Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America

Afterword: White Ethnicity as Cultural Becoming

 A f t e r w o r d White Ethnicity as Cultural Becoming [A]ctually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we come from,” so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. —Stuart Hall,“Introduction:Who Needs‘Identity?’” This work complicates the ways in which ethnicities are commonly represented in academic writing. By addressing how popular ethnography builds on the past to imagine a future for ethnicity,explaining how and why heritage is constructed, and considering the implications of creating specific kinds of identities in the larger context of ethnic and racial politics in the United States, it illuminates the complex contours of white ethnicity. It is my hope that as scholars continue critiquing practices of exclusion among white ethnics, they will pause for a long moment to reflect on the findings of this study instead of continuing to trivialize white ethnicity as a shallow cultural resource or to dismiss it as an ideological weapon in the service of antiminority politics. In this book, I have sought to take a close look at the process of constructing ethnic identities via the making of usable pasts and, in turn, to explore the power of heritage to make or unmake whiteness.The goal of this examination is to illustrate the often overlooked connection between ethnicity and race talk. Heritage,as it is practiced among European ethnics in the United States,appears to be solely about culture.The vocabulary of race, let alone an explicit language of whiteness, is absent from the heritage sites of American multiculturalism. In festivals,parades,community publications,quests for roots,documentaries,and museum exhibits, it is culture—food, dance, music, community, memorabilia, the arts, and family values—that commands center stage.The framing of heritage as White Ethnicity as Cultural Becoming  culture renders invisible the importance of heritage as a tool for making whiteness .Working against this discourse, I have sought to demonstrate that whiteness is not absent from the making of heritage as culture.Even when it is not mentioned at all, it is there—present and often pervasive, though not always apparent. Because the discourse on ethnicity does not operate as a self-contained entity but may ratify racial hierarchies, it is necessary to identify this invisible presence. The critical enterprise of connecting heritage, ethnicity, and whiteness draws attention to the political implications inherent in the making of an ethnic identity. When a collective constructs an identity for itself, it also creates a perspective on Others. Because ethnicity entails not only the making of the Self but also the making of Others, showcasing one’s own success implicitly points to another’s failure. One’s badge of honor becomes another’s source of stigma. In an interconnected world,the narratives that people tell about themselves have profound, if not always readily discernible, effects on how they see Others and, inevitably, on how Others, in turn, will position themselves in relation to them. Intended to intervene in specific academic discussions of white ethnicity, my research foregrounds a number of tensions that run through popular representations of a specific white social field, Greek America. It demonstrates the heterogeneity of this field, which entails conformity with as well as criticism of dominant narratives of whiteness, where empathy toward vulnerable groups coexists with apathy and even hostility toward them, and where both amnesia and the imperative to remember are present. Dominant sites within GreekAmerica contribute to the making of whiteness while others, perhaps less visible, work toward its dismantling.White ethnicity, therefore, is itself an ideologically accented social field, and popular ethnography is at the forefront of constructing competing ethnic meanings.An investment in maintaining relatively stable identities anchored in a collective coexists with a drive to creatively fashion private identities; the call to remember the past historically clashes with discourses building on ahistorical renderings of that past; portrayals of community harmony —of utopian Edens—in the present and the past collide with descriptions of conflict and dissent; idealizations of ethnic success cannot escape the shadow cast by historical failures; and the search for ethnic options leaves the searcher no choice but to sift facts and events through the screen of history and culture, taking into account how choices are mediated, even determined, historically. My analysis acknowledges the hegemony of an ahistorical, culturalist paradigm...