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~ Chapter 8 ~ From Racial to Ethnic Status: Claiming Ethnicity Through Culture In an oft-cited passage about group boundaries, the social anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969, 15) noted: The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses. The boundaries to which we must give our attention are of course social boundaries, though they may have territorial counterparts. If a group maintains its identity when members interact with others, this entails criteria for determining members and ways of signaling membership and exclusion. Barth recognized that ethnic boundaries are not static, fixed, and permanent, but rather continually transform through expression, validation, inclusion, and exclusion. Racial and Ethnic Boundary Change Today, social scientists agree that “race,” like ethnicity, is a social rather than biological category and have documented the processes by which racial boundaries have changed in different contexts and over time. In fact, changes in racial classification have been an inextricable part of the immigrant incorporation experience in the United States, and the European-immigrant incorporation experience exemplifies the way the boundaries of racial status can expand to absorb new groups. Groups such as Irish, Italians, and Poles, who once were perceived as “unassimilable,” became “white” because the boundaries of whiteness changed to incorporate them. European immigrants adopted certain behaviors to speed their own incorporation , such as actively distancing themselves from African Americans to attain whiteness. Another factor that helped their transition to whiteness was the cessation of large-scale European immigration in the 1920s. The closing of America’s doors to massive waves of new European ethnics not only diminished fears about an overflow of allegedly racial inferiors but also facilitated the economic incorporation and mobility of European newcomers, especially during the flush years following World War II (Foner 2000, 2005), when the economy was booming. With economic mobility came the decoupling of national-origin differences from the idea of “racial” differences, contributing to the development of the idea that for many European immigrants, racial status was achieved rather than ascribed (Alba 1990; Gans 1979; Haney-Lopez 1996; Perlmann and Waldinger 1997; Waters 1990). In other words, as economic and cultural differences diminished and eventually faded between white and nonwhite immigrant groups, the Irish, Italians, and eastern European Jews became racially reclassified as white. Herbert J. Gans aptly describes this process as “social whitening” or “social blanching” and makes clear that what changed was not the phenotype (skin color and physical and facial features) of previously nonwhite European groups, but the social construction (or, rather, reconstruction) of their skin color from nonwhite to white. As nonwhite immigrant groups achieve social and economic mobility and become more like native-born white Americans, they become reclassified, redefined, and accepted as white. “Social whitening” may have been a part of the immigrant incorporation experience, but many social scientists caution that the very fact that Irish, Italians, and Jews were not subject to the same type of systematic legal discrimination as African Americans were illustrates that they had a different status from blacks to begin with, a standing that facilitated their eventual racial treatment as whites (Alba 1985, 1999; Fields 2001; Foner 2000, 2005; Guglielmo 2003; Lieberson 1980). Although members of some European immigrant groups may not have been considered white when they first arrived on these shores, they were viewed as nonwhite rather than as black by the country’s Anglo-Saxons. This critical distinction should be underscored since in that time period’s rigidly compartmentalized black-white world governed by the one-drop rule (which implied two poles—pure whiteness versus everything else), not being white did not necessarily equal being black, even if it was similar to being black. But because European ethnic immigrants were not in fact black, their status eventually changed, thus hastening the evolution and acceptance of the idea that at least some racial categories—maybe all except black—could eventually change. Researchers have shown that European ethnics are not the only groups to have changed their status from nonwhite to white. Asian ethnic immigrant groups, such as the Chinese in Mississippi and the Japanese, also changed their racial status from almost black to almost white (Loewen 1971; Spickard 1989). James Loewen (1971) documented how Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta made conscious efforts to change their lowly status by achieving economic mobility, emulating the cultural practices and institutions of whites, intention138 The Diversity Paradox [18.220.140.5] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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