Theorizing Race and Ethnicity: There are, perhaps, no more troubled terms in American cultural analysis than the terms "race" and "ethnicity." While the cultural critic remains suspicious of these terms and what they denominate,or create, such terms also seem inescapable in talking about the American cultural landscape. The quotations listed below are not designed to give final definition to these terms, but merely indicate the degree of complexity involved when attempting to speak about race and ethnicity in American cultural history.

Horace Kallen--Immigrants appear to pass through four phases in the course of being Americanized. In the first phase they exhibit economic eagerness, the greed of the unfed. Since external differences are a handicap in the economic struggle, they "assimilate," seeking thus to facilitate the attainment of economic independence. Once the proletarian level of such independence is reached, the process of assimilation slows down and tends to come to a stop. The immigrant group is still a national group, modified, sometimes improved, by environmental influenes, but otherwise a solitary spiritual unit, which is seeking to find its way out on its own social level. This search brings to light permanent group distinctions, and the immigrant, like the Anglo-Saxon American, is thrown back upon himself and his ancestry. Then a process of dissimilation begins. The arts, life, and ideals of the nationality become central and paramount; ethnic and national differences change in status from disadvantages to distinctions. All the while the immigrant has been using the English language and bahaving like an American in matters economic and political, and continues to do so. The institutions of the Republic have become the liberating cause and the background for the rise of the cultural consciousness and social autonomy of the immigrant Irishman, German, Scandinavian, Jew, Pole, or Bohemian. On the whole, Americanization has not repressed nationality. Americanization has liberated nationality.

(From "Democracy Versus the Melting Pot)

 

Werner Sollors--Two conflicting uses of "ethnic" and "ethnicity" have remained in the air. According to Everett and Helen Hughes "we are all ethnic," and in E.K. Francis's terminology of 1947 "not only the French-Canadians or the Pennsylvania Dutch would be ethnic groups but also the French of France or the Irish of Ireland". BUt this universalist and inclusive use is in frequent conflict with the other use of the word, which excludes dominant groups and thus establishes an "ethnicity minus one." It may be absurd, as Harold Abramson has argued, to except white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans from the category of ethnicity, and yet it is a widespread practice to define ethnicity as otherness. The contrastive terminology of ethnicity thus reveals a point of view which changes according to the speaker who uses it: for example, for some Americans eating turkey and reading Hawthorne appear to be more "ethnic" than eating lasagna and reading Puzo.

As Everett Hughes suggested in a personal letter in 1977, the association of the ethnic with the other is not made in some languages: "In Greece the national bank is the ethnic bank. In this country ethnic banks cannot be the national bank...." Yet precisely the Greek etymological roots of "ethnicity" have something to do with Warner's confusion. To say it in the simplest and clearest terms, an ethnic, etymologically speaking, is a goy. The Greek word ethnikos, from which the English "ethnic" and "ethnicity" are derived, meant "gentile," "heathen." Going back to the noun ethnos, the word was used to refer not just to people in general but also to "others." In English usage the meaning shifted from "non-Israelite" (in the greek translation of the Bible the word ethnikos was used to render the hebrew goyim) to "non-Christian." Thus the word retained its quality of defining another people contrastively, and often negatively. In the Christianized context the word "ethnic" (sometimes spelled "hethnic") recurred, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, in the sense of "heathen." Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the more familiar meaning of "ethnic" as "peculiar to a race or nation" reemerge. However, the English language has retained the pagan memory of "ethnic," often secularized in the sense of ethnic as other, as nonstandard, or, in America, as not fully American. This connotationgives the opposition of ethnic and American the additional religious dimension of the contrast between heathens and chosen people. No wonder that there is popular hesitation to accept the inclusive use of ethnicity. The relationship between ethnicity and American identity in this respect parallels that of pagan superstition and true religion.

(From Beyond Ethnicity)

 

Tzvetan Todorov--The adversaries of racialist theory have often attacked the doctrine . . . . First, they draw attention to the fact that human groups have intermingled from time immemorial; consequently, their physical characteristics cannot be as different as racialists claim. Next, these theorists add a two-pronged biological observation to their historical argument. In the first place, human beings indeed differ from one another in their physical characteristics; but in order for these variations to give rise to clearly delimited groups, the differences and the groups would have to coincide. However, this is not the case. We can produce a first map of the "races" if we measure genetic characteristics, a second if we analyze blood composition, a third if we use the skeletal system, a fourth if we look at the epidermis. In the second place within each of the groups thus constituted, we find greater distances between one individual and another than between one group and another. For these reasons, contemporary biology, while it has not stopped studying variations among human beings across the planet, no longer uses the concept of race.

But this scientific argument is not really relevant to the argument against racialist doctrines: it is a way of responding with biological data to whiat is actually a question of social psychology. Scientists may or may not believe in "races," but their position has no influence on the perception of the man int he street, who can see perfectly well that the differences exist. From this individual's viewpoint, the only properties that count are theimmediately visible ones: skin color, body hair, facial configuration. Furthermore, the fact that there are individuals or even whole populations that are the product of racial mixing does not invalidate the notion of race but actually confirms it. The person of mixed race is identified precisely because the observer is capable of recognizing typical representatives of each race.

Kwame Anthony Appiah--Once the racial label is applied to people, ideas about what it refers to, ideas that may be much less consensual than the application of the label, come to have their social effects. But they have not only social effects but psychological ones as well; and they shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects. In particular, the labels can operate to shape what I want to call "identification": the process throughwhich an individual intentionally shapes her projects--including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good--by reference to available labels, available categories.