We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States. For this reason - and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change - categorizations are unstable and impermanent. Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position – what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994). The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it. Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what.
Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy. Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro whites no longer had mixed parentage Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing. By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census. The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested. In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays. Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (forthcoming, Nov. In Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.). Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality