9.1b Racialization

Sociologists use the term racialization to refer to the process by which groups of people and things become associated with race (Omi & Winant, 1986/2015). A macro-sociological approach to understanding racialization could focus on how governments construct racial categories. For example, the U.S. Census has asked questions about racial categorization since its start in 1790, and they have revised the categories multiple times (James, 2008) (see Chapter 6, Figure 6.4). Further, it was not until the 2000 Census that people could select one or more racial or ethnic categories from among these: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, two or more races, and Hispanic or Latino (see Figure 9.2) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

The language used by the U.S. Census, political activists, and everyday people changes over time, and the Census categories do not capture all the racial categories U.S. adults apply to themselves. For example, before 1970, the U.S. Census counted people now considered Hispanic as White. At the meso level, Puerto Rican American and Mexican American political activists saw the need for a pan-ethnic category. They successfully created Hispanic as a category so that they could show with data that poverty and unemployment rates were higher for these groups than for other groups classified as White (Mora, 2014; Gómez, 2020).

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are going through a similar process. The Census defines someone as White if they are “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). The 2030 Census will have a new racial category for the first time in decades: Middle Eastern and North African. Sociologists and MENA advocates have successfully argued that MENA should be a separate Census category because, as with Hispanic people, counting MENA people as White hides the harm they experience because of discrimination (Maghbouleh et al., 2022). The cases of Hispanic and MENA people and the U.S. Census illustrate that racialization is an ongoing process resulting from people self-identifying as a group and through categorization imposed by others, like the U.S. Census.

Photo 9.2

How MENA People Are Categorized by the U.S. Census Is Changing