Doctoral Dissertation Research: Racial Reproduction: The Relationship Between Immigrant Racial Knowledge and Immigrant Racial Identity

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how immigrants learn ideologies about the U. S. racial social structure. Focus groups and in-depth interviews will explore how new immigrants perceive the racial hierarchy and how these perceptions compare with racial categories in their countries of origin. Questions will focus especially on personal experiences and media exposure that have conveyed knowledge of the racial hierarchy. A second set of issues will investigate how contact with this racial ideology has affected the immigrants' own racial identity, for instance, whether they have maintained specific national affiliations or developed more pan-ethnic identities. These processes of acquiring racial knowledge and adopting new racial identities are bound up with immigrants' acceptance or rejection of racial ideology and the ideologies' characterizations of their own position in that hierarchy. A variety of immigrant groups will be interviewed to investigate how past experiences and their position in the racial hierarchy influence acquisition and acceptance of racial ideologies.