The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide

It is not often that I read a book that simultaneously expands my knowledge base on social and cultural realities AND draws me into deep reflection upon my own life in the midst of the knowledge. What a gift Eileen O'Brien has given this cyclical armchair sociologist. Throughout the reading of The Radical Middle I found myself exhaling with deeps sighs of self awareness while being moved by the thoughtful way in which she has dug deeply into the lives of those who contributed to her study. The Radical Middle is the account of what many of us have experienced who have lived a life in a world who's rhetoric around race is arguable controlled and guided by that of the White/Black dynamic. Those of us "brown" folks have been, for generations, stuck in the middle and much of society not knowing what do with us. Are you White? Are you Black? Where are you from? Where did you learn to speak English? "What are you?" This list of confusions goes on and on. Many of us know exactly what this cultural location feels like, we are adeptly able to shift from context to context without skipping a beat, but there are few who have captured this experience so well. But . . . now addd to your list of books to read on race, The Radical Middle: Latinos and Asian American Living Beyond the Racial Divide by Eileen O'Brien. While this book feel a little academic at times, especially the first chapter where we get a glimpse of the methods that were used, the rest of it is deft dance between the sharing of first account stories and experiences and O'Brien's insightful analysis and reflection. Throughout the book OBrien acknowledges and affirms the realities of this middle racial reality while challenging some of the ways that this group is still impacted by race, racism and the divide between White and Black. Here are a few snippets from the book. on self-understanding of race . . . Perhaps the most striking finding is that racial and ethnic categories operate more as sliding scales or continuums in the mind of respondents rather than hard and fast classifications. That is, one can conceive of race and ethnicity as continuous variables rather than categorical. Race and ethnicity appear to be "relative" designations that take shape for respondents as meaningful or salient categories for them depending on the context or who is surrounding them. - page 30 on the middle race's upholding of racist paradigms . . . When we look at this racial hierarchy from the vantage point of Latinos and Asian Americans themselves, we see that they are highly complicit in its maintenance. Leeway is given for white partners that is not given for blacks. Often antilock prohibitions are not explicitly stated, and are seen as taken for granted or matter-of-fact. - page 123 on the future of race . . . The future of race may be thus not in academic theories and racial terminology, but in the everyday experiences of the racial middle themselves, as they do the work of carving out a

This is a fascinating and well-written book about the growing Asian American and Latino population and their views on and experience of race and ethnic relations in the U.S. It is based on fifty in depth interviews, presented in sufficient detail that you can draw your own conclusions and agree or disagree with the author's analysis. O'Brien starts with recent debates over how the addition of millions of people of Hispanic and Asian origin to what was once a predominantly white and African-American population is changing race relations in America. Some suggest that a new majority coalition of people of color and white allies will bring an end to racism. Others suggest that African-Americans will remain at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that is changing from white over non-white to non-black over black. O'Brien finds that there is evidence to support some aspects of both of these theories, and that the members of the "racial middle" have their own ideas and experiences to add to the mix. The interviews provide an enlightening picture of the complex interaction of culture, ethnicity and race. The Asian Americans and Latinos in these interviews describe the ways in which they are pulled in different directions by the expectations of family and ethnic community, by their concepts of what it means to be an American, and by the stereotypes applied to them by white Americans. They are very aware of the ethnic diversity within their own "racial" groups, and dislike being racially stereotyped, yet they often stereotype the other groups they are not part of. My major disagreement with O'Brien comes when she argues in Chapter Five that her Asian American and Latino interviewees are subject to pervasive white racism and that they are largely in denial of that fact. It appears to me that the people she interviews make a plausible case for their own views to the contrary. The interviewees say that they think much of the stereotyping they encounter (usually a presumption of "foreignness") is simple ignorance, and the examples they give seem to bear that out. When an older white American with a Japanese daughter-in-law is unable to comprehend that an Asian American woman he is speaking with at a social gathering grew up in America, speaks only English, is of Thai descent, and knows nothing about Japan, it seems quite a stretch to consider that racism rather than ignorance. Similarly, when people have never heard of Macao or Cambodia, that too is ignorance, however annoying it may be to people whose families originate in those places. And when several people say that the discrimination that they face as Asian Americans or Latinos is of a different and far less harmful nature than the discrimination faced by African-Americans, I see no reason for O'Brien to describe this as a form of denial or minimization of racism, especially since, in a somewhat different context she herself distinguishes between her respondents own "in-group ethnocentrism" and the "ri