Multicultural Society

According to the readings, what are the defining characteristics of a multicultural society and how do immigrant/ethnic minority communities affect the dominant culture?

Module 6: Multiculturalism

This module examines how culture functions in a multicultural society. We are interested in how ethnic minorities develop, modify, learn, and transmit culture to succeeding generations. We are looking at influences on ethnic and racial groups and how these groups influence the wider society.

We ask how do groups in a multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial society stratified along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, language, and class learn to coexist? What are some of the shared struggles that pluralist societies like America must work through to maintain that spirit of democracy, a condition in America that De Tocqueville states "dominates all others" (Mansfield & Winthrop, 2000, p. 46)? What have we learned about our own culture, our shared destiny, our minority immigrant groups, and ourselves?

In this module, rather than asking how America changes immigrants, we explore ways immigrants influence American culture. We examine a framework to explain how they succeed. We end the module with a case study of Vietnamese immigrant youth in New Orleans, exploring how ethnic identity, family structure, use of native language, peer pressure, and ethnic community institutions function together to help young people living in an inner-city culture develop resilience.

Module 6: Multiculturalism

After completing this module, you should be able to:

· define culture

· summarize how culture is transmitted from one generation to the next

· explain what is distinctive about a multicultural society

· evaluate the implications of pluralism

· explain how immigrants affect culture in the host society

· explain segmented assimilation and its role in the New Orleans case study

· describe what happens to Vietnamese youth who completely assimilate to American culture in the Little Versailles community in New Orleans

· list the factors that are social capital for some immigrant youth

Module 6: Multiculturalism

Multicultural Society

We have learned America is a multicultural society and has been from the very beginning. In the last century, millions of immigrants from almost every part of the world flooded America's shores. Many American social scientists have studied immigrants and ethnic groups using the model of assimilation, in which immigrants gradually lose their ethnic culture, language, and even religion, and conform to the norms of American society.

The model of pluralism, on the other hand, has been a strong rival framework for the study of immigrant and ethnic minorities. Pluralism, with its underlying themes of competition and conflict, captures a wide spectrum of experiences of ethnic minorities in our multicultural society. Pluralists see that each group retains its cultural identity. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, a multicultural society is characterized by cultural pluralism, a situation in which many cultures exist under one general umbrella culture, and where these cultures are celebrated for their variety and contributions to the overall society (Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 1998, p. 434).

Multicultural Beginnings

Long before the first frigate landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, Native Americans, the indigenous people of America, crossed the Bering Strait, the land bridge from Asia to the New World. They populated every inch of the continent of North America tens of thousands of years ago. By 1850, the United States took its first official census of the Native-American population, finding 400,000 individuals in 1850. That number declined to 248,000 in 1890 (Maynard, 1996, p. 360).

In 1890, a Census Bureau report predicted the extermination of the Native-American population, but the report was mistaken. In 1990, almost two million Native Americans were counted in the census (Maynard, 1995, p. 360). Despite the turbulent relations between Europeans and Native Americans, the Native-American story is one of struggle, hope, and survival.

Resilience

Resilience is the message that comes from these turbulent beginnings. Resilience is the ability of an object to bend and return to its original shape without breaking. Resilient people can cope and carry on under difficult conditions. Sometimes ethnic minorities have had to develop resilience in response to the oppression and inequality imposed on them by the larger society.

For example, the dominant culture recognized some rights and allowed some Native-American practices to be retained. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) was enacted to stop the reallocation of Indian land, though much of it already was irretrievably lost. This act provided a $10 million fund for education and economic development projects for Native Americans. Although this act was hotly debated and contested by some tribes, it was generally viewed as a step forward in European and Native-American relations (Maynard, 1996, p. 357). However, it is important to note that the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare in 1969 acknowledged Indian education had been a process of "forced assimilation" and recommended comprehensive improvements.

Immigration Today

Immigration continues at record levels today. In 2002, another 32 million people, or about 11 percent of the total U.S. population, were added (U.S. Census, February 2003, p. 2). Unlike immigrants in the early twentieth century, these new immigrants are primarily non-European. The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act gave preference to immigrants from Western Europe. When this act was overturned, the doors opened to immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

By 2003, about 50 percent of newcomers to America were from Latin America, with 9.2 million immigrants coming from Mexico alone (U.S. Census, February 2003, p. 3). The U.S. Border Patrol detained some 93,734 people who illegally crossed the border along the southwest Mexican-American border in September 2005. This was a 17 percent increase from September 2004 (2004 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, p. 14).

Where do these newcomers go? They settle in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami and Dade County, Florida, to name a few hot spots in the United States for immigrants. Many immigrants are concentrated in major urban areas in the West and Northeast. California serves as an example of a multiracial, multilingual, and highly multicultural society. A full 26 percent of California's population is foreign-born. Clearly, our shared destiny is a multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial one (Orum, 2005, p. 922).

Culture

Worldview

Culture is dynamic and ever-changing and can be thought of as a body of learned behaviors, even a common worldview that is shared among members of a particular group or society. People with a common worldview perceive their world or universe in similar ways; they share a common way of interpreting, understanding, evaluating, and conceptualizing the world around them. Two white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males from a similar socioeconomic status in America may perceive the world in similar ways. They may value individualism, capitalism, and freedom and express these ideals in a Western Eurocentric way, such as endorsing the free market system or competition, because the dominant culture in the United States has Western European roots.

Ethnocentrism

In the United States, we have a long tradition of ethnocentrism. An ethnocentric individual sees others' worldviews, cultures, or ethnic groups as inferior. The feeling that one's own culture is superior to other cultures is a common situation in multiethnic, multiracial, and multilingual societies that are stratified like ours.

Cultural Adjustment

Ethnic and minority cultures cause the mainstream or dominant culture to organize its institutions in new ways. We have studied how a society can organize family and education to benefit some groups at the expense of others. Immigrants and ethnic and racial groups in America provide pressure and motivation to rethink assumptions about what constitutes a family or how schools should be run. During the civil rights movement, multicultural education came about as a response to pressures from ethnic and racial groups whose members wanted to be included in the curriculum of American public schools. With new groups continuing to come to America, new influences and new perspectives will change schools and influence the curriculum.

Cultural Transmission

We also know that culture is learned and transmitted. Although we recognize we are all related to one another, the culture we live in shapes and differentiates our culture—that is, our behavior, values, and mores ["the fixed, morally binding customs of a particular group" (Merriam-Webster, 1995)]. One generation teaching the next passes down its particular culture. Socialization at home and the formal education system have been the primary vehicles in transmitting American culture to the young. Although schools play an important role in teaching culture, cultural transmission takes place in many domains of society. Transmitting culture from one generation to the next involves a dynamic process of recreation and rediscovery in each generation.

Cultural Adaptation

Pluralists believe immigrants are influenced by American culture, but they also influence American culture as well. Influencing the dominant culture is called cultural adaptation. Rodriguez (2002) states that Americans have adapted to an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants by printing everything from items in grocery stores to drivers license examinations to instructions at ATM machines in both English and Spanish.

Whatever our beliefs about the necessity for ethnic groups to conform to traditional American mainstream culture, including language, we recognize the reality is different. Throughout our history, ethnic and racial minorities and immigrants have provided vibrant new ways of thinking, acting, speaking, and understanding in the United States. This is evident in the adoption of new forms of media, art, cuisine, and vocabulary, all of which have enriched American experience.

The richness of the English language itself comes from borrowings; "more than 75 percent of modern English vocabulary has either been borrowed or formed from borrowed elements from other languages"(Denning & Leben, 1995, p. 7).

There has been so much borrowing from ethnic cultures in music that the subject could command its own course at UMUC. Think of the roots of American jazz in African and African-American music forms as just one example, with rock and roll, reggae, hip-hop, and rap following in subsequent generations.

Revising the Assimilation Model

Objections to the Assimilation Model

Though assimilation has been the dominant framework used to study the process of conforming to American culture, the model has been criticized in recent years. In assimilation, the ethnic group gradually divests itself of its own culture to become American. Implicit in the model is an arrow pointing in one direction, toward becoming "more American" and less ethnic. However, the reality today is different from that predicted by the model of assimilation. Immigrants who do not physically resemble Europeans find their path to assimilation blocked. Some immigrant groups find opportunities for upward economic mobility to be more limited than they were for earlier groups of immigrants.

Still others argue that in a multicultural society the forces of assimilation are not unidirectional; they run in both directions, changing immigrants into more "American" individuals and at the same time introducing into American communities the institutions, influences, activities, choices, and values of the societies immigrants came from.

Though many social scientists acknowledge ours is a pluralistic society, they also continue to use the term assimilation in modified ways to describe the processes of acculturation and settling in of new immigrants.

The Segmented Assimilation Model

Recently scholars have attempted to modify the assimilation model to conform with the different circumstances of immigration and immigrants today. One such model is segmented assimilation, in which immigrants may assimilate into a particular stratum of culture, for example into the middle class, or into "an impoverished minority culture" that closes off their opportunities for upward social and economic advancement (Marger, 2006, p. 113).

Ways Immigrants Influence American Culture

Circles of Influence 

Sociologist Anthony Orum proposes two social processes, circles of influence and chains of command, to explain the spread of influence from ethnic communities, whose borders are permeable, outward into society (Orum, 2005, pp. 926–927). Circles of influence are the ways an ethnic community goes outside its physical or cultural boundaries and influences a larger community. Thus, circles of influence can have spatial locations, but they do not need to. Orum discusses the development of ethnic restaurants, schools dominated by a single ethnic group and that continue ethnic traditions, and churches and even movie theaters that become venues for ethnic culture outside the immediate area of the ethnic community. He also discusses ethnic associations and the development of certain job sectors or union membership that can be carriers of the message of a single ethnic community. These can be any entity outside the immediate community that helps advance the interests of that ethnic group.

Chains of Command

For Orum, chains of command are ways members of ethnic groups reach from the top down and begin to influence the layers of our hierarchical society. Orum cites as an example the election of Cuban-American mayors and city council members in Florida cities who then represent Cuban-American interests and political views.

Types of Communities

Orum then posits three types of ethnic communities—robust, permeable, and influential communities. A robust community has social resources that enable it to exert its influence in wider circles beyond its borders. Robustness depends on community agreement on important values and issues. Orum discusses the different generations of Polish immigrants in Chicago and how those immigrating to the United States since the breakup of the Soviet Union have different and more urgent political agendas (e.g., support for the agenda of the Solidarity trade union) than those who came to the United States in earlier generations.

Permeable communities are those whose borders allow them to influence other sectors of society. Examples of impermeable communities are Indian reservations and Amish communities. These communities are separated physically, socially, and economically from the outside society (Orum, 2005, p. 933).

The influential community has ample institutional resources (churches, schools, economic power, voting power) as well as permeable community boundaries between itself and the larger community. An influential ethnic group can succeed because it has "ease of social access" (Orum, 2005 p. 932) that enables it to extend its influence in wider circles of influence or at higher levels in the chain of command.

Policies on Learning English

Forcible Linguistic Assimilation

Most studies of ethnic minority youth emphasize the importance of learning English and its corollary, the forgetting of the student's native language. In the past, Native-American and immigrant students were forbidden to speak their native tongues on playgrounds and in classrooms under threat of punishment. The prevailing view was that immigrant students experienced "academic failure, anxiety, and mental confusion" because of bilingualism (Bankston & Zhou, 1995, p. 3). Favored by conservatives, a more recent version of this harsh policy is that "social adaptation" is retarded the longer a student clings to her or his native language (p. 4).

Reluctant Bilingualism

A more moderate, or softer, version of the forcible linguistic assimilation policy allows students to use their native language as a "crutch" only until they become fluent in English. Then students are mainstreamed into regular, English-only classrooms. This method is the official policy of the U.S. Department of Education (Bankston & Zhou, 1995, p. 4).

Linguistic Pluralism

In recent decades, as immigrant and minority groups have asserted themselves, a new set of views has come to dominate the ideas about retaining native languages. Since the 1970s, minority groups have begun to respect and to celebrate their ethnic differences from the mainstream. Though some studies have shown bilingual students to be poorer performers in both languages, the same and other investigations point out that a student who is fluent in one language is probably fluent and high performing in both languages. Thus, with further study, bilingual outcomes now appear to be as good as or even better than outcomes of "forcible assimilation" in the past (Bankston & Zhou, 1995, p. 3).

A Case Study of Ethnic Culture and Assimilation

The Community

Sociologists Carl Bankston and Min Zhou published a series of papers and a book examining how immigrant minority group culture shapes ethnic mobility (Bankston & Zhou, 1995; Bankston & Zhou, 1997; Bankston, Caldas, & Zhou, 1997; Zhou & Bankston, 1998). They intensively studied Vietnamese immigrants in the Little Versailles community in New Orleans. This poor and disadvantaged, inner-city African-American community has been the location for resettlement of immigrants from Vietnam since the 1970s. The earliest Vietnamese immigrants were better educated and from higher social levels than those coming since 1990.

The High Schools

The researchers surveyed all Vietnamese-American students in the two high schools in the community and the few Vietnamese-American students who attended a nearby magnet school with courses for the college-bound. The high schools in the community were 77 percent African American and 20 percent Vietnamese and 85 percent African American and 12 percent Vietnamese, respectively (Bankston and Zhou, 1997, p. 512). They had "poor learning environments" and were described as "dangerous places." As in other poor communities, "a strong anti-intellectual streak in American youth culture plays out" in schools, and "students see teachers and school administrators as oppressive authorities" (Yu, 1999, p. 329). Bankston and Zhou described the "environment of racial inequality" that surrounded the Vietnamese-American students (1997, p. 512).

The Survey

In their survey, researchers asked students about their schoolwork, families, friends, and plans. They also queried students about their grades, college aspirations, family and community life, presence of grandparents, language use at home and with friends, religious practices, selection of friends, the language students spoke with friends, deviant or nondeviant social behavior, and the number of hours spent on homework.

The Results

The researchers found Vietnamese students performing better academically than African-American and white students in both high schools in the community. Some, attending the magnet school, were spectacularly successful students. In a series of publications, Bankston, Caldas, and Zhou (1997) constructed a model of cultural influences to explain the success of these students.

Researchers found that students who associated with the Americans (in this case, African Americans) or with the most Americanized Vietnamese students reported the poorest academic performance and social behavior. In contrast, those who spoke Vietnamese with friends and who were tightly connected to the Vietnamese community had the highest academic performance and most positive social behavior.

The Explanatory Model: Segmented Assimilation

Bankston and Zhou found their data revealed the presence of segmented assimilation, in which immigrants assimilated into a particular segment of society. In this case, it was an impoverished, inner-city community. Those students who assimilated most completely into the surrounding community assimilated into a social level below that of their families. It was a dangerous environment where some immigrant youth were led into deviant social behavior. The Vietnamese who did well, however, came from families that worked to protect their children from assimilating into an inner-city culture that could lead them down (rather than up) the socioeconomic scale (Marger, 2006).

Peer Pressure

In the Vietnamese community, peer pressure—that is, the selection of Vietnamese-speaking friends—was the most important factor identified as contributing to higher academic performance. A number of variables relating to the family and its effects on students also mattered. One of these variables was the number of hours spent on homework.

Family Pressure

Factors correlated with positive academic outcomes included time spent studying, family stress on education, choice of Vietnamese-speaking friends, and attendance at the Vietnamese Catholic church. Each of these factors resulted from influences of the family on the student.

By the way, the researchers did not find a significant connection between fathers' or family's education and positive academic achievement. Most of the students surveyed came from families with fairly low levels of education and income. Forty-six percent of the Vietnamese in this community lived below the poverty line, whereas 36 percent of African Americans did (Bankston & Zhou, 1997, p. 514). The factors leading to academic success indicated not socioeconomic levels or parental education levels, but rather the families' high regard and respect for education. It also indicated an effort on the part of families and their compliant youth to remain within the culture and values they brought from Vietnam rather than embracing the values of the culture that surrounded them.

Ethnic Pressure

Bankston and Zhou, in their 1995 paper, reported an interesting set of connections. They found "students' literacy in their ethnic language can contribute to their academic achievement" (p. 14). In their statistical model of findings, the strongest pathways connected reading and writing Vietnamese with identification with Vietnamese ethnicity, so the authors collapsed those two variables into a single one, ethnicity. The next strongest pathway was the connection between ethnicity (language and culture) and grades in school. The third strongest connection was between ethnicity and the importance of attending college. The fourth strongest connection was between the importance of attending college and the time spent on homework (Bankston & Zhou, 1995, p. 13). The researchers pointed out how bilingualism in this close-knit community facilitated performance in school.

Social Capital

Bankston and Zhou found that fluency in Vietnamese "gives students access to the social capital" of their ethnic community (Bankston and Zhou, 1995, p. 14). In this case, Vietnamese youth found social capital within their ethnic community that facilitated their upward social mobility. Social capital refers to strengths and connections people make among relatives and friends, which then help them succeed.

Social capital is a concept developed by sociologist James S. Coleman. Adapting terms (physical capital and human capital) from economics, Coleman found a similar situation with social connections in families and communities. Social assets such as the positive relations inside families and between families and a cohesive community provided a strong incentive to academic achievement (Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 1998, p. 608).

Bankston, Caldas, and Zhou (1997) discussed their findings in terms of social capital. They found that common norms such as respect for education; family cohesiveness; the maintenance of native language, customs, and religion; and the limited interaction between the Vietnamese immigrant community and the surrounding neighborhood had great social value in encouraging academic achievement among youth. In effect, this active resistance to assimilation was highly protective of youth.

SUMMARY

We began this module by looking at the multicultural nature of American society. We found resilience to be an important attribute of ethnic minorities. We discovered that immigration continues at very high levels at present and that immigrants tend to settle in a few large cities in the United States.

We examined culture and found it is not a static concept. We discovered that culture is learned and transmitted from one generation to the next through the institutions of society such as the education system. There is not a rigid, monolithic American culture we ask immigrants to accept. Culture is continually changing, borrowing, adding, adapting, and moving on.

We investigated the ways ethnic groups not only are changed by coming to America, but change American culture by their presence and activities. We discussed circles of influence and chains of command as two ways ethnic minority groups affect the dominant culture. We discovered that robust communities whose borders are permeable are able to influence the wider society.

The view of bilingualism has changed in recent years. We discovered that the U.S. Department of Education policy, which researchers call reluctant bilingualism is giving way to considering the possibility that true bilingualism (linguistic pluralism) is preferable to extinguishing a student's native language.

Finally, we considered a case study of a Vietnamese immigrant community in New Orleans, an example of segmented assimilation. In this community, Vietnamese students who learn English but remain socially and culturally unassimilated fare better academically than those who assimilate completely. We found that in this community students benefited from the social capital of same-language peers, family, and community, and from families and religious institutions that formed a closed and protective network within which they could thrive academically. The culture brought by the immigrants, their values and norms, and the maintenance of their native language, all supported the development of youth who otherwise would have assimilated to a community where downward social mobility was likely.

One reviewer called the book based on these studies a "nuanced and sophisticated examination of culture and structure" (Gold, 1999, p. 159). We agree that the studies illustrated how many interacting aspects of culture—how many individual, family, and institutional practices—can form a seamless web that supports immigrant youth. We saw Coleman's concept of social capital in action. However, most important to us in this course, we discovered a renewed appreciation for the resilience, coping ability, and strengths of youth, families, and communities of ethnic minorities in America.

REFERENCES

Bankston, C. L., III, Caldas, S. J., & Zhou, M. (1997). The academic achievement of Vietnamese American students: Ethnicity as social capital. Sociological Focus, 30 (1), 1–16.

Bankston, C. L., III, & Zhou, M. (1995). Effects of minority language literacy on the academic achievement of Vietnamese youths in New Orleans. Sociology of Education, 68, 1–17.

Bankston, C. L., III, & Zhou, M. (1997). The social adjustment of Vietnamese American adolescents: Evidence for a segmented-assimilation approach. Social Science Quarterly, 78 (2), 508–523.

Denning, K., & Leben, W. R. (1995). English vocabulary elements. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gold, S. J. (1999). Growing up American (book review). Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 25 (1), p. 159.

Mansfield, H., & Winthrop, D. (2000). Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marger, M. N. (2006). Race and ethnic relations: American and global perspectives (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Maynard, J., ed. (1996). Through Indian eyes: The untold story of Native American peoples. New York: Reader's Digest.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.). (1995) Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, s.v. mores.

Orum, A. M. (2005). Circles of influence and chains of command: The social processes whereby ethnic communities influence host societies. Social forces, 84 (2), 921–939.

Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (2nd ed.). (1998) New York: Oxford University Press, s.v. multicultural society, social capital.

Rodriguez, R. (2002). Brown: The last discovery of America. New York: Penguin Group.

United States Census. (February 2003). Current Population Reports. Washington, DC: U.S. Printing Office

United States Department of Homeland Security. 2006. Yearbook of immigration statistics: 2004. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics.

U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. (1969). Indian education a national tragedy—A national challenge. 91st Congress, 1st Session, Washington, DC: U.S. Printing Office, p. 9.

Yu, H. C. (1999). Growing up American (book review). American Journal of Education, 107 (4), 328–331.

Zhou, M., & Bankston, C. L., III (1998). Growing up American: How Vietnamese children adapt to life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Module 6: Multiculturalism

Being able to define and discuss the following terms will help you pass the midterm and final examinations. Some terms on this list will appear on the midterm and final examinations for you to define. A sample definition has been provided to model a proper response.

· multicultural society

· cultural transmission

· cultural adaptation

· assimilation

· segmented assimilation

· pluralism

· circles of influence

· chains of command

· robust community

· permeable community

· influential community

· reluctant bilingualism

· linguistic pluralism

· social capital

Sample definition of assimilation:

Assimilation refers to the way immigrants settle into and adapt to society. In assimilation, individuals lose elements of their culture, language, and sometimes even their religion, as they gradually conform to the culture of the host society. For a century, assimilation has been the dominant model for studying the ways immigrants settle into American life. Today, it is seen as a less than adequate model for it fails to explain the contributions of immigrant ethnic groups to American society. It also fails to recognize the interest present-day immigrants have in preserving and enhancing their cultural distinctiveness.

Module 6: Multiculturalism

You may use these questions to assess what you have learned in this module. Questions will be selected from this list and placed on the midterm and final examinations. A sample answer has been provided to model a proper response.

1. What is culture?

2. What are the defining characteristics of a multicultural society?

3. What is forcible linguistic assimilation?

4. What is segmented assimilation and why does it matter?

5. How do immigrant/ethnic minority communities affect the dominant culture?

6. Why do researchers believe it sometimes helps immigrant youth to retain much of their native culture and language?

7. Please provide an example of social capital from your own life.

Sample answer to question 3:

Forcible linguistic assimilation is a term for the older practice of forbidding students to speak their native language, in an effort to have them learn English faster. Early in the twentieth century, immigrant students were not allowed to use their native language in classrooms or on the playground, nor were Native Americans in orphanages and boarding schools. This idea has been given up in some places as educators realize they might be more effective allowing students to use their native language as they are learning English. Other forward-thinking educators now recognize that bilingualism does not adversely affect students; they recognize bilingualism facilitates development in both languages.

Emerging Conceptions of Race

Module 5: Emerging Conceptions of Race

In our final module, we will explore some emerging concepts and lingering questions about race and race relations today. Although social scientists of all persuasions agree that race as a concept serves little function in explaining human differences, similarities, behavior, or intelligence, they still find that old ideas about race persist in the minds of most people.

We will focus our attention upon a number of topics to help us investigate contemporary issues of race. Topic I, Race and Americans, investigates the complex and shifting issues of race as it relates to national identity. In topic II, Racial Mixtures, we will discuss the new U.S. Census racial categories and what they imply about our traditional racial categories in America. Topic III, Race and Housing, will illuminate points in the housing market and related enterprises where racial discrimination takes place. In topic IV, Racial Profiling, we will present and discuss evidence used by police and customs officials to identify potential criminals and the actions taken by those officials. Topic V, Race and Poverty, describes some of the difficulties researchers encounter when they study racial groups. Our discussion in topic VI, Race and Health Care, illustrates the intertwined nature of race and poverty. Our module ends with topic VII, Race Redefined, in which we bring together several definitions of race and consider the usefulness of race as a category today.

Module 5: Emerging Conceptions of Race

After completing this module you should be able to:

· evaluate why some racial groups are considered "more American" than others

· hypothesize about the implications of recognizing multiracial individuals in our society

· judge whether the housing market discriminates against racial minorities

· weigh the evidence that racial profiling is commonplace

· evaluate the biological and societal significance of race today and in the future

Module 5: Emerging Conceptions of Race

Topics

Ethnicity and "Americanness"

"Who is an American?" is a question that social psychologists frequently address. In a research report titled American = White?, social psychologists Thierry Devos and Mahzarin Banaji describe a series of experiments they conducted to explore which American ethnic group—African American, Asian, or white—was most strongly associated with the category "American" (Devos & Banaji, 2005). The researchers recognized that we all talk about being committed to a multicultural America and we all discuss egalitarian principles. However, they found important differences between these explicit statements and implicit views. Devos and Banaji found people of all racial/ethnic groups openly discuss equality of all groups, but under the surface, they maintain racist views that were held by previous generations.

Study participants were 114 Yale University undergraduate students. The racial and ethnic backgrounds of the students were as follows:

· 77 were white Americans

· 18 were Asian Americans

· 9 were Hispanic Americans

· 8 were African Americans

· 1 person was of mixed race/ethnicity

· 1 person who declined to specify his or her race/ethnicity (p. 449)

In the Devos and Banaji study (2005), participants were asked to rate 13 factors related to "Americanness." The researchers defined Americannessas traits that a "true American" would possess (p. 449). For each characteristic, study participants were asked to quantify their agreement with the statement that the attribute is an important attribute of being a true American using a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree; p. 450). Study participants ranked the list of traits identifying Americanness as shown in table 5.1.

Table 5.1 Perceived Americanness of Personal Traits

Source: Devos & Banaji, 2005, p. 450

Do you agree with the rankings of these attributes? Which might you change or delete and why? Are there others you might add? How might you rank these traits?

Next, Devos and Banaji (2005) asked the same group to determine how three ethnic groups—white, African American, and Asian American—ranked in their degree of Americanness. They were asked to assign a value to each ethnic group, based on a 7-point scale ranging from 1, Not at all American, to 7, Absolutely American (p. 449). The data are summarized in table 5.2.

Table 5.2 Perceived Americanness of Ethnic Groups

Source: Devos & Banaji, 2005, p. 451

According to Devos and Banaji (2005) several key findings emerged from both parts of this study. Overall, participants expressed a strong commitment to democratic principles in their rankings of attributes they considered American: for example, the act of voting was perceived as far more important than one's religion. However, participants also expressed "that some ethnic groups are simply less American than others—not in rights and liberties but in the degree to which they embody the concept 'American'" (p. 451).

When asked openly, individuals of all racial and ethnic groups reported no minority group to be less American than others. However, when using measures of implicit thinking, the investigators found that "To be American is to be White" (Devos & Banaji, 2005, p. 463). They further found, "Asian Americans and, to a lesser extent African Americans, are not viewed as being as American as White Americans" (p. 463). Devos and Banaji believe these implicit views reflect the inequalities found in American society. They conclude that the strength of this belief about what makes one an American encourages mistreatment of ethnic minorities. When patriotism is expressed, they maintain, it implies "a relative exclusion of ethnic minorities from the national identity" (p. 464).

Perspectives on Being White

Sometimes the question "Who is an American?" illustrates the shifting nature of barricades that characterize racial and ethnic discrimination. Law professor John Tehranian (2007) discusses a professorship he had sought some years ago. He had interviewed at the law school and had gotten the impression there was strong support for hiring him. However, when the faculty cast their votes, he was one vote short of the required 75 percent. The faculty member who telephoned Tehranian with the news told him not to be concerned, for "It was just a race issue" (p. 2).

Tehranian discusses his disappointed response:

I robotically mumbled: "Well, it’s sad to think that there might still be discrimination against minorities." "No, no, John. They objected to the fact that you are white," he replied. I was stunned. "White?" I said. "Yeah. They insisted that we hire a minority candidate. They’ve drawn a line in the sand and simply won’t accept another white male hire." (Tehranian, 2007, p. 2)

This university was in a community with a significant Middle Eastern population, which was reflected in the student body, and there was not a single professor of Middle Eastern descent on the university's full-time faculty. Tehranian reminded the caller that he was Middle Eastern. The faculty member responded that Tehranian's being Middle Eastern meant that he was considered white. Tehranian responded, "White, huh? That's not what they call me at the airport" (Tehranian, 2007, p. 2).

This example illustrates the ambiguous nature of racial identity and "Americanness" for members of some groups. At the airport, we may presume, this man of Middle Eastern ethnicity is subject to intense scrutiny as a foreigner, and in many other circumstances, he is deemed a member of a minority group. He is thought of as a foreigner, even though he is an American citizen. On the other hand, because members of his group are sometimes characterized as white, he is denied the benefits of decisions to favor minority candidates.

Tehranian finds as a Middle Easterner, he has the "'luxury' of covering [disguising or changing his ethnicity] in multiple ways" (2007, p. 18), but he feels sometimes his racial/ethnic category puts him at risk (Tehranian, 2007, p. 18). He concludes that in the United States, covering in multiple ways—as he feels he must in order to avoid the effects of discrimination and racial profiling—comes at a cost to his "identity, dignity, and rights" (Tehranian, 2007, p. 18).

Recall the racial prerequisite cases in module 3, Race and the Law. Tehranian's case illustrates the complexity of racial prejudgments when put into practice in daily life in the United States.

In today's multiracial American society, the standard categories of race—black, white, Asian, and Native American—are disappearing. In 2000, the U.S. Census found that 6.8 million individuals checked a brand new box identifying themselves as having mixed-race ancestry. This category, called the "two or more races" category, was included for the first time in the 2000 U.S. Census, marking a watershed year for the recognition of multiracial individuals.

Do you belong to more than one race? On the 2000 U.S. Census forms, 6,826,228 people in America reported themselves as multiracial. Of those, more than 450,000 indicated that they identified with three or more races (U.S. Census, 2000).

In his book, Racism Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the ways African Americans and other minority groups lag behind white groups in the United States today. He finds that dark-skinned minorities as a whole "are about three times more likely to be poor than whites, earn about 40 percent less than whites, and have about an eighth of the net worth that whites have" (Bonilla-Silva, 2006, p. 2).

Bonilla-Silva finds inequality extends from failure to serve customers of minority races in restaurants to a controversial practice called racial profiling.

Racial profiling is a term for the action of searching or arresting a person based primarily on his or her perceived race, nationality, ethnic group, or religion. This behavior is most often exhibited as the preferential stopping of individuals of minority races by the police. Racial profiling also describes the characterization of an individual as a suspect based on perceived racial, ethnic, or religious attributes. The most common claims of racial profiling of this nature are seen in the preferential searching of people deemed to appear Muslim by customs agents at borders and in airports.

Is racial profiling legal?

If you speak to a statistician about race, he or she might comment that race and poverty are confounding (or confounded) variables in many research studies. Confounded variables are related to one another, or correlated, and often cannot be separated from one another in a given study (Kerlinger, 1964; Lohninger, 1999). Even when the variable of interest—in our case, race—is within the control of the researchers, extraneous confounding variables that are not controllable also affect the results. Because poverty is often correlated to racial categories, either variable, poverty or race, could be determining the results of the study. To further complicate matters, a third uncontrolled variable, such as having or not having health insurance, might just as logically have caused the result.

In 2006, African-American physician David Satcher, former assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and U.S. Surgeon General from 1998 to 2002, wrote an article dealing with those same confounding variables: race, poverty, and lack of health insurance.

Satcher found that in 1900, Americans lived on average 47 years, but today we can expect to live 77.6 years. African American males, however, have a life expectancy of 69.2 years, compared to 75.4 years for white males (Satcher, 2006, p. 1684).

Do you believe race is the cause for the difference in life expectancy that Satcher noted? Think of other factors that might affect the life expectancy within a particular group. 

Dr. Satcher then proceeded to ask the question, "What if we were equal?" (Satcher, 2006, p. 1684). He imagined how different conditions would be for African Americans if they had equal access to health care and health insurance and were treated equally at health care institutions. His data illustrate the gap between outcomes for African Americans and outcomes for white people. He finds that, if racial disparities in health care were eliminated, in one year alone:

· 24,000 fewer African Americans would have died of heart disease

· 4,700 fewer black infants would have died in their first year of life

· 22,000 fewer African Americans would have died of diabetes

· 2,000 fewer African American women would have died of breast cancer

· 250,000 fewer African American would have been infected with HIV/AIDS

· 7,000 fewer African Americans would have died of AIDS

· 2.5 million more African Americans, 65,000 of whom are children, would have health insurance (Satcher, 2006, p. 1684)

Race, poverty, and lack of health insurance function as confounding and intertwined variables in the narrative that follows, from a discussion of the health-care system in New Orleans. This situation illustrates how those three factors combined to produce poor health outcomes and inequalities in access to health care for African Americans in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.

A physician named Don Erwin served as chair of the department of internal medicine at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans (McCarthy, 2006, 1056). For years, he gave the finest care possible to his patients without thinking about who they were. His patients were middle-class and wealthy individuals with health insurance coverage; nearly all were white. Health care in New Orleans has always existed in a two-tier system: one tier for white people who were insured, and one for black people, most of whom were uninsured.

Reporting in The Lancet in 2006, Michael McCarthy asserts that the health care system in New Orleans might have been "the most inefficient and ineffective in the country" (p. 1056). People who had health insurance went to private hospitals that mainly served white patients. Those who didn't have insurance went to state-run public hospitals. Most of the uninsured were poor and African American. At Charity Hospital, the largest public hospital, patients waited months for appointments, and once at the hospital waited hours to be seen. At Charity Hospital, 75 percent of patients were African American, and 85 percent were uninsured and living on incomes of less than $20,000 per year (p. 1057). Charity Hospital cared for a much sicker population while operating with far fewer resources.

Charity Hospital was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and has remained closed since the hurricane flooded and devastated the city. Only half of the 22 hospitals in the New Orleans area have reopened, and all of them are overcrowded. Though many physicians have New Orleans, those who remain are planning to construct a new health care system for the city.

Dr. Erwin, now retired, has stayed in New Orleans to work to create a new medical system that is more efficient and more equitable than the two-tiered, black-and-white system that prevailed for so long. Erwin remembers, "I never took responsibility for patients who were not in my office," (as quoted in McCarthy, 2006, p. 1056). Today, he has responsibility for those additional, unseen patients and is working again. He serves in a nonprofit, privately funded primary-care facility that serves primarily poor African-Americans in New Orleans. Dr. Erwin divides his time between caring for patients and applying for donations and grants to keep the clinic where he works operating. He and others hope to construct a system of neighborhood clinics where even an uninsured patients can have his or her own physician, just as an insured patients does.

Before the hurricane, the wealthy hospitals that served mainly white patients had most of the expensive equipment. The equipment and the beds were often not in use in those well-funded hospitals and clinics. The poor hospitals like Charity Hospital—chronically overfilled, with more patients waiting—could not afford such expensive equipment, though they had far sicker patients who would have benefited from expensive diagnostic equipment (McCarthy, 2006, p. 1056).

The combination of such inefficiencies and unmet needs with the sheer numbers of uninsured, seriously ill people greatly increased the cost of health care in New Orleans and yielded poor health outcomes. Before the hurricane, Louisiana's per capita Medicare spending was the highest in the United States, yet its health outcomes ranked the lowest (McCarthy, 2006, p. 1056).

Even though the flaws in the former, two-tiered health care system have been recognized and criticized, many people believe real change will be difficult to achieve. The old system was a patchwork of private institutions (for white and insured patients) and public institutions (for black and uninsured patients). Hurricane Katrina destroyed many of the city's facilities, or damaged them beyond repair, but those facilities probably will be rebuilt as they were, because economic and racial segregation was so long established in New Orleans. Racial segregation, no longer mandated by law, nevertheless continues to be the custom (McCarthy, 2006). The health care system in New Orleans, developed as a segregated system, continues in such a manner today. With such unequal distribution of resources and producing such poor health outcomes, the health care system in New Orleans continues to practice under policies that Erwin characterizes as institutional discrimination (McCarthy, 2006, p. 1056).

Race Is Meaningless

Most scientists discarded race as a topic of scientific inquiry following the Nazis' atrocities in WWII. Geneticist Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, finds the connection between genetics and race a "highly charged topic" because of the history of eugenics and the denigration in the past of nonwhite groups (Collins, 2004, p. S13).

As we discussed in module 2, geneticists have discovered that all modern humans are descended from one small group of individuals who originated in Africa (Wells, 2006). That means race no longer has meaning, because we now understand that all humans are members of one race—the human race. Thus, until recently it has been easy to claim that race was "biologically meaningless" (Collins, 2004, p. S14).

Race Has Value as an Indicator

However, modern geneticists have rediscovered race. Race, even when defined only in terms of skin color, has some usefulness as a marker that might indicate ancestry. This is important because genetic ancestry is linked to certain diseases. We know some diseases (Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia) are more prevalent in certain ancestral migration groups. Parra, Kittles, and Shriver (2004) report that skin pigmentation is often used to estimate ancestral migration group. That group of researchers explored whether race (defined, for the scope of this research, as skin pigmentation) might be a way of discovering which branch of human migration a given individual comes from. They studied skin pigmentation and ancestry in five groups: African Americans in Washington, DC; African Caribbeans in England; Puerto Ricans in New York; Mexicans in Guerrero, Mexico; and Hispanics in the San Luis Valley, which straddles the border between Colorado and New Mexico.

Skin Color and Ancestral Group

Parra, Kittles, and Shriver (2004) recognize that illnesses can result from living in poverty and/or being exposed to environmental toxins, but there also are susceptibilities to diseases that are inherited—i.e., genetic. The researchers' strategy in looking for anything that correlates with genetic ancestry was to tap into this genetic component of disease or potential for disease that is shared by members of the same ancestral migration group. Descendents from each of the groups that left Africa and moved out into and across the world share common genetic mutations within their own groups. Thus, discovering an individual's ancestral migration group helps identify that person's potential for certain diseases. Parra and his team examined what they called association studies in order to evaluate the usefulness of skin color as a proxy for genetic ancestry.

Their findings revealed that the relationship between skin color and ancestry is variable. It was "moderately strong" in some of the groups they tested (Puerto Ricans living in New York City) and "weak" in others (Mexicans in Guerrero; Parra et al., 2004, p. S54). The researchers concluded that the relationship between skin pigmentation and ancestry may be "strong, weak or even absent," which means it is of only limited usefulness in determining ancestry to be in a certain migration group (p. S58).

Race is a blurry indicator, Collins says, of the limbs and branches of the human tree (Collins, 2004). It tells us something about different migrations of people out of Africa starting some 50,000 years ago, when the continents were joined together in one large land mass. A small group of people from Africa first walked to India, then crossed over to Australia. Other branches of the human tree went to the Middle East, the Far East, Europe, and to the Americas. Each branch follows different strands of the same original population. Individuals in each of these branches developed different small, genetic mutations that were either advantageous or detrimental to their survival, mutations that were passed on to descendents and that set the stage for diseases or helped prevent them. Because genetic mutations cluster by the limbs and branches of these ancestral migrations, some diseases, as well as some protection from diseases, likewise cluster by groups from this ancestral migration. Our traditional racial distinctions—African American, Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and white—are imperfect and imprecise names for these different branches of the human tree.

Researchers have discovered that geographic ancestry (which limb on the tree your ancestors followed out of Africa) is associated with genetic ancestry (your ancestors' genetic makeup), but that genetic ancestry is not strongly associated with our contemporary categories for racial groups (Bamshad, 2005, p. 937). Collins points out the blurry nature of race as defined by skin color, resulting from the mixture of populations that has taken place since the initial migrations out of Africa (Collins, 2004, p. S16).

In essence, we understand that our traditional categories of race, which are based principally on skin color, are of very limited usefulness in predicting ancestral migration group membership, but skin color data are the most accessible data we have.

Race Is the Result of Many Factors

Collins maintains that "'race' and 'ethnicity' are terms without generally agreed-upon definitions" (Collins, 2004, p. S13). His statements remind us of the conclusion reached by W. E. B. Du Bois, that race is socially and historically constructed. Collins finds our categories of race result from "culture, history, socioeconomics and political status" (p. S13), as well as connection to one's own ancestral migration group. For that reason, Collins finds that although race is an imperfect proxy for ancestral migration group, it is all we can use to predict the "geographical origins" of an individual and the "particular genetic variants" (increasing probabilities of certain diseases) that belong to the individual's ancestral migration group (p. S13). Thus, race is once again in use as a category by scientists, though it plays a much smaller role in science than it does in our history and culture.