The fundamental discourse of division in American culture for the last three centuries has been that of race, specifically the division of “black” and “white.” In many ways, in fact, this framework has eclipsed fundamental issues of class and confused issues of gender and citizenship, especially in everyday discussion. Other groups—Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, Irish Americans, Jews, etc.—have “fit” into American society in terms of this division as well. Hence, terms like “ethnicity” or stereotypes of new immigrants cannot be discussed without some understanding of the history and construction of race.

Race, in turn, has fundamentally referred to the social construction of biology. Often, this has meant phenotype—what someone looks like, based on skin color and a few associated categories—inscribed on the body. Genealogy was imputed via an unbalanced cultural model; “one drop” of African American blood determined race in many states.

This also precluded the construction of intermediate groups (mestizo) found in Latin American societies; “half-breed” was an insult, not a category. In practical terms, “looking” black or Indian or Chinese was the social determinant of racial categorization.

While the category “mulatto” might be recognized (or even sanctioned in New Orleans), legally these people were defined as black—hence, the longstanding category of the “tragic mulatto” and issues of “passing” (blacks living as white) which haunt literature and film.

These categories had further implications for policy and thought in the early Republic, where the Constitution defined slaves as the equivalent of three-fifths of a human being.

Scientists also argued polygenetic versus monogenetic models of racial origin which again made non-white races less than human. Even in areas like medicine, education and the census, pseudo-biological racial assumptions underpinned unequal treatment (as sociological assumptions later would do).

The “clear-cut” categories of race were confounded by European immigration in the nine-teenth century, which produced “white” populations that differed in language, culture, class and strategy from the dominant Northern European populations. Hence, the notion of ethnicity developed out of the category of race, mingling “visible” features with other distinctions of race, religion and perceived behaviors. In the nineteenth century for example, the Irish would have been classified as a race separated from the English, the Scottish or the Germans; through much of the twentieth century the Irish were considered an ethnic group, part of a so-called white race. This transformation is part and parcel of the story of assimilation, made possible in effect by the reality that the Irish may have been considered different from mainstream WASPs, but they were not as different as African Americans, the Chinese, or Native Americans were deemed to be. For the Irish themselves, and for other Southern and Eastern Europeans who faced hostility from native-born Americans, considerable mileage could be gained from the process of “whitening,” and by propagation of notions of ethnicity. At the same time, the idea of an “Irish” race allowed the Irish to distinguish themselves from their British colonizers and even to organize “racial” (political) action in Ireland without appearing disloyal to their new nation.

In the 1920s, immigration quotas reified certain categories of origin (older ethnics) as legitimate populations, while proscribing others as racially inferior. Here, the limitations on Asian immigration imposed between 1882 and 1943 are particularly striking. At the same time, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Northern cities reaffirmed the presence, meanings and tensions of the fundamental racial divide.

Race and ethnicity became major questions in politics and the social sciences from the turn of the century onward. Laws in the North and South sought to define race in terms of rights, location and boundaries in such areas as marriage. Anthropology, under the leadership of Franz Boas, developed a strong commitment to refuting race as a biological category which has continued to the present; Boas and his followers also worked with American ethnics, although this would be developed even more by sociology and anthropology in subsequent years (for example, the University of Chicago school of sociology). Many foundations were active in supporting this research and its propagation; African Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois also challenged the preconceptions of race on both intellectual and political grounds.

Political, demographic and cultural changes since the Second World War have further complicated concepts and usage of race and ethnicity Continued migration of African Americans to Northeastern and Western cities, places populated by large numbers of descendants of immigrants, encouraged a competitive racism in which divisions among European immigrant groups became increasingly blurred at the expense of increasingly ghettoized and segregated black (and Asian or Hispanic) communities. That is, contact and even marriage across religious or “ethnic” lines—e.g. Irish Catholic and German Protestant—became more socially acceptable, even while laws of miscegenation forbade marriages between “white” and “other” in many states.

The massive migration out of cities into the suburbs after the war, encouraged by the GI Bill and highway construction, further accentuated the racial divisions between white suburbs and black de-industrialized inner cities. In addition, political changes occurred from the emancipation of slaves in 1865 all the way through the Civil Rights movement, which both provided a strong racial caste to political discourse and then assaulted that discourse in ways that would contribute to status anxiety of more marginal white populations.

Within such a context the 1960s became a key period in the creation of what Steinberg has called the “ethnic myth.” In the countercultural assault on corporate America, many of the icons and mechanisms of assimilation came under attack, from the bland suburban tract to the WASP-dominated college campus and military-industrial complex.

Expression of European ethnic heritages and sometimes the “invention of traditions” became common at this time, further exaggerated once expressions of black cultural identity (connected with Black Power) became seen as politically potent weapons.

Ironically, what started out as a radical critique of mainstream American society soon turned into a white-ethnic backlash against civil-rights advances, the War on Poverty and affirmative action.

Boundaries between race and ethnicity, however, started to erode as the end of the century approached. This is particularly the case since post-1965 immigrants arriving in the United States have not fitted easily within the black-white model established in political discourse. Asian Americans have never fitted within the system, while Hispanics and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa have brought their own concepts of race with them that often incorporate (or conceal) racial distinctions and mixtures within the ethnic group. Further, whereas in the nineteenth century nativeborn Americans and European immigrants often came together at the expense of African Americans, in some of the recent reactions to immigration African Americans and other native-born Americans have moved closer together in their opposition to the newly arriving immigrants. In both cases, we must be aware of ethnicity as a potential strategy to divide class interests, as well as of the efforts of those divided by race and ethnicity to come together in common causes. Sometimes, in fact, division and cohesion are closely interwoven, as in the long history of Black-Jewish relations in the US.

Categories have also become neutralized in public (multicultural) discourse, where “ethnicity” is sometimes used as a “softer” word than race to imply that all divisions are epistemologically equal. “Ethnic studies” has become a major academic field in research and teaching by both challenging and blurring categories of difference (see literature, race and ethnicity). Moreover, demographics continue to complicate simple categories of ascription or self-identification, as questions of the 2000 census already have revealed.

With the elimination of laws against miscegenation since the 1960s, as well as the presence of new racial/ethnic groups, “multi-ethnic,” “bi-racial” or “hyphenated” families and citizens, while not the norm, have a greater presence in everyday life. Others have also identified American as their ethnic, racial or heritage category.

“Race” and “ethnicity” are used in more confusing and sometimes sinister ways in popular culture. “Black” music, “black” audiences/consumers and “Hispanic television” are all assumptions made in marketing and mass media. Asian Americans have both gained and suffered from assumptions underpinning their categorization as the “model minority,” while Native Americans have had to learn to reassert a complex of biological, linguistic, historical and cultural features to claim tribal identities.

“Ethnic” can refer to established American neighborhoods, food and nostalgia, or lead to the creation of “vaguely ethnic” characters in mass media, marked by clues of food, accent or religion. Here, ethnicity sometimes stands in for other categories like class.

Ethnic is also used to refer to continual global borrowing—“ethnic chic” may take items from Russia, Mayans, Nepal and Zulus, while “world music” mixes rhythms, instruments and heritages. Race, by contrast, tends to be strongly marked in the same situations—no television character is “sort of black” or “maybe Asian,” although light-skinned African Americans often have been highlighted as models and actors (and white female actors like Katharine Hepburn portrayed Chinese women on screen). Again, in reading these characters, it is important to see where “race” is an issue and where these characters are also used as vehicles for the discussion (or concealment) of issues of class, gender and “otherness.”