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4. Interrogating Ethnic Whiteness, Building Interracial Solidarity: Popular Ethnography as Cultural Critique
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C h a p t e r f o u r Interrogating EthnicWhiteness, Building Interracial Solidarity Popular Ethnography as Cultural Critique She pulls off her shoe and takes out the three pennies.The gray head of Mr.Yacobowski looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover.At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyedVirgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary. —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye [An] honest [community of memory] . . . will remember stories not only of suffering received but of suffering inflicted—dangerous memories, for they call the community to alter ancient evils. —Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart [L]ike any other individuals on this earth they [Greek Americans] have qualities but also shortcomings and they have met not only success, but failure. —Stephanos Zotos, Hellenic Presence in America c o n t o u r s o f w h i t e e t h n i c i t y One dominant contour of ethnic self-representation turns complex human beings into the celebrated model white ethnics.This chapter goes beyond this self-congratulatory caricaturing to showcase popular ethnographies that venture into dangerous memories and negative self-portrayals of ethnicity.The texts discussed here counter the discourse of ethnic perfection by centering on ethnic flaws. Unlike certain anthropologists who are reluctant to disclose sensitive self-knowledge to the public, these ethnographers adopt a different posture. They expose hidden secrets, openly display failures—racial prejudice by white ethnics,immigrant xenophobia,apathy toward the plight of others—and criticize what they perceive as social defects. In doing so, they debunk the mythology of success through a virulent ethnic self-critique and contribute in this manner to a GreekAmerican academic and literary counterdiscourse. If critical self-examination “means showing our‘dirty linen’ or stepping on very sensitive toes, so be it,” academic Harry Psomiades (1987, 100) writes, joining Helen Papanikolas, among others,in rupturing GreekAmerica’s“shame-culture and fear of revealing secrets”(Karageorge 2000,85).1 My analysis closely follows how and to what end popular ethnographers deploy their critique, attending to how their narratives generate usable pasts that contest ethnicity’s complicity to whiteness. In an essay seething with a profound sense of racial injustice, Nobel laureate and distinguished humanities professor Toni Morrison (1994a) encourages her readers to reflect on the ubiquity of race in structuring inequality in the United States.The conclusion of Elia Kazan’s film America, America, “the story of a young Greek’s fierce determination to immigrate toAmerica” (97), serves as her point of departure. In it, the “new immigrant . . . fresh from Ellis Island” is granted a job as a shoe shiner at Grand CentralTerminal.Noting this act of generous inclusion , where American workplaces open their doors to immigrant newcomers, Morrison draws attention to a contrasting act of exclusion.As if tempted by the success of the Greek,“a young black man, also a shoe shiner . . . enters and tries to solicit a customer. He is run off the screen—‘Get out of here!We’re doing business here!’—and silently disappears” (ibid.). This sequence of welcoming acceptance on the one hand and contemptuous dismissal on the other represents for Morrison a larger historical process through which immigrants are incorporated into the dominant social structure at the expense of the blacks. Stavros Topouzoglou, the immigrant character in Elia Kazan’s novel America America, enters the United States as an indentured servant. But historical patterns of immigrant consent to whiteness validate Morrison’s position that immigrant opportunity is created “on the backs of blacks,” launching the newcomers on the path of mobility while “pressing African Americans to the lowest level [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:40 GMT) Interrogating Ethnic Whiteness, Building Interracial Solidarity of the racial hierarchy” (1994a, 97...