Much has been made of the dramatic influx of immigrants to the United States since the mid-1960s. This “Fourth Wave” of migration is remarkable not just for its sheer numbers, but also for its ethnic diversity, with newcomers disproportionately arriving from Asia and Latin America. Much too has been made of the changes in how the state classifies and counts by race and ethnicity. Most recently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Directive No. 15 in 1977, requiring all federal agencies to collect data for at least five groups—American Indians and Alaska Natives, Asians and Pacific Islanders, non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics—then revised this directive in 1997 to include “mark one or more” responses that would allow for self-identification with multiple races/ethnicities. The face of America is changing before us.

These changes have inspired some to conjure Panglossian reveries of a multiracial city on the hill, while others portend the rise of Manichean “race wars” and “culture wars” and the end of our national identity as we know it. Several pointed questions prefigure these debates. Will Asians increasingly be “honorary whites”? Will Latinos increasingly be racialized, assimilated, or fragmented? Will African Americans remain relatively unified, or will they be increasingly divided by class, political ideology, or something else? What effect will the multiracial population of America have on these trends? Lastly, what can the work of social science tell us about the likely configuration of race and ethnic politics over a finite future, say, ten years hence?¹

Demography as destiny. A fine line separates forecasting from fortune-telling in a domain as complex and dynamic as racial and ethnic politics. But there are some obvious predictions to draw over a time horizon of ten years. Foremost among these is the persistence of current demographic trends. In the coming decade we can expect the foreign-born population and, with it, the proportion of Asians and Latinos in the United States to continue to rise. Sometime in this century, we are told, whites (as conventionally defined) will no longer comprise a majority of the voting-age population. Based on the last two censuses, moreover, the migration of Asians and Latinos to the United States is likely to spread well beyond “gateway” cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami into more geographically dispersed locales. Thus fewer Americans in 2015 will be able to claim no direct encounter with an Asian or Latino person.

A second prediction is that the population of Americans who self-identify with more than one race and ethnic group is likely to increase by 2015. I expect this for several reasons, first among them being our greater familiarity with the option to self-identify multiracially. Another reason is the continuing increase in interracial marriages, with Asian Americans in particular being likelier to out-marry than African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos. Third, the best evidence suggests that only a small fraction of Americans who might have identified with more than one race did so in 2000. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact that modest changes in how we ask people to self-identify ethnoracially can lead to dramatic increases in the estimated population of multiracial Americans. In a 2003 survey, for example, I find that more than one in four Californians identify multiracially when asked to allocate “identity points”—a substantially greater proportion than the one in twenty Californians who identified multiracially under the “mark one or more” format of the 2000 census. Finally, the trend of growing social acceptance of interracial unions and political legitimacy of multiracial identity will likely continue, thus amplifying each of the other factors leading to greater multiracial identification.

These predictions about demographic change, however, do not translate neatly into predictions about their likely effect on race relations and politics. A common view is that politics is a game of numbers, and that the rise in brown and yellow bodies will therefore crystallize into the emergence of Latino and Asian political power in America. Such expectations have thus far been dashed by the low levels of citizenship acquisition, voter registration, and political participation among these new Americans, not to mention the relative absence of party mobilization, the salience of dual citizenship and transnational political ties, the persistence of language barriers, little discretionary time, and other impediments to full incorporation and greater participation. Furthermore, greater intergroup interaction cannot guarantee peaceful coexistence and collaboration, as demographic change often instead precipitates and intensifies intergroup conflict. Similarly, it is unclear what the growing multiracial population in America implies. Some scholars envisage a radical transformation of how we conceive of families; others foresee the emergence of a mestizo nation and a mestizaje politics; yet others visualize the abandonment of our existing ethnoracial categories altogether and, with it, the significance of a politics organized around race and ethnic identity.

What more can we say than that growth and complexity will continue? One strategy is to presume that the past is prologue, and work as though past trends and current realities will transmute mechanically into future projections. Proceeding thus, the most commonly recapitulated racial ordering puts whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Bridging this black-white divide are Asians and Latinos, who are expected to continue becoming immersed in, and integrated into, the fabric of American society through processes of assimilation and incorporation that are segmented and uneven across the multiple contexts of immigrant life. A third common extrapolation is that Asians will be increasingly indistinct from ethnic whites, while Latinos and African Americans will continue to face economic hardships, social segregation, and political marginalization.

Beyond black-white. Such predictions, however, are incomplete. For one thing, the reliance of such predictions on structural trends leaves little room for the agency of mobilized interests—whether through pluralist or contentious politics—to alter the course of racial and ethnic politics. For another, they flatten crucial subgroup differences. The material conditions facing Southeast Asians are discernibly worse than those facing other Asians; the economic and political power of Florida's Cuban American community is substantial compared to other Latinos; the persecution facing Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians after 9/11 is more acute than that facing other immigrants in America. Even within the supposedly homogeneous African American community, there is considerable (and, by some accounts, growing) ideological diversity, economic division, and conflicts cutting across gender, sexuality, and immigration lines.

Perhaps most important from the standpoint of social science, projecting the future by reflecting on the present and past is dicey given the speed, scale, and scope of changes on the ground. In asking about the future of racial/ethnic relations in 2015, we need to do more than recite demographic projections or replicate dualisms like viewing race through a black-white lens or immigration through an assimilation-racialization lens. Our challenge is to consider whether the continuing demographic diversity in this nation will reconfigure our racial order, or otherwise alter the degree to which race functions as an organizing principle in American society. As this recasting of the question suggests, an alternate approach to forecasting the future—an approach perhaps better suited to our present disequilibrated times—is to limn several vignettes that imagine, conceptually, how Asians, Latinos, blacks, and whites might be situated vis-à-vis one another a decade hence.

My aim is to articulate analytically manipulable dimensions of “peoplehood,” where race is explicitly understood as one among several durable, overlapping group identities that interact with one another and serve as the basis for organizing, perpetuating, and contesting the existing distributions of power and privilege in our economy, polity, and society. The group identities I have in mind here are nation, class, and ethnicity. Past scholarship has rightfully and painstakingly separated race from class, ethnicity, and nation in the service of establishing the distinctiveness and singularity of race. In the context of this essay, it is equally crucial to recognize that race irrefrangibly intersects with, without reducing to, these dimensions of peoplehood. If the future is meaningfully different from the present, it will be as a result of the reconfiguration of race with class, ethnicity, and nation.

Race and class. The first vignette typifies contemporary debates over racial progress and racial attitudes, couched in terms of the alleged upward class mobility of African Americans, the putative merits of class-based over race-based policies, and the supposed reducibility of race to class (and vice versa). Race and class, taken together, situate whites and blacks at the antipodes with respect to each other. Both dimensions are integral to the everyday experiences of African Americans, while whiteness is defined by the invisibility of race as a lived experience, an absence reinforced by the relative material advantages of whites compared with blacks and by ideological commitments to economic individualism and the classless foundation of American society. This core antipodal relationship is a virtually defining characteristic of American racial order and just the sort of sticky, slow moving, structurally enchained reality that is unlikely to change over a decade.

What about Asians and Latinos? One point of this exercise is that if we hew narrowly to current state definitions of Asian orPacific Islander “races” and “ethnic” Latinos, then Asians and Latinos too are situated opposite each other in this two-dimensional space (see fig. 1).²

That Asians and Latinos—caveats about subgroup differences and glass ceilings notwithstanding—face contrasting socioeconomic conditions is uncontroversial: the material circumstances of Asian Americans are comparable to that of whites and quite unlike that of Latinos, who continue to function in the U.S. economy as its principal source of low-wage labor. The racial ordering, however, is more disputable (and, perhaps, disputatious). Beyond the state classification of Asian “races” and Latino “ethnicities,” the relatively greater salience of race for Asians is suggested by the difference in self-reported levels of racial discrimination—relatively low for Latinos and high for Asians, given their respective material circumstances. But this is too slender a reed on which to rest such a weighty claim. For one thing, the experience of second generation Latinos appears more racialized than that of their newly migrated counterparts. Furthermore, a disproportionate number of Mexican Americans identify racially as “Other Race”—a move that rejects the deracialization of Chicano/a identity and says more, perhaps, about the ironies of our present-day ethnoracial classification system than it does about real differences in “folk” race.

Race and ethnicity. The moorings of our present-day classification system are even shakier in the second vignette. Figure 2 proposes that we consider ethnicity as relatively invisible for blacks and whites. For African Americans, the viability of “ethnic options” is largely subsumed under the force of racial domination, the ethnic claims of African or Afro-Caribbean immigrants and cultural strands of Afrocentrism notwithstanding. For whites, ethnic claims are perhaps more readily accessible but sharp boundaries based on European ancestry are largely in their twilight, visible principally in symbolic celebrations of the cultural remnants of nationhood. By contrast, ethnic identity is far more salient for Latinos and Asian Americans—principally with respect to one's ethnic/national origin, but occasionally also in the form of panethnic identities. The result of this mapping of race and ethnic identity is that whites and Asians stand opposite one another.

One might object that this result is achieved through artifice, by foisting an incongruous OMB ethnoracial classification scheme upon an emphatically more complex and contested reality. This incongruity, further, contradicts other logics of statecraft, such as the seamless incorporation of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans under EEOC affirmative action guidelines and other cases in which all white racisms are treated as equivalent. This is, however, the reductio ad absurdum of our current state definitions of race and ethnicity. To the extent that bureaucratic illogics are a generative force for change, one possible future is that in which the state is impelled toward new racial classifications that resituate Asians and Latinos at the interstices of a black-white linear hierarchy. Accordingly, the ironies of our current classification scheme also open up a space for contestation and agency—as seen in the political free-for-all leading up to the OMB's revision of Directive 15 in 1997 and in the liberal employ of ethnic options in social surveys.

Race and nation. What should not be lost, however, in the rush to conform the state's ethnoracial classification system to our judgments about how race in America is ordered, is the palpable breach dividing Asians and Latinos from whites and African Americans. This breach is perhaps most economically described by juxtaposing racism against nationalism. In this vignette, we move from state definitions of race to consider race as an ideology of domination that locates Asians closer to Whites and Latinos closer to African Americans. Racially, Asians are often valorized as “model minorities” in contrast to the more negative popular images of blacks and Latinos. On the dimension of national ideology, however, both Asians and Latinos are cast as “perpetual foreigners” of unassimilable cultures and suspect loyalties. This bright line of national belonging not only separates immigrant-based ethnics like Asians, Latinos, and Arabs from whites and African Americans, but has also served a crucial role in nation-building projects and the making of America.

This vignette reveals a third possible ordering (see fig. 3), with whites and Latinos at the antipodes and a black-Asian pairing on the off-diagonal. Thus one upshot of the three vignettes is that any group—blacks, Latinos, or Asians—might be situated opposite to whites, depending on how race is defined and which overlapping identity classes are paired with it. A second upshot is that these dimensions of peoplehood act as organizing principles in American life precisely because they are durable. The relative position of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and whites vis-à-vis one another within the ideological structures of class, race, ethnicity, and nationhood are unlikely to change radically over the next decade.

Two steps back. At this point, the vignettes still lurch forward in the manner of an enthymematic argument—implying conclusions without the benefit of testable premises. That said, my charge is not to hedge bets, but to take risks. In this spirit, I close with specific predictions. First, we are not likely to grin and bear our current ethnoracial classification system for long. In particular, our current convention—most evident in the census—that ethnicity solely distinguishes Hispanics from non-Hispanics while assorted Asian national-origin groups are defined as separate “races” is untenable and likely to change in the near future. This prospect, however, will not lead to eradication or even diminution of race, even with the likely uprise of multiracial identities in American life.

Rather, our current sociopolitical milieu—Republican control of the federal government, nativist vigilantes policing the United States–Mexico border, sustained efforts to unmake the racial progress of the 1960s and abolish government codification by race or akin identities, encroachment of Christian mores in our political ethos, and other fin-de-siècle cris de coeur filled with nostalgia and jingoism—sets the backdrop for further consolidation of a contentious politics around “peoplehood.” The processes of immigrant assimilation and incorporation for Asians, Latinos, Arabs, and Afro-Caribbeans will grow even more bumpy and lumpy: immigrants who come matched to skills in demand in the U.S. economy will continue to enjoy the material fruits of their labor, but never without the thorns of social ostracism and ethnonational chauvinism. Similarly, a select few blacks will continue to move upward in America, but never without sobering reminders of the intertwined roots of the ideology of equal opportunity and the illusion of color blindness. At the same time, the prospects of a flourishing prismatic politics too are dim. The symbolic and, sometimes, real gestures of the current Republican regime to reach out to blacks, Asians, and Latinos may be ill-fated, but, over the short duration of a decade, they are a contrivance that will succeed. Barring some a restoration of the left, the Democratic Party's historic stranglehold on the partisan loyalties (if not actual votes) of communities of color will likely continue to attenuate.

This coup d'oeil into the future is decidedly bleak. To adapt Donald Rumsfeld's poetics to present circumstances, it is limned from “known knowns” and “known unknowns.” But there are “unknown unknowns” that too may adjudicate between the soothsayer and sophist in this essay. Ultimately, time (and perhaps our will to make a difference) will tell that tale.