(Page 2 of 21) - Racial Classification and the Politics of Inequality authored by Hochschild, Jennifer. and Weaver, Vesla.

Over the past century, Americans have developed and used dozens of racial classification

schemes, some with a hundred or more categories.

Any single category is itself rather plastic;

the federal government has at least 33 distinct definitions of American Indian scattered
throughout various laws and regulations. Advocates have insisted that race and ethnicity are
fundamentally different, or that they are synonyms. Scholars have provided evidence that the
races differ biologically – in their skull shape, forearm length, innate intelligence, or propensity
to violence – or that race is a purely social construction with no biological meaning. Judges have
set racial boundaries by ancestry, physical appearance, self-definition, community sentiment, or
behavior.

Drawing racial lines in accord with ethnicity, biology, regulatory structures, judicial

decisions or anything else is not, or not only, a parlor game. Official racial classifications have
determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry,
marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near
home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, join a tribe, sell “Native
American” artifacts, or open a casino. Private racial classifications affect whether an employer
offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, and whether the victim of a
heart attack receives appropriate medical treatment. Above all, racial classification helps to
create and maintain economic poverty and social and political inequality.

It is not necessary to remind readers of the basic American racial hierarchy – whites on

top, blacks on the bottom, others somewhere in between – or of its long-standing and deep
impact on every aspect of American life that shapes inequality and poverty. Instead, in this paper
we examine a slightly more subtle feature of racial hierarchy in the United States – the
relationship between the nominal racial categories of black and white, and the fact of multiple
gradients in between, as exemplified by shadings of skin color and multiracial ancestry or
parentage.

Our argument, in brief, is as follows. The history of racial classification at the turn of the

twentieth century provides three lessons for the present: 1) racial classifications have been
subject to continual debate, have changed a lot, and therefore could change again; 2) the
category of mulattos was available to blacks then, sometimes as a point of pride, but is largely
useless as a model for the black community now; and 3) the hardening of the “one drop of
blood” rule by 1930 increased racial inequality over the succeeding few decades, but in the long
run provided tools essential for African Americans to fight and partly overcome racial inequality
and racially-based poverty.

The project of which this paper is a part is jointly co-authored with Traci Burch, also of the

Government and Social Policy Program at Harvard University. She has been fully involved in
developing these arguments, but bears no responsibility for the literal content of this paper.

We thank Gwen Clark, Tiffany Jones, Brenna Powell, and Robert Preston for heroic

research assistance. Also, our gratitude goes to the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and
Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies for financial and institutional support.

For reasons of space, we focus here only on African Americans and European Americans

(typically shortened to blacks and whites). But the theory and our empirical examination will
eventually incorporate other groups, nominally defined as Asians, Latinos, and Native
Americans. Also for reasons of space, we address only two periods, roughly 1890 to 1930, and
1990 to the present, mostly ignoring the complex history before then and in between.