The Power of Identity: Understanding Race as a Category of Power

Alan M. Kraut, “Doing As Americans Do: The Post-Migration Negotiation of Identity in the United States” Journal of American History 101:3 (Dec. 2014): 707–725.

Political discourse about immigration in the United States marches on with great continuity. This historical trend reveals more about continuity than it does change, as Americans have been concerned with the process of immigrant assimilation since the nation’s conception. As Alan M. Kraut argues, historians often ask questions about the ways immigrants were assimilated in the past and how the relationship between “alien” and “American” has changed over time.  In asking these questions, they investigating a question also important to the general public: the relationship between identity and race.

The history writing of identity formation in the United States has arrived at a promising assumption: assimilation is a two-way street. Immigrants impact their communities in the United States with as much vigor as American culture impacts them. The historiography of assimilation has not, however, conceded this seemingly obvious conclusion. In the early years of the twentieth century cultural identity for immigrants was decidedly “old world” or “new world.” By the 1930s historians attempted to understand immigrants in their new homes, relinquishing some hold on the mutually exclusive “old” and “new” world identities. After World War Two, many historians struggled to understand how immigrants fit into the American mold, and what that mold was exactly, since it still excluded people of color. Finally, Richard Alba and Victor Nee presented the modern perception of assimilation as a double-paned window in 2003. Kraut’s analysis of historiography sparked an interest in a fresh approach to assimilation and immigrant identity formation.[1]

Kraut’s new perspective investigates the use of body modification to aid assimilation in immigrant communities, mostly during the years bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As he asserts, “the body of the immigrant is contested terrain where the process of identity negotiation occurs most visibly.”[2] Kraut proves in his investigation of voluntary cosmetic surgery by Asian or European immigrants that assimilation is not an automatic result of migration. The arguments of early twentieth-century thinkers aid in understanding why immigrants might have chosen a refurbished nose, or surgery to widen eyes that gave away their Asian roots. Anthropologist Franz Boaz argued (perhaps most convincingly to the modern reader) that the American environment changed appearance through changes in diet, exercise, and occupation. On the other hand, some physicians argued that differences in child rearing in immigrant communities contributed to the evolving physical appearance of children. This argument alluded to differences in the value placed on cultural elements such as sports, academics, or religion in different communities. As Kraut’s subjects were seeking surgical aids for physical assimilation, immigrant doctors were encouraging the physical assimilation of their patients into American society.

Kraut’s recognition of the practical malleability of racial identity brought on by twentieth-century cosmetic surgeries is reminiscent of Martha Hodes argument about the flexibility of racial systems writ large. As she follows a white, New England woman throughout her marriage to a West Indian mulatto man, Hodes explains the different identities assigned to both the white woman and her less-than-white husband as they cross the color line between the United States and the Caribbean. She argues that in the United States, any person of African descent could not be “white” by any means. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, a mulatto man could in fact be shaded whiter by means of class standing. Her argument mirrors on a more systemic level Kraut’s: racial systems are flexible and socially constructed. As Kraut shows, immigrants attempted to de-construct some of those racial systems with cosmetic surgery. Similarly, Paul A. Kramer defines race as a flexible category of identification. He argues that, in the case of the United States’ presence in the Philippines, race was used as a tool to assert power over those denied the rights of citizens of modern nation states. The American racial system, however, was not simply transplanted to the colony. Rather, a new racial system was formed, but identities were still defined in a racial context. Thus, race proves to be a flexible, but powerful, category of identity formation and negotiation.[3]