Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

American ethnic groups have been forged, along with peculiarly American ideologies and classifications of “race,” in the tumultuous course of the United States’ national expansion. In myriad ways, their unequal modes of incorporation reflect fundamentally different starting points, contexts of reception, and attendant definitions of the situation. The development of social, political, and economic inequalities based on race and ethnicity has been not only a central theme but a central dilemma of the country's history, shaped over many generations by the European conquest of indigenous peoples and by massive waves of both voluntary and involuntary migration from all over the world. Indeed, immigration as well as enslavement, annexation, and conquest have been the originating processes by which American ethnicities have been formed and through which, over time, the United States has been transformed into what is arguably the world's most ethnically diverse society. The national self-image created by that history reflects the experience of a country that has time and again been revitalized and renewed by immigration. But chimerical conceptions of “race” also derive from those fateful encounters, those social relations formed between strangers: phenotypical and cultural differences came to be associated with steep gradients of privilege and power, and became hardened into invidious, ... log in or subscribe to read full text