Horizon

Postethnic America 1

At long last, here's the inaugural post of the Horizon Book Club. We're reading Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. I have already posted a brief description of the book here.

The second chapter, "Haley's Choice and the Ethno-Racial Pentagon" focuses mainly on the five ethno-racial categories currently used on the census and many other forms that collect demographic data.

The most interesting claim so far is that race, as the concept is used today, does not indicate biological or cultural difference. Rather, the designation of one group as a race is determined by the extent to which the group has been discriminated against by "Euro-Americans".

The way this system of classification works can be further illustrated by comparing the status of Latinos with that of Jewish Americans. Jews were once widely thought to constitute a race, but are no longer. This transformation did not result primarily from scientific advances in biology and physical anthropology. Rather, the prejudice against Jewish Americans within American historical experience is judged to be less severe and damaging than the prejudice against Latinos who, because of that greater perceived victimization, are now said to constitute a race. ...

Hence, the blocs of the pentagon get their integrity not from biology, nor even from culture, but from the dynamics of prejudice and oppression in U.S. History and from the need for political tools to overcome the legacy of that victimization.

If you accept this, and it sounds right to me, then it's little wonder that the categories of the pentagon so closely replicate the old racist theories that divided people mainly on skin color. The irony of an attempt to address and compensate for racism is that it leads us to adopt racist categories, regardless of whether they otherwise make any sense at all. Paradoxically, race has come to be defined by racism, and policies designed to further equality are led to invent categories that institutionalize discredited racist ideas.

The next implication: this may be a necessary way to define the problem in order to offset the effects of racism, but the pentagon is a terrible way to define what Hollinger calls "communities of descent", racial and cultural identities, since they are grounded in nothing other than current and historical prejudices of the dominant ethno-racial group.

The other main thread in this chapter is the malleability of racial categories. Hollinger uses the example of Alex Haley, the author of Roots, who chose to write about (and identify himself with) his African American ancestry rather than his Irish ancestry. Hollinger wants the prescriptive concept of identity in multiculturalism to give way to affiliation, which in many cases, at least, would be voluntary.

Again, the "ethno-racial" pentagon appears to be an essential part of multicultural thought on this issue. He observes, for instance, that a Cambodian could easily choose whether to identify himself as a Cambodian, but would find it much harder to refuse the classification of Asian American. In a "postethnic" America, he says, this would not be; Alex Haley could walk in the St. Patrick's Day parade and no one would think twice about it.

This is where I start to see problems. First of all, how exactly would such attitudes be changed? So far Hollinger doesn't say much about that. More importantly, Hollinger seems to see the pentagon as something adopted by multiculturalists as a political tool, and that it's therefore somehow responsible for Americans' attitude toward race today. But it seems clear to me that the pentagon is merely describing something which already exists. People still see race and ethnicity as largely a matter of skin color. How would abandoning it as a framework for multiculturalism improve the situation? Is Hollinger succumbing to the suspect assumption that the theories of academic multiculturalists have all that much to do with the reality of race in America?

That's not a rhetorical question. The chapter is dense and I don't feel like I've really absorbed all of it. Just how well does Hollinger establish the connection between the official categories of the pentagon, multicultural theory, and what is really happening in America today? And how do we get from here to the "postethnic". As far as I can tell, he hasn't really addressed these questions so far.

Posted by Alan Hogue at May 16, 2004 06:04 PM