Race Lesson 4: Social Construction in the United States

Let's begin with a quick activity.

Census Classification and Racial Subjectivity
 For most of the history of the U.S., the census held every ten years measures race by allowing the census examiner to choose the race that he perceived the people to be.  You will attempt to do this by clicking here to do an activity from PBS's Race Power of an Illusion where you have to categorize people like a census taker would have.  (Use Safari or a browser that enables Flash)

Here is a screenshot of the activity:

This subjective, visual categorization of people is how the US Census operated until 1970.

After you complete the activity above, click here to fill out the Google form.  I recommend opening it in a new window.

1.  After finishing the activity, how many people did you correctly identify racially?

2.  How does this activity help to reveal that race is a social construction? 


Because race is a social construction, racial categories change depending upon which country you are in.  Using our sociological imagination, we will see that not only does race change depending upon where you are, but it also changes over time.  In the U.S., depending on when you are living, your race might be different. Remember that Omi and Winant made the case that race is a product of social, political and cultural history.  That is true within the history of the U.S. too.  During different time periods within the history of the U.S., social, political and cultural dynamics influenced race.  The sections below will show how different social institutions in the U.S. changed racial categorizations during various time periods.
 

Not only was racial classification based on this subjective and visual categorization of people, but also the categories have changed over time. This is just one way that institutional policies constructed race differently throughout US history.  Look at the different choices for the U.S. census over the years below.  Note how you would be categorized if you were living during each census.

3.  How many different races would you have been in the censuses above?

• From The Society Pages, here is how the US census has changed in how it determines race over the years.  Also worth reading the comments section.
• The timeline below is from the PEW research center and it explains how the U.S. census has changed over the years.  Click here for a more detailed look at the timeline of racial census categories.

4.  As the census changed can you identify one change and what the social, political or cultural changes were that resulted in a changing census? (You can try to examine the graphic or use the Society Pages link above for a guided explanation)

One census example worth examining is "Mexican" which was only used in 1930 and then discontinued.  Code Switch from NPR has a terrific history of the terms in Gene Demby's 2014 episode here.  In 1970 it was re-added as an ethnic group.  Both introductions were the result of economy at the time.  

Sociology professor Julie Dowling from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explains the history in her 2015 book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race, 

Dowling's research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.  

The 1965 immigration law was another institution that played a pivotal role in shaping the U.S. and making it the multi-cultural nation that it has become.  This 2019 episode of NPR's Fresh Air highlights Tom Gjelten's 2016 book, A Nation Of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story.  
The 1965 law opened the U.S. to countries all over the world, and it also created a demand for cheap labor that lead to the illegal immigration crisis from Central America.

The Supreme Court and Race

The Census Bureau is not the only U.S. institution that subjectively affected racial categorization over the years.  Because of the subjective nature of race in general and the census in particular, a number of Supreme Court Cases were forced to determine racial classification and policy.

United States V. Thind 

Bhagat Singh Thind (1892-1967) was born in Punjab and came to America in 1913.  He attended the University of California at Berkeley and paid for it by working in an Oregon lumber mill during summer vacations. When America entered World War I, he joined the U.S. Army. He was honorably discharged on the 16th of December, 1918 and in 1920 applied for U.S. citizenship from the state of Oregon. Several applicants from India had thus far been granted U.S. citizenship. 

He was applying based on the naturalization law at the time which was the 1790 United States Naturalization Law.  It stated the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. The law limited citizenship to immigrants who were "free white persons" of "good character".  The census forms allowed Singh to choose from these categories: White, Black, Mulatto, Chinese, American Indian.  His application for citizenship was challenged by the immigration office.  Singh argued that he was white from a state very close to the Caucasus Mountains, the region where anthropologists believed that Caucasians emerged from.

5.  Decide how you would rule:

____ Singh is a white man who deserves citizenship. 

____ Singh is not white and therefore does not deserve citizenship.


The Court determined that Thind was not white or Caucasoid, even though he did not fit into the other categories of race at the time (Mongoloid/Asian, Negroid/Black, American Indian).  Instead, the court ruled that because most people would say that he is not white, then he is not white. The court also ruled that this ruling applied to all Hindus - even though Thind was not even Hindu!  He was Sikh.  This was just one way of many that the legal system that shaped race throughout U.S. history.   For more information about Thind, checkout the Scene on Radio podcast.  It has a whole season on race and a whole episode about Thind (embedded below) as told through his son, who, surprisingly, had no idea about the case and everything that his dad went through!

I really want to emphasize the significance of Thind here.  The Thind case represents a simple idea that complicates race relations in the U.S. in so many ways:

For many Americans, being "American" means being white.

In Thind's case it is quite literally being considered not a citizen;  After the Thind ruling one-third of all Americans with Indian descent leave the country!

Besides the Thind ruling, here are some other ways that the legal system (legislation subsequently reinforced by Supreme Court) constructed race in the U.S.:

• Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857 (Black Americans could never be citizens of the United States.)
•  Chae Chan Ping v. United States 1889 (Limited rights for Americans who had Chinese ancestry.)
• Pace v. Alabama 1883 (miscegenation law allowed criminalizing interracial marriage - not overturned until 1967!)
• Ozawa v. U.S. 1922 (Japanese are not white.)
• Thind v. U.S. 1923 (If you don't seem white, you are not and Hindus are not white.)
• Lum v. Rice 1927 (Citizens who are Chinese don't have the right to attend white schools.)
• Korematsu v. U.S. 1944 (Americans can be held in prison or concentration camps because of their ethnicity and without due process.)

The changing nature of whiteness in the U.S.

From Harper’s Illustration, (paraphrased)

They are distinctly marked – the small and somewhat upturned nose, the black tint of skin…They are uneducated, and as a consequence, they are jobless,, poor, and they don't save what little money they have.  They drink alcohol, and act like barbarians…Of course they will violate our laws, they are like wild bisons leaping over the fences which easily restrain the civilized domestic cattle, and they will commit great crimes of violence, even murder, which certainly have increased lately.

6.  Who do you think the magazine is talking about? Why?





This caption and illustration show the subjectivity of race in the United States.  The writer was referring to the Irish who were emigrating in large numbers in the 1840s and 50s.  The Irish were not considered white.  Not only does this not make sense physically/biologically, but the caption reveals how subjective and social race was.  They were looked down on because of the jobs they did (dock labor), because of their religion (Catholic), because of their culture (alcohol use) and their social class (poor).  This subjectivity is just one example throughout the history of the United States.  Over the years, Jews, Italians, Greeks and other Southern Europeans faced discrimination because they were considered less desirable than Northern Europeans, but all of these people are considered "white" by today's standards.

Here are some sociology readings about how different groups have changed over time:

• Jews - Brodkin, Karen.  How Jews Became White Folks. 1998.
• Arabs - Ajrouch and Jamal. Assimilating to White Identity 2007.
• Italians - Staples, Brent.  How Italians Became White; Vicious Bigotry and Reluctant Acceptance.  NY Times. 2019.
• Armenians - Ghoogasian, Aram.  How Armenians Became White.
• Irish - Harriot, Michael.  When the Irish Weren't White. The Root. 2018.
• Asians - Zhou, Min. Are Asian-Americans Becoming White? Contexts. 2004.
• Hispanics - Darity, William.  The Latin Flight to Whiteness. 2016.

All of these are examples of how race has changed over the years in America.  Who is considered white changes because there is no empirical or objective way to define race.  And once a group is considered white, its members learn to not think of themselves in terms of race (Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Colorblind Racism. 2002.).  Race doesn't exist in any biological or empirical sense, it only exists as a social construction in response to the historical, political and social dynamics happening to a group in power, in this case, those in power in the United States.

7.  Is it surprising that the idea of who is white has changed so much over the years?  Which group is most surprising to hear about?  


For more on how race has changed, see Nell Irvin Painter's book called, The History of White People. 

Here is a review on Salon.

Here is an interview on NPR with Painter.

Here is a book review from NY Times.