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Preface
- Wesleyan University Press
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Preface Since the Second World War the national unity of Americans has been tied increasingly to a strong civic culture that permits and protects expressions of ethnic and religious diversity based on individual rights and that also inhibits and ameliorates conflict among religious, ethnic, and racial groups. It is the civic culture that unites Americans and protects their freedom-including their right to be ethnic. As a sophomore in college in 1947, recently returned from the U.S. Navy, I read two books that are the godparents of this book, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma and Robert MacIver's The Web ofGovernment . By setting forth the case for an American national identity based on unifying political ideals and documenting the failure to live up to those ideals with respect to Negroes, Myrdal issued a call for justice for blacks, not just for their sake but to make our nation whole. That call ultimately led me to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Myrdal, a Swede, had little to say about Jews or other religious or nationality groups in the United States (the word "ethnic" was not in use), probably because he assumed, like most liberals, their inexorable assimilation into dominant American culture. MacIver, an immigrant from Britain who had lived and worked in New York City for many years, was much more aware ofthe persistence ofethnic traditions and loyalties. Democracy, with all of its leveling and assimilating tendencies, he maintained , also allowed for ethnic diversity. What I took from Myrdal principally was a better understanding ofthe American creed and ofAmerican racism and the too optimistic conclusion that if Americans applied their creed consistently they would overcome racism. What I took from MacIver primarily was the confident beliefthat racial and immigrant-ethnic group harmony was possible in the U.S., although rarely present elsewhere. The five books I have written on aspects of ethnicity and American unity were shaped in part by my understanding of Myrdal and MacIver. But my confidence in their teachings was shaken by books by three friends and colleagues, all published in 1975· Warning against the destructive power of ethnic tribalism in The Idols ofthe Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change) Harold Isaacs challenged the view that ethnic mobilization in the U.S. was compatible with naxv XVI PREFACE tional unity. Isaacs wondered, in his last chapter, whether the ethnic patterns emerging in the 1970s-creating "new conflicts, new dilemmas "-would lead to a new pluralistic system, which, by emphasizing group rights, would destroy the very basis for American nationhood, the idea that "one is American only as an individual" and that "the American individual is free to associate with any kind of group to which he feels he belongs, and each such group is free to exist, to function, to live and to grow according to its own genius and its own vitality. It does so on its own ... in the great private domain where every person retains his own individual freedom of choice." At the end ofIdols ofthe Tribe, Isaacs concluded, "The underlying issue is still: Can human existence be made more human, and if so, how? ... How can we live with our differences without, as always heretofore, being driven by them to tear each other limb from limb?" The same concern was raised in a different way by Nathan Glazer in Affirmative Discrimination. Glazer saw American society drifting away from a pattern in which government generally had abstained from forcing assimilation on newcomers or from attempting to establish some kind of parity among different groups. Of course, that was only one historical pattern ofpluralism. There were others, in which government participated in enforcing not parity but inequality between individuals of different groups, usually on the basis of color. Glazer now was worried about the growing tendency to make public policy to compensate members of groups for past injustices to their forebears, a principle that "can be extended indefinitely and make for endless trouble." Warning that "the gravest political consequence is undoubtedly the increasing resentment and hostility between groups that is fueled by special benefits for some," Glazer saw a white backlash gaining momentum. ''The implications of the new course," he wrote, "are an increasing consciousness of the significance ofgroup membership, an increasing divisiveness on the basis of race, color and national origin, and a spreading resentment among the disfavored groups against the favored groups." John Higham acknowledged the recent surge of ethnic consciousness in Send These to.Me: Immigrants...