Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Adolph Reed, Jr., Skin Deep, Village Voice, 24 September 1996, p. 22.
of specific racial hierarchieshas been, naturalized in American life the extent to which we depend on it for our conceptual moorings However, the conviction of races solidity is undone by the ephemerality of the very categories that support it. Take the race/ethnicity distinction, for instance. It didnt exist less than a century ago. There were only races, and there were a lot of themGallic, Nordic, Mediterranean, Slavic, just to name a few from the list of those now homogenized as white. And each of those categories yielded other, more discrete races, such as Greeks, Armenians, Poles, the English, Welsh, Irish, and the like. (A Racial Adaptability chart prepared by industrial relations experts for employers in the 1920s listed 36 distinct races.) For most of the 19th century, even the Anglo American lower classes were often characterized as racially different from their social superiors. Whiteness, in fact, evolved as a generically meaningful status only gradually over the 19th and early 19th centuries, and in relation to specific issues associated with the incorporation of immigrant populations into an evolving system of social, political, and economic hierarchy. Whiteness became increasingly significant as a kind of safety net, providing a baseline of eligibility to rights, opportunities, and minimal social position. Of course, whiteness presumed a contrast with nonwhiteness, specifically blackness, which was simultaneously becoming a monolithic category marking inferior status. As ambiguous or intermediate categories disappeared in the 19th century, the basically bipolar racial system that we now know took shape. By the turn of the current century, immigrants came quickly to understand the material advantages of being declared white: among other things, they couldnt become naturalized citizens unless they were so classified. So federal court records from the period are littered with cases in which the swarthy flotsam and jetsam of the Mediterranean region in particular petitioned to demonstrate their legitimate claims to whiteness. These cases were steeped in state-of-the-art racial science, testament to the academys voluminous history of creating and legitimizing sophistries around racial classification. Charles Murray and sociobiology are direct lineal descendants of this once hegemonic strain of scientific racism. Besides, it didnt take much to figure out that being labeled black or colored would have a serious negative impact on economic and political opportunity. It only made sense for immigrants to try to avoid being thus hampered and these efforts were all the more important in the Jim Crow South. Sicilians, who came from the backyard of Africa anyway, were thrust among blacks in the north Louisiana cotton fields as well as in south Louisianaboth in New Orleans and in the cane fieldswhere they were physically indistinguishable in the pertinent ways from much of the officially black population. One of the most dramatic and revealing attempts to jockey for position involved descendants of the Delta Chinese, who had been imported into the Mississippi Delta region in the late 19th century to compete with blacks as plantation labor, but who eventually operated more as a stratum of commercial intermediaries. The Delta Chinese for some time occupied an ambiguous statusincluding open socializing and intermarriage with blacksthat Mississippis bipolar, white supremacist social order couldnt tolerate. Things came to a head around the issue of where Chinese should be slotted in the Jim Crow school system. No one with an alternative would have wanted to attend Mississippis schools for black people, which were never intended to provide anything like a decent education. A group of Chinese in Jackson therefore sought to
exploit the ambiguity of their colored designation to escape that fate. The result was Gong Lum v. Rice, in which the Chinese petitioners argued all the way to the Supreme Courtbased once again on academic state-of-the-art researchthat as an intermediate group they were in crucial ways racially and culturally nearer to whites and therefore should be permitted to attend white schools. (They lost the legal battle but won over Jacksons white elites, who quietly acquiesced.) Ethnicityand its corollary, the expansion of whiteness as a generic categoryis the result of similar efforts at successfully negotiating the bipolar racial system to avoid the stigma of blackness. White ethnicity emerged during the New Deal and immediate postwar period, and it reflects the incorporation of previously distinct racial populations into the safety net of whiteness. This incorporation was spurred by the Democratic Partys coalition politics and the upward mobility made possible by the New Deal. As ever, academic race theory was there to provide the legitimizing conceptual frame, inventing and projecting ethnicity as a category of subracial difference. Theres a lesson here as we confront a new destabilization in the American racial system, in the face of a wave of immigration of populations defined outside the expanded universe of whiteness. Multiculturalism is partly an attempt to transcend the bipolar system. In that sense, it is an assertion that the world is more complicated than black and white, and it therefore challenges the simplistic racial discourse that has so long been a poison in American political life. However, multiculturalism also partly overlaps model-minority ideology, the current eras version of the closer-to-whites-than-to-blacks move. To that extent its an application for a kind of contingent membership in whiteness, or for recognition of an ethniclike intermediate category of okaynessboth gambits that only reinforce existing racial ideology and hierarchy. We all need to be clear about which is which.