When immigrants first came to the United States, they formed ethnic concentrations with in the neighborhoods of Five Points, Brownsville and Harlem. But what started as ethnic segregation out of convenience slowly transformed (in Five Points after the Civil War and in Brownsville and Harlem after World War II) into segregation based on race. As we discussed in the blogs last week, race is a socially constructed means of labeling individuals based on outward appearances, which corresponds directly to socioeconomic status. It is no coincidence that African Americans, the darkest race, are those located at the bottom of American society. African Americans are on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder through no fault of their own but are placed there by the racial stereotypes on which American society was founded.
In my anthropology class, we covered the linguistic concept of langue as developed by Ferdinand de’ Saussure. Langue is the belief that rationality rather than indexicality give words their meanings. Words gain meaning from other words. For example, we understand the word “Yes” as not “No.” In anthropology, our professor asked us to apply the concept of langue to E.E. Evans Pritchard’s study of Nuer social groups. As a class we discussed how people define and label themselves in relationship to other people. Our reading this week made me think of how American Society works the same way. The white elite label African Americans as inferior in order to view them selves as not black and therefore make themselves the superior group. By creating divisions according to something arbitrary such as race, society creates power and distributes it according to skin color.
While the division of black and white is “black and white,” there is a lot of confusion surrounding the so-called “grey area.” As immigrants varying in skin tone arrived from places such as South America, Puerto Rico and Haiti, the previous categories of white and black became too specific. So, American society evolved and came to accept a spectrum of color between white and black. What I find fascinating is the constant fighting between groups that are more closely related racially (aka: the races whose complexions appear to be the same shade) such as the Puerto Ricans and Italians in Robert Orsi’s article.
As Praveena points out in her blog, the antagonistic relationship between the Italians and Puerto Ricans makes absolutely no sense. Instead of the initial desire to blend in (with the white majority) the Italians and Puerto Ricans wanted to stand out in order to avoid being smushed into the same category as black. The Italians wanted to be regarded and compared to other Europeans and not to the Puerto Ricans who were sometimes mistaken for blacks and the Puerto Ricans wanted to stand out and be defined as not black. The Puerto Ricans understood white to mean not black and so the desire to be “not black” became more important than wanting to be categorized as white.
