Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years

3. Where Americans Came From: Race, Immigration, and Ancestry

CHAPTER THREE Where Americans Came From:Race, Immigration,and Ancestry* IN SEPTEMBER 2000, Newsweek magazine set out to document “The New Face of Race” in the United States. “In every corner of America, we are redefining race as we know it,” the magazine declared.“The old labels of black and white can’t begin to capture the subtleties of blood and identity” (3). Looking only at the end of the twentieth century, it would be hard to disagree. In the spring of 2000, the U.S. census invited Americans for the first time to “check all that apply” when reporting race on the census questionnaires. With six major categories to choose from—white, black,American Indian orAlaskan Native,Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and “other”— Americans could be any of sixty-three different racial combinations. The Census Bureau also asked whether the person being reported on was of Hispanic origin. When those replies were included with answers to the race question, the possible combinations of ancestries doubled to a mindboggling 126.The resulting counts included, for example, 117,000 whiteblack -Hispanic Americans and 14,500 black-American Indian-Hispanic Americans. In 1900 too,Americans thought they were a very diverse lot,even though seven out of eight were recorded by the Census Bureau as white.The historically unprecedented flow of immigrants pouring in between 1880 and 1920 transformed almost every state and all but the most isolated communities. English, German, and, especially, Irish immigrants, so numerous in the nineteenth century, were still arriving, but they were eclipsed in numbers by Italians,Poles,and Jews.Americans with northern European roots viewed these newest arrivals from elsewhere in Europe as inferior “races.” In Janu- *Coauthored byAliya Saperstein. ary 1900, a headline in the NewYork Times asked, “Are the Americans an Anglo-Saxon People?”The article’s author, a doctor of medicine, declared emphatically, and proudly, that most Americans (60 percent by his calculations ) could indeed claim membership in the “Anglo-Saxon race.” He had determined that the rest of the white population was made up of “Continental Teutons” (23 percent), “Celts” (11 percent), and other “miscellaneous” groups (6 percent).1 The quarter-century that followed this declaration saw persistent struggles over whether to close the doors to the “Latin and Slavonic races” that made up those “miscellaneous groups”; as we recount in this chapter, the doors were effectively closed in 1924. A half-century later, they were reopened , and millions of far more culturally distinct newcomers arrived, mainly from non-European continents, sparking new debates about closing the doors. Meanwhile, one hundred years of mixing in schools, in workplaces , and, ultimately, in families had muted once seemingly immutable differences between varieties of European Americans and reduced their divisions from racial cleavages to “ethnic options”—the sociologist MaryWaters ’s term for whites’ freedom to choose, or not, the ancestral identification they preferred.2 We report in this chapter on how this history of immigration, acculturation , and intermarriage changed not only the ethnic and racial profile of the American people but also the very ways in which Americans thought about ethnicity and race. Paradoxically, ancestry became a less critical axis of difference over the century even as Americans’ ancestries became more varied. For example, differences between groups in learning English declined, and intermarriage across, first, national and, then, racial lines increased. Overt prejudice diminished, and in general Americans adopted more tolerant positions on controversial racial issues. The experience of African Americans at the close of the twentieth century is, however, an important exception to this story of convergence and change (as we will see again and again in the chapters that follow).Though the significance of race certainly declined, asWilliam JuliusWilson argued in his controversial 1978 book, a profound gulf yet remained between black and nonblack Americans on many measures of well-being at century’s end.3 Our first task is to describe Americans’ ancestral diversity in 2000. Plenty of controversy surrounds what to call differences that stem from people’s roots in different parts of the world. “Race” is only one of many options, and Americans’ understanding of what “race” is has changed over the decades. Nevertheless, because the question that Americans answered on their 2000 census forms referred to “race,” that is the term we start with.4 24 Century of Difference RACIAL DIVERSITY ATTHE END OFTHE CENTURY In 2000 the Census Bureau asked Americans...