The ethnic project: How racial fiction buttresses ethnic factions

The United States has a system of racial hierarchy with the white racial category at its apex, black at its nadir, and several other categories in between. Most people in the United States hold racial and ethnic positions at the same time. (Those who do not ethnically identify have been sociohistorically incorporated as fully “white” or “black,” the only two racial categories that tend to link ethnic erasure with racial adaptation.) Wealth-holding men seeking to protect their power created whiteness and used it to coopt poor European contract (indentured) laborers who might otherwise have joined with enslaved Africans to threaten to overthrow the wealthy’s power.

The U.S. racial system has shaped the inclusion of other groups since, and to this day pervades all U.S. social relations. Each group of “ethnics” – from native Americans through the “newest” arriving immigrant group – has been subject to the dictates of racial incorporation. Generally speaking, racial inclusion has meant subjugation to the bottom of the hierarchy, but some groups have managed to raise their racial status over time. This status-raising occurs not because of the benevolence of the dominant racial group, but because the status-raising group used their social agency in particular ways. Moreover, I argue, all racialized ethnic groups have similar desires to raise their racial status, but not all groups have equal power to realize those desires. My paper will present a theory of “ethnic projects,” or the process by which group agency carries out a quest for racial uplift. I will also theorize about the elements of ethnic projects that account for group success or failure in their ethnic project, using various U.S. ethnic histories as case-study evidence.