Not Just Black and White

Anecdotal conflict at a 2000 conference: panel on Asian immigration vs questions about Poles, Germans, Jews reveals a deeper split in the field.
Two intellectual worlds: ethnicity-focused studies (immigration, locale, community patterns) vs race-focused studies (system, structure, power, boundaries).
Gap: scholars often speak past one another; potential for productive exchange is lost.
Aim of the chapter: trace the genealogy of the divide, its consequences, and how bridges might advance immigration research.

Race:
- Based on perceived biological difference; outsiders often assign it; claims of primordiality.
- Highly power-laden, exclusive, difficult to exit; tied to social hierarchy.
Ethnicity:
- Based on descent/provenance; groups may assert shared kinship or homeland.
- Often self-identified; more flexible, less exclusive; easier to enter/exit; less tied to inherent worth.
Both concepts are socially constructed and historically contingent; both invoke origins as a basis of difference (constructed primordialities).

Four broad tendencies in the treatment of race/ethnicity:
1) Reduce to individual traits; focus on stratification.
2) Race as biological difference; ethnicity as cultural difference.
3) Subsuming one under the other (race = part of ethnicity or vice versa).
4) Instrumentalist explanations: categorization follows material interests.
Problems with these tendencies:
- Treating categories as fixed traits ignores processes, power, and deep societal roots.
- Overemphasis on culture (ethnicity) can become analytically clumsy when groups share cultures.
- Subsumption narrows analytic utility; instrumentalism underplays sustained power and moral weight.
- Insufficient attention to durability of race/ethnicity and their societal consequences.

Core empirical points:
1) Both center origins as a powerful basis for difference (genes for race; descent/provenance for ethnicity).
2) Both claim primordiality, yet both are socially constructed.
3) Construction processes differ: race often external (dominant groups defining others); ethnicity often internal (minority groups defining themselves).
4) Race is more exclusive and harder to exit; ethnicity more flexible and pluralistic.
5) Race carries differential valuation and persistent claims about change; ethnicity is more open to change and assimilation.
6) A population can be both race and ethnicity, or shift between the two (e.g., Irish being racialized, then claiming ethnicity).
Key takeaway: the boundary between race and ethnicity is porous and dynamic; both are constructed primordialities with overlapping processes.

The Ethnicity Approach:
- Roots in immigration and urban studies; unit of analysis: groups/communities within a population.
- Focus on culture, language, family, intermarriage, assimilation; comparative or community-study orientation.
- Boundaries are mutable; political focus on community interests; central problem: assimilation and mobility.
The Race Approach:
- Roots in slavery, Black-White relations, colonialism; unit of analysis: social system (often transnational/global).
- Race as an organizing principle shaping intergroup relations and society; focus on stratification and reproduction of racial hierarchies; attitudes as a lesser focus.
- Boundaries are constructed/contested; explicit political focus on power, privilege, and how categories are maintained.
Complementarity: race emphasizes structural power/how categories shape society; ethnicity emphasizes local group formation and lived experience.

Complementarity is real but not automatically compatible; a broader framework is needed to integrate empirical phenomena and analytic insights.
Shared ground: both rely on primordialist appeals to origins, and both involve boundary construction and group identity.
Synthesis aims to harness:
- Ethnicity’s attention to group formation, lived experience, and boundary power.
- Race’s attention to social structure, deep cultural assumptions, and global processes.
Result: a more comprehensive view of intergroup relations in immigration that respects both local dynamics and systemic patterns.

Panethnicity often begins as a racial category (e.g., Indians, Africans/Negroes, Orientals/Asians) and then becomes a basis for ethnic solidarity and political mobilization.
Process: construction by dominants, internal redefinition by the categorized groups, and political uses that reframe boundaries.
West Indian example ( Waters 1999 ): racial assignment to Black carries barriers; some groups preserve/assert West Indian identities against negative racial labeling; mobility and assimilation influence ethnic vs racial strategy.
White identity dynamics: whites historically the dominant racial group, with “hidden ethnicity”; shifting as whitening becomes contested, leading some to assert explicit white ethnic identities and blur race/ethnicity boundaries.
Implication: boundary-making and meanings are central to immigration and national belonging; race and ethnicity interact with nation and power.

Immigrants are both racial outsiders and ethnic agents; analysis must incorporate both perspectives.
Historical comparisons (e.g., Asian vs European immigration) reveal how racialized categories and ethnic mobilization shape communities and integration.
Immigration continually reconstitutes intergroup relations and the nation itself, through cycles of racialization and ethnogenesis.
Guiding questions for study:
- Who has the freedom to construct self-identity? Who is constrained by external categorization?
- How do racialization and ethnogenesis progress and interact over time?
- How does American nationalism shape the boundaries and meanings of race and ethnicity for immigrants?
- How can immigration research recognize both the push/pull of racialized categories and ethnic self-organization without privileging one over the other?

Approach: de-emphasize the race-vs-ethnicity debate and focus on how group boundaries are constructed within American nationalism.
Practical framework: study both the localized politics of identity (ethnicity) and the macro-structural processes of difference (race) to understand immigration’s ongoing reconstitution of social order.
End goal: illuminate how immigration and its consequences are produced by a dynamic interplay of racialization, ethnogenesis, and national belonging, past and present.

What is meant by a 'constructed primordiality' in race and ethnicity?
How do ethnic and racial categories differ in terms of who constructs them and who is categorized?
Why is panethnicity a useful concept for understanding immigrant mobilization?
How can a synthesis of ethnicity and race theories improve our understanding of immigration trajectories?
In what ways does immigration act as a catalyst for boundary-making and redefinition of national belonging?