Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation

PART IV: IDENTITY

PART IV IDENTITY The issue of how race will affect the future of the new second generation has been a major cause of worry. Since the vast majority of immigrants arriving since 1965 have been nonwhite, many scholars have suggested that the persistence of racial discrimination in the United States may hurt their life chances if whites see them less as immigrants and more as nonwhite (Gans 1992; Waldinger and Perlmann 1998). Indeed, the theory of segmented assimilation explicitly argues that racial discrimination will lead young nonwhite immigrants to a reactive ethnic identification with native minorities and a rejection of mainstream American values (Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Concern about these questions has led many scholars to ask whether the children of nonwhite immigrants are in danger of becoming a new, permanent, excluded underclass, worse off than their immigrant parents, who at least find some solace and dignity in the racial and ethnic hierarchies of their homelands. This worry accompanies a growing recognition that immigration has forever changed the racial landscape in the United States. Nearly one-third of all Americans told the census that they were black, Asian, or Latino in 2000 (Bean and Stevens 2003, 230). In 1970 blacks made up two-thirds of all nonwhites in the United States. By 2000 that figure had fallen to 40 percent. A center of immigration , New York has been even more transformed than the nation as a whole. In 2000 the city was only 35.7 percent non-Hispanic white, 25.9 percent nonHispanic black, 27.2 percent Hispanic, and 10.2 percent Asian. Moreover, according to the Current Population Survey—which, unlike the census, asks about parents’ place of birth—a majority of the city’s residents are first- and second-generation immigrants. Only half of all whites are native-born people with two native-born parents, while 41 percent of all blacks, the most nativeborn group in the city, are immigrants or the child of an immigrant. With this demographic transformation of New York, not only are native whites with native parents no longer the majority of the city, but they are a small minority (19 percent) within a highly complex multicultural world.This new reality provides 281 a fluid environment in which young people grow up to create an identity—an environment in which individual identity remains quite important but the old racial and ethnic categories have been breaking down. Indeed, even as social scientists recognized that this demographic revolution had made our racial categories outdated, they expected that the new immigrants and their children would place themselves within these outmoded categories. The city is far more diverse than the second-generation groups we surveyed— West Indians, Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians, Chinese, Dominicans, Russians, and native whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans—even though these include the main racial and ethnic groups in the city.1 Although a high level of residential segregation between blacks and whites continues to frame who lives near whom in New York City, these groups, or at least combinations of these groups, have high levels of interaction with each other. And as these chapters show, young people in New York define themselves through their interaction with each other. While our survey asked about ethnic and racial identity, language use, and ethnic practices and found widespread unwillingness to be confined to the simple racial dichotomy of white and black, the rich and informative ethnographic material presented here adds a great deal to our understanding of subjective identities. As table P4.1 shows, the vast majority of all three Latino groups and the Chinese refused to be categorized as either white or black. Instead, these groups mainly chose to be racially identified with their national origin—such as Chinese or Puerto Rican—although many of those from Spanish-speaking groups were willing to say they were “Hispanic,” “Spanish,” or “Latino.” (Only a few Chinese labeled themselves “Asian.”) And even among blacks and West Indians and among native whites and Russians, who were all certain that they were black or white, some laid claim to additional racial identities, including not only the other race but “West Indian” and “Native American.” Part 4 presents studies of two of our groups, Russians and West Indians, and two other important groups in the city, Korean Americans and Indo-Caribbeans. These four chapters examine how young people are identifying themselves in terms of their race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality. As...