Scholars have offered a range of perspectives on the twenty-first century racial landscape with little consensus about either the current state of the U.S. racial hierarchy or its future trajectory. We offer a more comprehensive assessment, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to study racial stratification across a number of socioeconomic outcomes. We pay particular attention to the robustness of results across different categorization schemes that account for self-identification and interviewer classification, as well as racial fluidity. Although we observe that White and Asian Americans generally have the best socioeconomic outcomes, on average, while Black Americans and American Indians have the worst, we also find meaningful differences in patterns of stratification both across outcomes and depending on how race is operationalized. These differences in stratification are reflected in the estimated number of strata as well as the rank order of racial categories. Our results suggest that ongoing debates about the nature of the U.S. racial hierarchy can be partly explained by methodological decisions about which outcomes to study and how best to measure race. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12552-021-09351-2.

Sociological research on immigration and Blackness has often focused on how immigrants from majority-Black sending countries negotiate between their racial and ethno-national identities. But as the Black immigrant population continues to grow, so too does the salience of subnational ethnic diversity. This begs the question: how do immigrants negotiate between their various racial and ethnic identity options as they integrate into American society? To tackle this question, I draw on 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with first- and second-generation Oromo immigrants to see how they situate their ethnic and racial identities in the context of integration into American society and continued homeland ethnic conflict. Two themes emerge in how my respondents articulate their ethnic and racial identities. First, respondents draw a sharp distinction between Oromo and Ethiopian as both separate national and ethnic identities. Second, respondents embrace their Black identity in part by relying on narratives of Blackness rooted in a shared history of anti-Black oppression that draw on the language of linked fate. Together, these findings demonstrate how Black immigrants’ identity can inform and be informed by notions of Blackness in both the United States and homeland contexts, and the importance of attending to subnational ethnic diversity in studies of immigration.