“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us Page: 5
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phenotypes associated with that race or ethnic group because of the patterns of racial
intermingling' and other events and trends in the history of the U.S. The social and legal practice
of the one-drop rule or hypo-descent is an example of this. People who had one distant ancestor
who was black and lived as white found they could be classified as black, even though their
phenotype and everyday life were those of white people.
There is abundant theory and evidence that classification according to race is an ongoing
practice in the U.S. The phenomenon of encountering what is supposed to be most obvious and
clear and being reminded that it may not be as clear as we are socialized to believe can be
unnerving for some (Goffman, 1963). Yet people still act as if group identification, especially
racial group identification in the U.S. is clear and immediate when it is just a matter of labels
used carried over into relationships and experiences to the point sometimes of instigation
violence (Wallerstein, 1991).
For such a social system to endure there has to be an easy way for people to determine
who belongs in which racial group. Americans tend to believe that race can be determined by
appearance, including skin color, hair texture, and shape of facial features. This may be true for
many or even most Americans, but perhaps the racial classifications institutionalized by the U.S.
government as of this writing -- white, black, Asian American, American Indian, Native
Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007) -- are each too narrow to capture
accurately the racial identities of Americans in 2011. These classifications are in flux as political
and social practices change. The racial classification of Pacific Islander used to be included as
part of the Asian/Pacific Islander category on the U.S. census, but in 1997, a separate category of
1 Race is classified by the U.S. government as black or African American, Asian American, American Indian or
Native American, Native Hawaiian and white. The government designates Hispanics as the only ethnic group. This
study will use these designations in historic background and as appropriate, but as will be noted later, the
interviewees in this study were not required to use any official designations. Their self-designations will be used.
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Smith, Starita. “What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us, dissertation, May 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115163/m1/12/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .