Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System

4. Building a Better Underclass

 CHAPTER 4  BUILDING A BETTER UNDERCLASS African Americans are not the only disadvantaged minority group in the United States, of course. In the sweep of American history, many groups have become targets of prejudice and discrimination (Jacobson 1999; Perlmutter 1999). Successive waves of European immigrants and their descendants struggled long and hard to be accepted as “white” within American society (Brodkin 1999; Ignatiev 1996; Roediger 1991). Full “whiteness” was not attained socially by most southern and eastern Europeans until the 1970s (Alba 1990), and the process of “whitening” did not begin for groups such as the Chinese and Japanese until after the civil rights era (Daniels 1988). As of the year 2000, however, intermarriage between Europeanorigin groups had become extensive, and unions between whites and Asians of the second or third generation were common (Lee and Edmonston 2005). Among whites in the United States, ethnic ancestry had become a complex amalgam of European origins (Lieberson and Waters 1988; Waters 1990), and the number of Eurasians was expanding rapidly in places with a long history of Asian settlement, such as California (Williams-Leon 2002). The future of America would seem to be one in which various European and Asian ancestries are increasingly jumbled together in a way that makes categorical distinctions between them fade (Alba and Nee 2003; Edmonston, Lee, and Passel 2002). There is presently little conceptual framing or social boundary work going on to create social distinctions between Europeans and Asians in American society . 113 The erosion of categorical boundaries is less certain for the group that has now become the nation’s largest minority—Latinos. A signi ficant share of this population originates in the Caribbean, a region that once housed plantations reliant on African slave labor. As a result, many, if not most, Caribbean Hispanics are of mixed African and European origins, and a large fraction are African in appearance. Even though racially mixed Latinos may be accepted as “white” or placed in some intermediate racial category in their countries of origin (Graham 1990; Telles 2005; Wade 1997), in the United States they are generally perceived and treated as “blacks” by white Americans, who are socialized into dictates of the onedrop rule (Denton and Massey 1989). Research has shown that black Hispanics face greater discrimination than white Hispanics in most U.S. markets (Allen, Telles, and Hunter 2000; Montalvo and Codina 2001; Yinger 1991). For example , darker-skinned Hispanics have been shown to earn lower wages (Darity and Mason 1998; Gomez 2000; Mason 2004; Rodriguez 1991; Telles and Murguia 1990), achieve less prestigious occupations (Espino and Franz 2002), inhabit poorer residential environments (Massey and Bitterman 1985; Relethford et al. 1983), suffer greater neighborhood segregation (Denton and Massey 1989), and generally experience more restricted life chances (Arce, Murguia, and Frisbie 1987; Duany 1998) compared with their lighter-skinned counterparts. To the extent that Latinos from the Caribbean are successful in achieving acceptance as white Americans, like the southern and eastern Europeans before them they will probably avoid the categorical mechanisms of racial stratification that historically have undermined the status and well-being of Americans who trace their ancestry to Africa. Patrick Mason (2004) found, for example, that Latinos espousing a white racial identity earned higher wages and incomes than those who subscribed to a nonwhite identity. Likewise , Denton and Massey (1989) found that Latinos who identified themselves as white achieved greater residential integration than those who said they were black. To the extent that racially mixed Hispanics are perceived by Categorically Unequal 114 whites to be “black,” however, they are likely to share the socioeconomic fate of African Americans (Duany 1998). Thus, Hispanics who say they are neither black nor white but espouse some racially mixed identity are treated more like blacks than whites in U.S. housing markets. Although their levels of segregation from nonHispanic whites lie in between those of white and black Hispanics, indices of segregation for them are much closer to those observed at the black end of the continuum (Denton and Massey 1989). The segmentation of Hispanic socioeconomic outcomes on the basis of skin color yields a variegated pattern of integration that Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou (1993) have called “segmented assimilation.” As Mason (2004, 817) concluded from his detailed research on the economic consequences of racial identity, “neither the abandonment of Spanish nor the abandonment of a specifically Hispanic racial self-identity is sufficient to overcome...