George Yancey. Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide.

George Yancey. Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide. Boulder: Lynne Rienner P, 2003. 239 pp. $49.95.

By now we likely reports that have all heard whites will soon lose their foothold as America's racial majority in coming decades if the growth rates of minorities continue to exceed those of European Americans. Political analysts and public commentators alike have projected that whites will likely be a numerical minority in this country within the next fifty years, and that there very possibly will not be a majority race in the United States by the year 2050. George Yancey interrogates such claims in his text Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide, and attempts to debunk the popular notion that the future numerical minority reality of American whites is an "unalterable fact." Such predictions, he asserts, are wrong not because minority growth rates have been assessed incorrectly, but because the definition of who is white is continually changing. Yancey contends that many individuals, namely Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans, will likely be able to assimilate into the dominant culture and even be counted as white in the years to come, whereas African Americans will continue to experience a degree of alienation unmatched by other racial groups that reinforces their separation. At issue here, then, is not only the permeability of racial categories and the need to view race as a social and historical construction, but the role that various forms of assimilation will play in just who gets counted as a member of the white racial majority. The latter will likely emerge as a troubling aspect of the text for many readers, especially since assimilation figures so heavily into Yancey's attempts to reconceptualize America's racial divide.

Yancey backs up his observations with findings assessed as part of the 1999-2000 Lilly Survey of American Attitudes and Friendships (LSAF), and uses this survey and its results for the majority of the quantitative analysis found in the text. The LSAF consisted of a phone survey of more than 2500 Americans, with "oversamples of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans." The survey was originally designed to assess "individual attitudes, social networks, and involvement in religious life of congregations," but as a research team member that organized the LSAF, Yancey was in the position to include questions that he felt would better enable him to assess the degree of assimilation that Latino, Asian, and African Americans have or have not experienced. It should be noted, however, that more than 1600 of the participants were in fact white, and that many of the questions used to determine social attitudes regarding minorities were rotated. For example, a third of European Americans were asked how they would feel if their child wanted to marry an Hispanic American; a third were asked about the same child marrying an African American; and so on. To be fair, Yancey does admit that there are some limitations of the research, but this acknowledgment does not deter him from predicting that the largest non-black minority groups will "soon shed their distinctions from majority group members."

Yancey draws from the work of Milton Gordon and his theorizations of structural, marital, civic, and identificational assimilation to explore how readily minority groups can become assimilated into the dominant society, identify with majority group status, and adopt social attitudes that benefit dominant group members. He argues in his opening chapter that viewing whites as a future minority not only assumes that all minorities share the same social position, it also "discounts the ability" of non-black minority groups to assimilate into the white majority. Yancey attempts to illustrate that this transformation of non-black minorities into majority group status is happening now, at the same time that African Americans remain separated from dominant culture. This results in what he calls the "twin processes of non-black assimilation and black separation," processes that he feels will ultimately reinforce America's racial divide. As the text's title recalls, this new divide will be not based on who is accepted as being most white, but on who is rejected for being most black.

Yancey is able to draw some evidence for his claims regarding the changing definition of whiteness in chapter two by examining how other racial and ethnic groups have historically assimilated into white society, but this does not include an examination of why African Americans might not desire to "move out" of the black race. Instead, he focuses on how European ethnic immigrants have assimilated into majority status, and argues that Latino Americans and Asian Americans are currently following a "similar path." Yancey asserts that the "Americanization" movement competed with racism and emphasized the need for immigrants to fit into American society, speak English, avoid ethnic organizations, and lose vestiges of their former cultures in the move toward preserving the stability of the dominant Anglo American culture. What it is absent from this discussion is any sustained examination of what the consequences of not having one's former culture preserved were, and what the implications of assimilation for world culture, global societies, individual social members, and our systems of domination and privilege are.

Yancey claims in his text's opening chapter that "it is debatable whether assimilation is a desirable goal for racial minority groups," and that he does "not take a position either way." For many, the question of whether or not assimilation is desirable is not so loosely assessed. Yancey studies residential and marital segregation patterns in subsequent chapters in order to demonstrate that many non-black racial minorities have been able to gain acceptance while African Americans continue to face resistance, but there is little space in the text for those minorities who actively choose not to assimilate and who resist attempts to encourage their assimilation. The richness of black culture or any other minority culture is seldom asserted, and assimilation is often portrayed as one of the only tangible routes to social inclusion. Yancey also neglects to engage the arguments behind cultural pluralism in any real detail, for even as he situates it as the contesting path from assimilation, he claims that he "takes no sides in this debate."

Despite Yancey's assertions regarding his own detached critical posture, he makes his position quite clear on numerous occasions. For example, he notes that there have been suggestions that African Americans have not assimilated due to their decision to self-segregate, but he then asserts that creating a racially integrated society was a priority of the Civil Rights Movement and that African Africans do indeed "desire integration as much as, or more than, other racial groups." There is virtually no reference to the large body of minority literature that has been critical of majority privilege and oppressive social practices, nor is there mention of how virulently many racial minorities have resisted the idea that one should accept majority membership rather than critique those ideologies and practices upon which such membership is based. And while there are occasional attempts made by Yancey not to essentialize the minority groups his study is most concerned with, they are far too infrequent, and the complexities of the groups themselves are often undermined along the lines of gender, class, religion, and other varied components of one's identity.

Whether or not America's racial divide or racial composition will radically change in the next fifty years remains unanswered by the text's conclusion, as one might anticipate given the difficulties that are involved in population forecasts. Yancey's speculations do reinforce how race as a construct is capable of shifting and why it is important to focus on social attitudes in qualitative studies based predominantly on race, but the limitations of his overall project reduce the potential impact and scope of this study.

Amanda Davis 

University of Florida, Gainesville