ABSTRACT
This chapter is about ethnicity and its structurational processes. It is not about any particular ethnic group-I draw from numerous examples and bits of data to illustrate points-but it does focus a little more on African Americans as an ethnic group, only because of the importance and interest in the issues and problems. I point out immediately that I understand the problem of labeling. The argument that the term African American fails to reflect differences in the community, and falsely implies similarity and consistency, is a reasonable one. Any single label will obscure class, religious, regional, and linguistic differences. But a continuous subdividing and classification of groups, attempting to account for any and all cutlural differences, is also impossible. It, too, can create rifts and false impressions of differences. Hecht, Collier, and Ribeau’s (1993) empirical data suggest a reasonable amount of convergence on the term African American, and it is the term they use, so I adopt it also. I use the term only when borrowing it from previously reported research, or when it is appropriate for illustrative purposes.
