The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

3. RACIAL REDISTRICTING: EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF WHITENESS

THREE RACIAL REDISTRICTING: EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF WHITENESS CHARLES A. GALLAGHER My family would object to a biracial relationship if the person I was seeing were African American. I’m dating someone from El Salvador now and they are okay with the relationship. —nineteen-year-old white female college student My dad would be more upset if the guy was black than if he was Asian. I think this is because of the slavery situation in America, the hatred towards black and vice versa. —eighteen-year-old white female college student We are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-AsianHispanic melting pot—a hard to differentiate group of beige Americans— offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again. —Political Analyst Michael Lind on the future of interracial relationships THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT has raised public awareness that millions of individuals with mixed-race backgrounds do not fit into the racial categories established by the government. What this movement has ignored however , are the ways in which existing racial categories expand to incorporate 59 60 CHARLES A. GALLAGHER groups once considered outside of a particular racial category. The social and physical markers that define whiteness are constantly in a state of flux, shifting in response to sociohistoric conditions. Groups once on the margins of whiteness, such as Italians and the Irish, are now part of the dominant group. National survey data and my interviews with whites suggest a process similar to the incorporation of Southern and Eastern Europeans into the “white” race is taking place among certain parts of the Asian and Latino populations in the United States. I argue that the racial category “white” is expanding to include those ethnic and racial groups who are recognized as being socially, culturally, and physically similar to the dominant group. How borders of whiteness have evolved over time provides theoretical insight into how racial categories are redefined and how this process affects the relative mobility of racial and ethnic groups.1 Not long ago Italian and Irish immigrants and their children had a racial status that placed them outside the bounds of whiteness.2 Both of these groups now fit unambiguously under the umbrella of whiteness. Like the process of racialization3 that transformed Italians and Irish into whites, some light-skinned, middle-class Latinos and multiracial Asians are being incorporated into the dominant group as they define themselves, their interests, and are viewed by others as being like whites. As white respondents in my study made clear, Asians, and to a lesser extent Latinos were viewed as having the cultural characteristics (a strong work ethic, commitment to family, focus on schooling) that whites believe (or imagine) themselves as possessing. In what was an extension of the model minority myth, many whites in this study saw Asians as potential partners in the demonization of African Americans, further legitimating the existing racial hierarchy. I argue that we are currently experiencing a “racial redistricting” where the borders of whiteness are expanding to include those groups who until quite recently would have been outside the boundaries of the dominant group. Within the context of contemporary race relations those groups who do not “conform” to cultural and physical expectations of white middle-class norms, namely blacks and dark-skinned Latinos who are poor, will be stigmatized and cut off from the resources whites have been able to monopolize; good public schools, social networks, safe neighborhoods and access to primary sector jobs. These expanding borders serve to maintain white or nonblack privilege by casting blacks in negative, stereotypical terms. As whites and other nonblack groups inhabit a common racial ground the stigma once associated with interracial relationships between these groups is diminishing. These trends in racial attitudes and how these perceptions may influence mate selection have important implications for multiracial individuals and how racial categories will be defined in the near future. RACIAL REDISTRICTING 61 The initial focus of the twenty individual interviews and eight focus groups (a total of seventy-five randomly picked white college student at a large northeastern urban university) was to examine the political and cultural meaning they attached to being white. What emerged in the interviews was a narrative about their whiteness that was intricately tied to how similar or dissimilar respondents saw other racial groups, why discussions of race relations tended to focus only...