Library:Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification

Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	American Political Science Review
First published	September 1967
Type	Article
Source	https://www.jstor.org/stable/1976090

Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification was an article by Michael Parenti, published in the American Political Science Review in September 1967.

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A question that has puzzled students of ethnic politics can be stated as follows: in the face of increasing assimilation why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics with about the same frequency as in earlier decades? On the basis of his New Haven study, Robert Dahl observes that "...in spite of growing assimilation, ethnic factors continued to make themselves felt with astonishing tenacity." Nevertheless, he asserts, "the strength of ethnic ties as a factor in local politics surely must recede." Dahl sets up a "three-stage" model to describe how political assimilation will follow a more general social assimilation. However, one of his co-researchers, Raymond Wolfinger, demonstrates in a recent article in this Review that ethnic voting patterns persist into the second and third generations, and that "at least in New Haven, all the social changes of the 1940's and 1950's do not seem to have reduced the political importance of national origins." The same observation can be made of religious-ethnic identities, for as Wolfinger notes, citing data from the Elmira study, social mobility in no way diminishes the religious factor as a determinant of voting behaviour; in fact, in the case of upper and middle class Catholics and Protestants, religion seems to assume a heightened importance as a voting determinant. Wolfinger marshals evidence to support the arresting proposition that, melting pot or not, ethnic voting may be with us for a long time to come, a finding which craves explanation.

Part of the reason for the persistence of ethnic voting may rest in the political system itself. Rather than being a purely dependent variable, the political system, i.e., party, precinct workers, candidates, elections, patronage, etc., continues to rely upon ethnic strategies such as those extended to accommodate the claims of newly-arrived ethnic middle-class leadership; as a mediator and mobiliser of minority symbols and interests, the political system must be taken into account.

Wolfinger suggests several further explanations, which may be briefly summarised as follows: (a) "Family-political identification." Voting studies show that as many as four-fifths of all voters maintain the same party identification as did their parents, a continuity which is not merely a reflection of similar life conditions but is in part ascribable to the independent influence of primary group relations. (b) "Critical elections theory." The emergence of highly salient ethnic candidates and issues may cause a dramatic realignment so that a particular party becomes the repository of ethnic loyalty even after the ethnically salient candidate and issues have passed. (c) "Historical after-effects." Partisan affiliations, as Key and Munger have demonstrated for Indiana, persist generations after the reasons for their emergence have ceased to be politically relevant. Thus "even when ethnic salience has faded, [...] its political effects will remain." (d) "Militant core-city residue." The ethnic community may retain a group awareness despite a growing class heterogeneity because the assimilationist-minded will advance to the suburbs while those among the upwardly mobile who choose to stay in the ethnic city settlements are more likely to be the most strongly in-group oriented.

Several comments are in order before we proceed further: of the above explanations, there seems to be some question as to whether (a), (b), and (c) are concerned with independent variables. It does seem that the Key-Munger historical aftereffect idea in (c) is an extension of the "fixation" of the "crucial elections" notion in (b) and that both must rest in large part on the strong inheritance and continuity of family partisan identifications in (a). Explanation (d), while suggestive, is wanting in substantiating data. What evidence we have does not necessarily support the "militant core-city residue" idea, and certainly does not lend substance to the image of a homogenised, assimilated suburbia, as we shall see below. Nevertheless, the above hypotheses submitted by Wolfinger may serve as useful explanations for the political continuity of all social groups, ethnics included.

Yet, after all is said and done, I cannot free myself from the suspicion that perhaps a false problem has been created which can best be resolved by applying certain analytic and theoretical distinctions, supported by data that extend beyond the usual voting studies. If, in fact, it can be demonstrated that assimilation is not taking place, then the assimilation theory as propounded by Dahl, along with Wolfinger's alternate explanations are somewhat besides the point. And the question, why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics despite increasing assimilation, becomes the wrong one to ask—because the answer may simply be that minorities are not assimilating. At first glance, such an assertion seems to violate the evidence of our senses. Have not old-world immigrant cultures all but disappeared? Are not the ethnics scattering into homogeneously Americanised suburbs? Is not the educational level of the national minorities continually increasing? Are not ethnic occupational distributions changing? etc.

The confusion rests, I submit, in the failure—common to many of us political scientists, and even to some sociologists and anthropologists—to make a conceptual distinction between "acculturation" and "assimilation." The distinction is crucial in reading correct meaning into our data and in guiding us to fruitful theoretical conclusions. For while it is established that ethnics have accommodated themselves to American styles and customs (acculturation) by the second generation, and while perhaps they may enjoy increased occupational and geographic mobility, it is not at all clear that they are incorporating themselves into the structural-identificational-group relations of the dominant society (assimilation). On close examination we find that the term "assimilation," as commonly used, refers to a multiplicity of cultural, social, and identificational processes which need closer scrutiny.

I. Acculturation and Assimilation

At the outset, it is necessary, as Talcott Parsons and others have urged, to distinguish between cultural and social systems: the cultural is the system of beliefs, values, norms, practices, symbols, and ideas (science, art, artefacts, language, law, and learning included); the social is the system of interrelations and associations among individuals and groups. Thus a church, family, club, informal friendship group, formal organisation, etc., composed of individuals interacting in some kind of context involving roles and statuses are part of the social system, or one might say, represent particular sub-societal systems within the society; while the beliefs, symbols, and practices mediated and adhered to by members of the church, family, club, etc., are part of the cultural system or sub-cultural systems within the total culture. By abstracting two analytically distinct sets of components from the same concrete phenomena we are able to observe that, although there may often be an important interaction, the order of relationships and the actions and conditions within one are independent of those in the other. Attention to this independence increases analytical precision.

What was considered as one general process becomes a multifaceted configuration of processes. And if it can be said that there is no inevitable one-to-one relationship between the various processes, and that imperatives operative in one system are not wholly dependent upon the other, then ethnic political behaviour becomes something less of a mystery. For ethnic social sub-systems may persist or evolve new structures independent of the host society and despite dramatic cultural transitions in the direction of the mainstream culture.

Since early colonial times, nearly every group arriving in America has attempted to reconstruct communities that were replications of the old world societies from which they had emerged. With the exception of a few isolated sectarian enclaves such as the Hutterites, the Amish, and the Hasidic, they failed to do so. If culture is to be represented as the accumulated beliefs, styles, solutions, and practices which represent a society's total and continuing adjustment to its environment, then it would seem to follow that no specific cultural system can be transplanted from one environment to another without some measure of change. Unable to draw upon a complete cultural base of their own in the new world, and with no larger constellation of societal and institutional forces beyond the ghetto boundaries to back them, the immigrants eventually lost the battle to maintain their indigenous ways. By the second generation, attention was directed almost exclusively towards American events and standards, American language, dress, recreation, work, and mass media, while interest in the old world culture became minimal or, more usually, non-existent. To one extent or another, all major historical and sociological studies of immigration and ethnicity document this cultural transition of the American-born generation.

However, such acculturation was most often not followed by social assimilation; the group became "Americanised" in much of its cultural practices, but this says little about its social relations with the host society. In the face of widespread acculturation, the minority still maintained a social sub-structure encompassing primary and secondary group relations composed essentially of fellow ethnics. A study of a Polish-American industrial town illustrates this cultural-social distinction. The Polish children treat their immigrant parents with either patronisation or contempt, speak American slang, are addicted to American popular music and popular culture, and accept fully the American way of piling up money and material goods when possible. Yet they keep almost all their social contacts within the confines of the Polish-American community and have no direct exposure to, and little interest in, middle-class American society. Similar findings were made by White and Gans in their respective studies—done twenty years apart—of Italian-American communities in Boston. American styles, language, sports, and consumption patterns predominated, but interpersonal relations and social group structures were almost exclusively Italian-American in both the North End of the 1940's and the West End of the 1960's.

From birth in the sectarian hospital to childhood play-groups to cliques and fraternities in high school and college to the selection of a spouse, a church affiliation, social and service clubs, a vacation resort, and, as life nears completion, an old-age home and sectarian cemetery—the ethnic, if he so desires, may live within the confines of his sub-societal matrix—and many do. Even if he should find himself in the oppressively integrated confines of prison, the ethnic discovers that Italian, Irish, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican inmates coalesce into distinct groups in "a complex web of prejudices and hostilities, friendship and alliances."

Hollingshead, in a study of New Haven, discerned vertical social divisions based on race, religion, and national origin along with the expected horizontal cleavages due to income and residence. Cutting across the class strata were the parallel dissections of the black and white worlds, with the latter further fissured into Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant components which, in turn, subdivided into Irish, Italian, Polish, et cetera. Within this highly compartmentalised world were to be found ethnic associational patterns.

II. Heterogeneity Within the Homogeneous Society

Could not such unassimilated sub-structures be more representative of a time when urban areas were segmented into ghettos untouched by post-war affluence, upward occupational mobility and treks to the suburbs? This is the question which seems to anticipate both Dahl and Wolfinger. In actuality, while individual ethnics have entered professional and occupational roles previously beyond their reach, minority group mobility has not been as dramatic as is often supposed. A comparison of first and second generation occupational statuses as reported in the 1950 national census shows no evidence of any substantial convergence of intergroup status levels. The occupational differences among ethnic groups, with the Irish as a possible exception, remain virtually the same for both generations, leading C. B. Nam to observe that even with the absence of large-scale immigration, "the importance of nationality distinctions for the American stratification system will remain for some time to come." If today's ethnics enjoy a better living standard than did their parents, it is because there has been an across-the-board rise throughout America. Fewer pick-and-shovel jobs and more white collar positions for minority members are less the result of ethnic mobility than of an overall structural transition in our national economy and the composition of our labour force.

Furthermore, despite our popular literature on the hopeless homogeneity of suburbia, suburbs are not great social melting pots. Scott Greer, after noting the breakup of some of the central city ethnic communities, cautions: "The staying force of the ethnic community [in suburbia] must not be underestimated." The good Catholic, for instance, "can live most of his life, aside from work, within a Catholic environment," in a sub-societal network of schools, religious endogamy, family, church, social, athletic, and youth organisations, and Catholic residential areas. Similarly, Robert Wood observes that suburbs tend towards ethnic clusters. In the more "mixed areas," ethnic political blocs are not unknown. As in the city, the tension between older resident and newcomer sometimes reinforces ethnic political alignments and ethnic social identifications. Minority concentrations are less visible in suburban than in urban areas because less immigrant and second-generation persons reside there. Lieberson's study of ten major metropolitan areas shows that the groups most highly segregated from native whites in the central city are also most residentially concentrated in the suburbs, so that suburban patterns bear a strong similarity to those found in the city.

Finally, residential segregation is not a necessary prerequisite for the maintenance of an ethnic sub-societal structure; a group can maintain ethnic social cohesion and identify, while lacking an ecological basis. The Jews of Park Forest live scattered over a wider area and "participate with other Park Foresters in American middle-class culture," that is, they clearly are acculturated. Yet in one year a Jewish sub-community consisting of informal friendship groups, a women's club, a B'nai B'rith lodge, and a Sunday School had emerged. Similarly distinct Lutheran and Catholic social groupings also had developed in which national origin played a large part. (Religion, according to Herbert Gans, was not the exclusive concern of any of the three groups.)

The neighbourhood stores, bars, coffee-shops, barber shops, and fraternal clubrooms which serve as social nerve centres in the ecologically contiguous first-settlement urban areas are difficult to reconstruct in the new topography of shopping centres and one-family homes, but they are frequently replaced by suburban-styled church, charity, and social organisations, informal evening home-centred gatherings and extended family ties kept intact over a wide area with the technical assistance of the omnipresent automobile. The move to second and third settlement areas and the emergence of American-born generations, rather than presaging an inevitable process of disintegration has led to new adjustments in minority organisation and communication. Even when most of the lifestyles assume an American middle-class stamp, these in-group social patterns reinforce ethnic identifications and seem to give them an enduring nature. Today identifiable groups remain not as survivals from the age of immigration but with new attributes many of which were unknown to the immigrants. In short, changes are taking place in ethnic social patterns, but the direction does not seem to be towards greater assimilation into the dominant Anglo-American social structure.

In addition to the movement of ethnics from first settlement areas to the surrounding suburbs there is a smaller "secondary migration" to the Far West. What little evidence we have of this phenomenon suggests that highly visible acculturation styles do not lead to the loss of ethnic consciousness. The numerous Italian, Armenian, Greek, Finnish, and Jewish sub-societal organisations, to cite the West Coast groups that have come to my attention, suggest that structural assimilation into the Anglo-Protestant mainstream is far from inevitable in the "newer America." Friedman, observing how the Jews in Alberquerque are so well integrated as to be "almost indistinguishable from the community at large," then goes on to describe a Jewish network of social organisations such as Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, Shul, Temple, et cetera. The strenuous efforts made by West Coast Greek-Americans on behalf of Mayor Christopher of San Francisco, including appeals that reached segments of the Greek community in New York, indicate that old-style political ethnic appeals are not unknown in California. The recent gubernational contest in Nevada, with its appeals to Mormons, Catholics, and Italians, moved one observer to comment that "the Nevada campaign made it clear once again that American elections more often than not are heavily dependent on a maze of ethnic, religious, and minority group voting factors that few candidates discuss in public." At the same time, the emerging political articulation of Mexican-Americans throughout the Far West should remind us that growing acculturation often leads to more rather than less ethnic political awareness.

In general terms, the new "affluence," often cited as a conductor of greater assimilation, may actually provide minorities with the financial and psychological wherewithal for building even more elaborate parallel sub-societal structures, including those needed for political action. In prosperous suburban locales, while the oldest and most exclusive country clubs belong to old-stock Protestant families, the newer clubs are of Jewish or varying Catholic-ethnic antecedents. Among Chicago's debutantes, established "society," primarily Anglo-Protestant, holds a coming-out at the Passavant hospital ball. Debutantes of other origins make do with a Presentation Ball (Jewish), a Links Ball (Black), and the White and Red Ball (Polish). Similar developments can be observed in numerous other urban and suburban regions. Rather than the expected structural assimilation, parallel social structures flourish among the more affluent ethnics. Increasing prosperity among Catholics has been accompanied by an increase in Catholic institutional and social organisations including a vast parochial education system, and the proliferation in sectarian higher education often means a heightened ethnic consciousness. Thus Lenski finds, after controlling for income and party affiliation, that parochially-educated Catholics tend to be more doctrinally orthodox and politically conservative than publicly-educated Catholics.

If ethnic social relations show this notable viability, it might also be remembered that ethnic subcultures have not been totally absorbed into mainstream America. Numerous writers have observed the influence of ethnic cultural valuations on political life, causing one to conclude that not only is there slim evidence to show that assimilation is taking place, but there is even some question as to whether acculturation is anywhere complete.

That ethnic subcultures may still operate as independent variables in political life can be seen in the recent Wilson and Banfield study. In twenty referenda elections held in seven major cities between 1956 and 1963 for expenditures to pay for public services such as hospitals, schools, and parks, it was found that the groups which, because of their income level, would pay little or nothing while benefitting most, were least likely to support such services, namely Poles, Czechs, Italians, Irish, and other ethnics. Conversely, upper-income White Protestants and Jews, the very groups that would be paying the costs while benefitting least, were the strongest supporters of these proposed expenditures. The correlations are too compelling for one to assume that the voters of all groups were acting out of ignorance of their actual material interests. More likely, the authors conclude, there is something in the White Protestant and Jewish subcultural belief systems which tends "to be more public-regarding and less private—[self or family]-regarding" than in other ethnic subcultures. In sum, cultural belief systems or residual components of such systems may persist as cultural and political forces independently of objective and material factors.