Abstract
In the past 20 years, scholars of top sociology and race and ethnicity articles increasingly have mentioned the term “color line.” Prominent among them are sociologists concerned with how incoming waves of Latin American and Asian immigration, increasing rates of intermarriage, and a growing multiracial population will affect the U.S. racial order. While much of this work cites Du Bois, scholars stray from his definition of the color line in two ways. First, they characterize the color line as unidimensional and Black–white rather than as many divisions between non-white people and whites. Second, scholars portray the color line as the outcome of microlevel factors rather than the product of international geopolitical arrangements. I contend that in contrast to scholarship that portrays immigrants and intermarried and multiracial people as shifting the color line, international and imperial policies related to immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification are longstanding sites of the construction of the U.S. racial order. Scholars should conceptualize the United States as an empire state in order to analyze the international political history of multiple color lines. In doing so, they can distinguish between differences in kind and degree of racial divisions.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 11-25 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Sociology of Race and Ethnicity |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2019 |
Funding
I am especially grateful to Mara Loveman, Cybelle Fox, Pamela Oliver, Casey Stockstill, Esther HsuBorger, Tina Park, Michael Rodriguez-Muñiz, the editors of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback, which helped sharpen the manuscript. Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Johanna Quinn, Aliza Luft, Daanika Gordon, Mark Sanchez, and Linda Marie Pheng also provided helpful suggestions along the way. I presented earlier versions of this article to the Race and Ethnicity Research Group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the 2014 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, the 2016 annual meetings of the Junior Theorist Symposium and the American Sociological Association, and the 2017 UMass Social Theory Forum on W.E.B. Du Bois and the Color Line in the 21st Century. I thank the discussants, panelists, and audiences of these venues, especially Tukufu Zuberi, Nicholas Vargas, and Aldon Morris.
Keywords
- color line
- Du Bois
- empire
- immigration
- intermarriage
- multiraciality
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Anthropology
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)