![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This analysis explores the multiple ways in which diverse individuals negotiate the complicitous nature of U.S. racial and ethnic categories in terms of self-descriptive labels. Specifically, we draw from narratives of 100 individuals who participated in 13 different focus groups over a 9-month period (September 2006 to May 2007). These discussions provide significant insight into the complex ways in which US citizens—native born, first- and second-generation, including persons of Asian, Hispanic, African, and European descent—negotiate US racial and ethnic classifications. Utilizing complicity theory (McPhail, Citation1994, Citation2002; Patton, Citation2004) as a frame, we found that US citizens of European and African descent enact rhetoric that complies with rigid conceptualizations of race. Additionally, people of color were more likely than White Americans to question US categories for race and ethnicity. However, through their everyday rhetoric, individuals who were born primarily in the Caribbean or Central and South America and then immigrated to the US were most likely to resist essentialist racial and ethnic labels. Our article concludes with a discussion of how the study contributes to complicity theory, increases our understanding of the complexities inherent in attempts to transform existing racial and ethnic labels, and ultimately can work to enhance social justice work.
The research reported here was made possible, in part, due to a 2007 James W. McLamore Summer Award in Business and Social Sciences and a Grant from the School of Communication, University of Miami.
Notes
The full description of this study, including objective statement, institutional review board documents, descriptions of focus group procedures, and transcripts is available from the second author.
These questions were just a couple of the many questions related to in-group/out-group communication that were posed to focus group participants. As such, we believe that the responses were more revealing—compared to those that we might have collected if the entire focus group concentrated on race and ethnic labels.
Throughout our thematic analysis section, we are committed to utilizing the racial, ethnic, and cultural labels that focus group participants used to describe themselves. While this results in some inconsistencies within and between sections, we concluded that this was most appropriate especially given the focus of our study.
While our transcripts used this spelling, an alternative variation is found within the work of Valdivia (Citation2005) where she described Jennifer Lopez as a “Nuyorican.”
Of note, none of the US citizens whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe made such distinctions. This may be explained through an acknowledgment on how White privilege did not require such interrogation from others, and how many of our European American participants were not recent immigrants. This illustrates a key point: The power of assimilation is influenced largely by ones' location in the process.