Irish Stew

TO THE STRAINS of a professional polka band, Chicopee proclaims itself the Kielbasa Capital of the World, while across town South Boston mothers wear buttons calling Southie "The Irish Riviera." Groups bound by common heritage are attracting more and more attention from the media: Londoners picket the Bolshoi to show their sympathy for Russian Jews, Brando passes up his Oscar for the sake of Native Americans, and the Basques help Franco destroy himself. Filmmakers have taken a renewed interest in the ethnic backgrounds of their protagonists, from Jimmy Cliff to the Corleones, and even prime time TV, exploiting the trend for all its worth, has its own Jeffersons and Bunkers, Chicos and Rhodas.

We're thinking about ethnics more, but is it because they are becoming more group conscious, and acting more like groups, or are we simply tuning in to a fact of social life that has been around since the Pharaohs chased the Jews across the pages of the Old Testament? According to Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, who in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience have collected sixteen essays by different authors on various aspects (both theoretical and empirical) of ethnicity, the world is becoming more ethnic. They claim an increasing number of people in different countries and in different situations are becoming conscious of their group distinctiveness and the "rights they derive from this group character."

Their argument, presented in a brief, admittedly non-comprehensive introduction to the book, follows from the findings of Beyond the Melting Pot, their study of New York's ethnics published twelve years ago which concluded that ethnic ties and characteristics were strong and showed no signs of disappearing. Their book was one of the first to challenge the liberal creed that all the people whose grandparents had passed through Ellis Island were assimilating into one homogenized mass of apple pie-eating Americans.

AS EVIDENCE for their belief that these ties are binding more and more people together today, Moynihan and Glazer point to the sheer number of ethnic conflicts that have erupted in the past twenty years: Catholic and Protestant in Belfast, Walloon and Fleming in Belgium, Greek and Turk in Cyprus, black and white in the US, etc., etc. They appear depressingly correct on that point.

Their other major argument is that both modern welfare and socialist states encourage ethnics to band together politically because it is easier to be responsive to their demands than to those of larger, less clearly defined groups, such as "workers," or "blue collar employees." Strategically, the state fosters the growth of groups small enough to accomodate (imagine the costs if the government actually wanted to help out all workers) and small enough to feel the benefits of a concession. Glazer and Moynihan neglect to mention the relative ease with which a state can co-opt and control an oppressed and potentially troublesome group once they are convinced they must fight for their own sliver of the pie rather than join ranks with other hungry people.

More difficult to accept is their contention that the success of an ethnic group depends on its "socially established values," that groups end up at the bottom of the social ladder because their beliefs and attitudes are different from those of the leaders of society. The groups whose norms best approximate "normal" values reap the rewards; others suffer the punishments. So, if Chicanos happen to get put in the fields all the time, it must be because they perceive the world differently from the Gallo brothers. In a way it is their own fault for thinking like that. If this seems a conservative conclusion, remember that Moynihan, the utility man of the Nixon-Ford administration, and Glazer are members of the right wing of the liberal school of American sociology, representing a position somewhere to the left of Social Darwinism but way to the right of anything Marxist. They didn't end up at Harvard for nothing.

THEIR "SOCIAL NORM" ARGUMENT is flawed. It does nothing to explain the considerable variations of status within ethnic groups: why, for example, a large number of Irish-Americans live in poverty in neighborhoods like South Boston while others sit on the boards of major corporations or in the White House or even in the United Nations. Similarly, if a group advances because its behavior and attitudes conform to social norms, it's difficult to explain the economic and political power of the Sicilian Mafiosi, who never went to college, joined the Rotary Club, or read Robert Dahl.

Still, just like you don't have to be Jewish to love Levi's rye bread, you don't have to agree with Glazer and Moynihan to find their collection of essays useful. The topics range from ethnic political force to the transmission of cultural heritage, the approaches run from anthropological to straight political analysis, and the regions studied include Uganda, Southeast Asia, Russia, Canada (Canada?) and India.

Much of the book was written at Harvard. In a fascinating study of Chinese in the Carribean, Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology, comes to the conclusion that ethnic allegiance is not as powerful as Glazer and Moynihan make it out to be. Richard Pipes, professor of History, discusses nationality problems in the Soviet Union, and Martin Kilson, professor of Government, presents a case study of black political attitudes and activity during the late '60's in the context of increasing black ethnicity.

If our current fascination with ethnics continues, we may be in for sitcoms about Estonians ("At Home with Dmitri") or Samoans ("The Boa-Boas"). Until Rhoda moves in with Chico next door to the Montefuscos and nobody mentions it, we'll know that the pot hasn't melted.