How American Are you if your Grandparents came from Serbia in 1888?

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Now that the theme of "ethnicity" has blazed up again before public eyes, a number of important questions have been raised, a number of objections voiced. What is the meaning of ethnicity? What is the difference between the "old ethnicity" and the "new ethnicity"? Is everybody ethnic? What political implications follow?

One of the most interesting developments is the abrupt rejection of ethnic analysis altogether. This rejection is of three types. Those who have been trying all their lives to get over their ethnic origin and join the influential mainstream sometimes see the experience of ethnicity as regressive; sometimes don't even want the subject brought up, have vivid emotional reactions against it; sometimes experience a new sense of relaxation and liberation, in a kind of expanded and (at last) integrated self-consciousness.

A second type of rejection occurs among some who have for a time been living in "superculture," that is, in the influential mainstream of power, wealth, and ideas, apart from any ethnic "sub-culture." In the 1930's many intellectuals retained not only an ideological but also an experiential contact with lower-middle-class workers. Since the Second World War the population of superculture has expanded enormously, and now there are millions of educated suburban Americans who maintain almost no contact, ideological or experiential, with ordinary people who work for a living, in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. One sees this gap between cultures on university campuses between faculty and other staff members, or at newspaper offices between the city room and the press room.

It used to be that democracy meant faith in "the common man." But for some time now the common man has come to be perceived as the nation's greatest menace, a racist, a fascist, and-if one is pressed-a pig. All hope is placed in "a constituency of conscience," as opposed presumably to people without conscience. Needless to say, anyone who writes in support of the white ethnic is looked upon with puzzlement. What's a nice man like you doing with people like those? … This puzzlement sometimes changes to shock, horror, and indignation if the subject is seriously pursued.

Thus passionate intensity is frequently stirred by the theme of ethnicity, most remarkably among people who believe in the universality of reason or love and simultaneously bewail the blandness and mindless conformity of the suburbs. Perhaps this is because the theme of ethnicity intimately involves each participant. Each is challenged to examine his or her own life for its ethnic materials. Almost by definition, these are more unconscious than not, having been taught informally rather than in explicit words or deeds. Gratitude for being prompted to live the examined life is sometimes keen, but sometimes absent.

This invitation to self-examination, moreover, is not simply a use of the ad hominem argument. In a reasonably homogenous culture, as in England or France, the terms of discourse are reasonably fixed. In a heterogeneous one like ours, the key terms themselves derive from our different historical experiences of America. Words like "moral" used in politics mean something different to a house mother in a dormitory in a small Ohio college, to Philip Roth, to John Courtney Murray, to Shirley MacLaine, to George Meany, to Jesse Jackson. When you see each speaker in his or her own historical context, the words make considerably more sense, even if one continues to disagree. The more sensitive to historical nuance one becomes, the more intelligible various classical arguments–between sectarian and mainline Protestants, for example–become. In the United States, our personal histories retain an influential ethnic and regional component, to which far too little note is methodologically paid. Thus many of our arguments result not in mutual understanding but in frustration and separation.

A third type of rejection occurs among some who are quite unconscious of any ethnicity on their part at all, either because they're simply white Anglo-Saxons who "don't make anything of it" or because they're "veritable living melting pots," nobody having traced the family's...