ABSTRACT
In the US, race is perceived as an utterly natural way to identify people and there is widespread recognition of racial categories at the societal, institutional, and governmental levels. Immigrants to the US are assumed to affiliate principally with one of several racial or ethnic categories such as Black, Hispanic, White, or Asian—labels that leave little room for the disparate class, racial, linguistic, or gender experiences they bring. For example, some immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America are labeled “black” even though they do not define themselves that way nor are they identified as such in their homelands (Bailey 2000a, 2000b). Omi and Winant (1994) argue that the black-white racial polarity is a system of representation that still plays a very real role in shaping social structures and individual experiences in the US. In recent years, other categories such as Asian, Latino, and Middle Eastern have emerged as recognizable identities that are distinct from both black and white categories. Understanding one’s place in the system of racial categorization is less of a dilemma for speakers born in the US where such categories are often perceived as natural, but for those born elsewhere such categories are not necessarily meaningful. Most immigrants from Europe, including countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, and the Balkans, are usually classified as white in the US. Yet whiteness may not be a category that is part of their self-definition, and their understanding of the meanings attached to whiteness might differ from those of people who have grown up in the US.
