in relation to ‘black’ and ‘white’.

The notion of
‘ethnic groups’ was frequently applied to differentiate between
whites by countries of origin in (white) Europe.
Many people have noted the ambiguities resulting from
‘racial’ classifi cations of Hispanics (see Hollinger 1995).
Rodriguez and Cordero-Guzman (1992) were among the fi rst
to document the shifts in meaning and emphasis in racial
classifi cation. They acknowledge that the concept of ‘races’
as conceived through the nineteenth and at least the fi rst half
of the twentieth century is discredited. Where ‘race’ has survived
as a scholarly term it refl ects the fact that the idea of
‘racial difference’ persists in popular usage. Races are, thus,
culturally constructed in local discourses. One such is the US
paradigm of ‘race as biologically or genetically based’ and
unchanging, and dominated by the divide between a category
‘white’ and the ‘one-drop’ rule for blackness (see F. J. Davis
2001). The white race ‘was defi ned by the absence of any
non-white blood and the black race was defi ned by the presence
of any black blood’ (Rodriguez and Cordero-Guzman
1992) – an asymmetrical defi nition refl ecting US inequalities
of power. The important conclusion is the much wider one
that they correctly draw:
Popular defi nitions of ‘race’ vary from culture to culture [suggesting]
the importance of historical events, development or
context in determining ‘race’.
Their evidence is drawn from a study of the racial or cultural
identifi cations of Puerto Ricans in an interview survey.
Their study was able to discount any idea that Hispanic
respondents did not understand the question or that they
simply searched for an intermediate (between white and

It is even possible to see the term ‘real whites’ (López and

Stanton-Salazar 2001) referring to non-Hispanic whites, the
latest twist in the long US story of defi ning whiteness (see
also Rodriguez 2000).
David Hollinger’s Postethnic America (1995), subtitled
‘Beyond Multiculturalism’ adds a contrasting viewpoint.
Rather than suggest that the US race classifi cation is breaking
up, he is concerned that there are intellectual and political
fl ows in exactly the opposite direction. The intellectual fl ow
is in the direction of recognizing that the term ‘race’ is obsolete;
but the practical (administrative) and political fl ow is
tending to consolidate the ‘recognition’ of races in American
life. In administrative practice, fi ve racial categories – white,
black or African American, Asian, American Indian and
Alaska native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacifi c islander,
plus a ‘some other race’ category – are increasingly deployed
not only in the Census but also as instruments of public
policy. Hollinger describes the routine nature of these categories,
plus the quasi-racial category ‘Hispanic’:
On application forms and questionnaires, individuals are
routinely invited to declare themselves to be one of the following:
Euro-American (or sometimes white), Asian American,
African American, Hispanic (or sometimes Latino) and Indigenous
peoples (Native American). (Hollinger 1995, p. 23)
This he calls the ‘ethno-racial’ pentagon, or the fi ve great
‘ethno-racial blocs’ which resemble the global categories of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientifi c racism –
Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, Amerindian – with Hispanic
as the outlier. The ‘great races’ are embedded in the
American imagination and are reproduced by the US Census.
Hollinger believes this classifi cation persists in popular
thought, despite the recognition of the concept of races as a
scientifi c and historical error: