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9. Societal Racism
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Chapter 9 Societal Racism T he American dilemma” is one of the most enduring phrases to emerge from twentieth-century social-science research. Gunnar Myrdal (1944/1962) coined this term in his landmark study of African Americans’ inequality in the United States. His book quickly became “an epoch-making work [that] brought to broad public notice for the first time the fact that . . . Jim Crow segregation was unjustified and indeed un-American” (Fredrickson 2002, 167). A Swedish economist with an outsider’s perspective of American race relations, Myrdal was struck by a contradiction in the United States (McKee 1993), which he dubbed “the American dilemma”: American democracy values freedom, justice, and equal opportunity, but white racism ranks whites above other groups. Becoming aware of the American dilemma is among the most fundamental challenges that immigrants face during their racial and ethnic adaptation. Yet social scientists vehemently disagree over whether Myrdal’s insight about white racism and black inequality can be generalized to mean that all nonwhites in the United States—including recent immigrants from Asia—face the same kind of hardships as African Americans. The sociologist Joe Feagin, a president of the American Sociological Association, has spent decades analyzing American race relations . He concludes (Feagin 2000, 204) that systemic racism against blacks “has been extended and tailored for each new non-European group brought into the sphere of white domination.” Ronald Takaki (1979, 1989, 1993), a historian and one of the most respected authorities on the Asian American experience, agrees that white racism victimizes Asian Americans just as it does African Americans. As evidence of a shared pattern of inequality he cites events such as the U.S. government ’s denial of citizenship to Asians in the 1920s and the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s. After reviewing the history of race relations since World War Two, the sociologist Howard Winant (2000, 309) reached the same verdict: “By and large the descendants of slaves, indigenous and occupied peoples, refugees, and migrants continue to be subjugated to the descendants of landholders and slavemasters, occupiers and European settlers.” 165 “ Other social scientists see greater complexity in the experiences of nonwhites in the United States. The sociologist Robert Blauner’s (1969, 1972) early distinction between colonized and immigrant minorities is the basis for several arguments that the American dilemma affects blacks in a unique way. The anthropologist John Ogbu (1978, 1991b), a leading authority on school culture, argues that African Americans respond to inequality by collectively resisting repression and seeking to change mainstream institutions. Asian Americans, by contrast, attempt to overcome adversity by assimilating into the institutions controlled by whites. The political scientist Andrew Hacker (1992, 9–10) goes even further in this line of reasoning, stating that Asian Americans do not experience the inequality at the heart of the American dilemma: “Most Asian immigrants arrive in this country ready to compete for middle-class careers. . . . [So even] if Asians are not literally ‘white,’ they have the technical and organizational skills expected by any ‘Western’ or Europeanbased culture.” A similar theory is advanced to explain why immigrants from Taiwan and the Philippines obtain better jobs through their social networks in the United States than do immigrants from China. It results from “the tendency of both Taiwanese and Filipinos to arrive relatively well versed in Western culture and social practices” (Sanders, Nee, and Sernau 2002, 299). The political scientist Lawrence Fuchs (1990), who has extensive policy experience at the national level, presents the strongest argument that the American dilemma is not the rule for all nonwhites, but is an exceptional problem that affected only African Americans. He believes that the civil rights era of the 1960s fundamentally reformed the American civic culture: the legal framework and political consensus protecting civil rights and ethnic diversity in the United States (Almond and Verba 1965). According to Fuchs, this period of social change largely resolved the American dilemma just prior to the new immigration that began in the 1970s. Thus Fuchs concludes that contemporary Asian Americans— nearly 70 percent of whom are immigrants—skipped the publicly sanctioned racism that so scarred African Americans. The sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee agree (2003, 58) with this view, noting that in contrast to African Americans, today’s immigrants are “much less burdened by the legacies of the historic norms and etiquette governing race relations. The examples of the Asian American groups offer the most compelling testimony.” Despite these positive assessments, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights...