Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Changing Significance Of Race For People Of Color, Juanita Tamayo Lott

Trotter Review

For more than two hundred years, race in the United States has been viewed as a black/white issue. Blacks have been defined not as a people unto themselves, but only in relationship to whites. This relationship is one of power with blacks as a “minority subordinate” group and whites as a “majority dominant” group. Other people of color—whether indigenous to the Americas, settlers who predated Western Europeans, nonwhite settlers with several generations of U.S.-born residents, or newly arrived immigrants and refugees—have been primarily defined as nonexistent. When other people of color have been recognized, it has been in a marginal …