Quotes from John Iceland

The Naturalization Act of 1870 expanded naturalization in the United States to "white persons and persons of African descent," but other nonwhites remained excluded.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act went further, barring the immigration of all Chinese laborers.

affirmative action,

Thus, according to the survey, individuals' behaviors are mainly to blame (i.e., lack of willpower), though respondents still often recognized the multifaceted nature of inequality and the role of structural factors such as educational opportunities and discrimination

In 1913 and 1920 California enacted "alien land laws" aimed at Japanese American farmers, essentially barring them from purchasing and leasing agricultural land. The Japanese Americans, however, found

The golfing champion went on to state that as a child he'd invented the term, "Cablinasian" to describe his parents multi-ethnicity and nationality—a mix of half Asian (Chinese and Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth Dutch.

The underlying reason why Woods might be identified as black in the first place, given his very mixed heritage, is the traditional "one-drop rule" in the United States. This rule refers to the legal (for a time) designation of people with any black ancestry—that is, a person with even a single drop of black blood—as black.

The rule was historically used as a tool of subjugation. If a society was going to keep blacks and whites "separate but equal" as declared by the infamous Jim Crow laws in the segregated South and antimiscegenation laws (which barred interracial marriages) that at one point existed in thirty-eight states across the country, then rules were needed to determine who would fall on each side of the stark line dividing privilege from oppression.

Culture has sometimes been used to blame poor people and minorities for their own disadvantage. For example, some people believe that cultural values and lifestyles, such as a weak work ethic, childbearing outside of marriage, criminal behavior, and drug use inhibit upward mobility among some groups.

Race has traditionally referred to groups that are biologically distinguishable by physical, mental, and genetic traits.9 Indeed, this notion remains widely held among the public.

Assimilation refers to the reduction of differences between ethnic groups over time.

Descendants of European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have largely assimilated into U.S. society. Groups once viewed as outsiders now view themselves, and are viewed by others, as part of the American mainstream.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights movement, prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

This perspective further argues that whites often don't recognize these systemic inequalities and thus don't acknowledge the privileges they enjoy by the virtue of being white and blame the disadvantaged position of many minorities on their own poor choices and wayward values.

Hispanics are faring quite poorly relative to most other groups, and Asians are faring quite well, as they surpass whites by a comfortable margin.

In other words, they feel part of the mainstream, and they are less likely to perceive the importance of race in other people's lives. This is what some commentators would refer to as "white privilege.

For example, the experiences of the Japanese are quite different from those of the Hmong from southeast Asia, many who came as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War. Likewise, the experiences of people of Mexican origin are quite different from those of immigrants coming from Cuba.

My conclusion is that there is considerable evidence that both Asians and Hispanics have experienced upward mobility across generations, indicative of some measure of incorporation in the United States. Asians have achieved parity, or even an advantage, when compared to whites in terms of education, income, and other outcomes.

For many Americans, race is an important part of their identity. It affects how they view themselves, their aspirations, and their communities.

In other words, race is a social construction, and how groups are defined varies over time and place.

African Americans are still more likely to be poor, unemployed, and incarcerated and suffer from worse health than whites. The

The story for Hispanics and Asians is complicated by the fact that many are immigrants or the children of immigrants, meaning that we have to take into account how the process of adaptation and assimilation (or possible lack thereof) affects their patterns of socioeconomic achievement and health over time and across generations.

While Puerto Ricans, compared to other Latino migrants, enjoy the benefit of U.S. citizenship at birth, the population is generally very racially mixed; many have some African ancestry, and darker-skinned Puerto Ricans in particular have encountered significant racial barriers.

A running theme in the book is that how we define racial and ethnic groups, along with changing patterns of identification in the U.S. population, affects our understanding of racial and ethnic inequality.