Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou

Crucial to this argument is the notion that high degrees of cultural loss among ethnics of European ancestry have dissolved the differences that have historically separated them from one other—say Italian Americans from Polish Americans. This collapse of ethnic boundaries makes possible their assimilation into an emerging European American group, which is brought together by a shared narrative of immigrant hardships followed by a hard-earned experience of social and economic mobility.

      Alba identified and sought to tackle a “paradoxical divergence” in the expression of white ethnicity (290). On the one hand, his findings pointed to the “long-run and seemingly irreversible decline of objective ethnic differences” (ibid.) among populations of European ancestry, a process he explained as the end product of inexorable acculturation and structural assimilation. The resulting cultural dilution of ethnicity becomes sociologically quantifiable, measured in high rates of language loss, the diminishment of ethnically marked behavior, and the “great extent and ease of intermarriage,” which tellingly reveals “the growing extent of social integration among persons with European ancestry” (291).¹ On the other hand, the sociologist is confronted with recurrent evidence underlining “the continuing subjective importance of ethnic origins to many white Americans” (290). Although white ethnics have departed radically from the immigrant generation’s behavioral patterns, they continue to observe family-based ethnic traditions, explore roots, undertake trips to places of ancestral origins, and voluntarily participate in the activities of ethnic associations.

      What is more, the persistence of individual ethnic identity correlates positively with high levels of education and social mobility. “[I]ncreasing education tends to heighten awareness of ethnic background,” Alba writes (308), accounting for this persistence as the outcome of rational choice. He suggests that ethnic identification among mobile, highly educated white Americans works beneficially “as a form of cultural capital” (ibid.) in that it enhances an individual’s economic and social interests by facilitating access to social networks of power. This position “presumes that ethnic symbols and references can be of use in the complex signaling by which individuals establish relationships to one another” (ibid). Its salience in upper-class circles requires that such an identity “need not occupy more than a small portion of the identity ‘masks’ individuals present to others, and need not be deeply felt” (308). Assimilated white ethnics do not return to behavioral ethnicity; instead they display a romanticized, nostalgic, and sentimental connection to it, a nonthreatening association that carries no social stigma whatsoever. In other words, total assimilation, in the manner predicted by traditional assimilation theory, has not occurred. What has taken place instead is a radical transformation of old-style identities and communities (determined by an ethnic culture) into voluntarily chosen, malleable ones that weaken and even situationally dissolve internal cultural boundaries among whites.²

      Because the overall thesis of his landmark book Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America rests on the notion of a tenuous ethnic identity, Alba expends a great deal of intellectual labor to establish white ethnic identities as weak in salience, ultimately shallow, and superfluous. He argues that the dissolution of ethnically based social structures that have historically shaped and sustained collective identities results in a fundamental transformation: the formation of largely private, family-centered identities, whose extreme variability makes the maintenance of meaningful ethnic collectives impossible. The weakening and decentering of the “available collective expressions of ethnicity” or the “supply side of ethnicity” (303) results in ethnic fragmentation and gives rise to highly personal and culturally tenuous identities. The prevalence of voluntary (and fragile) ethnic affiliation comes about as a result of social disintegration, as ethnic structures determining identity recede or even disappear from the public sphere.