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Ethnicity in Contemporary America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
It is just under a decade since the historian Theodore Hershberg, a close student of American minority groups and a founder of the then new Journal of Ethnic Studies, announced the demise of the “Age of Aquarius,” pronouncing at the same time its displacement by the “Age of Ethnicity.” In so proclaiming he also, figuratively at least, announced the passing of one of the oldest of American ideals: the notion of the “Melting Pot,” that social process by which the ethnic elements of American society would all be boiled down into a national cultural amalgam by way of their “Americanization.” In announcing the advent of the Age of Ethnicity, Hershberg gave tacit recognition to the fact that the melting pot model of ethnic group accommodation to American culture had now been pre-empted, officially and normatively, by the notion of “cultural pluralism.” There was no further need for amalgamation at all: each group was now to proceed to celebrate its origins, its distinct culture, and its fellowship in any way it pleased, as one of its fundamental American “rights.”
On reflection, it may seem that in some respects the timing of the Hershberg prophesy is odd, even perverse. Many specialists were even then about the business of eliminating ethnicity altogether as a major factor in American culture, pronouncing the vestigial ethnic elements in US society virtually “assimilated.”
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981
References
James H. Dormon is Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana 70504. During 1980–81 he was Fulbright-Hays Professor in Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick.
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3 The dominant American modal culture was, in addition to W.A.S.P. in origin, several other things as well. The core culture is based in a value system that was 1. essentially western liberal-bourgeois, 2. committed to the Protestant “work ethic” and the will to material achievement, 3. committed also to the Lockean synthesis which proclaimed the inter-relationship of “liberty” and property and thus the sanctity of contract: the summum bonum of the value system and the sole sanction for the governing of men. Three other related items complete the value-aggregate: 1. a commitment to “progress” within the liberal-bourgeois framework, 2. ethnocentrism, and 3. what we would now call “racism.” For purposes of convenience, I shall use a sort of short-hand term to encompass all of these features, the term “Anglo-Bourgeois.”
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30 Ibid., p. 63. The enormous cost of resettlement programs (recently calculated to be over 532 million dollars) has heightened public resentment. See International Herald Tribune, 7 February 1981. A bill currently before Congress would limit total immigration to 350,000 per annum while doubling the size of the border patrol. International Herald Tribune, 26 March 1981.
31 Ibid., 7 July 1980.
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