Who Is White?

Ran across this book review by Tamara K. Nopper for Who is White?:Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide by George Clancey. Though I've never heard of this book, the review has piqued my interest enough to spark a visit to the bookstore.
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The Browning and Yellowing of Whiteness

By Tamara K. Nopper

...George Yancey’s book Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide is such a necessary read. Yancey, a sociologist at the University of North Texas, provides compelling evidence that supports the (unstated) hypothesis that the color line of the twentieth century will remain firmly entrenched in the twenty-first. Using as his point of departure the popular projection that whites will soon be a minority group, Yancey opens his book by arguing that whites will remain the majority despite the growing populations of Latino/as and Asian Americans. How can the increase of Latino/as and Asian Americans enforce, rather than disrupt, the color line? Simple. By 2050, according to Yancey, most Latino/as and Asian Americans will be white.

...his argument is grounded in an understanding of how whiteness, like any racial category, is socially and politically defined yet enacted in real and meaningful ways. Whiteness is also fluid and maintains itself when threatened by incorporating previously excluded groups. In the chapter “How to be White,” Yancey covers ground commonly discussed by practitioners of what is becoming institutionalized as “whiteness studies,” including the racialized discrimination and nativism that different European ethnic groups faced before they eventually became socially accepted by Anglos and then later by a more expansive pan-European race simply known as “white."

Previous research on majority group domination tends to be built upon either the concept that white supremacy is, or was, the dominant ideology among majority group members, or the concept that dominant group members utilize notions of color blindness to protect their racial position of privilege. Both concepts lead to an understanding of an American racial hierarchy formed by a white/nonwhite dichotomy. In such a system all non-European groups face social rejection and theoretically all non-European groups deserve an equal amount of academic attention – even if they have not been receiving it. Yet given the merging of nonblack racial minorities into the dominant culture, this white/nonwhite dichotomy is losing relevance. A black/nonblack dichotomy produces more understanding about contemporary race relations. It suggests that the informal rejection of African Americans, rather than a tendency by the majority to oppress all minority groups in a roughly equal manner, is the linchpin to the American contemporary racial hierarchy.
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