Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide

by George Yancey

Book by Yancey, George

Genres: Race, Philosophy

230 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2005

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall very interesting data presented and very interesting hypotheses put forth, but I do not advise reading this page for page. It's basically empirical data presented as a book, so it's extremely dry to read. I personally jumped around to look for the key arguments and data supporting those claims. Nonetheless, I think the main contribution of this book is that is offers strong evidence AGAINST research and practice starting from the position that all people of color will perceive themselves as sharing interests or that European descended people will be the only ones perceiving an advantage in maintaining white supremacist structures. What I think would've made this more interesting, although it's clearly beyond the scope of the study, is a discussion of how "black" and "nonblack" are defined in practice. Yancey basically assumes that Black is a given, as if among African Americans there isn't differential access to the ability to experience identificational assimilation (which he described). I ask the following: who counts as "black" in the binary? I think African ancestry matters, but an explanation has to be made for situations such as the "hardworking immigrant" stereotype and the popular perception of African Americans (as opposed to African descended immigrants) as uniquely lazy, politically disruptive, unamerican, and sexually and morally "loose". If these issues didn't exist, you wouldn't have the situation where often Black immigrants show negative attitudes toward African Americans whose class privilege is minimal or invisible at a given time.

[P. Cept · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accurate analysis that is unfortunately playing out as predicted. Good work.

[Hollis]

a key text in afropessimist thought. some of Yancey’s statistical findings didn’t seem that significant to me, but then again I’m not a statistician—in other words, maybe there’s a slight audience barrier, to be expected. this book remains quite relevant when considering the assumed link between non-white racial identity & trends in social-political values.

[Bridget Belyeu · Rating 4 out of 5]

many interesting studies. eye opening.

[Dave Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work by Prof. Yancey. Only suggestion is to explore the path dependency of American definitions of race in early 1800s.