Final Reflection

SOCL 101

Salituro

Final Reflection

 

This is the final assessment for our SOCL 101 class. You can turn it in anytime BEFORE the exam period for our class closes.  You do NOT need to be in class for the actual scheduled final.

This paper will ask you to reflect on our class and apply your understanding of sociology to your own life.  This assignment is due by the end of the scheduled final exam period for your class.  This is a firm deadline without exception.  Be sure to write in proper prose with correct grammar and spelling. Be sure to answer each part of the reflection that I outline below. Make your writing authentic – use details and make it specific to your own life so that the essay is unique and can only be applied to your life.  Look back over our lessons on the blog to help give you ideas.  I highly recommend writing your paper in a separate app like Word or Google Docs and then pasting it into the Google Form.

 

Part 1:

In the syllabus, I wrote,

Learning sociology can give students new insights about everyday life.  C. Wright Mills, an important sociologist, said that sociology will make the familiar, strange; sociology may make you feel uncomfortable and challenge your assumptions about the world.  Peter Berger, another notable sociologist, warned that "People who like to avoid shocking discoveries...should stay away from sociology."  Sociology can be an amazing class that changes your perspective about the world and more importantly about yourself.  These insights will hopefully increase student mindfulness about themselves as individuals, their interactions with others and their society in general.

 

Now looking back at the class, what is something that we learned that made you think about your life differently or something that challenged your assumptions about the world?  What is some of the evidence we examined that contributed to your new way of thinking?  Use specific examples of how you thought before the class and how you think now – even if it is not a huge difference, explain the nuance in how you might think differently and provide an explanation of the sociological theory/research that helped you to do so.

 

Part 2

This course is a Tier 1 foundational social science class that intends to help students “demonstrate cultural, societal and self understanding.”  As written in the syllabus, 

These courses examine how humans are shaped by their societies.  Students who successfully complete this class will demonstrate an understanding of the relationships among cultural, and social forces, and their impact on human behavior.

 

With this in mind, think about what we learned about how people are shaped by social forces – especially nature and nurture, culture, family, school, peers, and social media.  Explain how you have been shaped by one or more of these social forces.  Explain authentic details and specifics that only apply to you in your explanation of the topic.  What research/readings from class adds to your understanding of how you are shaped by whichever topic you choose? Explain how the research/readings applies to your example specifically.

 

Part 3  

This course has a diversity learning outcome that seek to:

·      Recognize that human diversity is complex and variegated.

·      Distinguish the various factors that inform and impact individual identity formation.

·      Comprehend how group identities are formed in a heterogeneous society.

 

With this in mind, choose an outgroup identity such as gender (male or female), race (Black, Asian, or Hispanic) or social class (middle class or low-income) that you do NOT identify with.  Explain how the course informed you about about this identity and what you want to take away from the course to increase your understanding of this outgroup.  How is this identity more complex and varied than you (or the average American) might realize?  What challenges do people of this identity face? Connect your answer to at least one reading or evidence that I assigned/cited in class.  How does this reading/evidence inform your understanding of the group?

 

Part 4

Please write a review of the course content.  What do you want to remember from the course?  What was most interesting?  What would you like to learn more about?  Do you think SOCL101 is interesting/useful? If so, why specifically? If not, why not – what could be specifically different?

Grading

This Essay will be grade out of 40 points.

Parts 1-3 will be graded out of 10 points based on your ability to clearly and correctly answer the whole question and provide authentic/specific examples in your answer.

Part 4 will be out 5 points for a meaningful and thoughtful response.

Finally, there will be 5 points for all technical aspects including:  grammar, spelling, turning it on time.

3.07 Inequality and Gender

Announcement:  Next class (Tuesday 11/26) will be ASYNCHRONOUS so you do not have to be present in class on that day. 

Action items:

Mahler and Kimmel's article here.

CJ Pascoe's Dude You're a F** (For background info click here).

      

Google Form Here

1.  Before you begin, please answer this question in as many ways as you can (brainstorm): 

Besides being different physically, how would your life be different if you were born a different sex?

Today's Lesson: 

What is gender and why is it confusing? What does it mean that gender is a social construction?What is a binary and how does it contribute to the confusion?What evidence is there that gender is a social construction?What does the construction of gender look like for Americans?How do the agents of socialization construct gender?

Besides social class and race, another area of inequality that sociologists frequently examine is gender.  Similar to race, our society often uses the term gender erroneously.  Because of that, society makes assumptions about gender and biology that are more a social construct than biology.

Operationalizing terms:  What is gender and why is it confusing? 

Oftentimes, gender is confused and misunderstood because we are limited by our language.  We use the terms "male" and "female" to refer to both sex and gender.  Then, to add to the confusion, oftentimes sexuality is genderized.  Many people use the term "gay" or other pejoratives to mean that someone or something is not masculine.  So all three of these terms are confused with each other.  But, sex, sexuality, and gender are different terms that technically refer to different aspects of who we are as individuals. 

Professionals like doctors, psychologists, sociologists, social workers, and others who study people have written and researched about the differences of these terms extensively.  Sex is the biology that someone is born with.  Most often, a person's sex is assigned based on their reproductive parts.  People are also born with an aptitude for a sexuality.  As they get older, the sexuality becomes sexual attraction such as heterosexual or homosexual attraction.  These are part of our biological makeup, our nature. Most researchers have concluded that these can't be changed.  "Gender" however, is not biological.  It is a social construction that we learn from an early age and we often take it for granted.  Gender is how we think we should act based on our sex and sexuality.  In sum:

• Sex is the biology individuals are born with and often assigned at birth.
• Sexuality is the biological aptitude an individual is born with for attraction.
• Gender is how an individual reacts to these two.  This is not biological but instead a social construct.  
• Gender can be an inner identity/feeling or an outward expression

2.  Do you understand the difference between the terms "sex", "sexuality" and "gender" and why these differences create confusion?



What does it mean that gender is a social construction?

While sex and sexuality are determined (at least in part by biology), gender is a social construction.   Think about how you answered that question at the top of this post.  Most of the ways your life would have been different are examples of society treating people differently based on their sex (and sexuality).  This constructs a certain way of being.  So, for example, if I am a heterosexual male, how should I act?  What colors should I like?  What clothes should I wear?  How should I talk?   What sports should I play?  Is it okay for me to cry?  To be rough?  To like violence?   To be sensitive?  And so on... These are all our gender and they are all learned reactions.

Gender reveal parties are one example of how our language uses male/female to refer to both sex and gender - do these parties really reveal a child's gender?  Will the child be masculine/feminine?  How do we know?  

"Nature has no edges.  It is not binary."

What is a binary and how does it contribute to the confusion?

Humans tend to be dualistic in their understanding of the world (and thus, their language).  So much of our understanding is oversimplified into dualism: light and dark, wet and dry, tall and short, etc...  But the reality is that there is so much in between these concepts.  The same is true in terms of "gender".  Our culture pushes people to the edges of the continuum below.  This creates a duality for sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.  This duality is often referred to as a "gender" binary.

Evidence for the continuum

• Sex - Scientific American explains the continuum here.  And they provide a useful graphic here or here.
• Sex - One example of the spectrum of sex is the IAAF's 2018 proposal of new rules that would exclude some female runners from competing in women's Olympic events.  Guardian article here.
• Gender - The Gender Spectrum website also provides resources and an explanation.
• Gender Identity - Here is a terrific program about gender from National Geographic called The Gender Revolution.  It has an in-depth explanation of transgender as well as some of the latest science about sex and gender.
• Here is a Guardian article about shattering the myth of the gendered brain.
• For more info, this is a great blog from Dr. Zevallos, an Australian sociologist from a Latin-Australian background.
• The-Be-you-tiful-intiative started by a former student of mine.
• It's pronounced metrosexual, a free online resource for learning & teaching about gender, sexuality, & social justice created by Sam Killermann. 
• From the BBC, this article details the changes in pitch for women's voices and the dynamic effects of nature and nurture on each other.

3. Is gender a binary or a continuum?  What does that mean?

Evidence that gender is a social construction - change over place and time

Because gender is a social construct, it can be examined with a sociological imagination to show that it is different depending on where or when you examine it.  

Where

Some cultures have acknowledged a non-binary gender for centuries such as India's Hijra, Japan's Wakashu, Mexico's Muxe and two-spirit people from American Indians.

PBS highlights gender-diverse cultures here:

When

"The Manly Origins of Cheerleading" from Soc Images shows how cheerleading has changed from being considered very masculine to feminine to something in between:

And from the Smithonian, checkout this article about children's clothing becoming genderized:

First dresses then pink and blue

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out. For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

For a more detailed explanation of the genderization of colors, see this 9 minute video from PBS

A third example of the changing social construct is heels for men, explained here in Teen Vogue:

4.  How has our notion of gender changed over time?  Use your sociological imagination to explain how one of the examples above is evidence for gender being a social construction.


For more information:

Scene On Radio did an excellent 10-part series podcast is about gender from the 
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University distributed by PRX. The series attempts to answer:  What’s up with this male-dominated world? How did we get sexism, patriarchy, misogyny in the first place? How can we get better at seeing it, and what can we do about it? Co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee explore those questions and more.  This is an excellent podcast about the social construction of gender:

This 2018 episode of Hidden Brain explains how the differences between men and women are created by society.  

What does society construct for gender?

Take a moment to think about if you have heard the various phrases and where you might have heard them:

Man up!

Boys will be boys.

You play like a girl.

Someday you'll meet Prince Charming/Mr. Right.

You need to cook and clean so that you can be a good wife.

That's not lady-like.

5.  Which of the messages have you heard before?
Mark all the messages that you have heard - even if the message was not directed at you.

6.  What agents of socialization have you heard say those phrases from the link above? 
List all the categories of people where you have heard these.  Were they:  parents, siblings, friends, peers, teachers, coaches, actors/actresses, tik-tok stars, somewhere else?

7.  List the messages that the phrases convey for males.  For example, for "Boys will be boys," you might write, "There's only one way to be a boy," You can't change boys," or,  "It's ok for boys to be rough."

8.  List the messages that the phrases convey for females.



This activity should reveal that even though people actually exist on a continuum (lesson 1), our culture constantly promotes a binary.  We hear these binary messages from all of the agents of socialization.  The messages start even before you are born.  So the idea of a binary is very strong and we are pushed to the ends of the binary from the moment we are born.


The boxes of the binary

Before going further, let me clarify about the biology of males and females.  On average, categorically, men and women are indeed different.  On average, males are taller, have more muscle mass and more testosterone and less estrogen than females.   However, none of these are at the exclusivity of each other.  Males and females both have testosterone and estrogen, they both have muscle mass.  Females can be tall and have a lot of muscle mass.  Males can be short and have little muscle mass.  People are complex and we all exist along a continuum.  

However, our society emphasizes the polar ends of the continuum.  Males are pushed to be only masculine and females are pushed to be feminine.  Society gives the appearance that there is only one way to be masculine or feminine.  Below are some of the traditional traits that dominant US culture has pushed for each gender.  Note that these are traditional in the sense that society has generally promoted them, even if they do not apply to you.  To be clear, I am not saying that men and women should be these ways, I am saying that society has traditionally socialized men and women to be these ways:

9.  Which of the traditional gender traits (above) are similar to the messages that you identified that are associated with he phrases above?  

PEW Research Center found similar gendered language in a 2017 study about gender expectations for men and women.  Click through the follow up analysis (2018), and look for ways that gender is constructed.

How Americans describe what society values (and doesn’t) in each gender? What traits does society value most in men and in women? What traits does society say men and women should not have?

You can click on the link above to explore their findings.  Here is a sample of their findings.  Gold is for women and green is for men.

Examples of data/evidence for the binary.
Please look at each of the links below.  Look for how the marketplace creates the binary between male and female  - especially in ways that are unnecessary.  When you are finished looking at each, answer question six.

• Gendered Products; See this post about products that are pointlessly gendered thus reifying the idea of traditional gender traits.  
• Gendered Halloween costumes.

10.  After reviewing the two links above (aren't those funny?), what product was the most pointlessly gendered?  What costume was the most ridiculously gendered?

Finally, one last bit of evidence that society pushes us to the binary is in the gendered language of teacher reviews.  This example shows how socialization shapes how American college students perceive their professors.  Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com at his site, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. The interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here. Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do.  Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.   For example, the word "funny" shows up in the chart below.  Notice that orange is female and blue is male.  For every single subject (in the column on the left) funny is mentioned more in reviews of male teachers.  Every single subject!  

After you have tried your own search for words, or if the website was not working, click here to see my analysis of the RateMyProfessor data.


11.  See how many words you can find that are completely gendered.  Make a list.
Go to professor Schmidt's website, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews.  See how many words you can find that are genderized.  What are the words?  List them in number 7.

How does society construct the gender binary?

The construction of gender and agents of socialization

All of the agents of socialization help to construct gender.  Look for the claim and evidence supporting each of these agents.  How does each agent contribute to the socialization of gender?  What evidence does sociology provide that agents of socialization influence individuals' self-concepts about gender?

Family:

This article from Newsweek explains the research by neuroscientist Lise Eliot that shows parents begin treating infants differently from the moment they are born.   Parents talk differently to babies based on sex.  Experiments reveal this is true for strangers as well.  It can even be argued that parents treat babies differently before they are born!  For example, pink and blue, decorating the nursery, "gender" reveal parties, and choosing a name.

This research published in Developmental Psychology by Fausto-Sterling, et. al. shows, "measurable sex-related differences in how mothers handle and touch their infants from age 3 months to age 12 months."

Treating six month-olds differently:

• boys are given independence and encouraged to be active
• girls are coddled and ecouraged to be dependent and passive
• by thirteen months, each gender acts differently.

Also differences in toys; boys=action figures, weapons; girls=jewelry, dolls.  

Click here to see a post from the Society Pages that examines how the  Barbie above helps to reinforce lessons learned from teachers.  The toy does not just show up in a little girl's toy box.  Toys come from family which is trying to do right by the kid based on messages in the media. 

Peers

Girls and boys learn what it means to be a man or woman from friends.
See the book from Patricia and Peter Adler on preadolescent peer pressure.

This research by Patricia and Peter Adler published in Sociology of Education shows that values for popularity develop as early as fourth grade;

• boys: athletics, coolness and toughness, grades=lower popularity (think about how this shows up in the ratemyprofessor reviews from the other lesson).
• girls: family background, physical appearance (esp. clothing and makeup) and ability to attract popular boys, grades=higher popularity.          

School

From the Society Pages, this post shows the latent lessons (hidden curriculum) that schools teach.  In this case, it starts as young as 8 years old.   (See the image below)

From the National Academy of Sciences this study shows that teacher anxiety about math affects their students. 

This research in the journal of Sociology of Education shows how high school begins to shape students' interest in majoring in STEM fields in college.

This research from Gender and Society shows that high school teachers' attitudes about females and math affect how teachers grade and teach female students.

This article from the NY Times shows that gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture.

The Society Pages explain how cross-cultural studies provide evidence that the gendered expectations in STEM are a result of a social construction 

This 2007 study in Sociological Perspectives explains the  connection between core sports and homophobia finding that boys who participate in core sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer) are nearly 3 times more likely to express homophobic attitudes.  Conversely, females who participated in nonathletic extracurricular activities were half as likely to express those attitudes as individuals who did not participate in those activities.

Work

Sociologist Jill Yavorsky found that the polarization in gendered traits also shows up in hiring practices, especially when overlapped with social class, published in the Journal of Social Forces here. 

12.  Which research about gender being constructed through the agents of socialization (family, peers, school) reinforcing gendered ideas is most interesting to you and why?

Concluding

To summarize, the agents of socialization play a pivotal role in helping each of develop a sense of self (remember the isolated kids, Genie and Danielle from the social structure unit?).  One of the ways that the groups influence us in thinking about gender.  And the influence is particularly strong because it happens from the time we are young (even before we are born) and then continues in a web of structure that perpetuates the construction of gender.  The web is a connection of parents, schools, peers, toys/marketers and media that all reinforce the gender binary.  

For More Info about Gender:

 

3.06 Racialization of Asian and Hispanic/Latino/Latinx/Latine Americans

Google Form for today's lesson

Today's Lesson: 

Asian

• What racism did Americans identified as "Asian" face historically? 
• What are the timeline and demographics of Asian immigration to the US? 
• What is the model minority myth and how did it get created? 
• How is the model minority myth harmful? 
• What is the perpetual foreigner stereotype?

Hispanic

• What are the timeline and demographics of Asian and Latine immigration to the US?
• How/why did the terms "Hispanic" and "Latino" get created?
• How do most Americans identified as Hispanic prefer to identify?
• What racism did Americans identified as Hispanic face?

Americans Racialized as Asian

Often, Asians are seen as a "model minority" because a large number of Americans with Asian heritage have achieved high levels of education and income.  However,  there is a long history of discrimination against Americans of Asian descent.

From the Asia Society's Center for Global Learning:

Beginning in the 1850s when young single men were recruited as contract laborers from Southern China, Asian immigrants have played a vital role in the development of this country. Working as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen, the Chinese represented 20% of California's labor force by 1870, even though they constituted only .002% of the entire United States population. With the depression of 1876, amidst cries of "They're taking away our jobs!," anti-Chinese legislation and violence raged throughout the West Coast.

• 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the only United States Iaw to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race—which restricted Chinese immigration for the next sixty years.
•  1899 Philippine-American War 

From the Scene on Radio podcast season 4 episode 9 about race and democracy

" America’s involvement in the Philippines, though, may be the most grossly under-discussed chapter in U.S. imperialism, and in the nation’s bloody war history.  After the United States decided that it would end its war with Spain not by liberating but by annexing the Philippines, not surprisingly, Filipino nationalists disagreed and fought with the United States. And this began a war that lasted years, and arguably over a decade. It just depends how you count the war. But the United States was governing militarily at least parts of the Philippines, and fighting up and down the archipelago, from 1899 to 1913. It's the second longest war in U.S. history. And it's a war that was deeply one-sided in terms of the death counts.  Forty-two hundred U.S. soldiers died. Estimates of the Filipino death toll, mostly from disease caused by the upheaval of the war, range from 200-thousand to a million or more. Immerwahr’s estimate is three quarters of a million. He points out, the most intense period of that war lasted from 1899 to 1903—four years, the same length as the U.S. Civil War."

 

• In 1907, Japanese immigration was restricted by a "Gentleman's Agreement" between the United States and Japan. 
•  1913, CA passed Alien Land Law which barred Asians from owning land. 

• 1922 Ozawa v. U.S. (allowed denial of citizenship based on race) see also here.
• 1923 Thind v. U.S. (all people perceived to be "Hindus" are not white and not citizens)

• By 1924, with the exception of Filipino "nationals," all Asian immigrants, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians were fully excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land.
• 1942 Korematsu v. U.S.  (Japanese internment camps) 

• ...immigration laws remained discriminatory toward Asians until 1965 when, in response to the civil rights movement, non-restrictive annual quotas of 20,000 immigrants per country were established.

 

Asian American Civil Rights Movement

All of the discrimination means that Asian-American success was severely limited by racism.  Structural racism prevented Asian immigrant success in the U.S. and that had to be changed before Asian-Americans could thrive.  Asian-Americans did not stay silent in this fight.  They had to fight for equality.  Many Asian Civil Rights leaders worked with the Black Panthers (see the picture below from Giant Robot Magazine's (1998) history of the yellow power movement.

• Richard Aoki learned and worked with the Black Panther Party (though later became an FBI informant).  NPR story here.
• Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee created AAPA and changed the pejorative label of "orientals" to Asian-Americans.  Ichioka legacy here.  
• Yuri Kochiyama worked so closely with Malcolm X that she held Malcolm X in her arms after his assassination.  NPR story here.  People's History here.

Yuri Kochiyama holds the head of Malcolm X after his assassination.

And here is Mrs. Kochiyama with the grandson of Malcolm X:

ThoughtCo has a history of the Asian-American Civil Rights movement, the "Yellow Power Movement".

1. What aspect of the racialization of Americans identified as Asian stands out to you as being most interesting or surprising?  Why?

The Social Construction of  "Model Minorities" and radicalized Asians.

One way that to prevent a larger coalition of Asian-Americans and African-Americans from fighting for civil rights together was to embrace Asian-Americans while resisting African-Americans.  Not only did internal pressure domestically contribute to embracing Americans perceived as Asian, but international developments also contributed to the embracing of Americans perceived as Asian.  In a 180-degree turn from the Komatsu decision in the 1940s, during the Cold War, geopolitics like the Vietnam war, the Korean War and the threat of communist China led the US to embrace the Asian-American cause.  This way the U.S. could try to win over the increasing number of immigrants from these countries and sway popular opinion that despite the use of the atomic bomb in Japan and wars in Korea, Vietnam and disputes with China, the US was not anti-Asian.

At the same time, the change in immigration law in 1965 opened the door for more diverse and more educated class of immigrants:

South Asian Indians become model minorities

From the Atlantic (2021), The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism By Arun Venugopal

Many of us are unaware of the special circumstances that eased our entry into American life—and of the bonds we share with other nonwhite groups.

There was a term for our place in the country’s racial order: model minority. The concept is generally traced to a 1966 article in The New York Times Magazine by the sociologist William Petersen, which focused on Japanese Americans; the basic idea was extended to other Asian Americans. Of course, the notion of “model minorities” comes with a flip side—“problem minorities.” 

What is forgotten is that before Indian Americans became a model minority, we were regarded as a problem minority. Also forgotten is the extent to which the U.S. engineered the conditions that allowed certain nonwhite groups to thrive.

The majority spoke English and came from upper-caste communities (as my parents did). The composition of the diaspora was representative of only a narrow slice of India: people who had the social capital and intellectual means to succeed far from home, and who had the resources to make the journey in the first place.

The result was an intense form of social engineering, but one that went largely unacknowledged. Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been.

East Asians become model minorities 

From Ellen Wu's The Color of Success; Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014)

Jeff Guo of the Washington Post interviewed Ellen Wu, author of the book Color of Success (the interview is available here The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans: Washington Post analysis).  In the interview Wu explains that her research found

...according to a recent study (2016) by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades [1950s, 60s, 70s].  Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.

How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained. 

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, "The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

From NPR,

'Model Minority' Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks'

[Promoting the myth of the Model Asian minority] showcase a classic and tenacious conservative strategy, Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said, involves "1) ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values."

"It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success (excerpted here). Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth, and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made."

From CNN, The truth about Asian Americans' success (it's not what you think) by Jennifer Lee, August 4, 2015 

Based on a survey and 140 in-depth interviews of the adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles -- fellow sociologist Min Zhou and I explain what actually fuels the achievements of some Asian American groups: U.S. immigration law, which favors highly educated, highly skilled immigrant applicants from Asian countries. Based on the most recent available data, we found that these elite groups of immigrants are among the most highly educated people in their countries of origin and are often also more highly educated than the general U.S. population.

Take Chinese immigrants to the United States, for example: In 2010, 51% were college graduates, compared with only 4% of adults in China and only 28% of adults in the United States. The educational backgrounds of immigrant groups such as the Chinese in America -- and other highly educated immigrant groups such as Korean and Indian -- is where the concept of "Asian privilege" comes in.

When highly educated immigrant groups settle in the United States, they build what economist George Borjas calls "ethnic capital."

This capital includes ethnic institutions -- such as after-school tutoring programs and after-school academies -- which highly educated immigrants have the resources and know-how to recreate for their children. These programs proliferate in Asian neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as Koreatown, Chinatown and Little Saigon. The benefits of these programs also reach working-class immigrants from the same group.

Ethnic capital also translates into knowledge.

In churches, temples or community centers, immigrant parents circulate invaluable information about which neighborhoods have the best public schools, the importance of advance-placement classes and how to navigate the college admissions process. This information also circulates through ethnic-language newspapers, television and radio, allowing working-class immigrant parents to benefit from the ethnic capital that their middle-class peers create.

Our Chinese interviewees described how their non-English speaking parents turned to the Chinese Yellow Pages for information about affordable after-school programs and free college admissions seminars. This, in turn, helps the children whose immigrant parents toil in factories and restaurants attain educational outcomes that defy expectations.

The story of Jason, a young Chinese American man we interviewed, is emblematic of how these resources and knowledge can benefit working-class Chinese immigrants. Jason's parents are immigrants who do not speak English and did not graduate from high school. Yet, they were able to use the Chinese Yellow Pages to identify the resources that put Jason on the college track.

There, they learned about the best public schools in the Los Angeles area and affordable after-school education programs that would help Jason get good grades and ace the SAT. Jason's supplemental education -- the hidden curriculum behind academic achievement -- paid off when he graduated at the top of his class and was admitted to a top University of California campus.

This advantage is not available to other working-class immigrants.

From the American Psychological Association,

Hyper-Selectivity and the Remaking of Culture: Understanding the Asian American Achievement Paradox by Lee and Zhou

Here is the Abstract:

From the Asian American Achievement Paradox, different groups of Asians were disparately shaped by more than their own will to succeed:

A Russel Sage 2015 publication authored by Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Min Zhou, professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

"While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding of how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups."

From Contexts,

How hyper-selectivity drives Asian Americans’ educational outcomes

by Jennifer Lee

Hyper-selectivity benefits all members of an immigrant group, because these groups are more likely to generate “ethnic capital,” which manifests into ethnic institutions like after-school academies and SAT prep courses that support academic achievement. The courses range in price tags (some are freely available through ethnic churches), so they are often accessible to the children of working-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents. Hence, the hyper-selectivity of an immigrant group can assuage a child’s poor socioeconomic status (SES) and reduce class differences within an ethnic group. In turn, this produces stronger educational outcomes than would have been predicted based on parental SES alone.

Here are a few results from Lee and Zhou's publications available in JSTOR.  They are shorter journal articles that highlight segments of their later published book (mentioned above).

From Inside Higher Ed

The Asian American Achievement Paradox

Here are presentation slides from Lee and Zhou.

From Columbia University, Tran, Lee et. al.

hyper-selectivity and Asian racial mobility 

Asian Americans Advancing Justice resists efforts that use Asian-Americans as a wedge against affirmative action. 

 2. Why is the term "model minority" not representative of Asians as a biological race?

Racism and the Asian "Model Minority" Myth 

Although on average Asian Americans have a higher median income and higher educational level than all racial groups in the US, they face implicit bias in their own ways.  It should be noted that the higher average level of income and education hide the wide disparities within the Asian American community.  Thinking about Asian Americans as a model minority is an overgeneralization that hides important realities about implicit biases both in the Asian American community and in other communities.

How Good Are the Asians?  Refuting Four Common Myths about Asian Americans, from the journal Phi Delta Kappan in 2009:

 

 

MMM Ignores Racism

First,  here is a post from the Society Pages that explains how the model minority myth makes Asian stereotypes more acceptable in society.   Here is a clip of an SNL skit from the daily beast about Jeremy Lin highlighting the ways that the media is able to stereotypically portray Jeremy Lin - Because he is Asian, the racism is more acceptable.  

From this article from the Winter 2004 Contexts:

Model Minority Myth Hides Vast Differences within Asian-American Population 

This 2009 research published in the Annual Review of Sociology explains that many laws, and racial resentments changed in the second half of the 20th century which allowed more opportunities for Asian Americans, but the successes of Asians on average hide wide disparities that still exist.

This article published by Kevin Kumashiro, dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco highlights findings that were published in the Journal of Higher Education.

"Research in higher education shows that class and ethnicity shape Asian-Americans’ post-secondary decisions, opportunities and destinations. The model minority stereotype, in fact, begins to break down when we look at the data by ethnicity and class. While Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans do have high rates of educational attainment, it’s a different story for Southeast Asian-Americans.Southeast Asian-Americans have among the lowest educational attainment in the country (e.g., fewer than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 25 of Laotian, Cambodian or Hmong descent have a high school diploma). Compared to East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (Indian, Pakistani), Southeast Asians in the U.S. are three to five times more likely to drop out of college. Southeast Asian-American students struggle with high rates of poverty and are often trapped in programs for English learners, which fail to prepare them for college. But this diversity among Asian-Americans is often lost in conversations about the “Asian disadvantage.” As a result, the interests of the most vulnerable Asian-Americans are not represented by anti-affirmative action rhetoric."

3. What are some reasons why the term "model minority" harmful?

The Perpetual Foreigner Stereotype

Another aspect of racism that is hidden by the model minority stereotype is the perpetual foreigner syndrome.  If someone is perceived as being Asian, there is an assumption that they are a foreigner and not really American.  In some cases, the person's ancestors may have been in the U.S. for generations.  Chinese immigration has been happening since the 1850s.  Frequently the perpetual foreigner syndrome manifests itself in questions like, "Where are you from? Where are you really from?"

When Tara Lipinsky beat 

Michelle Kwan

, a headline said "American Beats Kwan."  Why is this a problem?

This 2011 article from the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology details the implications for ethnic minorities facing perpetual foreigner syndrome.  It includes a comparison of Asian and Latino/as.

This article in the Johns-Hopkins News Letter (2017) explains the frustrations of a 5th generation American who is still asked "Where are you really from?"

Here is an article from Quartz critical of a 2016 segment on The O'Reilly Factor of Fox News which not only promoted the perpetual foreigner stereotype, but a host of others as well.

PEW, Discrimination Shapes Most Asian Americans' Lives,

For many Asian Americans, discrimination experiences are not just single events, but instead come in several often-overlapping forms. Overall, the survey showed that most Asian Americans experience discrimination in three broad ways: Those related to being treated as a foreigner (even if they were born in the U.S.); being seen as a model minority; and other discrimination incidents in day-to-day encounters or because of their race or ethnicity.

The "Bamboo Ceiling"

From Psychological Science, Lessons from the Bamboo Ceiling by Ludmila Nunes, (2021), 

" ... despite having the highest educational attainment, highest median income, and lowest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States (Hsin & Xie, 2014; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019; U.S. Department of Labor, 2019), Asians are underrepresented in U.S. leadership positions."

From the Journal of Business Psychology, Granting Leadership to Asian Americans: the Activation of Ideal Leader and Ideal Follower Traits on Observers' Leadership Perceptions by Kim KY, Shen W, Evans R, Mu F., (2022),

"...stereotypical views that Asian Americans possess ideal follower traits (i.e., industrious, reliable, and competent) may also contribute to poorer perceptions of Asian Americans as leaders than White Americans.

 

"From the LA Times March 28, 2018 by Jennifer Lee (@JLeeSoc), a professor of sociology at Columbia University and Karthick Ramakrishnan (@karthickr), a professor of public policy at the UC Riverside, "Asian Americans think an elite college degree will shelter them from discrimination. It won't;"  Implicit bias affects hiring of Asian Americans.

"In numerous interviews with corporate leaders, we learned that Asian Americans are less likely to be seen as leadership material, and are thus given fewer opportunities to advance and succeed. Part of this is based on stereotype. Asians are often viewed as smart, diligent, focused, quiet and technically competent — traits that make them desirable employees, but not desirable leaders. So strong are these stereotypes that even when Asian workers take creative risks, supervisors may still prefer to promote someone else."

From the Asian American Advancing Justice institute in Washington DC also addressing implicit bias and job promotion:

"While many Asian Americans have high educational attainment and work in professional fields, some encounter a glass ceiling that blocks their professional advancement.  This often takes the form of perceptions that Asian Americans have poor communication skills or that they are passive and lack leadership potential. Reliance on stereotypes should not continue to pose barriers to advancement in the workplace."

Racism in Healthcare

From PRI, Asians face implicit bias in their healthcare:

A University of Chicago Research Study showed that

"More than half of Asian Americans with Type 2 diabetes don’t even know they have it. That compares to one in four Americans with the disease overall who are unaware. Even though the American Diabetes Association changed its screening guidelines for Asian Americans, a large number are still going unscreened....That difference is so significant that two years ago, the American Diabetes Association changed the screening guidelines to recommend Asians are screened for diabetes at a lower body mass index, but that didn’t necessarily result in more screenings, according to Elizabeth Tung, a physician at the University of Chicago. She recently wrapped up a study looking at the disparities in diabetes screening between Asian Americans and other adults.

What we found was that Asian Americans were the only racial and ethnic group that was consistently screened less than other racial and ethnic groups,” Tung says. “We found that overall, Asian Americans had 34 percent lower odds of being screened than whites.”

Racism in Education

Educationally, teachers will call home less for Asian students.

This article from the Atlantic highlights research by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, a sociologist and an assistant professor of education at New York University's Steinhardt school.

"Cherng’s statistical analysis found sharp contrasts in how math and English teachers communicate with parents from different racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds, reflecting many existing stereotypes of black, Latino, and Asian American students....Cherng attributed this to the “very implicit, really deep bias” that certain kids “get math” and certain kids don’t...teachers were less likely to contact immigrant Asian parents about academic and behavioral struggles. Only 5 percent of math teachers and 9 percent of English teachers communicated with parents of first- and second-generation Asian students about misbehavior. And less than 5 percent of English teachers contacted parents of first-generation Asian students who rarely do homework, which was 10 points less than the frequency of contact with the parents of their third-generation white counterparts."

Anti-Affirmative Action Policies and Asian-Americans

From NBC News, 70% of Asian Americans Support Affirmative Action, Here's Why Misperceptions Exist

According to the national 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, which examined almost 1,570 voters, targeting the six largest national origin groups, found that 70 percent of Asian Americans supported affirmative action, while 16 percent opposed it. Chinese Americans, who were the least likely of the ethnicities to back the program, still favored it at a majority of 56 percent.

Data on Harvard’s own admissions shows that race-conscious admissions have benefitted all communities, including Asian Americans, producing a more diverse student body, Yang said.

Harvard’s admissions statistics show that the share of its admitted class that is Asian American has grown by 27 percent since 2010, according to the university's response to the lawsuit. When looking at its class of 2023, Asian Americans make up more than 25 percent, while Latinx students comprise just over 12 percent and Black students constitute more than 14 percent.

“Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been used as a wedge and certain groups have purposefully showcased Asian American dissent to affirmative action as a way of masking their anti-Black and anti-Latino agendas,” Yang explained. “Such efforts hide the fact that most opponents of affirmative action are really trying to increase the number of Caucasian students at the expense of Black, Latino and Native American applicants.”

A working paper published last year in the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard fell under the categories of recruited athletes, legacy students and children of faculty and staff. That share also includes what’s referred to as the “dean’s interest list,” which consists of applicants whose parents or relatives made donations to the university.

The research noted that roughly 75 percent of white students admitted from those categories, identified as "ALDCs," "would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."

Racism during Covid-19 Pandemic

4. What type of racism toward people racialized as Asian is most interesting/compelling to you? Why?

From Pew Research 2023,  Among Asian Americans, U.S.-born children of immigrants are most likely to have hidden part of their heritage.

From Pew Research 2023, Discrimination Experiences Shape Most Asian Americans’ Lives

Americans Racialized as Hispanic and Racism

My former student Heidi Rojas is a singer and songwriter.  She wrote the song La Situacion about the experience that many Americans from Hispanic and Latina decent have in the U.S.  See more about her song here.

The Social Construction of Hispanic from "Mexican" to "Latinx"

1848 The border crossed many Mexicans with the controversial Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo : 

• 100,000 ethnically Mexican residents become US citizens technically guaranteed rights
• although Mexico demanded that the former Mexicans be given full citizenship, they were discriminated against.  

1896 Supreme Court rules In Re Riccardo that Mexican-Americans are white.

 

1898 Spain cedes Puerto Rico to the U.S., in 1918 over 1 million Puerto Rican residents become US citizens.

Cuban immigration increases. 

 

1930 "Mexican" appears on US census because of nativism and economic depression.  Mexican Americans had traditionally seen themselves as white. When the 1930 Census classified “Mexican American” as a race, leaders of the community protested vehemently and had the classification changed back to white in the very next census. The most prominent Mexican-American organization at the time—the patriotic, pro-assimilationist League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)—complained that declassifying Mexicans as white had been an attempt to “discriminate between the Mexicans themselves and other members of the white race, when in truth and fact we are not only a part and parcel but as well the sum and substance of the white race.” Tracing their ancestry in part to the Spanish who conquered South and Central America, they regarded themselves as offshoots of white Europeans.  Choosing either Mexican or White implies that Mexicans are not White. The Mexican government and LULAC lobby to change that and in 1940 Mexican is removed.

 

Despite identifying as White, Americans identified as Mexican face continued discrimination.

 

 The Birth and Growth of Racism against Mexican-Americans.  The American Experience.  PBS. 2009.

 Watch a 1 minute clip here or at PBS Local.  Other clips:

Watch on Amazon Prime here. 

1954 Hernandez v. Texas - Supreme Court rules that discrimination against Americans identified as Mexican is illegal under the 14th ammendment.

1960s Chicano - "Chicano" emerges as a term for Americans who have Mexican heritage but they don't feel Mexican.  "Mexican American" feels like a misnomer to them.

In 1970 Hispanic was re-added as an ethnic group. Code Switch from NPR has a terrific history of the terms in Gene Demby's 2014 episode here.   

 

1976 Hispanic - Cristina Mora (2014)'s research in her book, Making Hispanics, uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and ’80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

Because of pressure from advocacy groups, political strategists and media marketers, Congress passes a law mandating the collection of "Americans of Spanish origin or descent".  This is the origin of "Hispanic" which was tied to language and heritage connected to Spain. Mostly, this combines Americans with Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage but also includes people from Spain and people from over a dozen other countries, but excludes Brazilians.  

For more on Hispanic identity:

Who You Calling Hispanic? (2021) From NPR's radio show and podcast, Code Sw!tch 

Hispanic identity is recent and a social construction 

 

How Distinct Ethnic Groups Became 'Hispanics'.  Othering & Belonging Institute. 2017.

Cristina Mora, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and member of the Haas Institute's Diversity and Democracy cluster, presented earlier this month on her book, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American.

In the talk, which was a part of the Institute's Thinking Ahead lecture series, Mora explained that in the US in the 1960s diverse ethnic groups like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and others were all classified as white by the Census Bureau.

Activists from these different groups, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, thus came together to demand that the Census Bureau create a new category that separates them from the descendants of Europeans as part of the larger struggle for equal rights.

The activists wanted to obtain data on their ethnic groups, which had been mixed with data on people who were actually white, and didn't face the same forms of discrimination as those who originated from countries south of the border.

1990s Latino - By 1990, "Hispanic" had been used on 2 censuses which allowed problematic aspects of the term to arise - The term included Spain which was not only European but also seen as an adversarial imperial power and it did not include Brazil which was in the Americas but historically Portugese.  Latino emerged as a term inclusive of all of Latin America.  

2000 Hispanic/Latino becomes and ethnicity - The census adjusts to allow "Hispanic/Latino" as an ethnicity with subcategories that identify with: Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc... And then race is a separate category allowing people who identify as Hispanic/Cuban/White or Latino/Puerto Rican/Black etc...

2010s Latinx - because Latino is masculine, many gender activists advocate for Latinx as a gender-inclusive term.

Despite the 1976 law and the 1990s lobby for Latino, a substantial group of Americans identifies with their ethnicity (like Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican) rather than the pan-ethnic terms of Hispanic or Latino.  And because this was a label imposed upon them, many people radicalized as "Hispanic" rejected that label and that still shows up in the PEW data Explanation and history from PEW:  Who is Hispanic? (2021):

For more on the creation of Hispanic and identity:

Julie Dowling's Mexican Americans and the Question of Race (2015)

Sociology professor Julie Dowling from the University of Illinois Chicago explains the dynamics of Mexican Identity in her 2015 book, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race. From the publisher,    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. 

• You can read a review of Dowling's work here: Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, 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:  2/3 of Texan Latinos check white with the highest % along the border those people who checked white were more identified with this ideology of using whiteness as a strategy, while those who checked other were more identified with anti-racist politics, or they identified more or with immigrants with African-Americans. So it wasn't so much color or assimilation, but what strategy they use to combat the discrimination they faced. Because the overwhelming majority of the people I spoke to experienced discrimination — whether they identified as white or whether they identified as other. Some of the lightest people checked other and some of the darkest people checked white. It wasn't a skin color issue or an assimilation issue: It's a strategic issue.

NPR Code Switch interviewed Dowling on the census and who checks Hispanic and who checks white and why.

• The Invention of Hispanics; What It Says about Race.  The Heritage Foundation. 2019.

• When Labels Don’t Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity. PEW Research. 2012.

Nearly four decades after the United States government mandated the use of the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” to categorize Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries, a new nationwide survey of Hispanic adults finds that these terms still haven’t been fully embraced by Hispanics themselves. A majority (51%) say they most often identify themselves by their family’s country of origin; just 24% say they prefer a pan-ethnic label.

• Defining Hispanicity: E Pluribus Unum or E Pluribus Plures? NIH. 2006.  A history of 'Hispanic', 'Latino' and the shifting concept of race.

• Hispanics are also divided over how much of a common identity they share with other Americans. 
• When it comes to describing their identity, most Hispanics prefer their family’s country of origin over pan-ethnic terms. Half (51%) say that most often they use their family’s country of origin to describe their identity.
• “Hispanic” or “Latino”? Most don’t care—but among those who do, “Hispanic” is preferred. Most Hispanics do not see a shared common culture among U.S. Hispanics. Nearly seven-in-ten (69%) say Hispanics in the U.S. have many different cultures, while 29% say Hispanics in the U.S. share a common culture.

• What does it mean to be Latino? From NPR's radio show and podcast, Code Sw!tch

• The Institutionalization of Hispanic Panethnicity 1965 to 1990. American Sociological Review. 2014;

Research on racial/ethnic categorization provides insight on how broad processes, such as migration trends or political shifts, precede the establishment of new categories, but does not detail the struggles and compromises that emerge between state and non-state actors. As a result, we know little about why new census categories are defined in certain ways or how they become legitimate. This article addresses this gap by using an organizational lens to reconstruct how the Hispanic category emerged in the United States. I demonstrate that categories can become institutionalized through a two-stage process as state actors and ethnic entrepreneurs (1) negotiate a classification's definition and (2) work together to popularize the category. I argue that cross-field effects undergird these stages—movements toward developing a new category within state agencies are reinforced by similar classification efforts occurring among social movement groups and media firms, and vice versa. I identify three organizational mechanisms that sustained these effects in the Hispanic case: the development of boundary spanning networks between state and non-state actors, the transposition of resources across fields, and the use of analogy and ambiguity as cognitive tools to describe and legitimate the new category. I discuss the theoretical merits of incorporating organizational analysis, especially the concept of cross-field effects, into the study of racial/ethnic classification.

• Is Being Hispanic a Matter of Race, Ethnicity or Both?  Pew Research Center.  2015.

When it comes to reporting their racial identity, Latinos stand out from other Americans. In the 2010 census, for example, 94% of the U.S. population selected at least one of the five standard, government-defined racial categories – white, black, Asian, American Indian or Pacific Islander. But among Latinos, just 63% selected at least one of these categories; 37% of Latinos, or 19 million, instead selected only “some other race,” with many offering write-in responses such as “Mexican,” Hispanic” or “Latin American.”

Federal policy defines “Hispanic” not as a race, but as an ethnicity. And it prescribes that Hispanics can in fact be of any race. But these census findings suggest that standard U.S. racial categories might either be confusing or not provide relevant options for Hispanics to describe their racial identity. They also raise an important question long pondered by social scientists and policymakers: Do Hispanics consider their Hispanic background to be part of their racial background, their ethnic background or both?

A new Pew Research Center survey of multiracial Americans finds that, for two-thirds of Hispanics, their Hispanic background is a part of their racial background – not something separate. This suggests that Hispanics have a unique view of race that doesn’t necessarily fit within the official U.S. definitions.

• The Latino Flight to Whiteness.  The American Prospect. (2016)

In a 1997 article in the Journal of Black Studies, sociologists Jonathan Warren and France Twine had already challenged the view that the United States was gravitating toward a white minority population because of evidence that the new immigrant population tends to identify as white. A similar preference for whiteness is present among Hispanics who select a single category as their racial identity. In the 2010 census, the majority of Hispanic respondents, 53 percent, said they are white, a mere 2.5 percent said they are black, and more than 35 percent chose a category other than black or white (some choosing "Hispanic" itself or their national origin as their racial classification). A majority of "single-race" Hispanics selected a white racial identity.

The census does not include information about an individual's physical appearance. But there are surveys that enable us to compare the interviewees' self-reported race with their complexion as judged by the interviewer. In a survey devoted exclusively to Hispanics, the interviewers coded the respondents on a continuum of Very Light, Light, Medium, Dark, and Very Dark. The vast majority of Hispanics coded as Medium to Very Dark said their race is white. Even among the Dark and Very Dark respondents less than 5 percent said they are black. (For these findings, see William Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton, "Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness," Transforming Anthropology, 13:2 October 2005 103-109.) The preference for whiteness among Hispanics parallels a flight from blackness.

5.  What is something about the creation of "Hispanic/Latino" that you find surprising or interesting?

Discrimination and Prejudice against people identified as Hispanic

 

The Brutal History of Latino Discrimination in America, from History.com (2017), Though Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination. Anglo Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving. In some cases, that prejudice turned fatal.

A History of Anti-Hispanic Bigotry in the United States; This Animus Bubbles Up Frequently, with Devastating Results,  from Washington Post (2019),

Marie Arana details the various peaks of racism toward people seen as non-white from the Western Hemisphere.

 

The 'Forgotten' History Of Anti-Latino Violence In The U.S., from NPR (2019), The rate of hate crimes against Latinos in the U.S. is at its highest in nearly a decade, according to an annual report by the FBI.  The report revealed 485 hate crimes against Latinos in 2018. That’s 58 more than reported the year before and surpassing those against Muslims and Arab Americans.

 

Racism, Not a Lack of Assimilation Is the Real Problem Facing Latinos in America, From NBC News (2019), 

A bounty of research debunks the idea that Latinos are not integrated into American society: Latino immigrants, like other immigrant groups, are completely English dominant by the third generation; their economic mobility rate is almost equal to that of whites; and Hispanics are more likely to marry outside their group than blacks or whites.

 

Disparities do remain, but those who tell Latinos to assimilate often fail to acknowledge the centuries of exclusion, racism and systemic discrimination that have slowed Latinos’ economic and social mobility. Racism puts up practical roadblocks to integration and participation, preventing Latinos from being accepted as “assimilated,” experts said....a recent report found that in Iowa City, Iowa, Latinos were denied home loans four times more often than whites, the biggest disparity in the country. This adds to the wealth gap between whites and Latinos because most families’ net worth comes from their homes and their equity.... 

 

When it comes to language, many Latinos see a double standard.  “It is a deficit when you speak Spanish, but it’s an asset to whites and white Americans when they speak it,” said scholar and educator Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, who documented racism in the criminal justice system in her book, “Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court.” “This is the ultimate form of exclusion.”

 

 

Colorism

Colorism and Hispanic Identity from PEW (2021):

 

 

Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans.  Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles. 2012.

Abstract:  How racial barriers play in the experiences of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. Some consider Mexican Americans similar to European Americans of a century ago that arrived in the United States with modest backgrounds but were eventually able to participate fully in society. In contrast, others argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout U.S. history and this limits their participation in society. The evidence of persistent educational disadvantages across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping support the racialization argument. In this paper, we explore the ways in which race plays a role in the lives of Mexican Americans by examining how education, racial characteristics, social interactions, relate to racial outcomes. We use the Mexican American Study Project, a unique data set based on a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio combined with surveys of the same respondents and their adult children in 2000, thereby creating a longitudinal and intergenerational data set. First, we found that darker Mexican Americans, therefore appearing more stereotypically Mexican, report more experiences of discrimination. Second, darker men report much more discrimination than lighter men and than women overall. Third, more educated Mexican Americans experience more stereotyping and discrimination than their less-educated counterparts, which is partly due to their greater contact with Whites. Lastly, having greater contact with Whites leads to experiencing more stereotyping and discrimination. Our results are indicative of the ways in which Mexican Americans are racialized in the United States.

 

Stereotypes about Citizenship Status 

Who Are the "Illegals"? The Social Construction of Illegality in the United States.  Flores, Rene and Schacter, Ariela. American Sociological Review. 2018.

Wash U and U of Chicago sociology professors explain that political rhetoric, racist stereotypes drive false notions about immigrant criminality.

From Wash U news:

Fueled by political rhetoric evoking dangerous criminal immigrants, many white Americans assume low-status immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Syria, Somalia and other countries President Donald Trump labeled “shithole” nations have no legal right to be in the United States, new research in the journal American Sociological Review suggests.

In the eyes of many white Americans, just knowing an immigrant’s national origin is enough to believe they are probably undocumented, said Ariela Schachter, study co-author and assistant professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Our study demonstrates that the white American public has these shared, often factually incorrect, stereotypes about who undocumented immigrants are,” Schachter said. “And this is dangerous because individuals who fit this ‘profile’ likely face additional poor treatment and discrimination because of suspicions of their illegality, regardless of their actual documentation.”

Findings suggest that the mere perception of illegal status may be enough to place legal immigrants, and even U.S. citizens, at greater risk for discrimination in housing and hiring, for criminal profiling and arrest by law enforcement, and for public harassment and hate crimes in the communities they now call home. “When people form impressions about who they think is ‘illegal,’ they often do not have access to individuals’ actual documents. There have actually been a number of recent incidents in which legal immigrants and even U.S. born Americans are confronted by immigration authorities about their status. So these judgments seem to be based on social stereotypes. Our goal was to systematically uncover them,” said study co-author René D. Flores, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

From a broader sociological perspective, Schachter and Flores argue that an immigrant’s real standing in American society is shaped not just by legal documentation, but also by social perceptions.

“These findings reveal a new source of ethnic-based inequalities — ‘social illegality’ — that may potentially increase law enforcement scrutiny and influence the decisions of hiring managers, landlords, teachers and other members of the public,” they conclude in the research.

Conducted in November 2017, the experimental survey asked a representative sample of 1,500 non-Hispanic white Americans to guess whether a hypothetical immigrant was in the country illegally — and perhaps a threat worth reporting to authorities — based on the reading of a brief biographical sketch.

By systematically varying the immigrant’s nation of origin, education level, language skills, police record, gender, age, race and other variables, researchers created a pool of nearly 7 million unique immigrant sketches that touched on a range of stereotypes. Each respondent was randomly assigned to view 10 of these unique sketches during the survey.

Using complex statistical analysis, researchers estimated how much each of these individual immigrant traits and stereotypes influenced the assumptions of white Americans from various demographic backgrounds, geographic regions and self-identified political affiliations.

Surprisingly, the study found that white Republicans and white Democrats jump to many of the same conclusions about the legal status of hypothetical immigrants — except when it comes to the receipt of government benefits.

From Immigration-Related Discrimination and Mental Health among Latino Undocumented Students and U.S. Citizen Students with Undocumented Parents: A Mixed-Methods Investigation, 

Research has consistently linked discrimination and poorer health; however, fewer studies have focused on immigration-related discrimination and mental health outcomes. Drawing on quantitative surveys (N = 1,131) and qualitative interviews (N = 63) with Latino undergraduate students who are undocumented or U.S. citizens with undocumented parents, we examine the association between perceived immigration-related discrimination and mental health outcomes and the process through which they are linked. Regression analyses identify an association between immigration-related discrimination and increased levels of depression and anxiety; this relationship did not vary by self and parental immigration status. Interview data shed light on this result as immigration-related discrimination manifested as individual discrimination as well as vicarious discrimination through family and community members. We contend that immigration-related discrimination is not limited to individual experiences but rather is shared within the family and community, with negative implications for the mental health of undocumented immigrants and mixed-status family members.

Hispanic Health Paradox

The Hispanic Health Paradox across Generations: The Relationship of Child Generational Status and Citizenship with Health Outcomes (2015) from the NIH,

 

Stat News details the Hispanic Paradox and reports that new research may show that Hispanics live longer, but not necessarily healthier.

PEW Research Center collection of surveys about Hispanics/Latinos.

6.  What do you find interesting about the examples of racism toward Hispanic Americans?

7. What are some similarities between racism toward Asian and Hispanic Americans?

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