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作者

Richard Alba

来源

CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue2,P.446-450

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

The Graduate Center City University of New York

摘要

Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, written by Nathan Glazer in collaboration with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and originally published in 1963, is one of the most successful American sociology books ever. When Herbert Gans compiled his list of sociology best sellers for Contemporary Sociology (March, 1997), Beyond the Melting Pot (BtMP) ranked in the top 10. I doubt it has lost its position in the interim. (Remarkably, Glazer was a coauthor with David Riesman and Reuel Denney of the top seller of all time, The Lonely Crowd (1950), the only book on the list with sales of more than 1 million.) BtMP’s popularity, which extended far outside academia, rested on a combination of savvy observations about ethnic, racial, and religious groups in New York with a framework for understanding that reality that made sense at the time to many Americans, especially White Americans. In addition, coming largely from the pen of Glazer, it was written to be accessible yet eloquent, and it achieved both. It is curious in a way that the impact of the book was so immense. It opens with an extended consideration of the uniqueness of New York, given its large size and ethno‐racial diversity. Yet readers saw BtMP as illuminating American urban realities, at least those to be found in many other northern cities like Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago. When it appeared—not long after, it should be remembered, the election of John F. Kennedy, the first and only Irish Catholic President—BtMP seemed like a powerful shot across the bow of the ship of assimilation, which had been steaming along until then, buoyed by the research of the Chicago School and its many students. “The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen,” Glazer and Moynihan wrote in their conclusion (p. 290, all page citations are to the 1970 edition). The “melting pot” was the widely accepted metaphor for assimilation processes that were assumed to be fusing ethnic groups into a common national alloy, especially in the post‐World War II era of prosperity, a time when the second and third generations of White ethnics were making great strides socioeconomically and moving to ethnically and religiously, but not racially, integrated suburbs. The great insight on which the book is based, which propelled much sociological discussion of ethno‐racial difference, inequality, and conflict in subsequent decades, was that assimilation had not melted the children and grandchildren of immigrants into a seamless American society without ethnic distinctions and divisions. Glazer and Moynihan acknowledged that there was a reality to assimilation, that the lifeways and languages of the immigrant generation fell away rather quickly, making ethnic Americans very different from their immigrant forebears, to say nothing of the natives of the countries from which the immigrants came. But new forms of distinctiveness emerged. Surely, these were partly consequences of the differential starting points for integration established by the immigrants—for instance, eastern European Jews brought a host of skills useful in small‐scale industries like the garment trade, while southern Italians came mainly from agricultural backgrounds in an economically backward region, which meant they had limited formal educations but often possessed manual skills of value in construction. But the new ethnic distinctiveness was also due to processes that took hold after the groups’ arrival and involved a complex interplay between group characteristics, such as family cultures, and opportunities in the urban contexts where immigrants settled. As a consequence, each group acquired a congeries of correlated economic and social traits that amounted to a distinctive profile: “When one says Jews, one also means small shopkeepers, professionals, better‐paid skilled workers in the garment industries. When one says Italians, one also means homeowners in Staten Island, the North Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens” (p. 17). Glazer and Moynihan asserted something more—that ethnic identities persevered because they gave something almost tangible to individuals, that groups as collectivities and communities had a fundamental role in urban America because of their political and economic significance. In their language, the individual is “connected” to the group “by ties of interest.” The ethnic groups in New York are also “interest groups” (p. 17). The italics were in the original, and one consequence of this insight the authors deemed so important that they put it entirely in italics: “The ethnic group in American society became not a survival from the age of mass immigration but a new social form” (p. 16). As one can see from this discussion, Glazer and Moynihan's ideas were formulated in terms of immigration and the ensuing experiences of the second and third generations. These ideas were a poor fit for African Americans (“Negroes” in the terminology of the time) and Puerto Ricans, two of the five groups discussed in depth in the book (the others were the Irish, Italians, and Jews). Indeed, to apply them, Glazer and Moynihan were obliged to view these non‐White minorities, who had been incorporated into American society by colonization and enslavement, as immigrants or, perhaps better put, as having started anew by virtue of their migration from the South and from the Island. This viewpoint could not avoid gross distortions of the oppressive forces affecting non‐Whites in the New York City of the mid‐20th century. This distortion was compounded by another fundamental premise undergirding the perspective of Glazer and Moynihan, a premise that was nevertheless a major basis for its common‐sense appeal to many educated, White readers of the time. The premise was expressed boldly in the 1970 preface to a new edition, where the authors contrast a Northern model of group relations, “perhaps best realized in New York City,” to the Southern one of racial domination. In the Northern model, “in effect an open society prevails for individuals and for groups.…There is competition between groups, …, but it is muted, and groups compete not through violence but through effectiveness in organization and achievement” (p. xxiii–xxiv). The premise entailed in the Northern model placed great explanatory weight for the place of a group in urban America on the characteristics of the group itself, on its human capital in the form of acquired skills and talents of value in an urban economy, on its family patterns and their implications for the well‐being of children, on its values in relation to education, and on its collective solidarities as a community and what these meant for its ability to project and defend group interests and to assist group members. This perspective, especially in the comprehensive way that the book employed it, was an original contribution to the understanding of the situations of the second and third generations of immigrant‐origin groups. But applied to non‐Whites of non‐immigrant origins, it slid too easily into a deficit model, attributing the low standing of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to unfortunate deficiencies that held back their advancement. In the chapter on African Americans, Glazer visibly strove to avoid this. He called attention repeatedly to the prejudice and discrimination that afflicted Blacks everywhere in American society. Nevertheless, his perspective did not give him adequate ways to comprehend systemic, or institutional, forms of racism. Not that he was unaware of, say, segregation as a systemic form, he was. But, even so, his view of its consequences was ambivalent; his discussion highlights the vibrancy of a segregated Harlem in the 1920s. Yet the overall tenor of the chapter is legible in its view of the “unfortunate” position of blacks because of the social problems that beset the group and community: “The Negro immigrant has not had the good fortune of arriving with useful skills and strong institutions, nor has he found a prosperous, well‐organized Negro community to help him” (p. 26). Later in the chapter, Glazer inserts himself personally when suggesting that Blacks bear a measure of responsibility for their situation: “We do not proposal a single explanation of the problems that afflict many Negroes; obviously if the schools were better, …. If the housing and job conditions were better, … If the police were fairer, … If Negroes had better jobs and higher incomes, … But I [sic] think it pointless to ignore the fact that the concentration of problems in the Negro community is exceptional, and that prejudice, low income, and poor education explain only so much” (pp. 51–2). A couple of pages later, he adds, “this … must mean, in the end, a higher degree of responsibility by the middle‐class and well‐to‐do and educated Negroes for the others” (p. 53). Similar omissions, distortions, and misplaced emphases appear in the chapter on Puerto Ricans. Rightly, BtMP has been criticized for its impoverished understanding of the racist oppression responsible for the positions of Blacks and Puerto Ricans. But it is important to learn from the book, and not just to sit in judgment. In any event, Glazer himself did learn and issued a corrective when he much later wrote We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997). Glazer and Moynihan were paradoxically prisoners of a perspective that was in itself an advance on previous thinking. It was only after their book, with the publication of Robert Blauner's (1972) Racial Oppression in America, that many sociologists began to grasp that the experiences of immigrant groups and colonized ones could not be comprehended with the same theoretical concepts. To put the contribution of BtMP in historical context, it appeared, quite ironically, at almost the same moment as Milton Gordon's Assimilation in American Life (1964), mid‐century's canonical statement of assimilation theory. Gordon's book was an abstract dissection of the stages of assimilation, and it famously asserted that acculturation meant the adoption by minorities of the culture of middle‐class, White Anglo‐Saxon Protestants; when that happened, little of their own culture, save for religion, would be left. BtMP presented a very different picture of ethno‐racial cultural differentiation. Both of these books have been very influential over the decades. But, in the long run, BtMP arguably has had the greater influence, and notions of assimilation today have been forced to take the differentiation it depicted into account. One immediate impact of BtMP was to ignite scholarly investigation into the role of ethnicity among Whites and its potential to continue indefinitely. The book was the prelude then to research by prominent sociologists like Herbert Gans, Andrew Greeley, Stanley Lieberson, and Mary Waters. BtMP also fueled popular literature, exemplified by Michael Novak's The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), and for related ideas of a “resurgence” of ethnicity among Whites. Andrew Greeley became the sociologist most closely associated with the argument for a permanent role for immigration‐derived ethnicity in alliance with religion. The other sociologists, including me, found more or less strong evidence of assimilation. But no one claimed that ethnic differentiation was negligible. BtMP also informed journalistic interpretations of conflicts in American society. When, during the 1970s, intense political controversies arose over the Vietnam War and African‐American advance, the viewpoint of BtMP was at hand to interpret these conflicts in terms of ethnic groups. In northern cities, it was commonly argued, the flag‐carrying opponents of the antiwar movement came from the ranks of working‐class ethnics, especially Catholics, for whom displays of patriotism served to quell lingering doubts about their full membership in the nation. Urban racial conflicts, including racist assaults on African Americans, were seen as a product of struggles over urban residential space between minorities and the White ethnics remaining in enclaves, who were often Italian. Here, BtMP’s analysis of the tenacity of the Italian hold over their neighborhoods because of their “village‐mindedness” passed easily into the common wisdom of the time. BtMP rendered a classic view of assimilation no longer viable. That view, easily supported in earlier writing on assimilation, envisioned assimilation as, over several generations, eradicating ethnic differences. Quantitative analyses of ethnicity, standard in the 1970s and 1980s, compared mean values on an array of social and cultural variables for specific ethnic groups to their equivalents in the overall population; significant differences, usually found, appeared to indicate incomplete assimilation or persisting ethnicity. Yet, by the 1980s, it became clear that ethnic origins were playing a much smaller role than they had at mid‐century in determining the life chances and social affiliations of Americans with European immigrant ancestors. This finding became especially clear when ethnic populations were decomposed by generation and birth cohort. How then to comprehend this complexity? When Victor Nee and I formulated in Remaking the American Mainstream (2003) what is now called “neo‐assimilation” theory, we deliberately avoided the view that assimilation had to mean the complete similarity between groups, one a minority group and the other the core. Instead, we defined assimilation as a process of “decategorization” occurring in the mainstream, a part of the larger society in which ethnic origins were much less determinative of how individuals viewed and treated each other. Moreover, we allowed for assimilation to be a two‐way process, implying that the mainstream was not fixed but could change to facilitate minority‐group entry. This kind of change was a major part of the story of White‐ethnic assimilation, evident in the shift from a White Protestant mainstream to a White Judaeo‐Christian one. These reformulations were influenced by BtMP. In closing, I want to point out an underappreciated aspect of BtMP. Because of immense changes in the composition of the American professoriate in recent decades, it is too easily overlooked that Glazer and Moynihan, themselves the products of New York working‐class enclaves, were among the first self‐professed ethnics to integrate the elite levels of American intelligentsia and universities. The few Jews who, through exceptional assimilation, were able to achieve professorial status at elite universities in an earlier period—e.g., Robert K. Merton—in general were forced to adopt the appearance of the WASPs around them through name changes and acculturation. Glazer and Moynihan were part of a larger generation of ethnics arriving at universities, and they saw a path to integration there that did not require such thorough‐going acculturation and abandonment of ethnic identities. A key part of their strategy was to elevate the status of their origins by asserting distinctive ethnic histories and experiences and by reframing these within the American national story. As Matthew Frye Jacobson expresses this strategy in Roots Too (2006), it sought to replace the symbolism of Plymouth Rock with Ellis Island. The move to promote White ethnic identities within the public sphere has too often been misunderstood as merely a reaction to the civil‐rights movement. It was that, but not just that; it was also a positive strategy for widening the range of identities that were viable in the mainstream in order to make room for assimilating ethnics. In this respect, too, we can view Glazer and Moynihan as forerunners of developments whose character has become clearer over time. At a moment when the diversity of higher education is burgeoning, we have come to take for granted that previously underrepresented groups press to have their distinctive stories acknowledged. That is one way the mainstream changes.