Forgetting the vernacular past, then, a past that was understood in evolutionary terms as inferior premodern irrationality, debasement, dependency, backwardness—in short, as antithetical to American modernity—functioned as a necessary condition for the making of immigrants into citizens of the republic. The following recollection illustrates the connection between coerced cultural amnesia, whiteness, and Americanization:
[In the American Hellenic Progressive Association] you met people your age who had the same goals. To become American. You became American by giving up your parents’ ways because they also had to give them up so they wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb. By giving up the Old World ways. We ran away from being Greek. We married non-Greek blonde women…. We made a conscious effort to forget Greece. (Anonymous interviewee quoted in Karpathakis 1999, 62)
In its association of forgetting the ancestral homeland, abandoning tradition, and embracing blondness—the icon of whiteness—the above passage illustrates immigrant acquiescence in the discourse of Americanization as total cultural, political, and racial assimilation. Because the immigrants’ past is understood as a source of pollution, the immigrants themselves were expected to undergo a profound transformation by surrendering their past to a new historical location. They were asked to abandon their memories and bury their ancestral ties in the landfills of history in order to cultivate new identities.
This vocabulary of radical rupture and discontinuity, pervasive in political discourse as well as in narratives of personal transformation, indelibly marked the immigrant encounter with American modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Academic monographs, popular magazines, immigrant diaries, research reports, immigration policies, and political speeches repeatedly refer to the forgetting of ethnicity as a condition necessary to reconstitute immigrants as American subjects. National belonging required de-ethnicization: the liberation of newcomers from ancestral ties, loyalties, and obligations through a process of social amnesia. Forgetting, as Ernest Renan’s (1990) often cited statement makes clear, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11).
I have analyzed one specific Greek American response to the foregoing conditions in more detail elsewhere as a reflexive project of disembedding the self from traditional structures in order to claim full participation in modernity (Anagnostou 2004a). There, I showed that political and racist nationalism worked dialectically to make race and cultural forgetting crucial components of immigrant Americanization. In response to this predicament, a sector of Greek America’s middle class embraced whiteness as an institutional policy of racial exclusion as well as an everyday practice that sought to obliterate habits of thought and conduct that could be traced to the immediate Greek past. At the forefront of this emerging configuration was the American Hellenic Progressive Association (AHEPA), an organization that made a spectacle of the Hellenic past while purifying its vernacular counterpart. In public performances that staged the newly constituted American Hellenic identity, immigrants performed usable pasts that stressed their racial and cultural compatibility with Americanism. In ritual commemorations of the nation, this identity generated a visual economy that was intended to ingrain into newcomers a cultural and racial whiteness: draped in American flags, dressed in ancient togas or in the alternatively uniform costumes of Masonic lodges, immigrants marched in arrangements tailored to the expectations of their new national affiliation. Through their physical discipline and standardization of dress, they came to embody the values of the racialized nation. Highly stylized, the folk past was relegated to the margins, still holding symbolic significance as a link with antiquity—folk dances, for example, continued to be featured at AHEPA events—but being largely devalued as incompatible to American modernity. The configuration on the steps of the U.S. Treasury was superseded by a body politic that performed its ethnic ancestry in a manner that privileged “the externally directed model” of ideological Hellenism over the Romeic model of Greek identity (Herzfeld 1986a, 23). It visually inscribed the narrative of Greek cultural continuity in the political economy of American whiteness.
Mapping Ethnicity onto Race: From New Immigrants to White Ethnics (1970s)
I now move forward to the 1960s and 1970s to focus on a period that witnessed the articulation of a new social category, that of the white ethnic. A product of the volatile racial politics during the civil rights era, this classification sought to impose cultural coherence on and, in turn, to harvest the political potential of the descendants of the new immigrants. On the one hand, it advocated antiassimilationism, ethnic revitalization, and a return to the roots. On the other hand, coming “into existence as a labeled group in response to the civil rights and black power movements and the allied organizing of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans” (di Leonardo 1994, 170), it operated as a potent political force in the competition for cultural and material resources.
“I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs,” Michael Novak (1971, 53) provocatively framed his confessional narrative, in an apparent intermeshing of personal and collective politics. A pioneer account in the now popular genre of growing up ethnic, this autobiographical work provided a testimony of how subtle and not-so-subtle coercion—by peers and institutions—and gentle encouragement—by wary immigrant parents bearing the scars of racism—led to ethnic self-effacement. An intellectual who professed a politics “rooted in the social and earthy sensibility of Catholic experience” (70), Novak claimed to give public voice to a collective that had been forced into silence. “The PIGS are not silent willingly” (53), he wrote. “The silence burns like hidden coals in the chest” (ibid.). The son of Slovak immigrants, Novak shattered this silence with all the intellectual might, eloquence, and political acumen that he had mastered in the corridors of the academy as a professor of philosophy and religious studies. He adopted the position of an intellectual committed to advancing the interests of white ethnics by articulating a sense of profound rage and discontent. “Such a tide of resentment begins to overwhelm the descendant of the ‘new immigration’ when he begins to voice repressed feelings about America,” he wrote. “[A]t first his throat clogs with despair” (61). The authorial exposé of private thoughts and feelings becomes a necessary step toward collective empowerment. “So the risks of letting one’s own secrets out of the bag are rather real,” he noted, casting his testimony as a vital crossing of boundaries between the private and the public.
The category “white ethnic” was crucial for Novak’s function as an intellectual who wished to advance the interests of an underrepresented and maligned population, the PIGS. The self-ascription PIGS itself—“an insulting, self-polluting label” (Abrahams and Kalcik 1978, 233)—makes the claim of “belong[ing] to the margins of society rather than [being] part of the center or establishment … [and] reverses the assimilation process and brings down on ethnics’ heads the charge of being different, non-Anglo” (233–34). This politics drew from a textbook case of panethnic identity construction: the making