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The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US.

The majority of Dominicans have sub-Saharan African ancestry,' which would make them "black" by historical United States 'one-drop' rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican-American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non-Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype-racialization as black or white makes visible ethnidracial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African-American. This resistance to blacuwhite racialization suggests the transformative effects that post-1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.Although academics over the last decades have increasingly emphasized that United States notions of race are local, mutable and contradictory sociopolitical constructions, the majority of Americans continue to treat individuals of African ancestry as "black" and individuals of only European ancestry as "white." Such categories have long organized the American social world, e.g., through residential patterns, marriage partner choices, church memberships, and overall social hierarchy, and both black and white Americans treat them 'In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco ('white'), 73 percent were classified as indio ('indian-colored), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 1 1 percent were classified as n e p ['black'] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of "whiteness," for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Domingua, 19789). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, "whiten" an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287). 0 2001 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved. 0 198-9183/01/3503.0135 ZMR Volume 35 Number 3 (Fall 2001):677-708 677

Divergent practices for displaying respect in face-to-face interaction are an ongoing cause of tension in the US between immigrant Korean retailers and their African American customers. Communicative practices in service encounters involving Korean customers contrast sharply with those involving African American customers in 25 liquor store encounters that were videotaped and transcribed for analysis. The relative restraint of immigrant Korean storekeepers in these encounters is perceived by many African Americans as a sign of racism, while the relatively personable involvement of African Americans is perceived by many storekeepers as disrespectful imposition. These contrasting interactional practices reflect differing concepts of the relationship between customer and storekeeper, and different ideas about the speech activities that are appropriate in service encounters. (Intercultural communication, respect, service encounters, African Americans, Koreans)