The Nation's Pulse/Harvard Hyphenates America

...If categorizing Jews posed special problems, there were many other definitional conundrums as well-so many that the author can only conclude that "the old saying that 'there are lies, damned lies, and statistics' is particularly true of estimates of ethnic populations...

...such "underrepresentation" was...

...In 1867 Henry James remarked upon the distinctively cosmopolitan nature of American culture...

...Nevertheless, we should not become so preoccupied with the dark and ugly moments of ethnic relations in America that -we lose sight of the obvious: America has assimilated an extraordinary variety of ethnic groups...

...Trying to justify their choice of 106 ethnic groups, the editors say that these groups are characterized by 14 particular features "although in combinations that vary considerably...

...Their existence is shrouded in mystery, for no one knows how they formed in the first place or how they have maintained their cohesiveness over the years...

...Asian American/Oriental...

...In 1978, the Civil Service began to ask employees of the federal government if they were"Black/Negro...

...The Wends-a.k.a...

...And the story of blacks and American Indians constitutes a tragic subplot to the main story...

...and in some ways they are misleading...

...Perhaps the most curious entry is entitled Tri-Racial Isolates, a catch-all term for some 200 small, isolated groups apparently of combined white, black, and American Indian ancestry who live mainly in swamps or inaccessible mountain valleys in the eastern United States...

...For if any band of people who stick together in some way-who regard themselves as distinctive and are regarded as such by others-qualifies as an ethnic group, then those who died at Jonestown rate an entry in the Encyclopedia...

...To pose the question in this way is certainly to simplify what the editors of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups* call "the immensely complex phenomenon" of ethnicity...

...In any case, the distinction between open and closed ethnic groups is no longer a hard and fast one, for as the editors point out, many Americans "feel an affinity to two or even more groups...

...Ethnicity, of course, is a serious business, for the story of American immigration has often been a story of prejudice and discrimination...

...Why, for example, should Americans of Asian descent be singled out...

...Suppose, for example, one's father remarries someone of Albanian descent, and one feels closely attached to one's stepmother's culture...

...Perhaps we can dispel some of the definitional fog if we distinguish between the "old" ethnicity, which is a primordial phenomenon so obvious that it is not worth dwelling on, and the ''new" ethnicity, which is a self-conscious sense of one's own ethnic distinctiveness-a sense that arises when one's own ethnic identity can no longer be taken for granted...

...Another writer argues that "ethnicity . . . may be the most crucial aspect of the American national character...

...Some observers, for example, would argue that Sicilians rate a separate entry, for they form a culture distinct from the Italian, under which they are subsumed "in the Encyclopedia...

...Aleuts, Eskimos, or Non-Minority Caucasians...

...If anyone can become a Mormon, in a sense anyone can become an Albanian even though he is not an Albanian by descent...

...The fact was simply that the federal government had begun to single out certain ethnic groups by compiling statistics on their "representation" in certain jobs-the point being that if there was not a correlation between the percentage a particular ethnic group composed of the general population and the percentage it composed of employees in a particular government agency, then something was wrong...

...Black...

...The new ethnicity may be in part a response to modernization, but in the United States it is in large part the unintended result of government policies...

...Ethnicity, according to the Encyclopedia's entry on "Survey Research," is one of the most elusive concepts in social science...

...The distinctive elements of each European culture are being preserved in the United States by those people who appreciate them, who may or may not be those for whom the features form part of an ancestral heritage...

...More and more-at least in the United States-ethnic identification is seen not as something that one is stamped with by birth or upbringing, but something that one chooses...

...One can choose to belong to a religio-ethnic group, but one is assigned by birth (or upbringing) to other kinds of ethnic groups...

...Moreover, as if to make it clear that the Encyclopedia should not be regarded merely as a celebration of ethnicity, the editors have interlaced among the 106 entries 29 thematic essays in which historians, sociologists, and political theorists wrestle with the notion of ethnicity and ponder the effect ethnic groups have had on American politics and culture...

...Some ethnic groups persist unchanged over long periods of time, but many undergo large fluctuations in their membership...

...He wrote to a friend: "I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture . . . We are ahead of the European races in the fact that . . . we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short . . . claim our property wherever we find it.'' Because Americans have no national culture, because America is a nation of nations, the American is a new man in a distinctively cultural sense...

...The rise of the so-called "new ethnicity" not only has given us the hyphenated American, it has also changed the landscape of American politics and culture-to what extent and to what effect it is not yet clear...

...Rather, they usually complain that they too deserve to be singled out...

...Unfortunately, the preoccupation with fairness on the part of the government may compel many Americans to retreat to the confines of their particular ethnic group in order to take advantage of government quota programs...

...Twenty years ago no one would have dreamed of concocting an encyclopedia along these lines, for ethnic studies existed on the fringes of academic respectability...

...Hispanic or Spanish-speaking...

...In the twentieth century, especially in the United States, ethnicity also has been a response to the growing power of the modern state...

...American Indian...

...If determining the size of ethnic groups is a difficult enterprise, elucidating the meaning of ethnicity is virtually impossible...

...I hope no one of Wendish descent will be offended if I say that the entry-full of odd and arresting details about the customs of the Wends-seems as if it were written by Vladimir Nabokov: a haunting and amusing fairy tale rather than a sober historical account...

...Wanting to be academically respectable, the editors of the Encyclopedia perhaps protest too much that their approach has been scholarly and judicious...

...Immigration, natural increase, and sampling variation cannot account for these changes...

...True, they suffered from discrimination in the past, but as an ethnic group they have been extremely successful and need no help from the government in acquiring jobs...

...The enigma of these outcasts suggests a more general problem: What exactly is an ethnic group...

...These thematic essays vary greatly in quality, but they are a welcome inclusion because they generally ask the reader to think about ethnicity as a problematical political and social phenomenon...

...They spurn the dogma of ethnic mystique: "A scholar does not have to be black to write about Afro-Americans...

...Asian/Pacific Islander...

...Many late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century writers, philosophers, and publicists were in rebellion against what Novak calls "'mindless' and 'soul- . less' modernism...

...incredible...

...For one thing, the new ethnicity is not very new...

...The Encyclopedia does have a separate entry on West Indians...

...Kinship ties are sometimes traced to a mythical progenitor...

...everyone "possesses" it...

...We learn, among other things, that the Wen-dish poet Mato Kossyk "visited the Sterling group in the 1880s and communicated with them in Sorbian...

...prima facie evidence of discrimination...

...White ethnics rarely argue that such attention to "race" is unconstitutional-that it violates the intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...

...The term "ethnic"-first used as an adjective, subsequently as a noun-became popular in the 1960s to describe those who were neither members of so-called "oppressed" ethnic groups-mainly blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics-nor members of supposedly mainstream ethnic groups that had lost much of their ethnic distinctiveness-namely Americans of English, German, and Scandinavian descent...

...The editors would probably argue that these groups have not been in existence long enough to possess "a historical identity of their own...

...Just as there is no generally agreed-upon definition of ethnicity, there is little consensus on how to measure it, either in sample surveys or in other research situations...

...As such, they surely are different from other ethnic groups - "open," we might say, rather than "closed" in that anyone can become a Mormon but obviously not everyone can become an Albanian...

...The Mormons raise another question because they are tireless prose-lytizers, continually recruiting new members into their ranks...

...They suffered less from the discontents of modernity than from the discontents of affirmative action, and their complaints had a good deal of basis in fact...

...the Lusatian Sorbs (they speak Sorbian)-immigrated to central Texas and Sterling, Nebraska in the mid-nineteenth century...

...But by now awareness of the Wend-ish heritage of some Sterling families is only a dim memory in the minds of a few of the old people...

...Obviously, many are not quite sure about how to express their ethnic origin, and therefore they change their mind from time to time when asked to respond to such a question...

...The variety is astonishing...

...If these groups rate entries, then why are there no entries on the Hare Krishna and the Church of Scientology...

...One reviewer in the New Republic has argued that Jews do not constitute one ethnic group, as the Encyclopedia would have it, but three: Sephardic Jews, German Jews, and Ashkenazic (Yiddish-speaking) Jews...

...others carelessly bandy it about...

...A stickier problem arises from the editors' decision to list religious faith as one of the 14 characteristics that define ethnic groups-a decision that enables them to have entries on such cohesive religious groups as the Mormons, the Hutterites, and the Amish...

...Some observers may argue that the Mormons are not an ethnic group-that the adjective does not apply-but the editors themselves admit that the Mormons "are not the same in character as immigrant or racial groups...

...As David M. Heer, in the essay on intermarriage, says: "Italian festas are still being held but are being increasingly patronized by people with little or no Italian ancestry...

...In the editors' words, "ethnic identification, even when ethnic heritage is unmixed or fully understood, is a matter of individual choice, ratified on a con-tinuum from passive acquiescence to active participation...

...In "Pluralism: A Political Perspective," one of the thematic essays, Michael Walzer speaks of ethnic groups as "communities without boundaries, shading off into a residual mass of people who think of themselves simply as Americans...

...Some proponents of cultural complexity, however, flirt with ethnic determinism...

...Far from being an anomaly, multiple ethnic identification is commonplace among third- and fourth-generation Americans...

...Catholic Conference that calls on the private and public sectors "to give consideration to those ethnic groups who have too long been unrepresented in large and important areas of American life...

...As the author of "Concepts of Ethnicity" says, "the worldwide rise of ethnicity is based . . . not only on what Robert Nisbet has called the 'quest for community' but also, and more importantly, on the wider functions of the state and thus the greater impetus to organize in order to get what the state is distributing-and to prevent others from getting it...

...And they warn the reader to be alert "to biases characteristic of the ethnic literature" - biases, presumably, that even exist in the 106 articles the Encyclopedia devotes to particular ethnic groups, from Acadians to Zoroastrians...

...The old ethnicity is something one "possesses" insofar as one does not think about it...

...But the socialization process as described by the author is universal-it applies to everyone, not just Americans...

...As the editors put it: "The capacity of the United States to absorb so many different people and to forge binding ties among them is...

...The result will be mutual hostility and competition between groups for the attention and favors of government...

...But anyone reading the list of features could easily come to the conclusion that groups other than the ones listed merit separate entries as distinctive ethnic groups...

...Of course the federal government has been in the business of compiling statistics on ethnic groups for a long time, ever since it began assigning ethnic labels to the millions of foreigners emigrating to this country...

...In "Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective," Michael Novak says that "the new ethnicity arises in an era of advanced technology...

...White...

...Other American Jews, however, resented the new category because Jews were the only people singled out by religion, and in 1944 the government omitted Hebrew from the race-or-people statistics and distributed Jews according to the country of birth...

...Ethnics-or white ethnics-became a composite term for Americans of eastern or southern European descent: Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Italians...

...This statistical muddle should serve as a cautionary tale for the government...

...and the essays on Italians, Jews, and blacks do take into account these different sub-groups...

...As one observer wrote recently in Commentary: "In support of such claims, all sorts of ethnic and religious groups not included in the government's affirmative-action guidelines have begun sponsoring studies designed to prove that they too have suffered discrimination.'' A sign of the times is a recent statement by the U.S...

...Similarly, Thomas Sowell has argued that there are three different black groups in the United States: descendants of slaves, descendants of the antebellum "free persons of color," and descendants of immigrants from the West...

...it should alert the government that the attempt to enforce "fair" employment practices on the basis of the statistical distribution of ethnic groups is doomed to failure...

...Because people often identify themselves with several ethnic groups, it is extremely difficult to chart the boundaries between them...

...And it also asks the following question: ' 'Is your ethnic heritage Hispanic...

...he is free to claim his property wherever he finds it, free to enjoy gospel music, Vietnamese food, and Macedonian folkdances, free also to negotiate his own private treaty' with his heritage...

...It would be wrong, however, to quibble about the editors' choice of ethnic groups, since it is better to err on the side of inclusiveness...

...The Encyclopedia has entries on Albanians, Assyrians, Bosnian Muslims, Cape Verdeans, Copts, Cossacks," Frisians, Kurds, Maltese, Manx, Tatars, and Turkestanis-to name only some of the more exotic ethnic groups that have found their way to the United States...

...Unrepresentation or underrepresentation: These are terms used by those who, as the Catholic Conference says in its statement, compete for "appropriate recognition" from the government...

...Yet Novak also claims that in America "many persons have the opportunity to become involved in cultural traditions not originally their own, and to appropriate music, ideas, values, and even a set of intellectual landmarks not native to their own upbringing.'' Although Novak at first implies that one is in effect inexorably mired in one's ethnic tradition, he then goes on to imply that in the United States one is free-no matter what one's descent-to appropriate whatever one wants from any cultural tradition...

...The categories are pointless, for all ethnic groups have been discriminated against, all ethnic groups have been oppressed...

...But in the United States the new ethnicity was not simply the by-product of a vastly enlarged state...

...Thus, the compilation of statistics on favored ethnic groups-and the affirmative action programs based on those statistics-have fueled the fires of competiron among ethnic groups...

...According to Michael Novak, "reason operates in pluralistic modes...

...For the customs of America's myriad ethnic groups act as a countervailing force to the homogenizing power of the mass media...

...With this volume, ethnic studies-or, more accurately, the politics and- sociology of ethnic groups-have come of age...

...Some of the thematic essayists handle the notion of ethnicity with extreme care (see especially the essay on "Concepts of Ethnicity" by William Petersen...

...Where would one put a Swiss acquaintance of mine who converted to Mormonism...

...They stress their neutrality: "ethnicity, whether good or bad, has been and remains important in the American social fabric...

...A most fanciful entry is the one on the Wends, a Slavic ethnic group from what is now East Germany...

...They act as a centripetal force against the centrifugal pull of the essays on particular ethnic groups...

...In surveys taken by the federal government, the number of people giving their ethnic origin as German jumped from 19-96 million in 1969 to 25.7 million in 1971 and then back to 20.5 million in 1973...

...No doubt, other ethnic groups can also be broken down in this way, but it is less important to worry about such matters than to insure that these distinctions are acknowledged in a particular entry...

...in an era of centripetal and homogenizing forces," but the new ethnicity is as old as the Enlightenment, to which it stood in reaction...

...These ethnic groups were subsumed under the category of white ethnics not because of any common thread that connected their ancestral cultures but because most of them were working-class or lower-middle-class whites...

...or Polish to write about Poles...

...During the past 15 years, numerous writers have rephrased the question...

...And with the advent of the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy, this counter-Enlightenment movement took on a pathological form...

...The statistics are unreliable, but the more important point is that the categories themselves make very little sense...

...The question of what constitutes an ethnic group obviously bedeviled the editors...

...Ethnicity, then, is the human condition...

...For many liberal journalists, the rise of white ethnicity was evidence of racism, but the real reason for its sudden appearance as a composite ethnic category was not racism but political resentment-resentment on the part of white ethnics of their unfair treatment by the government...

...What then, they ask, is the Afro-American, the Jewish-American, the Italian-American...

...According to one writer, "Americans may be said to possess ethnicity, because as children they were socialized to a given way of life through family, relatives, neighborhood, community, and social institutions...

...Of course, many religious sects proselytize...

...it was a response to specific government policies...

...To accede to the demands of white ethnics that they too receive favorable treatment would lead to the balkanization of America...

...But if ethnic politics bodes ill for the health of the polity, the preservation and indeed revival of ethnic cultures-their food, music, dances, and distinctive customs-is all to the good...

...But is it any more crucial to Americans than, say, to Englishmen...

...Such bizarre federal categories have proliferated to the point that the National Endowment for the Humanities now asks prospective panelists and reviewers (as well as applicants) to identify their "race": "American Indian/Alaskan Native...

...For example, in 1899 the government instituted a category called "Hebrew" because many American Jews complained that it was misleading to designate Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe -where most were regarded as pariahs-as Poles, Rumanians, or Russians...

...These distinctions, of course, are very rough ones...

...Indies...

...Should the new ethnicity be welcomed as a long overdue recog-nition of man's need for roots-his need for a community smaller than the state but larger than his family- or should it be attacked as a divisive and illiberal force, one that makes civic discord more likely...

...One of the most valuable essays in the Encyclopedia is the entry in the Appendix on "Methods of Estimating the Size of Groups," by Charles A. Price, in which the author quite painstakingly shows how difficult it has been for the government to arrive at a fair and accurate method of categorization...

...the new ethnicity is something that is willed, chosen- something that one thinks about continually in order to determine one's commitment to it...

...they too are worthy of the government's concern...

...Known by colorful names-the Jackson Whites, the Brass Ankles, the Red Bones, the Mclungeons, the Biack Dutch, the Bushwhackers-these strange groups are usually poor and uneducated and are frequently regarded by their neighbors as pariahs...

...The Encyclopedia, then, provides ammunition for those opposed to statistical representation, and it is a minor irony that the Encyclopedia owes its existence in large part to a grant from that apostle of "representation," the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...But even if we acknowledge differences in relative degrees of oppression, it is questionable whether past injustices are redressed by enforcing rigid statistical requirements that only serve to stir up ethnic distrust and to increase the likelihood of civic discord...