Jiannbin Lee Shiao

Korean Adoptees and the Social Context of Ethnic Exploration1

In this article, the authors examine ethnic identity development among Korean adoptees and the ways they explore their ethnicity in early adulthood. They argue that social context plays an important role in mediating whether and how adoptees pursue ethnic exploration. Employing a grounded theory analysis of a uniquely representative sample of Korean adoptees, they find that historical period and institutional setting shape the availability, content, and experience of exploration. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for research on racial stratification, ethnic assimilation, ethnic identity, and transracial adoptees.

The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race

Recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis. In this article, we provide a theoretical synthesis that accepts the existence of genetic clusters consistent with certain racial classifications as well as the validity of the genomic research that has identified the clusters, without diminishing the social character of their context, meaning, production, or consequences. The first part of this article describes the social constructionist account of race as lacking biological reality, its main shortcomings, and our proposed solution: the concept of clinal classes. The second part discusses the character of the group differences that would be consistent with clinal classes and introduces the concept of genomic individualism, which extends an emerging model for understanding biosocial causation to include the genetic effects of ancestry. The third part develops the argument for a “bounded nature” reformulation of racial constructionism that reconceptualizes racial and ethnic categorization as the social perception of ancestry. The final part summarizes the article’s contributions and outlines implications for future research.

The Many Faces of International Adoption

Adoption is an old story with a new twist: international adoptions are reshaping American families and cultural landscape. In the long view, the authors believe international adoption is an immigration story that must be contextualized within research not only on individual adoptees, but within the waves of immigration that have altered American history.

Response to HoSang; Fujimura, Bolnick, Rajagopalan, Kaufman, Lewontin, Duster, Ossorio, and Marks; and Morning

I would like to thank Daniel HoSang; Joan Fujimura, Deborah Bolnick, Ramya Rajagopalan, Jay Kaufman, Richard Lewontin, Troy Duster, Pilar Ossorio, and Jon Marks; and Ann Morning for their comments on our article in Sociological Theory. We disagree on a vast range of things, but there are other points on which we do agree.1 I agree with HoSang that primarily genetic explanations of major racial projects, such as transatlantic slavery and the Holocaust, would be morally suspect, and I would add that our proposed bounded nature framework indicates why such explanations of their occurrence and consequences are also empirically wrong. I agree with Fujimura et al. that historians and social scientists have documented how social processes produce racial categories and meanings, and I would add that our proposed redefinition of race/ethnicity as a social perception of ancestry contributes to the same literature, in fact, by making explicit how the construction of race/ethnicity differs from other social constructions, in particular, the construction of gender.2 I agree with Morning that some instances of constructionist theory include a conception of biology as empirically real albeit meaningful only through social perception, and I would add that this conception is very similar to what we call “the social exaggeration of genetic differences” and that our bounded nature framework uniquely reveals its significance by directly comparing it with other possible modes of biosocial causation. With few exceptions, the comments on our article miss the forest for the trees. Our central argument is that social processes (Xs) are the primary cause of variations in racial attitudes, racial inequalities, ethnic assimilation, and racial/ethnic interactions (Y1-4), even controlling for the kinds of biologically based group differences that would be consistent with contemporary findings about the genomic structure of human ancestry (Xg), that is, Xs → Y1-4|Xg. We make this argument in three steps: First, we explain the recent research in genomics as validating the existence of genetic clusters (Xg). Second, we consider the kinds of group differences that would be consistent with genomics and would also bear on sociological explanations, before evaluating the plausibility of expecting genomic research to find evidence for such differences; that is, we explore the predictive validity of Xg. Third, we consider how much the existence of these differences would affect sociological theory by (1)

It Starts Early: Toward a Longitudinal Analysis of Interracial Intimacy

Researchers regard interracial intimacy as a mechanism for integration because of the assumption that the partners come from distinct social worlds (e.g., racially homogeneous friendship networks). Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the author investigates the relationship between interracial friendship and interracial intimacy, specifically the question of how young adults’ chances of having an interracial romantic relationship depend on the racial composition of their friends during adolescence and their exposure to interracial relationships among these friends. The author finds that early interracial friendship remains a significant positive influence on the likelihood of subsequent interracial intimacy, even after controlling for opportunities for interracial friendship, personal characteristics, local variations in social distance, and selection effects. This suggests that a substantial fraction of interracial romantic relationships in early adulthood involve partners from social worlds that are already racially heterogeneous. Despite the robustness of this finding, there are also substantial variations in the magnitude of the association between interracial friendship and intimacy, which furthermore coexists with social distances larger than the effects of interracial friendships. In brief, the primary influence of interracial friendship may be to produce the perception of select individuals as exceptions to their respective race-gender groups.

A Comparative Approach to Social Differences

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Valerie Chepp. 2013. ‘‘Intersectionality.’’ Pp. 57–87 in The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by G. Waylen, K. Celis, J. Kantola, and S. L. Weldon. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferree, Myra Marx, and Elaine J. Hall. 1996. ‘‘Rethinking Stratification from a Feminist Perspective: Gender, Race, and Class in Mainstream Textbooks.’’ American Sociological Review 61(6):929–950.

The Meaning of Honorary Whiteness for Asian Americans: Boundary Expansion or Something Else?

Research on interracial intimacy divides between quantitative comparisons of interracial and same-race marriages and qualitative studies of existing interracial unions. This article bridges the divide by examining how interracial dating histories differ from same-race dating histories among Asian Americans, a group that sociologists consistently regard as potentially having attained a racial status as “honorary whites.” Synthesizing the literatures on ethnic boundaries, homogamy, and interracial intimacy, the author examines the role of boundary processes in differentiating same-race and interracial dating histories. What does becoming honorary whites, as indicated by participation in racial exogamy, actually mean for Asian Americans? Using a unique sample of 83 Asian Americans with a wide range of dating histories, the author finds that social networks are a crucial mechanism for differentiating racial endogamy and exogamy. In addition, my results show that becoming honorary whites has critically involved boundary repositioning, rather than boundary transcendence, blurring, or expansion.

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (review)

by 1975, Chiang had lived in the West for over forty years. He had seen many dark sides of Western society as well, though he seldom mentioned that in his delightful illustrations. Moreover, China in 1975 was vastly different from China in the 1930s when Chiang left. His enthusiasm reflected the emotional attachment of many Chinese Americans to their home country. He was not a fallen leaf returning home but a diaspora Chinese with many roots. In short, Zheng’s book about Chiang Yee is an interesting and well-researched biography, and a unique combination of art history, intellectual history, and social history. Haiming Liu California PolyteChniC State UniverSity, Pomona

Breakthrough Books: Race and Racism

A “list” of what five sociologists consider breakthrough books about race and racism.

Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA By Nadia Y. Kim Stanford University Press. 2008. 328 pages.

current jurisdiction over the future.’’(127) Dissenting opinions are, in her view, a window into the active negotiations over restructuring meaning systems that occur between judges. They also function symbolically as formal appeal for rehearing of legal issues by the court at a later time. Although she argues these points persuasively, whether her data support those claims is a less convincing argument. Richman’s contribution is an analysis of the way legal indeterminacy itself does social work, by inviting legal actors to reframe debates, reformulate legal concepts and push for innovations in legal thinking. In this way, it is not concrete law that is constitutive of social change, but it is the legal arena and its invocation of dialogue and disagreement that provides a frame for the ‘‘revision, negotiation and eventual sedimentation’’(18) of news ways of defining and legalizing families. This is certainly an important intervention in our evolving understanding of the relationship between law and social change. And, if Richman is right, her work might illuminate the ways legal actors engage in a dialectic process with law, watching it for signals of evolving logics, for invitations to reframe concepts and arguments, for cracks in the veneer of precedent where inroads and innovations can be made. For this reason, I wish she had done more work to establish how the cases she surveys actually affected the evolving strategies of the LGBT family movement. Though she interviews judges and lawyers, she seems mainly to reflect on their understanding of and reactions to specific court decisions, and less on the ways in which those understandings may have changed what they did next.