Reinventing the Color Line Immigration and America's New Racial/Ethnic Divide

Résumé du document

"The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the Color Line". Writer and social reformer, W.E.B. Du Bois said at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, the color line corresponded to a Black-White divide. However, from the end of the twentieth-century to the beginning of the 21st century, the Color Line seemed to have evolved with the arrival of new immigrants in the US, such as Asians and Latinos, as the result of the Hart-Celler Act. "Reinventing the color line" is an article on the evolution of the Color Line within the 20th century. This is a study led by two professors at the University of California that was based on results of two formal elements: the 2000 U.S. Census on multiracial reporting, and data collected from in-depth interview with 46 multiracial individuals. In this article, writer's goal is to elucidate the experience of ethnic identification: the choice of ethnic and multiracial identities; if they feel constraint or free in their choice of identities; and the meaning of the same.

Extraits

[...] The Census showed that 24% of the population identified themselves as multiracial, and that the multiracial population is clustered in the Western region of the US. The Census also pinpointed the age phenomenon: 42% of Americans who identified themselves as multiracials were under the age of 18. Although of the children living with couples of different races are identified multiracials, most black-white couples who reported a single race for their children chose black, while most Asian or Latino-white couples chose white rather than Asian or Latino. It perpetuated the exclusion of blacks. [...]

[...] To my mind, Reinventing the Color Line is a brilliant article, but not totally complete because it does not cover the trend in the whole country. Furthermore, it seems to hide some aspect of the immigrants' life, who are, according to me, still subject to discrimination even if they “look like whites”. Plus, to me, this study does not cover the whole topic; indeed, multiracials in general have to face exclusion from “both that is to say, for example a white-black multiracial is consider as black for whites and as white for blacks; and this problem is not typical to the US. [...]

[...] To Americans, there are cliché about what a typical Asian or Latino would look like, and if multiracial Asians or Latinos do not look like it (for example a Mexican with green eyes), they are considered as totally white just because they look like whites. As a conclusion of the interviews, Latinos and Asians have more freedom to choose among various racial and ethnic options, including white identities while Blacks have not that choice. For most Asian-white and Latino-white multiracials, their ethnic identities are “more symbolic than instrumental”. Most feel that their races hold very little consequences in their daily lives. [...]

[...] While this analysis presents an objective approach of Latinos and Asians, the Blacks are always seen to be excluded. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century the Color Line corresponded to a black-white divide. The study aims to show that even if new immigrants came to the US within the 20th century, modifying the division between blacks and whites, the old divide is still applicable in so far as Asians and Latinos seem to be on the white side of the divide or at least on the nonblack side. [...]

[...] The blacks' interviews did not give the same results: they did not claim a white or nonblack racial identity. The findings indicated that group boundaries are more likely to be fading for Latinos and Asians than for Blacks. Asians and Latinos are not only closer to whites than blacks are to whites; they are also closer to whites than to blacks. And wherever the new color line is situated, it continues to exclude blacks from other racial groups, similarly to the traditional black-white divide. Asians and Latinos multiracials may be the next in line to be white. [...]