One theme that comes up a lot when we discuss race and politics in the United States is the way that the concept “race” itself changes over time. For example, nowadays you hear a lot about white voters, but fifty years ago, the central category was occupied by white Protestants. White Catholics were considered a separate category, not black but not fully mainstream white, sort of like Hispanics and Asians today. (This is not to say that today’s commentators treat whites as a monolithic bloc, there’s still lots of talk about the Catholic vote, but I think that “white” as a category is perceived as having more meaning today as a national political category, compared to how things were thought of than in the mid-twentieth century.)
Another example is the perception of Asian Americans. I was thinking about this topic recently after seeing this offhand comment in a blog by Tom Maguire:
The Japanese are neither brown-skinned nor Muslim nor poor . . .
I’m pretty sure he’s right about there being very few Muslim or poor people in Japan. (Not zero in any case but a small fraction of the total population of the country. Apparently Japan has a high rate of relative poverty, though.)
But I always thought the Japanese did have brown skin. I guess people used to say “yellow,” but it always seemed more like “tan” to me. I wonder if this is some sort of modern redefinition: if Japanese are honorary whites, then their skin gets lightened too? I’m not suggesting any malign intent here on the part of Maguire, just wondering if there’s some relabeling going on implicitly.
Sort of vaguely related to the idea that, until very recently, in the U.S. when people said “Asian” they meant east Asian and not, for example, south Asian. (Consider, for example, HABAW. I think she would’ve been referred to as HIBAW had she been south-Asian-looking. Especially considering that she had a British accent.)
P.S. That first paragraph above was pretty much of a mess. Probably because it’s based on my speculations and not backed by any hard facts.
P.P.S. I can’t quite bring myself to post this on 538; it doesn’t quite seem of general interest. Scrolling through Maguire’s blog, I noticed that he and his commenters don’t have a very high impression of Nate, so I don’t know what they’d think of my comments here.
P.P.P.S. I encountered Maguire’s blog through a typically circuitous internet path, starting with a search offi my own blog to find this graph that had been posted by Greg Mankiw and then going to the source, then to this update, to the main page of that blog, where i scrolled though a few pages of Youtube links until I found this link which caught my eye.
Well, what about South Asians in the USA?
Some are Muslim. Some are poor. As for skin color….quite a large range there.
And there are an extraorindary number of doctors and engineers, to say nothing of lawyers and other professionals. Clearly, this is a result of how our how our immigration policies have favored the education and the way that high education levels act like an inherited trait — though clearly mostly through culture and environment, rather than genes.
South Asia. 1.5 billion people. Mostly Hindu. And most people don't even know what South Asia is, and really do not mean those folks when talking about "Asians."
Our ideas and common labels for enthnicity don't really work well.
The more I've learned about "race", the clearer it has been to me that how to define races are pretty much political decisions, taken like most political decisions with no consistency at all. I've seen charts in museums in Latin America showing the absurdly complex racial classification system in Spanish colonial times, with different categories depending on how many Indian, African, or European ancestors you had. But the "one drop" rule adopted in the post-reconstruction race codes, that still informs American thinking about race (its why people, including Obama, think Obama is Black), is no less ridiculous.
So in the United States there is apparently a race of "Hispanics" that apparently doesn't exist anywhere else. This includes people who can trace their ancestry back to Spain, Mexico, or Paraguay, but evidently not Brazil, but its a racial classification, not a linguistic one! Plus the confusion about defining "Asian", which seems to consist of tracing ancestry back to some, but not all countries on the continent of Asia.
Like in other areas of American life, it might be worth looking at how other countries handle this. I would suggest Brazil as a point of comparison, since its another immigrant nation with a history of slavery. Not that their way of handling things is better, but the contrast would be informative.
But I always thought the Japanese did have brown skin.
It's darker than Caucasian skin, but not much darker. Japanese have the lightest pigmentation among Asians, ranging from whitish to tan. Trying to fault Maguire on his phrasing sound much more like defining white up, than defining ethnicity down.
It's interesting, because typically, when people say Asian in the UK, they mean South Asian — as in Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi etc.
Since I'm Chinese, it's quite funny to sometimes have to put myself down as 'Asian – Other.'
Japan is one of those rare instances where the local oppressed minority happens to be White:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
It's funny, when I saw the subject I thought it was going to be about how nobody is white anymore: "oh, I'm non-white, I'm Jewish" "I'm Hispanic, and white people look funny to me". I've seen someone try to gain non-white cred because she had red hair!
Too many lawyers, tenured professors, and other middle-class liberals with too much middle-class guilt, all trying to grab a bit of that ethnic moral high ground. And mostly managing to insinuate that white working-class people in trailers are "privileged" over them.
All I can say is . . . I'm pretty sure that most Japanese people are browner than I am!
For the sake of consistent terminology, "Hispanic" is not classified as race, but ethnicity by the U.S. government. It's the only ethnicity classification in the system and it makes talking about demographics based on census data very confusing because one has to specify when one is talking about non-Hispanic whites vs. whites generally (most Hispanics are classified as white, but there are Hispanics who classify under every other racial group…there are Asian Hispanics and Pacific Islander Hispanics, for instance)
Japan is one of those rare instances where the local oppressed minority happens to be White:/i>
this is genetically false. the ainu are simply a branch of siberians who don't have the typical northeast asian look. the japanese themselves are on the order of 20-25% of the same jomon stock as the ainu.
re: japanese = white. there's a long history to this. when europeans encountered east asians in the 16th century they often did label these people as "white," because they overlapped with the complexion of southern europeans and were very advanced cultures. the rise of european racialism in the 19th century erased this viewpoint. the rise of japan brought it back implicitly, there was a survey in the journal of ethnic studies read which surveyed white canadian students in the 1980s. about 50% thought that japanese were white. all of them invariably thought that argentina was non-white. the difference was probably because argentina is a basket-case, albeit 90-95% self-identified white (more than USA), while japan was on the rise.
cultural alienness also matters. i have middle eastern friends who are white until someone hears their name. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity has some interesting stuff in this vein.
p.s. i believe that many east asians and middle easterners do consider themselves white, as opposed to the blacker and browner people of south and southeast asia, as well as africa. the arabs consider themselves white in relation to africans obviously, since some of the hadiths going back to muhammad make distinctions between "whites and blacks."
If we must talk about race, we should use something other than a color name. I'm not "white", or even eggshell or ecru. Maybe beige. What's wrong with "Caucasian"?
Using "Caucasian" emphasizes the similarity of features — EXCEPT for skin color — that run from Ireland through Russia and Iran to India.
ZBicyclist's comment minds me of Steve Biko's wonderful response to the judge who asked him why he called himself "Black" when he looked brown: why do you call yourself White when your skin is a kind of pinkish-grey?
"cultural alienness also matters. i have middle eastern friends who are white until someone hears their name" The same is true for (or even more so) Latin Americans who are European descendants. Just think about Argentina, where the population is whiter than US or even the German descendants in the south of Brazil. Sorry, professor Gelman but they can be "whiter" than you!
My impression is that white in US means mostly anglo-white, those who believe are British descendants.
Antonio: I didn't say anything about Brazilians; I merely said that most Japanese people are browner than I am. What interested me about Maguire's original comment was that he considered it so evident that Japanese are not "brown-skinned" that neither he nor any of his commenters felt the need to remark on this.
What's wrong with "Caucasian"?
what's wrong with mongoloid and negroid? :-) nothing is wrong with it, but it seems weird to preserve a pre-world war 2 racial term when the others have been discarded.
Just think about Argentina, where the population is whiter than US or even the German descendants in the south of Brazil.
just a minor note, argentina "whites" seem to be on the order of 10-20% non-white, mostly amerindian. american "whites" are less than 5% non-white. at least that's what the genetics tell us. so a greater percentage of argentines self-identify as white, but the proportion of white ancestry in the USA population (white = european) may still be greater.
It's really good to see you tackle a hard and somewhat repugnant topic.
I think it will help if one transparently acknowledges that
(1) there's a lot of not fully transparent competition going on among American subpopulations to maximize status and minimize stigma
(2) This results in efforts to work the refs (and as a technocratic elite on this topic, you're a ref)
I think what will help in empirical modeling is to use multiple scales, including:
(1) self-reported subpopulation affinities, without a few pre-named categories, that are then sorted back into categories that fit the data, including racial categories
(2) sorting by race and ethnicity using dna testing rather than self-reporting. May be mostly the same as self-reporting, but it'll be interesting to see where they vary.
(3) Sorting by skin-complexion scales (what are the social science skin complexion scales? This gets directly to your post. I've hear of 12 tone scales or something similar, by the data on the nets seems sparse. I chalk it up to repugnancy, and social science elites attempting to form fit their scientific narratives into coherent myths?)
(4) Sorting by other features scales, such as eye shape, nose shape, lips shape, skull shape, and hair texture.
(5) etc.
The data to collect is rich and readily available, the possible research results can be illuminating. But folks seem to battle here on a mythological playground rather than get their hands dirty and see what we can discover about ourselves.
I get why a south asian american would want to be considered a smart asian when applying to a tech job, a dark-skinned marginal man when wanting to attract a female attracted to bad boys, and of solid aryan stock when going to meet his blonde girlfriend's parents.
I think if as a social scientist you want to break out from being a myth guardian to a hero of Enlightenment, you've got to cut through the elaborate myths and kabuki shaping our public racial discussions and look at all sorts of phenotype, genetic, and cultural data, drawn from primary sources, and shaped and mediated as little as possible in the collection process.
"I've seen someone try to gain non-white cred because she had red hair!"
Yes it's ironic, but I think it has more marginal-from-the-mainstream legitimacy than what I've seen (mostly from latino elites) of claiming non-white cred because they had brown hair.
The term "Non-Asian Minority" (or NAM) is becoming more common as it is very useful.
South Asians were legally switched from "Caucasian" to "Asian" in 1982 by the Reagan Administration in response to requests by Indian immigrant businessmen to be made eligible for minority business development loans from the Small Business Administration.
In general, affirmative action drives race/ethnic classification decisions. People care more about legal privileges than they care about social science.
In 1982, the Reagan Administration also made Hasidic Jews a protected minority eligible for low interest SBA minority development loans.