Root of It All

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, ethnicity took on increased significance for many Americans having recent immigrant origins in Europe, largely but not wholly in response to the ongoing black freedom struggle. In a wide-ranging and continually provocative survey of this phenomenon, Matthew Frye Jacobson completely recasts our previous understandings of the so-called white ethnic insofar as its scope, content, timing, and significance.' Contradicting many contemporary observers who assumed the ethnic upsurge was merely a last gasp before assimilation, Jacobson forcefully argues that the revival has continued into our present day, bolstering this contention with a dizzying variety of examples from the realms of cultural production and politics. result has been a thoroughgoing reformulation of identity in the post-civil rights era-its touchstone moving, in his words, from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island. Going even further, Jacobson ventures, The ethnic revival recast American nationality, and it continues to color our judgment about who 'we' Americans are and who 'they' outside the 'we the people' are, too (p. 8). Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America is cultural and intellectual history par excellence and functions nicely in dialogue with Jacobson's previous works on earlier European immigrant generations.2 It also rides the crest of interest in the history of identity and racialized power in the United States that has mounted since the 1990s. Roots Too is an outstanding and original book. However-like those critics of whiteness studies who have leveled complaints about fragmentary and too-broadlyconstrued evidence3-social, urban, and local historians may come away from Jacobson's work incompletely satisfied. While he irrefutably establishes that the revival of interest in ethnicity took place not only at the individual level of psychic interiors, but also at the level of national political dialogue and mass-media distribution, Jacobson completely overlooks how the revival played out in-between, at the ethnic neighborhood and community level (p. 19). While such a perspective might not significantly challenge his