The History of White People (48 page)

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Moynihan had moved to New York with his family when he was six. Like Glazer, he lived in poor neighborhoods and studied at City College. However, Moynihan joined the Navy’s officer-training program at Tufts University and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Tufts after the war. In Washington, Moynihan and Glazer decided to work together, with Moynihan adding an essay on New York’s Irish community and a general conclusion to Glazer’s articles on ethnic groups in New York. Their 1963 book,
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
, became one of the most influential sociological studies of its time.
¹⁷
Glazer joined the Harvard University faculty in 1969, where Moynihan—soon to be elected U.S. senator from New York—had been since 1964.
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In its first edition,
Beyond the Melting Pot
painted an optimistic picture of various New York ethnic groups (including Negroes and Puerto Ricans) who were competing for power in the city and accommodating one another’s claims. Glazer and Moynihan denied that any of the ethnic groups had melted into a bland Americanness. Ethnic groups were “not a purely biological phenomenon,” and while old country languages and cultures had largely disappeared, ethnic groups were being “continually recreated by new experiences in America.”
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Much of the book’s readability rested on its ready resort to shaky generalization, which occasionally veered awfully close to stereotype.
¹⁹
The Jews were coming out on top by dint of intelligence and hard work; the bewildered Puerto Ricans could not figure out how to work the system; the Negroes were struggling against a heritage of discrimination, but the urban policies of the Kennedy administration would provide the assistance they needed. The Italians were losing ground, on account of “a failure of intellect.”
²⁰
In a mean-spirited aside, Glazer and Moynihan quote “a world-famous Yale professor who, at dinner, ‘on the day an Italian American announced his candidacy for Mayor of New York,’ remarked that ‘If Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen.’ (It was later also said of Mario Procaccino that he was so sure of being elected that he had ordered new
linoleum
for Gracie Mansion.)” Never mind the Italians; all in all, the future seemed hopeful.

Beyond the Melting Pot
appeared in a second edition in 1970 with a very different feel. In a new long introduction, Glazer regretted the rise of black militants who insisted on their uniqueness. Now, he lamented, “we seem to be moving to a new set of categories, black and white, and that is ominous.”
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And that was where American whiteness stood three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century. The civil rights movement, it seemed, had spawned the ugly specter of black power, a source of alienation for white people. Rejecting the burden of white guilt that Malcolm X laid on them, white Americans were morphing into Italian Americans and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans. What they had in common was not being black.
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Basically, white versus black now sufficed as an American racial scheme—for the moment.

A
gitating and media-dominating as America’s civil rights and black power movements were, most of the country’s white people might have doubted that the upheaval had much to do with them. They might have thought that they were individuals who had succeeded by themselves and that “race” had always meant black people, who had not. In fact, by the 1960s the whole “races of Europe” discourse had fallen completely out of fashion. Books such as William Z. Ripley’s
Races of Europe
, once essential reading on race, were now remaindered as useless, and if you were not Jewish, calling Jews a race would send you straight into the anti-Semitic column.

Reminders that Jews and Italians had been labeled as “races” a generation earlier might have prompted a retort that “race” was used more loosely in the past. This is true. But
every
use of “race” has always been loose, whether applied to black, white, yellow, brown, red, or other. No consensus has ever formed on the number of human races or even on the number of white races. Criteria constantly shift according to individual taste and political need. It was clear, however, that in the olden days, Jim Crow had kept the “colored” races apart from whites and African Americans largely hidden behind segregation’s veil. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the end of legalized segregation began to propel black people into national visibility as never before.

Concurrently, other changes were soon to deeply alter Americans’ sense of the very meanings of “race.” Little noticed at the time, the openness of the mid-1960s went well beyond the black/white color line. The Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler) Act of 1965 was specifically crafted to counter earlier Nordic-minded immigration statutes, especially in terms of Asians. It also allowed for wider immigration from the Western Hemisphere and Africa. Therein lay the seeds of demographic revolution.

New
new immigrants of the post-1965 era, overwhelmingly from outside Europe, were upending American racial conventions. Asians, greatly rising in number, were rapidly being judged to be smarter and, eventually, to be richer than native-born whites. Latinos formed 13 percent of the population by 2000, edging out African Americans as the most numerous minority.

The U.S. census, without peer in scoring the nation’s racial makeup, had begun to notice Latin Americans in the 1940s by counting up heterogeneous peoples with Spanish surnames and hastily lumping them together as “Hispanics.” Though an impossibly crude measurement, it survived until 1977. By that point, the federal government needed more precise racial statistics to enforce civil rights legislation. To this end, the Office of Management and Budget issued Statistical Policy Directive no. 15.

Here was a change worth noting: in the racially charged decades of the early twentieth century, governments at all levels had passed laws to separate Americans by race. Though Jim Crow segregation was supposed to be separate but equal, in practice it worked to discriminate, by excluding nonwhites from public institutions, whether from libraries, schools, swimming pools, or the ballot box. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to change all that, so that by the late twentieth century the rationale for counting people by race had morphed into a means of keeping track of civil rights enforcement. Statistical Policy Directive no. 15 set the terms for racial and ethnic classification throughout American society by directing federal agencies—including the U.S. census—to collect data according to four races (black, white, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Asian/Pacific Islander—Hawaiian was added later as a concession to protests) and one ethnic category (Hispanic/Latino, which is not racial). Elaboration was good for civil rights, but it opened the way to chaos.

Under these guidelines the Hispanic/Latino classification portended enormous turmoil. Now that there was a “non-Hispanic white” category, did there not also exist Hispanic white people? Yes, no, and other. Faced with the given racial choices on the census of 2000, fully 42.2 percent of Latinos checked “some other race,” rather than “black” or “white,” throwing nearly 6 percent of Americans into a kind of racial limbo.
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In addition, the U.S. census of 2000 had to increase a deeper and more personal recognition of multiracial identities. For the first time, respondents were allowed to describe themselves as belonging to one or more of fifteen “racial” identities. As so often in the past—and adding confusion—the list of races included nationalities.
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(See figure 28.1, Question 6 from 2000 U.S. Census.) This expansion now allowed for 126 ethnoracial groups or, for purists, 63 races. It did not take much analytical ability to see that any notion of race lay so diluted as to lose much of its punch. And taxonomy was rapidly buckling much further under the weight of interracial sex.

Nothing new here. Americans’ disorderly sexual habits have always overflowed neat racial lines and driven race thinkers crazy. Asians and Native American Indians had the highest rates of interracial marriage, but others, including African Americans, now often married and had children with people from outside their racial-ethnic group. By 1990, American families were so heterogeneous that 1/7 of whites, 1/3 of blacks, 4/5 of Asians, and 19/20 Native American Indians were closely related to someone of a different racial group. With some 12 percent of young people now calling themselves multiracial, it is expected that, by 2050, 10 percent of whites and blacks and more than 50 percent of Latinos, Asians, and Native American Indians will be married to someone outside their racial group.
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With so many nonwhite and white Americans marrying willy-nilly, barriers between the progeny of European immigrants have largely disappeared. Among white people, three out of four marriages had already crossed ethnic boundaries by 1980. A generation later, very few white Americans had four grandparents from the same country.
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Crèvecoeur’s European-derived “American, this new man,” had arrived. William Z. Ripley had predicted this outcome in 1908, fearing, above all, the “inharmonious” mixing of Italian men and Irish women. But he now would have been forced to reconsider his prediction that such a “racial” mix would make Americans ugly.

Fig. 28.1. Question 6 from 2000 U.S. Census.

We have already seen the lowering of racial boundaries starting in the 1940s, when “ethnic” began replacing “race” as applied to the descendants of European immigrants. The use of “racial groups” for white people has become a moribund category, too, partly because white people are so mixed up. Finally, the perquisites of mere whiteness count for less in the present situation, while the stigma of blackness—once just one drop sufficed to curse the white-looking individual—also seems less mortal.

Back in the twentieth century, white people were assumed to be rich or at least middle-class, as well as more beautiful, powerful, and smart. As citizens and scholars, they said what needed to be known and monopolized the study of other people—with themselves hardly being marked or scrutinized in return. Think of Francis A. Walker and William Z. Ripley, for whom formal education, New England ancestry, and useful connections assured authority. Half a century later, the upheaval of the civil rights era turned the looking glass around, bringing white people under scrutiny. Think of Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

W
ITH THE
American South so fully in the spotlight during the civil rights revolution, one of the earliest scrutinizers of whiteness came from north Georgia. Lillian Smith (1897–1966), a white southern essayist, novelist, and (with her lifetime partner Paula Schnelling) operator of a fancy summer camp for girls, powerfully described her South in
Killers of the Dream
(1949 and 1961). The book pilloried southern culture as pathological and white supremacist southerners as caught in a spiral of sex, sin, and segregation.
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Here was a book of wide influence that portrayed whiteness as morally diseased.

Following Smith, two white Texan journalists turned a critical gaze on white people by passing as black. John Howard Griffin (1920–80) dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the South, researching a magazine series published as
Black like Me
in 1961. An international bestseller,
Black like Me
became a feature film in 1964. (Gerda Lerner, then a writer, later a pioneering historian of women, wrote the screenplay.) White southerners in
Black like Me
were indeed a perverted, disgusting crowd. The women dehumanized their black neighbors with the “hate stare” the men’s notions of blackness began and ended pornographically.
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Griffin, in turn, inspired Grace Halsell (1923–2000), whose dyed skin turned her into a strange-looking black woman, but black enough to pass and to attract racist insult, in the North and the South, as she chronicled in
Soul Sister
(1964).
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By the 1990s, whiteness was no longer the invisible norm, and the critical study of white people was burgeoning into an academic field in the mold of black studies.
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Critical white studies began with David R. Roediger’s
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
in 1991 and Noel Ignatiev’s
How the Irish Became White
in 1995. Seeing slavery and black people as central in creating nineteenth-century white identity, these two books show how working-class European immigrants, Irish in particular, took advantage of being classified as white in the American context. Irishmen took control of workplaces, unions, and politics, crucial steps in their upward mobility. It soon followed that middle-class status transformed them fully into Americans.

An abundance of books and articles dissecting the meanings of whiteness followed.
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Whiteness studies hold white race, ordinarily invisible in the black/white dichotomy, up to the light. In them it appears as social, not biological, a powerful social construct letting whites think of themselves first and foremost as individuals. Although white people may exempt themselves from race, white privilege comes into view as a crucial facet of white race identity. At the same time, many other characteristics—class, region, gender, age, able-bodiedness, and sexual orientation—all affect the manifestation of this privilege.

Nowadays, whiteness studies analyze the porous nature of contemporary racial boundaries. In contrast to their nineteenth-and twentieth-century counterparts, multiracial people may now claim their own separate category.
¹⁰
In former times, however, one black ancestor, no matter how distant, could convey a permanent “taint” of blackness that made one a Negro, as in the case of Gustave de Beaumont’s title character Marie. Race was central to identity, and people were assumed to remain permanently where they were born, especially if their races were stigmatized. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance.”
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As we have seen, powerful men like Thomas Jefferson also bowed to the ideal of racial purity—he held that interracial sex would surely lead to degradation—even while contravening his view by having children in a stable, intimate relationship with one of his slaves.
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Nowadays, only white supremacists and Nazis fetishize white racial purity.

Today the attractive qualities that Saxons-Anglo-Saxons-Nordics-whites were assumed to monopolize are also to be found elsewhere.
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After a string of nonwhite Misses America, Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé Knowles are celebrated as Hollywood beauties; Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, dominate elite sports; Robert Johnson (founder of BET network), Bill Cosby, and the financier Alphonse Fletcher Jr. have made millions; Oprah Winfrey is rich and famous. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have been secretaries of state, and Alberto Gonzales attorney general. Even more to the point of uniting power and beauty, Barack Obama is president of the United States. First Lady Michelle Obama, whose skin color alone would have condemned her to ugliness in the twentieth century, figures as an icon of beauty and intelligence on the global stage. None of these individuals is white, but being white these days is not what it used to be.