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This chapter explores the Dominican experience in the United States, where the Dominican racial system is called into question. Mixture is still preferred as a way of talking about Dominicans and race, but there has been a shift from indio to mulato, informed by particular American experience. Emerging from this experience is the idea of “here” (Dominican Republic) and “there” (United States) and the formation of a Dominican diaspora.

This chapter discusses geopolitical aspects of the modern racial system in the post-World War II era. Antiracist and liberal-capitalist modernity became rampant after World War II in the form of state-recognized U.S. antiracism movements such as racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. These movements influenced the formation of the state, from the period of Cold War expansionism to the period of contemporary neoliberalism by using literature as a tool for Americans to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to racial difference. The book stresses the importance of literary studies for producing, transmitting, and describing the violence of race-liberal orders that inspired the antiracism movements.

Chapter 1 provides an in-depth introduction to the Anglo-American and Latin/Caribbean racial systems—the two layers of the racial palimpsest that exists in southern Louisiana. A racial system is a collection of formal and informal rules that order the ways color, phenotype, and status are “read” from individuals’ bodies in a way that places them higher or lower in the social hierarchy which apportions resources and opportunities. The conceptualization of the Anglo-American and Latin/Caribbean racial systems emerges from an in-depth, comparative analysis of the ways racial categories and practices changed over time in the United States and across the Americas. This discussion lays the conceptual foundation for the racial palimpsest concept, which is then applied to material in the chapters that follow.

The introduction presents the St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana migration case, which traces the integration of white and free black refugees and their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The St. Domingue refugees initially reinforced Louisiana’s triracial system. Then, over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the binary Anglo-American racial system came to dominate as the Anglo-American population grew and their racial practices asserted increased pressure on the Latin/Caribbean system. The introduction discusses the ways these immigrants and their descendants coped with contrasting understandings of race and draws parallels between this historical case and the situation of contemporary immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who often resist the binary logic of the Anglo-American US system.

Chapter 6 examines the contemporary experience of Creoles of African descent. Changing conceptions of blackness during and after the civil rights and Black Power movements challenged Creole identity and made it more difficult for many Creoles of color to see themselves as distinct from other black Americans. These tensions are explored by examining the stories of Creoles of color as gathered from interviews and participant observation with Creole cultural organizations. These stories show three different responses Creoles of color have had to the pressures to assimilate to the binary US racial system: (1) adopt a black American identity; (2) pass as white; or (3) resist the categories of black and white. The chapter concludes by considering similarities between Louisiana’s Creoles of color and Latino immigrants of color who have experienced many of the same tensions and misunderstandings as they have struggled with Anglo-American conceptions of whiteness and blackness.

This chapter looks at narratives articulating Chinese caste elevation in the Mississippi Delta within academic studies, popular culture, film, and memoir. James Loewen's The Mississippi Chinese argues that when faced with a binary racial system that had no accommodation for a third race, the Chinese engineered a shift in status from “colored” to white in the course of one generation. The chapter highlights what becomes repressed in positing racial uplift in response to intermediate status. In contrast to European immigrant groups, the Asian's supposed caste rise can only be characterized as a registered incompletion, as near-whiteness. This incompletion is likewise reflected in the discourses that have sought to represent such status, the scholarship surrounding and generated by Loewen's thesis, including the 1982 documentary film Mississippi Triangle. The chapter thus examines what discursive contradictions were generated in the incomplete attempts to convince of African American disassociation, specifically, the repression of Chinese-Black intimacy.

This chapter describes the income and education profiles of the ten largest multiracial groups in the United States in order to better understand how these groups are positioned within the racial inequality system in the U.S. Through doing so, this chapter answers three main questions: What are the inequality patterns for multiracial groups? Are those inequality patterns the same for children and adults? How do those patterns vary across major cities in the United States?

Chapter 4 examines the experience of St. Domingue refugees of color across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on refugees and their descendants who were free people of color. As was the case with white Creoles, Creoles of color faced intense pressure with the rise of Jim Crow to take a stand on one side or the other of the starkly drawn black/white border. Although they were officially categorized with black Anglo-Americans, Creoles of color in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in many ways to operate according to a Latinized racial system that allowed them to differentiate themselves socially from Anglo-blacks. In contrast to the white Creoles who blended into white Anglo-American society, many Creoles of color saw a benefit in preserving their Creole identity because it provided a way of resisting the degrading racial effects of the Anglo-American racial system.

This chapter investigates how the Italian American press negotiated and digested the American racial system by examining its discussion of Italian and African American issues. In response to American violence against Italian immigrants, especially lynching, mainstream newspapers such as Il Progresso resorted to the experience of African Americans as a frame of reference to understand their own racialization. These newspapers stridently criticized self-appointed standard-bearers of white America who claimed ancestry from Anglo-Saxon or Nordic racial stock for questioning the Italian race while hypocritically oppressing African Americans as a consequence of skin color and African ancestry. In addition, empathetic news stories about issues such as segregation and race riots were ubiquitous within the Italian American press alongside sympathetic commentary.

Chapter 3 follows white St. Domingue refugees as they integrate into Louisiana’s Creole community and struggle against the tide of Anglo-Americanization during the nineteenth century. As the refugees blended into the Creole community, they felt the consequences of the racial and cultural assumptions Anglo-Americans made about Creoles. The most damaging of these was the suspicion that—because of their higher tolerance for publicly acknowledged interracial relationships—all Creoles, whether they appeared to be white or not, were really racially mixed. This chapter explains how and why most white Creoles eventually let go of their Creole identity and blended into Louisiana’s white Anglo-American community.

This chapter discusses patterns in the deployment of symbolic boundaries with ethnoracial significance. Latino migrants deploy an elaborate array of language and action directed at African Americans that is frequently and strongly negatively inflected. The particular racial systems of Latin American migrants’ origin countries and communities are analyzed. An argument for the transnational roots of this symbolic order is developed.

This introductory chapter traces the history of ideas about race and human classification systems, from the bible to the Classical period and on to the first “scientific” attempts to rank differences and ascribe characteristics to races. Starting with the view from the Tower of Babel came the notion that linguistic and cultural diversity was the Supreme Being’s punitive response to such human hubris of reaching for heaven on earth. Following that came a litany of scholars, scientists, and doctors, who established hierarchies that left white Europeans on the top of the intellectual period, and other races lagging behind. Among these was Hippocrates, who wrote that the forms and dispositions of human beings corresponded with the nature of the country, their region’s climate and topography. Meanwhile, the French physician Francois Bernier developed the first post-Classical racial classification system, basing it on physical attributes. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was the first phrenologist, and although he also classified race, he asserted that all races belonged to a single species. Physician George Morton measured cranial size and then estimated brain size in an effort to rank humans based on intelligence. The chapter then looks at more modern concepts, such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution; scientific rejection of the notion that races were biologically different; and UNESCO’s statement that social issues give rise to racism.

Chapter 6 presents a fresh perspective on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Detailing Tourgée’s close collaboration with Louis A. Martinet and the New Orleans Citizens’ Committee in challenging Jim Crow, the chapter first refutes the myth that Tourgée’s Creole-of-color clients objected to his strategy of using a light-skinned plaintiff to embody the wrongfulness of segregation. Next, through rhetorical analysis of the brief Tourgée submitted to the Supreme Court, the chapter argues that Tourgée sought on the one hand to expose the concept of race as unscientific and thus legally untenable and on the other hand to reclaim the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as bulwarks against discrimination. Finally, the chapter contrasts Tourgée’s bitter ex-post-factum denunciations of the Court for having endorsed white supremacy and the racial caste system with the surprisingly muted public reaction to the Court’s verdict.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Latino GBT activists live their lives as “Latinos” in a racial social system. In a parallel fashion to stigma related to gender nonconformity, it treats the racial labeling of groups as stigma. That is, to call someone Latino or to use the label Latino is part of the process of marking differences between groups, creating social separation, and establishing discriminatory practices. This stigmatization reinforces, if not creates, relations of power. From the viewpoint of the labeled group, stigma can take the form of actual experiences; perceptions about how others or the society at large see them; and internalization of the negative views others have in the self.

This chapter shows how much of the white South fought tooth and nail to preserve the racial caste system until blacks took to the streets and demanded change. National leaders found southern segregation an embarrassment in international relations. By the early 1960s, the civil rights revolution was gripping the land. Within the South, especially North Carolina, a few elected officials began to support more racial equality, some overtly and others covertly. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation in public places. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated political stratagems that southern states had adopted to block African Americans from voting. Race remained a powerful undercurrent in politics. Yet over the decades, attitudes gradually began to soften.

This chapter examines the gendered face of Latinidad as it is transported, manipulated, and articulated by popular media networks under the contemporary conditions of globality. Latinidad, the process of being, becoming, and/or performing belonging within a Latina/o diaspora, challenges many popular and academic categories of ethnicity, location, and culture. As a cultural and conceptual framework, Latinidad enables a more nuanced reading of the disjuncture between the lived realities and commodified constructions of hybridity. The global presence and mobility of the Latina/o population has led to significant reconfiguration of the U.S. national imaginary with regard to race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. In particular, the heterogeneity of the Latina/o population has unsettled a deeply entrenched black and white racial system which is embedded in various types of institutional and social discourses. Indeed, the transnational lives and cultural hybridity of Latina/os and Latinidad exceed national boundaries and disrupt conventional categorizations of race.