“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us Page: 43
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Bonilla-Silva would probably assign most of them to the honorary white layer of his
stratification scheme. It would be easy for many racially ambiguous people to fit into a racial
stratification pattern that is porous, allowing people who can fit different look and class
expectations to move back and forth between levels of stratification. But do racially ambiguous
people really fit the honorary white description? Many of them certainly do not seem to be
aspiring to whiteness because it is innately superior, as racist ideology claims it is.
The fact that there are honorary whites is nothing new; the question is whether or not the
"actual whites" knew there were honorary whites among them or whether the honorary whites
made it known that they had minority ancestry and fought for the betterment of members of
minority groups. Although in slavery, for example, light-skinned blacks received some
privileges, and in more recent times, some Latinos became stars in Hollywood by downplaying
their Latino identity (Anthony Quinn, Rita Hayworth), there have always been light-skinned
members of minority groups who chafed at the privileges they received and fought for the rights
of their darker brothers and sisters. Honorary whites are supposed to be a buffer between racial
groups. I don't think people who stay connected to their minority community, are actively taking
part in social welfare activities, and who maintain and announce their minority identity, are
acting as buffers between groups or obscuring the true nature of social problems.
In such an unstable and shifting racial landscape, new research has to be done to develop
new paradigms. The old theories are not useless, but certainly new theories on what is happening
in the U.S. to people who find themselves constantly in confusing and complicated situations
because of race need to be developed. Because most of the interviewees have lived in a region of
the country that is diverse and dynamic, they have rich insights into race relations in the kind of
America where there is no racial/ethnic numerical majority. They see the racial landscape from a43
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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/m1/50/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .