The Ethnic Project

Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions

Vilna Bashi Treitler

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804787284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

Race is a known fiction—there is no genetic marker that indicates someone's race—yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism.

In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups—Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans—she shows how each negotiates America's racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these "ethnic projects" these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking.

CHAPTER 1

RACISM AND ETHNIC MYTHS

Racial beliefs and practices harm large segments of our population. Yet few of us see society’s current state as unnatural or unjust; most deny that race or other structural forces limit the life chances of individuals and groups. We do not believe that our attitudes or actions are based on racial considerations. Instead, race has become commonsense: accepted but barely noticed, there though not important, an established fact that we lack the responsibility, let alone the power, to change. The color line has come to seem a fiction, so little do we apprehend its daily mayhem.

Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial

The United States has a fabled history of immigration, culturally signified in the sonnet by Emma Lazarus, who implores foreign nations to send “your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” in a “world-wide welcome” to them all.¹ The sonnet is inscribed on the interior of the pedestal of the “Mother of Exiles” (as the verse names the Statue of Liberty). This iconic sonnet encapsulates the mythos that the United States is a nation built on the labor of immigrants and still welcomes immigrants from around the world. Histories that look at the travails of nonwhites since the inception of the first Thirteen Colonies and on until today could testify that the reality has never quite lived up to the words that Lazarus issued from the Statue of Liberty’s “silent lips.” Those histories, instead, read as a complex contest for resources, one that was from the beginning contextualized in a language that demarked the deserving from the undeserving, arranging the humans involved into unequal ethnic groups.

The American polity is legendarily characterized as a “melting pot,” a nation brought together under Lady Liberty’s torch of enlightenment and crown of seven spires (representing the seven continents and seven seas),² welcoming the world’s “tired” and “poor” who are willing to work or “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”³ Although people from all over the world have come and still come to “America” (read “the United States”) to restructure their lives, they are not all seen as equally endowed with the ability to fit in or become American. For example, the American Protestant Association (APA1) was formed in fearful response to the spread of Catholicism, which they believed was “subversive of civil and religious liberty,” in 1842 in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” The American Protective Association (APA2, formed in 1887 with an identical agenda) never saw any of its favored legislation passed but claimed two million members in 1895. Members of APA1 were encouraged to swear that they would denounce the Catholic Church, never join a workers’ strike with a Catholic, and never knowingly allow a Catholic to join the association; APA2 sought to ban Catholics from elected office, remove Catholic teachers from schools, and make speaking English a prerequisite for citizenship.⁴ These sentiments about who made appropriate compatriots were far from isolated. At around the same time, the U.S. government instituted the first of many laws declaring populations inappropriate for immigration, naming the Chinese as the first ethnic/national-origin group to be so deemed. Still, Catholics kept coming, as did the Chinese and other previously undesirable migrants, even though they received unequal welcomes and were not equally considered real “Americans.”

But that does not mean that each group would prefer and eagerly adopt the unhyphenated version of the term “(ethnic)-American” in lieu of their other ethnic options, for many are quite fond of and embrace their separate ethnic identities. Well, that is true to a point. We have known for some time that people will change ethnic identifiers as they pick and choose among possible ancestries in order to portray themselves in the most positive light. Mary Waters (1990), in her book Ethnic Options, explains how people decide which ethnicities to choose, preferring, for example, to say they are “part-French” but failing to acknowledge that they’re also part-Polish.

How do some ethnicities become more desirable and others less so? How were all these ethnic groups incorporated into the American polity and how do we develop legend and lore about who is better than whom? Despite the inequality that persists among ethnic groups in the United States, ethnic conflict is minimal compared to many other parts of the world. How has incorporation occurred with so little ethnic conflict? And what does the process of ethnic group inclusion and the differential outcomes tell us about how our society is organized? Is there a way to explain differences in outcomes that can be reasonably applied to several cases?

Two interrelated histories can provide answers to these questions. The first is a demographic record of the lands that comprise the United States of America, one that involves encounters with people who were living their lives when they were “discovered” by Europeans who chose conquest over community along with voluntary and forced migrations. A chronicle of the inclusion or incorporation of these disparate peoples, the circumstances that brought them here, and what happened to them afterward is helpful in interpreting the commonalities and differences among groups of various ethnicities. The second history explains how these people from the Americas and lands farther away were drawn together into an economically and socially stratified American society. These joint histories frame the ways various groups were differentially integrated into American society. But if incorporation has happened for nearly all groups in U.S. history, why is ethnicity still relevant? My answer is that these histories describe the racial and economic interactions that have kept ethnic, racial, gender, and class divisions alive, allowing them to persist even beyond the births and deaths of generations of now-homegrown “Americans” who remain ethnicized.

We have mostly folkloric histories about who got here and when, and why some succeed and others do not, all retold as if people used only their will and wits to make a living and create a legacy. In these histories we find that some ethnic groups have been able to achieve a kind of racial uplift and have the rest of society think of them with a much-improved racial status. Perhaps the catchy title of Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White makes Irish American history the best-known example of racial uplift for persons who were first considered black-equivalents but have since become whitened, but there are other relevant histories (e.g., those of the Chinese and Mexicans). Some achieve true or pseudowhiteness, and some do not. For example, the Chinese were once so hated that we started closing our borders against them using our first immigration laws; now, Americans of means seek out Chinese children to adopt and love them as their own. Many who we now think of as racially worthy (the Irish, Greeks, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) have started at the racial hierarchy’s “bottom” and moved “up” over time. What accounts for the success of those who become our ethnic heroes by reaching status positions higher than the positions they had when first incorporated, while others remain in low status positions and become our ethnic villains? Which groups rise so high as to reach the hierarchy’s very top category and become white, and how did they accomplish it? Which ones have not, and why? Physical difference/similarity alone cannot be responsible, because former nonwhite groups (like the Irish and Polish) were also once believed to be wholly racially different in appearance from “white,” and some (perhaps the Chinese) seem unable to achieve total whiteness but have achieved mobility nonetheless. What explains this?

ETHNIC PROJECTS

In specific historical moments various outsider groups undertook concerted social action (namely, an “ethnic project”) to foster a perception of themselves as “different” from the bottom and “similar” to the top of that racial hierarchy. Ethnic groups are variously successful at this enterprise. Ethnic projects succeed to the degree that the dominant population accepts that the new group is culturally or racially different enough from the hierarchical bottom to merit a recognizable “ethnicity,” which itself references the dominant society’s use of different racial overtones. If one’s project is successful, it provides group members some relief from the pejorative labels, damning prejudices, and exclusionary practices that had originally plagued the group.

Although many ethnic groups have made attempts to achieve “racial uplift” in this way, only a few have been successful. The theory of the ethnic project can be summarized as follows. An ethnic group begins as a collection of a significant number of “outsiders” who poorly fit into the racial frame that is operative at the time of their insertion into their geographic communities. As “strangers,” members of the group are first identified as equivalent to the “bottom of the barrel,” racially speaking. The European colonizers of North America are the exception: they created the system of racial domination and put themselves at the top; they neither experienced incorporation, nor can they be considered a minority group; and only racial subordinates require incorporation as minority groups.⁵ Most ethnic groups incorporated into the United States since the colonial era are looked down upon at the time of incorporation and given very low racial status—this we call “racialization.”⁶ For example, those nations that occupied the North American landmass before European conquest (variously grouped as a single ethnicity called “Native Americans” or “First Nations”) were branded as savages, albeit sometimes “noble” ones. The savage ideation remained, even after some groups (namely the Cherokee and the Choctaw, among others) adapted the ways of transplanted Europeans, giving up their indigenous lifestyles in a futile attempt to preserve their existence and save their own lives. The Europeans who proselytized about the ways of “civilization,” and who promised to spare cultural adapters, instead betrayed them. They did the same to those Native American nations who were less culturally malleable. In not so different fashion, albeit with different outcomes, Greek and Polish immigrants were seen as the worst kinds of brutes, uneducable but useful because of their ability to labor at “what would kill a white man.”⁷

Ethnic project theory argues that many racialized groups (some immigrant, some native-born) launch similar campaigns for “racial uplift,” but specific factors account for a group’s success or failure in these efforts. A group’s success is predicated on its ability to benefit from the marginalization initially designed to segregate the group and deny its members access to the socioeconomic opportunities and rewards that those at the top of the racial hierarchy are routinely granted.⁸ That is, groups that succeed take the racial structure as a given and primarily work to change only their place in it.

Ethnoracial groups hopeful for ethnic project success undertook some subset of activities intended to foster relationships separate from and possibly superior to ethnic nonwhite others. In some cases groups used their workplace and neighborhood relationships with African Americans to show those deemed to be “white” that they were not themselves also “black.” They proved themselves to be nonblack by ostracizing and in some cases brutalizing their black neighbors, friends, spouses, children, and coworkers. They separated themselves from supposed racial inferiors by self-segregating their residences, workplaces, and sites of leisure. Many took the added step of forbidding intermarriage between themselves and (only) racial inferiors. They chose to protect and maintain their racial superiority by enforcing a racial labeling that was intended to make the aforementioned racialized/racializing segregation commonsensical. Occupations, neighborhoods, and activities were labeled according to the racial hierarchy—as “white,” “civilized,” or “cultured” as opposed to “black,” “savage,” “heathen,” or “street.” Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta, Mexicans in Texas, and the Irish in the Northeastern United States all had lived among and intermarried with African Americans, yet to achieve racial uplift they decided to segregate themselves residentially, occupationally, and romantically from the “blacks” with whom they had been formerly conjoined and compared.

In their quest for increased racial status, ethnic groups with successful strategies did not threaten to bring down the racial status quo. Successful groups only sought to raise their own status within the hierarchy and did not question the legitimacy of racialized thinking or human hierarchies. For example, Mississippi’s Chinese chose to open retail stores and become economic middlemen, refusing to sharecrop any longer alongside African Americans. But neither did they argue against the existence of the sharecropping system, the unfair advantage whites took, or the maltreatment of blacks who were left with sharecropping as their only employment alternative. In similar fashion, the Irish said that they would no longer work with blacks because Irishmen now “did white men’s work.” In sum, racial status-seekers appeal to the hierarchy’s racial superiors regarding their group’s racial worth, and they often offer justifications regarding the worthlessness of racial inferiors. Even ethnic groups who have attained “whiteness” and wished to secure their position regularly reassert their superiority. Only Native Americans and African Americans made appeals to the equality of men and women of all races, yet in choosing this (failing) universal human rights strategy to combat racial enmity, they were certainly unrewarded.

Of course, not everyone in a group automatically agreed to compliance. Thus, ethnicized seekers of higher status would commonly institute mechanisms of punishment for those within their own group who would ignore the incipient or ongoing ethnic project and instead trespass over hierarchically lower color lines—through varied attempts to inappropriately fraternize or cooperate with racial “others.” For example, Mississippi Delta Chinese would ostracize those in their group who would not break off romantic liaisons with African American mates, spouses, or co-parents. Similar actions took place among Mexican and Irish intermarried groupings. White women who refused to leave the Native American families they joined often were labeled kidnap victims, bringing to their new families violence from white families of origin who wanted their kin “back home.”

Unsuccessful ethnic projects, though they may have done many or all of these same things, are characterized by the fact that they have not, to date, gained high racial status for their group. The reason some have not triumphed is that their ethnic project efforts actually threaten the racial status quo. In their endeavors to raise their status, groups who pose a threat to the racial hierarchy itself must fail if those who dominate the racial system are to retain their power.

HOW AN ETHNIC GROUP COMES TO BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH

The basis for all these projects is ethnoracial mythmaking, which creates an ethnic group and racial lore to characterize the group. For such mythmaking to succeed, there needs to be a demographically significant subpopulation that is large and sociologically significant enough to require the group to be identified by a name, a creation story that explains how they got here, and a justification for their place in the society into which they are incorporated. This process of mythmaking has several steps that can be identified for the purposes of making it recognizable. Not all steps are required, nor is there a singular sequence to them.

First, societal recognition is available only to those groups that are socially significant enough to count. The history of the United States is in large part a history of the demography that recounts how the population of this nation became the admixture it is today. This population includes three categories: (1) persons present on this land well before the current nation was even a thought, for whom the land offered food to eat and a place to call home; (2) persons who arrived voluntarily to labor and find their way in a new land; and (3) persons forced to migrate here, whether pushed from their own lands by violence and hardship or forced by contract or enslavement to provide labor on this land in exchange for survival. Chronicling the demography of a nation is not a mere counting exercise. We must know who someone is in order to count them, tally their characteristics and historical events, and tell their story. This in turn requires decision making about which of their characteristics are salient. Which characteristics and events “count,” and how do we weigh them to decide what makes up a group and what facts are relevant to their history?

Another step is naming. We believe ethnicity to be created by a group’s own process of cultural production, but the truth is that not all groups get to name themselves. Think of American “Indians,” or immigrant “West Indians,” so named because of Columbus’s geography errors. Neither group named themselves, nor do they have the power to erase the mistakes. This is why I describe this ethnic creation process as one that takes place in the context of racialization. Ethnic projects are not merely about the creation of an ethnic identity, for many of these groups are not actually embracing the ethnicity they have chosen but rather one that was imposed on them. Think of the ways we create amalgamations of many so-called American Indian nations, or of West Indian/black Caribbean persons from islands so multitudinous and varied that they speak different languages and emerged from different colonial histories. Persons in dominant races who never cared what those people called themselves long ago snatched from them their original names and applied names that fit the dominant way of thinking.

A third step: characterization. This is where one might recognize such myths as those meant to convince that upward mobility may be achieved by hard work and moral righteousness (a.k.a. the “bootstrap” or “model minority” myths) or that some groups are more prone to drunkenness or criminal activity. It is characterizations of this kind (lodged against “savages” and “heathens”) that created races in North America.⁹

Counting, naming, and characterizing groups are all steps in the process that sociologists call incorporation. Are groups welcomed, embraced, accepted, included, integrated, blended, or assimilated? Tolerated or ignored? Marginalized, segregated, rejected, “rehabilitated,” ostracized, or annihilated? By whom are they embraced, tolerated, or rejected? What power does the dominant element have to disseminate and popularize their assessments? How much control, agency, and responsive power does the subordinate group have? Thus, two histories are relevant and conjoined: the history of the lives of those in t...