Product Description

What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms "race" and "ethnicity"? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that "race" and "ethnicity" are socially constructed concepts, not objective, scientifically-grounded variables, and do not accurately represent the real world. She joins the growing critique of the unreflective use of "race" and "ethnicity" in American policymaking through an exploration of how these terms are used in everyday practices. Her book is filled with current examples and analyses from a wealth of social institutions: health care, education, criminal justice, and government at all levels. The questions she raises for society and public policy are endless. Yanow maintains that these issues must be addressed explicitly, publicly, and nationally if we are to make our policy and administrative institutions operate more effectively.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1185064 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 262 pages

Customer Reviews

Q: What is your race? A: What do I look like, a martian?
The humorous title to this review is from page 130 of Dvora Yanow's book and is an excerpted interview between a policeman and a crime suspect. Yanow's serious book is a timely historical overview of the use of racial and ethnic categories by government bureaus. Her book contains example government affirmative action forms, college applications, vendor certification forms, housing fair lending notices, job training forms, and police department statistical crime report forms. Perhaps most amusing is a Matrix for Generating Race/Ethnicity of a Child by the California Department of Health Services that is reminiscent of something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon.

Her thesis is that race and ethnicity have always been state-constructed categories and are an (quote) anthropological and scientific joke (end quote). Her book points out the absurdity of trying to categorize people of mixed race or who can pass as white, of categorizing criminals by eye-balling, of lumping groups that have nothing in common, such as Asian-Pacific Islanders, and of obscuring more important groupings such as poor whites. She believes racial and ethnic categories are proxies for group origin identity stories. But Yanow asks (quote) why are identity stories largely confined to race-ethnic terms, especially when those terms aren't real? (end quote). She states that the continuing use of such categories runs against the grain of classical liberalism and what it means to be American. She reminds us that the public has apparently largely forgotten the Nazi regime in which population control and genocide depended on race-ethnic labeling and marking by central government.

In a closing Yanow minces few words when she states that racial and ethnic categories have become the (quote) foundations for the redistribution of wealth in the form of various publicly funded programs and eligibilities for their services (end quote). She emphatically states:

(start quote) Yet we cannot - I cannot conceive of a way in which we can - achieve a socially egalitarian society when we constantly remind ourselves, almost daily, of differences of the sort that are built - conceptually, cognitively, linguistically - into the race-ethnic language that we use. The categories "sell" concepts of race and ethnicity through dispassionate documents and administrative means that most people would not give a second thought to, but that have material consequences...It seems to me, in light of the preceding case examples, quite evident that in order to achieve a socially just society, we need to give up these ways of counting ourselves and find others....Yet perhaps it is time to stop using race-ethnicity as a proxy for
economic and behavioral problems, lest our very language continue to perpetuate inequality...Race and ethnicity data, as established under the OMB (Federal Office of Management and Budget) definitions and Guidelines, provide ways of naming discriminatory practices and seeking legal redress, and they legitimate and provide credibility for claims for
governmental assistance (funds for schools, hospitals, health services, Housing, jobs, etc.) and political representation (end quote).

Yanow believes that we need to rethink and reframe racial and ethnic categories, but points out that the process won't be easy.

However, a weakness of Yanow's book for politicians is that she avoids devising any new categories that might eliminate some of the abuses of the widely accepted five category system presently used on government forms (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific Islander, and American Indian-Alaskan Native). Yanow's book would have been complemented by recent sociological research on how Italian Americans were once considered as Non-White, but eventually became White (see Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America, Routledge Publishers, 2003). Not widely known in academia or the media is that 600,000 Americans of Italian-American descent were forced to carry identification cards during World War II, were restricted from freedom of movement, 10,000 were forced to relocate, and even baseball hero Joe DiMaggio's mother was deported to Italy (see Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II, Heyday Books, 2001). How did Italian-American immigrants assimilate without all the redistribution programs of today even though many were identifiably different by skin color and other physical attributes? How did Italian Americans avoid the sense of entitlement that pervades so many groups that immigrate to the United States today? Why haven't Italian Americans come forward with claims for special treatment under Affirmative Action programs? Perhaps the reason that the Italian-Americans have been largely ignored is that their story contradicts the victimology paradigm prevalent in most of academia and enshrined in government programs.

Yanow's book is a nuanced and balanced contribution and, as such, perhaps does not lend itself to being used as ammunition for the proponents or the opponents of perpetuating the current racial and ethnic categories. Says Yanow:

(quote) I am convinced that we must stop giving accounts of ourselves in terms of the five gross, lumpy race-ethnic categories (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian-Pacific Islander, American Indian-Alaskan Native): they create, impose, and maintain identities that are, by and large, not embracing of individuals' lived experiences and, because of the baggage of meaning that they carry, detrimental to human dignity. And yet, as convinced as I am of that position, I am equally convinced of the fact that we need modes of storytelling for collective and individual identity purposes, including a story of national origins (end quote).

Dvora Yanow's book contains some interesting quotes at the beginning of each chapter. It is perhaps fitting that we close this book review with the following excerpted quote from a noted Black scholar:

(quote) The mistake is to assume that birth
certificates and biographical sketches and all the
other documents generated by the modern bureaucratic
state reveal an anterior truth - that they are merely
signs of an independent existing identity.
But in fact they constitute it.
The social meaning of race is established
By these identity papers - by certificates...
And all the other verbal artifacts that proclaim race
to be real and, by that proclamation, make it so (end).
--- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.