Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (review)

Is the United States an immigrant nation or a nation of immigrants? The question raises vast differences in the roles of history and policy in the formation of the United States and notions of who is/is not a U.S. citizen. Indeed, the tensions raised by the role of immigrants and immigration in the conceptualization of the United States are intimately connected to the construction of race and ethnicity in that history. The authors featured in the edited volume Not Just Black and White explore a diverse range of historical and sociological analyses of the question and its relevance to the "color line" in the twenty-first century.

Are race and/or ethnicity in the United States the most important basis for determining who is or is not included as American? Or is class or clash (cultural conflict) a more reliable indicator of how social hierarchies have formed throughout the history of the United States? The chapters in this book present a cogent argument for the relationship between immigrant identities and the structural (political, racial, economic, religious, cultural) or historical/contextual factors that have determined the changing status of policy and, consequently, of polity in the United States.

In their introduction to the book (1–19), editors Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson state that Not Just Black and White is an interdisciplinary compilation of some of the best scholars on immigration and race/ethnicity in the country. While the reader might note a range of perspectives from scholars in sociology and history, it is important as well to note the perspectives on immigration and identity negotiation that are not present in the book: for our purposes we might question the absence of rhetorical, interactional, or performance-based studies of discursive and embodied American identities. For instance, in his discussion of Latino and Latina panethnic identities, Jose Itzigsohn notes of a Dominican official in his study that "the Dominican identity is important to me but my political identity is Hispanic" (201). Later, Itzigsohn explains that "my point is that the nationalist sentiments and intraethnic conflict [within the Dominican community in the United States] coexist with panethnic identification" (201). While I do not argue with the panethnic strategies posited by Itzigsohn, the contextual negotiation of Dominican identities in Providence (where he locates his study) has been elsewhere inclusive as well of strategic association with African American identities by the younger generation of Dominicans.

The location and strategic negotiation of language intra- as well as inter-ethnically is as important as the contextualization of specific events of community formation or division—and yet is undertheorized or studied by the scholars in this book. The larger point for those who study interaction is that identities are negotiated in context and in relationship to conversational status, in addition to the larger frames of economic, social, and political mobility. Yet it should be noted that while the authors do not focus on the rhetorical construction of race and ethnicity in the United States, many essays do question the meaning and significance of these terms at different moments in U.S. history, and in different spaces as well. One notable study of the discourse of ethnicity and its impact on immigration and on immigration studies is found in Victoria Hattam's chapter entitled "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy" in which she charts intellectual debates over the basis of Jewish ethnic identification in the United States.

The authors in this volume raise several issues that I think are important to the future of immigration, race, and ethnic studies in the United States. First, the role of whiteness as the construction against which all other configurations of immigrant identities (race, ethnicity, religion, class) are measured figures strongly in the historical and social analysis of political, social, cultural, and economic shifts among inter- and...