to live in certain neighborhoods, and eventually high rates of intermarriage with members of the dominant population. In a society in which complex political and social developments led to the redrawing of the boundaries of whiteness to accommodate the formerly despised immigrants, privileges accrued to those who most closely approximated its cultural, physical, and aesthetic standards.10 But the political import of whiteness studies lies in their capacity to link white ethnic empowerment with race-specific inequalities. As a center of racial and cultural normativity, whiteness does not merely represent the standard against which other categories of people were measured and evaluated. In addition, it stands for “an oppressive ideological construct that promoted in the past and maintains in the present social inequalities” (Newitz and Wray 1997, 3); as such, it is constituted by practices that consent to racial domination. Nobel laureate (1993) and distinguished professor Toni Morrison (1994a) speaks about these practices as “race talk,” the “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture”: “The explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy” (98). Consenting to race talk means embracing whiteness. The failure to challenge “negative appraisals of the native-born black populations” (ibid.) was the single most important variable that opened the immigrant path of opportunity. In his autobiography, labor historian Dan Georgakas (2006) affirms this position, showing how it was immigrants’ fear of stigmatization and retribution by white society—not inherent racism—that led to their passive consent to whiteness:
[I] ask[ed] my father why his bar was racially segregated. I knew he had no personal animus toward blacks, so I wanted to know why blacks were not welcomed at his bar. He replied that The Sportsman’s Bar, like all the worker bars on Jefferson Avenue, was already segregated when he arrived in the city. Greek bar owners, even if they had wanted to do so, were in no position to challenge the color line. The result would have been empty stools and tables at the least, more likely broken windows, smashed heads, and possibly worse. (263)
Whiteness studies have been effective in showing that race talk permeates social discourse even when not making explicit references to race or racism. The notion of model ethnicity, for instance, stigmatizes African Americans and works against their political interests, such as affirmative action, though it abstains from directly mentioning race. By explaining mobility on the basis of cultural values, it masks institutional practices that historically have limited or taken away opportunities from racial minorities. Anthropologist Karen Brodkin (1998) makes this point forcefully in regard to Jewish whiteness: “The construction of Jewishness as a model minority is part of a larger American racial discourse in which whiteness, to understand itself, depends upon an invented and contrasting blackness as its evil (and sometimes enviable) twin” (151). Giving “rise to a new, cultural way of discussing race” (145), ethnic pluralism eschews the burning issue of the role played by the political economy of race in structuring hierarchies. Similarly, avoiding consideration of how white ethnics commonly disassociate themselves from whiteness and instead privilege their ethnic identities fails to interrogate how white ethnics are still immersed in white privilege. As Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (1997) make clear, “[m]aking whiteness visible to whites—exposing the discourses, the social and cultural practices, and the material conditions that cloak whiteness and hide its dominating effect—is a necessary part of any anti-racist project” (3–4).11
The “white ethnic community, since the late 1970s, is no longer a hot topic for academic papers and popular cultural accounts,” stated one of its most authoritative interpreters in the 1990s (di Leonardo 1994, 181). Its “transformed construction … remains ‘on hold.’ … [It] stands backstage, ready to reenter stage left or right on cue” (ibid.). Of course, white ethnics still possess academic cachet within whiteness studies, in which they are analyzed in terms of their historical incorporation into whiteness, as I earlier pointed out. A thread in this scholarship rightly interrogates those social structures that treated European immigrants and their descendants preferentially, while it criticizes the historical complicity of assimilated ethnics in the oppression of racial minorities. It calls attention to the political implications of early immigrant discrimination as a means of white ethnic participation in the discourse of racial victimization. Asserting “that no single group has a monopoly on being a victim” (Gallagher 1996, 349) carries political valence, as it contests race-based affirmative action policies. Construed in this manner, white ethnicity and its expressive cultures are out of vogue in departments of ethnic and racial studies presently preoccupied with alterity oppression, minority status, and marginality. But the construction of white ethnicity has been gaining momentum in popular culture, representing the intensification of an ongoing trend in numerous venues engaging with ethnicity, such as narrative and documentary film, standup comedy, television series, autobiography, fiction, ethnography, and history. No longer on hold, this production of white ethnicity has attracted increasing scholarly interest, particularly in the context of ethnic revival and roots (Jacobson 2006).
On another academic front, it was sociology, notably the work of Herbert Gans (1979), that launched white ethnicity to the forefront of research as “symbolic ethnicity,” a situational deployment of “easily expressed and felt” cultural symbols (9). Ethnicity was seen as a choice, a fleeting attachment, a nostalgic return to the immigrant past. It was discussed as a matter of sorting through the closet of one’s ancestral memorabilia, family traditions, and the available stock of ethnic manifestations to choose those aspects that most suited an individual’s needs. Symbolic ethnicity subsequently received its most systematic examination and exposition by Mary Waters (1990), and, embraced by prominent sociologists of ethnicity in the United States, most notably Richard Alba (1990), it became a powerful interpretive tool to explicate identity among middle-class, assimilated white ethnics.
The academic success of thinking of ethnicity as choice is due, in no small measure, to the capacity of its practitioners to tap into and authoritatively interpret an enduring social phenomenon: the persistence of ethnic identification among the highly assimilated descendants of European immigrants in America in the post–civil rights era. Symbolic ethnicity effectively addressed a pressing sociological question, namely why ethnicity persisted among middle-class white suburbanites. The answer privileged the notion of ethnicity as an individual’s voluntary connection with selective aspects of ethnic culture—professional organizations, parades, and festivals—that suited the need for personal fulfillment through temporary ethnic belonging. Such largely unforced belonging counteracted alienation, and its ephemeral nature freed individuals from the traditional experience of ethnicity as an all-encompassing obligation. This conceptualization marked a fundamental shift in understanding the form and function of ethnicity. It signaled a drastic departure from the classic understanding of ethnicity as a force that determines an individual’s biography (occupation, selection of spouse, place of residence, behavior). Practitioners of symbolic ethnicity reversed this model, assigning to the individual the power to exploit ethnicity, now seen as a cultural resource that could be manipulated almost at will. White ethnics, then, embodied a historical transformation in the way ethnicity was experienced and practiced. Unlike their grandparents, who followed the dictates of ancestral ways, they were endowed with the agency to script their own ethnic repertoires. Having no need of ethnicity for purposes of adaptation, generations of assimilated ethnics expressed their identities in ways quite different from those used by previous generations, this time in readily available and contextually activated ethnic symbols. Ethnicity “takes on an expressive rather than instrumental function in people’s lives,” Gans (1979, 9) suggested, framing symbolic ethnicity as a matter of enjoyment and leisure, a set of “easy and intermittent ways of expressing” identity (8). Ethnicity entailed manipulation of culture for the purposes of temporary belonging to a collective and of connecting—most often nostalgically—with the immigrant past. Individual choice was emphasized, and the significance of ethnic structures in the making of identities was severely downplayed.
Powerful academic narratives invite scholars and the wider public to think of white ethnics in terms of a polarized duality. On the one hand, these populations are known as previously stigmatized entities that eventually were granted access to whiteness; subsequently, the question of
