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1. Introduction: Immigration and the Color Line in America
- Russell Sage Foundation
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~ Chapter 1 ~ Introduction: Immigration and the Color Line in America On November 4, 2008, the United States elected Barack Obama president, elevating an African American to the country’s highest office for the first time. Because Obama’s rise illustrates how far the United States has come from the days when blacks were denied the right to vote, when schools and water fountains were segregated, when it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry, and when racial classification was reduced to an absolutist dichotomy of black and white, it is fitting to ask: Does Barack Obama’s election signify substantial erosion in the country’s long-standing black-white color line? Many scholars and pundits assert that his victory indicates that the country has finally moved beyond race and that the color line long dividing blacks and whites has largely disappeared. For example, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, in an op-ed piece titled “Is Race Out of the Race?” (Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2008), argued that Obama’s enormous appeal among white voters reflects a dramatically changed political climate in the United States and that Americans no longer struggle under the burden of race. Other observers proclaimed, in a similar vein, that the Civil War had finally ended and that the United States has become a “postracial” society, no longer bound by racial strictures (see Michael Eric Dyson, “Race, Post Race,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008, “Opinion”; Thomas L. Friedman, “Finishing Our Work,” New York Times, November 5, 2008, op-ed; Adam Nagourney, “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls,” New York Times, November 5, 2008, op-ed). Undoubtedly, Obama’s ascendance to the presidency is a historic event of great importance, one that has broken through barriers many thought would never be breached. In light of W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous and pessimistic prophecy over a century ago, “The problem of the twentieth-century will be the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men” (1903/1997, 45), few probably would have thought that shortly after the end of the twentieth century, the son of a white mother and a black father would become the nation’s forty-fourth president. Rather, many would have expected Du Bois’s racial realism to cause him to anticipate the drop in President Obama’s public-opinion ratings that occurred by Labor Day of his first year in office (see Adam Nagourney, “Looking for Tea Leaves in Obama’s Sliding Numbers,” New York Times, November 23, 2009). What, then, are we to make of Obama’s presidency? What does it signify? Does his election suggest that the color line in the United States is well on its way to being eradicated ? Does the decline in Obama’s poll ratings hint merely that an exceptionally talented and appealing individual—one who just happens to be black and who had the good fortune to follow one of the most unpopular occupants of the White House in history—ran a great campaign and was elected president of the United States but is now being judged on his performance according to the standards applied to any president? Given the crushing burden the black-white divide has imposed on African Americans throughout American history, questions about the persistence and disappearance of the color line inspire considerable scholarly interest and carry enormous policy significance. These questions about the color line are hugely important, too, because of the tectonic shift that took place in immigration in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first that has brought millions of newcomers to the country (counting both the foreign-born and their children) who are neither black nor white (Foner and Fredrickson 2004; Bean and Stevens 2003). Almost sixty million such people, largely Latinos and Asians, currently reside here (Bean et al. 2009). On which side of the black-white color line do these new nonwhites fall? If there were convincing reasons that the old black-white divide has largely disappeared, then the question of where the new immigrant groups fall would be largely moot, and the forces driving the color line’s dissolution would also probably work to enhance the sociocultural and economic incorporation of the new immigrant groups. Their successful integration would not constitute a significant societal or public-policy challenge resulting from substantial discrimination against them. If, on the other hand, the historic black-white color line continues to...