How Race Is Made

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican AmericansÑfrom 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolishedÑto understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational waysÑthat is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

For at least two centuries, argues mark smith, white southerners used all of their senses - not just their eyes - to construct racial difference and dene race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the articial binary of ''black'' and ''white'' to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation. Based on painstaking research, how race is made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then post bellum racial segregation became central to southern society, white southerners asserted that they could relyon their other senses - touch, smell, sound, and taste - to identify who was ''white'' and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signied difference and perpetuated inequality. Smith argues that the history of southern race relations and the construction of racial difference on which that history is built cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to come to terms with the south's past and present, smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How race is made takes a bold step toward that understanding.

This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.

Shows how science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Examining the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, this book illustrates the ways health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and define racial groups.

A New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book . . . [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”—Boston Globe Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.

Illuminates the emergence of race as a central concept in philosophy and the social sciences.

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Introduction : the paradox -- The scientific sources of the paradox -- The political sources of the paradox -- International pragmatism -- Sociological knowledge -- Conceptions of racism -- Ethnic origin and ethnicity -- Collective action -- Conclusion : the paradox resolved.