Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America’s New Racial/Ethnic Divide |
Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America’s New Racial/Ethnic Divide
Social Forces
Volume 86, Number 2 (December 2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-7605 Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0024
Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine
Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine
Contemporary nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia, increasing racial/ethnic intermarriage, and the growing number of multiracial individuals has made the black-white color line now seem anachronistic in America, consequently raising the question of whether today’s color line is evolving in new directions toward either a white-nonwhite divide, a black-nonblack divide, or a new tri-racial hierarchy. In order to gauge the placement of today’s color line, we examine patterns of multiracial identification, using both quantitative data on multiracial reporting in the 2000 U.S. Census and in-depth interview data from multiracial individuals with Asian, Latino or black backgrounds. These bodies of evidence suggest that the multiracial identifications of Asians and Latinos (behaviorally and self-perceptually) show much less social distance from whites than from blacks, signaling the likely emergence of a black-nonblack divide that continues to separate blacks from other groups, including new nonwhite immigrants. However, given that the construction of whiteness as a category has been fluid in the past and appears to be stretching yet again, it is also possible that the color line will change still further to even more fully incorporate Asians and Latinos as white, which would mean that the historical black-white divide could again re-emerge.
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Tags: Frank Bean, Frank D. Bean, Jennifer Lee, Social Forces