From Pennsylvania Dutch to California Ethnic: The Odyssey of David Hollinger

David Hollinger has thought long and hard about the nature of diversity in America and the perils and possibilities it presents us. This book—part intellectual history, part cultural commentary, part advocacy—is his attempt to break “the logjams of the multicultural debates” (p. 84). Since practically everyone today professes to be a multiculturalist, multiculturalism, he observes, has been reduced to a shibboleth. In this rigorously argued work, Hollinger strives to move the debate “beyond multiculturalism” to a consideration of “postethnic America.”

Hollinger’s postethnic America would not be a reversion to a monocultural society; rather it would be a country in which a multiplicity of diversities flourish freely. In fact, his critique of multiculturalism is that it is not ethnic enough. He objects to its orthodoxy, which would impose rigid racial categories (defined as bodily shapes and colors) upon a dynamic, fluid cultural diversity. This orthodoxy is embodied in what Hollinger calls the “ethnic-racial pentagon,” the quinquepartite division of the American population into “ethnic-racial blocs” (p. 24). The pentagon, he recognizes, is a “historical artifact” (p. 24), invented in the 1970s “to correct the injustices committed by white people in the name of the American nation” (p. 36). Neither races nor ethnicities, the ethnic-racial blocs were born of “a history of political and economic victimization based on bad biology” (p. 8). Essentially the categories were established to gather statistics needed to implement antidiscrimination and affirmative action policies. In the 1980s multiculturalists reified the pentagon, conjuring it as cultural and political reality.

Hollinger faults the pentagon paradigm for its inability to accommodate the increasing diversification of America, citing the demands of mixed race persons for recognition of their hybrid ancestry. (More emphasis could have been placed on the new immigration, which greatly complicates the business of ethnic-racial classification.) Since a basic principle of postethnic America would be an individual’s voluntary rather than involuntary affiliation with “communities of descent,” a major indictment of the multicultural pentagon is that it pastes labels on persons regardless of their culture, affiliation, or identity.

Hollinger himself at times not only appears to accept the ethnic-racial blocs of the pentagon as defining real ethnicities, but to approve of the outcome. For example, he declares that “the pentagon . . . has symbolically erased much cultural diversity within the Euro-American bloc” so that the Irish have become indistinguishable from the English (p. 26). Hollinger also accepts the logic of the pentagon, approving of the “racialization of Latinos” (p. 32), since they are entitled to racial status on the basis of their history of victimization. European Americans, while they may have had “their share of suffering,” do not rate high on the victimization scale as compared to “races” (p. 37). Without entering into the question of placement on the index of suffering, this reader was stopped cold by the following generalization: “Being classified as Euro-American, white, or Caucasian has rarely been a basis for being denied adequate employment, housing, education, or protection from violence” (p. 22).

Hollinger is well aware that he is caught in a “tragic contradiction” (p. 49) between his desire to affirm freedom of cultural affiliation and his endorsement of a policy of entitlements which requires the classification of the population into “crude, colloquial categories, black, yellow, white, red, and brown” (p. 8). Although the dismantling of the pentagon that institutionalizes and hardens these pseudoethnic-racial categories would seem to be a prerequisite to ushering in postethnic America, Hollinger’s commitment to a politics of victimization prevents him from contemplating such a resolution of the dilemma. “The goal of equality,” he foresees, “demands for America a future even more ethnic [racial?] than its past” (p. 23).

As an alternative to multiculturalism, Hollinger proposes a “postethnic perspective” that prefers voluntary to involuntary affiliations, allows for multiple identities, and entertains the formation of new groups. Rejecting the notion of primordial group identity, this perspective regards both race and ethnicity as social constructions. It appreciates...