The Racial Middle

Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide

Eileen O'Brien

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814762202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The divide over race is usually framed as one over Black and White. Sociologist Eileen O’Brien is interested in that middle terrain, what sits in the ever-increasing gray area she dubbed the racial middle.

The Racial Middle, tells the story of the other racial and ethnic groups in America, mainly Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the largest and fastest-growing minorities in the United States. Using dozens of in-depth interviews with people of various ethnic and generational backgrounds, Eileen O’Brien challenges the notion that, to fit into American culture, the only options available to Latinos and Asian Americans are either to become white or to become brown.

Instead, she offers a wholly unique analysis of Latinos and Asian Americans own distinctive experiences—those that aren’t typically White nor Black. Though living alongside Whites and Blacks certainly frames some of their own identities and interpretations of race, O’Brien keenly observes that these groups struggles with discrimination, their perceived isolation from members of other races, and even how they define racial justice, are all significant realities that inform their daily lives and, importantly, influence their opportunities for advancement in society.

A refreshing and lively approach to understanding race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century, The Racial Middle gives voice to Latinos and Asian-Americans place in this country’s increasingly complex racial mosaic.

1

The Panethnic Racial Middle

They say, if you’s white, you’s all right, If you’s brown, you can stick around, But if you black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back.

—Big Bill Broonzy, “Black, Brown, and White” (1951)

The experiences of persons in the racial middle in the United States have always been framed by those on the racial poles of white and black. As the above song lyric makes plain, those in the “brown” ambiguous middle category have often been juxtaposed against a “white” category that is favored and a “black” category that is not. Thus, a “brown” person is anyone conditionally accepted as “not black” (and thus can “stick around”) but still not completely favored as “white.” They hover in a middle that subverts the simple characterizations in this dichotomy of “right” and “wrong,” “front” and “back.” This is undoubtedly a precarious position and begs the question: How have those in the racial middle negotiated this position, framed largely by the poles on either side of them? How do they navigate this middle territory?

If one studies in detail the social construction of racial categories and the ideologies attached to them in the United States, one soon realizes that virtually everyone in the society actually fits into a middle category, because the idea of a “pure” racial stock is an absolute scientific fallacy.¹ There are indeed many Americans, however, who either think of themselves as “white” or “black,” and perhaps more important, Americans who are treated as “white” or “black” in social, economic, and political institutions. This ever-present reality fuels modern racism as we know it. History shows that the U.S. government has attempted at all costs to fit all persons into this seemingly clear-cut white/not-white dichotomy, making it difficult for those who did not fit it to assert their own exceptionalities.²

Yet there are two “middle” demographic groups in particular whose proportions in the U.S. population are growing at such unprecedented rates that changes to this simplistic dichotomy could very well be on the horizon. Those two groups are Latinos and Asian Americans. Indeed, as of the 2000 census, those categorized as Hispanic have already outnumbered those in the black/African American category.³ By the middle of this century, the percentage of Latinos in the U.S. population is expected to double, amounting to almost 25 percent of the entire nation, and Asian Americans’ proportion is also expected to more than double, from 3.6 to 8.9 percent.⁴ This means that, taken together, Latinos and Asian Americans will soon constitute about 35 percent of the U.S. population, while African Americans would be at only 13 percent. Whereas previous numerical realities meant that challenges to the hegemonic white-over-black racial order were contained enough not to disrupt it, many experts are now questioning whether such a status quo can be maintained, given these massive population shifts.

The racial middle groups of Latinos and Asian Americans exhibit interesting characteristics that are not completely reducible to the patterns typical of whites or blacks. Asian American families earn incomes and attain educational levels that are equal to and sometimes even higher than whites.⁵ Latinos and Asian Americans both tend to feel most “warm” (on feeling thermometer indicators) toward whites and least warm toward blacks.⁶ These sentiments, coupled with greater social contact with whites, have led to Latinos’ and Asian Americans’ higher intermarriage rates with whites than blacks. They are less likely to support race-related policies like affirmative action, and less likely to vote Democratic, than are African Americans.⁷ Yet they continue to earn lower returns on their education than similarly educated whites, facing glass-ceiling barriers to promotion in their occupations.⁸ Both groups are severely underrepresented politically.⁹ Many Latinos are segregated residentially, particularly when they are darker skinned.¹⁰ Some Asian Americans are targets of cruel hate crimes, often becoming the racialized scapegoats for the instability of the working class in a globalizing national economy.¹¹ Both groups also cope with the internalization of cultural images that marginalize their phenotype, some even undergoing plastic surgery to emulate European physical features.¹² Some of these patterns mirror African American historical experiences in the United States, while others are more reflective of white experiences. Latinos and Asian Americans are thus sociopolitically an “up-for-grabs” group in the United States, because they do not consistently ally with blacks or with whites. They defy simplistic categorizations in a society that has insisted on operating along such dichotomous lines for the greater part of its history.

History of the Not-So-New Racial Middle in the United States

Although the exponential growth of the racial middle has been largely a post-1965 development, members of certain racial middle groups have been present in the United States for as long as it has existed as a nation. This means that some members of the racial middle, whose claims to being “American” are sometimes challenged by white Americans, can have longer generational histories in the United States than some white Americans themselves. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, as the United States was transitioning from an agriculturally based to an industrially based economy, three groups from the racial middle played a key role in providing the labor power that built the nation—Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese. These groups arrived in a racially polarized society, between the bifurcated poles of black and white, and the society struggled to make political, legal, and social sense of where these middle groups should “fit” and what their rights should be, if any.

The Mexicans had an interesting experience because some of what was formerly Mexican land eventually, despite resistance, became U.S. territory. Thus, in some ways, their experiences of conquest and broken treaties were similar to those which had already been experienced by Native Americans. The same kinds of cultural disparagements that were created to justify the takeover of Native American land were created by those in power to rationalize the westward expansion onto Mexican ground.¹³ The influence of European colonization, however, and the more fluid boundaries between skin tones among Latin American peoples, meant that some persons of Mexican nationality were deemed “white” and allowed to experience the privileges attached to that racial designation. Indeed, up until 1980, census takers were instructed to mark Mexican Americans down as “white” unless their phenotype appeared to be “Negro, Indian, or some other race.”¹⁴ Thus, gradations in skin tone made a difference for Mexican Americans’ access to privileges, in a way that was not similarly experienced by their African American peers.

African Americans, in contrast, were forced to follow the law of hypo-descent (known as the “one-drop rule”) when categorizing their “race.” Whether they appeared visibly lighter skinned or not, if they had even “one drop” of “black blood,” they were to be considered racially black. This existence of “black blood” had nothing to do with biological blood testing or even phenotype, but was based on the legal records of racial assignment for all of the distant generations of the person’s family. Thus, if even one parent or great-grandparent (and in some states, great-great-great-grandparent) was considered “black” on paper, no matter how many other “whites” existed in that person’s family, they would still be deemed black. This rule worked effectively to maximize the percentage of the population who would be legally forced to provide free labor to the U.S. economy, consigned to lives of chattel slavery. This one-drop rule continued as the basis of the racial dividing line for legal segregation, however, long after slavery was outlawed in 1865. As a case in point, the landmark separate-but-equal U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ruled in 1896 that a “black” man who seemed visibly “white” to most still had to ride in the “colored” car of the train, legally solidifying the salience of the one-drop rule for at least another half century.¹⁵ This state-created racial category of “black” neglected the myriad ethnic differences among Africans that existed on their forced transport to the Americas as slaves, and then continued to neglect the vast diversity of class, skin color, educational attainment, and other factors among them long after slavery had been abolished.

That system of chattel slavery that predated the century of legal segregation for African Americans had itself been in place for over a century when the first Chinese arrived on U.S. soil. The arrival of this mostly male cohort began with the California gold rush of 1849 and continued throughout the following three decades, as they labored in mining, railroad, irrigation, and manufacturing industries, sending remittances home to their families in China.¹⁶ As was also the case with Mexican laborers, Chinese workers were paid less for the same work than workers who were considered “white.”¹⁷ Americans who had previously considered themselves along more ethnic lines (as Irish, Italian, Polish, and so on), much like the Chinese and Mexicans, began to abandon some of these ethnic affiliations, as it became more materially expedient for them to identified with the privileged “white” class.¹⁸ This pattern of labor exploitation pitted white workers against others, and sprouted white resentment of the other groups. In contrast to the Mexican workers whose homeland was either formerly part of the United States or very nearby, however, the Chinese workers could be more easily eliminated as a labor threat by banning their continued immigration from China, which was accomplished by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.¹⁹ The Chinese in the United States did not have much say in such policy matters, because, not deemed legally “white,” they were ineligible to be voting citizens.²⁰ While Mexicans were often tragically disenfranchised due to the refusal to recognize their rightful property claims (and one had to own property to vote), they were never legally barred from voting as an entire group due to their “race” in the same fashion as the Chinese.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 created some space for Japanese workers to begin migrating to the United States, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Japanese officials worked with the U.S. government to come up with an arrangement that would hopefully subvert the negative representations and backlash that the Chinese laborers had experienced before them. They worked out the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which would allow the Japanese to bring their wives with them, unlike the Chinese who were forbidden to do so. This allowed the Japanese to eventually move out of the low-wage job sector to an extent that the Chinese had been unable to do.²¹ This still could not withhold the eventual backlash, however, and immigration acts of 1909 and 1924 prevented further generations from immigrating.²² Even the second generation that was already permitted to remain in the country, and worked hard to be deserving of the designation of “American” (after all, the United States was their birthplace), could not escape hostility. The U.S. courts also still held that persons of Japanese descent could not be considered white, as evidenced by the case of Ozawa v. United States (1922), where a Japanese American man unsuccessfully petitioned the courts for a white racial designation.²³ The backlash was felt even harder when the United States placed members of the second generation into internment camps during World War II. They were under suspicion as “the enemy,” despite the fact that most of them knew nothing of life in Japan and felt more allegiance to the United States.

When the internment camps began, it may surprise Americans today to find that Chinese Americans—who now are included in the same “race” category as Japanese Americans—proudly wore buttons stating “I’m not a Jap.”²⁴ At this point in its history, the United States dealt with each of these three “middle” groups as distinct ethnic categories, with varying rights and privileges depending on the sociopolitical circumstances (but never at the level as esteemed as whites). As such, the divergent policies and national sentiments applied to the Chinese, and then the Japanese, illustrate how meaningful ethnic distinctions remained to Americans in the racial middle, at a time when ethnic differences were rapidly declining in significance for those on the racial poles of black and white. These ethnic distinctions in the racial middle, however, were still circumscribed by the ultimate racial categories of black and, more important, white. The U.S. courts have played a significant role over time in policing the boundaries of race, especially guarding the boundaries of whiteness, due to the material and social privileges that come along with it.²⁵ Thus, in the early U.S. history, we see policies that protect the borders of whiteness, largely preventing Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese from fully penetrating them.

Post–Civil Rights Era: The Panethnic Racial Middle

As the civil rights movement began to put the United States squarely in the international spotlight, threatening its global reputation as a beacon of freedom and equality for all, the nation necessarily became a bit more flexible on race and ethnicity than it had been in the past. After intervening on the global scene in World War II in the name of anti-Semitism and antifascism, it became difficult for the United States to continue to stand behind certain of its own policies which ran counter to such ideals. One such policy concerned immigration. A national-origins quota system had been in place since 1924, severely restricting flows from Africa, Asian, and Latin America, and the United States repealed those racist quotas with the Immigration Act of 1965. Although the United States did not set out to invite large numbers of non-Europeans to its shores by enacting this newer policy, it is indeed what happened. Well-educated immigrants from Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, and India began arriving in much larger numbers than they had previously.²⁶ This mid-twentieth century period also expanded significantly the ethnic diversity of Latin American immigrants. Beginning in 1917, Puerto Rican American immigration became unrestricted due to their status as U.S. citizens, but a subsequent project called Operation Bootstrap (1948–65) dramatically increased the “push factors” drawing them to the mainland; consequently, between 1950 and 1960, the average number of Puerto Rican Americans migrating to New York annually more than doubled. Further, Cuban immigration peaked dramatically in the 1960s after Fidel Castro took over.²⁷ Immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia began significantly outnumbering those from Europe, representing many more nations than are listed here.

The U.S. civil rights movement, happening concurrently, undoubtedly set a model for other disenfranchised and exploited groups in the nation. African Americans and their allies raised additional unwanted global attention for the United States as mass media became more easily transmittable across the world, and the brutality of white terrorism, particularly in the southern United States, could longer be ignored. As African Americans began to gain concessions from the state in the form of Supreme Court decisions, support from the National Guard in the South to enforce these rulings, and civil rights acts enacted by the president, other oppressed groups began to take note of their successful organizing tactics and sought to put them into practice for themselves. The Black Power movement of the late 1960s gave rise to the Native American “Red Power” movement, the Asian “Yellow Power” movement, and the Latino “Brown Power” movement.²⁸ These movements were some of the first efforts of Latinos and Asians to organize across ethnic lines into panethnic racial groupings. Because no single ethnic group (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Puerto Rican Americans) possessed numbers by itself to come close to the total population of African Americans, it became a necessary organizational move for Latinos and Asians to bridge across their ethnic differences for the sake of forming these race-based groups. By 1980, the United States exhibited a further degree of racial flexibility in its record keeping, as for the first time, respondents filled out their own racial designation on the census as opposed to census takers choosing it for them.²⁹ It was the beginning of a bit more agency and the ability to shape racial categories “from below.”

It is not the whole story, however, that Latinos and Asians, through simply their own volition, came across ethnic differences to form larger panethnic racial groups. A variety of external factors exerted pressure on them to acknowledge the reality of their shared fates. Ye Len Espiritu’s work on Asian panethnicity does an excellent job of outlining how such factors operated in the lives of Asians in the latter part of the twentieth century. She points out that community activists who provided necessary services to their respective ethnic communities found that access to valued resources was at stake, because agencies realized that they had more access to grant money if they reported to serve the larger sounding “Asian” population, rather t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Panethnic Racial Middle
• 2 The Meanings of Race and Ethnicity from the Racial Middle
• 3 Reshaping Racist Ideology from the Middle
• 4 Interracial Border Crossing
• 5 “No racism, only that one time . . .”
• 6 Progressives
• 7 The Potential of the Racial Middle
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author