Seeking Convergence in Race Relations Research

Abstract

Research on American race relations is at a critical divide. After a decade or more of collectively debunking demeaning myths and stereotypes about minority life, as well as challenging an array of earlier, order-based theories such as assimilation, the field has come to reflect a rich mosaic of new paradigmatic tendencies and goals. Race, which has always been a fuzzy concept, can no longer be analyzed on its own slippery terms. Instead, it now must be conjugated with often equally muddy notions of class and gender. Psychology and sociology, which previously could claim almost exclusive title to the domain of intergroup relations research, have had to give substantive ground to other methodological and analytical approaches. Recent contributions from disciplines as old as economics, history, literature, and political science, or seemingly new like ethnic studies or policy studies, have clearly led to a more provocatively pluralistic field of inquiry. And finally, among other major changes, research on American race relations has begun to reflect, slowly but nonetheless to a greater extent than it did before, the multiracial reality of America’s past, present, and future. New research on Chicanos, American Indians, and Asian Pacific Americans have not supplanted, nor have they sought to supplant, the long tradition of scholarship on blacks. But they have provided added credence to viewing persistent societal conditions of poverty, discrimination, prejudice, and powerlessness from multiple vantage points of group experiences. These contributions on other nonwhite populations have augmented the research agenda on American race relations by demonstrating the continued importance of issues dealing with language, immigration, and land ownership. They have also underscored the need for new visions, interpretations, and conceptualizations of America’s multiracial experience.

Like many other scholars, I had parceled out white attitudes toward different racial groups almost as if there were no important similarities and differences in the ways whites imaged or treated them. Yet I knew that the reality of white America’s experience was dynamically multiracial. What whites did to one racial group had direct consequences for others. And whites did not artificially view each group in a vacuum; rather, in their minds, they lumped the different groups together or counterpointed them against each other. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages (1979)

We are experiencing on a massively universal scale a convulsive ingathering of people in their numberless groupings of kinds— tribal, racial, linguistic, religious, national. It is a great clustering into separateness that will, it is thought, improve, assure, or extend each group’s power or place, or keep it safe or safer from the power, threat, or hostility of others. This is obviously no new condition, only the latest and by far the most inclusive chapter of the old story in which after failing again to find how they can co-exist in sight of each other without tearing each other limb from limb, Isaac and Ishmael clash and part in panic and retreat once more into their caves. Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe (1975)