U.S. racial and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

The study of U.S. racial and ethnic relations is often reduced to the study of racial or ethnic relations. This article reveals the limitations of a focus on ethnicity or race, in isolation, and instead urges a new framework that brings them together. We consider three cases that have been conceptualized by the ethnicity paradigm as assimilation projects and by the race paradigm as structural racism projects, respectively: (1) African-American entrepreneurs; (2) the Mexican middle class; and (3) black immigrant deportees. We reveal the shortcomings of the ethnicity paradigm to consider race as a structural force or to acknowledge that structural racism conditions incorporation in marked ways; and the limitations of the race paradigm to take seriously group members’ agency in fostering social capital that can mediate racial inequality. Instead, we offer a unifying approach to reveals how ethnicity and race condition members’ life chances within the U.S. social structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Race relations
• middle-class minorities
• assimilation
• critical race theory
• race and ethnicity
• undocumented immigrants

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This is not to say that scholars engaged in race research fail to consider the role of ethnicity, or that ethnicity scholars ignore the role of race; however, the way in which they understand these concepts and their effects is through the lens of their own paradigm’s primary focus. That is, the salience of race in ethnicity research is often relegated to a secondary or additive role and vice versa. Likewise, individual-level characteristics associated with “values”, “skills”, or “resiliency”, and how such attributes influence specific outcomes are readily incorporated into race or ethnicity research as offering a partial but subordinate explanation. The ethnicity paradigm’s emphasis on the meso-level effect of ethnicity or the race paradigm’s attention to macro-level processes associated with race is in keeping with each paradigm’s organizing principles. Our cases serve to illustrate this point.