Ethnicity everywhere and nowhere: a critical approach towards parsing ethnic and non-ethnic processes

This article has two parts. First, it presents Andreas Wimmer's framework for comparative ethnic boundary making as a way of disentangling ethnic and non-ethnic processes. Wimmer's framework helps avoid the persistent tendency among researchers to attribute ethnic causes to ethnic patterns of inequality. Second, it focuses on how these insights can be applied to the US case, a nation that arguably pays a lot of attention to ethnicity and where ethnic cultures are often seen as the driver of differences in educational success and mobility between ethnic groups. The article sheds light on how this understanding can be complicated through existing and further research along Wimmerian lines.