Table Of ContentMAINSTREAM
AND MARGINS
REVISITED
MAINSTREAM
AND MARGINS
REVISITED
Sixty Years of Commentary
on Minorities in America
PETER I. ROSE
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2017 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
Copyright © 2017 by Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2016027293
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rose, Peter Isaac, 1933- author.
Title: Mainstream and margins revisited : sixty years of commentary on
minorities in America / Peter I. Rose.
Description: New Brunswick [N.J.] : Transaction Publishers, 2017. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027293 (print) | LCCN 2016047973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781412864299 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781412863926 (eBook) | ISBN
9781412863926
Subjects: LCSH: United States--Race relations--20th century. | United
States--Ethnic relations--20th century. | United States--Race relations-
-21st century. | United States--Ethnic relations--21st century. | Race
relations in literature. | Ethnic relations in literature. | Minorities--
United States. | Immigrants--United States. | Refugees--United States.
Classification: LCC E184.A1 R7162 (print) | LCC E184.A1 (ebook) |
DDC 305.800973/0904--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027293
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-6429-9 (pbk)
In memory of Charles H. Page and Charles D. Lieber,
my first editors and much-missed friends.
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion.
I resist anything better than my own diversity.
—Walt Whitman, 1855
The point is to see that the hyphen connects instead of separates.
—John Dewey, 1915
The worst crime the white man has committed is to teach us
to hate ourselves.
—Malcolm X, 1972
Those who feed suspicion about immigrants and Muslims and poor people, and
people who aren’t likes “us,” and say that the reason that America is in decline
is because of “those people” didn’t just happen last week. That narrative has
been promoted for years.
—Barack Obama, 2016
Contents
Preface: Encountering American Dilemmas ix
Prologue 1
1 “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”:
Some Reflections on the Insider-Outsider Debate (1978) 3
Part I. The Marginality of a Model Minority
2 The Ghetto and Beyond: Reflections on Jewish
Life in America (1968) 29
3 Country Cousins: “Ambassadors to the Gentiles”
(1957, 1961, 1977, 1993) 45
4 Going to the Mountains: Seeking Respite in
“The Jewish Alps” (1990) 55
5 Admission to the Club: “The Mathew Principle”
and College Enrollment (2006) 59
Part II. Black and White in American Society
6 The Black Experience: Issues and Images (1969) 69
7 Social Physics: The Resurgence of Ethnicity (1974) 85
8 Blacks and Jews: The Strained Alliance (1981, 1994) 99
9 The Real McCoy? A Novel Look at Racial
Tensions in New York (1998) 119
10 Killing the Messenger: The Black Family and the
Politics of Race (2011) 125
11 Facts, Fiction, and Literary Ethnography: The
Controversy over Harper Lee’s New/Old Novel (2015) 133
Part III. On Strangers at the Gate
12 Long Night’s Journey: The Ordeal of the
Indochinese Refugees (1982, 2003) 145
13 The Harbor Masters: American Politics and
Refugee Policy (1984) 165
14 From Pariahs to Paragons: The Downs and Ups
of Americans from Asia (1985) 189
15 The Persistence of (an) Ethnicity: Resistance
to Americano Dreams (2005) 203
16 Making a Difference: William Allan Neilson
and the Rescue of Refugee Intellectuals (2005) 219
Part IV. Perspectives on a Stratified Society
17 Culture and Character: David Riesman
Reconsidered (1982) 241
18 It’s Almost 1984: Three Sociological Perspectives
on Social Issues in American Society (1983) 263
19 White America, Circa 2010: Two Views (2011, 2012) 277
20 Hillsborough Boy: Robin M. Williams, Jr.
and His Legacy (1999) 291
21 Studying “The Truly Disadvantaged”:
A Portrait of William Julius Wilson (2015) 307
Coda
22 The Threat of the “Other”: Old Challenges,
New Realities (2016) 325
About the Author 341
Index 343
Preface: Encountering
American Dilemmas
Thirty-five years ago, when we were fast approaching George Orwell’s
fateful year of rule by Big Brother, I wrote an essay titled, “It’s Almost
1984.” It did not focus on some pending total reorganization of an
imagined Stalinist-like society, but on concerns about one very real
aspect of our highly diverse nation and new challenges to all sorts
of racial, religious, and ethnic pluralism that was—and remains—the
warp and weft of America’s social fabric. Like Orwell’s concern with
totalitarianism, my own was based on persisting anxiety about rents
in that fabric and the ways three fictional sociologists—each repre-
senting one school of then-current thinking—sought to explain and
deal with them. That essay was the final one in a little volume of my
essays published in 1983. That book is this book, though it is now a
good bit longer and somewhat weightier in several aspects.
When first published, Mainstream and Margins consisted of eleven
pieces I had written over the first 25 years of my career. This almost
completely revised and much expanded iteration of that early book
incorporates seven of the original essays and adds fifteen more. While
revisiting the principal issues discussed in the first edition, subtitled
“Jews, Blacks, and Other Americans,” this one spans a much broader
period—1957-2017—and an expanded scope of concern. It includes a
new section on immigrants, refugees, and refugee policy, and those who
aid—and those who thwart—the movement of the dispossessed. That
part reflects my growing interest and concern with another of America’s
dilemmas, recurrent waves of xenophobic sentiment and attempts to
control the borders, sometimes—and seemingly paradoxically—joined
by those not “long off the boat” themselves. There is a reason for this shift.
After years of studying, writing, and teaching about generations of
Jews, race relations in the United States and America’s ethnic minori-
ties, in the late 1970s I began to explore the ways in which we were
ix
