Race

Race is a problematic social classification that classifies different groups of people by particular physical attributes. Skin color is the most common identifier of racial difference. Some researchers, especially in the areas of genetics and educational psychology, continue to assert the scientific meaning and biological sources of racial differences; increasingly, however most scholars agree that racial categories cannot be thought of as biological in origin. Thus, rather than being given in nature, race must instead be recognized as a social construction, meaning that distinct human races have no real biological basis, but instead reflect subjective discriminations by individuals and societies. Though imaginary, therefore, race has very real consequences for people's lives. Race and racism are products of both social organization and cultural representation, rather than the result of innate characteristics and hereditary factors.

The theory of racialization has been crafted to understand the social and historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Racial formation is linked to the evolution of hegemony, and the way in which society is organized and ruled. In other words, race is a political categorization scheme that maintains the prevailing distribution of power and privilege in a society. Despite the continuous temptation to think of race as an essence—as something fixed, concrete, and objective—the reality is that if changes occur in social, economic, and political life, racial categories can also be manipulated, altered, and transformed. “Whiteness” in the United States is the quintessential example of how racial categories shift as a result of changing circumstances and the reconfiguration of the dominant social hierarchy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Irish, Southern Europeans, and Jews were classified as “nonwhite” by the Anglo-Saxon majority. With the end of World War II, however, the American racial order was reconfigured as the color line was drawn around, rather within, Europe. Thus, the category of “white” expanded, while the category of “nonwhite” took on new meaning.

Racialization is both a macro-level social process, as well as a micro-level experience of everyday actions, claims, and struggles. Dominant groups exercise much power and privilege over minority groups as the racialized “Other.” The historical experiences of Asian Indians and Chinese in the United States, for instance, demonstrate the power of racialization in creating and sustaining racial [Page 1458]categories and racial hierarchies during a particular historical period. When they first arrived on American shores in the mid-19th century, Asian Indian and Chinese labor migrants encountered both de facto (practice) and de jure (law) racial discrimination. The combination of social tensions and economic competition provoked much hatred toward both Asian groups. Exclusionary national immigration and naturalization laws and restrictive state legislation on marriage, landholding, and voting—including anti-miscegenation laws and anti-alien land laws—reflected this prejudice. These discriminatory regulations were combined with prohibitive social practices to ensure that Asian Indians and Chinese would be cast as racialized minorities in American society well into the 20th century. Classified as “nonwhites,” both groups were barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens and both groups experienced continuous socioeconomic inequity. The exclusionary era resulted in declining Asian Indian and Chinese immigration and population, extreme sex ratio imbalances, limited occupational choices, and forced spatial segregation in isolated communities.

...