Chapter 2: Color Lines

Conversations about race in America are almost always unpleasant.  To the ears of many white Americans, complaints of racism sound shrill, antiquated, and self-serving.  Many black Americans are exasperated and angered by their quotidian encounters with discrimination and racism, feelings that are exacerbated when they hear others accuse them of seeing things that are not there.  Latinos grow weary hearing the issue of race reduced solely to black and white relations.  Asians sometimes feel invisible to the outside world, caricatured as a monolithic “model minority,” their successes resented by others.  To Native Americans, there is a sad irony, that the country’s original people are today its most forgotten. Despite all the talk of a post racial America, and the very real climb up the socio-economic ladder for some people of color, the story of race in America is neither old nor new, but one long, evolving narrative, rooted in a painful history of oppression and exploitation.  

European settlers’ genocidal campaign against indigenous populations left racism’s indelible imprimatur on the New Land but slavery and its aftermath is the template that has since framed all interactions across race and ethnicity.   When immigrants arrive in this country, they enter into a cauldron of tensions, rivalries, and polarizing realities that were shaped and defined by the enslavement and brutalization of Africa’s descendants.  America’s growing diversity raises a call for new thinking about diversity and the structures of inequity, but the trick is to avoid losing sight of historical truths while adjusting to new realities.

Recent Census Bureau data indicates that not only have Latinos eclipsed African Americans as the largest minority population in the United States,  but also that  Latinos  in twenty of the twenty-five most populous counties outnumber  blacks (see Table 2-1; Table 2-2 reports on the demographics of America’s largest metropolitan areas).  In California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas,  non-whites, Nevada, Maryland, Georgia, Arizona, Mississippi, and New York state trailed closely behind.

California, the country’s most populous state, became a pioneer in minority-majority politics in 1999 when its white population receded below the 50 percent mark for the first time; by 2007, their numbers had dipped to 43 percent of the state’s 36.6 million residents.


So why does it matter?  The experiences of non black racial minorities are unique and unacknowledged by most Americans because our mind-set does not make room for them.  If the United States is to make progress in racial equity, then a full and diverse picture needs to be painted.  Without understanding the reality of the struggle, how can Americans join together to put forward useful solutions?