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  • Root of It All
  • Todd M. Michney (bio)
Matthew Frye Jacobson. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 483 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

In the mid-1960s, ethnicity took on increased significance for many white Americans having recent immigrant origins in Europe, largely but not wholly in response to the ongoing black freedom struggle. In a wide-ranging and continually provocative survey of this phenomenon, Matthew Frye Jacobson completely recasts our previous understandings of the so-called "white ethnic revival" insofar as its scope, content, timing, and significance.1 Contradicting many contemporary observers who assumed the ethnic upsurge was merely a last gasp before assimilation, Jacobson forcefully argues that the revival has continued into our present day, bolstering this contention with a dizzying variety of examples from the realms of cultural production and politics. The result has been a thoroughgoing reformulation of white identity in the post–civil rights era—its touchstone moving, in his words, from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island. Going even further, Jacobson ventures, "The ethnic revival recast American nationality, and it continues to color our judgment about who 'we' Americans are and who 'they' outside the 'we the people' are, too" (p. 8).

Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America is cultural and intellectual history par excellence and functions nicely in dialogue with Jacobson's previous works on earlier European immigrant generations.2 It also rides the crest of interest in the history of white identity and racialized power in the United States that has mounted since the 1990s. Roots Too is an outstanding and original book. However—like those critics of "whiteness studies" who have leveled complaints about fragmentary and too-broadly-construed evidence3 —social, urban, and local historians may come away from Jacobson's work incompletely satisfied. While he irrefutably establishes that the revival of interest in ethnicity took place not only at the individual level of "psychic interiors," but also at the level of national political dialogue and mass-media distribution, Jacobson completely overlooks how the revival played out in-between, at the ethnic neighborhood and community level (p. 19). While such a perspective might not significantly challenge his [End Page 307] conclusions or even be feasible in a study of such scope, we must regard Jacobson's work as cultivating a field of inquiry in which there remains much productive work to be done.

Jacobson's first chapter skillfully lays out the national manifestations of ethnicity from the time of John F. Kennedy's 1963 "return" trip to Ireland (a journey retraced by many subsequent presidents and hopefuls) to the dedication of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in 1990. Here we also first encounter Kennedy's recurring construct of the United States as a "nation of immigrants," posited in his ghostwritten 1958 work of the same name, and which is obviously highly problematic in explaining the origins of American Indians, African Americans, and the original Mexican Americans. Jacobson identifies the civil rights movement as supplying both a model and impetus for the ethnic revival, a straightforward and undisputed linkage but one which a host of contemporary commentators considered as a "catalyst" in the context of other factors including the sexual and youth revolutions, Vietnam War, and demographic developments within individual ethnic groups.4 He also names antimodernism as a wellspring for the revival, another connection that was widely recognized at the time.5 In addition, Jacobson points to events on the international scene that inspired members of European ethnic groups to adopt "homeland" political activism and helped redefine group identities: for example, the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, the 1967 Six Day War, and rumblings in the Eastern Bloc. The "New Ethnicity," as it was dubbed at the time, took form in the revitalization of old national ethnic organizations and the founding of new ones; at the same time scholars, many of recent Southern and Eastern European origin themselves, established immigration history as a legitimate field of inquiry and ethnicity as an accepted category of sociological analysis. Jacobson holds that the 1977 miniseries Roots was interpreted by white Americans not as African American family history but rather...

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