‘Coloured in South Africa, Black in the United States’

International migrations and different racial classifications

Bibliographic Data

ID22206170
AuthorsA I Tewolde (0000-0001-9769-654X, University of Johannesburg, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume10
Pages100915
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Sciences & Humanities Open (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2590-2911 • E-ISSN: 2590-2911
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.100915
OpenAlexW4394584680
LanguageEN
References cited57

Scholarly conversations on immigration and racial classifications suggest that how migrants get racially classified by host societies reflects historical, socio-cultural, demographic and political peculiarities of the receiving countries. How migrants are racially categorized, for example, differs between the US, South Africa and Brazil. This paper builds these theoretical and empirical debates and conversations by making comparisons on how I am racially perceived in South Africa as ‘Coloured’ and how I would be racially classified in the US context as ‘Black’. The ideology one-drop rule classifies all Eritreans (including myself), Ethiopians and Somalis, in the US under the broad racial rubric ‘Black’ despite variations in phenotypic appearance. In South Africa, due to my curly hair texture, facial features and fair skin tone, I am usually socially perceived as ‘Coloured’, a category absent in the US, due to the absence of the principle of one drop rule. Drawing on secondary literature, my own experiences with racialization and the experiences of migrants in the US, I develop an analytical concept of ‘regionalizing race’, which I hope scholars of migration and racialization will adopt in analyzing and interpreting how migrants are differentially racially classified in different national contexts

Genealogy · Geography · Political science · History · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy