{"id":22094,"date":"2013-07-15T02:52:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T02:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22094"},"modified":"2013-07-15T02:53:04","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T02:53:04","slug":"in-florida-a-death-foretold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22094","title":{"rendered":"In Florida, a Death Foretold"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Florida, a Death Foretold<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-03-31<\/p>\n

Isabel Wilkerson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived \u2014 white, earnest and fresh from the North \u2014 white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough \u201cfeel about Negroes as Southerners do.\u201d In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study \u201cCaste and Class in a Southern Town,\u201d they are saying \u201cthat he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one\u2019s caste to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described.<\/strong> Assumptions about one\u2019s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.<\/p>\n

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers \u2014 like previous waves of immigrants in the past \u2014 may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…<\/p>\n

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. \u201cBlacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,\u201d said Paula D. McClain<\/a>, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, \u201cbecause they know what laws have done to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But shared hardships don\u2019t necessarily make allies. \u201cAs linked fate rises, so does competition,\u201d said Michael Jones-Correa<\/a>, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. \u201cIt\u2019s like a sibling rivalry,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not a painless relationship.\u201d And, of course, Latino immigrants don\u2019t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. \u201cWhen we come to the U.S.,\u201d Eduardo Bonilla-Silva<\/a>, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, \u201cwe immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, \u2018My job is to be anything but black.\u2019 \u201d…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Florida, a Death Foretold The New York Times 2012-03-31 Isabel Wilkerson In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived \u2014 white, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14646,8,394,20],"tags":[319,3707,10140,8893,10280,2640,10281,2327,10143],"class_list":["post-22094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-eduardo-bonilla-silva","tag-florida","tag-george-zimmerman","tag-isabel-wilkerson","tag-michael-jones-correa","tag-new-york-times","tag-paula-d-mcclain","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-trayvon-martin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}