Race, Ethnicity, and American Immigration Policy

From the earliest days of U.S. nationhood, race and ethnicity have profoundly influenced the politics and governance of immigration. To be sure, this policy arena has been shaped by a variety of economic, social, cultural, and political forces. Yet it is impossible to explain the arc of American immigration policy over time save for recurrent battles over racial and ethnic criteria. This chapter reviews an impressive body of scholarship that chronicles the prominence of race and ethnicity as grounds for immigrant inclusion or exclusion as well as the myriad of ways race and ethnicity have affected the integration and acceptance of immigrants for generations. Additionally, much of the scholarship reviewed in this essay underscores the evolving meaning of racial and ethnic categories even as ascriptive hierarchies have proven durable.

Latino Public Policy Opinions

Latinos are playing a growing role in public policy debates not only surrounding immigration, but across several domestic policy domains. This has led to an increased interest in the attitudes of the Latino population toward public policy. This chapter focuses on four specific aspects related to Latino public opinion. First, we briefly discuss the vital role that public opinion plays in American politics today. We then examine Latino attitudes toward important policy areas. Next, we discuss issues involved in the accurate measuring of Latino public opinion. And finally, we suggest some future directions in the study of Latino public opinion.

Racial Justice Advocacy, Political Representation, and the Contemporary Interest Group Universe

Advocacy organizations have long been a crucial conduit for the construction, articulation, and representation of the interests and identities of African Americans, Latin@s, American Indians, Asian Pacific Americans, and other racialized groups in the United States. These organizations promise to provide a measure of “insider” political access to racialized “outsider” groups by opening up the policy making process and offering them an institutionalized and compensatory source of representation. The extent to which this promise has been fulfilled, however, has been the subject of much debate. This chapter argues that while advocacy organizations have substantially improved the political representation and position of racialized groups, they continue to face many challenges in attempting to fulfill their potential. Suggestions are made about how scholars and activists might clarify these challenges and better confront and dismantle the many inequalities and forms of white privilege that continue to mark American politics, economics, and society.

The “Liberal Tradition” and American Racism

In 1955, Louis Hartz argued that the United States had been founded as a “liberal society” which unconsciously embraced the precepts of John Locke, in ways that dominated all other political perspectives throughout American history. Recent analysts of that thesis have focused on the relationship of this “liberal tradition” to American racial inequalities. How and why have both liberalism and racism grown so abundantly in the American political garden? This chapter reviews five types of responses: racism as an anomaly in American liberal society; the unity of American racism and liberalism; the existence of multiple liberalisms, some racist, some not; views seeing liberalism and racism as strongly symbiotic; and more contingent symbiotic accounts. None of these positions dominates modern scholarship. Together they define a vital research agenda.

Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Food

Food policy intersects with racial and ethnic politics along several dimensions: the agricultural workforce, acculturation into American society, the availability of healthy food, and the provision of social programs. First, the demand for agricultural and other low-wage workers in the food industry has encouraged immigration but many of the undocumented suffer from lack of access to basic services and legal protections. Second, many of these recent immigrants are less likely to suffer from the diseases of over-abundance that affect many Americans. However, as immigrants become acculturated into American life, their health outcomes become increasingly similar to less educated and poorer blacks and whites. Third, diet-related diseases are part of a multifaceted problem: education and income are often barriers to procuring healthy foods. Fourth, white attitudes about minority groups is associated with less support for social programs that might improve minority health outcomes. This chapter links these distinct areas of research.

The Civil Rights Movement

This chapter offers a critical survey of extant scholarship on the civil rights movement. It highlights topics, organizations, and specific figures and campaigns that have been extensively studied, while also calling attention to other aspects of, or persons or groups in, the movement that have received much less scholarly attention. The piece ends with an extended section on what the author terms “silences, holes, and biases” in the literature on this most important of American social movements. More specifically the author calls for a temporal and geographic broadening of research on the African American freedom struggle, more attention to black activism within a host of institutions (e.g. schools, workplaces, cultural institutions), and increased research on the dynamics of white resistance to collective political action by African Americans.

Race, Class, and Politics in the Black Community

Class is an underdeveloped concept in both formal and informal U.S. political discourse. There is little historical or sustained popular discourse on elites, workers, the bourgeoisie, or the unemployed. Nonetheless, class is still a crucial axis upon which people organize themselves politically and through which political messages are pitched. This chapter offers a definition of class as that system of stratification that is rooted in economic productivity, resources, or capacities. It then lays out the role of class in racial and ethnic politics by focusing on cross-class political cleavages and unity within the African-American community. I develop the concept of black middlemen and middlewomen who act as brokers of political, economic, and symbolic resources. Such brokerage can alternately result in collective empowerment or internal class domination. I conclude by adding gender to the discussion of class, race, and politics to highlight the importance of an intersectional framework.

Multiculturalism and Liberalism

This chapter examines the debate about multiculturalism in political theory. It traces the emergence of a philosophical literature to justify policies enacted by contemporary liberal democratic states that seek to fairly accommodate cultural diversity and remedy racial injustice. It traces the origins of the contemporary philosophical debate about multiculturalism (particularly in the United States and Canada) to the communitarian critique of theories of liberal neutrality that emphasized individual freedom and autonomy at the expense of collective membership. The liberal–communitarian debate culminated in liberal defenses of minority group rights that emphasize the centrality of culture and group membership to individual autonomy. The essay goes on to consider three remaining sources of tension in liberal multiculturalism: the question of how to reconcile commitments to gender equality and multiculturalism, the issue of how to deal with illiberal minority cultures (particularly religious groups), and the failure to adequately conceive racial justice.

Formative Mappings, Political Trappings

Contemporary scholarship on racial and ethnic politics in the United States has broadly followed three main approaches in assessing the history of race and ethnicity in the United States. We therefore map three different ways of seeing the relationship between race and ethnicity contained within Whiteness Studies, scholarship on cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, and scholarship on intersections and Intersectionality. Each locates the history of racial and ethnic difference within a larger political problematic, each attaches a different significance and valence between racial and ethnic categories, and each bears with it the particular political investments constituting its origins. By highlighting the divergent ways racial and ethnic categories are mobilized we underscore the irreducibly political nature of race and ethnicity and their ongoing generative role in American politics.

America’s New Racial/Ethnic Diversity

The United States is more racially/ethnically diverse than at any point in the country’s history as a result of immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification. The Latino and Asian populations have more than tripled in size since 1970; Latinos are now the largest racial/ethnic minority group, and Asians, the fastest growing group in the country. Also contributing to America’s new diversity is increasing intermarriage and a growing multiracial population. Intermarriage soared more than twenty-fold between 1960 and 2000, and the multiracial population is poised to account for one in five Americans by 2050, and one in three by 2100. However, this new diversity is not evenly apparent across the country. Some states—like California—reflect the new diversity, which is also evident at the metropolitan level. In other states, the new diversity is nearly invisible. The pattern of high and low diversity in the United States reflects the country’s vast heterogeneity.