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作者

Aldon Morris

来源

CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue2,P.451-456

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Northwestern University

摘要

Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (1963) book, Beyond the Melting Pot, shattered the melting pot thesis. By analyzing Negroes, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Italians in New York City simultaneously, the authors demonstrated that distinct group identities remained strong, showing no propensity to change. Given its clear writing and inherently interesting topic, Beyond the Melting Pot made a huge splash across the academy and the learned public. Indeed, during the racially explosive 1960s, the American imagination obsessed with relations between Blacks and Whites. Beyond the Melting Pot stepped into this obsession providing what appeared to be answers to simmering questions concerning the directions of American race relations. Beyond the Melting Pot developed interesting and entertaining histories and analyses of its five race/ethnic groups, as they existed in New York City in the 1960s. At times, these accounts relied on thin data while fueled by speculative reasoning. Moreover, crucial historical developments were ignored or glazed over. For example, race riots between Blacks and Whites that roared through the history of New York City dating back to the 18th century received no attention. Other racial violence, including police brutality routinely committed against Blacks, escaped attention. Nevertheless, these two White male scholars spoke with God‐like confidence about race and ethnicity in New York. Beyond the Melting Pot focused on the social positions these groups occupied and their likely fates in the future. In this essay, I argue Beyond the Melting Pot's analysis regarding Blacks and their community was fatally flawed because it embraced the Black inferiority thesis prevalent from the beginning in American social science. That thesis entered the side door of the Chicago School, was fully embraced by the North Carolina Odum School, and seized center stage in Myrdal's American Dilemma. At the crux of the Black inferiority thesis was the implication that Blacks bore large responsibilities for their own misery emanating from their position at the bottom of America's racial hierarchy. In this view, qualities within the Black community and inside the minds and genetic structures of Blacks constituted the root causes of Black inequality. These internal defects would require elimination if Blacks were to share the privileges enjoyed by Whites. The Civil Rights Movement was at its zenith when Beyond the Melting Pot rolled off the press. The Montgomery bus boycott, Southern student sit‐in movement, and the Freedom Rides had occurred just several years earlier (Morris 1984). The vicious racist confrontations in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, were unfolding as Beyond the Melting Pot appeared in bookstores. Race relations were tense in New York City at the time, given Black challenges to police brutality and racial injustice. Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and other leaders were preaching against White racism in New York City and mobilizing to change it. Washington D.C. was preparing for the great march on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” These protests revealed that the Black community possessed high levels of social organization and that white racism and the violence it spun lay at the heart of America's race problem. In Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan developed an analysis of the Black community and the reasons for its degradation that were completely at odds with realities exposed by the Black rebellion. In their analysis, the primary causes for Blacks languishing at the bottom of the racial hierarchy stemmed from the shortcomings of Black people themselves and their institutions, especially Black culture and the family. Because these shortcomings were not properties of the Jews, Irish, and Italians, they prospered economically and socially relative to Blacks. Glazer and Moynihan were not blind to the intense, peculiar, and specific racism Blacks alone encountered. Indeed, they argued that white racism was an obstacle to Black progress. Yet, as they acknowledged the deleterious effects of white racism, they always qualified it, arguing that racism fell far short of explaining Black inequality. The more powerful explanation, they argued, was deeper than racism; the qualities of Blackness itself were the main culprit. What, then, existed in the core of Blackness for Glazer and Moynihan that caused Blacks to commit race suicide? If you were Black, you instantly realized the need to buckle your intellectual and self‐respect seat belts, given the first chapter was entitled “The NEGROES.” At the outset (p. 26), the authors informed readers that “Negroes accepted an inferior place in society.” This was a jarring proclamation given the Black movement was on the move knocking down walls of Jim Crow and challenging de facto racism in the North. Nevertheless, Beyond the Melting Pot's opening chapter declared that the lack of culture and broken Black families were main contributors to Black inequality. They summed up their cultural argument thusly: It is not possible for Negroes to view themselves as other ethnic groups viewed themselves because—and this is the key to much in the Negro world—the Negro is only an American, and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect (p. 53).