Multicultural America Research Articles

Measurement of Race and Ethnicity in a Changing, Multicultural America

It is well accepted that concepts of race, ethnicity, and ancestry are changing constructs that reflect the social, economic, and political climate of the times. Studying the history of the collection of data on race, place of birth, Hispanic origin, and ancestry in US decennial censuses provides a better understanding of the race and ethnic concepts currently in use for official federal statistics. This history can help guide the evolution of these concepts for research on alternative measurement approaches, future censuses, and future statistics. The purpose of this paper is threefold. The first objective is to provide a historical overview of race and ethnic measurement in US decennial censuses. The second and third objectives are to present Census Bureau plans to experiment with alternative approaches to measuring race and ethnicity in the 2010 Census and to discuss race and ethnic measurement issues for future decennial censuses.

:The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865–1915

:The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865–1915

The Rise of Mutlicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise of Mutlicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 Ronald J. Zboray The Rise of Mutlicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915. By Susan L. Mizruchi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2008. The aim of Susan L. Mizruchi's ambitiously wide-ranging book, The Rise of Multi-cultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915, can be glimpsed through the theoretical lens of Maurice Charland's classic essay, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois," [Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133-50]. Charland examined how then-contemporary rhetoric constituted a collective subjectivity—as a "people"—shared among French provincial separatists, linked them to a salient past for their independence project, and constrained its newly constituted audience to seek secession from Canada as something justified by the very act of rhetorical constitution. In her book, Mizruchi similarly attempts to acknowledge rhetorically, through "a literary-cultural study," current-day American diversity as the essence of national identity with transhistorical roots dating to the period from the Civil War's end to just before the U.S. entry in World War I. "I invoke 'multiculturalism,'" she writes of a mid-twentieth-century term she dubs "deliberately anachronistic," "to underscore continuities between past and present." (3) By proffering a host of antecedents alternately embracing or decrying diversity, she, in short, invites her readers into a rhetorically-constituted subjectivity as an American people with a longstanding multicultural identity too often forgotten in today's culture wars over issues like immigration and racial profiling. Social difference and [End Page 169] obsessing about it is nothing new. The possible actions that can follow from Mizruchi's constitutive rhetoric include defending multiculturalism as something traditional against alarmists arguing that it is a historical departure and casting critics of it as predictably persistent, somewhat hackneyed, reactionary figures, almost folkoric landmarks within the landscape of cultural difference—gargoyles atop the American cathedral of diversity. Mizruchi sees rapid and vibrant economic development as the wedge that opened the nation's gates to cultural others. "An unrivaled expansion of the economy coincided with rising rates of immigration and migration," she claims, "making economic forms and institutions singularly receptive to these mobile populations." (289) A skeptic might argue that other countries had absorbed large labor forces from outside national boundaries or from among subalterns within, yet they maintained a single-dominant-culture hegemony that made the ethnic other virtually invisible while remaining stuck in lower-end occupations. Mizruchi accounts for this seeming American exceptionalism in two ways: 1) by recourse to the "social mobility" whipped dead by the New Social Historians of the 1960s and 1970s (she points to "much productive fusion of ethnic identities and economic aspirations"), and by reliance on a plausible if unproven assumption that "a developing print culture flourished through its incorporation and representation of this diversity." (2, 289) Hence, her subtitle, "economy and print culture," identifies what she sees as the motive forces behind the rise of multicultural America. That Mizruchi summons "print culture" as a key signifier licenses her to move effortlessly between literature and society, for, as New Literary Historicists are wont, she shuffles together classic texts by Mark Twain or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with subliterary ones like advertisements. The result shows that she more than met "the challenge of this book," which she indicates "is to convey the breadth and complexity of these developments, while at the same time capturing the variety of ways in which American writers responded." As a disciplinary achievement in English literary studies her book admirably succeeds in this. The book could be a very useful text for upper-level literature courses surveying the period, for it gives a robust and lively context for the writing. Moreover, paralleling the customary lecture sequencing of such courses, the book's eight thematic chapters unfold in a rough chronology, from writers' responses to the turmoil of the Civil War and its aftermath to their take on "the largely triumphant story of economic progress" albeit with waves of "human casualties" in its wake. (7) Viewed interdisciplinarily, however, the book must be approached with some caution. There is slippage here between multiculturalism as a singularly...

The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History in Philip Roth'sThe Human Stain

The evolving political landscape of a multicultural America grown disenchanted with the mythology of the melting pot had vast repercussions for the Jewish American literary imagination. Nonetheless, critical race theory has yet to take full stock of the role of Jewish writers in the debates over canonicity, representation, and multicultural literary genealogies occurring in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Philip Roth'sThe Human Stain, published in 2000, directly engages questions of literary history, race, and the position of the Jewish writer and intellectual in the canon wars. By depicting the tragedy of an African American man who passes into whiteness by passing for a Jewish professor, Roth uses the trope of passing to simultaneously critique the puritan impulse he perceives at the heart of the multicultural academy and write himself into the multicultural canon taking shape at the time.

Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings Andrew J. Falk (bio) Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings. By Michael Galchinsky. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. x + 256 pp. A rich American Jewish historiography has developed over the past thirty years, one that has detailed the construction of ethnic communities [End Page 232] and identities. Yet, as historians Hasia Diner and Tony Michels have written recently, scholars should focus more attention on the international political dimensions of the Jewish experience.1 More studies are needed that take what we know of complex transnational Jewish identities and examine their rich relations with the state, including intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. In Dancing at Three Weddings, Michael Galchinsky marries the two. The "three weddings" refer to Jews who "dance" in the worlds of nationalism, internationalism, and pluralism. In other words, modern American Jews are citizens of the world, citizens of multicultural America, and "imagined" citizens of Israel. These overlapping loyalties have influenced how Jews in general have approached human rights. After the Holocaust a generation of determined Jews blended many commitments: to core religious values such as tikkun olam, to international human rights, to Israeli nationalism, to American-style pluralism, and to an acute interest in self-preservation. The result was a clear mission and a desire to help draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the new United Nations, to create the state of Israel, to promote domestic civil rights, and to detect genocide around the globe. Whether acting because of, or in spite of, the absence of government intervention, activists filled a much needed void as advocates for victims. While many traditional histories examine genocide in graphic detail, Galchinsky's contribution is a catalog of the motivations and responses by a diverse community of Jews to deal with postwar tragedies. The story is not as heroic as one might think. The author argues that transnational Jewish activism in the area of international human rights has waned in the past half-century, and attributes the decline to these competing worlds of Jewish identity. Jewish nongovernmental organizations, for instance, devoted fewer resources to support their human rights initiatives. Meanwhile, Israeli Jews have become more active as lines blurred between human rights and state security with respect to United Nations resolutions, refuseniks in the former Soviet republics, and Israeli state actions in Palestinian-populated territories. Israel's vulnerable reputation before the UN contributed to its unwillingness, some might say inability, to respond. In several cases, as Galchinsky points out, a coalition of government officials, informal organizations, and individuals produced mixed results in their rescue and relief operations. This has been especially true when Jews responded late and inadequately to genocide perpetrated against non-Jewish victims. [End Page 233] Rather than looking at a particular NGO in a discrete period of time or place, the author is able to draw general conclusions. Readers undoubtedly will agree with the author when he writes that "this study makes no claim to comprehensiveness" (167). He prefers to rely on case examples of Russian Jews, non-Jews, Israeli Jews, and others to make his point. The book's organization is, therefore, thematic. For such an expansive topic, the author handles the details well and relies on many relevant sources, including UN resolutions, court decisions, treaties and international agreements, a series of personal interviews, and even the Torah. He also engages much of the existing literature, though some readers may conclude that more could have been done in this regard. For example, the author makes little use of correspondence, memoranda, and other documents from government collections and from NGOs relative to the extensive scope of the work. Readers familiar with the history may be reminded of other specific organizations and individuals not mentioned here. A number of prior studies could have been consulted. On the other hand, the broad view is part of the book's appeal, and it is accessible to a variety of audiences. Another drawback is in methodology. Though the author explains that "the book's main aim is largely historical rather than theoretical," some readers may be frustrated by its resistance to historical methods of organization and analysis...

"Favoritism Cannot Be Tolerated": Challenging Protestantism in America's Public Schools and Promoting the Neutral State

Asking us to reconsider the origins of American multiculturalism, Kevin M. Schultz's essay argues that modern multiculturalism's history extends back before the rise of demands from the holy trinity of class, race, and gender that emerged so forcefully in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Schultz finds an early articulation of the multicultural ideal in post-World War II America being made by groups rarely associated with multiculturalism today: Catholics and Jews. As one example of the emergence of the ideal, Schultz tells the story of what happened when the Gideons of the postwar era tried to bring the Bible to all of America's public school children. Catholics and Jews came together to challenge the Gideons' action, and, in doing so, demanded at least one key facet of multicultural America: state neutrality. In the words of the court, "favoritism cannot be tolerated," even if it was granted to a group within the dominant majority. In the case, Catholics and Jews made clear their desire for a public recognition of their identities, free choice as to when those unique identities mattered, and the removal of any punishments for maintaining social and cultural differences. Today's critics who see the rise of neutral "proceduralism" as something that deprives America of a robust and unifying vision of the common good miss the fact that the demand for state neutrality and group recognition was made out of an effort to force Americans to acknowledge the fact of their pluralism. Giving us a thicker description of the origins of American multiculturalism, Schultz shows us that multiculturalism, properly understood, is actually a key part of a vision of America's common good.

Defining American Identity in the Twenty-First Century: How Much “There” is There?

This study examines whether the increasing ethnic diversity of the United States is changing how the normative content of American identity is defined. It relies on a wide-ranging set of norms to test the claim that an increasingly multicultural America will engender a multicreedal America. In addressing this claim, the study provides an empirical assessment of the “multiple traditions” theory and develops more accurate measures of how Americans view the content of American identity than has typically been included in public opinion research. The results confirm the multiple traditions perspective, showing that a broad range of constitutive norms define being American. A complex and contradictory set of norms exist, and it is difficult to reduce them into a single measure of “Americanism.” The results further show that most Americans, regardless of their ethnic or immigrant background, share this complex view of the norms that constitute American identity, though there are signs of divergence to monitor.

Migrants Encounter Migrants in the City: the Changing Context of ‘Home’ for Second‐Generation Greek‐American Return Migrants

AbstractThis article looks at the ‘return’ migration of second‐generation Greek Americans to their parents’ homeland, Greece. It is based on interviews with, and written accounts supplied by, 40 participants in the research, all now living in the Athens region. The article addresses two main sets of questions. First, why do they relocate to Greece, what are they looking for, and how do they cope with difficulties and disappointments? Second, and more specifically, how do they react to the fact that Greece is no longer a homogenous hellenistic society, but has become in recent years a de facto multicultural one due to the presence of hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers and their families? Three hypotheses are proposed for this inter‐migrant encounter: returnees, shocked by the ‘new immigration’, view it negatively as upsetting the ‘pure Greek’ homeland they had hoped to find; returnees are more sympathetic because of their own families’ history as immigrants in multicultural America; and returnees differentiate themselves as ‘good’ migrants from Greece’s immigrants who are constructed as ‘bad’ migrants. Evidence from the migrants’ testimonies is found to support all three hypotheses; however, there is more support for the second one. In addition, a fourth outcome was voiced: that of discrimination against Greek Americans who are made to feel, in certain circumstances, outsiders by the ‘true’ Greeks. Suggestions are made for further comparative research.

Thomas Meinecke’s German Fictions of Multicultural America: Model or Admonition?

The end of the Cold War accelerated changes in the demographics of Germany that had been taking place in spurts since its founding: the settlement of Aussiedler from the East increased with the demise of the USSR, conflicts in the Balkans and in developing nations released new waves of refugees, and the descendants of Gastarbeiter from the early 1960s onward began to play a more visible role in German society and politics. As land of origin for the term “multicultural,” the United States presented a possible model for unified Germany as it contemplated a possible new identity as “Einwanderungsland. ” Writer, pop musician, and disc jockey Thomas Meinecke, attuned to American music, has written two novels set in the US that emphasize its legacy as an Einwanderungsland while rejecting the idea of the American melting pot. His two novels set in the US, the comic picaresque The Church of John F. Kennedy (1996) and his formless multi-narrator novel Hellblau (2001) both implement concepts from cultural studies theory to examine dimensions of the American multicultural society from the perspective of disillusioned post-unification Germans. Moving off the beaten path both in their contemporary travel and in their historical research, these German characters encounter a wide range of distinct ethnic heritages in the US that move between mutual hostility and productive cross-fertilization. Rather than a melting pot, the US presents itself as a jumbled conglomeration of continuously evolving hybrids generating a rich culture--especially in music-- but a frayed socio-economic fabric. German stereotypes of the US as a materialistic land without culture give way here to an image of a country that has generated new forms of culture through the interaction of various ethnic groups. Meinecke’s view of the US explores the trade-off between the dynamism of a fissured and fragmented pluralistic society and the stability of a homogeneous society in which one ethnic tradition clearly prevails. His novels thus anticipate the controversies emerging in the late twentieth century in both Germany and the US about the relative merits of a “Leitkultur” or a dominant “core culture” versus a heterogeneous multiculture.

The Fractious nation?: unity and division in contemporary American life

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Fractious Nation? Jonathan Rieder l. Getting a Fix on Fragmentation: Breakdown as Estimation Error, Rhetorical Strategy, and Organizational Accomplishment Jonathan Rieder PART 1. MOREAL UNITY, MORAL DIVISION 2. The Fetish of Difference Richard Bernstein 3. Fragments or Ties? The Defense of Difference Martha Minow 4. The Myth of Culture War: The Disparity between Private Opinion and Public Politics Paul DiMaggio 5. America's Jews: Highly Fragmented, Insufficiently Disputatious Jack Wertheimer PART 2. REFIGURING THE BOUNDARIES OF CITIZENSHIP: RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND NATIONAL BELONGING 6. Once Again, Strangers on Our Shores Mary C. Waters 7. Expelling Newcomers: The Eclipse of Constitutional Community Cecilia Munoz 8. The United States in the World Community: The Limits of National Sovereignty Douglas S. Massey 9. Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: Narrowing the Enduring Divisions of Race Jennifer Hochschild 10. The Ambivalence of Citizenship: African-American Intellectuals in Search of Community Kevin Gaines PART 3. UNITY AND DIVISION IN THE POLITICAL REALM 11. Social Provision and Civic Community: Beyond Fragmentation Theda Skocpol 12. Stable Fragmentation in Multicultural America Paul Starr 13. The Moral Compassion of True Conservatism John J. DiIulio Jr. 14. Shaking Off the Past: Third Ways, Fourth Ways, and the Urgency of Politics E.J. Dionne Jr. Epilogue: Into the Unknown: Unity and Conflict after September 11, 2001 Jonathan Rieder List of Contributors Index

Review: Racism, Sexism and the Media: The Rise of Class Communication in Multicultural America

Review: Racism, Sexism and the Media: The Rise of Class Communication in Multicultural America

Neglected Voices in the Multicultural America: Asian American Racial Politics and Its Implication for Multicultural Education

The author explores changing representations of Asians in the history of the United States through critical cultural and historical analysis and delineates the underlying power relationships in the racial discourse of the United States. The author argues that the representation of Asians, especially the model minority construct, has been influenced by the domestic and global economical and political milieu. However, the notion of Asian-ness is not a stable and unifying concept. It has changed and it will continue to change. By merely embracing diversity without a critical examination of racial politics in our classrooms and society, multicultural education only reinforces White hegemony.

Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (review)

The interrelationship among church, state, and school in the United States has been quite complicated, and any book on the subject is apt to be equally so. When the author is not only a historian but a professor of education and a Congregationalist pastor, such a work becomes even more complex.

Postethnic Experience in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Multiculturalism has meant something of a crisis for many Jews in the United States in that it has placed them in the paradoxical position of being part of the dominant white majority while they continue to maintain their particularity as an ethnic minority. Some scholars who subscribe to the ideal of a postethnic society as a means of resolving the divisiveness and fragmentation in multicultural America have, however, argued that this very dualism experienced by American Jews today may well point toward what they hope will come about in American society as a whole when it moves beyond multiculturalism. This essay explores some of the ways in which the contradictions experienced by Jewish Americans as members of an ethnic minority with majority status figure in recent Jewish American fiction. It concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications of the anomalous position of American Jews for the place of contemporary Jewish writing within the rapidly changing canon of American literature.

Marketing and Consumer Identity in Multicultural America

Marketing and Consumer Identity in Multicultural America

Marketing and consumer identity in multicultural America

The Marketing Environment in a Multicultural Society Consumer Identity in a Multicultural Society Marketing in a Multicultural Environment Mature Americans Fastest Growing Subculture US Latinos - Marye Tharp with Ernest Bromley Largest Ethnic Subculture African Americans - Jerome D Williams and Marye C Tharp Ethnic Roots, Cultural Diversity Gay Americans Sexual Orientation as Community Boundary Asian Americans - Satomi Furuichi et al In Search of the 'American Dream' Multicultural Markets and Marketing Future Directions

Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America

Journal Article Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America. By James W. Fraser. (New York: St. Martins, 1999. x, 278 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-312-21636-X.) Get access R. Laurence Moore R. Laurence Moore Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1494, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674790 Published: 01 March 2001

The Calling of Counterterrorism

The Calling of Counterterrorism Lon Troyer (bio) In honor and memory of Michael Rogin There may be no word in today’s political lexicon more volatile and provocative than “terrorist,” but the term itself was rarely invoked in the United States until the late 1960s. This is evidenced by the fact that, up until that point, the broad category of crimes that come to fall underneath the umbrella of terrorism (bank robberies, bombings, hijackings, thefts, vandalism, etc.) were categorized by their given names by those steadfast chroniclers of the everyday, newspaper indexers.[1] A need to track and organize the widespread unrest and variety of means, some violent, connected with Sixties social movements in the U.S. — as well as the guerrilla groups found abroad — found an efficient and exotic marker in terrorism. While its compatriot, “guerrilla warfare,” has for the most part atrophied from disuse, “terrorism” is a term that gains more weight and intensity with each passing year. The increased political currency of “terrorism” over the past three decades coincides with two distinct dynamics in American politics: the factionalization of Left movement politics after the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of neo-conservatism and the far Right. While some historians of the ‘60s like Todd Gitlin cite the resort to violence by a distinct minority of its members as a defining moment in the Left’s decline in the U.S., few have noted that the dissolution of movement politics was aided and abetted by the Left’s association with a term with the capacity to horrify and frighten a mass public. Although “terrorism” was used almost exclusively by the harshest critics of movement politics at the time, by the late 1990s, when fugitives like Katherine Ann Power and Sara Jane Olson were surrendering or arrested, it was common to find newspaper and television accounts blithely referring to their actions as those of terrorists. What had been political and violent had transmogrified into terrorism through the distorting lenses of time, distance, and usage, as if politics was never violent, as if valid political convictions could never propel one to violent means. Why was this so easy as the millennium drew to a close? (It would be nice to comfort oneself with the belief that political action had become more “enlightened” or “reasonable,” but even a cursory glance at the historical record makes that thought absurd.) The answer is found on the other side of the political spectrum. As many of the activists and fugitives of the ‘60s became lawyers, professors, restaurateurs and suburban community pillars in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a different “counterculture” arose in response to the changes Sixties movements had wrought. Angered by an increasingly multicultural America, frightened by powerful centralized federal government, or propelled by otherworldly concerns, bringing them under the microscope of that government’s watchful eye, figures on the far Right had begun to, for different purposes and to different ends, organize and often arm themselves. From the Branch Davidians to the White Aryan Resistance to the militia movements to Ruby Ridge, rightwing extremists picked up weapons as the Left laid them down. This was done more often under the guise of “self-defense” than “revolution,” but with the similar result of eliciting confrontations with law enforcement officials and federal agents. Sometimes their crimes were real, as in the assassinations of public figures they disagreed with, or feared, as in Randy Weaver’s threat to defend his land against any governmental interference, or merely speculative, as in the alleged child abuse that justified attacking the Waco encampment, but in all cases they were portrayed as terrorists, and it was the terrorist label that served to justify the violence committed by state actors against them. The political extremism of the far Right brought terrorism solidly into the domain of domestic politics in the U.S., situating terrorists inside, rather than primarily outside, our imaginative and physical borders. The ability to name members of domestic oppositional groups and extremist figures as terrorists was facilitated, from the ‘70s through the end of the Cold War, by a burgeoning institutional discourse that viewed political violence abroad as the product not of oppositional movements with...

Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience

Introduction: Black Studies and the Black Intellectual Tradition, by Manning MarableOne: Theorizing the Black World: Race in the Postcolonial, Post-Civil Rights Era1. Toward an Effective Antiracism, by Nikhil Pal Singh2. The Political Moment in Jamaica: The Dimensions of the Hegemonic Dissolution, by Brian Meeks3. Sandoms and Other Exotic Women: Prostitution and Race in the Caribbean, by Kamala Kempadoo4. Race and Revolution in Cuba: African-American Perspectives, by Manning Marable5. The Fire This Time: Harlem and Its Discontents at the Turn of the Century, by Johanna Fernandez6. Crack Cocaine and Harlem's Health., by Beverly Xaviera Watkins and Mindy Thompson FulliloveTwo: Mapping African-American Studies7. African-American Studies and the Warring Ideals: The Color Line Meets the Borderlands, by Johnnella E. Butler8. The Future of Black Studies: Political Communities and the Talented Tenth, by Joy James9. Black Studies and the Question of Class, by Bill Fletcher Jr.10. Black Studies: A Critical Reassessment, by Maulana Karenga11. Black Studies Revisited, by Martin Kilson12. Theorizing Black Studies: The Continuing Role of Community Service in the Study of Race and Class, by James Jennings13. A Debate on Activism in Black Studies, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Manning MarableThree: Afrocentrism and Its Critics14. Afrocentrism, Race, and Reason., by Molefi Kete Asante15. Afrocentrics, Afro-elitists, and Afro-eccentrics: The Polarization of Black Studies Since the Students Struggles of the Sixties, by Melba Joyce Boyd16. Reclaiming Culture: The Dialectics of Identity, by Leith Mullings17. Afrocentrism, Culture Nationalism, and the Problem with Essentialist Definitions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, by Barbara Ransby18. Afrocentricity and the American Dream, by Lee D. Baker19. Multinational, Multicultural America Versus White Supremacy, by Amiri BarakaFour: Race And Ethnicity in American Life20. The Problematic of Ethnic Studies, by Manning Marable21. Prophetic Alternatives: A Conversation with Cornel West22. Race in American Life: A Conversation with John Hope Franklin

Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America. By James W. Fraser. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 278 pp. $24.95

Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America. By James W. Fraser. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 278 pp. $24.95 Get access Elizabeth S. Carpenter Elizabeth S. Carpenter University of VirginiaCharlottesville, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 42, Issue 4, Autumn 2000, Pages 872–873, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/42.4.872 Published: 01 October 2000