a conclusive definition of Okinawa’s relation to Japan through conscious, open, rational analysis of racial and ethnic identity. While the Marines held steadfast to the image of the enemy civilian, soldiers’ ideas about the race, ethnicity, and identity of the Okinawans evolved through their interactions with the civilians on the battlefield. As the population exhibited obedience and cooperation, the Army expressed feelings of kinship toward the civilians and reshaped its military government policies toward leniency. With the exception of the Marines, the U.S. military recognized the Okinawans as competent and civilized: a group that formed a distinct, separate, unique ethnic community that was neither American nor Japanese in its likeness. Considerations of race, ethnicity, and identity by the Americans deeply influenced the conduct of the occupation beyond practical concerns of resources and battlefield conditions. The mercurial nature of the identity of the Okinawans displays both the malleability of race and ethnicity and its centrality in occupation planning.

The Importance of Families and Communities in Understanding Ethnicity and Maintaining Ethnic Identity

1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Mary E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
American Society ◽  
Agent Of Change

Social science provides us with a variety of theories that attempt to explain the dynamics of race and ethnicity. Many of these theories are concerned with the basic question of ethnic difference: its origins, persistence, and decline. In the contemporary literature on immigration to the United States and on how immigrants adjust to that relocation, assimilation and the persistence of ethnic identity have often been considered polar opposites. Researchers, however, are beginning to find that both processes often occur simultaneously, as when immigrants become acculturated into American society but also maintain or even construct distinct ethnic identities, often “symbolically.” Even though a generation of immigrants may give up their ethnic identities, adopt the host language, and intermarry, their children or grandchildren may choose to renew ancestral ethnicities, and in so doing, may even contribute to the re-ethnicization of their parents as adults. Ethnicity (and ethnic identity), therefore, is both a conservative force as well as an agent of change. The articles in this special issue of Ethnic Studies Review explore the dynamics of ethnicity in the United States and contextualize the experience of various groups within families and communities.

The Long War on Drugs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne L. Foster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Ethnic Chinese ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modern War

The beginning of modern war on drugs in the United States is commonly credited to President Richard Nixon, who evoked fears of crime, degenerate youth, and foreign drugs to garner support for his massive, by early 1970s standards, effort to combat drugs in the United States. Scholars now agree, however, that the essential characteristics of the “war on drugs” stretched back to the early 20th century. The first federal law to prohibit a narcotic in the United States passed in 1909 and banned the import of “smoking opium.” Although opium itself remained legal, opium prepared for smoking—a form believed to be consumed predominantly by ethnic Chinese and imported into the United States—was not. All future anti-narcotics policies drew on these foundational notions: narcotics were of foreign origin and invaded the United States. Thus, interdiction efforts at U.S. borders, and increasingly in producer countries, were an appropriate response. Narcotics consumers were presented as equally threatening, viewed as foreigners or at the margins of American society, and U.S. lawmakers therefore criminalized both drug use and drug trafficking. With drugs as well as drug users defined as foreign threats, militarization of the efforts to prohibit drugs followed. In U.S. drug policy, there is no distinction between foreign and domestic policy. They are intertwined at all levels, including the definition of the problem, the origin of many drugs, and the sites of enforcement.

Face the Nation: Race, Immigration, and the Rise of Nativism in Late Twentieth Century America

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1030 ◽  
Author(s):  
George J. Sanchez
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
American Society ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article examines the rise of nativism directed at Asian and Latino immigrants to the United States in contemporary American society. By focusing on the Los Angeles riots and other evidence of the rise of anti-immigrant feelings among the population, this study reveals that a racial nativism has arisen which intertwines a new American racism with traditional hostility towards new immigrants in a variety of ways. Both recent scholarship on race and John Higham's classic work on nativism are utilized to provide a conceptual framework for understanding our multiracial contemporary setting. Tellingly, this new racial nativism emerges from both sides of the political spectrum, and is evident in attempts to keep discussions of race focused on solely white/black national construction. Finally, the study explores how immigrants themselves have responded to these attacks by increasing naturalization rates and political activity, forming a newfound ambivalent Americanism.

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