UGOD Seminar | Race, Color, and Wealth Accumulation – Conceptualizing the Racial Identification Process for New Immigrants in the United States

Existing racial identification theories in the U.S., a product of the country’s bi-racial tradition, are facing an increasing inconsistency with the rising diversity of modern immigrants from around the world. To address it, I propose a conceptual framework that relies on a two-step identification mechanism to explain how immigrants’ complex ethno-racial information is systematically processed by U.S. institutions. In the first step, referred to as genotypical categorization, each immigrant is assigned a preliminary category label (e.g., Black, White, or Asian). In the second step, referred to as phenotypical differentiation, the immigrant’s skin tone is further evaluated for the final determination of ethno-racial identity. This conceptual framework is verified in the context of wealth inequality, and the findings indicate that Asian and Latino immigrants have not been considered candidates for whitening.