








ew Ethnicity
to revise his account and to call the district  Humphrey country." It is one of the most consistently liberal districts in Pennsylvania. Why send this constituency the message that it is the enemy?
Jimmy Breslin was once asked by an interviewer in penthouse how, coming out of Queens, he could have grown up so liberal. Actually, next to Brooklyn, there is no more liberal county in the nation. A similar question was put to a liberal journalist from the Dorchester area, in Boston. The class and ethnic bias hidden in the way the word "liberal" is used in such interviews cries out for
attention.
One of the large social generalizations systematically obscured by the traditional anti-Catholidsm of American elites is the overwhelmingly progressive voting record in America's urban centers. The centers of large Catholic population in every northeastern and north central state have been the key to Democratic victories in those states since at least 1916. The hypothesis that Catholics have been, second only to Jews, the central constituency of successful progressive politics in this century is closer to the facts than historians have observed. (Massachusetts, that most Catholic of our states, stayed with McGovern in 1972.) The language of politics in America is, however, mainly Protestant, and Protestant biases color public perception. Protestant leadership is given the halo of morality and legitimacy, Catholic life is described in terms of negatively laden words: Catholic "power," "machine politics," etc.
There are other examples of odd perception on the part of American elites with respect to Catholic and other ethnic populations. The major institutions of American life-government, education, the media give almost no assistance to those of "white ethnic" background who wish to obey the Socratic maxim: "Know thyself." One of the greatest and most dramatic migrations of human history brought more than thirty million immigrants to this land between 1874 and 1924. Despite the immense dramatic materials involved in this migration, only one  ajor American film records it: Elia Kazan's America!
Merica! That film ends with the hero's arrival in Amer-Ka. The tragic and costly experience of Americanization as scarcdy yet been touched. How many died; how Were morally and psychologically destroyed; how carry the marks of changing their names, of g their mother tongue and renouncing their for-^er 1 entity in order to become "new men and new 10^ ~theSe are mchhs of violence, self-mutilation, frony The inner history of this migration must as .e 0 be understood, if we are ever to understand the ahons and fears of some seventy million Americans.
I A Then this part of the population exhibits self-y V consciousness and begins to exert group ^Ratpa d^S'^whether these are claims made by ag-ateregi] ^^^uals or claims that are corporate they 31 y confronted with the accusation that they are
bemg divisive". ("Divisive" is a code word for Catholic ethmcs ^d Jews, is it not? It is seldom used of others: white Southerners, Appalachians, Chicanos, blacks, native Americans, prep-school British Americans, or others who maintain their own identity and institutions.) Earl Raab writes eloquently of this phenomenon in Commentary (May, 1974): "Modern Europe . . . never really accepted the legitimacy of the corporate Jew although it was at its best willing to grant full civil rights to the individual Jew. That, for the Jews, was an impossible paradox, a secular vision of Christian demands to convert . . . [And] it is precisely this willingness to allow the Jews their separate identity as a group which is now coming into question in America." Individual diversity yes; group identity, not for all.	'
The Christian white ethnic, like the Jew, actually has few group demands to make: positively, for educational resources to keep values and perceptions alive, articulate, and critical; negatively, for an equal access to power, status, and the definition of the general American purpose and symbolic world. Part of the strategic function of the cry "divisive!" is to limit access to these things. Only those individuals will be advanced who define themselves as individuals and who operate according to the symbols of the established. The emotional meaning is: "Become like us." This is an understandable strategy, but in a nation as pluralistic as the United States, it is shortsighted. The nation's hopes, purposes, and symbols need to be defined inclusively rather than exclusively; all must become "new men" and "new women." All the burden ought not to fall upon the newcomers.
There is much that is attractive about the British American, upper-class, northeastern culture that has established for the entire nation a model of behavior and perception. This model is composed of economic power; status; cultural tone; important institutional rituals and procedures; and the acceptable patterns of style, sensibility, and rationality. The terse phrase "Ivy League" suggests all these factors. The nation would be infinitely poorer than it is without the Ivy League. All of us who came to this land-including the many lower-class British Americans, Scotch-Irish, Scandinavians, and Germans  are much in the debt of the Ivy League, deeply, substan-
tially so.	_
Still, the Ivy League is not the nation. The culture ot the Ivy League is not the culture of America (not even of Protestant America).
Who are we, then, we who do not particularly reverberate to the literature of New England, whose interior history is not Puritan, whose social class is not Brahmin (either in reality or in pretense), whose ethnicity is not British American, or even Nordic? Where * American institutions, American literature, American education is "entity mirrored, objectified, rendered accessible to intelligent Criticism, and confirmed? We are still, I think, ^blidy verified culture to sustain us and our duldre .
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7. THE ETHNIC LEGACY
It is not that we lack culture; it is not that we lack strength of ego and a certain internal peace. As Jean-Paul Sartre remarks in one of his later works, there is a distinction between one's identity in one's own eyes and one's identity in the eyes of others. In the United States, many who have internal dignity cannot avoid noticing that others regard them as less than equals, with a sense that they are different, with uncertainty, and with a lack of commonality. It is entirely possible that the melting pot" would indeed have melted everyone, if those who were the models into which the molten metal was to be poured had not found the process excessively demanding. A sense of separate identity is, in part, induced from outside-in. I am made aware of being Catholic and Slovak by the actions of others. I would be sufficiently content were my identity to be so taken for granted, so utterly normal and real, that it would never have to be self-conscious.
The fact of American cultural power is that a more or less upper-class, Northeastern Protestant sensibility sets the tone, and that a fairly aggressive British American ethnocentricity, and even Anglophilia, govern the instruments of education and public life. Moreover, it is somehow emotionally important not to challenge this dominant ethnocentricity. It is quite proper to talk of other sorts of social difference income, class, sex, even religion. To speak affirmatively of ethnicity, however, makes many uneasy. Some important truth must lie hidden underneath this uneasiness. A Niebuhrian analysis of social power suggests that a critical instrument of social control in the United States is, indeed, the one that dares not be spoken of.
In New York State, for example, in 1974 the four Democratic candidates for the office of lieutenant governor (not, however, for governor) were named Olivieri, Cuomo, La Falce, and Krupsak. It was the year, the pundits say, for "ethnic balance" on the ticket. But all four candidates insisted that their ethnicity was not significant. Two boasted of being from upstate, one of being a woman, one of being for "the little guy. " It is publicly legitimate to be different on any other account except ethnicity, even where the importance of ethnic diversity is tacitly agreed upon.
If I say, as I sometimes have, that I would love to organize an "ethnic caucus" within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the common reaction is one of anxiety, distaste, and strained silence. But if I say, as I am learning to, that I would love to organize a "caucus of workingmen and women" in both parties, heads quickly nod in approval. Social class is, apparently rational. Cultural background is, apparently, counter-rational.
Yet the odd political reality is that most Americans do not identify themselves in class terms. They respond to cultural symbols intimate to their ethnic history in America. Ethnicity is a "gut issue," even though it cannot be
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mentioned. A wise political candidate does not, oi speak to a longshoreman's local by calling its n Italian American and appealing to some suppo tural solidarity. That would be a mistake. But if h( about those themes in the cultural tradition that their own identity themes like family, childrer neighborhood, specific social aspirations, and grie they know he is with them: he does represent I order to be able to represent many constitue representative has to be able to "pass over" in cultural histories. He may never once make < explicit as a public theme; but, implicitly, he recognizing the daily realities of ethnicity an experience in the complex fabric of American soci<
According to one social myth, America is a ' pot," and this myth is intended by many to be nc descriptive but normative: the faster Americar daily white ethnic Americans "melt" into th American pattern, the better. There is even ; ranking according to the supposed degree of tion: Scotch Irish, Norwegians, Swedes, Germar Dutch, liberal or universalist Jews, the Irish, and the line to the less assimilated: Greeks, Yugosla garians, Central and East Europeans, Italians, ( Jews, French Canadians, Portuguese, Latins and speaking. . . . (The pattern almost exactly rei history and literature of England.).
Now it was one thing to be afraid of ethnicity i: confronting a first and second generation of irni It is another thing to be afraid, in 1974, in conf third and fourth generation. Indeed, fears about of ethnicity seem to be incompatible with c about how successful the "melting pot" has be about a "revival" of ethnicity confirm the fact nicity is still a powerful reality in American lif
What, then, are the advantages and disadva making this dangerous subject, this subterranea explicit?
The disadvantages seem to be three. The fir everyone's mind is that emphasis on ethnicity i to the disadvantage of blacks. It may, it is said, legitimization of racism. It may "polarize" w blacks. Nothing could be further from the tru who are concerned about the new ethnicity Ge (Washington), Irving Levine (New York), Barbe ski (Baltimor
