Jennifer Lee and Dalton Conley discuss race and immigration

In this interview for Dalton Conley's book, You May Ask Yourself, Jennifer Lee describes her research on the shifting color line in the United States.

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  Education

[OfficialGetGln]

Since people self identify their ethnicity, culture and "race", they can move between these labels as their mood changes. How we label ourselves has much to do with wether we prefer to identify with the historical oppressor or with the historically oppressed.

[OfficialGetGln]

It's true that the "white" category has become more inclusive throughout U.S. history. Early U.S. labels where "Irish race", "Italian race" - those have been morphed into the misnomer "white". Later Mexicans were added to the "white" group (this was an agreement after the Mexican American war so that Mexicans would not be segregated due to the existing Jim Crow laws. Later middle easterners were added to the "white" category of the census as well. These are legal "race" labels.