WK 3

2 Culture

[I]ndividuals feel, think, and see things from the viewpoints of the groups in which they participate (Smith, 1991, p. 182).

[W]e cannot understand human diversity without understanding how culture contributes to the substantial variations we observe every day (Lonner, 1994, p. 241).

Culture is to human behavior as operating systems are to software, often invisible and unnoticed, yet playing an extremely important role in development and operation (Matsumoto, 2001, p. 3).

In the early years of psychology’s development as a discipline separate from philosophy, during the last part of the19th century, there was interest in what was called “folk culture.” But this interest waned as issues related to the concept were seen as too speculative and not readily amenable to empirical inquiry (Pepitone, 2000). Culture has re-emerged as a significant construct in the past few decades. In current psychological discourse, our definitions and conceptualizations of culture come primarily from cultural anthropology where culture is generally understood to refer to that part of our environment that is constructed by human beings to embody shared learning.

Definitions and Common Themes

An early definition, in 1891, presents culture as the incorporation of all socially acquired habits and knowledge (see Mio, Trimble, Arredondo, Cheatham & Sue, 1999). More than a century later, the core of this definition remains the same, despite multiple variations on the basic theme. Baldwin, Faulkner, Hecht, and Lindsley (2006) refer to the definition of culture as a “moving target” and devote an entire book to its discussion, providing an appendix of 300 variations. Nevertheless, for the purpose of the present text, I focus on what seems to be the essence of common agreement.

In this common agreement within social science, culture is understood to represent “socially transmitted beliefs, values, and practices … [and] shared ideas and habits” (Latane, 1996, p. 13). Pepitone (2000) adds that the distinct patterns defining a culture are identified with by those who behave in accordance with them. Different aspects of culture are emphasized by others. Thus, Ray (2001, p. 3) notes that culture may designate what cannot be verbalized easily, “the unconscious cognitive and social reflexes which members of a community share.” Lehman, Chiu & Schaller (2004) summarize the basic elements contained in just about every definition of culture – shared distinctive behavioral norms that are omnipresent and may appear natural, and are transmitted to new members of the culture. These norms provide interpretive perspectives that assist in the perception and cognition of events.

While some events are complex and some involve social interactions, an event can be as simple as “the smell of herbs and spices or distinctive foods cooking in restaurants and neighborhoods” (Forman & Giles, 2006, p. 98). Interpretation of what is smelled will vary with background, experience, and expectation. Culture refers to what we learn from others in the form of familiar associations or interpretations, beliefs, attitudes, and values. It prepares us to attend to some events and not to others, to ascribe particular meanings to what we experience, observe, and learn about from others.

In addition, a culture’s interpretative perspectives may be communicated to those outside the culture in the form of artifacts or art or performances (West, 1993). Kitayama (2002) calls attention to the presence of cultural artifacts that may include tools, verbal and nonverbal symbols, and particular daily practices or routines. These are what outside observers use to learn about cultures not their own. When the new Museum of the American Indian first opened in Washington, DC, it gave space to a sample of tribes of varying size from all parts of the United States in which each could present to visitors what was considered to be the most representative of their history, practices, art, symbols, narratives, including the voices of tribe members.

Bond (2004) suggests that culture describes not just what persons within the group can or should do – “affordances” or prescriptions – but also what they should not do – “constraints” or proscriptions; and that it includes “a shared system of beliefs (what is true), values (what is important), expectations,… and behavior meanings … developed by a group over time” (p. 62). To these can be added shared possibilities or encouragements, and shared adaptations to the particular circumstances of the group members (Lonner, 1994). Observed from the outside, a culture may be described in terms of distinctive food, dress, speech, music, rituals, texts, and so on. From the perspective of the individual within the culture, however, the affordances, constraints, expectations, possibilities, and patterns may not be overtly apparent or easily verbalized, since culture is lived, and only sometimes scrutinized or described by those who live it.

Culture is Part of Human Biology

It is culture that sets us apart from other animals and from our closest primate relatives. Culture is part of human biology (or human “nature”) in that it is made possible by our biological equipment. It is the structure and function of particular parts of our biological equipment that provides us with the neural, skeletal, and physiological capacities to learn, practice, and adapt to changing conditions on a level not reached by other animals. As noted by Rogoff (2003, p. 63), humans are “biologically cultural.” This essential and empirically accurate understanding is missed and obfuscated in discussions of culture that pit nature against nurture with arguments that rest on the false premise of separation between the two.

Contributing most especially to culture is our biological (neurological and anatomical) capacity for oral and written language that sets us apart from the most highly developed of other animals. A vital aspect of culture, therefore, is that it incorporates what is both learned and shared (Swartz, 2001). There can be no culture without transmission or teach-ability. Values, beliefs, normative behavior, and interpretations of experience are transmitted both explicitly and implicitly (or more indirectly) through the socialization process and through shared everyday life experiences and challenges (Lonner, 1994; Reid, 2002). Transmission is an essential feature of culture. What we attend to within a community, how we behave, what we believe, and what we anticipate must be communicated from one generation to another. This communication depends upon a common language or mode of expression.

Lonner and Hayes (2004) emphasize the pervasiveness of culture and the range of activities, events, and experiences that are shaped by it in every day life from birth through the rituals of death. The shared ways of behaving and believing are “created daily through interactions between individuals and their surroundings” (Segall, Lonner & Berry, 1998, p. 104). It is through social interactions that culture is maintained and persons are assisted in behaving in accord with prescribed and shared standards, values, ideas, and beliefs (Cohen, 1998; Swartz, 2001).

The most contemporary approaches to culture emphasize the active role of individuals as interpreters and modifiers as they interact with others and with their environments (Berry & Poortinga, 2006). Culture does not connote a static model of adherence to norms. There is always within-culture variation and change (Caulkins, 2001; Foley, 1997). A culture is dynamic, or a “work in progress” (Ray, 2001, p. 185), always in the process of developing and changing (Mullings, 1997). Contradictions and challenges exist and there are differences among those in the same shared culture. An important corollary is that no one learns everything that can be learned and people do not all learn the same things (Gatewood, 2001). Each person experiences different aspects of the same culture in a unique and individual way within predictable limits.

Diversity of Cultures

Some prefer to limit the concept of culture to what is learned, shared, and transmitted within large groups such as nationalities or ethnicities. This view was the dominant one within the earlier multicultural discourse in psychology but there are signs of change (e.g., Sue & Sue, 2003). The position I present in this work, like the one advocated by Pedersen (1999, p. 3), is that culture be broadly defined “to include any and all potentially salient ethnographic, demographic, status, or affiliation identities.” It follows that each cultural context in which we participate or behave will contribute to who we are, our beliefs about ourselves and others, how we interpret events, how we relate to and interact with others, and what we accomplish in promoting change in our lives and communities. Each of us will bring our complex and unique multicultural selves into our social interactions with others and into our interpretation of events.

When members of a group share a common history, or common locus in society, or common experiences, the fact of this sharing can shape a common identity. The view that culture reflects adaptations to “historical, political, economic, and social realities” (Mio et al., 1999, p. 83) is common to all definitions. Yet, within psychology some discussions of culture have been narrow and mostly limited to ethnic minorities. Others, however, have a broader perspective. As noted by Essed (1996, p. 57), for example, “The experiences of motherhood or a profession can appeal to a specific identity. We all have multiple identities.… We are defined by where we come from, but also by what we do.” We are defined by the particular adaptations people in our group have made to their environments, as these adaptations and experiences have been shared and communicated across generations. The shared environments may be geographic or physical, economic or political, occupational or ideological.

It is meaningful and authentic, accurate and empirically demonstrable, to speak of “inner city culture” or Southern White culture, of military culture, ivy-league culture, women’s culture, gay culture, Native American, or African American culture. Culture may be observed in a “religious enclave, an urban scene, an immigrant community, or a neighborhood” (Caulkins, 2001). By focusing only on what is distinctive or common among large cultural groups we neglect the vital recognition that “individuals incorporate more than one culture” (Hong, Morris, Chiu & Benet-Martinez, 2000).

The next chapter will focus on ethnicity and the factors that relate to past and present geography and nationality. Particular attention will be paid to the cultural significance of being part of a U.S. White majority or to a minority group. But culture is not the property only of groups that originate from the same part of the globe, or people who experience oppression or privilege, or who are socially marginal, or who may share physical characteristics like skin color. Learned prescriptions and constraints, and their transmission, also characterize those who share a political philosophy, an ideology, a religion, a profession or occupation or social status, a gender or social class.

Framing the discussions within this book is the proposition that behavior at a particular time and in a particular place is the outcome of the intersections of the cultures most salient to the person and most relevant to the situation. Consider, for example, what classroom behaviors might be similar and different between a working-class 30-year-old Italian American heterosexual male graduate student and an affluent 30-year-old gay African American graduate student studying psychology at the same elite university? What behaviors will be similar and different between a heterosexual Native American 40-year-old woman clinical psychologist and a 60-year-old bisexual Jewish American woman clinician in conversation with the same patient? And how differently or similarly will they respond to a 20-year-old and an elder within the same tribe, each of whom presents the same symptoms of depression?

Hong and her colleagues (2000, 2003) have introduced the concept of “frame switching” to refer to shifts an individual may make in interpreting events or issues from within the frames of different, multiple cultural identities. Their “dynamic constructivist” approach suggests that an individual can ascribe different meanings, even contradictory ones, to the same event, but that only one meaning will be dominant at a particular time and place, depending upon the other stimuli within a specific situation or upon immediately preceding events that have had a “priming” effect. I suggest that it may also be possible for several meanings of relatively equal strength to be evoked, reflecting the influence of more than one cultural background that may be relevant to the situation.

A culture is not the same as a “reference group.” The latter can be defined as a group in which one chooses to participate or would like to participate; a group whose opinions or goals one values (Smith, 1991). We may use groups to which we belong or aspire to belong as reference points for behavior or beliefs, but cultural influence goes far beyond that. It shapes “who we are in spite of ourselves, effortlessly and inexorably as we … internalize our community’s habits of thought, values and forms of behavior” (Ray, 2001, p. 3). It is within our (various) cultures that we have practiced and learned how to behave, and what to believe and feel, in accord with prescriptions and proscriptions that were transmitted to us across time from significant others. Cultural influences continue to mold the specifics of development, beginning before birth, influencing subtle and also clear and obvious ways of doing things. Influences from non-familial cultural communities powerfully affect variations in adult behavior. Rogoff (2003) views cultures as “communities” or “groups of people who have some common and continuing organization, values, understanding, history, and practices” (p. 80). Such communities may vary in the extent to which the members are in continuing face-to-face contact or physical proximity and in the extent to which their influence is dependent on proximal contact among their members.

Empiricism and Social Constructions

Our cultural communities define us and provide contexts for behavior in particular situations. The relationships among these communities and the behavior of persons identified with them can be studied with multiple methods, and conclusions from such studies can be replicated and verified. The consequences of cultural membership for behavior can be direct or they can influence the relationships among other variables (Adamopoulos & Lonner, 2001). Thus, cultures can be viewed as both antecedent and dependent variables (Matsumoto, 2001; Forman & Giles, 2006). A review of relevant literature by Lehman et al. (2004) illustrates the conclusion that culture and psychological processes influence each other: “cultural paradigms influence the … thoughts and actions of individuals, which then influence the persistence and change of culture over time” (p. 703). And, as similarly noted by Rogoff (2003, p. 51), “people contribute to the creation of cultural processes and cultural processes contribute to the creation of people. Thus, individual and cultural processes are mutually constituting rather than defined separately from each other.”

Culture, like all of our major social psychological concepts, is a social construction. This status, however, is not an impediment to empirical inquiry. I share Pepitone’s (2000, p. 244) conviction that what is socially constructed can “be objectively real in the sense of having significant effects.” We can identify cultures and investigate their antecedents, consequences, and role as mediators between variables. And it is imperative that we do so, since they help us to define and understand persons and make sense of human behavior.

3 Ethnicity

In the USA, the terminology of ‘race’ persists both in popular and academic discourse despite the acknowledgment that it conveys a notion of discrete, inherently different and permanent divisions of humankind which are not matched in reality (Fenton, 1999, p. 3).

Beginning in the nineteenth century, race has occupied an important place in the social science literature and, more recently, in the discourse on multiculturalism within psychology. But there is good reason to re-examine this concept and the literature in which it is embedded. I argue here that the concept of race, born out of the need to justify the oppression and enslavement of some groups of people by more powerful others, is now thoroughly discredited. Its scientific base has been found wanting and the concept has been abandoned by both anthropologists and geneticists. It is time for psychologists to do the same.

Ethnicity is a far more useful and definable concept, denoting diversity in terms of shared national origin and current allegiance. The frequently used “race/ethnicity” designation, which keeps one foot in the past, seems unnecessary. A more straightforward approach is to subject ethnicity to careful analysis and to consider its significance for community dynamics, sociopolitical issues, personal identity, and behavior.

Race and Racism

Discrimination against groups and individuals based on skin color and other assumed associated characteristics (phenotypic and genotypic) is the hallmark of racism. This construct can be operationalized and defined clearly by particular behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and institutional practices that debase and oppress persons because of their assumed racial category (Clark, Anderson, Clark & Williams, 1999). Its reality, strength, and function in our society is well established. Racism is both an institutional and interpersonal phenomenon that includes negative attitudes (prejudice), beliefs (stereotypes) and acts of avoidance and distancing (discrimination) that can be overt or covert (Maluso, 1995). Its societal function is to maintain inequality by giving some groups more, and some groups less, access to goods and resources (Ossorio & Duster, 2005). This has been the case in the United States throughout our history, beginning with the occupation of land belonging to native peoples. Racism is implicated in all our “social ills, such as police brutality, poverty, illiteracy, disease, unemployment, crime, drugs, and urban crises” (Jalata, 2002, p. 107).

Racism is experienced in tangible and personal ways as avoidance, suspicion, poor service, harassment, and verbal epithets. It is “a daily fact of life” (National Advisory Mental Health Council, 1996, p. 102) in all areas and affects access to educational, employment, medical, neighborhood, governmental, and all other societal resources. It has direct negative consequences for personal and community health and welfare, amply documented by an enormous literature. When I first drafted this chapter, there was both open and quiet speculation about how seriously racist bias would affect the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and, despite the success of the Obama campaign, it may be some time before the answer will be fully known. We have witnessed, before and after the election, an increase in hate-filled and threatening messages. But the facts of racism and its effects do not provide the concept of race with meaning nor justify continuing to use it in either scientific or popular discourse.

Tied historically to the maintenance of racism, race has been an immensely significant sociopolitical category despite the fact that it is not reliably related to biological differences. It is, in fact, largely because race does not have a clear biological meaning that its utility for invoking, justifying, and maintaining status quo discrimination and oppression is so great. Races, so well accepted as real, continue to be presented in popular and political discourse without the necessity of scientific validation.

Early Usage

According to the American Anthropological Association (1997), our ideas about race are historically linked to folk taxonomies that followed the early explorations of America by Europeans who, for the first time, saw groups of people who looked different from themselves. In the 18th century,

Carolus Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy and a European, described American Indians as not only possessing reddish skin, but also as choleric…. Africans were described as having black skin, flat noses and being phlegmatic, relaxed, indolent, negligent … and governed by caprice. In contrast, Europeans were described as white, sanguine, muscular, gentle, acute, inventive, having long flowing hair, blue eyes,… and governed by law (p. 2).

Racial divisions of human populations were introduced into both scientific and popular discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries (Fenton, 1999; Smedley & Smedley, 2005). In 1925, W. E. B. DuBois noted that it was only after slavery was introduced into the New World that race became the prominent way to classify and judge human beings. He recognized that the concept of race was based on unfounded assumptions and pseudo-science, its main consequence being exclusion (cf. Gaines & Reed, 1995; cf. Keita, 2002). The historically identified races originally classified by Linnaeus in 1758 as African, Asian/Mongoloid, Caucasian, and Indian were uncritically assumed to differ in skin color, in facial features, hair type, and other inherited physical characteristics. The idea of a Caucasian race came from the belief that the most perfect skulls could be found among people in the Caucasus Mountains (American Anthropological Association, 1997). To justify slavery and exploitation, some groups needed to be separately categorized and provided with distinct physical and human characteristics that could be ranked lower than those given to Whites or Europeans.

The main factor in making decisions about racial categories has been politics, not biology (Holmes, 2000). Race has been invoked to justify categorizations of “otherness” for groups of persons on bases other than skin color. Jews, for example, were designated by the Nazis as non-Aryan members of an alien race to justify their segregation, then persecution, and then destruction. But Jews were marked as racially different even prior to the Nazi era, and the tortured logic in this reasoning and the comparison of Jews to Blacks has been well documented (Boyarin & Boyarin, 1997; Gilman, 1991). Marking Jews as different involved “slipping within and among the categories of race, nation, religion, and culture … [and raising the question] Is a Jew white?” (Itzkovitz, 1997, p. 180). The new racial group that was created to encompass presumed Jewish difference (Pellegrini, 1997), and to justify their harassment and destruction, could be found discussed and described in medical and anthropological literature (Britzman, 1996).

Not only Jews, but also Italians and Irish and Poles were considered to be non-White races when they came in large numbers as immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Biale, 1988; McDermott & Samson, 2005). These groups were labeled “racial” and described as “inherently and irredeemably distinct from the majority of the white population” (American Anthropological Association, 1997, p. 3). They were “widely viewed as filthy, diseased, verminous, intellectually inferior, criminal, and morally deficient” (Kaye/Kantrowitz, 2007, p. 11). In the 1890s, the Irish were said to be “ ‘Negroes turned inside out’ while Negroes were ‘smoked Irish’ ” (Patterson, 2000, p. 15). In 1899, a leading sociologist, William Ripley, classified Europeans into three races: Teutonics, said to be the most highly developed, were blond and blue-eyed; Alpines from northern Europe, stocky and chestnut-haired, came next; and then the least regarded were the dark Mediterraneans or Southern Europeans (“What’s white,” 2000).

Presumed Racial Differences

The most commonly invoked racial group difference is skin color. What is true about skin color, however, is that the skin cells of all human beings contain some melanin, the pigment primarily responsible for providing color. Skin color varies with geographical region and climate (cline), gradually darkening from northern to southern Europe and from northern Africa to central Africa (Fish, 1998). Differences are due to how much pigment one has and how it is distributed on the skin. The 6–10 pairs of genes that are believed to be responsible for skin color are not reliably related to the other approximately 30,000 gene pairs that are carried in human cells. In other words, “different traits do not cluster together in neat packages” (Cohen, 1998, p. 47). There are independent spatial distributions of hair type, hair color, blood group, eye color, head shape, and facial features. Skin color is not a reliable marker of race. Yet, as we know, it continues to be a marker of differences in privilege, between groups and within groups (Bell, 1997; Lilhadar, 1999).

The conclusion that there are no distinct human races is now widely accepted as a result of the failure to find patterns of genetic difference. Available knowledge tells us that human beings all had the same beginning as a species in Africa; and small groups then moved in different directions and different distances from their origin (Mio, Barker-Hackett & Tumambing, 2006). The more that anthropologists studied traits of human groups, the fewer significant differences were observed, leading to the conclusion that there are no distinct races (Ossorio & Duster, 2005). Within-group differences in the visible characteristics said to represent race are far greater than differences between groups, and “no matter how racial groups are defined, two people from the same racial group are about as different from each other as two people from any two different racial groups” (American Anthropological Association, 1997, p. 2). The genetic differences between groups and individuals cannot be sorted into discrete racial groups, and human beings are now regarded as a relatively homogenous species (Hubbard, 1994). Most human genes are also common to all other living creatures, with about 85 percent shared with dogs (Wilson, 2009).

Within a presumed “race,” there are variations in skin color, blood groups, enzymes, and serum proteins (Betancourt & Lopez, 1993). For example, there is more DNA/genetic variation in a single African tribe than across all non-African peoples combined (see Boyd, 1996). Sickle cell anemia is found among some Southern Europeans as well as among Africans, but not in some tribes in South Africa (“Race” 1995). All of the blood types (A, B, and O) are found in all population groups (Zuckerman, 1990). Thus, “It is the culturally invented ideas and beliefs about these differences that constitute the meaning of race” (Smedley & Smedley, 2005, p. 20). One irony is that while Blacks across the world “have the most internal genetic variation … they are most likely to be treated as if they were genetically homogenous … [and] placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy” (Ossorio & Duster, 2005, p. 118). About 30 percent of White Americans have more than 10 percent non-European ancestry, and a Black person and a White person may have more DNA in common than two Blacks (Begley, 2004).

Brent Staples (2002), a New York Times African American columnist, has provided a personal example. He compared his skin color (medium brown) to that of two other Black men, Colin Powell, whose skin is a bit lighter, and Anatole Broyard, a now deceased New York Times reporter, who was dramatically lighter, looked White, and “passed” for White (Lee, 2008). Nearly all self-defined Black Americans have had White ancestors. Mixed ancestry is the rule in the United States, beginning with the importation of slaves in 1619.

Genetic testing provides evidence that the ancestries of persons considered Black as well as those considered White are complex and often unexpected. Brent Staples (2005) described his great surprise at learning that a little more than half of his genetic material was traceable to sub-Saharan Africa, while more than a quarter came from Europe, and one-fifth from Asia. Similarly, a program spearheaded by the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has given Morgan Freeman and Maya Angelou, for example, knowledge of White great-great-grandfathers (Lee, 2008).

Some recent medical research that focused on disease susceptibility and efficacy of drug treatments has seemed to suggest that differences between “racial” groups be reconsidered. What is correlated with certain diseases or reactions to certain drugs, however, is not race but specific genetic markers. Frank (2007, p. 1981) points to “the instability of ancestry estimates, the absence of established relationships between genetic variants and phenotypes, [and] strong correlations between ancestry estimates and unmeasured environmental exposures.” There is a wide range of responses to drugs, such as ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers. Some drugs, in other words, that may not work well for African Americans, in general, may be very effective for a “significant percentage” of Black patients (Roylance, 2004).

Current Status

The conclusion that there is no biological reality to race, nor any packages of genetic differences that reliably distinguish groups of people, is now accepted among anthropologists and biologists. The earlier efforts within science to verify folk beliefs about human differences by examining bodies and measuring heads failed (Smedley & Smedley, 2005). Newly acquired evidence indicates that any two human beings are at least 99 percent genetically identical (see Harmon, 2007). Physical differences reflect the differing environments lived in by one’s ancestors.

Beginning in the 1950s, statements by UNESCO began to challenge the validity of the concept of race and to suggest that its use was misleading and dangerous (see Yee, Fairchild, Wizman &Wyatt, 1993). Medical researchers know that self-reported race is not a reliable indicator of genetic make-up, and the National Institute of Medicine has urged investigators to no longer use traditional racial categories (see Schmid, 1999).

Despite the lack of biological reality, there are continued attempts to link race to differences in intelligence (e.g., Hernstein & Murray, 1994; Saletan, 2007). Following the historical tradition in which intelligence was measured with bumps on the skull or cranial capacity, the newer claims use IQ scores to posit the existence of significant, genetically based differences between Blacks and Whites in the United States. In rebutting such claims, Nisbett (2007) notes that approximately 25 percent of the genes of African Americans are the same as those of European Americans and that skin color is only weakly associated with IQ scores. He also cites a study that compared the children of German women (post-World War II) whose biological fathers were African American with those whose fathers were European American. The average IQ scores were the same. He summarizes additional data in a New York Times op ed piece aptly titled “All brains are the same color,” and in a new book (Nisbett, 2009). The Flynn effect, described in detail by Gladwell (2007), refers to the fact that IQ scores around the world have been rising about three points each decade since their development, strongly suggesting a powerful environmental influence.

In the early 1980s, Yee (2006) introduced to the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association a Resolution on Race that was approved and adopted. This apparently long-forgotten Resolution “mandated APA to lobby the government to end the use of race and substitute ethnicity to classify the population” (p. 12). Others (e.g., Wang & Sue, 2005) now urge caution when using race as a variable or demographic category in psychological research. Helms, Jernigan & Mascher (2005) have urged research psychologists not to use racial categories as independent variables, since, lacking in conceptual meaning, they cannot be used to explain human behavior. Even more pointedly, the American Anthropological Association (1997) recommended to the Census Bureau that it eliminate the term “race” in favor of ethnicity or ethnic group. The Association argued that “race” has no biological justification and has been proven not to be a real natural phenomenon. Noting that 26 different racial terms have been used in the U.S. Census since 1900, including at one time Hindu and Mexican, the Association urged that racial classifications should be replaced by more accurate ways of representing diversity in the U.S. population.

Some important voices in psychology (e.g., Helms, 1994; J. M. Jones, 1991, 1998; Sun, 1995) who agree that the racial classification system is irrational and not based on science, have argued, nevertheless, that race (and racial identity) must continue to be among the phenomena we study as long as racism is a continuing sociopolitical phenomenon. It is argued that, as long as some groups of people share significant experiences of discrimination and oppression because of their socially designated racial categorization, race as a social category continues to matter and the concept continues to have a reality. But challenging and ending racism, and the realities of its tragic consequences for individuals and communities, is not aided by continued use of the term race, falsely denoting, as it does, groups of people presumed to share patterns of innate characteristics.

Those who suffer indignities and oppression fueled by racist prejudice and discrimination are not benefited from use by social scientists of a concept that disguises the real basis of that prejudice and discrimination – namely designation of inferior status by the more powerful in order to maintain unequal access to resources. I agree with Christensen (1997, p. 621): “Racism is about the unequal distribution of economic wealth and political power … supported by numerous institutional practices and … traditions.” It is not about race.

Ethnicity

A new scholarly discourse on ethnicity stakes out a prominent place for it in providing a sense of who we are. These discussions are occurring at the same time as media and politics in the United States are reflecting a growing appreciation of ethnic identity, as its importance for individual lives and families is increasingly recognized (Worchel, 1999). There is wide interdisciplinary agreement that our ethnic location is crucial to, and a signal of, personal identity (American Anthropological Association, 1997; Fenton, 1999; Giroux, 1999; Markus, 2008). This location can result from the ascription of others, from birth, from individual choice, or from some combination of these.

What Does Ethnicity Mean?

Ethnic background denotes a national group from which one’s parents/ancestors have come and with which one feels kinship and identification. Ethnicity represents what we have learned within our families about the traditions, practices, and customs of their communities of origin. Our ethnic group is associated with special experiences in language, music, history, literature, food, and celebrations that are similar to that of others of the same background. From ethnicity, one can derive a sense of shared and transmitted common heritage and values (Hall & Barongan, 2000). The basis of this commonality is national origin or what some refer to as our “roots” or common history (Worchel, 1999), the shared heritage of struggles and adaptations of parents, their parents, and ancestors. Taken from the Greek, ethnos means nation or tribe, and ethnikos means nationality (Betancourt & Lopez, 1993).

Members of the same ethnic group share a common history and set of influences and experiences, especially if they are also age cohorts. Members of ethnic groups learn about themselves not only from others within the same group but from the ways in which they are regarded or treated by mainstream institutions and by members of other groups. Ethnic experiences, then, may include, for some, various forms of oppression, discrimination, stereotyping, and prejudice, and for others, various forms of entitlement or privilege.

One need not live among others geographically to share in ethnic identification. This is true of immigrants (Deaux, 2006) – those who leave families to pursue personal advancement through education or occupation, or those who must leave for economic or political necessity and survival. What is important is that an individual “wants to be counted as a member” (Mio, Trimble, Arredondo, Cheatham & Sue, 1999, p. 108). How salient and important one’s ethnicity is will vary across individuals and, for the same individual, will vary with time, situation, socio/political events, and immigrant or native-born status, among other variables. As Fenton (1999, p. 21) notes, “ethnicity as an element of individual consciousness and action varies in intensity and import depending on the context of action.” The strength, significance, or salience of ethnic identity can vary for the same person at different times and in different contexts, and can vary among persons who may have similar backgrounds (Phinney, 1996). Multiple ethnic identities held simultaneously are possible and not uncommon (Biale, 1988; Hong, Morris, Chiu & Benet-Martinez, 2000; Root, 1996, 2001). As noted by Nagel (1994, p. 154) “Since ethnicity changes situationally, the individual carries a portfolio of ethnic identities that are more or less salient in various situations and vis-à-vis various audiences.”

African Americans

We are accustomed to recognizing, studying, and thinking about prominent U.S. ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and native American Indians but, in fact, each of these are categories made up of many distinct ethnicities. African Americans, who constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population – about 35.5 million (Aizenman, 2008), may have family ties to some particular region in Africa or the Caribbean or the West Indies. There is diversity among African Americans in skin color, ancestry, socioeconomic status, geographical region, and dialect (Caldwell-Colbert, Henderson-Daniel, & Dudley-Grant, 2003).

Common unifiers are the legacy of slavery, centuries of subordination and prejudice, and continued discrimination. Regardless of family origin, most older African Americans will recognize James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” as the Black national anthem (“An anthem,” 1999). Contributing heavily to a common ethnic bond or identity among Blacks in the United States is the wide array of experiences associated with racism (Nelson, 2008). Yet, particular components of African American culture will differ by region of the country, between rural and urban areas, and, of course, by social class. Consider, for example, such diverse Black ethnic communities as those in New Orleans or rural Mississippi and those in urban communities like Newark or Chicago. According to the U.S. Census, in 2000, 54 percent of African Americans lived in the South, 8 percent in the West, 19 percent in the Northeast, and 19 percent in the Midwest (Hill, Murry, & Anderson, 2005).

What decades of research and personal experience make clear is that a major contributor to African American culture, regardless of gender, geographic region, or socioeconomic status, is systemized institutional and interpersonal prejudice and discrimination and their consequences for persons, families, communities, and the country as a whole. These ever-present ingredients within the majority European American society provide a contextual environment in which daily life and social problems are embedded (Maton, 2000). The continued practice of de facto segregation in neighborhoods and schools, and multiple societal barriers to achievement and power, are part of a collective experience that have profound and deep effects on African American culture (Steele, 1997; Wilson, 1998). It was only in 1969 that the last legal segregation policy in the United States was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. A Virginia state law (in force since 1662) that prohibited marriage between persons of different “races” was challenged by a couple whose bedroom was broken into by a county sheriff and deputies five weeks after their marriage in 1958 in Washington, DC. They were arrested, ordered to pay court costs, and banished from Virginia (cf. Martini, 2008). Laws that prohibited “interracial” marriage had been enacted, at some time, in 40 states (Staples, 2008a).

Interactions with members of the majority culture, historically and currently, present cues of stigma, being less respected, less welcomed, less entitled, and less significant. An examination of the literature on teacher interactions with Black public school students (Chang & Demyan, 2007) found evidence of the pervasiveness of lower expectations, higher ratings of problem behavior, and more negative feedback. Entman and Rojecki (2000) analyzed images of Blacks in a broad range of contemporary media – TV network news, local TV news, TV ads, primetime TV entertainment, and Hollywood films. Their conclusion is sobering: “across the diversity of genres and outlets, the mass media convey impressions that Blacks and Whites occupy different moral universes” (p. 6). Negative images are still the norm and include Blacks as depersonalized victimizers. The “overall pattern” is that “although they do entertain us in songs and games – in what really counts, Blacks are takers and burdens on society” (p. 8). Even when the stereotyping is subtle, and even when African Americans are in roles of achievement, dignity, and affluence, Blacks are presented as distanced and excluded from White domains, with inter-ethnic intimacy or friendship a rarity.

A remarkable speech by Senator Barack Obama (2008), prior to the U.S. presidential election, in response to issues of race that emerged during the presidential primaries, directly addressed the real and powerful anger existing within the Black community as a consequence of injustice and racist discrimination. He spoke of the “brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” of segregated and inferior schools, of legalized discrimination, and of color-based economic opportunities. On TV talk shows that followed the speech, prominent members of the Black community reinforced Obama’s words. Despite the rhetoric of U.S. politicians during election years, the idea that we are all equal members of one nation is still more a hope than a reality. An almost unbelievable example comes from the convention of the Republican Party, one of the two major political parties in the United States, when it nominated its presidential candidate in September 2008. Of the 2,380 delegates, only 36 were Black (“Largely White,” 2008). Another example, writ large during the 2008 presidential campaign, is the stream of both overt and disguised racist responses to Senator Obama in the electronic media and elsewhere (Landay, 2008). Staples (2008b) illustrated these with descriptions of Obama as “uppity,” openly expressed by Georgia Congressman Westmoreland, and a reference to the Senator as “that boy” by Kentucky Congressman Davis. European Americans can only imagine the painful personal struggle by Senator Obama during the election campaign to avoid doing or saying anything that might evoke images of the angry Black man. Continued racist messages and frightening incidents have followed after the presidential election and been reported in the press (Associated Press, 2008; Knowles, 2008; Sullivan, 2008). Horrifyingly, many contain threats of assassination, and are reported from diverse areas of the country.

The cues and consequences of stigma are manifested in the everyday lives of African Americans in multiple ways, both indirect and direct. In 2006, a shocking 25 percent of Blacks were below the official federal poverty line (compared with 8 percent of Whites), and the median annual income of Blacks ($30,200) was two-thirds that of Whites (Swarns, 2008). To be African American in contemporary America is to know that more men of color are in penal institutions than in college, and to live in fear that one’s sons, brothers, or partners will be among the former. The statistics are stark. In the United States, the average Black person is 447 percent more likely than the average White person to be in jail, and 521 percent more likely to die as a result of murder (Vedantam, 2008). One in nine Black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is in prison (compared with 1 in 30 nationwide). About one-third of Black men in their twenties are in the criminal justice system – on parole, probation, or incarcerated (Sue & Sue, 2003). There is also a huge difference in incarceration rate between Black and White women between the ages of 35 and 39 – one of every 100 Black women compared to one of every 355 White women (cf. Crary, 2008).

The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified a “school to prison pipeline” for Black children (“New project,” 2007). U.S. Department of Education data reveal that African American public school children are suspended or expelled nearly three times as often as White children. Many of these children find their way into the juvenile justice system where they are four times more likely to be held than European American children, and others are admitted to state adult prisons where they account for 58 percent of the youth population. These phenomena are powerful aspects of someone’s immediate day-to-day cultural environment influencing attitudes, values, beliefs, fears, coping strategies, aspirations, assumptions, and behavior.

To be an African American man (across social classes) is to have a lifespan that is five to seven years shorter than that of a European American man (Sue & Sue, 2003), an average life expectancy that is closer to men in Vietnam or El Salvador than it is to U.S. White men (Penner, Albrecht, Coleman, & Norton, 2007). Significant and large disparities in health care access and health outcomes are well known; they can be seen in infant mortality rate and in all major diseases and survival rates. This knowledge transcends “statistics” and is part of lived experience within the low-income Black community. According to van Ryn (cited in Penner et al. 2007), physicians’ responses to a patient include the stereotypes activated by the patient’s social category, influencing interpretation of symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment decisions. An empirical study by van Ryn and Burke found that, regardless of individual patient attributes, physicians reported their Black patients as likely to be less intelligent and educated than White patients, less likely to follow medical instructions, and more likely to abuse drugs. What does this state of affairs contribute to the anxieties, knowledge, expectations, and behavior that adults pass on to their children?

To be African American often means being perceived by European Americans as a potential threat or a probable thief. Carbado (2005) shares the personal strategies he employs to try to override this perception when he goes to a department store: “I might, for example, dress ‘respectable’ … Purchasing an item, especially something expensive, immediately on entering the store is another strategy I can employ to disabuse people of my ‘blackness’ ” (p. 193). He notes that White people (i.e., middle-class White people) are not required to take similar steps.

Gender intersects with ethnicity to produce special vulnerabilities and negative experiences for African American men. Dottolo and Stewart (2008) cite a 2004 study by Young that found that nearly all of an interviewed group of Black men, but none of the White men, reported having been detained by the police at some time. All of the men, interviewed in their fifties, had attended the same high school. Expectation of police harassment is common in African American communities, a salient issue especially for boys and men, but also for parents who need to prepare their children somehow for the realities of discrimination.

The personal toll taken by stereotyped beliefs about African Americans is highlighted by the literature on “stereotype threat” (Marx, Brow & Steele, 1999; Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1998). Such threat is described as situational and can be expected to occur when negative stereotypes about one’s group can be used to interpret one’s behavior. To experience stereotype threat, one need not believe that the stereotype is true of oneself but only fear that others will invoke it in the particular situation one is in. The research suggests that such threat is particularly damaging to African Americans who identify with academic or particular career domains.

Stereotype threat as well as other elements of the Black experience will have different consequences for different segments of the U.S. Black culture. Senator Obama has been chosen by the citizens of the United States to be the country’s 44th President, thus reaching a place in U.S. politics and history beyond what anyone could have predicted or expected for an African American. Yet, publicly not in support of Obama’s candidacy during the primary elections were some among the nation’s most well-known former Civil Rights advocates, older Black men who have achieved considerable individual economic and political power (e.g., Ron Dellums, mayor of Oakland Ca; Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta, GA; and Rep. Rangel, Congressman from New York). For a time, the 42 members of the House Congressional Black Caucus was split in its support for Senator Obama, as were some of the best known Black clergymen and mayors (Bai, 2008). Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, originally among the group of non-supporters, later declared himself for Senator Obama after what he has described as a momentous conversation with himself. These men may be viewed as representatives of a culture within a culture; they share beliefs and behaviors that situate them in an older African American generation. As suggested by Nelson (2008, p. 19), they “tell us more about what has been than what lies ahead.” Some younger members of the Congressional Black Caucus like Barbara Lee of California and Jesse Jackson, Jr. from Illinois were early supporters of Senator Obama. These newer generation emerging African American leaders may be more comfortable in the larger national community as a result of their education and post-civil rights-era experiences.

Some within the older generation have expressed the fear that Senator Obama’s election will lead policy makers to the erroneous conclusion that racist prejudice and discrimination have abated, or been eradicated (cf. Swarns, 2008). While the situations are not comparable, these fears remind me of others. In the 1960s, I taught at a historically Black College where I met and worked among members of a similar culture within a culture – what Frazier (1957) called the Black Bourgeoisie. Among the faculty (all of whom were African American except for myself, and most of whom were men), I stood out as a White woman, and also for my political and social activist perspectives and my non-middle-class background. The other faculty, highly educated and economically secure academics, were anxious in the face of student-led sit-ins and public demands for civil rights equality and, for the most part, were not participants.

There are other cultures within a culture among African Americans; in the chapter on social class I will call attention to the very affluent. But another example is that of street-corner or street-life Black men, first carefully studied about 40 years ago by Liebow (1967) and described in a book entitled Tally’s Corner. The location of that study was a neighborhood in Washington DC, one in sharp contrast to the neighborhoods more likely to be seen by tourists, diplomats, and members of Congress. A new study (Payne, 2008), situated in Harlem, New York City and Paterson, New Jersey, reveals that little seems to have changed for street-life Black men. Payne describes the communities of his study participants (ages 16–64) as “economically impoverished,… [with] high rates of unemployment, challenged school districts, arrest, police brutality, infant mortality, substance abuse, and dilapidated housing” (p. 3 f.). Street life, Payne suggests, enhances psychological and economic survival through friendship and bonding and positive community activities. It also includes a wide range of illegal ones. Payne’s qualitative and quantitative data reveal a shared ideology of attitudes and beliefs, particularly about economic and educational opportunities.

“The streets” refer to settings that include street corners, vacant lots, pool halls, parks, public recreational areas, and drug houses where chronically unemployed Black youth and men hang out and interact and where they seek recognition and respect (Oliver, 2006). Unemployment among Black men is twice as high as among White men, and the former earn 62 cents for every dollar earned by the latter. Oliver discusses “the streets” as an intergenerational ghetto institution in which values and norms and male roles are transmitted from one generation of marginalized Black men to the next. Despite this, however, the culture of the streets seems to be one that Black males who are exposed to it are able, at some point, to leave behind.

Within African American culture are wide, diverse, and multiple sources of pride, resilience, creativity, humor, achievement, and strength. That I have paid more attention to the negative challenges stemming from racism should not be misinterpreted. The data found in social science literature (e.g., Thomas, 2004) as well as the content of memoirs, fiction, and biography offer innumerable and varied examples of the role played by African American ethnicity in shaping dreams, hopes, positive values, and accomplishments, and art, music, and literature. From such sources we learn also of the powerful role played by churches, Christian faith, and spirituality in ethnic heritage and daily life. From studies such as the African American Women’s Voice Project, for example, we learn of the value placed on maintaining connection to Black heritage, as a way of dealing with racist and sexist challenges (Shorter-Gooden, 2004). From participant observer and participatory action research such as that by Ginwright (2007) and Guishard, Fine, Doyle, Jackson, Travis and Webb (2005) we learn how Black youth and their parents in community-based organizations function as problem solvers, political actors, and pursuers of social justice.

Latina/o Americans

This ethnic category, now the largest minority group in the United States, consists of almost 40 million people, or 15 percent of the population (Roberts, 2008a). Latina girls make up 15.2 percent of all the country’s girls (Denner & Guzman, 2006). Latinas/os are heterogeneous in terms of country of origin as well as educational and socioeconomic status, food, music, accents, holiday rituals, and shades of skin (Betancourt & Fuentes, 2001; Navarro, 2003). They include distinct groups from every country in Central and South America as well as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The largest group (67 percent) are Chicanas/os of Mexican descent (Lui, 2006).

For the most part, it is the Spanish language, as well as the experiences of exclusion and prejudice, that serve as unifiers within this diverse culture (Szulc, 1999). Many Latinas/os, descendants of indigenous peoples in the southern hemisphere, prefer not to be considered Hispanic, since this term denotes descendants of families from the Iberian peninsula in Europe (i.e., Spain and Portugal). It was White Spanish and Portuguese who came to the New World as conquerors and oppressors (Fears, 2003), and while Hispanic is a U.S. Census category, it is not what identifies Latina/o ethnicity. Morales (2002) has suggested an alternative identity: Spanglish. This, he argues is “what we speak, who we … are, and how we act, and how we perceive the world” (p. 3). It connotes an intricate mix of ancestry and the heritage of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.

While Latina/o Americans are diverse and represented in every social class, education level, occupation, and all other domains, they are over-represented among those with low income, the unemployed, and families living in substandard housing. Nearly 25 percent of families and over 40 percent of children live in families below the official poverty line (Langenkamp, 2005; Sue & Sue, 2003).

Negative stereotypes about Latina/o Americans permeate our media and mainstream culture. In films, advertising, television, and journalism, Latinas/os are either generally absent or negatively and stereotypically portrayed (Aparicio, 2003). The current climate in the United States is one in which European Americans are warned in the media about “the browning of America” (Ramos-Zayas, 2001). Negative stereotypes flourish, and fear and hate are expressed openly against undocumented immigrants who are subjected to harsh and unsympathetic treatment by those carrying out U.S. government policies. Most particularly impacted are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. As a consequence, open expression of Latina/o ethnicity has become problematic and personally dangerous in some areas of the United States. At the same time, ironically, Spanish is the second language in the U.S., and, in some cities and neighborhoods, it can be heard and seen everywhere in streets and shops along with other expressions of Latina/o ethnicity in food, music, and dress.

Nagel (1994) points out that, as is the case with other ethnicities, the situation and audience may influence public identification as Latina/o American. A Cuban American, for example, may identify as a Latina/o to non-Spanish-speaking others, or as a Cuban American to other Spanish speakers. In interacting with other Cuban Americans, identification may (or may not) be as a Marielito who came in boats through a special arrangement with the Cuban government in the 1980s; it was said at the time that Cuba thereby emptied its prisons and mental institutions.

The experience of Latinas/os, as with other ethnic groups, must be understood in the context of their history in the United States. Mexican American history includes colonization. As the young United States moved westward to the Pacific, White settlers were attracted to territories that were part of Mexico, and the original resident population of these areas became viewed as the trespassers. Ybarra (2003) recalls that his history books in Texas schools never mentioned the fact that Mexican people were in the state well before it became the 34th to join the Union. Little progress seems to have been made for Latina/o children in providing a respectful learning environment. Langenkamp (2005, p. 129) found evidence of a “reproduction of inequality” and an “undermining of students’ cultural identity” in her study of a public school in Texas. Ybarra (2003) also recalls the movies he saw as a child in which the good White cowboy was pitted against dirty Mexican “bandidos.” “To be Mexican-American,” he writes (p. 27), “means that you live in a country where your ancestors lived but where you feel that you are no longer valued as a citizen.”

The emphasis on negative challenges in the above text is far from a complete discussion of Latina/o American ethnicity. Once again, the reader is referred to a sizable literature of fiction and memoirs that celebrate strengths and values and ethnic pride (e.g., Alvarez, 1991, 2007; Chavez, 1994; Garcia, 1992).

Asian Americans

Americans of Asian descent, who constitute 5 percent of the U.S. population (Aizenman, 2008), also include very distinct and different ethnic groups varying in language, religion, customs, immigrant experiences, and sociopolitical history. They can be from China, Korea, or Japan (East Asia); Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand (Southeast Asia); India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, or Butan (South Asia); or they can be Filipino (Okazaki & Hall, 2002). There are at least 60 separate Asian American groups, including native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (Austria, 2003). Up until the past several decades, literature on Asian American culture was scarce and Asian Americans were mostly an “invisible” minority (Sue & Wagner, 1973).

Today the term “model minority” has largely replaced older conceptions, presenting a popular image as stereotypic as the older ones. Research on teacher perceptions of Asian American school children, for example, reveals the dominant picture of cooperative, eager to please, academically competent, well-behaved, industrious, and reliable students (Chang & Demyan, 2007).

To counter the pressures of the civil rights movement and its calls for economic and social justice for minorities of color, Asian Americans, beginning in the mid-1960s, were presented in the media as successful and problem-free – diligent, valuing education, socially mobile, and earning high incomes. The actual picture is considerably different. Careful analyses show, for example, an enormous income gap between working-class immigrants living in urban ghettos (the “downtowners”) and educated professionals and business owners (the “uptowners”). The economic profile for Asian Americans is bipolar, with Indians at the high end and Cambodians at the low end of the spectrum (Lui, 2006). The annual income of Asian Americans, considered together, is considerably less than that of European Americans with the same level of education. Yu (2006, p. 327) suggests that a visit to “the workplaces, such as Chinese buffet restaurants and Manhattan sweatshops, [will reveal] … the everyday survival struggles of those less fortunate Asian workers” who do not fit the model-minority narrative.

A recent study of Chinese Americans (University of Maryland, 2008), who, at 25 percent, constitute the largest among the Asian American groups, confirms their diversity. The investigators found a 50–50 split between the poorly educated and the better educated and more prosperous. The former tended to be more recent immigrants. But, the latter, despite their educations, were found to be confronting a glass ceiling, with those in the medical and legal professions earning considerably less than their European American colleagues. Academic success, the hallmark characteristic of the “model minority” is also far from an Asian American universal among all the constituent ethnic groups. A report by the College Board (cf. Lewin, 2008) notes that, as is true generally, Asian American SAT scores are correlated with parental education and income level. And more Asian Americans are enrolled in community colleges than in public or private four-year institutions.

Important in understanding contemporary Asian American culture/s is that each “began at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, and all faced intense racial prejudice and oppressive forms of social, political, and economic discrimination” (Endo, 1973, p. 283). In reviewing a novel by the contemporary Chinese American author Fae Ng, Mishan (2008) reminds us that while the first people not permitted to enter the United States legally were criminals and prostitutes, the next group was the Chinese.

In the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Asian American immigrants, if not brought to the United States to work on railroads or mines, were unwelcome and legally excluded (Tien, 2000). In the 1800s, to compensate for the decline of slave labor, “Chinese men were recruited as cheap contract laborers to work in mining, construction, and to build the trans-continental railroad” (Austria, 2003, p. 64). Chinese immigrants who came to work in the California gold mines were described as depraved beasts of burden and opium addicts (Yu, 2006). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (not repealed until 1943) prohibited immigration and banned the naturalization of Chinese already in the United States. The Immigration Act of 1917 declared all people from Asia to be inadmissible, and the National Origins Act of 1924 instituted an immigration quota for all nations outside the western hemisphere. When China was our ally during World War II, a yearly quota was set of 105 Chinese; to circumvent this quota some resident Chinese invented fictitious “paper families” to bring others into the country (Mishan, 2008).

In 1952, immigration restrictions were liberalized but with very low quotas for Asian countries, and the popular media continued to present Asian Americans as the insidious “yellow peril” – uncivilized, untrustworthy, treacherous, deceitful, and a threat to the American way of life (Yu, 2006).

Common to most older Asian American family members are memories of war, military control, suffering, and less than welcome entry into the United States (Chin, 2000b). A cyber exhibit documents the extraordinarily difficult challenges faced by Chinese Americans during their first hundred years in the United States (National Women’s History Museum, 2008). Added to these is the unique chilling experience among Japanese Americans of having been imprisoned, many for up to four years, by the U.S. government following a presidential Executive Order in February of 1942. Two-thirds of those made to leave their homes were U.S. citizens.

The forced dislocation of families from what was called the military exclusion zone (states on the west coast) impacted those imprisoned as well as all other Japanese Americans. As recounted by former internees, many families were given only a few days’ notice before having to move to an internment camp; they could take with them only what they could carry; and they “suffered not only the indignity of suspected disloyalty based solely on race, but also tremendous economic and personal losses” (Nagata, 2000, p. 50). In the camps, an entire family lived in a single barracks room; eating, toileting, and laundering were communal activities; and shortages were the norm. Some years ago, I saw such a room on display – a shame-evoking sight. When World War II was over and families moved back to the west coast, they faced discrimination in housing and jobs, and sometimes violence. The internment, many scholars believe, has been the pivotal experience for Japanese Americans in how they see themselves and their relations with other groups.

Each Asian American group has its own history, language/s, customs, beliefs, and relationship with the majority U.S. culture. Kakaiya (2000) has described aspects of the Indian immigrant experience. While the earliest Indian immigrants were male farm laborers, after 1965 there was considerable immigration of largely technically trained and educated professionals. More common, beginning in the 1980s, were Indian immigrants interested in business ventures such as motels, gas stations, and liquor stores.

Fiction and memoirs have added considerable qualitative information to what we know about Asian American life. Books by Jumpa Lahiri (1999, 2003, 2008), for example, focus on Indian Americans whose lives are lived among others who are well educated and fairly affluent. She explores the close interrelationships among Indian immigrants of similar background and experience and poignantly examines the tensions between older-generation expectations and those of their children living in a new world. Highlighting the lives of Chinese Americans is the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston (1976, 1980) and Amy Tan (1989). Their work reveals cultures in which the heritage of the past intersects with circumstances and issues of life in the United States. Readers are introduced to language, challenges, adaptations, beliefs, and aspirations that comprise the Asian American experience.

American Indians

As is true for other ethnic groups in the United States, there are cultures within cultures among Native American Indians. Among the almost 2.5 million people who identified as Native American or Alaskan native in the U.S. census of 2000 (cf. Sue & Sue, 2003), most relate closely to an ancestral tribe. It may surprise many to learn that there are about 600 tribal societies, each of which regards itself as a sovereign nation.

Among the Indian tribes are differences in language, customs, history, and size. There are tribes with only a few people living in isolated areas and others, like the Lakota-Dakota-Nakota or the Navajos, that are spread across several states (Peroff & Wildcat, 2002). The U.S. government provides federal recognition to more than 500 tribes; this entitles them to various services and their members to federal programs. The tribes that have not been officially recognized by the government do not have the right to legal and socio-political jurisdiction over their members (Cramer, 2006; Willis & Bigfoot, 2003). Federally recognized American Indian tribes constitute the largest landholders in the U.S. but their land and natural resources are held in trust by the government and managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (Lui, 2006).

In 1988, a Congressional Act made casino gambling possible in Indian lands, and 354 such establishments can now be found in 28 states, operated by 224 tribes. The Mashantucket Pequot’s Foxwoods (in Connecticut) is the largest resort casino in the world. In addition to providing employment, its revenues are used for higher education costs for any member of the tribe and for housing (Cramer, 2006). Where such gaming revenues are absent, unemployment (for both urban and reservation Indians) is over 50 percent, and life expectancy is 6–10 years less than that for other Americans. Compared with other ethnic groups in the U.S., Native Americans have the highest rates of diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and suicide (Gray, 2002). The average income is 62 percent of the U.S. average (Sue & Sue, 2003). The economic and environmental exploitation, that began centuries ago, continues. Within the Navajo Nation, for example, many years of uranium mining have left behind disastrous physical devastation, abandoned mine sites, and probable radiation effects seen in high levels of cancer (“The cold war,” 2008).

As the first people in what was to become the United States, American Indians, who originally numbered about 5 million (Willis & Bigfoot, 2003), have a unique history as victims of White settler expansion. The consequences of this for Native Americans has been loss of survival resources, traditional ways of life, and land, together with war, disease, broken treaties, and genocide. This history of forced colonization, fueled by greed and racism (Cramer, 2006), remains part of American Indian identity. Legends, family narratives, and tribal education provide examples of systematic efforts to undermine the survival of a people.

It was U.S. government policy that American Indian children be sent to boarding schools, often far from their families. They were not allowed to speak their own language, their hair was cut, and they were taught domestic or other skills. A character in a novel by Louise Erdrich (2005, p. 251) recalls an incident at his boarding school:

It was forbidden to speak what the teachers called Indian; sometimes those words seemed to inflame a special wrath from the teachers…. One day, Seraphine forgot or rebelled and began to speak her own language and would not stop. The matron was showing girls how to mend cushions and chairs. In her hand there was a thick needle…. She turned and struck Seraphine. The needle ripped across the girl’s face … the scar of speaking her language remained across her lips all of her life.

While the federal policy of mandated boarding schools has been abolished, reservation parents now face a choice between having their children remain in poorly funded reservation schools or attending public schools off the reservation in nearby towns. Johnson (2008) reports on such a dilemma faced by Crow Indians near Hardin, Montana. The Hardin high school is growing (and was 70 percent Indian in 2000) while the Lodge Grass high school on the reservation is shrinking in enrollment. What Indian students can get at the town school are advanced courses in math, English, and the sciences, as well as the Crow language (in addition to French and Spanish), and Indian pottery making. At the same time, “[t]here is an unofficial line in the school parking lot, one side for Whites, the other for Crow” (par. 5).

Negative stereotypes of the American Indian and anti-tribal attitudes have remained strong in places where there is a significant Indian population and have re-emerged as a backlash to Indian casino successes. In addition, the dominant perception of lazy and drunken Indians has led to arguments that affluent and successful Indians can’t be genuine or “real.” The Indian man is supposed to be silent and illiterate, a noble warrior on the plains or a city street corner bum; an Indian woman is seen as chaste or hypersexual, with long braids and feathers (Cramer, 2006). A newer, contrasting picture is of spiritual and noble environmentalists (Hamill, 2003). From fiction by Tony Hillerman, for example (in too many books to cite), readers can get a more realistic sense of what contemporary life is like for Southwest Indians – particularly the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni. Books by Louise Erdrich (e.g., 1984, 1986, 2005) provide insights into the lives of Plains Indians (especially Ojibwe). How little non-Indians know about the first people on our continent was sharply brought home to me during an exchange I had with a craftswoman during a Schimutzin celebration in Connecticut. At these yearly celebrations, tribes from all over North America compete for prizes in drumming, singing, and dancing, and vendors sell Indian art and crafts. I noticed that Turtle Island was indicated as the place where some work was produced and naively asked, “Where is Turtle Island?” It is what Indians have called North America, I was told, for over the past 600 or so years.

As a result of marriage with escaped and freed slaves, some Native Americans identify closely with African Americans. This is true, for example, of the Narragansetts of Rhode Island and the Seminoles of Oklahoma (Staples, 2002b). While the number of people who identify as American Indian has been increasing, it is estimated that the percent who are “full-blooded” is only about 34 percent, prompting questions about “true” identities (Foster, 1997). The U.S. government has used the biological criterion of “blood” to determine who is an Indian, and issues a CDIB (Certified Degree of Indian Blood) certificate to specify amount of Indianness. Tied to the CDIB is eligibility for federal programs, such as health care. The federal government is bound by treaties to provide federally funded health care for Native Americans, although it currently spends less to fulfill this obligation than it does for prisoners or recipients of Medicaid (cf. Miller, 2007).

The measure used by the federal government to determine who is a “real” Indian is in opposition to a prevalent Indian view that self-identification should rest on ties of kinship and relationship to the community (Jennings, 2008). Prior to contact with Whites, tribal membership did not rely on “blood” but on kinship through marriage or adoption, and some tribes continue to maintain their emphasis on ancestry, not considering blood quantum in making judgments about membership (Hamill, 2003). Peroff and Wildcat (2002) distinguish between “spatially” defined Indians whose identity in a tribal system begins at birth and “aspatial” Indians who may not be physically a part of a community but identify with it, with most Native Americans falling somewhere along this continuum. Fiction by any American Indian writer presents many examples of families and friends moving back and forth between city and reservation, visiting, staying, and moving on. Despite some fears that “wannabe” Indians are trying to gain tribal acceptance for illegitimate reasons, a casino-rich tribe like the Pequots had only 550 members in 2000, an increase from the 20 in 1983 (Cramer, 2006), but hardly an overwhelming one.

Friedman (1995) notes the importance of the point of reference in claiming an Indian ethnic identity. He uses two writers, Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn, as examples. In relation to White people, they are women of color. “In relation to women of color, they are Native American. In relation to Native Americans, they are members of the Laguna Pueblo” (p. 17). Other points of reference are the sites of interactions. Nagel (1994) notes that the same person might refer to her/himself as a “mixed blood” on the reservation, as a Pine Ridge Indian when speaking to someone from a different reservation, as a Sioux or Lakota when filling out U.S. government forms, or as a Native American when speaking with a non-Indian.

Jewish Americans

Jews constitute only 1/3 of 1 percent of the world’s population (compared to 33 percent who are Christian) and less than 2.5 percent of the population of the U.S. (compared to 95 percent who are Christian). But, despite the objective reality of their minority status, Jews are seldom included as a minority group in discussions of multiculturalism.

For centuries, Jews have had to cope with various manifestations of anti-Semitism and its personal, political, and economic consequences. Even in most of the early American colonies, citizenship was tied to Christianity; by 1800 “Jews could vote and hold political office everywhere except in Maryland and new Hampshire” (Lui, 2006, p. 246). In many parts of the world, Jewish communities have, at various times, been physically attacked and brutalized. A fictionalized description by A. Bloom (2007), for example, illustrates the horror and destruction experienced during an eastern European pogrom in the early 1920s. This is part of the personal story brought to the United States by countless numbers of Jewish immigrants. Such incidents preceded the Nazi-era Holocaust which, in one way or another, affected all Jewish American families, either through direct family ties or general emotional kinship. Another part of the Jewish American story is overt and covert anti-Semitism that, up until the 1950s, presented educational and occupational barriers and challenges to many.

Being Jewish provides another interesting example of ethnic complexity. A Jewish cultural identity can refer to one’s religious beliefs or to a secular non-religious recognition of shared history, customs, language, literature, and values. Whether religion is acknowledged and practiced or whether it is the music, food, customs, and/or guiding life principles that matter most, “Jews experience themselves as members of a minority culture” (Langman, 1995, p. 223) – as “insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders” (Biale, Galchinsky &Heschel, 1988, p. 5). A common thread in Jewish values is tikkun olam, a concept referring to “healing the world”, and a commitment to principles of social justice and progress (Feinstein, 2004; Siegel & Cole, 1997) – not always practiced, but held as an ideal.

The approximately 5.3 million Jews within the U.S. tend to be better educated and more affluent than other groups. Reliable data indicate that among Jews there are three times as many persons with postgraduate degrees as the national average (35 percent versus 11 percent) and that 46 percent live in households with family incomes equal to or larger than $100,000, compared with a national average of 18 percent (cf. Zuckerman, 2008). But Jews are found also among working-class, low-income and low-advantaged groups.

Within the Jewish community, there is considerable diversity depending upon the part of the world from which they have come. For example, Eastern or Central European Jews are Ashkenazi; Jews from Spain and middle-eastern countries are Sephardic. Among religious Jews, there are divisions and different sects and variations in degree of orthodoxy. Diversity is seen also among communities in different parts of the country. Kaye/Kantrowitz (2007, p. ix), for example, writes about growing up “in the Jewish land of Brooklyn” where being Jewish had to do with eating “cabbage soup and kasha varnishkes.” And, on the far southwest side of Chicago can be found the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation that is led by an African American rabbi. “[W]hile services include prayers and biblical passages in Hebrew, the worshipers sometimes break into song, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir” (Koppel, 2008, paragraph 2). After 25 years of photographing Jews in more than 40 countries in all parts of the world, Frederic Brenner rejected the notion that there is an authentic Jew. He found differences everywhere, including between cities and communities in Israel (Goodstein, 2003).

Adding to the complex picture is the relative ease with which some Jews can “pass” as non-Jewish Whites, and avoid the stigma of Jewishness (Langman, 1995), by changing such stereotypic (and unreliable) ethnic “give-aways” as a last name, the shape of one’s nose, or the color and texture of one’s hair. In various places and historical periods, anti-Semitism and oppression forced the conversion of Jews to Christianity. These Crypto Jews found ways to hide their rituals and ancestry (Gitlitz, 1996). Disclosures of having been born into Jewish families sometimes come as a surprise, as occurred when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (reared as a Catholic) learned that her parents had been Jewish and that two of her grandparents may have been murdered in Auschwitz (“Albright concludes,” 1995). The novelist Joyce Carol Oates revealed a similar recent discovery of Jewish heritage – a discovery that influenced her writing of The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Oates, 2007).

European Americans

To be European American is typically equated with being White (a term used by the U.S. Census). From an ethnic perspective, this can mean associating oneself with, or taking for granted, dominance and privilege and having little or no knowledge or interest in one’s ancestry. While those who are White seldom consider whiteness to be their ethnic identity, Hurtado and Stewart (1997) note that “people of color are experts about whiteness” (p. 308), and see the connection between an array of privileges and opportunities and being White (McDermott & Samson, 2005).

The question of just who is White and the meaning of whiteness has shifted with historical events. For example, the nation’s first Immigration Act, passed during the second session of the first Congress in March 1790, gave the privilege of naturalization only to free White person aliens, and “well into the 20th century persons of various ethnicities and hues sued for the purpose of proving themselves white” (“What’s White,” 2000, p. 64). Until the immigration laws enacted in 1965, it was White European ancestry that was the principal basis for admission into the United States (Sachs, 2001).

For many European Americans, their whiteness is invisible and taken for granted as the norm (Gillborn, 2006). Implicit in this is denial of the role played by whiteness in the domination of those who are deemed non-White and the sociocultural and economic privileges associated with whiteness (McLaren, 1999). The assumption that whiteness is a natural identity and that only “others” have ethnicity has been identified with racism (Friedman, 1995), or domination and supremacy (Gillborn, 2006). When White persons assert that they have no ethnicity, this may be an exercise in power; it suggests that such a state of being is just human, is to be preferred, and represents progress (Perry, 2001).

There is extensive evidence that whiteness is associated with higher status, privilege, power, advantage, and beliefs about merit. McIntosh (1988) has identified 50 privileges (unearned assets) that accompany being perceived as White, including the option of not being seen. To Owen (2007, p. 206), whiteness connotes particular properties including: “a location of economic, political, social and cultural advantage relative to those locations defined by non-whiteness”; being perceived “as natural, normal or mainstream”; and being “largely invisible to whites and yet highly visible to non-whites.” Reitman (2006) conducted in-depth interviews with a sample of male employees in Seattle’s hi-tech software industry and found evidence of a “whitewashed” workplace, despite employees who were not White. The everyday practices and expectations revealed an assumption of the normalcy of whiteness.

White dominance and privilege is more likely to be taken for granted if one is Anglo Saxon than if one’s parents have transmitted customs, beliefs, history, narratives, foods, or music from particular regions of Europe – for example Norway or Poland, Greece or Italy, and so on. Such ethnic influences are often revealed in novels (e.g. Krikorian, 2003, by an Armenian American) or memoirs. From such literature we learn about the Irish experience, the Italian experience, or the Greek experience, for example, and the consequences of growing up with these ethnic identities in U.S. communities. Howard (1999) writes about a new way of being White by exploring his Celtic heritage and making the connection to his ethnic roots and history.

A recent trend in research on whiteness recognizes its complexity and that its “meaning is imported by the particular context in which white actors are located” (McDermott & Samson, 2005, p. 249). Thus, Whites who are marginalized as a result of poverty or minority sexual orientation are not as likely to receive the benefits of white-skin privilege as middle-class and heterosexual Whites. These gradations in privilege are often apparent to, and understood by, people of color. Ramos-Zayas (2001) studied a mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago and found that Jews in the community were seen as “not quite White”; that Poles and Italians were perceived as not cultureless, like other Whites, but as marking their ethnicity with festivals, food, and music; and that “hillie-billies” were regarded as the lowest echelon in the ladder of Whiteness” (p. 368) who did not share the power or privilege of other Whites.

Ethnicity Matters

The reader will have noticed that attention has been paid in the previous sections to those ethnic groups in the United States that receive the most popular and scientific “press.” One striking and serious omission is Muslim ethnicity. It is hoped and thought likely that we will begin to learn more and more about Muslim life in the United States. Phinney (1996) suggests that there are three aspects of ethnicity that account for its psychological importance: distinctive values and attitudes; sense of belonging to the group; and experiences of powerlessness and prejudice associated with minority status (or the reverse). These aspects and others influence behavior in complex ways.

Beliefs associated with our ethnicity are implicated in vast areas of behavior and everyday life. For example, there are ethnic consequences for the shaping of views about the nature of illness, its treatment, and duration. Thus, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported (cf. Watters 2007) that not only do ethnic cultures differ in the likelihood of using different diagnoses, but that there are different outcomes for patients similarly diagnosed. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, do better in developing countries than in North America and Europe. Barber (2008) suggests that this is because those who are ill in cultures in the former societies typically get more support from their families and communities and are less likely to be stigmatized and excluded. The WHO is recommending that mental health work in disaster areas focus on support, and resist imposing assumptions about symptoms and treatment. With respect to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, it has been reported from Sri Lanka following the tsunami, as well as from Guatemala, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, that many of the most significant consequences to individuals exposed to the traumas of natural disaster or war are “not on the PTSD checklists” (Watters, 2007, p. 15). Differences among peoples are found in symptoms as well as in beliefs about the best ways to heal. Belief in the positive effects of discussing stress-provoking experiences is not a universal belief.

A 1992 study by Lopez and his colleagues (cited by Betancourt & Lopez, 1993) compared Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles with Anglo Americans in the same city, and they found important differences in reports of psychological distress and symptoms. In still another example, Arguello (cited by Landrine, 1995) found, among a sample of young unmarried Latinas, that anal heterosexual intercourse was considered a way to maintain their virginity and avoid the use of condoms (associated with birth control). Losing one’s virginity before marriage would bring shame on their families and was a more salient negative consequence than the possibility of HIV infection.

Language can be a powerful ethnic cue. A sample of bilingual Chinese students in Canada were randomly assigned to write anonymous and confidential self-statements in either Chinese or English. Those writing in Chinese were found to make more collective self-statements and to show more agreement with Chinese cultural views (Ross, Xun & Wilson, 2002). The researchers concluded that those writing in English wrote self-descriptions that were closer to those written by Euro-Canadians. Similarly, Hong and colleagues (2000) used Chinese and U.S. national symbols as primes for a sample of westernized Chinese students living in Hong Kong, exposing some to such U.S. iconic symbols as an American flag and Superman, and exposing others to the Chinese symbols of a dragon and the Great Wall. On presumably unrelated tasks, the participants were then found to behave in ethnically predicted ways in making attributions, for example, about a pictured fish that was swimming in front of a group of fish: was it leading the group or being chased? Available to bi-ethnic individuals, the researchers demonstrated, is knowledge from either culture that can guide an individual’s construction of meaning or interpretation, depending upon which cues are present and dominant.

Studying ethnic groups leads to a recognition and respect for diversity, while also sometimes demonstrating areas of similarity in basic values and/or ways of behaving. Schwartz & Bardi (2001), for example, reported similarities in some desirable goals and guiding life principles among large samples from many countries across the globe.

The study of ethnic groups has often focused on negative attitudes (prejudice) and discrimination directed toward minority groups, and on descriptions and consequences of stereotypes held and transmitted, particularly by those who are more dominant and powerful. Those within a devalued ethnic culture share the experiences of social inequality and deprivation and personal challenges that result from both overt and covert prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. D. W. Sue (2007) and his colleagues have called attention to the microaggressions experienced daily by people of color in the United States. These are brief but pervasive everyday snubs, looks, and gestures that communicate disrespect and denigration.

An interesting phenomenon is that ethnic stereotypes may change with the context of an ethnic group’s location. Gilman (1996) suggests that Jews, for example, are thought to be smarter than people of other ethnicities if the larger society in which they live needs to see them that way. In pre-Holocaust Europe, Jews were seen as smart but unoriginal and parasitic. In contrast, a contemporary dominant stereotype is that Jews are intellectual but physically weak, unless they are Israeli. Similarly, Krech (1999) argues that our naïve image of the American Indian as an ecological preserver of the environment is unsubstantiated by close examination of the reality of American Indian life and their use of animals and plants.

There are now more and more frequent media accounts of mixed ethnicities and complex ancestries and identities (e.g., “The new face of race,” 2000). Census data predictions are that by the year 2050, nearly 5 percent of the population in the United States will classify themselves as “multiracial” (cf. Roberts, 2008b). Among a sample of beautiful children whose faces appeared in the New York Times Magazine (“Race is over,” 1996), we can see a child who is both Pakistani and African American, a child who is Filipino and Italian and Russian, and children with other complex ethnic identities. Issues of mixed ancestry have been brought into recent prominence by celebrities such as the golfer Tiger Woods, and President Barack Obama. Both present their mixed ethnic family backgrounds as positive features of their personal identities. According to the 2000 Census, 7.3 million respondents (3 percent of the population) self-identified with two or more ethnic categories, and 3.1 million couples (or about 6 percent of married couples) reported themselves to be inter-ethnic (Navarro, 2008). These statistics are probably underestimates since there are pressures on many to make a choice of one dominant ethnicity. Tiger Woods’ description of himself as Cablinasian (Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian) was not greeted positively by all (cf. Navarro, 2008). President Obama, the son of a White mother and African father, has chosen an African American identity, but has faced such questions as “Is he Black enough?”

Mixed ethnicity may well be as much a personal identity as Asian American or Italian American. Root (1996, 2001) suggests that such an identity is accompanied by its own special challenges and experiences. It is likely to be part of the multicultural uniqueness of more and more persons in the United States. And like other ethnic backgrounds its influence on behavior will vary with the situation, the interpersonal context, the time, the place, and the level of its immediate salience.

Fiske, S. T. (2014). Social beings: Core motives in social psychology (3rd ed.).