Nation states became more and more interested in representing their population along identity criteria, and the census then arose as the most visible means by which states could depict and even invent collective identities . In this way, previous ambiguous and context-dependent identities were, by the use of the census technology, ‘frozen’ and given political significance. “The use of identity categories in censuses was to create a particular vision of social reality. All people were assigned to a single category and hence conceptualized as sharing a common collective identity” , yet certain groups were assigned a subordinate position. In France, for example, the primary distinction was between those who were part of the nation and those who were foreigners, whereas British, American, and Australian census designers have long been interested in the country of origin of their residents. In the US, the refusal to enfranchise Blacks or Native Americans led to the development of racial categories, and these categories were in the US census from the beginning. In some of the 50 federated states of the US, there were laws, including the “one drop of blood” rule that determined that to have any Black ancestors meant that one was de jure Black . Soon a growing number of categories supplemented the original distinction between white and black. Native Americans appeared in 1820, Chinese in 1870, Japanese in 1890, Filipino, Hindu and Korean in 1920, Mexican in 1930, Hawaiian and Eskimo in 1960. In 1977, the Office of Management and Budget , which sets the standards for racial/ethnic classification in federal data collections including the US Census data, established a minimum set of categories for race/ethnicity data that included 4 race categories and two ethnicity categories . In 1997, OMB announced revisions allowing individuals to select one or more races,greenhouse growing racks but not allowing a multiracial category. Since October 1997, the OMB has recognized 5 categories of race and 2 categories of ethnicity .
In considering these classifications, the extent to which dominant race/ethnic characterizations are influenced both by bureaucratic procedures as well as by political decisions is striking. For example, the adoption of the term Asian-American grew out of attempts to replace the exoticizing and marginalizing connotations of the externally imposed pan-ethnic label it replaced, i.e. “Oriental”. Asian American pan-ethnic mobilization developed in part as a response to common discrimination faced by people of many different Asian ethnic groups and to externally imposed racialization of these groups. This pan-ethnic identity has its roots in many ways in a racist homogenizing that constructs Asians as a unitary group , and which delimits the parameters of “Asian American” cultural identity as an imposed racialized ethnic category . Today, the racial formation of Asian American is the result of a complex interplay between the federal state, diverse social movements, and lived experience.In fact, the OMB itself admits to the arbitrary nature of the census classifications and concedes that its own race and ethnic categories are neither anthropologically nor scientifically based . Issues of ethnic classification continue to play an important role in health research. However, some researchers working in public health have become increasingly concerned about the usefulness or applicability of racial and ethnic classifications. For example, as early as 1992, a commentary piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, challenged the journal editors to “do no harm” in publishing studies of racial differences . Quoting the Hippocratic Oath, they urged authors to write about race in a way that did not perpetuate racism. However, while some researchers have argued against classifying people by race and ethnicity on the grounds that it reinforces racial and ethnic divisions; Kaplan & Bennett 2003; Fullilove, 1998; Bhopal, 2004, others have strongly argued for the importance of using these classifications for documenting health disparities . Because we know that substantial differences in physiological and health status between racial and ethnic groups do exist, relying on racial and ethnic classifications allows us to identify, monitor, and target health disparities .
On the other hand, estimated disparities in health are entirely dependent upon who ends up in each racial/ethnic category, a process with arguably little objective basis beyond the slippery rule of social convention . If the categorization into racial groups is to be defended, we, as researchers, are obligated to employ a classification scheme that is practical, unambiguous, consistent, and reliable but also responds flexibly to evolving social conceptions . Hence, the dilemma at the core of this debate is that while researchers need to monitor the health of ethnic minority populations in order to eliminate racial/ethnic health disparities, they must also “avoid the reification of underlying racist assumptions that accompanies the use of ‘race’, ethnicity and/or culture as a descriptor of these groups. We cannot live with ‘race’, but we have not yet discovered how to live without it” . Reinarman and Levine have argued that investigations of ethnicity in alcohol and drugs research have typically taken the form, whether intentionally or not, of linking “a scapegoated substance to a troubling subordinate group – working-class immigrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or rebellious youth” . Different minority ethnic groups have often been framed at one time or another by their perceived use of alcohol and illicit drugs, regardless of their actual substance using behaviors and regardless of their relative use in comparison with drug and alcohol use among whites . Such framing arguably has led to extensive stereotyping of minority cultures, their characters, and their behaviors. For example, in the 18th century, white settlers in the US used stereotypical portrayals of Native drinking to justify the confiscation and exploitation of Native lands . In the early part of the 19th century, Chinese immigrants were victimized and controlled for their supposed opium use, despite the fact that only 6% at the time used opium . In the early 1900s, cannabis was relatively plentiful along the Texas border brought to the US by Mexican migrants, and its popularity among ethnic minorities practically ensured that it would be classified as a narcotic and attributed with addictive qualities . By the early 1930s, cannabis had been prohibited in 30 states. In 1937 the Marijuana Tax Act was passed by Congress which banned cannabis at the Federal level . And, the most recent drug scare, which fueled the development of the War on Drugs, linked crack cocaine to impoverished African Americans and Latinos in inner city neighborhoods .
Since the War on Drugs, an exceptionally high rate of imprisonment of mainly poor ethnic minority people has occurred primarily for non-violent crimes and relatively minor drug offences. For example, in 2012, although African-Americans accounted for only 13% of the national population , nearly 40% of those incarcerated for drug offences in State or Federal prisons were African-Americans . Hispanic/Latinos, while accounting for 17% of the national population in 2013, represented 37% of all those in prison for drug offenses . These statistics lie in sharp contrast to the available empirical data on differential rates of alcohol and substance use between whites and non-whites . The evidence from Monitoring the Future – a longstanding and reliable source of data on drug use among youth in the US – suggests that crack cocaine cannot be considered a drug consumed primarily by Blacks in American nor can marijuana be considered a drug used primarily by Latino/as. Rather, white youth have higher rates of use for most drugs of abuse. For example, Terry McElrath and colleagues reviewing 30 years’ worth of data from MTF,vertical hydroponic garden found that for all drugs except heroin, past year prevalence rates were significantly higher among whites compared to blacks and Latinos . In spite of the backdrop, the vast majority of alcohol and drug research has failed to mention the injustices of drug laws and high rates of imprisonment of ethnic minority youth. Instead of situating research within a context of oppression and inequality, researchers have tended to ignore this situation and instead focus on risk factors associated with drug use among racial/ethnic groups, an approach that dominates alcohol and drugs research today.This trajectory in alcohol and drug research is unfortunate in light of recent debates in social epidemiology about the importance of examining health disparities within a framework that considers “social structures and social dynamics that encompass individuals” . Social epidemiologists have argued that mainstream research tends “to focus on the body, lifestyle, behaviour, sex/gender, race/ethnicity and perhaps the personality, emotional state or socioeconomic status of the single person” . Just as mainstream epidemiology has been criticized for having little regard for social structures, social dynamics, and social theory , most existing studies of ethnicity within drug and alcohol research can similarly be critiqued for failing to adopt a structural approach as well as neglecting contemporary social science theories of and debates about ethnicity. In mainstream drug and alcohol research, traditional ethnic group categories continue to be assessed in ways which suggest little critical reflection in terms of the validity of the measurement itself. This is surprising given that social scientists since the early 1990s have critiqued the propensity of researchers to essentialize identity as something ’fixed’ or ’discrete’ and to neglect to consider how social structure shapes identity formation. Recent social science literature on identity suggests that people are moving away from rooted identities based on place and towards a more fluid, strategic, positional, and context-reliant nature of identity. This does not mean, however, that there is an unfettered ability to freely choose labels or identities, as if off of a menu . An individual’s ability to choose an identity is constrained by social structure, context, and power relations.
Structural constraints on identity formation cannot be ignored, as people do not exist as free floating entities but instead are influenced and constrained in various ways by their socioeconomic and geographical environment . As such, an identity is not just claimed by an individual but is also recognized and validated by an audience, resulting in a dialectical relationship between an individual and the surrounding social structures . Similarly, a ‘new’ perspective on ethnic identity specifically has emphasized the fluidity and contextually-dependent nature of ethnicity, minimizing notions about ethnicity as a cultural possession or birthright and instead emphasizing ethnicity as a socially, historically, and politically located struggle over meaning and identity . Ethnicity or ethnic identity is not some immutable sense of one’s identity but rather something produced through the performance of socially and culturally determined boundaries . Hence, individuals are not passive recipients of acquired cultures but instead active agents who constantly construct and negotiate their ethnic identities within given social structural conditions . In spite of these sociological contributions, which have enriched our understanding of identity generally and ethnicity specifically, the alcohol and drugs fields have not adequately integrated these perspectives, thwarting our ability to understand the relationships between ethnicity and substance use. As such, the field is ripe with correlations between ethnic group categories and substance use problems, resulting in solutions to problems that focus on reifying questionable social group categorizations and revealing little about how drugs are connected to identities and shaped by broader social and cultural structures. It is important to note that we do not intend to argue that existing categories of ethnicity be disregarded in the alcohol and drugs fields. As Krieger and colleagues have noted in another context , surveillance data documenting health disparities, in our case in substance use, are exceedingly important in terms of identifying potential inequities in health. However, without understanding the complexity of ethnic identity and its relationship to substance use, these surveillance data may perpetuate stereotypes and the victimization of specific socially-delineated ethnic groupings, obfuscate the root causes of substance use and elated problems, and reify politicized categories of ethnicity which may have little meaning for the people populating those categories. While acknowledging that socially-deliented ethnic categories are important for documenting social injustices, we must also be vigilant about questioning the appropriateness of those categories . Conceptually this type of critical approach is important for considering how substance use is related to negotiations of ethnicity over time and place and bounded by structure.