Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer L. Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, professor of African and African American studies, and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. Vesla M. Weaver is an assistant professor in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Traci R. Burch is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University and research professor at the American Bar Foundation.

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"This is a wide-ranging exploration of how America looks, thinks, and lives in terms of race as we go into this new millennium. Bridging political science, sociology, and the burgeoning study of DNA, the authors show us that racial order remains one of the most reliable ways of organizing our past and present as Americans, even as that order is dynamic and indeed transformed over time."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"It is not often that one reads a book that changes how we think the world works.Creating a New Racial Order is replete with original, and sometimes surprising, insights and evidence on the forces that are generating rising racial heterogeneity in the United States. The authors' compelling analysis of the ongoing transformation of America's racial order is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Showing how historical trends have produced an unprecedented complexity and fluidity in racial meanings, classifications, and identities in the United States, this book argues that the American racial order is changing for the better and explains why this is happening. Bold and provocative, this book is a game changer."--Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine

"With an in-depth analysis of changing definitions of race, this compelling and absorbing book presents evidence that the American racial order is in the middle of a historic transformation. It marshals a spectacular amount of research and sophisticated detail, and will stir considerable debate and discussion. In my reading in this subject area, I haven't encountered a book equal to this one."--Raphael J. Sonenshein, California State University, Fullerton

Aus dem Klappentext

"This is a wide-ranging exploration of how America looks, thinks, and lives in terms of race as we go into this new millennium. Bridging political science, sociology, and the burgeoning study of DNA, the authors show us that racial order remains one of the most reliable ways of organizing our past and present as Americans, even as that order is dynamic and indeed transformed over time."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"It is not often that one reads a book that changes how we think the world works.Creating a New Racial Order is replete with original, and sometimes surprising, insights and evidence on the forces that are generating rising racial heterogeneity in the United States. The authors' compelling analysis of the ongoing transformation of America's racial order is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Showing how historical trends have produced an unprecedented complexity and fluidity in racial meanings, classifications, and identities in the United States, this book argues that the American racial order is changing for the better and explains why this is happening. Bold and provocative, this book is a game changer."--Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine

"With an in-depth analysis of changing definitions of race, this compelling and absorbing book presents evidence that the American racial order is in the middle of a historic transformation. It marshals a spectacular amount of research and sophisticated detail, and will stir considerable debate and discussion. In my reading in this subject area, I haven't encountered a book equal to this one."--Raphael J. Sonenshein, California State University, Fullerton

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Creating a New Racial Order

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Figures and Tables.....................................xiIntroduction...................................................xiiiPART I: THE ARGUMENT...........................................11. Destabilizing the American Racial Order.....................3PART II: CREATING A NEW ORDER..................................192. Immigration.................................................213. Multiracialism..............................................564. Genomics....................................................835. Cohort Change...............................................1136. Blockages to Racial Transformation..........................139PART III: POSSIBILITIES........................................1657. The Future of the American Racial Order.....................167Notes..........................................................183References.....................................................213Index..........................................................255

Chapter One

There are many ... variables that are not matters of degree. And it is these variables that define what it means to be black in America.... Police do not stop whites for "driving while black," but police do stop blacks, particularly wealthy blacks, for this offense.... Thus, it would be wiser to regard "driving while black" and being black not as two variables but, instead, as part of the same condition. It is this second type of variable that forces one to conclude that by definition blacks and whites do not occupy the same social space. —Samuel Lucas

Does race exist? Of course it does. We see it every day. Guy steals a purse, the cop asks, What did he look like? You say, He was a six-foot-tall black guy, or a five-and-a-half-foot-tall Asian man, or a white guy with long red hair.... We hold these vague blueprints of race in our heads because, as primates, one of the great tools of consciousness we possess is the ability to observe patterns in nature. It's no surprise that we'd train this talent on ourselves. —Jack Hitt

It is possible that, by 2050, today's racial and ethnic categories will no longer be in use. —Migration News, 2004

Many Americans, like the first two people quoted above, believe that we must recognize, and should perhaps celebrate, clear differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Even if race is "merely" a social construct with no biological basis, it has a huge impact on the quality and trajectory of individual lives and on American society and politics more generally. Whether group boundaries are intended to include or exclude, everyone apparently knows where to draw the lines and what the lines imply.

But group boundaries that seem fixed, even self-evident, at a given moment are surprisingly unstable across a period of years. A Harvard anthropologist's 1939 textbook titled The Races of Europe showed eighteen races spread across the continent. In an elaborately overlapping swarm of lines and hashmarks, Carleton Coon showed how the "Partially Mongoloid," "Lappish," "Brünn strain, Tronder etc., unreduced, only partly brachycephalized," "Pleistocene Mediterranean Survivor," "Neo-Danubian," Nordic, and (separately) Noric, and a dozen other groups were distributed among those whom we now designate as "White."

This is not how we now view Europe, nor was this image itself stable. As Jack Hitt points out, "the number of races has expanded and contracted wildly" over the past few hundred years, "growing as high as Ernst Haeckel's thirty-four different races in 1879 or Paul Topinard's nineteen in 1885 or Stanley Garn's nine in 1971." One hundred and thirty years earlier, Charles Darwin had made the same point in some exasperation:

Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.

And the number and nature of what we call races may again change, as the third epigraph reminds us.

What constitutes a race or ethnic group has been no more stable over time than how many there are. People in the nineteenth century spoke of the race of Yankees, the "criminal race," or the "race of Ushers" (in Edgar Allen Poe's famous ghost story). The concept of ethnicity emerged early in the twentieth century, but in 1936 the chair of Yale University's board of admissions rejected an increase in the freshman class on the grounds that Yale might admit "too large a proportion of candidates who are undesirable either racially or scholastically." He was referring in the first instance to Jews. One author of this book is the child of what was once an interracial marriage—between an immigrant German Jew and a New England Congregationalist descended from the Puritans.

Nor is the concept of race or ethnicity coherent even at one moment in time. One of us used to teach undergraduates that Asians were a single race with many ethnicities and that Latinos were a single ethnicity with many races—but scholars now dispute whether race is best understood as distinct from ethnicity (as that lesson implies), a subset of it, or a synonym. Consider the U.S. census, typically thought of (if at all) as the epitome of neutral bureaucratically inflected science. Figure 1.1 shows the two key questions on the 2010 census.

The first question implicitly asks about ethnicity—but only for Hispanics and, curiously, Spaniards. Swedes, Koreans, Arabs, or Nigerians, never mind the Portuguese or Brazilians, have no official ethnicity. The second question first defines race as a color—"White" or "Black." But there is no Brown, Yellow, or Red; instead the answer category shifts to race as a tribe—but only for Native Americans. Race then appears as a nationality—but only for nations that are, roughly speaking, in South or Pacific-rim Asia. Finally, the question gives up, allowing the respondent to declare "Some other race," defined only by the person filling out the form. And since a respondent may now "mark one or more boxes" (as well as choosing a Latino ethnicity), one's official race can be a combination of color, nationality, tribe, and "some other" thing. There are, in fact, 63 possible racial combinations and 126 possible combinations including ethnicity. Through all of this, the word "race" appears seven times on the document. As one highly knowledgeable statistician puts it (though not for attribution), "race on the census is a rat's nest."

Incoherence in census categories simply reflects the realities of American racial and ethnic politics. In fact, given the opportunity people define themselves in even more ways. Asked on a 2007 survey to indicate their "ancestry, nationality, ethnic origin, or tribal affiliation," about 40,000 American citizen students at several dozen selective colleges and...