The present cannot be seen apart from its pasts. The regulation of ethnicity as acceptable difference in the present invites investigation of the historical processes that brought about the hegemony of white ethnicity in the first place. Now selected as celebrated signs of inclusion to the multicultural polity, the pasts of white ethnics have undergone a dramatic social and semiotic shift in relation to their transnational histories. American modernity has historically treated Old World expressive culture with suspicion, ambivalence, contempt, outright hostility, or a cautious acceptance often supplemented by strategies of containment. Immigrant customs have been objects of intersecting discourses that have constructed immigrants as primitives, exotics, savages, and inferior folk irreducibly unfit for American citizenship. Powerful racial hierarchies and relations of domination were sustained on the basis of representing immigrant cultures as embodiments of an inferior way of life. A host of immigrant activities, such as political activism directed toward social and racial justice, were excluded from American modernity. This particular immigrant engagement with social issues was fiercely persecuted and demonized as unpatriotic. What is more, bilingualism was seen as anathema and a menace to the nation. Even today’s reclaimed ethnic cuisine and dancing were at some point subjected to scorn, ridicule, and even disgust. The present celebratory packaging of the past often forgets these histories of oppression and intimidation. The glorification of selective aspects of the past is wrapped in a bundle of silences.
In view of the struggles over the place of the immigrant past in the present, it would be erroneous to treat the past as a known, fixed entity waiting to be retrieved at a moment’s notice. It would be false to approach it as a resource that merely awaits discovery by disinterested researchers: the past is a domain made rather than naturally found. What we recognize as the past comes about as a process of exclusions, displacements, and forced forgetting. It entails, in other words, an ideological construct. Attention to how the past is defined in specific social and temporal contexts enables the identification of continuities and discontinuities, but also helps recover those practices and meanings of the past that have been erased from public memory in the present. In this examination, we must take into account the strategies, interests, and investments that motivated the production of specific usable pasts. For if we take seriously the notion of the past as a dynamic and historically contingent process, we should agree with Vladimir Propp (1984) that our inquiry should center on “what happens to old folklore under new historical conditions and trace the appearance of new formations” (11). For my purposes, the inquiry into the ways in which the past is appropriated under new conditions must exhibit a strong historical component. The principal task becomes to explain why certain pasts are privileged, why some pasts resonate better than others with present conditions, and why certain pasts are relegated to the margins.
“Who Are the White Ethnics”? Whiteness, Racial Hierarchies, and Ethnic Identity
To frame my topic in relation to whiteness, might seem counterintuitive. An obvious alternative strategy is to privilege the cultural component of ethnicity at the expense of its relation to systems that organize difference in racialized terms. One might even suggest that the examination of ethnicity as culture cancels a claim to whiteness because of the normative understanding of whiteness as an invisible domain devoid of culture (Frankenberg 1993). As Pamela Perry (2001) shows, white identity is construed as a culturally empty category associated with the explicit refusal to seek “ties or allegiances to European ancestry and culture, [and having] no ‘traditions.’” To the white high school populations that she studied, “only ‘ethnic’ people had such ties to the past” (58). For these youth, ethnic traditions were not merely meaningless but undesirable as well. In fact, this construction sustains powerful hierarchies that rest on the implicit duality between whiteness as “good, controlled, rational, and cultureless, and otherness … [as] bad, out of control, irrational, and cultural” (85). “It connotes a relationship of power between those who ‘have’ culture (and are, thus, irrational and inferior) and those who claim not to (and are, thus, rational and superior)” (86).
But this should not lead to the erroneous assumption that an ethnic location necessarily distances one from whiteness. Hyphenated ethnic identities are not merely cultural signifiers; as I noted in the opening of this introduction, they are deeply entrenched in racialized categories. Popular classifications confer upon Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, Greek Americans, and Jewish Americans a specific racialized status because “the second part of the compound [in these identities] … always emphasize[s] whiteness” (Trouillot 1995, 133). It is precisely the incorporation of these groups into whiteness that affords them a contextual self-manipulability of identity. One could self-identify as a Greek in one context and as a white American in another.
As the scholarly project of whiteness studies has demonstrated, the whiteness of the ethnics can no longer remain unexamined, an invisible norm that evades critical scrutiny. Making its operation visible becomes a first-order analytical priority in order to reveal how it confers privilege and to disrupt its reproduction of relations of inequality. As a category historically associated with systems of domination, the whiteness component of ethnicity must be examined in order to identify practices and social discourses that contribute to its making.9
A thread within whiteness studies explains the historical transformation of the so-called new immigrants of the 1900s—a category that classified southeastern Europeans and a host of other collectives such as Syrians and Armenians as nonwhite—into the celebrated middle-class white ethnics of the 2000s. It becomes crucial for its practitioners to demonstrate how this reconfiguration in racial meaning gradually endowed white ethnics with those social privileges that were denied to people of color: entry to unions, the ability to secure loans, the right 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