Joane Nagel

Why are racial and ethnic boundaries so persistent and ubiquitous?

       Americans occupy a social landscape marked by racial and ethnic boundaries. We gaze across this divided social space sometimes with suspicion, sometimes with desire. Our lives reflect these contradictions. Even as we barricade ourselves inside ethnic enclaves, we plan trips as ethnic tourists, traveling across boundaries as consumers of raced and ethnic-flavored popular culture—music, movies, TV, dress, hair, talk, food. Mostly, though, our lives are ethnically cleansed—friendships, partners, neighborhoods, churches, schools all safely segregated. Occasionally we become interracial intimates—for love, or sex, or domination, or revenge. Despite these interactions, the differences persist. Racial and ethnic barriers remain in place while the traffic moves over and around them. 
      Although US history is unique, we are not alone in our ethnic and racial preoccupations, ambivalencies, and often denied histories. Other countries and societies in the past and present global system look more like us than unlike us—building community or breeding contempt out of differences in religion, language, color, custom. Sociology offers a conceptual toolkit for identifying patterns and reasons for ethnic integration and segregation, alliance and conflict, intimacy and distance. My work examines the ways that politics, culture, gender, sexuality, and the environment shape racial, ethnic, and national boundaries, movements, activism, identities, and conflicts. I draw on the traditions of comparative and historical sociologists and depend on the work of environmental, cultural, and sexuality studies scholars.