The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  By the early 1960s, Malcolm X was the second most sought-after speaker on American college campuses. (The most popular of all was the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964 against labor unions, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Act.)4 Playboy magazine introduced hipsters to Malcolm through an interview with Alex Haley (Malcolm’s biographer) in May 1963, and the Saturday Evening Post enlightened the masses with a fourteen-page excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1964, a large story opening with a full-page color illustration and the title “I’m Talking to You, White Man.”

  Here are a few of Malcolm X’s iconic statements: “When I say the white man is a devil, I speak with the authority of history…. The record of history shows that the white man, as a people, have never done good…. He stole our fathers and mothers from their culture of silk and satins and brought them to this land in the belly of a ship…. He has kept us in chains ever since we have been here…. Now this blue-eyed devil’s time has about run out.”5 To this blanket of blame, descendants of European immigrants, the children of Louis Adamic’s Peter Malek, answered, “Racists? Our ancestors owned no slaves. Most of us ceased being serfs only in the last two hundred years.”6 But few heard them. For the time being, black power garnered all the attention.

  Very importantly, Malcolm X brought to blaze the love affair between academia and black nationalists, an attraction that continued after Malcolm’s departure from the NOI in 1964 and his assassination in 1965. The black power movement he inspired propelled Black Panthers onto campuses and encouraged black intellectuals like the novelist James Baldwin to speak their minds openly. In The Fire Next Time, a brilliant essay that troubled white readers, Baldwin called white Americans’ relationship to Europe “spurious” they were hypocrites for Anglicizing their names, pretending to be real white Americans in recognition that the real America never could be only white. Embracing white supremacy and losing their ethnic identities, Baldwin maintained, were the price second-generation immigrants paid for the ticket to American whiteness.7 In 1970 Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s Rap on Race, a best seller, was eclipsed only when black power’s most glamorous symbol, the Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton, held a conversation at Yale—later published—with America’s most famous postwar psychologist, Erik H. Erikson.8

  Pushed along by an avid media, the black power movement remade the notion of American racial identity.9 Now the most fascinating racial identity was black, not white, a flip certain to disturb those who had struggled so hard to measure up to Anglo-Saxon standards. Working-class whites who resented being ignored, Catholics who felt vulnerable in academia, and Jews who were used to having the last word were all deeply offended. And white people pushed back. The rise of the “white ethnic” identity arose in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors.

  IF BLACK people could proclaim themselves black and proud, white people could trumpet their whiteness. But therein lay a gigantic problem embedded in the long-standing American tradition of white nationalism. The Ku Klux Klans and white nationalists had already co-opted the white label, leaving “ethnic” for the aggrieved third and fourth European immigrant generations. They were innocent, they maintained, having had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow. And they embraced identities rooted in Europe as though it were still the early twentieth century.

  But that time had passed. White ethnics could not reenact Horace Kallen’s 1915 version of cultural pluralism, for they no longer spoke the old languages, wore their ancestors’ clothes, or respected their grandparents’ outmoded conventions of gender. The white ethnicity of the late twentieth century was little more than a leisure activity, one that American entrepreneurs embraced. Ethnic consumers could buy T-shirts imprinted with European flags, take tours of the old country, and parade in the street on ethnic holidays. This “symbolic ethnicity” seemed to offer a warm, family-oriented middle ground between stereotypes of plastic, uptight, middle-class Protestant Anglo-Saxons and violent, disorganized impoverished blacks.10

  IN THE 1970s the term “ethnicity” shouldered aside older concepts of the white races. To be sure, the distinction between race and ethnicity still remains unclear. As a leading sociologist confessed, “it is true that systems of race and systems of ethnic relations have much in common.”11 To this day scholars and lay people find it difficult to tell race and ethnicity apart. Even the Oxford English Dictionary lists a second meaning for “ethnic”: “Pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological.” Nowadays race leads directly to race as black, as in the black/white scheme of the South where the civil rights revolution became visible.12 Black power took the concept even further, making black race a positive sign and white race the mark of guilty malfeasance. A correction to the guilty malfeasance part of the equation quickly appeared in print.

  MICHAEL NOVAK’S Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) became the national anthem of lower-middle-class whites. Born the grandson of Slovak immigrants in the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, steelmaking region, Novak (b. 1933) graduated from Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, and the Gregorian University in Rome, where he studied for the Catholic priesthood.

  Staying with theology, he pursued graduate work at Catholic University and at Harvard, earning an M.A. in 1966. In 1961 he published a novel, The Tiber Was Silver, in which a young seminarian wrestles with ideas of God and tenets of the Catholic Church. As a freelance journalist between 1962 and 1965, Novak covered the Second Vatican Council’s deliberations on the postwar world, then taught at Stanford University and the experimental college of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. In The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, perfectly suited to the times, Novak concentrates on those unmeltable “PIGS,” Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, in their view so long reviled: “The liberals always have despised us. We’ve got these mostly little jobs, and we drink beer and, my God, we bowl and watch television and we don’t read. It’s goddamn vicious snobbery. We’re sick of all these phoney integrated TV commercials with these upper-class Negroes. We know they’re phoney.” Though they felt detested, the ethnics gloried in judging themselves smarter and harder-working than Negroes and tougher than the college crowd. Novak went along, deploring the “bigotry” he saw in Protestant and Jewish intellectuals so prejudiced against the ethnics and so in awe of black militants.13

  Among Novak’s heroes were the straight-talking vice president Spiro Agnew, born Spiro T. Anagnostopoulos in Baltimore, and the Alabama governor George Wallace.* Those tough guys reminded Novak of Slovak men arguing in Johnstown barbershops or his “uncle drinking so much beer he threatened to lay his dick upon the porch rail and wash the whole damn street with steaming piss—while cursing the niggers in the mill below, and the Yankees in the mill above—millstones he felt pressing him.”14 Newly elected governor in 1963, George Wallace had proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and backed up his words by “standing in the schoolhouse door” to protect the University of Alabama from two black students.15 The university did finally admit the students (who eventually became honored alumni), but Wallace won, too, going on to pesky runs for the presidency in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976.†

  Richard Nixon picked up the theme, running on the Wallace-inspired, antiblack “southern strategy” in 1968, a ploy that served Republicans well past the Ronald Reagan era. Novak reports with pride that Reagan’s pollster had lifted “work, family, neighborhood, peace, strength” from him and used the slogan to rally Democrats for Reagan.16‡ Clearly, as they had for a century, races were still assumed to have racial temperaments, so the depiction of ethnic whites as temperamentally honest and hardworking enjoyed a very long life. At bottom, the southern strategy pitted white people—Americans—against an alien race of black degenerate families judged lacking those self-same virtues. How things had changed from a promising brotherhood of the postwar era to a time of black/white tensions in the 1970s! A classic text soon s
panned the two eras, capturing the mood of each moment from an academic point of view.

  IN THE late 1950s the sociologists Nathan Glazer (b. 1923) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) saw a trend and conceived a study of the various racial and ethnic groups in their own New York City. Glazer came from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant background and grew up in working-class East Harlem and the Bronx. He attended City College (where tuition was free); graduating in 1944, he went on to the University of Pennsylvania and to Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. in sociology and collaborated with David Riesman on The Lonely Crowd.* During the Kennedy administration of the early 1960s, Glazer worked in the War on Poverty in Washington, D.C., and got to know Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary of labor.

  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.*

  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.”18

  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.”21 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.* Basically, white versus black now sufficed as an American racial scheme—for the moment.

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  THE FOURTH ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  Agitating 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.1

  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 “raci
al” identities. As so often in the past—and adding confusion—the list of races included nationalities.2 (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.3

  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.4 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.