“They Are There with Us”: Theorizing Racial Status and Intergroup Relations

Working from a case study of Latinx immigrant settlement in a Black-White community in North Carolina, this article draws on social psy-chology, racial formation theory, and intersectional theory to produce the theory of racial status. This integrative theory better accounts for how race relations are formed and transformed, particularly among non-Whites. Racial status theory proposes that groups are most likely to get along when they believe their racial status is shared. In concep-tualizing race as a status rather than a category, the author theorizes shared racial status as the product of three mechanisms: contact, discrim-ination, and external threat. These three mechanisms determine whether or not the boundaries of racial status shift and, when they do, in what di-rection. Moreover, in retheorizing intergroup relations dynamics through racial status, the author posits that collective racial status building is the process by which linked fate occurs on the one hand and assimilation on the other, suggesting new frameworks not only for understanding inter-group relations, but also for revealing dynamics of integration among immigrant newcomers and racial politics.