Racial Classification in the US - Essay Example

According to the Legal Information Institute, under Article I, section 2 (US constitution was ratified in 1787) “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.” Here the all other persons were mainly the slaves i.e. slaves were considered as 3/5ths of a person whereas a free man was considered one person. There was a gender bias in the US; women were not allowed to vote.

Immigration
Immigration has long been part of American society. All non–Native American groups are, in essence, of immigrant stock. Even in the Colonial period, the English colonies contained large numbers of non-Anglo immigrants, especially those from various German states. By the 1790s Germans were outnumbered only by English immigrants and Africans forcibly brought as slaves. Another half million Germans arrived before 1850. They were welcomed to America. After the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers considered the new United States to be underpopulated and actively recruited immigrants, though the preference was for those of Western European and Protestant background.

In the 1840s and 1850s, many citizens who were offended by their predominant Roman Catholic faith frowned upon the arrival of millions of Irish immigrants fleeing famine. The Great Depression and World War II curtailed European immigration, although Mexican immigration increased during the war. The border between the United States and Mexico was fluid throughout the nineteenth century, and many Mexicans became U.S. citizens after the 1846–48 Mexican War. During World War II, Mexicans were recruited to work both in defense industries and in agriculture, the latter campaign extending officially into the 1960s.

Conclusion
After World War II, immigration policy also shifted to allow more Eastern Europeans to enter if they were fleeing from nations controlled by communists, but quotas favoring Western Europeans remained in place until 1965. The net effect of this was that increasing numbers entered the United States illegally, especially Mexicans and Central Americans. From the 1950s into the 1990s, fewer Europeans sought to settle in the United States, and the makeup of immigrants shifted toward those from Asia and Latin America. The 1930 census, for example, reported that over 11 million of the previous decade’s 14 million immigrants had come from Europe; by 1990 just 4.3 million of 19 million had come from Europe, whereas nearly 5 million were from Asia and over 8 million from Latin America. Large numbers of Filipinos settled in the United States after World War II, and larger numbers of Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese came during and after the Vietnam War. Poor economic conditions in Latin America sent millions of Latinos northward, including large numbers of undocumented aliens.

An ethnic stratification is a form of social ranking that describes enduring relationships of inequality between different ethnic or racial groups. Ethnic stratification specifically pinpoints the existence of a hierarchical social system that positions ethnic groups relative to one another based on the political exigency, economic wealth, and class status members may or may not enjoy.

In order to consider ethnic stratification in the United States fully, it is first necessary to interrogate the terms ethnicity and race, as the terms are often (incorrectly) used as synonyms for one another. One of the better definitions of ethnicity comes from the British sociologists Ellis Cashmore and Barry Troyna, who define it as “a subjective feeling of oneness or unity that a racial group may feel in certain contexts.” In an American context, Cashmore and Troyna’s definition falls short, eliding as it does the complex interactions between race and ethnicity, between (fallacious) sociobiology and culture. Race, which implies genetic ancestry, has been a powerful organizing principle in the United States, permeating every aspect of history, from Jim Crow to civil rights legislation. Ethnicity has served as a more politically neutral catchall term, taken to mean a population’s supposed genetic traits as well as its cultural qualities. Perhaps it is for that exact reason that the term ethnic stratification has held far more traction in American social thought than racial stratification has.

Therefore, given these definitions, ethnic stratification occurs as a result of unequal interactions between two or more populations deemed culturally or physically different from one another. And for this particular form of stratification to take place, ethnic groups once isolated from one another must come into contact. From antiquity to the present day, urbanization, colonization, territorial expansion, and human migration have contributed to the ethnically heterogeneous societies we see today. Stanley Lieberman, in his seminal 1970 article Stratification and Ethnic Groups, parses out historically “superordinate migrations” (conquest or annexation) from comparatively “subordinate migrations” (compelled by political refuge, slavery, or labor), signaling the potential for future societal inequality. Followed to its logical end, it is apparent that the nature by which diverse ethnic groups initially meet is a critical factor in explaining ethnic stratification. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration is consequently an important one.

An effective, long-lasting solution to ethnic stratification in the United States has not yet translated into public policy.