THE RECOVERY AND REMOVAL OF TOLERATION

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN NATIONAL ORIGIN

DISCRIMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

JOHN KROMKOWSKI

Ethnicity in the United States has been perceived as a passing phase of social development. The anthropological terms "ethnicity" and "ethnic group" now so frequently used in various contexts are publically associated with primordial origins, personal ancestry, primitive society and pre-rational consciousness. Moreover, academic understanding ethnicity in the United States has not been advanced by the European social science tradition of differences such as Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft. The limits of such dichotomous types of consciousness, simplistic anthropological ways of knowing and the romantic critiques of cultural change and urbanization are now clear. Such explanations of the traditional and the modern rest on simplistic notions of traits and types of human consciousness behavior and relationships. In America ethnicity became a popularized category used descriptively and normatively to analyze personal identity and social change. In broadest outline this statement of the ethnic question yielded the following climate of public opinion: On the descriptive level, the immigrant or ethnic possessed a compact experience of rural, tribal life--blood, land, faith--characterized by a type of consciousness that was unlike the differentiated experience of urban individual life--autonomous, mobile, orderly, yet free. Urban citizens, whose consciousness and action were rational and liberating were unlike ethnics. On the normative level, some cheered the withering of primordial attachments and compact patterns as signs of human advancement and enlightenment. Others argued, however, that changes brought on by the loss of ethnicity were sources of spiritual breakdown, psychological confusion and social pathologies. The loss of ethnic tradition produced anomie, normlessness, rootlessness and meaninglessness of an absurd urban world.

Knowledge is the solvent for inappropriate and unfair forms of social formation. The insightful development of ethnography and ethnology and the application of phenomenological life-world analysis to urban communities and ethnic cultures as well as a clearer understanding of the long-term processes which form and influence our consciousness of social and political realities cast new light on the sources of social formation which sustains misunderstandings and discrimination against urban ethnic populations in the United States.

The search for theoretic and applied insight into ethnicity and immigration of ethnic populations in the United States requires the displacement of a paradigm based on fear and conflict as well as ignorance and neglect of ethnicity which distorted significant pieces of the American tradition. The recovery and renewal of this tradition is possible. However, the fashioning of a hopeful narrative of multi-ethnic cooperation is by no means an easy task. It requires a corrective warning about misuses of ethnicity as well as honest-to-experience appraisals of social, political and economic aspects of the multi-ethnic reality of contemporary America. The task of recovery and renewal begins with critical clarification of existing practices and processes which drive social formation. In this regard three recent public events can be viewed as vectors which will shape the future: The Immigration Reform debate of the mid-80s, The U.S. Census and The Supreme Court Decisions on National Origin Discrimination. The first raised public awareness, the second focused attention on public data collection and the third restated legal doctrine. These three events converge to indicate a pivotal point in the new discussion of ethnicity in the United States. From this point new directions in public policy and social formation can be expected.

In recent decades the American government has adopted strategies of active intervention in social, economic and political areas to eliminate illegal discrimination and to redress its effects. This direction of policy was partially the result of the need to make a special effort to end the exclusion suffered by African-Americans, especially the descendants of persons ravaged by the legacy of Southern practices of isolation and terror. However, it was clear that attempts to assure liberty and justice for all by national governmental action have many consequences. African-Americans participation in political and social action would be a limited success without economic growth and prosperrity produced through urban development.

Morover, the possibility of economic mobility through urbanization is far from certain for many ethnic groups. The Kerner Commission Report sums up the experience of Southern and Eastern immigrants in American cities during the 1960s:

Eastern and Southern European ethnics, who come to America from rural backgrounds, as the Negroes did, are only now, after three generations, in the final states of escaping from poverty. Until the last 10 years or so, most of them were employed in blue-collar jobs, and only a small proportion of their children were able or willing to attend college. In other words, only the third and in many cases the fourth generation has been able to achieve the kind of middle-class income and status that allows them to send their children to college. Because of favorable economic and political conditions, these ethnic groups were able to escape to middle-class status from working-class and lower middle-class status. But it has taken them three generations.

In fact, the Kerner Commission report appears to endorse and to forecast a linear and universal path of development of ethnic and economic progress. The implication is that ethnic differences over time become less significant and that economic and political participation are the driving forces and measures of inclusion. This parsimonious reduction of a complex social reality to a linear economic and political progression of class statuses is useful, but incomplete. The experience of the twenty-year since the Kerner Report demands a fuller range of social theoritization that is attentive to historical antecedents. To understand and to analyze the intersection of American ethnicity with the social, legal, economic and cultural dynamics and essential aspects of the development a hopeful narrative required to govern a multi-ethnic society.

Because American history and contemporary America are an ethnicly charged social reality, deterministic historical explanations are inadequate. Theoritization about the American reality must extend to a philosophical anthropology which is sufficiently expansive to include ethnicity as a form of consciousness. Moreover, ethnicity must be included as an element of a societies' self-understanding of its social history as well as its contemporary shared understanding of itself as a multi-ethnic social reality. Linear economic explanations of multi-ethnic development have lost credibility and ethnic consciousness has emerged as a variable in a variety of contexts. The existential and practical nexus between political and social economy and ethnic consciousness has become patently clear. Simplistic class and cultural paradigms are giving way to the search for more comprehensive explanations of the human condition in pluralistic societies.

Including ethnicity into models of social reality has been prompted by the recognition of humankind's symbol-making and meaning-seeking `tendentia'. Thus ethnicity may be one of the basic codes of order for human consciousness. Moreover, the uses and misuses of ethnic symbolization and the incorporation of ethno-mythic materials into modern public philosophy and civil theologies often influenced by sciences of society ill equipped for the analysis and the rhetoric needed to govern multi-ethnicity has engendered forms of political language and action that demand critical clarification.

Fundamentally, the rise in ethnic consciousness seems to be an integral and fundamental aspect of the search for meaning and order. This search has a number of origins and facets:

- The general search for meaning in the wake of an era marked by existential meaninglessness and the absurd from the 1930s to the 1950s.

- The breakup of the empires, the World Wars and the process of nation-building raised the level of national consciousness and ideologies of the nation-state.

- The establishment of ethnic groups by immigration into multi-ethnic or other ethnic contexts raised the issue of self-identity and group rights.

- A serial effect seems to have been generated in the United States by the revision of American history attendent upon the civil rights movement. Cultural-nationalist interest that began with African-American identity moved other groups to search for clearer self-identity.

- Even the social sciences were affected by this search for meaning and self-identity, moving researchers beyond ideals of abstract objectivity in a shift of paradigms which involved a process-metaphysics and epistemology.

Increasingly, the term `ethnic' has taken on broad meanings. Thus, exploring ethnicity involves integrating the whole range of factors relating to the person, group, society and international affairs. Yet tremendous gaps of scholarly and academic knowledge and lags in the dissemination of such information are present, even at the highest level of public consciousness and decision-making.

The following exchange between Clare Booth Luce and Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski illustrates the problem and suggests the therapy needed to overcome inadequate analytics. The exchange is quoted at length because it is archtypic of the debate derive from misunderstanding the past and misreading the persistence of ethnicity in modern changing societies and the rise of ethnic scholars and their rightful claim on fashioning a restatement of the American tradition.

An issue of GEO magazine which carried an interview with Clare Boothe Luce, former Congresswoman, Ambassador and member of President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, reveals a nativist Americans' ingrained perception of ethnicity. In the course of her remarks Mrs. Luce said:

We are now encouraging illegal entry of so many aliens at an hour in history when there are so few, if any, frontiers left open that there are bound to be dreadful clashes within our society. Soon there will probably be as many Mexicans in Texas, New Mexico, lower California and Arizona--and as many Cubans and Latin Americans in Florida--as there are natives. They are also pouring in from Haiti. Now a vast majority of these are illegal. They're coming over the border, and they're coming in with wives and sisters and nieces who get pregnant immediately because they can then become American citizens and go on relief. I do not know how much more we can absorb.

In the nineteenth century, the United States absorbed something like forty million immigrants. But the vast majority were of a fundamental culture, and they were all white. They were not Black or brown or yellow. (Emphasis added).

. . . I am not sure we are not heading for the fate of ancient Rome, which in its later days had far fewer Romans than immigrants from all the conquered provinces around the Mediterranean basin. Rome became the city of pollution and noise and foreigners, and it collapsed under the weight of the barbarians.

. . . Americans identify with America, and increasingly there are people--Poles, Italians, Israelis--who identify with two countries. But I do not know of any other identification that I can make, say, with the condition of the people of the Sahara. I repeatedly see pictures in the papers of a starving mother with her child holding out its hand. I think it would be hypocritical if I didn't say that I would feel a little more compassion if one of my pet birds had broken a leg in its cage in my own house.

A particularly vigorous critique of such contemporary scapegoating was distributed by The National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski, Senior Research Fellow of NCUEA and former Special Adviser on Ethnicity and Social History, National Endowment for the Humanities presented the following rejoinder:

That Mrs. Luce is obviously not a paragon of liberal, internationalist compassion is clear. That she does not seem to be aware of the underlying racism of her remarks is obvious. That she also re-writes history to suit her arguments appear to be a symptom of social, economic, and cultural amnesia which has become increasingly used to justify and to defend the transformation of public policy initiated by the national executives Mrs. Luce advises.

Not unlike most political story-tellers who attempt to conjure and to evoke visions of a pristine and simpler pattern of human history and social order, Mrs. Luce's vision of America includes a claim about a "fundamental culture'' that "the vast majority" of the earlier immigrants shared with Americans as well as the charge that the newer immigrants are utterly different. Her story is silly and pernicious. She clearly has forgotten, for example, who the "natives'' of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California were when Americans arrived in the Southwest in the 19th century. Just as importantly as she has conveniently forgotten how remarkably similar the pre-World War I immigration is to current immigrants. This, of course, enables her to close her eyes to the possibility that our experience with latter-day immigrants will be as successful as the Americanization she claims for earlier immigrants.

Story-telling aside, let's look at the facts: It is difficult to imagine that Mrs. Luce believes that an English speaking, literate, West Indian Episcopalian shares less with Americans today than an illiterate Catholic Slovak peasant or a Greek Orthodox fisherman from the Peloponessus did or that a restaurant waiter from a Catholic, Latin culture is more alien than a Yiddish speaking, Hassidic garment worker was seventy five years ago. It is equally difficult to conceive of the reasons she feels the children of the better educated, more sophisticated Asian immigrants of today are less likely to adapt successfully to American life than the descendants of the peasants from Kwangtung and Honshu who came during the nineteenth century.

In point of fact, many upper class WASP Americans before World War I did not perceive the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe as sharing a common fundamental culture with them. Upper class pessimism about the ability of the immigrants and their children to ever become American was far more profound than Mrs. Luce's about the new immigrants. In the 1920's immigration restriction laws were passed, after all, not to keep out Mexicans or Haitians but to exclude Poles, Greeks and Jews.

In the minds of many the perception of the cultural gap was so great for some that they could even doubt the fundamental humanity of the new immigrants. As one mine owner noted about the cold and hungry Slavic immigrant workers he locked out: "Suffering? How can they be suffering? They don't even speak English?"

Though many persons recognize cultural changes, it is equally important to note the cultural aspects of race consciousness and ideology in America.

In this regard, Mrs. Luce has also forgotten that color in America has been as much a social fact as a physical attribute. At the turn of the century. the most common way of distinguishing natives from the new Eastern and Southern European immigrants in popular speech and writing was "white men and foreigners'' or ''white men and hunkies.'' Even a distinguished sociologist could affirm that "a Pole can work under conditions that would kill a white man." Those who saw the society from bottom made the same distinctions. A Black artisan in Detroit in response to a reporter's question about whites practicing his trade remarked. "There's no white men. There are some Polacks but they ain't white, you know." Clearer and more obviously understood evidence emerges from the record of mobs that lynched Italians in New Orleans or burned their houses and forced them out of Frankfort, Illinois. These violent, armed bigots and racists "knew" they weren't dealing with whites."

Thus the debate on Immigration Reform provokes Americans to rethink their historical record and imputed historical-myth are envoked to interpret current conditions. The historical warrant for optimism and pessimism are passionately argued. Most interestingly, however, is the extension of the analysis of ethnicity into the categories such as race and color. This overlap of consideration, as Dr. Radzilowski points out, has a long and passionate ideological function in the South and generally neglected history in the North. While this history is not the purpose of this inquiry, its contemporary linkage to ethnicity and the collection of information by the Census of the United States reveal its immediate and practical significance.

In the climate of opinion shaped by the immigration reform debate the public discussion of national origin discrimination surfaced in the early 1980s when the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs challenged the regular, though apparently inadvertant, exclusion or lapse in reporting on discrimination based on national origin by Robert Pear of the New York Times. Pear regularly covers civil rights issues. Typically, the New York Times reported that discrimination based on race, religion, gender, age, sex, handicap defined the purview of the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Owing to advocacy on many fronts, by the mid-80s the New York Times began to acknowledge the statutory inclusion of protection of persons who were discriminated against because of the national origin. This issue grew in public perception because of the influx of new immigrants and because of the raging congressional debate over the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform Bill. A particularly salient episode was captured by Robert Pear in his article "Immigration and the Randomness of Ethnic Mix" (New York Times, October 2, 1984) Pear quotes Lawrence Fuchs, an expert on immigration and former staff director of the Select Committee on Immigration Reform, saying "We are probably going to have a browning of America over time." He concludes as a result "concepts of color and race will probably change and its possible that questions about color won't even be asked in the Census 150 years from now."

The prognosis of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs was passionately different. In presentations to the U.S. Census and to the Commission on Civil Rights NCUEA argued against the point of view reflected by Dr. Fuchs:

It is surprising and unfortunate that a scholar as careful as Professor Fuchs should contribute so to the continuing popular and legal nonsense and to the debasement of the language of the public discourse with his talk of `browning' and `non-white.' To focus on the skin color of the new immigrants or of their off-spring as they intermarry with other Americans is to say nothing of significance or about our future as a people. What is important about them is their culture. It would be the height of absurdity to tell us for example, that the immigrants who shaped the history and culture of New York City were "white" instead of Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Barbadian, Dominican, etc.

NCUEA's testimony to Congress regarding the 1990 census pursued the issue further:

There is no question why we should wait 150 years to eliminate questions about color from the Census. We can do it now and we should. Such a move would spare us the insults to intelligence and assault on meaning that the present system of racial classification delivers. What can be more bizarre than the category of "white?" It is a remnant of the racism and nativism that infected our national culture earlier this century.

On the very day the above testimony was presented to Congress a particularly potent and legally relevant history of this issue was promulgated by the Supreme Court in Saint Francis College, et al., Petitionery v. MAJID Ghaaidan AL-KhazeRaji (May 18, 1987). This case of a United States citizen born in Iraq who was denied tenure as a professor because of national origin discrimination prompted the court to revisit the Congressional intent of the 1870 Civil Rights Law (42 USC Section 1981) and by so doing indicated the historical roots of racial/ethnic discrimination within the American social reality and the desire of Congress to protect citizens from discrimination because of being "genetically part of an ethnicity and physiognomically distinctive sub-grouping of homo sapiens." The Al-KhazeRaji case is quoted in its entirety because it offers a capsule the historical and legislative record. The court shows the climate of understanding which prevailed at the very time plans for the recruitment of the large scale immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe were being made. Moreover, the court uses this historical and legal basic to affirm Congressional intent to protect all ethnic persons. Because all persons are ethnic and ethnicity is neither a scientific nor a legally-historically acceptable warrant for the denial of equal protection.

The Supreme Court findings and argument follows:

There is a common popular understanding that there are three major human races--Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Many modern biologists and anthropologists, however, criticize racial classifications as arbitrary and of little use in understanding the variability of human beings. It is said that genetically homogenous populations do not exist and traits are not discontinuous between populations; therefore, a population can only be described in terms of relative frequencies of various traits. Clear-cut categories do not exist. The particular traits which have generally been chosen to characterize races have been criticized as having little biological significance. It has been found that differences between the `average' individuals of different races. These observations and others have led some, but not all, scientists to conclude the racial classifications are for the most part socio-political, rather than biological, in nature. S. Molnar, Human Variation (2nd ed. 1983); S. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981); M. Banton & J. Harwood, The Race Concept (1975); A. Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth (1974); A. Montagu, Statement on Race (1972); Science and the Concept of Race (M. Mead, T. Dobzhansky, E. Tobach, & R. Light, however, was different. Plainly, all those who might be deemed Caucasian today were not thought to be of the same race at the time ? 1981 became law.

The historic evidence cited by the court bears quoting:

In the middle years of the 19th century, dictionaries commonly referred to race as a `continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock,' N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language 666 (New York 1830) (emphasis in original), `[t]he lineage of a family,' J. Donald, Chambers's Etymological Dictionary of the English Language 415 (London 1871). The 1887 edition of Webster's expanded the definition somewhat: `The descendants of a common ancestor, a family, tribe, people or nation, believed or presumed to belong to the same stock.' N. Webster, Dictionary of the English Language (W. Wheeler ed. 1887). It was not until the 20th century that dictionaries began referring to the Caucasian, Mongolian and Negro races, 8 The Century Dictionary and Cyclopeida 4926 (1911), or to race as involving divisions of mankind based upon different physical characteristics. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 794 (1916). Even so, modern dictionaries still include among the definitions of race as being `a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock.' Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 969 (Springfield, Mass. 1986).

Encyclopedias of the 19th century also described race in terms of ethnic groups, which is a narrower concept of race than petitioners urge. Encyclopedia Americana in 1858, for example, referred in 1854 to various races such as Finns, vol. 5, p. 123, gypsies, 6 id., at 123, Basques, 1 id., at 602, and Hebrews, 6 id., at 209. The 1863 version of the New American Cyclopaedia divided the Arabs into a number of subsidiary races, vol. 1, p. 739; represented the Hebrews as of the Semitic race, 9 id., at 27, and identified numerous other groups as constituting races, including Swedes, 15 id., at 216, Norwegians, 12 id., at 410, Germans, 8 id., at 200, Greeks, id., at 438, Finns, 7 id., at 513, Italians, 9 id., at 644-645 (referring to mixture of different races), Spanish, 14 id., at 804, Mongolians, 11 id., at 651, Russians, 14 id., at 226, and the like. The Ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica also referred to Arabs, vol. 2, p. 245 (1878), and Greeks, 11 id., at 83 (1880), as separate races.

The Court goes in the present the legislative intent:

These dictionary and encyclopedic sources are somewhat diverse, but it is clear that they do not support the claim that for the purposes of Section 1981, Arabs, Englishmen, Germans and certain other ethnic groups are to be considered a single race. We would expect the legislative history of ? 1981, which the Court held in Runyon v. McCrary had its source in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat 27, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1870, 16 Stat. 40, 144, to reflect this common understanding, which it surely does. The debates are replete with references to the Scandinavian races, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess, 499 (1866) (remarks of Sen. Cowan), as well as the Chinese, id., at 528 (remarks of Sen. Davis), Latin, id., at 238 (remarks of Rep. Kasson during debate of home rule for the District of Columbia), Spanish, id., at 251 (remarks of Sen. Davis during debate of District of Columbia suffrage) and Anglo-Saxon races, id., at 542 (remarks of Rep. Dawson). Jews, ibid., Mexicans, see ibid., (remarks of Rep. Dawson), blacks, passim, and Mongolians, id., at 498 (remarks of Sen Cowan), were similarly categorized. Gypsies were referred to as a race. Ibid., (remarks of Sen. Cowan). Likewise, the Germans:

`Who will say that Ohio can pass a law enacting that no man of the German race . . . shall ever own any property in Ohio, or shall ever make a contract in Ohio, or ever inherit property in Ohio, or ever come into Ohio to live, or even to work? If Ohio may pass such a law, and exclude a German citizen . . . because he is of the German nationality or race, then may every other State do so." Id., at 1294 (Remarks of Sen. Shellabarger).

There was a reference to the Caucasian race, but it appears to have been referring to people of European ancestry. Id., at 523 (remarks of Sen. Davis).

The history of the 1870 Act reflects similar understanding of what groups Congress intended to protect from intentional discrimination. It is clear, for example, that the civil rights sections of the 1870 Act provided protection for immigrant groups such as the Chinese. This view was expressed in the Senate. Cong. Globe, 41st Cong., 2d Sess., 1536, 3658, 3808 (1870). In the House, Representative Bingham described 16 of the Act, part of the authority for Section 1981, as declaring `that the States shall not hereafter discriminate against the immigrant from China and in favor of the immigrant from Prussia, nor against the immigrant from France and in favor of the immigrant from Ireland.' Id., at 3871.

Based on the history of Section 1981, we have little trouble in concluding that Congress intended to protect from discrimination identifiable classes of persons who are subjected to intentional discrimination solely because of their ancestry or ethnic characteristics. Such discrimination is racial discrimination that Congress intended Section 1981 to forbid, whether or not it would be classified as racial in terms of modern scientific theory.⁵ The Court of Appeals was thus quite right in holding that Section 1981, `at a minimum,' reaches discimination against an individual `because he or she is genetically part of an ethnically and physiognomically distinctive sub-grouping of homo sapiens.' It is clear from our holding, however, that a distinctive physiognomy is not essential to qualify for Section 1981 protection. If respondent on remand can prove that he was subjected to intentional discrimination based on the fact that he was born an Arab, rather than solely on the place or nation of his origin, or his religion, he will have made out a case under Section 1981.

Thus the Supreme Court documents the original legislative intent of Congress: to prohibit ethnic discrimination in 1866 was much fuller and extensive than the focus on African-Americans which shaped the debate of the 1960's and polarized the discussion of ethnicity by limiting the range of ethnicity to a Black-White zero sum game. Thus, the 1960s use of ethnicity as a political symbol eclipsed the earlier experience and effort of Congress to illigitimate discrimination based upon ethnicity. This legal clarification is important and timely. That this intent of Congress was not implemented even in the 1870s is painfully clear from the social history of thos decades. This legacy continued into the 1960s. Nonetheless the inclusion of this ignored statute in the law and the recovery of the legal basis for contemporary practice and for its contribution to a multi-ethnic and theology is especially relevant sources of precedent. In point of fact, two generations after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, President Theodore Roosevelt's Commission on Immigration (1907-1911) produced a set of reports which extended the racism of the Post Civil War South to the Eastern and Southern Europeans who had been recruited and attracted to the Northern cities of the United States. Through several years of testimony and 42 volumes of materials the Dillingham Commission, as it was called after its chairman, subtly but decisively "presented the current theory of race. The moral difference between the "old" and "new" immigration emerged to the discredit of the late arrivals, as it were, factually." The intensity of this fear was publicized in the Congressional Debates on the Census and Reapportionment in 1971 and 1920. When the growth of immigrant populations in cities signaled an awesome shift in potential political power. Throughout this period states resisted legislative reapportionment and city charters limited the enfranchisement of ethnic citizens by systems of at large rather than district elections.

More than twenty years after the Report of the Dillingham Commission was published such racial views were still respectable and "scientific" enough that a prestigious journal such as Scientific American could publish blatantly nativist articles such as "The Nordic-Superior or Inferior" by W.P. Hartman in 1933. In the article Mr. Hartman, who identified Nordics as the blondhaired people of the British Isles, Scandinavian and Northern and Western Europe, concluded among other things, that

Love of liberty is exclusively Nordic. Self-government has never been known by any other race...With a few exceptions...(the Nordic) unquestionably developed the great civilizations that are known to history.

Not until World War II revealed the horrible fruits of racism did such `scientific' prejudice begin to wane and discrimination start to lose its legitimacy. What remained of them went underground.

Discrimination and bigotry that affected the life chances of Americans of Southern and Eastern European ancestry began with their earliest schooling. Considered less able and intelligent than their American counterparts, Eastern and Southern European children were actively discouraged from pursuing the same education as native-born children. Michael Katz in his study of the American school system has shown that the end of the common school and the development of special schools designed to provide manual training were a direct response to the need to separate "inferior" immigrant children from better American students. The low expectations and racist attitudes of teachers and administrators compounded the effects of poverty and a non-English speaking home to handicap permanently the immigrant child. The sentiments expressed by E.P. Cubberly, the father of American school administration, are not untypical of the early 20th century educators:

These Southern and Eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the Northern Europeans who preceded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self reliance and initiative and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously our national stock and corrupt our civic life... Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups...and to set up here their national manners, customs and observances. Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as part of our American race and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government . . . (emphasis added)

Given this prevailing sentiment and the social formation of consciousness it produced one can begin to understand the pessimism which sums up the entire attitude toward ethnicity in the United States. The recent decisions of the Supreme Court regarding discrimination based on national origin and the foregoing accounts of political, social science, failure of political will and their consequences for previous social formation suggest that much more attention to ethnicity could be incorporated into the processes of contemporary social formation in the United States. In point of fact, the revival of ethnicity during the 1970s was such an attempt. The ethnic revival was in some respects a sort of disparate affirmation and a sort of social therapy. It was somewhat effective.

Nonetheless the reflections of Paul J. Asciolla, a founder of the Illinois Consultation on Ethnicity, provides an insightful set of misuses of ethnicity that must be avoided. Asciolla argues that a proper application of ethnicity as a factor and concept in American culture is an uphill battle. Asciolla claims that ethnicity is kept alive consciously. It can diminish and indeed vanish. Asciolla suggests the following explanation for the small gains in Federal public policy concerning Eastern and Southern European-American populations, but one could extend his claims to the entire field of ethnic politics and efforts to use ethnicity in American society. Asciolla's record as an ethic activist enables him to recount the strange applications of ethnicity. Asciolla writes that ethnicity has been:

1. Romanticized and glamorized by novels, articles, readers, lectures, radio, television and film, newspaper columns and newsletters, and personal born-again ethnic apologias where the thrill of ethnicity and the process of raising the issues is more important than the product and policies which result.

2. Commercialized by ethnic entrepeneurs from T-shirs to topless bars.

3. Politicized by offering it as a commodity to be bartered for votes, political appointments, contracts, and grants.

4. Plagiarized in sundry ways such as ethnic food-fun-and farmers people, films-television media, festivals, and television situation comedies.

5. Polarized by using it as a wedge to get a piece of the pie without respect for the rights of other individuals or groups.

6. Mythologized by separating it from real life, and giving it exhoribitant transcendental meaning. By the way, don't be surprised if you see two new books on the bookstands: The Joy of Ethnicity and Inner Ethnicity.

7. Homogenized or Balkanized by editorial writers and columnists, it depends on the time of the year or the crisis.

8. Criticized as the root cause of social strife and intergroup conflict.

9. Memorialized following a coup de grace from a Time magazine essay or some scholarly journal . . . or as just the special demon of another Washington-based special interest group.

10. Canonized by chauvinists who would make ethnicty the snake oil for all of society's ills and the miracle cure for all our troubles.

11. Guerilla-ized in a jungle-type warfare search and destroy mission making a journey up the river like the travellers of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now! searching for Colonel Kurtz.

12. Capitalized by compensatory grants and contracts and other drippings from the table of the Federal coffers.

Asciolla closes his case and litany of misuses with the following assessment:

We have been able to do almost everything except institutionalize ethnicity and the self-evident reality: monocultural social policy cannot satisfy the needs of a pluralistic society!

Asciolla's critique of such misuses of ethnicity and his injunction to "institutionalize" ethnicity as necessary and self-evident for a multi-ethnic society underscore the importance of the search for new approaches to social policy and social formation. Thus both critiques of misuses and creative approaches that foster understanding of the multi-ethnic character of the American society must be yoked together. A social therapy of this sort would involve nothing less than a retheoritization of ethnicity in America and the implementation of a process of social formation derived from this retheoritization. Efforts of this sort would be the ground upon which a new social formation and public policy could be fashioned.

The fashioning of a social policy for a pluralistic society begins with the critique of social definitions that constitute the very structure of rewards and benefits of a society steeped in racial/ethnic exclusion and denial. Thus the theory and practice of ethnicity and politics interact. The ongoing program of resource allocation and regulation toward such ends raises prudential and practical questions with regard to the scope, mechanisms, level of effort and measurement of success, as well as criteria for assessing the composition of those populations assigned or targeted as beneficiary of equal protection, due process, and compensatory remedies. Clearly at the level of practical common sense and in American public debate no one seriously challenges the national legal warrant to recognizing ethnic and racial realities of the human condition and the American population. Recent approval by the United States of the Genocide Convention is further evidence of universal and international legal affirmation of cultural rights of ethnicity populations within the power-field of political, governmental authority. But contemporary conflicts among ethnic groups are not easily resolved by appeals to universal claims. Fresh approaches are needed.

Among the multiple ways of knowing and using ethnicity few are more relevant than the historical studies at the micro level--investigations that trace the development of a particular population and the geographical differentiations within the same national group. Such close grain analysis tends to expose the fiction of large scale historical mythologies of ethnic groups. Social historians and radical phenomenologists are discovering at the experiential level that ethnicity is a dense network of local meanings. What Frank Thistelhwaite wrote of pre-World War I migration is equally true today:

Seen through a nagnifying glass, this undifferentiated mass surface breaks down into a honeycomb of innumerable particular cells, districts, villages, towns each with an individual reaction or lack of it to the pull of migration. This is not simply a question of Scottish Highlanders emigrating in a body to Upper Canada, Rhinelanders to Wisconsin, Swedes to Montana, Northern Italians to France and Argentina, Souther Italians to the United States, though these elementary distinctions are important. We only come to secret sources of the movement if we work at a finer tolerance. We must talk, not of Wales, but of Portmadoc or Swansea, not of North or South Italy but of Venetia Giulia, Friuli, Basilicata and Calabria, not of Greece of even the Peloponnese, but of Tripolis, Sparta and Megalopolis, not of Lancashire but of Darwin or Blackburn, not of Norway but of Kristiana and North Bergenhus. . . . Only when we examine . . . districts and townships, and trace the fortunes of their native sons, do we begin to understand the true anatomy of migration.

The governing feature of the American ethnic reality that is conveyed in Thistelhwaite's finding is that ethnic group and ethnicity, includes a local experience of national, linguistic and religious differentiation among participants in the American cosmion--the American reality. Moreover, the American reality also is constituted by communally shared symbols of order. Thus ethnicity as constituted within the American experience is mediated by social processes among and between populations at the local level. Thus the term ethnic consciousness is well understood as local consciousness. This form of consciousness has been juxtaposed or opposed to modern forms of shared consciousness constituted by large-scale institutions--the national government and corporations organized for large-scale order and the large-scale production and distribution of goods and sources. To be sure the large scale governmental and economic enterprises have initiated new forms of human autonomy and prosperity. But their record of providing peace and well-being must be read in the shadow of World Wars, modern horrors and the destruction of tradition. Hence, the emergence of ethnic consciousness in an era driven by large-scale systems of governance, production and culture frequently appear as signals of the cost of modernity. This critique of modernity and support of ethnicity in thought and action compelled the search for mechanism within large-scale institutions of order which could accommodate the persistence of ethnic group variety within the American reality. The Supreme Court's recent recovery of the legislative intent to render equal protection and due process to all populations and the changing contour of the American brought on by new immigrations are elements of a new narrative which is simultaneously true to the tradition and attendant to the needs of current practice.

It is the immigrants and their children then and now who are optimists; who still live and believe in the possibility of liberty and justice for all. The grandchildren of the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, from the Middle East and the Orient who were, only a few decades ago, considered genetically incapable of becoming Americans have succeeded beyond expectation. Poles, Italians, Romanians, Irish, Slovak, Germans, Lithuanians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs and Armenians now exceed the national average for income and education and are rapidly moving into the academic, professional and business bastions of the older elites. Contrary to Mrs. Luce's claim we can expect the newer immigrants, Hispanic and African-Americans, if assured the same opportunities to succeed, to do as well. Careful disaggregation of mobility indices for African and Hispanic populations suggests a trend toward mainstream status, but an unfilled agenda of equal opportunity and a bankrupt national policy for urban economic development are constraints which have hindered progress and isolated urban ethnics at the margins of human political, social and economic success.

All immigrant groups, of course, suffered from the alienation and dislocation that came from moving from the farm to the factory and from Europe to Asia to America. The ethnic groups that Mrs. Luce cites as having successfully adapted to America suffered most of the same problems the new migrants do. Their success has obliterated the memory that at the height of the immigration almost one-third of the prostitutes in New York City were Jewish, that the majority of juvenile delinquents in Chicago were Slavic and that in the 1920's Poles were either first or second in every category of welfare recipients in the City of Detroit.

Nevertheless, contrary to Mrs. Luce's fears, few immigrants then or now come here to go on welfare. They come because they are ambitious, want to work and to succeed. However, they also want more. It has never been ignoble in America to want to make money, even though both earlier and newer immigrants have often been criticized for it. But most immigrants also shared the rest of the American dream which at its best and in its most generous form promised the citizen a place to live in freedom, with honor and dignity. The American dream promised an opportunity to provide security for their families, to build communities, to educate their children, and to raise them to be good and useful human beings.

The immigrant experience is not a tourist trip: It is no easier now than ever in human history to leave family and friends and undertake often long and dangerous journeys to live and work, usually at the lowest and most menial jobs, among strangers who do not speak your language. Those physical and ultimately spiritual journeys of immigrants are born of necessity and nourished by hope and desire. Contrary to the horror stories about alien hordes and the self-servicing aristocratic myths of sending countries, it is usually the best and the brightest who yearn for the American world. We must adjust our social policy and social formation as well as our immigration policy to continue to take as many of the newcomers as we can. As in the past, the immigrants are bringing our future with them and that future is a uniquely American story we should be telling again. When one hears the laments which destroy our past and divide our future as a free, multi-racial, multi-ethnic people, it is time to sing a new and hopeful song about our past so that our future as Americans can be strong and free.

1. "Comparing the Immigrant and Negro Experience," Kerner Commission Report, National Advisary Commission on Civil Disorders in the United States, (Washington, D.C. 1968), p. 145.

2. GEO, September 1984.

3. Response to Clare Booth Luce, NCVEA, Oct. 1984.

4. New York Times, Oct. 2, 1984.

5. In forthcoming proceedings of Changing Perspectives on Civil Rights Regional Forum, United States Commission on Civil Rights, Los Angeles, Sept. 8-9, 1988.

6. Congressional Testimony, House Subcommittee on Population and Census, May 18, 1987.

7. Saint Francis v. Al Khaziraji and Shaari Tefila v. Cobb, US Supreme Court Decision, May 18, 1987.

8. W.P. Hartman, "The Nordic-Superior or Inferior" Scientific American, August 1933, pp. 33-34. Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971).

9. Elwood P. Gubbenly, Changing Conceptions of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), pp. 15-16.

10. Paul Asciolla "Response" in Civil Rights Issues of Euro-Ethnic Americans in the United States: Opportunities and Challenges, US Commission on Civil Rights Consultation, December 3, 1979, (US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1982).

11. Frank Thistlewaite, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" in Stanley N. Katz and Stanley I. Kulter, New Perspectives on the American Past: 1877-Present (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).