“This unique text provides the reader with uncommon rigor and a dispassionate evaluation of both the change and stagnation concerning an area of American life that is fraught with passionately held but conflicting points of view.”—Richard Alba, author of Strangers No More: The Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe

“Many textbooks in this field are superficial. They ignore relevant social scientific research in order to pander to ideological fads that revel in bombastic generalizations. By contrast, Iceland’s Race and Ethnicity in America judiciously analyzes an impressive array of scholarly studies in order to present a more complete and honest appraisal. Anyone seeking to have a truly serious conversation about race in contemporary America needs to start with this book.” —Arthur Sakamoto, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University
 
“John Iceland’s Race and Ethnicity in America is a wonderfully thorough and broad examination of both theories about and demographic trends in race and ethnicity in the United States, providing along the way insightful analyses of how immigration, together with shifts in the definition and meaning of concepts of race and ethnicity, has helped both to reduce and to exacerbate racial and ethnic inequalities. This impressive synthesis constitutes must-reading for both beginning students and accomplished scholars alike.”—Frank D. Bean, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Research on International Migration, University of California, Irvine

John Iceland is Head of the Department of Sociology at Penn State University.

Race and Ethnicity in America

By John Iceland

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-28692-4

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables,
Acknowledgments,
1. Conversations about Race,
2. Race and Ethnicity and Causes of Inequality,
3. Black-White Inequality,
4. Hispanics and Asians,
5. American Indians,
6. The Multiracial Population,
7. International Comparisons and Policy Debates,
8. Conclusion: American Color Lines,
Notes,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Conversations about Race

Discussing racial issues can be difficult. It is often more challenging than talking about many other sociological topics — such as changes in the occupational distribution of American workers or regional migration patterns — because race can be very personal. For many Americans, race is an important part of their identity. It affects how they view themselves, their aspirations, and their communities. This is reflected in, for example, personal ads ("single white female seeks ...") and, institutionally, in the design of the decennial census questionnaire, which asks people about just a few basic characteristics, including age, gender, race, and ethnicity, and where and whom they live with. Also signifying the sensitivity of the topic, racial epithets have become among the most taboo terms to speak in public forums, as their use often results in immediate censure.

Race is important today because racial conflict has been an integral part of U.S. history. It was present during colonial times, in the form of the violent seizure of land from American Indians by white settlers and in the forcible importation of slaves from Africa. Waves of immigration from a variety of countries provided fresh opportunities for animosity and conflict, as new immigrants — such as the Irish and Italians — were often viewed with alarm and disdain, and certainly as racially inferior to U.S. natives of northern and western European stock. Nevertheless, over time all these groups have made critical contributions to the growth and vitality of the country's economy and culture.

Even periods of apparent tranquility often veil simmering problems and resentments. These often flared in race riots, of which there have been many, including riots by Protestant nativists again Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston in the mid-nineteenth century, riots by whites against blacks in East Saint Louis, Atlanta, and Tulsa in the early twentieth century, riots by blacks across many cities in the Northeast and Midwest during the civil rights era in the 1960s, and, more recently, riots by blacks in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015.

Some might point to the years immediately after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a high point in terms of optimism about race relations. Indeed, one poll conducted in 2011 indicated that only 28 percent of the population reported that racism was a "big problem" in society, down from 41 percent in 1995. But a similar poll just a few years later, in 2015, indicated a sharp increase in saying it was a big problem, to 49 percent. African Americans were more likely to say that racism was a big problem in all years, but even among African Americans there was a drop in the percentage saying so between 1995 and 2011 from 68 percent to 50 percent, before a substantial increase to 66 percent in 2015. What happened? Did racism get much worse from 2011 to 2015? Is racial inequality worse today than just a few years ago, not to mention more than two decades ago?

Rather than signifying a sharp increase in racism in the course of a few years, the change in public opinion in the early 2010s was likely an outgrowth of a series of widely covered incidents that exposed and symbolized simmering and unresolved issues reflecting deep-rooted racial inequality. In a country that was supposed to be on its way to being postracial, they indicated that there was much ground yet to be covered in reaching this goal. Among the incidents between 2011 and 2015 was the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year old African American, in 2012 by George Zimmerman, and Zimmerman's subsequent acquittal. Zimmerman had invoked Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law in his defense (this law authorizes a person to protect and defend his or her own life against threat or perceived threat). Then there were a series of African American fatalities at the hands of the police (often white officers) in 2014 and 2015 that received considerable attention, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Freddie Gray in Baltimore; and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. Many of the incidents were caught on camera and disseminated through both conventional and social media. These deaths spurred protests in numerous cities against police brutality, the overpolicing of black communities, and the poor treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system. These coalesced into the national Black Lives Matter movement, which protested racism, discrimination, and racial inequality in the United States.

Yet the public's opinion on these issues remains divided. People have strong opinions about race and the source of inequalities, because, as noted earlier, race is personal. Thus, conversations about race can quickly devolve into aggressive or defensive discussions about culpability concerning the current state of affairs. Incidents that make the news are filtered through one's beliefs, values, and experiences and take on broad symbolic meaning. In some sense, then, it may not altogether matter if a particular incident was sparked by racial animus or not; rather, it often represents a set of broader grievances.

For many, the deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement represents the devaluation of black lives, and especially young black men, by the police — and by all Americans. That some of these men were involved in criminal activity before their confrontations with police (for example, Michael Brown stole cigarillos from a liquor store and Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes on the street) symbolize to others black criminality, the disproportionate violence in black communities, and the lack of appreciation of the challenges police officers routinely face in enforcing policies not necessarily of their own making. The comment boards that accompany online news accounts of these incidents exemplify the discordance in conversations about race. For example, comments posted in response to an opinion piece about racism and police brutality by New York Times columnist Charles Blow spoke past one another. Here are but a couple of such comments (and note that these are relatively civil and articulate ones, in contrast to the often nonsensical and hateful ones easily accessed on various online forums and social media):

Mr. Blow is telling us to please, please think systemically about racial bias and injustice. It is possible to have racism without racists. In both NYCity and Ferguson black and brown men are routinely stopped under the guise of good police practice. The stop and frisk practices in NY were found to be racially biased in the round of protests around racial profiling in the late 1990s, but were continued and defended by multiple NYC administrations. If police are instructed to treat black and brown men as criminals until proven innocent, than [sic] this...