CONSTRUCTING “RACE” AND “ETHNICITY” IN AMERICA: CATEGORY-MAKING IN PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION

Vol. 14 No. 4 (April 2004)

CONSTRUCTING “RACE” AND “ETHNICITY” IN AMERICA: CATEGORY-MAKING IN PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION, by Dvora Yanow. Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2003. 272pp. Cloth. $73.95. ISBN: 0-7656-0800-6. Paper. $27.95. ISBN: 0-7656-0801-4

Reviewed by Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Department of Political Science, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Dvora Yanow’s titular quotation marks tell the tale of her argument in this book. Race and ethnicity, important categories that appear natural and worthy of accounting by policy makers, are themselves formed and manipulated within the policy process. Unlike some other structured outcomes of policy making such as tax brackets, they play a particularly ironic role: they are social and political constructions caught up in the essential political enterprise of making policy and administration look scientific and, hence, justifiable. Building on traditions of symbolic interactionist scholarship on public policy (Edelman 1964; Edelman 1977; Gusfield 1963; Schram and Neiser 1997; Stone 1997), Yanow seeks to uncover how this causal inversion works and the manner in which official categories come to matter through the suppression of their own contingency. Categories of race and ethnicity emerge in this analysis as “collective identity narratives” (p.7) that reinforce ideas about a fixed, ahistorical, and neutral categorization of social difference that simultaneously suppress historical inquiry into schemes of governance.

Yanow’s book is at its best and most compelling when it recovers this history which she pursues by mapping the changing nature of racial and ethnic narratives to the domestic and foreign policy concerns of their day. She traces the effects of these narratives to the categories deployed by the state within the federal Office of Management and Budget, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, census, local agencies, and even published academic research on policy making. This study reveals an interesting contrast that she intelligently exploits. On the one hand, we learn about the changing nature of these categories-e.g., the Census has articulated race in many categorical terms such as whites (rather constantly), slaves, colored persons, Negro, Black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, African American, to contemporary mixed categories-the divergent historical technologies by which such categories are “counted,” and the imaginations that inform both the conceptual and methodological transformation. On the other hand, we see the curious persistence of belief, arrayed against historical variability, that these categories are “grounded in science, given by nature, fixed, and immutable” (p.x).

Through their very administration, then, Yanow shows how the deployment and measurement of these categories do a form of epistemological and social violence in several ways. First, they reify these identities, lumping together divergent histories and social problems under balky phenotypical or linguistic labels (such as “Asian” or “Hispanic”) whose very status erases the recognition and significance of political, economic, and family differences. Second, they facilitate the official allocation of rewards on the basis of these labels, creating a broadly-based political compulsion to adopt and use these categories-cum-identities. Echoing sociolegal concerns about the social gaps produced by “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1991; Hutchinson 2001; Iglesias 1993; Kwan 1997), Yanow argues that, “the policy and administrative standing of American race-ethnic categories has overtaken the ontological status of individuals who do not fit them” (p.108). Third, ideas of citizenship and entitlements are constructed on the basis of these labels, inverting a means of accounting for social marginality into a centralizing political logic. Finally, these categories organize the forms of knowledge around which administrative power is authorized: they are treated scientifically by administrative institutions and thus produce policy that lends scientific prestige to government, inhibiting democratic reform and reformulation.

Yanow’s analysis is historically rich and argumentatively solid, however far it fears to tread from its American pragmatist roots in symbolic interactionism. Indeed, works on Foucault’s concept of governmentality would augment her analysis quite well; see, e.g., Barry, Osborne and Rose (1996), Cooper (1998), Foucault (1991). Where Yanow’s symbolic interactionism stresses the Kantian importance of autonomous constructions of meaning, it also strives in her hands for a synthetic ethical voice from which she is prepared to argue that the potential harm in racial-ethnic categorization outweighs any potential for remedy (p.215). Although she is sensitive to the fact that a collective national consciousness is itself constituted through these various narratives of categorical difference and that, in contrast, “ambiguity and confusion may be useful” (p.xiii), the deployment of the American “we” often overshadows the value of the exclusions that it can make, hiding the value of ambiguity. Consider Yanow’s pronouns in the following bill of particulars:

Every time we invoke one of the category names or one of the race-ethnic terms, we sustain through that language the reality status of those things in the world (including the eugenic and classical baggage that they carry and that echo in their usage);

Every time we use a category name that lumps together several identities, we enforce the characteristics of that lumpier identity in its limited range on those subsumed under the name; and

Every time we use a race-ethnic term, we impute an importance to those traits that occludes other features, such as class, that might be equally important or even more powerful explainers of the social problem we are trying to solve. (p.215)

Certainly, a national project only succeeds where it smooths over social particularisms, and reminders of class antagonism, genealogical baggage, and the like, become important ethical considerations as they reveal both contingency and ambiguity. Nonetheless, the foregrounding of a “we,” as the agent harmed, is itself a barrier to more productive analysis of the deployment of categories.

I would like to consider Yanow’s criticisms from the perspective of a native activist. Yanow claims that “we can [and that we should, ed.] tell national identity, national origins, and personal identity stories without recourse to the language of race or of ethnicity” (p.201). Yanow’s rejection of these grammars to some degree frees Native epistemologies of self and other that rely on genealogies and historical belongings to land that predate nationalist and American constructions and frequently elude the concept of racial difference. But what happens when these grammars disrupt the premise of a uniform national identity? The Supreme Court in RICE v. CAYETANO made it clear in its rejection of native-only voting for the state’s Office of Hawaiian Affairs that native Hawaiians-who do not consider themselves a race and whose “racial” unity was explicitly denied by the state of Hawai‘i as defendant-cannot evade judicial categories. In Justice Kennedy’s words, “ancestry can be a proxy for race” (at 514), a certainty that erases the history of colonization while it “scientifically” legitimates legal ways of knowing. On the other hand, turning away from law and policy is disempowering, even more so when the national imaginary remains an ethical imperative. Constrained to re-narrate difference within the national “we” reproduces the fiction of a nation of immigrants in spirit if not in story, and becomes the likely, perhaps hegemonic, arrangement of citizenship opposed by many Native activists.

This dilemma sounds much like Yanow’s own criticisms of the paradoxical constraints emerging within dominant categories. Yet, the state of Hawai‘i and Native supporters of OHA were striving to make a broader point in RICE. The framework of nation-the concern for the consequences of categories upon a “we”-disciplines the ways in which categories of otherness can be heard. Justice from the perspective of native Hawaiians and a state that is committed to dualism may demand Hawai‘i be narrated as two or more nations, or collective associations equivalent in importance to national bodies, lacking a coherent and unified “we” or a consistent scheme of citizenship. In a similar manner, a politics of justice that queers categories (Hutchinson 1999); or emphasizes a “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988), as native Hawaiians do when some of them agree to ethnic/constitutional categories under which they can achieve federal recognition, or that reaches beyond the nation through adoptions of human rights or international agencies (Stychin 1998), plays with categories in novel ways without seeking their destruction altogether. Perhaps any category, however contingent, could serve to create the same kinds of violence that race and ethnicity have done in the context of American history; deconstructing these categories is important, but a willingness to take on the nation at the same time may be a necessity of justice.

Although Yanow won’t take us that far, her book is an important contribution to thinking out the role of narratives and social categories in the reproduction of social, political and legal hierarchy. For those of us teaching sociolegal studies, this book could offer a useful discussion piece in undergraduate and graduate seminars, highlighting interesting questions about the relationship of law and policy to social knowledge and practices, the contingency and character of categories in policy making, as well as the ethical implications of race and ethnicity in contemporary governance.

REFERENCES:

Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas S. Rose. 1996. FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL REASON : LIBERALISM, NEO-LIBERALISM AND RATIONALITIES OF GOVERNMENT. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cooper, Davina. 1998. GOVERNING OUT OF ORDER: SPACE, LAW, AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING. London ; New York: Rivers Oram Press; Distributed in the USA by New York University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” 43 STANFORD LAW REVIEW 1241-1299.

Edelman, Murray J. 1964. THE SYMBOLIC USES OF POLITICS. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

---. 1977. POLITICAL LANGUAGE : WORDS THAT SUCCEED AND POLICIES THAT FAIL. Institute for Research on Poverty monograph series. New York: Academic Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. GOVERNMENTALITY. IN THE FOUCAULT EFFECT: STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY, edited by G. Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gusfield, Joseph. 1963. SYMBOLIC CRUSADE: STATUS POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hutchinson, Darren. 1999. “Ignoring the Sexualization of Race: Heteronormativity, Critical Race Theory and Anti-Racist Politics,” 47 BUFFALO LAW REVEW 1-116.

---. 2001. “Identity Crisis: ‘Intersectionality,’ ‘Multidimensionality,’ and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination,” 6 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF RACE & LAW 285-317.

Iglesias, Elizabeth. 1993. “Structures of Subordination: Women of Color at the Intersection of Title VII and the NLRA. Not!” 28 HARVARD CIVIL RIGHTS-CIVIL LIBERTIES LAW REVIEW 395.

Kwan, Peter. 1997. “Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender & Sexual Orientation: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories,” 48 HASTINGS LAW JOURNAL 1257-1292.

Schram, Sanford, and Philip Neiser. 1997. TALES OF THE STATE. New York: Roman and Littlefield.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in IN OTHER WORLDS: ESSAYS IN CULTURAL POLITICS. New York: Methuen.

Stone, Deborah A. 1997. POLICY PARADOX : THE ART OF POLITICAL DECISION MAKING. New York: W.W. Norton.

Stychin, Carl. 1998. A NATION BY RIGHTS : NATIONAL CULTURES, SEXUAL IDENTITY POLITICS, AND THE DISCOURSE OF RIGHTS, QUEER POLITICS, QUEER THEORIES. Philadelphia, Pa: Temple University Press.

CASE REFERENCE:

RICE v. CAYETANO, 528 U.S. 495 (2000)

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