Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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The notion of
‘ethnic groups’ was frequently applied to differentiate between
whites by countries of origin in (white) Europe.
Many people have noted the ambiguities resulting from
‘racial’ classifi cations of Hispanics (see Hollinger 1995).
Rodriguez and Cordero-Guzman (1992) were among the fi rst
to document the shifts in meaning and emphasis in racial
classifi cation. They acknowledge that the concept of ‘races’
as conceived through the nineteenth and at least the fi rst half
of the twentieth century is discredited. Where ‘race’ has survived
as a scholarly term it refl ects the fact that the idea of
‘racial difference’ persists in popular usage. Races are, thus,
culturally constructed in local discourses. One such is the US
paradigm of ‘race as biologically or genetically based’ and
unchanging, and dominated by the divide between a category
‘white’ and the ‘one-drop’ rule for blackness (see F. J. Davis
2001). The white race ‘was defi ned by the absence of any
non-white blood and the black race was defi ned by the presence
of any black blood’ (Rodriguez and Cordero-Guzman
1992) – an asymmetrical defi nition refl ecting US inequalities
of power. The important conclusion is the much wider one
that they correctly draw:
Popular defi nitions of ‘race’ vary from culture to culture [suggesting]
the importance of historical events, development or
context in determining ‘race’. That there are different systems
of racial classifi cation in different countries (and sometimes
within countries) is quite counter to the usual perception that
most White Americans hold of race in the US. (Rodriguez and
Cordero-Guzman 1992, p. 524)
Their evidence is drawn from a study of the racial or cultural
identifi cations of Puerto Ricans in an interview survey.
Their study was able to discount any idea that Hispanic
respondents did not understand the question or that they
simply searched for an intermediate (between white and