“Confessions of a White Ethnic” intervened in the ethnic politics of its era, purporting to represent white ethnics from an insider’s viewpoint. Novak wrote bitterly: “If you are a descendant of southern and eastern Europeans, everyone else has defined your existence. A pattern of ‘Americanization’ is laid out. You are catechized, cajoled, and condescended to by guardians of good Anglo-Protestant attitudes. You are chided by Jewish libertarians. Has ever a culture been so moralistic?” (62). Boldly entering into the fray of polemic ethnic politics, Novak spoke on behalf of the working-class and lower-middle-class ethnics—the laborers, “small businessmen, agents for corporations perhaps” (56), shoving their raging discontent in the face of 1970s America. Conscious of their parents’ humiliation as immigrants and forced to hide their ethnicity, the story goes, white ethnics played the WASP game, only to discover that the game was rigged. Their struggle to escape social marginality and economic stagnation was “blocked at every turn” (ibid.). Excluded from liberal-black political coalitions, denigrated as parochial, conservative, and racist by intellectuals, oppressed by middle America, silenced and misrepresented by the media, excluded by curricula and preservation societies, the white ethnic emerged as a profoundly resentful collective subject. “[F]eeling cheated” (ibid.) and abandoned, white ethnics witnessed the liberal sympathy extended to racial minorities while they themselves absorbed the scorn of East Coast intellectuals, who failed “to engage the humanity of the modest, ordinary little man west of the Hudson” (59).
Novak’s victimizing populism articulated ethnic dissatisfaction and resentment to subsequently harness it for a specific antiassimilationist and antimodernist agenda: the return to ethnic roots. His “politics of cultural pluralism, a politics of family and neighborhood, a politics of smallness and quietness” (8), sought to revive what he saw as the communitarian ethos that was stripped away from the immigrant Gemeinschaft. Indicting modernity for this outcome, he enumerated its ills. The culprit in this polemic was the modern individual, culturally disconnected and alienated, incapable of long-term ties and commitments, who resigned himself to the mercy of the free marketplace. Novak tenuously connected atomism, transience, and corporate capitalism. “Becoming modern,” in his view “is a matter of learning to be solitary,” to experience a life where “nothing [is] permanent, everything [is] discardable” (68). The assault on immigrant traditions—effected by militant assimilationism in the past and secular humanism in the present—devalues roots and disdains “mystery, ritual, transcendence, soul, absurdity, and tragedy” (67) in the name of rationality and progress. What this reconfiguration enables, according to Novak, is the making of ethnic subjects amenable to the demands of rational and individualized corporate culture. White ethnics—an inherent component of “network people,” as “socially textured selves, not individuals” (68)—functioned as a bulwark against this specific kind of assimilation. “Part of Americanizing the Indian, the slave, or the immigrant [was] to dissolve network people into atomic people. Some people resisted the acid. They refused to melt. These are the unmeltable ethnics” (69).
“[L]osing the sharp lust to become ‘American’” (4), the sons and daughters of the new immigrants are transformed here into white ethnics. Anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo (1994) has dissected the emergence of this category in the 1960s, illustrating its relation to the social and political currents of the time and to the specific interests it served. She bluntly maintains that the construct of “white ethnic community” as a homogeneous, working-class, close-knit set of coherent urban communities constituted an invented American tradition in that it falsified the social realities of the people who were made known through the category. What media, scholars, politicians, and ethnic leaders presented as a neatly demarcated collective was, in fact, as di Leonardo points out, an assortment of diverse, shifting, mobile, and residentially dispersed populations. Widely disseminated in popular culture, this was an ideological construct created as a political strategy to address profound social rifts. Represented as law-abiding, orderly, patriotic, and hardworking, white ethnics composed the silent majority that stood opposite the collectives pressing the federal government, the states, and social institutions toward reform and, often, radical change. The image of the white ethnic as social exemplar further polarized divisions in a society shaken to the core by the vocal activism of racial minorities, including the black power, civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. The ideology of the white ethnic was consciously embraced and promoted by the political establishment, di Leonardo (1994) maintains, outlining this dynamic:
The Nixon administration in particular sought to exploit and enhance these social divisions through the use of the polarizing discourse of the silent majority—as opposed to the protesting anti-administration “minority.” … [B]etween administration rhetoric and the media’s response, an image grew of this stipulated entity: the silent majority were white (implicitly, white ethnic), largely male, blue-collar workers. They were held to be “patriotic” and to live in “traditional” families—ones in which males ruled, women did not work outside the home for pay, and parents controlled their children. (175)
It is noteworthy that in the writings of ethnic intellectuals such as Novak, the making of the white ethnic followed the template of black nationalism. Di Leonardo, once again, notes: “[K]ey expressions of white ethnic resentment were couched in a language consciously and unconsciously copied from the blacks themselves. Notions of the strength and richness of white ethnic cultures and their repression by WASPs, for example, mimicked black cultural nationalist celebrations of black culture’s endurance despite white domination” (ibid.). But if the immigrant past served as a reference point for the ensuing white ethnic revival or new ethnicity—tentatively in the beginning, and with an increased ethnic confidence later—it was a past that had been seriously reworked for public consumption by the dominant society and the assimilated progeny of the immigrants. In the 1920s, the Chicago School of sociology and anthropology construed urban immigrants from southeastern Europe as caught in the duality “noble versus nasty peasant” (di Leonardo 1998, 87). They were seen “both as the inheritors of Gemeinschaft—the simple, humanly satisfying, face-to-face, traditional rural world that was giving way to the complex, anomic, modern urban world of strangers—and as rude, uncivilized peasants who must modernize, assimilate, Americanize in order to rise to the level of work and social life in the new industrial city” (di Leonardo 1994, 171). As we will see in chapter 2, the highly scripted ethnic festivals in the 1970s and 1980s, sanitized that past. Community closeness and access to an authentic folk past furnished evidence of exotic, domesticated otherness, while the rational management of the festival place implicitly communicated the modernity of the folk, neutralizing in the process the negative image of the uncouth peasant.
White Ethnicity as Contour
It is time to identify interconnections among the practices and moments of representation discussed above and to reflect on how specific intersections help us understand the making of ethnic pasts in relation to whiteness. The ethnographic encounter between the folklorist and the ethnic family; the staged performance of ethnic/racial continuity in front of the U.S. Treasury; the racialization of the immigrants as interstitial whites; and their ethnicization/racialization as white ethnics—all point to ethnicity as a contested terrain of cultural representations. We witness in these examples the power of dominant narratives to displace or marginalize nonhegemonic alternatives. The perspectives of the “folk,” immigrant rejection of whiteness, the anticapitalist function of the vernacular, and nonpopulist views of white ethnics are contained or rendered invisible by professional folklore, assimilationism, and populism. The analysis of these moments of representation in discourse and history makes it possible to illuminate struggles over the production of ethnic meanings and to rehabilitate