Karen Manges Douglas

A Call for the Racialization of Immigration Studies: On the Transition of Ethnic Immigrants to Racialized Immigrants

There is more than a century of research that has examined immigrants in the United States. Despite major changes in the origin of immigrants, the assimilation perspective, based on the experiences of European immigrants, continues to be the dominant paradigm used to assess immigrants in this country. While immigrants of color have experienced major hostility and racialization, research continues to largely neglect issues involving race relations. This study provides a historical overview of the racialization of immigrants including immigration policies and shows that the racialization of immigrants has occurred historically but particularly over the past half century as non-Europeans became the primary groups of immigrants in this country. In addition, the study calls for immigration researchers to more fully incorporate race perspectives into the study of immigrants. Furthermore, the study illustrates the need to consider methodological and data approaches to integrate racial matters into the study of immigrants. The article concludes with a discussion of the sociological implications of incorporating race more centrally in the study of immigrants.

Immigration in the Era of Color-Blind Racism

For most of the history of the United States, race played an explicit role in immigration laws that designated only Whites (and later Blacks) as eligible for U.S. citizenship. Today, however, we are in a new era in race relations—one that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva refers to as “colorblind racism.” Color-blind racism provides a critical perspective for understanding the enduring role of race in immigration practices in the post–Civil Rights era. This article illustrates this enduring reality within immigration policies and practices utilizing the color-blind perspective. We begin by summarizing the key tenets of Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism. We then overview immigration policies and practices in effect during the era of explicit racialization. Next, we contrast policies and practices with the more subtle employment of racialization today. The bulk of our article is devoted to illustrating how the racialized impact of immigration policies and procedures serves as a mechanism for the reproduction of color blindness and a racially unequal social order. We conclude with a discussion on the difficulties of grappling with this reality in a racially stratified society that is reluctant to acknowledge it.

Pathways to Downward Mobility: The Impact of Schools, Welfare, and Prisons on People of Color

Throughout the course of American society, racial stratification has been a fact of life. Indeed, the founding of the nation occurred alongside the extermination and subjugation of indigenous people. Through the centuries other groups, most notably blacks, have been subjugated and oppressed. While race is well embedded in the foundation of American society, organizational arrangements and the occupants of positions within them have contributed to continued stratification. W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the major issue of the 20th century in the United States would be the color line. Little did Du Bois realize that his prediction would be realized into the 21st century (Darling-Hammond 2004). The 20th century began with the clear demarcation of the races with people of color cut off completely from societal opportunity structures. The period extending from the late 1950s to the early 1970s witnessed a ray of hope for minorities, particularly in the areas of education and civil rights. These gains, however, were short-lived as the closing decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have involved significant retrenchment to earlier epochs. While such trends have occurred across all societal institutions, we focus on three that have experienced especially grave changes over the last few decades—education, welfare, and prisons. These institutions are intimately linked, with education thought to be the great equalizer (or enabler), welfare the safety net, and prisons the social control. In recent times,

Bureaucratic Capitalism, Mass Incarceration and Race and Ethnicity in America

Much scholarly attention has focused on the negative aspects of mass incarceration and rightly so. However, we know of no one that has paid attention to the role of large-scale organizations (or the millions of people they employ) that profit from or derive their livelihood off of mass incarceration and ancillary industries. We argue that the US system of mass incarceration is foundational to the reconfigured post-industrial economy. Millions of Americans, indeed entire communities, are dependent upon the millions of convicts and ex-convicts for their very sustenance. Every year, universities across the US graduate more than 60,000 students with majors in Homeland Security and Law Enforcement. These “controllogy” disciplines are perfecting the science of keeping people under control. Furthermore, race and racism undergird this system. Residents of highly policed “million dollar block” neighborhoods characterized by failing schools, low rates of home ownership, and limited access to credit, fuel the now multi-generational school-to-prison pipeline. Consequently, society has grown dependent upon black and brown incarcerated bodies to maintain a significant part of the US economy. We conclude the chapter by advancing a counter-system to this system of mass incarceration that allows us to reverse course.

The Making of “Americans”: Old Boundaries, New Realities

This essay explores the highly complex issues of race and ethnicity in the early-twenty-first-century United States, the context into which millions of people from the other American nations enter. Though the election of the first black person to the U.S. presidency reflects real progress, the racial discourse that both surrounded Obama’s election and continues to persist during his administration points to the tremendous work on race that still needs to be done. We illustrate the significant role race has played historically in influencing the laws meant to control the population coming to the United States, contorting the distribution of property and resources. We then examine how these race-conscious policies continue to play out into the twenty-first century.