Abstract
In the summer of 2012 on a typically steamy Washington day, the U.S. Census Bureau held a press conference to announce the results of an “experiment” it had run concurrently with the 2010 national census. That year, hundreds of thousands of households had received questionnaires that deviated slightly from the regular census form, permitting the Bureau to investigate how Americans would respond to various changes in the wording and format of its questions on race and ethnicity. At the press conference held two years later to unveil the test results, few reporters showed up, leaving the room filled overwhelmingly with Bureau staff, and the news got little media coverage the next day. But the Bureau’s key finding—that Americans were much more likely to answer a race question that included “Hispanic or Latino” as an option, compared to the current format which does not include such a checkbox—may lead to an important shift in the way we conceive of and officially classify racial groups. In other words, it reminds us that race categories—and the beliefs about differences that underpin them—are constantly in flux.
Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America is devoted to the proposition that racial orders change, and that the United States is currently undergoing a serious transformation in race thinking. The authors define a racial order as “the set of beliefs, assumptions, rules, and practices that shape the way in which groups in a given society are connected with one another” (p. xiii), and they see such orders as having five principal components: (1) classificatory typologies (like the Census Bureau’s race categories), (2) norms and rules for assigning individuals to categories, (3) socioeconomic stratification, including relative group positioning, (4) group-specific state policies (permissions and prohibitions), and (5) social relations between and among members of different groups. In each one of these areas, the authors argue, visible change is underway. There is no clear definition of “race,” either among scientists or the public, and no strict or shared rules about how to ascertain an individual’s identity. Racial groups have become more heterogeneous in their socioeconomic standing, so that knowing a person’s race offers less of a clue than in the past to their income, occupation, educational attainment, or other status. The idea that the state should treat Americans differently based on race no longer enjoys the wide support it did for most of the nation’s history. And everyday encounters and relationships between people of different races take place with a degree of fluidity, acceptance, cooperation and normalcy that is unprecedented.
Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver, and Traci Burch identify four key driving forces behind the evolution of the United States’ racial order: immigration and multiracialism, both of which change the demographic makeup of the nation, as well as genomic science and cohort change. In their perspective, contemporary genetic science is fueling new debates about the very nature of race, while generational change means that the formative experiences of older Americans—memories of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement—are gradually giving way to the worldviews of young people who have no firsthand knowledge of that history.
The authors take pains to caution however that the racial order they predict may never emerge fullblown because there are powerful counterforces at work. Some people may resist new or more fluid identities; others may respond to shifting categories by targeting new pariahs, like illegal immigrants or Muslims. And the deeply-ingrained institutional structure of racial inequality—think wealth differentials, or incarceration rates—may simply be too mammoth to be displaced by the winds of change the authors describe. For these reasons, Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch strive not only to describe the transformation they perceive in the works, but also to pave the way for it. As they put it, “Promoting the gains and reducing the costs of a transformed racial order are the driving motivations behind this book. We aim to contribute to understanding and explaining creative forces, provide warnings against their harms as well as extol their virtues, and generally help strengthen the political will to attain Madison’s vision of a country of majority-less factions” (p. xv).
One of the most appealing things about the book is its earnest call to action, which is really of the best kind: an appeal that simultaneously stresses the need for improvement while nurturing the optimism that change for the better is within reach. It is born of the heartfelt confidence that, as Orlando Patterson put it, “‘the United States has worked harder and gone farther than any other advanced majority-white nation in confronting and righting the wrongs of its racist past’” (p. 168). Creating a New Racial Order also deserves high marks for taking up such an important and timely matter, one with the most far-reaching of implications, and doing so in an unusually well-organized and -argued manner.
Such broad arguments about sweeping changes and huge social forces, however, are likely to have some gaps upon closer inspection, and this book is no exception. For one thing, it does not consider how less explicitly race-related factors could shape the United States’ racial order, such as: economic trends and new inequalities; developments in technology that foster transnationalism and a more global outlook among youth; declining religiosity and perhaps thus religious segregation; and gender and sexual mores that make unions outside marriage more acceptable, relationships that are more likely than marriages to be interracial. The book also generally overlooks the role that specific actors and institutions (aside from genomic science) play in shaping racial concepts and identities. Formal education and mass information campaigns (e.g., documentaries, museum exhibits) attempt overtly to shape the public’s notions of race, and the media sensationalize changing demographics—most notably the Census Bureau projection that whites will make up less than 50 percent of the U.S. population by 2050—all of which color Americans’ participation in and reaction to the passage from one racial order to another.
Finally, despite the importance it accords to individuals’ conceptualization of race, the topic receives curiously short and superficial shrift. Central to the issue is the question of how enduring the essentialist view that races are biologically-determined groupings will prove to be. Although the book addresses this through its discussion of genomics, it offers little sense of how the essentialist versus constructivist debate will be affected by immigration and multiracialism. As immigrants make the country less black and less white, will old beliefs about race biology, fostered in the era of slavery, fade away? Will we move to the kind of cultural essentialism scholars have described in Western Europe? Or will we simply racialize newcomers in the ways blacks and American Indians were envisioned in the past? And what beliefs about difference will immigrants and their children bring to the table?
Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Creating a New Racial Order is one that can be remedied in the future. Despite its exhortations about the need for change, the book is surprisingly short on actual proposals. Missing is a concrete grasp of who the demographic, political, and educational actors are who might harness the forces of change to improve the nation’s racial order. The authors rightly call for fundamental changes in our structures of wealth and exclusion, even citing interesting work by Myers on the need to “grow a new base of middle-class taxpayers” (p. 176), but how can we actually get there from here? The virtue and the intention of this thought-provoking volume is to start a conversation about the momentous changes underway and how best to bring them to fruition.