Race and Ethnicity

Race and Ethnicity. Race and ethnicity have always mattered in the American experience. But their meanings and actualizations have changed over time and space, suggesting that they are social, not scientific, categories. Neither fixed nor permanent, they are continually negotiated and renegotiated. Race and ethnicity, or supposed physical and cultural groupings, respectively, were not always so defined or distinguished. America's first peoples formed economic, political, and ethnic groupings by language, kinship, and religious belief. They created idealized hierarchies that favored their own group over others. These perceived commonalities and differences justified belief systems and practices, alliances and fractures, cooperation and exploitation that shifted as time passed and situations changed.

America's Indigenous Peoples and the Columbian Encounter.

Hunters and gatherers organized bands that competed for land and resources with one another and also with herders and agriculturists. Language formed a basis for unions such as the Iroquois Confederacy that arose during the mid–fifteenth century in present‐day central New York involving the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk “nations.” Ethnic relations sometimes were expressed in terms of gender. During the mid–eighteenth century, for example, the Mohawks considered their dependents, the Delawares, to be “women,” while classing themselves as “men.” These diverse social organizations and ethnic relations among native peoples became blurred and racialized with the entry of Europeans into the Americas. The conquest of America's peoples by Europeans was represented by the victors in ethnic, racial, and sometimes sexual terms. Christopher Columbus on his first voyage in 1492 abducted some ten to twenty‐five Indians to exhibit in Spain as specimens from exotic lands. During subsequent visits, Columbus and his men exerted themselves as conquerors over the Indians, demanding their labor and property, capturing and exporting them as slaves, and raping women. Indian resistance—refusing to plant crops, running away, or rebelling—prompted Spanish retaliation and warfare that, together with introduced diseases, decimated the Indian population. The Spaniards who first settled on the North American continent in 1519 petitioned King Charles V for permission to punish natives who opposed them because, the colonists claimed, they were infidels and practiced homosexuality.

Conquest involved both extermination and propagation. Sexual relations and intermarriage between Spanish men and Indian women, common during the colonial period, resulted in the formation of a new group called “mestizos” or mixed peoples. Mestizos, as a distinct group, occupied a third position that was neither Spanish nor Indian and revealed the porous boundaries of racial categories. Nevertheless, the borders that delimited the racialized categories of Europeans, mestizos, and Indians generally reflected their respective political class positions with Europeans on top, mestizos in the middle, Indians at the bottom. Wealth and social status, however, could blur categories and hierarchies of race, so that “Spanish”—which could be either a racial or national designation—came to indicate a member of the ruling social class.

Plantation economies and horrific population declines among the Indians led to the traffic in enslaved peoples from West Africa that introduced another element in the American racial equation. Sugar, its cultivation and its products, was the initial reason for the eventual enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans and their transport across the Atlantic to the Americas that began in 1503 and ended in 1888 when the last slaves were emancipated in Brazil. Throughout the Caribbean, a small white elite governed large numbers of Indians, mestizos, and enslaved Africans, who provided much of the labor required for sugar production. Legal codes enforced the supremacy of masters over servants, and economic gain determined social relationships. Like the islands' indigenous peoples, Africans resisted their enslavement, ran away, and initiated rebellions, the most significant of which was the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804 that installed a free, African‐led republic. The pattern established in the Caribbean of a plantation society and its system of labor and race relations became a template for kindred European settlements to the north.

English Colonization and Slavery.

Like the Spaniards before them, the English were drawn to North America in large part by the allure of commerce, and they brought with them ideas about race and ethnicity that had guided them in Britain. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the English had embarked upon a colonizing mission in Ireland that involved its conquest and settlement. The Irish were wild, ignorant, beast‐like savages, the English held; accordingly, both the land and its inhabitants had to be cleared and tamed before civilized “plantations” of settlers could take root and grow. Ideas derived from that venture—of the innately superior English and inferior natives, of wars of subjugation, and of separate enclaves of English settlers that reproduced English society and remained apart from indigenous societies—guided the English in their settlement of the Americas.

Among most English settlers, despite occasional sexual relationships and less frequent marriages between English men and Indian women, the perceived divide between themselves and the indigenous peoples was wide and unbridgeable. There arose no distinctive mestizo class, as among the Spanish, in English North America. Instead, mixed peoples belonged to the subject class. Some historians attribute that difference in race relations to a tolerant Roman Catholicism in Spanish America and an intolerant Protestantism, especially Calvinism, in English America. Others cite the allegedly more benign characteristics of Spanish American Indians in contrast to the threat to English settlement posed by the more warlike Indians of North America. Still other scholars point to the greater number of marriages between Spanish men and Indian women, and the consequent motivation to legitimate unions and their offspring. Whatever the causes, racial concepts and relationships evolved differently in the different parts of the Americas.

A third racialized group in English America was constituted when twenty enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619. Some historians maintain that Europeans believed in the innate inferiority of Africans and took those ideas with them to the New World, and thus this form of racism preceded African enslavement. Other historians, however, argue that the notion of African inferiority arose as a consequence of and justification for their enslavement. Slavery, according to this view, spawned a racism that included both physical and cultural distinctions and hierarchies to justify a system of labor. All agree that America's English settlers commonly viewed Africans as heathens whose enslavement was preparatory to their eventual conversion to Christianity. By the early eighteenth century, relations between Africans and Europeans became institutionalized in slave codes passed by colonial assemblies. Despite slavemasters' frequent sexual encounters with female slaves, sexual relations and marriage between Europeans and Africans were officially forbidden and punishable by law.

Race in Theory, Law, and Social Practice.

Europeans developed a science of race in the eighteenth century as part of an attempt to classify and thereby order nature. Common to these theories were the association of culture or behavior with race or physical type and the ranking of these “races” as superior or inferior. A particular species of “scientific” racism arose in the American South about the mid–nineteenth century in defense of African enslavement. These theorists rejected the environmental determinist explanation for racial differences and promoted the belief that blacks were innately and unalterably inferior to whites. The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 generally ended the debate over single or multiple descent, but it failed to eradicate the idea of race as a natural or scientific category. Indeed, Darwin's work spawned new evolutionary theories of race.

These efforts produced greater differentiation in racial classification. Europeans, for example, were subdivided into various “races” that included the Germanic or Teutonic “race” and its British branch, the Anglo‐Saxons. Their alleged superior vigor, intellect, masculinity, love of liberty, and democratic institutions were celebrated by many English and American intellectuals as the racial inheritance of Anglo‐Saxons and their American transplants. While the seventeenth‐century view of Anglo‐Saxons had stressed their Germanic origins and Protestantism, the nineteenth‐century view equated it with Anglo‐American whiteness or a blend of European races produced by the American melting pot. The racial career of the Irish exemplifies that trajectory of Anglo‐Saxonism and whiteness. A Catholic, non–Anglo‐Saxon people earlier racialized as bestial by the English, the Irish who migrated to America worked with and lived among free blacks in northern areas like New York City. Before the Civil War, the Irish were deemed, like blacks, to be lazy, sensual, and savage, but beginning in the 1850s the Irish assumed the mantle of whiteness when contrasted with the American Indian, African, or Asian.

Whiteness was acquired through the instrument of law and through everyday belief and common speech. One of the earliest and most basic expressions of whiteness in the new American republic was the 1790 Naturalization Act that limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” and naturalization was extended to blacks in 1870 but the 1790 racial requirement for naturalization and its 1870 modification remained in forced until 1952. Like the Irish, groups racialized as nonwhite sought the protections and guarantees of citizenship and whiteness. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War granted U.S. citizenship to Mexican residents of the ceded territories. Mexicans thus were rendered “white” by treaty. In 1878, three Chinese migrants petitioned for naturalization under the claim that Asians were white. The judge, in his ruling, wrestled with the meaning of the term “white persons” as intended by Congress in 1790 and as used in contemporary common or scientific discourse, and concluded that the Chinese were not white. Immigrants from Armenia were originally classed as Asians and hence nonwhite, but through a 1909 court decision they were rendered white. Immigrants and would‐be immigrants from Syria and India underwent even more complicated legal transformations from “nonwhite” to “white” and back again.

These court decisions relied upon what was considered scientific evidence as well as common knowledge or everyday speech. A 1923 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Asian Indians were nonwhites exemplified the shifting ground: “the blond Scandinavian” and “the brown Hindu” might have shared a common ancestor in the distant past, the Court noted, but “the average man” clearly knows the differences between them today.

Like whiteness, nonwhiteness was fraught with ambiguity. Persons were defined as “black,” for instance, in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia if they had any ancestral trace of so‐called “Negro blood.” That category included those with one‐sixteenth “Negro blood” in Kentucky; one‐eighth in Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, and North Dakota; and one‐fourth in Oregon. By law, thus, a person might be black in one state but not in another. Chinese Americans were classified as whites in Louisiana in 1860; in 1870, they were enumerated as Chinese; in 1880, the children of Chinese men and non‐Chinese women were classed as Chinese; but in 1890, those biracial children were reclassified as either blacks or whites and only those born in China or with two Chinese parents were deemed to be Chinese.

Race concepts have wielded extraordinary influence throughout American history. Race determined citizenship, immunities, and privileges. American Indian tribes were deemed sovereign entities by the Supreme Court during the 1800s, but were also considered “wards” of the federal government. Even as the Court devolved guardianship to the federal government, Congress, the states, and successive chief executives pursued policies of Indian removal. Similar racial preoccupations underlay the initiatives pursued during the 1840s and 1850s by Middlewestern states such as Indiana and Illinois to prohibit the entry of African Americans. Other white supremacists in the North proposed the removal of all African Americans and peoples of color from the entire United States.

Yet people crossed racialized boundaries. American Indians and whites lived side‐by‐side in the South and West during the nineteenth century and created communities that advanced the welfare of both groups. Blacks and Irish Americans worked together, formed a waiters' union in New York City in 1853, lived in close proximity, and sometimes intermarried. Likewise, about 25 percent of New York City's Chinese men from the 1820s to the 1870s married Irish‐American women. Despite conflicts between racialized groups, there were countervailing examples of cooperation, acculturation, and intimate relations. Racial ideologies sometimes had to be taught to and imposed upon America's people.

Racial segregation was a crucial instrument of social control in the American South. Small farmers chafed under the paternalism of the planter elite, but benefited from their racialized identities as whites. Racialist ideologies, reinforced by gendered and sexualized images and sanctions that included white men's sexual access to black slave women and the myths that grew up around white southern womanhood, supported the male planters' power over the state and its peoples. Segregation reached new heights in the post‐Reconstruction South with laws and practices that policed the racial borders between black and white. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed a citizen's right to vote irrespective of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” yet African Americans were routinely denied the ballot by states that imposed property and literacy requirements from the end of Reconstruction down to the voting Rights Act of 1965.

Racial Ideas, Expansionism, and Immigration Policy.

Expansionists invoked white nationalism in promoting America's push westward. Ordained by God and history, they contended, whites should implant the blessings of liberty and democracy across the continent. White settlers and U.S. soldiers—including African Americans—moved west through Indian country, initiating wars and policies that decimated and dispersed the Indians. The 1840s expansion in the Southwest, culminating in Mexico's surrender of its northern territories, proved a precursor of the Manifest Destiny dogmas of the 1890s that drove American civilization to the Pacific and beyond. War against Filipino nationalists was justified in part as a beneficent mission—the white man's burden—to uplift what President William McKinley called our “little brown brothers.”

Immigration recast racial and ethnic relations in major cities of the late nineteenth century. Urban centers attracted whites and blacks from America's rural districts, as well as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, Canada, and Mexico. By 1890, cities like Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York had very high proportions of immigrants. Italian, Polish, Jewish, Chinese, Mexican, and other ethnic and racial neighborhoods took root because of immigrant choices and discrimination that forced residential segregation upon the new Americans. Ethnicity persisted, but it was also subject to change through pressures to assimilate, often called Americanization, effected through the public‐school education of American‐born generations. And while ethnicity stirred nativist agitation (itself a kind of ethnic identification), it also offered a means of political and economic mobilization. Ethnic politics and ethnic labor dominated the early twentieth‐century urban landscape, fueling the engine of mass production and consumption.

The law long functioned as an instrument of the racialized state by favoring the entry of British and northern Europeans, and restricting the immigration of racial and ethnic others. Congress excluded Chinese laborers in 1882; imposed restrictive quotas on southern and eastern Europeans in 1924; and successively excluded Japanese and Koreans, Asian Indians, and Filipinos before World War II. Not until the Immigration Act of 1965 did Congress eliminate national (and hence racial and ethnic) quotas.

Challenging the Primacy of Race.

The struggle against racial discrimination peaked with the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The legal basis for segregation in the public schools and with it the “separate but equal” doctrine fell in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and individuals and organizations challenged racial segregation in public facilities and transportation. Yet the gap between promise and practice remained.

Race and ethnicity are neither natural nor given: they have no basis in human biology. They are defined and actualized by people who impose, accept, and contest these terms' meanings and their workings. They are therefore historical insofar as they are made and remade in place and over time. Although they are culturally constructed abstractions, race and ethnicity are given substance in the institutions and cultures of America's peoples, providing justifications and means for division and union, inequality and equality.
See also Americanization Movement; Anti‐Semitism; Asian Americans; Evolution, Theory of; Expansionism; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; German Americans; Hispanic Americans; Immigrant Labor; Immigration Law; Indian History and Culture; Italian Americans; Nativist Movement; Race, Concept of; Social Class; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

George M. Fredrickson , The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro‐American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, 1971.
Stephen Jay Gould , The Mismeasure of Man, 1981.
David R. Roediger , The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, 1991.
Michael Omi and and Howard Winant , Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to 1990s, 1994.
Gail Bederman , Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, 1995.
Richard C. Trexler , Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas, 1995.
Ian F. Haney Lopez , White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 1996.
Thomas F. Gossett , Race: A History of an Idea in America, 1997.

Gary Y. Okihiro