CHAPTER 1

ACCOUNTING FOR DIFFERENCES

HOW TO EXPLAIN

In this chapter, we develop a multidimensional framework to help account for experiences and responses to ethnoracial exclusion. Our analytical strategy is meant to be suggestive of how patterns are set in place rather than to provide a parsimonious causal analysis of patterns sensu stricto.1 At the most abstract level, our approach resembles that used by historical institutionalists interested in configurational explanations,² by sociologists of immigration, and by social movement scholars who pursue discursive opportunity structure explanations. The latter group has analyzed emotions and the availability of religious and human rights frameworks and their impact on mobilization (e.g., Williams 2004; Bröer and Duyvendak 2009), while scholars of immigration have argued that discursive opportunity structures influence the claims-making of minorities (e.g., Koopmans and Statham 2000).³ Similarly, we zoom in on a few dimensions to account for the patterns of experiences, responses, and groupness that we identify in the evidence we have collected.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CONTEXT

Our explanatory framework analytically distinguishes between three dimensions to make sense of how they influence experiences and responses (see also Falleti and Lynch 2009). More specifically, we focus on the dimensions listed in Table 1.1 that pertain to (1) history and the socioeconomic and institutional context (which we capture by the notion of background factors); (2) the strength and mode of groupness (i.e., the extent to which individuals conceive of themselves as part of a group, which itself includes several dimensions, e.g., self-identification and group boundaries); and (3) available cultural repertoires (themselves the product of history). In the three country chapters (Chapters 2–4), we detail how these various elements are more or less salient as broad contextual factors, how they are connected, and how they may help explain aspects of the puzzle. We also spell out the configuration of groupness for each of the five groups being studied. Although this approach could be criticized for having too many explanatory dimensions for too few cases—what Stanley Lieberson (1992) termed the “small N, big conclusion” problem—again, our goal is not to offer a parsimonious explanation but to improve our understanding of why and how patterns contrast across groups, in line with the classical Weberian tradition in comparative sociology. Each of the three dimensions we focus on has several components that define in important ways the context in which the lives or our five groups evolve. We argue that these components need to be considered when trying to account for individuals’ experiences of and responses to ethnoracial exclusion.

TABLE 1.1. DIMENSIONS ENABLING AND CONSTRAINING NARRATIVES OF EXPERIENCES AND RESPONSES

Historical, socioeconomic, and institutional elements	Cultural repertoires	Groupness
•  Size of group and its relative demographic weight •  Ethnoracial demographic diversity of the region and society •  History of group relations and inequality •  Changes in levels and national patterns of inequality •  Economic context (e.g., economic recession and expansion)	•  National myths and ideologies (e.g., American Dream, Zionism, racial democracy) and models of incorporation in the polity (e.g., melting pot, multiculturalism) •  Transnational antiracist repertoires (e.g., human rights, social justice, black diaspora) •  Empowering ideologies (e.g., black nationalism)	•  Self-definition and self-labeling •  Meaning of identity and perceived cultural distinctiveness of group •  Salience of racial, class, and national identification in the group •  Reported network composition and homophily
•  Concentration of ethnoracial minorities across classes and recent transformation of class structure •  Spatial and institutional segregation (including incarceration) •  Institutional and legal reforms (including those dealing with race, ethnicity, and nationality) •  Political transformation (progressive, liberal, and conservative eras)	•  Available repertoires of group disadvantages and shared experiences; ready-made scripts about exclusion and universalism •  Hierarchy of class cultures (e.g., dominance of middle-class culture, stigmatization of the poor) •  Class- and gender-specific cultural repertoires (e.g., masculinity, self-actualization) •  General cultural repertoires (e.g., meritocracy, therapeutic culture, identity politics) •  Neoliberal repertoires (e.g., competition, privatization of risk, self-reliance)	•  Symbolic boundaries toward dominant group and its perceived advantages •  Census categories and policies making group identity salient •  Homophily in cohabitation/marriage and friendship •  Perceived spatial segregation

Historical, Socioeconomic, and Institutional Elements. Among the main background elements shaping experiences and responses, one has to consider the history of the country, particularly as it pertains to ethnoracial relationships. Other relevant factors (see Table 1.1, column 1) include the level of inequality in the country and whether it and the economy are growing or contracting; the size of the group under consideration and its salience; the ethnoracial diversity of the country’s population; the concentration of the stigmatized group in low-income categories; the extent to which the middle class is diversified racially; the extent of spatial and institutional segregation each group experiences; and the historical transformation of politics, which brings about conservative and progressive changes, as well as neoliberal moments (e.g., Phillips-Fein 2009 and Waterhouse 2013 for the United States). Finally, we also include the institutional and legal structures and reforms of the society, particularly those that bear on race, ethnicity, and nationality. The explanatory dimensions under this heading are the mainstay of background explanations for contemporary forms of American racism (e.g., in the analysis of laissez-faire racism by Bobo and Smith 1998). They are also the main focus of most macro-historical comparisons of race relations (e.g., Marx 1998; Winant 2001).

Cultural Repertoires. Individuals do not develop narratives in isolation; instead they construct narratives from historically constituted, culturally available narrative templates, public narratives, or meta-narratives and in conversation with other narratives (Somers 1994; Ewick and Silbey 2003). Although many terms are used to describe these sources of meaning (scripts or frames, among others) and there are nuances in what each of them highlights (Lamont and Small 2008), we favor the term “repertoires,” defined as a set of tools available to individuals to make sense of the reality they experience.⁴ Table 1.1, column 2 lists the explanatory elements that pertain to such cultural repertoires. Some repertoires may be more readily available in one national context than in another.⁵ The cultural repertoires considered include national myths of incorporation in the polity (e.g., the American Dream, Zionism, and racial democracy). There are also models of incorporation (Portes and Borocz 1989) or philosophies of integration (Favell 1998) that speak to the principles by which the polity holds together (e.g., multiculturalism, diversity, and Republicanism). Cultural myths of belonging as defined by collective memory are often related to these two broad categories. Other significant repertoires include transnational anti-racist repertoires ranging from human rights to social justice and the Black Pride promoted by members of the black diaspora during the Civil Rights Movement. Such repertoires may be widely available to group members as cultural resources as they are looking for scripts to make sense of experiences of exclusion and group stereotypes. Also relevant are class-related cultural repertoires (e.g., the self-actualization so crucial in the middle classes), as well as broader cultural repertoires, such as those pertaining to therapeutic culture and individualism. Repertoires pertaining to the relative standing of various classes (the cultural hegemony of the upper middle class) also matter. References to neoliberal repertoires are most prominent in our analysis of the United States and are least prominent in Brazil: in some contexts, neoliberal narratives have resulted in an increased emphasis on the privatization of risk, competitiveness, and hard work and have intensified demands on stigmatized groups to be more self-reliant (Moraes Silva 2012; Hall and Lamont 2013; Sharone 2014). After the Civil Rights Act, blacks have the de jure right to confront, and self-reliance places de facto the burden of overcoming racism on their individual shoulders. This has important effects on the decline of collective responses among African Americans, one of the main themes developed in Chapter 2 on the United States (see also Harris 2014).

Of course, other authors consider the impact of repertoires on identity. For instance, Dawson (2009) focuses on media exposure, Essed (1991) is concerned with public narratives, and Lipsitz (2011) factors in national myths of belonging, while racial formation and systemic racism approaches also consider the impact of frames.⁶

Our approach takes into consideration a broader range of cultural repertoires than most. We look toward not only repertoires that feed into racialization but also those tied to specific class cultures and positions, national ideologies and myths, and economic transformation. We also consider how such repertoires interact with one another to enable subjective experiences and responses.⁷

Groupness. The third column of Table 1.1 isolates groupness as a distinct explanatory dimension. For our purpose, groupness is a function of self-identification and perceptions of out-groups (symbolic boundaries). But it is conditioned by background conditions that include network composition and homophily (spatial and social boundaries), as well as the size and visibility of the group and the multiracial character of the national context (which are discussed as part of the background against which the group stands, with more or less contrast; Zerubavel 1991; Alba 2005). Because groupness is a less familiar concept than that of repertoire, we discuss it in some detail below and explain how we went about operationalizing this notion already present in the contemporary literature (Brubaker 2009). The configuration of groupness for each of our five cases is revisited in greater detail in the second section of each country chapter.8

Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 20, 7) define groupness as “the sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded, solidarity group” and a “fundamental and consequential sameness among members of a group or category” (see also Brubaker 2009).⁹ In our case, we focus on groupness as experienced by our interviewees. While previous accounts have tended to treat groupness as a one-dimensional category that varies from weak to strong (Bailey 2009a), we operationalize it as multidimensional, so as to capture both the symbolic bases according to which groupness is defined and its potentially contradictory character when relevant (i.e., the fact that groupness can be considered weak on certain dimensions and strong on others).

For the groups we consider, we draw a detailed picture of their degree of groupness. Contrary to dualistic images of group identity that oppose in-group and out-group, this picture combines:

1.  The self-identification of our interviewees, as captured by questions concerning self-definition and self-labeling, the perceived cultural distinctiveness of the group, and the use of distinctive referents when defining the meanings of racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity (cultural symbols such as Kwanza, African-American history, expressions of pride and honor, etc.);¹⁰ and

2.  The strength of group boundaries, as revealed by perceived closeness to in-group members, including friendship, dating, and marriage, and by boundary work toward out-groups (toward whites in particular in the United States and Brazil), including concerning white privilege.¹¹

We also consider perceived background conditions that could be identified (spatial separation, network structures, etc.).¹² We put particular weight on the availability and institutionalization of public narratives in shaping the experience of and responses to stigmatization and discrimination. This dimension of groupness has often been overlooked by dominant approaches to racial inequality and racism, which are typically overwhelmingly descriptive and when explanatory, mostly focus on macro-level explanations of racism in the US context (as argued by Emirbayer and Desmond 2015).

Also relevant to groupness are the demographic weight of the group and the diversity of the environment in which it is located. That Black Brazilians make up roughly 50 percent of the Brazilian population—including those who identify as browns (pardos) and as blacks (pretos)—and evolve in a highly multiracial landscape certainly influence how prominent they are as a group. Similarly, it matters that Ethiopian Jews began immigrating relatively recently and make up only 2 percent of Israel’s population in a relatively homogeneous racial context and that Mizrahi Jews constitute a narrow majority of the Jewish population of Israel. The extent to which any group stands out against a background of greater or lesser ethnoracial demographic diversity matters not only for the definition (“brightness”) of the boundaries and thus groupness, but also as a dimension of the context in which that group operates. Nor does the size of a group mechanistically translate into weak or strong groupness. One also needs to take into consideration historically constituted racial classification systems, how diversity and other policies influence group formation, political strategies of political parties and minority social movements, and much more (e.g., Loveman 2014; Paschel 2016).

The three country chapters (Chapters 2–4) show variations in the groupness of the five groups under consideration. As shown in Table 1.2, these variations can be broken into two dimensions: self-identification and group boundaries. Table 1.2 provides details on the characterization of groupness for each dimension. It shows that our approach to groupness is multidimensional: it considers both internal (self-identification) and external (toward out-groups) boundaries, which can be characterized as strongly policed, blurred, fuzzy, ambiguous, and the like.

African Americans, Ethiopian Jews, and Palestinian Arabs are at the high end of the spectrum on the strength of groupness, whereas Black Brazilians and Mizrahim are at the low end. While again, we acknowledge that referring to the strength of groupness may flatten out what is after all a multidimensional reality, in Table 1.2 we use strength as a heuristic device to aid comparison across cases. We consider the very different configurations of identification (including national and class identifications) in which these groups find themselves. Patterns of groupness figure prominently in the arguments deployed in each of our country chapters. The construction of this explanatory dimension is also an empirical contribution of the study, as this dimension could not be captured without the mediation of clear conceptualization and operationalization. Thus, the empirical analyses of groupness figure prominently in each country chapter and are revisited in the Conclusion to the book.

In the United States, the strong racial groupness of African-Americans manifests as a combination of strong group identification; strong social boundaries based on perceived high spatial segregation; strong racial homophily (despite our interviewees’ valuing friendship with people of diverse backgrounds); and high awareness of racial stigmatization and discrimination, which are perceived as existing independently of class stigma. There are also few differences in self-identification or experiences of stigmatization/discrimination across classes, as if being black overrides class-specific experiences. Respondents also identify slightly more with their racial group than with the nation. Their strong racial groupness coexists with a pro-universalist orientation: they proclaimed universalism or openness to out-group members despite their awareness of discrimination. This is why we described their groupness as strong but contradictory.

TABLE 1.2. CHARACTERIZATION OF GROUPNESS FOR THE FIVE ETHNORACIAL GROUPS STUDIED

	UNITED STATES	BRAZIL	ISRAEL
	African Americans	Pretos and pardos	Palestinian citizens	Ethiopians	Mizrahim
Characterization	Strong but contradictory	Blurred	Strong	Dissonant	Weak
Primary bases of groupness	Race	Race	Nationality	Race/Immigrant status	Ethnicity
SELF-IDENTIFICATION
Self-definition and self-labeling as group member	Strong	Strong	Strong	Medium	Weak
Perceived cultural distinctiveness/meaning of identity	Strong	Weak	Strong	Strong	Mixed
National identification	Mixed	Strong	Weak	Strong	Strong
GROUP BOUNDARIES
Reported social boundaries
Perceived spatial segregation	High	Low	High	High	Low
Homophily	High	Low	High	High	Low
Symbolic boundaries
Symbolic boundaries toward dominant out-groups	Strong but contradictory	Porous	Strong	Weak	Weak
Available repertoires of group disadvantages and shared experiences	Strong (racism, slavery)	Mixed (racism, slavery, and class)	Strong (colonialism)	Strong (versus Ashkenazim)	Weak

In Brazil, our interviewees display blurred racial groupness, with racial identification, as they largely identify as black but do not view themselves as sharing a culture distinct from the majority culture. They make up 51 percent of the Brazilian population according to the 2010 census, and their expressive culture largely defines the majority culture. Also, they identify racially as black and nationally as Brazilian (i.e., they combine both national and racial identification). They experience less perceived spatial segregation than African Americans do, based mostly on class rather than race. They also experience low salience of racial preference in personal relationships and a conflation of race and class in experiences of stigmatization and discrimination. But they are aware of being racially stigmatized (especially among those who have strong racial identification—although we do not make a causal claim here). Here our analysis resembles Sansone (1997), who describes Black Brazilians as having “blackness without ethnicity.” However, while Sansone focuses on cultural distinctiveness captured by the notion of ethnicity (equating the latter with having a shared culture), our approach is to examine the nuances of the boundedness of groups.

In Israel, ethno-national identity based on religious identification is at the center of Israeli life and organizes the formation of the polity, which shapes how different types of stigma are framed and experienced. The three Israeli groups experience groupness in highly differentiated ways. The first two groups are categorized by the majority group as “other,” one because of its local political history (Palestinians) and the other because of skin color and ties to Africa (Ethiopians). The third group (Mizrahim) largely perceives itself as unmarked, yet its members face social boundaries (mostly class-based spatial segregation and discrimination in education and the workplace) and Orientalist stereotypes (i.e., a patronizing attitude toward non-Western cultures; Said 1978). We describe Mizrahi Jews as demonstrating weak ethnic groupness, which we contrast with the strong national groupness of Arab Palestinians and the dissonant racial groupness of Ethiopian Jews. These three groups connect in diverse ways to the Zionist national polity (with Arab Palestinians symbolically and institutionally excluded from the polity despite full citizenship, while Ethiopian and Mizrahi Jews feel fully identified with the nation-state of Israel despite varying degrees of ethnoracial exclusion).

Wimmer (2008, 2013) represents a parallel and kindred effort to our own, particularly in that we also regard groupness as an issue to be ascertained empirically.13 As elaborated in elsewhere (Lamont 2000; see also Brubaker et al. 2006), we share an inductive approach to self-identification that does not start with the assumption that ethnoracial identity is most salient for members of the group under consideration (even if our sampling strategy used specific externally defined categorizations—ethnoracial self-identification, education, and occupation—as a basis for inclusion in the population to be studied; see also Brubaker 2009).14 While we are agnostic about the salience of self-identification across groups and contexts and consider this an empirical issue, we also acknowledge that there is no “view from nowhere” and that so-called unmarked or universal categories are dominant categories turned into doxa (Bourdieu 1977: 164).¹⁵ Thus, our aim is to tackle the challenge of maintaining an open-ended perspective on groupness without obliterating the politics of categorization.

While a few authors have explored a taxonomy of how actors change ethnic boundaries through expansion, contraction, transvaluation, boundary crossing and repositioning, and blurring (Alba 2009; Zolberg and Woon 1999; Wimmer 2013), our goal is to produce a phenomenology of group boundaries by relying on the in-depth narratives of stigmatized groups. Whether they do it by confronting or not, our respondents structure the types of boundary changes discussed by these authors. We are interested less in the general configuration and reconfiguring of boundaries than in the processual experiences that produce them.¹⁶

There are other important differences between our position and major contributions to the relevant literature: Instead of emphasizing the cognitive and the motivational, including the self-enhancing and self-protecting dynamics that social psychologists often privilege (Major 1993), we consider feelings of similarities and differences described by the social actor.¹⁷ Identities are factored in, but we also locate these in a network of self-reported relationships in time and space shaped by such factors as spatial segregation, homophily, and classification systems.¹⁸ In the African American case, for instance, this approach leads us to reconstruct a multidimensional, and in some ways contradictory, portrait of ethnoracial groupness, which we describe as strong by some criteria (identification, in-group preference, out-group boundaries) but paradoxically mixed by other criteria (friendships with whites, normative commitment to a culture of diversity or to a desire to weaken group boundaries).¹⁹ Again, Table 1.2 captures the different dimensions of groupness for each of the cases under consideration.

CONNECTING FINDINGS AND EXPLANATION

A close examination of our cases suggested a complex and textured explanation that takes into consideration a range of dimensions enabling various types of experiences. We need to explain how two groups with a high degree of groupness but different relationships with the polity—African Americans and Arab Palestinians—experience exclusion differently and respond to it differently. How can we explain that African Americans provided more narratives of experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and offered a wider range of responses than did Arab Palestinians? We suggest that it is in part because the latter largely do not define themselves as full members of the polity and have low expectations about equal treatment. Comparably, two groups with low groupness (or boundedness)—Black Brazilians and Mizrahi Jews—are located differently in their respective countries’ polities and interpret their experiences of exclusion in contrasting ways: Mizrahi Jews systematically downplayed personal experiences of stigmatization, while Black Brazilians perceived high levels of stigmatization, especially based on status and social class stereotypes. In both comparisons, there is no linear relationship between the degree of groupness or boundedness and the frequency of incidents or types of responses to incidents mentioned in interviews. Instead, responses to incidents appear to be shaped by the distinctively structured contexts in which these groups find themselves, so it is necessary to refer to these contexts to make sense of the reported experiences and responses.

Tables 1.3 and 1.4 summarize a few of the patterns of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and responses to those experiences along with the causal argument for each of our five groups. These dense tables will also be discussed in detail as each country chapter unfolds, with the full list of experiences and responses provided in tables in Appendix 2. Because the total frequency of types of experiences and responses varied across sites, when Tables 1.3 and 1.4 compare the frequency of different types (low, medium, or high), this refers to their relative frequency within that site. For now, it suffices to mention that, as shown on Table 1.3, being insulted or disrespected is the primary form in which assault on worth is experienced across all sites (ranging from very high to medium for all groups). African American interviewees most often mention being misunderstood compared to other groups. In contrast to African Americans, Black Brazilians more often interpret incidents of assault on worth as being about negative stereotypes relating to being poor, having low status, or being uneducated. This suggests that racial stigmatization is experienced somewhat separately from class stigmatization for blacks in the United States, an area where they diverge from their Brazilian counterparts. Being stereotyped as threatening is more frequent for African American and Black Brazilian men, as well as Arab Palestinians. The incidence of being denied opportunities ranges from high to medium for all groups. Similarly, when it comes to responses, we find that confrontation is the most frequent response everywhere, but it is as predominant as management of the self and no response among Black Brazilians (unlike for the other groups); that African Americans, Ethiopians, and Mizrahim most frequently offer self-improvement as an ideal response; that non-response is one of the most frequent reactions for Black Brazilians and Arab Palestinians; and that, among ideal responses, Black Brazilians most value the use of universal redistributive policies. Finally, Mizrahim most rarely offer collective responses. While such responses are also rare for Black Brazilians, their support for the black movement has grown in recent years.

TABLE 1.3. RELATIVE NUMBER OF MENTIONS OF TYPES OF INCIDENTS AND RESPONSES FOR THE FIVE ETHNORACIAL GROUPS STUDIED

TYPE OF INCIDENT	UNITED STATES	BRAZIL	ISRAEL
	Blacks	Pretos and pardos	Palestinian citizens	Ethiopians	Mizrahim
Assault on worth	Very high	High	Very High	High	Medium
Insulted/disrespected	High	Medium	High	Medium high	Medium
Misunderstood	Medium high	Low	Never	Low	Never
Stereotyped as low status/low class/uneducated	Medium	Medium high	Low	Medium	Medium low
Stereotyped as threatening	Medium for men	Medium for men	Medium	Low	Low
Discrimination	High	Medium high	High	Medium	Low
Denied opportunities	Medium high	Medium	High	Medium high	Medium high
Profiling (men only)	Medium	Medium	High	Medium low	Low
RESPONSE TO INCIDENTS
Confront	Very high	Medium high	High	Very high	Very high
Management of self	Medium high	Medium high	Medium	Medium	Medium
Not responding	Medium	Medium high	Medium high	Low	Medium
Competence/work	Low	Low	Low	Medium	Low
Isolation/autonomy	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low
IDEAL RESPONSE
Self-improvement	High	Medium low	Low	High	High
Collective mobilization/solidarity	Medium	Low	Medium	Medium	Low
Redistributive policies	Low	Very high	Low	Medium	Medium
Affirmative action policies	Very high	Medium	Low	Low	Low

Note: The number of mentions refers to the relative frequency of the various types of incidents and responses, which was calibrated for each site and category based on the frequencies reported in Appendix 2. For the United States and Brazil, the scale is: 1–20% = low; 21–45% = medium; 46–60% = medium high; 61–80% = high; and 81%+ = very high. For Israel, slightly different scales were used due to different sample sizes. These are available upon request.

TABLE 1.4. PARTIAL SUMMARY OF EXPLANATORY DIMENSIONS

HISTORICAL, SOCIOECONOMIC, AND INSTITUTIONAL ELEMENTS	UNITED STATES	BRAZIL	ISRAEL
	Blacks	Pretos and pardos	Arab Palestinians	Ethiopians	Mizrahi
Size of group demographic (%)	Minority (14)	Slight majority (51)	Minority (20)	Very small (2)	Slight majority of Jewish population (52)
Concentration in lower income group	Mixed	High	High	High	Mixed
Social and spatial segregation	High	Mixed	Almost total	High	Mixed
Institutional discrimination (army, schools, work)	Mixed	Mixed	High	Mixed	Low
GROUPNESS
Self-identification	Strong	Mixed	Strong	Mixed	Low
Boundaries toward dominant out-groups	Strong but contradictory	Porous	Rigid	Medium	Porous
CULTURAL REPETOIRES
National myth and ideology	Melting pot	Racial democracy	Nakba (catastrophe)	Zionism (In-gathering of exiles)	Zionism (In-gathering of exiles)
Model of incorporation	Civil Rights/multiracialism	Transnational blackness	Rights of citizenship	Jewish melting pot	Jewish melting pot
Neoliberal repertoires	High	Low	Low	Mixed	High
Universalist repertoires (religion, human rights, pro-diversity)	High	High	High	Mixed	Mixed

Some of our explanations for these patterns are presented in Table 1.4. We argue that a combination of elements interact with cultural repertoires and groupness to enable various types of excluding experiences and responses to those experiences across contexts. Instead of providing a list of explanatory factors for each of our cases, we will consider how various explanatory dimensions are articulated differently in each instance.

ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS

We characterize our contributions in relation to several approaches in the literature. One of them is social psychology. Social psychologists typically predefine what we call incidents. To take one example, in their influential experimental research, Steele and Aronson (1995: 797) analyze stereotype threat, defined as “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.” These authors activated the racial identity of blacks to establish whether it would depress their performance on intelligence tests, but they neglected to consider in depth other types of responses, such as confrontation. We complement this work by exploring how individuals interpret their experiences.

By adopting an inductive approach, we open possibilities for a finer analysis of a broad range of experiences and responses to stigmatization, and of how those responses are enabled by various dimensions of their contexts. Thus, while psychologists working on stigma typically consider identities and boundaries as cognitive phenomena located in peoples’ heads (with a focus on in-group favoritism and out-group dynamics (e.g., Major 1993) and adopt a top-down approach with a priori constructs and deductive hypotheses, we focus on narratives about lived experience.20 Also, while political scientists typically focus on institutions and material factors (Marx 1998) or on identity politics as an area for political struggle (Walzer 1997), we redirect inquiry by adopting a bottom-up approach to boundary formation that locates groups in their local and historical contexts and considers which aspects (including identity politics) are actually relevant for actors.

At the same time, we do not deny that different individuals may react to similar incidents in different ways. While psychologists may focus on such personality traits or states as grit or self-efficacy to explain these differences (see Duckworth et al. 2007; Reich, Zautra, and Hall 2012), we focus on various types of social and symbolic resources and how societies may enable some responses rather than others. Thus, our emphasis is on the empowerment of social resilience by cultural repertoires and institutions across national contexts, instead of on individualized resilience embodied in personality traits (Hall and Lamont 2013; see also Komarraju, Karau, and Schmeck 2009).

Our approach is also a complement to studies of cultural change resulting from social movements and political ideology. Instead of privileging the impact of those involved in identity politics and activists whose numbers are often exaggerated and who receive disproportionate attention from sociologists,21 we focus on the often-neglected experiences of ordinary men and women and on the way that responses to ethnoracial exclusion may contribute to change.²² We also advocate an open-ended approach that captures the full range of responses possible instead of romanticizing one particular type, such as resistance, which is the focus of much attention (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012). In the context of a rapid transformation of racial consciousness in Brazil (Sansone 2003) and of identity politics among Mizrahi activists in Israel (Hever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller 2002), we want to renew the conversation about racial formations (Omi and Winant 1994) and how to influence them. We also want to consider and answer whether it makes sense to ask if one of the three societies under consideration in our research offers a better path forward from the perspective of the victims of ethnoracial exclusion. In the Conclusion, we argue that the contexts in which these groups’ lives are structured are so different that to ask which group is worse or better off is almost nonsensical.

Unsurprisingly, this book also dialogues with the comparative literature on race and ethnicity. This literature most often adopts a macro-historical comparative perspective and focuses on historical legacies variously defined (e.g., Fredrickson 1988; Marx 1998; Winant 2001). We take legacies into consideration as a source of social-structural constraints (e.g., patterns of socioeconomic inequalities, neighborhood segregation, and state institutions) and as cultural sources of scripts for interpreting racist and other incidents. This comparative literature has been criticized for not considering the mechanisms through which historical legacies are reproduced or transformed (Cooper 1996). By focusing on the quotidian experiences of ordinary people (i.e., nonactivists), we aim to enrich our understanding of how such legacies play out in contemporary narratives—for example, in the ready availability of legal tools to address hate crimes and discrimination in the United States (Bleich 2011) and in the role played by the state in distributing resources and arbitrating among groups in Brazil and Israel (Santos 1979), which influence responses to racism in each national context.

Our multimethod comparative and interview-based case study is structured around three country chapters concerning the United States (Chapter 2), Brazil (Chapter 3), and Israel (Chapter 4) that build on one another. For each country we proceed as follows. First, we describe the historical, institutional, and structural contexts in which the ethnoracial group (or groups, in the case of Israel) live, as well as the metropolitan areas where we conducted interviews. Second, we describe how their members understand their relationship to their ethnoracial group (i.e., their groupness). Third, we identify the ways in which each group experiences ethnoracial exclusion. Fourth, we turn to their responses, through both specific experiences and through what they consider ideal responses. We account for these patterns as the analysis unfolds. The conclusion of each country chapter brings together patterns of experiences and responses and analyzes how these result from different forces and constraints that operate for each group. The book’s Conclusion steps back to capture comparisons across the three countries and five groups. It also synthesizes some of our main arguments and proposes an agenda for future research.