Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide (review)

Will white Americans become a numerical minority in the next fifty years? This is the central question that this book addresses, and Yancey has a clear answer — no. Using highly accessible language, Yancey discusses the expanding boundaries of whiteness over the twentieth century. Yancey predicts that European Americans will continue to allow these boundaries to expand over the twenty-first century, in order to avoid becoming a numerical minority. He anticipates that the definition of whiteness will change to include all minorities except African Americans.

Yancey bases this argument on his thesis that African Americans experience alienation in a way that Latino and Asian Americans do not. Yancey uses data from a nationwide telephone survey of attitudes and friendship to test his hypothesis that nonblack minorities are likely to have opinions on racialized matters that are more similar to European Americans than to African Americans. On the basis of his finding that some Asian and Latino Americans are identificationally assimilating in combination with previous evidence that some are residentially and maritally assimilating, Yancey contends that Asian and Latino Americans will eventually adopt a white racial identity.

Yancey finds some evidence for his hypothesis that whites disparage blacks more than they do Hispanics and Asians. However, the difference between whites' opinions of blacks and their opinions of Asians and Hispanics pales in comparison to whites' preference for whites over nonwhites. As he points out, European Americans' ideal neighborhood would be 49 percent European American, 16 percent African American, 17 percent Hispanic American, and 18 percent Asian American.

However, the fatal flaw of this book is that Yancey treats Asians and Latinos as as homogeneous racial groups. By referring to Hispanics as a "nonblack minority," Yancey is ignoring the significant presence of Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Yancey argues that the "undisputed presence of European Americans in the genetic heritage of most Latino Americans will increase their tendency to assimilate." He further claims that European Americans will eventually accept Hispanics as "whites," because of the phenotypic similarity between whites and Latinos. Yancey provides no empirical evidence for this claim of phenotypic similarity. Without concrete data on the racial ancestry of Hispanics in the U.S., these assertions are pure speculation.

On the contrary, it is just as likely that a large number of Hispanics in the U.S. are direct descendants of indigenous people, of Europeans, of Africans, or of Asians. One could equally well argue that many Latinos will become (or already are) black or American Indian, as a result of shared racial ancestry with African Americans and Native Americans. Moreover, conceptions of whiteness are not necessarily based on phenotypic similarity. In Brazil, some African-descended people are included in the definition of whiteness, while indigenous people are the exoticized "other." And the U.S. Census has classified very dark South Asians as "white."

In the next step in his empirical analyses, Yancey assesses the ideological proximity between Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. He finds that Hispanics, as a group, have views that as closely approximate whites in ideological beliefs as they do blacks. In his next analysis he considers only those respondents who made over $30,000 a year. In this income category, he finds that Hispanics' views more closely proximate whites' than they do blacks'. However, there is another way to interpret these findings. It is possible that some Hispanics are more ideologically close to blacks, others to whites, and others to neither. For example, third-generation Cuban exiles may be more likely to think that income taxes should be cut than are African Americans. However, fourth-generation Chicanos may be more likely to support affirmative action than European Americans. And first-generation Guatemalans may be more likely to support reforms to immigration legislation than are either blacks or whites.

If Yancey were to have systematically taken generational status, racial ancestry, and...