U.S. Ethnic Politics

Abstract

Unlike most countries, which recognize the existence of classes and class struggles in both commonsense understandings of and legitimate political discourse, the United States is silent about class and obsessed with racial/ethnic politics. While other dimensions of stratification such as, for example, gender and age also enjoy political legitimacy, the politics of race/ethnicity has displaced class politics on the American political scene. This hegemony of race/ethnicity in the perception and discussion of most conflict and political struggle is the result of the complex interaction of many factors. Perhaps most important is the heterogeneous origin of the population, whose composition is continuously affected by the changing nature of immigration flows. Demographic factors alone, however, cannot have such powerful political effects; one must take into account the heritage of slavery, the presence of colonized minorities (Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans), and the lasting political effects of McCarthyism, which eradicated the left from American politics and defined class politics as un-American. Equally important are the effects of deindustrialization, economic recession, steadily increasing unemployment, and the erosion of the st-andard of living of the American working class. A key determinant of the salience of race and ethnicity in American politics is the role of the state in legitimating the labeling of people in racial terms, thus creating, despite the heterogeneity of the populations thus labeled, races1 and ethnicities that presumably can be described on the basis of real and identifiable common traits. The current definitions of Asians, blacks, and Hispanics are exceedingly broad,' and they have the objective effect of minoritizing the entire world (Gimenez, 1988). These labels ignore socialclass and national-origin differences among people, thus blurring the differences between U.S. minority groups (populations historically oppressed in the United States) and immigrants. In the social reality created by these