The New Ethnicity & Blue Collars

...Work I am doing with William McCready indicates that even when social class is held constant there are very considerable differences among ethnic groups in personality orientations, occupational values, expectation toward spouse and children, and quantity and quality of intimacy in family relationships...

...The inevitable corollary of such a conclusion is that those who are different from us should change because, obviously, we can't be expected to change...

...And I would submit that this larger bigotry can be found precisely among those so ready to confess their guilt over racism and to insist that the rest of us confess too...

...When it comes to choosing relationships where either intimacy or trust are involved, there is still a strong tendency to choose people of whom we can say in effect, if not in fact, "your mother knew my mother...

...Many of our colleagues react to this finding with complete disbelief, for if it is true, the official model is no longer acceptable, and my alternative model becomes plausible...

...There is, of course, considerable overlap...

...We have rarely if ever asked whether the better educated get higher scores simply because they are likely to know in advance the "right" answers...

...Of course, it's hardfor them because their ethnic past has only re cently been forgotten...

...The Irish Catholics and their Italian successors had become "superpatriots...

...For Max Weber the disappearance of Gemeinschaft was not something to be especially happy about...

...The fundamental assumption behind distrust This article is excerpted from Andrew Greeley'sforthcoming book, That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish, copyright1972 by Andrew M. Greeley, to be published in May by Quadrangle Books, Inc...

...The myths that the hard hat supports the war and the white ethnics are racist are myths that persist in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary, in part because the opinion-making, intellectual and political elite really don't think it worth the effort to learn anything about the alleged hard hats and racists...

...Metzger's conclusions seem eminently sane...

...So powerful is the model that says social class differences are good and...

...The ethnic groups did not come into being in the Old World...

...Sometimes I think that Mr...

...Only the very rich may be able to live in diversified neighborhoods...

...The irrational—that is, the sacred, ascriptive, particularistic—was not only going away, it ought to be going away...

...We have permitted ourselves to be deceived by the research showing that prejudice scores go down as education goes up...

...The research demonstrates that what we are dealing with in the black pride phenomenon, even among the young, is not a desire to isolate oneself from the rest of American society, but the right to have one's own particular heritage and culture respected as part of the society...

...The blunt truth is that many members of those elite groups who read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and also Commentary and the New York Review of Books, know more about Nigeria than about the Northwest Side of Chicago, and have a much better understanding of the issues facing Britain in its entry into the Common Market than of the issues facing American Poles and Italians...

...It is very difficult to persuade elite Americans that there are many blue-collar workers in the cities who are not "ethnic" (read Italian or Polish), and that there are many ethnics who are not bluecollar workers...

...Wherever the subject of ethnicity is discussed, there is always a black person present who shakes his head and says he wonders why this interest in ethnicity seems to have come precisely at the time when American blacks are finally beginning to get some tiny fragments of justice...

...Successful assimiliation, moreover, has been viewed as synonymouswith equality of opportunity and upward mobility . . . assimilation is viewed as the embodiment of the democratic ethos...

...but, given the size and heterogeneity of American society and the fact that it was put together quickly, the amazing thing is that it works at all...

...they are American creations...

...The work of Nie and Currie, recently confirmed by work done in Boston by Wilson and Banfield, shows that the ethnic groups are not any more "private" or "particularistic" than other Americans and, if anything, are less so...

...The other objections to the concern for ethnicity come from those mainstream American liberals who are still dogmatically convinced that ethnic diversity is a "bad thing...

...It may even be seen as an advantage so important that, compared to it, a college education will pale into insignificance...

...It would be interesting if some similarly sensitive author documented the bigotry in intellectual America...

...Real estate, construction contracting, law, medicine, the church, and politics are part of the public sphere, but are still organized in many cities around ethnic, religious, and racial diversity...

...Itis certainly within the province of sociologicalanalyses to point to the possibilities of conscious intervention in the social process (byeither the majority or the minority group) to achieve given ends...

...I am suggesting merely that ethnic collectivity is one of the sources available for finding self-definition and social location...

...They became ethnics in the United States, partly because the larger society has defined them as ethnics, but partly also because it was in their own interest to become ethnics...

...I certainly do not want to suggest that the present plight of the blue-collar worker is not worth considering, but I must insist that the blue-collar worker is one thing and the ethnic is something different, and while there is a partial overlap, it is not complete...

...If so, we may have to let Poles continue to be Poles, and may even require of the Irish that some of them learn what it means to be Irish again...

...It is all right for society to develop mechanisms to deal with the former conflict in the political order but it is immoral for society to develop mechanisms for trying to deal with the latter problem—or, if mechanisms are to be developed, they must be based on the assumption that one side is moral and the other not...

...The assimilationist strategy overlooks the functions whichethnic pluralism may perform in a democratic society...

...The political structure of the early years of the Republic reinforced that consensus...

...He notes that Sociologists, by and large, have accepted theimage of Horatio Alger in the Melting Pot asthe ideal definition of American society...

...While the Poles are no more liberal on matters of race and war than their white AngloSaxon counterparts, neither are they any less so...

...These elites don't seem to understand that American blacks are not asking for separation from the rest of society but for the right to develop their own culture within the society...

...Great injustice was done to Polish and Italian Catholicism by Irish leadership, and I suspect it is still being done...

...The blacks and the Spanish-speaking Americans may force on mainstream America that cultural pluralism which we have honored in theory and rarely accepted in practice, and eventually they may persuade mainstream America that cultural pluralism is not separatism...

...Underlying the assumption that all diversity except that of social class ought to go away is a basic model, which either in pop or sophisticated versions permeates much of social science...

...But from the very beginning, American politics were denominational and regional...

...The Greeks, the Latvians, the Slovaks, the Slovenes, the Luxembourgers, the Armenians...

...We are a nation that has discovered once again, perhaps definitively the fact of human diversity...

...The answer seems to me that this is not a very NEW ETHNICITY & BLUE COLLARS good question...

...It is an evolutionary model that sees the human race moving from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft—from community to association —from the sacred to the profane, from the particularistic to the universalistic...

...c) To abandon the notion that assimilationis a self-completing process will make it possible to study the forces...

...The latter group may argue that nobody sought balance for them 30 or 40 years ago...

...It's easy...

...Data available to us at the National Opinion Research Center shows that the more involved a person is in his own ethnic heritage, the less likely he is to display signs of racism and bigotry...

...For the Germans and the Irish, it's too late...

...or rational, and that ethnic, racial, and religious differences (with exemptions for blacks and Jews) are bad and/ or irrational that many of the agencies becoming involved with research on ethnic groups justify it by saying that what they are in fact interested in is "blue-collar" workers...

...The black phenomenon can be fit into this image of politics by assuming that all blacks are poor—or identify with the black poor—and, hence, belong on the "liberal" side...

...Yet the pop version of the GemeinschaftGesellschaft model has become an accepted part of conventional wisdom...

...The response is that the white ethnics are so racist, even passive consent cannot be expected...

...If positive cooperation is not possible, it still is true that in most large American cities, black goals are not going to be achieved without at least passive consent of substantial numbers of white ethnics...

...Like most good Irish Americans, I was firmly persuaded for many years that all Catholic ethnics had to become good Americans, which of course meant good Irish Catholics...

...Other Americans, observing that now it is all right to be proud of being black, wonder, quite reasonably, why it is not all right to be proud of being Italian or Polish...

...Well, they're all going to go away, too...

...We have learned not only to harmonize social class diversity within some kind of civil and political unity— however tenuous at times—but also to harmonize, more or less, regional, religious, ethnic, and racial diversity.3 An emphasis on the politics of "rational issues," that is, issues of social class, ignores the richness and success of the American political enterprise...

...In the private sphere, men still are inclined to choose to be with "their own kind of people...

...They belonged to a past the evolutionary process was inevitably leaving behind...

...Some ethnic groups have managed to maintain a very high level of internal cohesion, despite the fact that most of their members have entered the middle- and upper-middle class...

...Italians, after all, are white ethnic racists who refuse to confess their guilt...

...272 ANDREW M. GREELEY ethnic groups have no contribution to make, it is scarcely worth learning anything about them...

...Very recently, an exception has been made for blacks...

...Italians provide pizza, Poles provide Polish jokes, and the Irish provide corrupt politicians...

...In a city like Newark, the decision to base promotion in the school system on racial factors rather than test scores is a decision that benefits the blacks to the disadvantage of the Italians...

...now it is more or less conceded among American elites that separatism—for blacks— is good...

...for, after all, social class is the only "rational" difference in the society...

...He would be less cold to you, and you might be more likely to get the job...

...The notion that there are uppermiddleclass Polish and Italian suburban professionals runs so contrary to the social geography of many of the liberal elite that they seem quite incapable of believing that such people exist...

...One can leave to such existential philosophers as Gabriel Marcel and political critics as John Schaar the question of whether the bureaucratic model is adequate for human life...

...The self-hatred of many American intellectuals is so great that they seem quite incapable of even considering the possibility that something good has happened in the United States...

...Passed on in the early socialization experience, these traditions take the form of subtle differences in what people expect from those with whom they have close relationships...

...The conviction that social class politics are the only kind of rational politics shows the 2 L. Paul Metzger, "American Sociology and BlackAssimilation: Conflicting Perspectives," American Journal of Sociology, January 1971, pp...

...Conflict between black and Pole or, in New York, between black and Jew, over access to the land of the city, is irrational and illegitimate...

...2) A second result of adherence to the assimilationist model is that we misunderstand the American political structure...

...While it is hard for some observers to give up the notion that most, or all, white ethnics are blue-collar workers, the notion is inaccurate...

...But because whole new areas of relationships have been created, it does not follow that the old forms of human relationships have been eliminated...

...Some ethnic groups have become indistinguishable in their social-class distribution from the rest of American society...

...It was useful to be able to say to the personnel manager at the factory, "My mother knows your mother...

...Gans sees the behavior of the Italians in a community threatened by urban renewal in Boston as essentially workingclass behavior and not as behavior uniquely Italian...

...It looks to him, he observes, as though the concern for ethnicity is simply one more form of white racism...

...one from NEW ETHNICITY & BLUE COLLARS militant blacks and their white supporters, and the other from the mainstream white liberals...

...Ties of common faith, common ancestry, common race could be expected quickly to vanish...

...The bureaucrat must treat all men evenhandedly because in the world of rationalized bureaucracy all men were interchangeable...

...The great men of proto-sociology—Tonnies, Troltsch, Weber, Durkheim—all chronicled the end of a peasant, feudal era and the beginning of a modern, urban era...

...Obviously, I have a model of my own, and its broad outlines, I suppose, are implicit in my railing against the official one...

...Many liberals were properly horrified in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy when, as Pat Moynihan put it, Fordham men were investigating Harvard men...

...The attempt to impose the European Left—Right continuum simply does not correspond to the nature of American politics...

...We may even begin to enjoy it...

...Research shows that the ethnics are no more racist than anyone else, and that the Irish are second only to Jews in their score on prointegration scales, but such evidence is systematically ignored by those convinced it can't possibly be true...

...With one or two exceptions, such as Michael Novak, American Catholic intellectuals have shown little taste for the revival of interest in ethnicity...

...Only rarely did anyone bother to ask whether there were fierce pressures at work demanding that they become superpatriots, if only to establish that they were Americans just like everyone else...

...How to justify such a strategy...

...Our elites rail against these issues as ethnic politics, without realizing that ethnic politics is part of the very fabric of American life...

...And now we act as though we had discovered this fact for the first time, and had absolutely nothing in our past experience that would help us understand how one copes with it...

...which facilitateor hinder assimilation or...

...One hears that blacks and Puerto Ricans, too, say of each other, "Why can't they be like us...

...However much the ideal of assimilation might be urged, it was nevertheless essential to recognize that in addition to social class issues, there were also issues of race, religion, and nationality...

...Yet, does any liberal academic believe in his heart that we have much to learn from the Poles or the Italians...

...I now understand that the Irish hierarchy at the turn of the century (with one or two exceptions) was no more tolerant of diversity within the Church than the WASP political leadership was tolerant of diversity within the country...

...Men not only were organizing themselves around the dimension of social class, but this was the way they ought to organize themselves...

...3) Since it is assumed that most ethnic groups ought to vanish (except for Jews, blacks, Spanish-speaking Americans, and American Indians), and since it is also assumed that most 3 I do not hesitate to say "racial diversity," becausethe overwhelming evidence of survey data is that blacks still accept the American political structureand, indeed, are optimistic about their future gainswithin that structure...

...For American society is a complex society in which the idea of assimilation and homogenization is an absurd one...

...It's a little more difficult to figure out why most Jews are liberal because social class position should put a considerable number of them on the side of the conservatives...

...Metzger offers three conclusions: NEW ETHNICITY & BLUE COLLARS (a) The belief that racial assimilation constitutes the only democratic solution to the raceproblem in the United States should be relinquished by sociologists...

...The framers of the Constitution were already operating within the framework of a cultural consensus that saw the need to recognize that regional and religious diversity necessitated toleration for pluralism...

...Diversity is not going to be eliminated...

...Communities based on common kinship or faith or historic experiences were "irrational" and hence immoral...

...Men will necessarily differentiate themselves...

...There are three different perspectives from which ethnic groups are viewed by contemporary American sociologists...

...The new consciousness of ethnicity is in part based on the fact that the blacks have legitimated cultural pluralism as it has perhaps never been legitimated before...

...In the Old Country the immigrants were citizens of towns, not of nations...

...If one knows something about Italian Americans, one might even think this would be a gross injustice and that if anybody is to be selected by society to pay the price, it certainly ought not to be the Italians...

...Levi-Strauss has pointed out that in primitive tribes the totemic clans are always made up of animals of the same class of beings...

...Apparently he doesn't realizethat the Catholic Church is quite incapable ofhaving official positions anymore, and that it isterribly uneasy about the rediscovery of ethnicity...

...Are blue-collar ethnics influenced more by their blue-collar status or by their ethnicities...

...Yet we need not be what we were born...

...What has happened with the urbanization and industrialization of society is not the replacement of Gemeinschaft by Gesellschaft, but rather a tremendous expansion of human relationships, and most of the new relationships—with the bus driver, the traffic policeman, the departmentstore clerk, the government bureaucrat, the personnel officer at the factory—are in fact Gesellschaft relationships...

...However, on the basis of research in progress at the National Opinion Research Center, the following assertions can tentatively be made: • Considerable ethnic diversities persist even when social class is held constant...

...American theory endorses cultural pluralism, but our behavior insists on as much assimilation as possible, as quickly as possible...

...The time may come when the most desirable neighborhoods in the large cities are those with people of widely different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds...

...Perhaps more important, without some kind of fundamental consensus from, if not the active cooperation of, white ethnic Americans, the reasonable goals of American blacks will not be achieved...

...1) The demand for cultural pluralism is confused with a demand for separation and, since separation is bad, so is cultural pluralism...

...American Catholicism has done all it could to promote the elimination of ethnic differences—inits own efforts to prove that it is as Americanas anyone else, if not more so—and now suddenlydiscovers the process may have been a mistakeand needs to be reversed...

...The work being done by Norman Nie and Barbara Currie confirms my own earlier research showing that political and social attitudes differ significantly among various ethnic groups even when social class is held constant...

...There is no longer a substantial cultural component attached to membership in an ethnic community but the communities will persist in any case because, through the course of history, they have become super-interest groups whose numbers perceive political and economic advantage in sustaining cooperation with each other...

...Political power could result from ethnic cohesiveness and the ethnic col lectivity could provide social support for its members...

...of diversity is that it ought to go away unless it is the diversity based on social class—and that this diversity only is "rational...

...The temptation to see pluralism ending with one's own group is apparently a universal temptation...

...The amount of explicit identification with either or both probably varies from time to time and situation to situation...

...But if the temptation is universal, in the present state of American society it is a temptation to which we should not succumb...

...Elite groups assume that "issue politics" are the issues of social class...

...Research done at the University of Michigan shows that large majorities of blacks are in favor of black studies while only tiny minorities are seeking a black nation...

...With the previous assertions in mind, we can now address ourselves once again to the question: is social class loyalty or ethnic loyalty more important to the blue-collar ethnic...

...The third perspective is advanced by Peter Rossi (mostly in personal conversations) and suggests that, in addition to a social class component and an interest group component, ethnic communities are still the bearers of cultural traditions...

...Some blue-collar ethnics are more "liberal" on both matters of race and peace than their nonethnic blue-collar counterparts...

...It was important what one did, not who one was...

...The tribe achieves structural integrity not by homogenization but by diversification...

...The question is fairly simple to phrase, but there is no simple answer...

...In my model, then, ethnicity is one form of Gemeinschaft that has survived in a rationalized, bureaucratized society, and one of the criteria we have for finding role opposites with whom we are able to relax as a prelude to intimacy...

...grip Marxism of a sort has on the minds of most American intellectuals...

...Such an observation, while perhaps understandable, is socially and politically obtuse...

...We have been helped by our economic wealth and we have not made a perfect job of it by any means...

...The two pertinent questions ought rather to be: (a) What kind of behavior is predicted by social class and what kind by ethnicity—quite apart from any explicit or conscious loyalty to either social class or ethnic group...

...The Irish, the Scandinavians, and the Germans, in particular, ANDREW M. GREELEY are no more likely to be "blue-collar" or "workingclass" than any other Americans from similar regions in the country...

...which generatethe sense of ethnic and racial identity...

...They wonder why, just as they have begun to make it on their own, they are to be punished for a social injustice with the creation of which they had little or nothing to do...

...What we do know, however, enables us to say that to see the world of the ethnic in terms of either social class or ethnic groups is far too simple-minded...

...He, Tonnes, and others felt a distinct nostalgia for the world that was disappearing and grave unease about the new one emerging, but many of their successors have taken the evolutionary model not merely as description but as norm...

...It merely means that they no longer exhaust the totality of life...

...In what Peter Rossi calls the "public sphere," the rational principles of the technostructure prevail...

...There are two versions of the charge of immorality...

...If we are to have a rational politics, we must have a politics of social class in which men are divided into liberal and conservative, depending on whether they take the position of the rich or the poor...

...It must be confessed that at present we know very little about the answers to these critical questions...

...It may In Our Spring Issue: THEODORE DRAPER The Communists and the Miners 1928-1933 276 very well be that both because they provide self-definition and also substructure within the larger society, ethnic groups are a strong, positive social asset...

...I am not suggesting that a sense of presumed common origin (Max Weber's definition of ethnicity) is the only criterion around which an intimate relationship can be established...

...In both cases, the conclusion from the im plicit model is the same...

...b) Under what sets of circumstances does conscious identification with either social class or ethnic group or both become pertinent and important...

...Bigotry against those who are "different" may well be less intense in the United States than in any other large nation, but it's still here, and while blacks suffer the most, they are by no means the only ones...

...I have asked this question in order to suggest that racism in the United States is but a manifestation of a much wider bigotry...

...Such ignorance can be useful...

...Worse, it fails to recognize one of the most important accomplishments of American life...

...It is a truism among liberal academics that we have a lot to learn from the blacks, a truism I fully concede...

...Who knows, perhaps the time will even come when American fathers and mothers will worry and sweat and slave so that they can make enough money to move into a neighborhood where their children can have the advantage of being reared in an atmosphere of diversity...

...We print it withthe publisher's kind permission...

...Conflict between capital and labor is, somehow, rational and legitimate...

...Not all blue-collar workers, even in northern cities, are ethnics, and not all ethnics are bluecollar workers...

...The Italians and the Irish, in particular, are more "liberal" than typical Americans, even when social class and region are held constant...

...But this would make things much too complicated...

...What is the relationship between ethnicity and social class...

...As such, they are implicated in the struggle for power and privilege in the society...

...I suspect that most blue-collar ethnics do not think in terms of "loyalty" to either social class or ethnic group...

...628-29, 643-44...

...Thus, one can have a tribe in which there is a bear totem and a lion totem and a tiger totem, and another tribe that will have an eagle totem and a falcon totem...

...Pope is right, that if we were not all born little Tories and little Whigs, then we were born either little assimilationists or ANDREW M. GREELEY little pluralists...

...Similarly, all the Catholic ethnic groups are more likely to be Democrats even when social class is held constant...

...b) To abandon the idea that ethnicity is adysfunctional survival from a prior stage ofsocial development will make it possible forsociologists to reaffirm that minority-majorityrelations are in fact group relations, and notmerely relations between prejudiced and victimized individuals...

...Gemeinschaft was dying, they thought, and the rationalized, bureaucratized city was replacing the tribal, ascriptive society of the peasant commune...

...In fact, we Americans have learned how to integrate, more or less well, more or less justly, in a rather brief period of time, a fantastic variety of racial, ethnic, and religious groups...

...Diversity is bad...

...Yet for some bizarre reason, we would like to be persuaded that our success has come not from learning how to deal with diversity, but rather from having eliminated diversity...

...Even the recent immigrant groups from Eastern and Southern Europe have substantial middle- and upper-middle-class components...

...I was persuaded by the official version of American Catholic history (so far as there is any) in which the bishops who struggled against the German and Polish claims for "separatism" were the heroes and the bishops who pushed "separatist" positions were the villains...

...In the present state of research, it is impossible to say what blend of the three perspectives is most useful for understanding ethnic diversity in American society...

...but one will never have in the same tribe (unless it be the National Football League) eagles, lions, falcons, and bears...

...4) Ethnicity is immoral—when it isn't a white ethnic racist cop-out...

...Their ethnic heritage has been strangled, but black and Spanish-speaking Americans may make it possible for Italian and Polish Americans to keep alive in the larger American context something of the past from which they came...

...Glazer and Moynihan see the ethnic groups of New York City as essentially interest groups...

...NEW ETHNICITY & BLUE COLLARS 277...

...Ties of blood, faith, land were becoming less important...

...The reason for this, Levi-Strauss says, is that the purpose of the totemic clans is to differentiate the tribe as a prelude to its reintegration...

...As a result, when we discover that some groups are considerably less satisfied with their share in society than others, we are quite incapable of applying the wisdom of our own experiences to these newly discovered problems...

...One can also assume that most sociologists are now sophisticated enough to realize that Gemeinschaft has survived and is doing nicely...

...What counted was one's place in the technostructure...

...A number of damaging results flow from the conviction that these irrational diversities ought to go away...

...Professor William Simon, for example, sees life as so narrow, dull, provincial, and frustrating in white ethnic communities that the best thing we could do is help their few sensitive young people to break out...

...Robert Coles has documented in his Middle American the strange, complex mixture of bigotry and enlightenment in middle America...

...If men would stop defining themselves as Irish or Italians or Catholics or Missouri Synod Lutherans, they would be better human beings, and our society also would be better.' 1 Professor William Simon has gone so far as tosuggest that my insistence on the importance ofprimordial ties reflects the official position of theCatholic Church...

...What is important is whether these differentiations can become socially constructive...

...One might also hazard the suggestion that the evidence reported above about the greater "liberalism" of ethnics, particularly those with some kind of conscious ethnic identification, would indicate that the survival of ethnic groups may turn out to be a very good thing for improving the quality of American life...

...Far better to mark the Italians down as victims and proceed with one's plans...

...We now must turn to a question that is both central and difficult...

...The work of Nie and Currie also indicates that those ethnics who have some kind of formal affiliation with an ethnic organization or engage in some kinds of explicitly ethnic behavior are likely to be the most liberal on matters of race and peace...

...The first is taken explicitly by Herbert Gans in his brilliant book 274 The Urban Villagers...

...Rural communities of Germans and even Luxembourgers in the Middle West have become quite prosperous without ceasing to be ethnic, while even in large cities the Greeks have managed to maintain strong internal bonds, though they are spacially diffused and quite successful economically...

...I have chosen to write what may seem an abrasive article, if only because previous efforts to break through the conventional wisdom have been so completely unsuccessful...

...There is no getting around it: as long as the decision is limited to the school system and to the city of Newark, anything done to help the blacks will hurt the Italians...

...Although they have repeatedly documented thediscrepancy between social reality and culturalmyth in America, they have also taken the view that the incorporation of America's ethnic andracial groups into the mainstream culture isvirtually inevitable...

...we must improve our abilities to live with it...

...The second perspective is employed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer in Beyond the Melting Pot...

...The sociologist Paul Metzger has argued persuasively the case for cultural pluralism...