MULTICULTURALISM

"Models of American Ethnic Relations:"
A Historical Perspective"
George M. Fredrickson
Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing,
Columbo, Cullen and Lisle, (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2004).

          Fredrickson presents a well-supported and balanced descriptive comparison of models representing relations between races over time in America. He begins with an important observation that skin color or physical appearances were not treated as conditions automatically disqualifying candidacy for assimilation. Just as missionaries in the mid-1800s subjected Native American Indians to assimilation pressures, conservatives today attribute the disadvantages of African Americans to cultural pathologies rather than genetic deficiencies. Ethnic hierarchy has been the background condition against which to compare all other conditions. It is the most influential or durable conception of relations between dissimilar groups, affecting at various times sequentially, the Irish, Italians, Chinese and Jews, as well as Native American Indians and African Americans.

          In the 1920s, scientific racism, eugenics and social Darwinism found widespread support in the US as well as in Nazi Germany. Henry Ford was renown as a proponent of these views and he had good relations with the Nazis. Immigration restrictions did reduce the anxiety level of nativists and immigrants achieved significant gains economically, professionally and became politically involved. The civil rights movement of the 1960s targeted the legalized racial hierarchy of southern states and Fredrickson argues that the continued disadvantages of African Americans constituted a racialized de-facto form of ethnic hierarchy.

          His description of assimilation is unnecessarily pejorative. He emphasizes "one-way" assimilation and describes it as conformity to a single, stable European--especially English--culture that presumes the superiority, purity, and unchanging character of this dominant culture. He claims that this amounts to a presumption that nothing in the original culture is worth preserving or would be preserved and, therefore, one-way assimilation is cultural genocide. The boundary between groups eligible for assimilation and those kept beyond acceptance has varied over history. Native American Indians were subjected to especially severe forced assimilation, which largely failed. In large part, assimilation campaigns targeting southern and eastern Europeans-before the 1920s and the drastic curtailment of immigration-were more successful.

          The civil rights legislation of the 1960s has failed to improve conditions for African Americans and many have rejected the integrationist ideal as insulting and devaluing to their distinctive culture and experience. Racial inequality cannot be resolved by integration or by one-way assimilation to white middle-class values.

          In other words he advocates a common civic culture in which all ethnic and racial groups participate without sacrificing their cultural distinctiveness. This is closer to the concept of cultural pluralism, which relies on a concept of relativity of culture that was not available in earlier centuries. The previous model held that culture was evolutionary, progressive and universalistic. Therefore, some cultures were superior because they had evolved more and progressed farther than the simpler, more primitive cultures. Cultural pluralism developed from the arguments of anthropologists that any given society must be interpreted only on its own terms, as a means of survival for that group in its environment. The advocates of cultural pluralism included Jews who valued their cultural distinctiveness and did not want to be "melted down" into an American pot.

         Fredrickson argues that the upward mobility of American Catholics and Jews together with revulsion at Nazi genocide led to a synthesis between cultural pluralism and assimilation in which only religion separated white Americans. In the 1980s consciousness of ethnic identity gained fresh prominence as some groups argued for the value and significance of cultural variations among the different ethnic origins of Euro-Americans. Other groups sought a competitive parity. "This ideal of cultural diversity and democracy was viewed by some of its critics as an invitation to national disunity and ethnic conflict" (640). The extreme point of view is called group separatism that leads logically to ethnic federalism. However, Fredrickson describes Afrocentrism, for example, as merely cultural and spiritual secession from American society. He concludes that these projects meet only skeptical responses because most members of minority groups recognize their impracticality and that they would lead to deteriorating conditions rather than improvements. Therefore, he concludes that ethnic separatism is merely a symptom of racial injustice and a call for action against it rather than a genuine portent of state fracture. The demands of a few militant ethnocentrists for self-segregation and isolation should not be mistaken for the ideal of a broad -based democratic multiculturalism. He supports cultural pluralism based ion inclusion and free choices of constructed ethnic identity as the best strategy for a just and cohesive society. He believes that only conditions of overt ethnic hierarchy would threaten national unity and cohesion.