free whites. African Americans were even referred to as “smoked Irish.” Only after Irish Americans took jobs that distinguished them from African Americans, endorsed slavery (despite Irish leaders’ condemnation of the practice), and joined the dominant white voting blocs did they become accepted as “whites.” Chinese Americans in Mississippi in the late 1800s also shifted their informal racial status from black to white (Loewen 1971). They became small-business owners and gradually associated more with whites rather than blacks, allowing them to be perceived by others as nonblacks and so closer to whites. More recently, in the 1970s, Indian Americans petitioned to have their race changed in the US Census from white to Asian American (Das Gupta 2006). They believed that their racialized experiences best resembled that of other Asian Americans, and there were economic and political gains in being designated a racial minority, such as more attractive small-business loans. Across these changes, however, the centrality and taken-for-granted normalcy of whites are not questioned.
If we take a comparative perspective and examine how racial categories are assigned in countries beyond the United States, it becomes even clearer how race is socially constructed. People who may appear to share the same phenotypic features and might be categorized in a similar way in the United States (say, as “black”) in a country like Brazil may actually be divided into different categories (Telles 2004).
Online resource: For a discussion of how racial categories have changed in the US Census and how US racial categorization compares with racial categorization in Brazil, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/looking-in-the-cultural-mirror/201112/what-does-the-brazilian-census-tell-us-about-race
Race is a politically created concept. Racial categories are externally imposed, and groups must navigate within and between them. Groups with greater power over social discourse, media, and the economy assign the racial categories of a society, and minorities attempt to jockey for position within those options. Members of the same race may have nothing in common except for a shared phenotype (and, even then, those phenotypes are not actually identical). This process of being externally assigned a racial group is an example of racial formation.
Durability of race
Even though race is a matter of historical and social construction, as opposed to biological processes, unfortunately it is not going away. Once categorized as a distinct racial category, people begin to believe it. Race is hard to eradicate at the subjective level, partly because both those who constitute the majority (when it comes to racial categorization, “majority” refers not to a numerical quantity but to one’s membership in the dominant racial group, i.e. white) and minorities (those classified as nonwhite) start to feel strong bonds to members of their socially constructed race. It is continually reinforced “as a fundamental principle of social organization and identity formation” (Winant 2000: 184). Being part of a group creates comfort. Cultural norms start to develop over time. Especially in a society that is so deeply organized by racial categories, not being straightforwardly a member of a racial group could make it harder for some people to feel attached to others (this may be true, for example for multiracial people who are phenotypically ambiguous and difficult to classify). Just as importantly, moreover, racialization has become embedded in many social institutions. Racial categorization was (and continues to be) codified in the law, for example. The US Constitution is a case in point. In the United States’ founding document, African Americans were defined as “three-fifths” a person. Today, we judge schools, for instance, based on how racially diverse they are.
Another challenge in eradicating race as a concept is our cognitive dependence on it, even as that dependence misguides us. The brain classifies people in terms of social categories, including race, in order to simplify our reading of people. The brain tends to put people, objects, or ideas into groups and give them labels, so that we can then act on them in a predetermined way without having to consider the item’s (whether person, object, or idea) individual characteristics. This makes daily interactions much easier. For example, we have a mental image of what a chair looks like: it has a level seat, four legs, and a back. When we see an object that fits that description, we perceive it to be a “chair” and so we know how to act on it: we sit on it. This makes daily life much easier than inspecting each chair we encounter. Once we have seen lots of chairs, we can allow objects that do not exactly meet that description to still be chairs (e.g. chairs with only three legs).
This is a useful cognitive device, but when it is applied to people, it can have negative consequences. We are quick to classify people based on little information. Skin tone and hairstyle are easy means of classifying people into what we call “race.” But as explained above, those characteristics do not tell us anything meaningful about people, like intelligence, morals, social skills, and so on. Still, these criteria persist partly because of their significance socially and partly because they are stark visual cues. For instance, we could classify people based on eye color or height. But these are more difficult to either discern or to categorize differently. What this suggests is that the criteria (i.e. skin tone, hair texture, etc.) we have used are relatively random. And the term we have used for these random categories that ultimately serve as cognitive tricks is “race.” For all of these historical, political, economic, emotional, and cognitive reasons, race is a social construction, but one that does not go away.
Ethnicity
Race is analytically distinct from ethnicity, although they have similarities. Ethnicity refers to a typically self-proclaimed sense of group membership based on a presumed (not necessarily actual) common ancestry, history, and way of life (Cornell and Hartmann 2007). Because it is self-proclaimed, individuals often take pride in their ethnic background. In the United States, ethnicities generally overlap with national homelands (or countries of origin) but are not limited to them. Individuals from a national homeland become an ethnic group. For example, German American, Brazilian American, and Nigerian American are all ethnic groups and they also coincide with a nation-state (Germany, Brazil, Nigeria). Outsiders may overlook distinctions within those ethnicities or national-origin groups. For instance, Gujaratis, Punjabis, Bengalis, and so on are meaningful groups within India and Indian America. In the United States, such sub-ethnicities are rarely recognized and so people are simply referred to as Indian. Hmong people are a distinct ethnic group that is spread across several Southeast Asian countries. Most Hmong people do not identify with the countries in which they live but do identify closely with those of their ethnic group who live in other countries.
Ethnicity versus race
Ethnicity and race overlap at times, and the difference can be more analytical than observable. When someone is treated differently based on their physical appearance, then race is active. Race involves power inequalities and a sense of being acted upon. For this reason, race is a problematic concept, and racebased thinking should be eradicated. For example, being treated as black is unavoidable for most African Americans, even for multiracial persons who “look black.” President Barack Obama’s characterization as America’s first “black” president is a case in point. He is, in fact, multiracial but is treated by virtue of his phenotype as “black.” Similarly, when outsiders refer to a Korean American as “Korean” or “Asian” based on physical appearance, it is a racial interaction. When that African American or Korean American himself or herself adopts that label and feels connected to others similarly identified because of a shared history or upbringing, then ethnicity is at work. So the difference between race and ethnicity in these cases is only analytical. Most of the time, both ethnicity and race are at play. Individuals are assigned an ethnic or racial group and often adopt that group as meaningful to their lives. The difference between ethnicity and race matters because, as researchers, we want to know how to make sense of how individuals inhabit social categories and the origins of the categories. In later chapters, we will discuss how
