Multicultural Psychology. Jennifer T. Pedrotti
to read. Europeans couldn’t use slaves in skilled jobs, which were reserved for Europeans. Europeans had to administer prescribed punishment for slave “misbehavior” and were expected to participate in patrolling at night. They did not have the legal right to befriend Blacks. A White servant who ran away with a Black was subject to additional punishment beyond that for simply running away. European rights to free their slaves were also curtailed. (2016, p. 22)
Gender constructions and gender roles around class and race were also formed. Buck goes on to describe how, following Bacon’s Rebellion, the elites developed and spread the idea of White masculinity. The underlying concept was that White superiority could be seen by how well White men were able to provide for their families. White men should work, and their wives stay home, unlike Blacks and people in Native communities, where both genders (inside and outside of the slave system) worked. The narrative of the successful White man was formed, describing men who worked and were the heads of households where women stayed home and cared for the home and children. Married White women (especially Whites who were not recent immigrants) were discouraged from wage labor with claims that “true women served only their families” (Buck, 2016, p. 24). Working-class White men became slave patrollers and plantation overseers, and were given or allowed to buy small parcels of land.
The economic benefits connected to being White helped strengthen the racial divide, but the real psychosocial work of the construction came with what W. E. B. Dubois (1935) called the “psychological wage of Whiteness,” the idea that one’s Whiteness had meaning and value, that it alone made one superior to other races. This “wage,” along with the social, political, and economic privileges given to Whites, finally and fully disrupted the earlier interracial communities.
In 1776, the nation declared that only White male landowners could vote. By 1790, only Whites could be citizens. In 1862, the Homestead Act provided free land to anyone who improved that land within five years; the only other criterion was that one had to be a citizen, which limited this benefit to only Whites. So, whether you were from a family of wealthy plantation owners in Virginia or were a newly arrived poor immigrant, if you were White, you could own land. These race-based policies around voting, citizenship, and land ownership worked in concert to further racialize class inequality. Researchers at The Economic Policy Institute argue that the biggest factor in our increasing racial wealth gap today is housing inequality. That inequality can, in large part, be traced back to The Homestead Act as well as to the housing policies of the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., redlining—more on this in Chapter 6), and the GI Bill of World War II.
The GI Bill helped returning veterans buy homes by providing funds for down payments as well as government-backed 30-year low-cost mortgages. Of the nearly $120 billion in loans granted through the GI Bill, more than 98% went to Whites. That historically established racial wealth gap was expanded by the recent collapse of the housing market in the United States. Harper’s Magazine published a deposition from a Wells Fargo loan officer who described how the lender targeted members of the Black and Latino communities during the housing boom (Jacobson, 2009). As new customers to the housing market, these individuals’ lack of knowledge and experience with buying a home made them vulnerable. Instead of being given the 30-year flat-rate mortgages that most qualified for, they were often sold loan packages with adjustable rates and balloon payments. The selling of those loan packages meant a financial bonus for the loan officers, who knowingly increased the likelihood of foreclosure for their Black and brown clients.
Figure 2.2 African American Timeline
Attitudes, policies, and inequalities established in our past are still seen within today’s raced and gendered homeownership levels, home values, and wage inequity. A recent Institute for Policy Studies (2019) report found that between 1983 and 2013, the median wealth of a Black household declined 75% (from $6,800 to $1,700), and that the median Latino household wealth declined 50% (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median White household increased 14% from $102,000 to $116,800.
The idea of race, what it means to be Black and what it means to be White, has been constructed, enacted, and entrenched. The concepts became part of our sense of self and others; thus, our attitudes and behaviors are impacted, but more than that, race has been embedded in our laws, policies, and economic and political systems. Far from “natural,” the path to race, race relations, and racial inequality in the United States was designed with purpose and intent. Understanding that sociohistorical context and the structural nature of race is key to understanding the psyches and individuals that it produces. A racial segregation timeline is given in Figure 2.2, and a table showing major events in African American history is shown in Figure 2.3.
Figure 2.3 African American Racial Segregation Timeline
Asian Americans
For Asian Americans, that very term raises a number of issues, from the way in which it obscures the extraordinary diversity contained within this group (more than 20 nations, cultures, histories, etc. in the United States alone) to the use of “American” for a population ironically seen as “the perpetual foreigner.” Neither of the authors of this text can count the number of times Asian American students have told us the story of being praised for their command of the English language and of being asked, “Where are you from?” followed by, “Where are you really from?” when the answer of Chicago or New Orleans or Fresno isn’t enough. Asian Americans are often seen as not really American; they are often betrayed in popular culture with heavy accents, but little ethnic or national specificity, they are “Asian,” and thus other.
Early encounters, and the beginning of Asian racial constructions in the United States, began in the 1800s with the Chinese and Japanese. In Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Lee (1999) argues that there are six “faces” or images that make up the racial construction of Asian Americans—the “pollutant,” the “coolie,” the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the “gook,” each one constructed at “a specific historical moment, marked by a shift in class relations accompanied by cultural crisis” (p. 8). He goes on to write that
some studies attribute hostilities towards Asian immigrants directly to economic competition and the creation of an ethnically defined segmented labor market. They provide us with an economic framework for understanding the dynamics of class and race and a map of the economic terrain on which anti-Asian hostility has been built (pp. 5–6).
In other words, the coolie representations of the Chinese were developed at a time when the Chinese laborer was seen as a threat to White labor. Politically, these representations formed the backdrop to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred all Chinese immigration; it was the first federal law that targeted a specific ethnic group. Similarly, a report from the US government’s Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, “Personal Justice Denied” (Kashima, 1997), concluded that the economic threat that White West Coast farmers felt from Japanese agricultural success formed “part of the impetus for the incarceration of the Japanese” (p. 42) during World War II. Figure 2.4 shows a timeline of Asian American history.
Figure 2.4 Asian American Timeline
Asian Americans may soon become the fastest growing immigrant group in the United States. According to Pew research (Lopez, Ruiz, & Patten, 2017), the Asian immigrant population grew 72% from 2000 to 2015.
Latinx
Despite the statistics for Asians, the population most of us think of when the issue of immigration is raised is Mexicans. The irony is