Ethnoracial Hierarchy Research Articles

Hierarchy in the Politics of Migration: Revisiting Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Migration State

Migrants and refugees face hostile publics and organized political interests, and contend with new and evolving forms of surveillance, deportability, and political violence. Researchers show that these political dynamics are fundamentally shaped by the politics of race and ethnicity. Yet, even as this work is increasingly abundant, it has not always been taken up by mainstream accounts of migration. In this article, we revisit scholarship on the politics of international migration, bringing together a collection of — sometimes disparate — research to explore how scholars can forge new lines of inquiry regarding the relationship between migration, race, ethnicity, and power. To do so, we evaluate three types of relationships at the core of migration politics: the relationship between migration and the state, the migration-related demands of domestic publics on the state, and how migrants interact and contend with the state. Across these relationships, we examine how ethnoracial hierarchies draw on, legitimize, and reinforce uneven distributions of political power, disparate deployments of state action and violence, and projects of nation- and state-building. Combining the intellectual prowess of distinct fields and approaches, we draw on productive convergences and tensions between existing and emerging frameworks and analytic starting points across disciplines to map future research trajectories in the multidisciplinary study of immigration, citizenship, asylum, and racial and ethnic politics. We conclude with a note on the politics of knowledge production–whereby some accounts of migration have been privileged over others–and point to important epistemological and methodological interventions for advancing research on the politics of migration.

‘Do I really need to check that box?’ Ethnoracial ambiguity among Indigenous North Africans in the United States

ABSTRACT This article examines the experiences of Amazigh people (plural: Imazighen) and how they negotiate ethnoracial hierarchies in the United States. Imazighen are Indigenous peoples from North Africa; upon arrival to the U.S., they are confronted with ethnoracial categories into which they don’t fit neatly, particularly due to their Indigenous status. Drawing on interviews with 75 Imazighen, we explore how they navigate ethnoracial identity through five themes: (1) illegibility in racial appraisal through everyday interactions; (2) navigating pre-existing ethnoracial hierarchies; (3) discourses about being ‘African (American), but not Black,’ which results in ‘lumping’ by geography, but ‘splitting’ by race; (4) discourses about being ‘not Arab,’ which results in ‘splitting’ processes to highlight Indigeneity; and (5) being appraised as Latine and ‘lumped’ through perceived proximity to other racialized groups. This article explores how a categorically ambiguous population grapples with everyday moments of racial appraisal and how they arrive at a sense of reflected race. Because the labels they are accustomed to (e.g. Amazigh or Berber) are illegible in the U.S., they become open to racialization processes, usually in conversation with notions of Arabness and Africanness. Simultaneously, they challenge norms of racial classification, particularly by introducing an Indigenous dimension.

Gauntlet at the Lychgate: How and Why is the Church of England Racist?

Recently, much has been said and written about racial justice in the Church, often at cross purposes, mired in ambiguous terms and incompatible frameworks. Racism remains just beyond a universally accepted model of the problem, tangled in a host of other historical, ideological, cultural, political and economic compulsions. In the Western Church this is exacerbated by the theologically rooted othering that is the legacy of our Church history, complicit in empire and slavery and mired in a culture shaped by a hermeneutic of ethnoracial hierarchy. This summary article considers this particular structural drive and introduces the broad theological and ecclesiological legacy of systemic racism in the Western Church, narrating the theologised virtue aesthetics which form a backdrop to institutional racism in the Church of England.

Asian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics

Abstract With increased discussions of racial justice in academia, linguistics has had to contend with long-standing issues of inequality. We contribute to these conversations by considering historical and contemporary racializing tactics with respect to Asians and Asian Americans. Such racializing tactics, which we call model minority logics, weaponize an abstract version of one group to further racialize all minoritized groups and regiment ethnoracial hierarchies. We identify three functions of model minority logics that perpetuate white supremacy in the academy, using linguistics as a case study and underscoring the ways in which the discipline is already mired in racializing logics that differentiate scholars of color based on reified hierarchies. We urge language scholars to reject a superficial multiculturalism that appropriates embodied difference while perpetuating injustices under an inherently white supremacist framework. For those dedicated to greater racial justice in the discipline, we offer actions to critically reflect on and help dismantle existing racializing logics.

To “Elevate, Humanize, Christianize, Americanize”: Social Work, White Supremacy, and the Americanization Movement, 1880–1930

Through close reading of primary sources, we analyzed social work’s role in the Americanization movement, a massive nation-building, nation-defining endeavor that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century. Although social work was a significant force in the rationalization and implementation of Americanization, its embrace of the project remains largely unknown within the field. We locate social work’s participation in the movement’s sedimentation of whiteness as the national identity and examine the ways in which this construction was applied to discrete populations: Indigenous Americans; African Americans; and immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Both settlements and charity organization societies were intimately engaged in the construction of the proper citizen: the self-sufficient, self-managing laborer/consumer, docile to the underlying logic of the industrializing nation. The ethnoracial hierarchy of the United States solidified through these endeavors continues to shape the nation and the profession’s approach to immigrants and racialized others today.

All Entrepreneurs are Equal but Some are More Equal than Others

This paper sheds light on how ethno-racial stereotypes affect legitimacy perceptions about entrepreneurs. Our findings show that compared to nonminority entrepreneurs, minority entrepreneurs are perceived as less legitimate due to their ethno-racial attributes. Our study confirms the presence of an ethno-racial hierarchy among different minority groups that increases the harshness of legitimacy perceptions for lower-status minority groups. Entrepreneurs’ higher level of education alleviates some of those inequalities but fails to eliminate them completely. We demonstrate that observers’ beliefs in a just world play a fundamental role in mitigating or increasing the harshness of legitimacy perceptions. Through three conjoint experiment studies, totaling 22,608 evaluations nested in 1,413 observers from the general public in the United States, we examine how entrepreneurs from two minority groups, Black Americans and Latinx, are judged relative to nonminority entrepreneurs (White Americans) after their endeavors have failed. We then further examine whether there are differences when these two groups of minority entrepreneurs are judged relative to each other. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how system inequality and prejudice endure in business.

European Immigration and Patterns of Intra- and Interracial Mortality Inequality in the United States, 1900 to 1960

European immigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century occupied a “middle tier” in the ethnoracial hierarchy. The author uses mortality data disaggregated by nativity (1900–1960) and parental nativity (1900–1920) to examine intraracial and interracial mortality inequalities during this period. The findings suggest that variation within the white population mirrored the ethnoracial hierarchy: the U.S.-born white population with U.S.-born parents had the lowest rates of mortality from 1900 to 1920, and the foreign-born white population had higher rates than their U.S.-born counterparts. Given this heterogeneity, interracial inequality is higher when various U.S.-born white populations are the reference. Disaggregation also reveals divergent trends, such as the exceptionally high foreign-born mortality rates during the 1918 influenza pandemic. The findings suggest that analyses of mortality inequalities that rely on white population averages may understate intra- and interracial inequalities in relation to the ethnoracial hierarchy of the era.

How the “Commercialized Performance of Affiliative Race and Ethnicity” Disrupts Ethnoracial Hierarchy: Boundary Processes of Customers’ Encounter with South Asian Waitpersons in Hong Kong’s Restaurants

This study analyzes how the “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAE) generates boundary processes that disrupt established ethnoracial hierarchies. The CPOARAE involves three parties: managers of a service workplace, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarchy, and ethnoracial majority customers. The managers hire workers to carry out affiliative racial and/or ethnic performance to make customers feel that they are being served by workers who belong to highly positioned ethnoracial groups. I analyze the symbolic boundary disorientations of Han-Chinese Hongkonger customers, which result from customers’ confrontation with ethnoracial ambiguity during CPOARAEs. These boundary processes show that despite being a capitalistic product and a popular cultural practice, CPOARAEs have the potential to disrupt and remake ethnoracial hierarchy. This study’s data are primarily collected from multiple in-depth interviews with 24 customers and participant observation in several restaurants, and secondarily from interviews with managers and workers.

The Alien Citizen: Social Distance and the Economic Returns to Naturalization in the Southwest

Abstract Citizenship acquisition is often promoted as one factor that can facilitate the economic integration of immigrants. However, not all individuals and groups experience positive benefits from naturalization. This article argues that social distance from the native-born is an important factor that influences who does and does not benefit from citizenship acquisition. Specifically, I create a new continuous measure of social distance for immigrants during the age of mass migration. I show that the relationship between social distance and the economic returns to citizenship takes an inverted U-shape. Those considered closest and furthest away in social distance to the native-born report little to no advantages to citizenship, while those in the middle report larger returns. I then focus on the Mexican population in the historical Southwest and take advantage of a unique enumeration in the complete count 1930 U.S. census that coded Mexicans as either white or Mexican. Mexicans coded as white report economic differences between citizenship statuses, while Mexicans coded as nonwhite report no difference between citizenship statuses. The results suggest that citizenship may not be beneficial to all individuals and groups, depending on where they fall in the ethnoracial hierarchy.

Surveillance, race, and social sorting in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made headlines for its use of mass surveillance technologies against UAE residents, as well as opponents externally. Under the guise of protecting national security, there has been a proliferation of state-led initiatives to monitor public spaces and online activity across the UAE, making the country an important laboratory for advanced surveillance tools. This article takes as a starting point that despite claims to being race-neutral and scientific, surveillance technologies have an embedded racial bias and operate according to context to (re)produce forms of state control and racial social relations. Reviewing the introduction of multiple surveillance technologies, this article traces the rationales used to racially order space and define deviance in the UAE context, emphasising questions of race, migration status and labour, to understand how the state defines, codifies, and regulates an ethno-racial hierarchy.

Panethnic boundaries and the making of white-collar minority identity in Hawai’i

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on ethnoracial identity formation documents the growth of panethnic and regionalised identities in the United States, which individuals express in response to both external racialisation processes as well as meta-group identity assertions by multiple ethnic groups. Yet how are panethnic identities shaped by organisational contexts, and how might the way individuals enact these group identities contribute to exclusionary processes? Examining the case of Local identity in Hawai’i, this study explores how third and fourth-generation Japanese and Chinese workers articulate a panethnic identity within a white-collar office. They do so by drawing racialized boundaries against Haoles (whites) as well as internal group hierarchies informed by ethnicity and class. The panethnic boundaries that workers enact ultimately reinforce the dominant position of Japanese and Chinese workers within the workplace, and within this region more broadly. I close by elaborating on how panethnic boundary-making reconfigure symbolic ethnoracial hierarchies within institutional settings while simultaneously serving as exclusionary criteria towards panethnic subgroups.

Scandalous denouncement: discrimination, difference, and queer scandal in urban Amazonian Peru

ABSTRACT Over the course of the 2010s, one objective of HIV prevention efforts in Peru’s Amazonian region has been to mitigate the adverse effects of discrimination on transgender communities. Some of the technical experts implementing these efforts in the city of Tarapoto referred to ‘cultivating a culture of denouncement’ as a shorthand for this objective. This article juxtaposes two experiences of discrimination and subsequent efforts at seeking redress. While both involve trans women who were denied entry into a nightclub, one case was converted into a successful discrimination grievance while the other case was never formally codified as such. Ethnographic analysis of Yesika’s ‘unsuccessful’ case suggests that the imperative to file formal discrimination grievances as a form of HIV prevention, though intended to mitigate exclusion, paradoxically reinforces ethno-racial hierarchies, obscures the willful inaction of auxiliary municipal police, and subjects those who attempt denouncement to intensified allegations of being ‘scandalous.’ Yesika’s scandalous denouncement thus makes visible how preventing HIV is embedded in existing configurations of ethno-racial, gender, and sexual difference.

Inequality, Exclusion, and Tolerance for Political Dissent in Latin America

Although many countries meet electoral standards of democracy, often these regimes fail to promote social inclusion or meaningful representation. We argue that systems of exclusion have deleterious consequences for how people think about democracy, undermining tolerance for political dissent. Using cross-national public opinion data together with contextual measures of economic and political marginalization along ethnoracial lines, we evaluate the relationships between exclusion and political tolerance across Latin America. Over-time analysis in Bolivia further probes the mechanisms linking exclusion to intolerance. We find that tolerance of dissent is depressed where ethnoracial hierarchies are pronounced. We advance understanding of oft-unexplained society-level differences in political tolerance and emphasize the importance of the macro-structural context in shaping citizens’ commitments to basic democratic rights.

Re-evaluating intergroup dynamics in the South: Racial attitudes among Latino immigrants in Durham, NC

Racial attitudes have long been studied for their salience to inter-group relations and the insight they provide into the nature of ethno-racial hierarchies. While research on racial attitudes among Latinos, now the largest minority group in the United States, has grown in recent decades, critical gaps remain. As such, this paper explores Latino immigrants’ attitudes toward Whites, Blacks, and other Latinos across multiple dimensions, including perceived affluence, intelligence, cultural behaviors, and receptivity to contact. We examine cross-group and cross-dimension variation in attitudes in order to evaluate key theories in the literature on racial attitudes, including the effects of socio-demographic factors, social contact, perceived threat, and forms of insecurity. Overall, Latino attitudes do not neatly subscribe to White superiority across dimensions, as they perceive differences in intelligence to be more modest than those in affluence, and rate their own cultural behaviors above those of Whites. Increased contact is associated with more positive views toward Blacks, but more negative views toward Whites and to a lesser extent, other Latinos. Perceived threat results in lower evaluations of all groups, whereas greater insecurity results in negative attitudes toward Whites and Blacks, but appears to push Latinos closer to their own group. Overall, results suggest that among immigrant Latinos, greater integration and social contact reduce White supremacy, rather than simply improving attitudes towards all out-groups, but that the softening of anti-Black prejudice is undermined by perceived vulnerability to crime and anti-immigrant forces.

Changing Boundaries of Whiteness? Demographic and Social Determinants of Middle Eastern and North African Marriage Trends in the United States

Intermarriage is an important indicator of immigrant integration trajectories and the rigidity of ethnoracial boundaries. Although questions of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) integration and social exclusion occupy a central place in public discourse, little is known about their marriage patterns. The authors use the 2017 American Community Survey to estimate patterns of coethnic, panethnic, and intergroup marriages for MENA populations. Compared with other immigrant groups, rates of intermarriage are relatively high, and there is little evidence of “panethnic” patterns of marriage. However, more recent marriages have become less exogamous. Hierarchical age-period-cohort models suggest that this is driven by changing patterns among more recent cohorts, with some evidence of a post-2001 period effect among men. Compositional changes in the country of origin account for some, but not all, of these cohort effects. The findings highlight the importance of further research on MENA Americans to understand their unique social experiences of the U.S. ethnoracial hierarchy, particularly in the context of increasing racialized anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination after 2001.

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

What Salience Does White Privilege Have in Non-Diverse Societies?

This article argues that white privilege is salient in non-diverse societies, and can be an effective analytical tool to understand the relationship and life course variances – inclusive of the institutional and socio-economic inequalities – amongst ethno-racial groups. Using the experiences of Norway, Poland and the Polish diaspora in Western Europe it suggests that white privilege is determined by at least three elements. First, an ethno-racial hierarchy whereby those who are constructed as ‘white’ receive increased privileges (relative to ‘non-whites’) in the geographical, cultural and political reality they occupy. Second, there is a disenfranchised established minority population who is phenotypically different than the dominant population, and who, through the articulation of their dissatisfaction, begins and/or sustains a public debate on their weaker position in society. Third, there is a link between the dominant ‘white’ population and past exploitation of ‘non-whites’.

“It Has a Way of Getting in Your Blood When You’re Basque”: Basque Sheepherders, Race, and Labor, 1880–1959

Abstract Despite their small numbers, Basque sheepherders became prototypical figures in the history the American West, viewed as elusive, mysterious men hidden in high pastures tending their enormous herds for months at a time. Basques became so associated with herding that even when the Immigration Act of 1924 placed severe restrictions on the number of Spanish nationals who could immigrate, American herders lobbied for special legislation that would allow them to keep importing sheepherders from Spain. This article contends that this preference for Basque herders arose not from Basques’ particular expertise but from narratives of their ancient origins and racial distinctiveness. Both Basques and non-Basques developed constructions of Basqueness that emphasized the group’s non-“Latin” status, thus placing Basques in an advantageous position in the American ethnoracial hierarchy relative to other Southern European ethnic groups. These narratives allowed sheepherding to be racialized as a Basque profession and also underlined Basques’ European Indigeneity—an Indigeneity that was to some extent transferred to the American West.

Support and setback: how religion and religious organisations shape the incorporation of unaccompanied indigenous youth

ABSTRACTChurches are recognised as pillars of solidarity and support within immigrant communities but rarely in regard to youths’ social incorporation. Drawing on 24 months of participant observation of two Catholic churches and in-depth interviews with unaccompanied Guatemalan Maya youth church members in a Los Angeles, California community, this study examines the role of the church and religion in youth’s incorporation trajectories. I find that the church and its religious practices provide unaccompanied youth with spaces and resources of incorporation support. Over time, youth also experience financial and socioemotional setback as they become involved in church subunits that are organised by an ethnoracial hierarchy that disparages indigenous Latinos, require financial contributions, and teach reliance on God to change one’s circumstances. This study shows that immigrant-serving organisations can unwittingly reproduce inequality when they offer individualised solutions to structural marginalisation. Findings also demonstrate that incorporation is as much a socio-economic process as a socioemotional one, as immigrant youths’ mental and emotional health instability can impinge on their social participation.

DISPARATE LESSONS

AbstractThis paper compares the identity-formation processes of Latino students in three different college contexts (a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university). Drawing on ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and surveys of members of Latino student organizations, I chart the distinct ways in which Latino students interact with one another and arrive at particular ethnic identities on different campuses. By applying ethnoracialization theory to mesolevel settings, I examine how students respond to external ascription as they co-construct and negotiate their ethnic-racial understandings. I identify three different patterns by which students deploy panethnic boundaries, specifically, as they adopt and define identity labels: inclusive Latino identification signifying solidarity above all, qualified Latino identification mediated through specific organizational membership, and the rejection of panethnic identities. I consider how the organizational context of each campus provides a distinct racial climate that mediates student interactions and potentially shapes the disparate identity outcomes that result. The findings suggest that, beyond providing academic experiences, colleges also provide Latino students with disparate lessons regarding who they are and where they fit in the ethnoracial hierarchy.