The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide | 
 enlarge | Author: Eileen Obrien
Publisher: NYU Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 712480
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 243
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0814762158
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN: 9780814762158
ASIN: 0814762158
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
The divide over race is usually framed as one over Black and White. Sociologist Eileen O’Brien is interested in that middle terrain, what sits in the ever-increasing gray area she dubbed the racial middle. The Racial Middle, tells the story of the other racial and ethnic groups in America, mainly Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the largest and fastest-growing minorities in the United States. Using dozens of in-depth interviews with people of various ethnic and generational backgrounds, Eileen O’Brien challenges the notion that, to fit into American culture, the only options available to Latinos and Asian Americans are either to become white or to become brown. Instead, she offers a wholly unique analysis of Latinos and Asian Americans own distinctive experiences—those that aren’t typically White nor Black. Though living alongside Whites and Blacks certainly frames some of their own identities and interpretations of race, O’Brien keenly observes that these groups struggles with discrimination, their perceived isolation from members of other races, and even how they define racial justice, are all significant realities that inform their daily lives and, importantly, influence their opportunities for advancement in society. A refreshing and lively approach to understanding race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century, The Racial Middle gives voice to Latinos and Asian-Americans place in this country’s increasingly complex racial mosaic.
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In-depth interviews illuminate a changing America November 21, 2008
This is a fascinating and well-written book about the growing Asian American and Latino population and their views on and experience of race and ethnic relations in the U.S. It is based on fifty in depth interviews, presented in sufficient detail that you can draw your own conclusions and agree or disagree with the author's analysis. O'Brien starts with recent debates over how the addition of millions of people of Hispanic and Asian origin to what was once a predominantly white and African-American population is changing race relations in America. Some suggest that a new majority coalition of people of color and white allies will bring an end to racism. Others suggest that African-Americans will remain at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that is changing from white over non-white to non-black over black. O'Brien finds that there is evidence to support some aspects of both of these theories, and that the members of the "racial middle" have their own ideas and experiences to add to the mix.
The interviews provide an enlightening picture of the complex interaction of culture, ethnicity and race. The Asian Americans and Latinos in these interviews describe the ways in which they are pulled in different directions by the expectations of family and ethnic community, by their concepts of what it means to be an American, and by the stereotypes applied to them by white Americans. They are very aware of the ethnic diversity within their own "racial" groups, and dislike being racially stereotyped, yet they often stereotype the other groups they are not part of.
My major disagreement with O'Brien comes when she argues in Chapter Five that her Asian American and Latino interviewees are subject to pervasive white racism and that they are largely in denial of that fact. It appears to me that the people she interviews make a plausible case for their own views to the contrary. The interviewees say that they think much of the stereotyping they encounter (usually a presumption of "foreignness") is simple ignorance, and the examples they give seem to bear that out. When an older white American with a Japanese daughter-in-law is unable to comprehend that an Asian American woman he is speaking with at a social gathering grew up in America, speaks only English, is of Thai descent, and knows nothing about Japan, it seems quite a stretch to consider that racism rather than ignorance. Similarly, when people have never heard of Macao or Cambodia, that too is ignorance, however annoying it may be to people whose families originate in those places. And when several people say that the discrimination that they face as Asian Americans or Latinos is of a different and far less harmful nature than the discrimination faced by African-Americans, I see no reason for O'Brien to describe this as a form of denial or minimization of racism, especially since, in a somewhat different context she herself distinguishes between her respondents own "in-group ethnocentrism" and the "rigid inflexibility" that characterizes "anti-black racism" (p.101). It seems a very accurate statement.
In-depth interviews such as these can help distinguish between different types of ethnic prejudices, ranging from those that are largely based on ignorance, to those based on varying degrees of ethnocentrism to those based on racism. Historian George M. Fredrickson says that racism has two components, "one is a belief that the differences between the ethnic groups involved are permanent and ineradicable. If conversion or assimilation is a real possibility, we have religious or cultural intolerance but not racism. The second is ... its linkage to the exercise of power in the name of race and the resulting patterns of domination or exclusion" (Racism: A Short History, 2002). It is necessary to understand the differences between types of prejudice in order to develop policies to overcome them and it is not useful to simply label them all as "racism". Telles and Ortiz' recent book, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (2008), sets an excellent example as it carefully distinguishes between impermeable racialized barriers and barriers that can be overcome and examines how the barriers against full equality have changed for four generations of Mexican Americans. However, their book is based on surveys and O'Brien's in depth interviews add an important dimension to our ability to understand people's lived experience, in addition to covering a wider range of ethnic groups.
O'Brien makes another important contribution in the book's concluding portrayal of several people she interviewed whose self-identification is multi-cultural and whose mixture of national origins, religious beliefs and languages spoken breaks out of stereotypes and transcends fixed racial identifications. This group wants to "change the rules of the racial game" because they identify with "complexity... rather than any homogenous identity". They value multilingualism and different cultural traditions and want to take what they consider best from each without being labeled as "acting white", "acting black", "acting (or not acting) Asian" or "acting (or not acting) Latino". Despite her generally pessimistic analysis of American race relations, O'Brien joins in the hope that this group helps point the way to a genuinely diverse American future.
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