The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions

241 Pages·2013·9.074 MB·English

by  Vilna Bashi Treitler

THE ETHNIC PROJECT
Stanford Studies in
COMPARATIVE RACE AND ETHNICITY
THE ETHNIC PROJECT
Transforming Racial Fiction
into Ethnic Factions
Vilna Bashi Treitler
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bashi Treitler, Vilna, author.
The ethnic project : transforming racial fiction into ethnic factions / Vilna Bashi
Treitler.
pages cm--(Stanford studies in comparative race and ethnicity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-5771-3 (cloth : alk. paper)--
ISBN 978-0-8047-5772-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ethnicity--United States--History. 2. Racism--United States--History. 3. Race
--Social aspects--United States--History. 4. United States--Ethnic relations--
History. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in comparative race and ethnicity.
E184.A1B273 2013
305.800973--dc23 2013017962
ISBN 978-0-8047-8728-4 (electronic)
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond
People are history: Their experiences, feelings, adjustments,
imaginings, hopes, uncertainties, dreams, fears, regrets,
tragedies, and triumphs compose our past. . . . Our parents
and grandparents . . . are worthy of scholarly attention: they
have been actors in history, making choices as they left their
homelands and settled in America. They helped to transform
their adopted country, and in turn, were themselves changed
as they became Americans.
Ronald Takaki, A Larger Memory:
A History of Our Diversity, with Voices

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1. Racism and Ethnic Myths 1
2. How Ethnic and Racial Structures Operate 19
3. Ethnic Winners and Losers 43
4. The Irish, Chinese, Italians, and Jews:
Successful Ethnic Projects 67
5. The Native Americans, Mexicans, and
Afro-Caribbeans: Struggling Ethnic Projects 103
6. African Americans and the Failed Ethnic Project 139
7. The Future of U.S. Ethnoracism 171
Notes 187
Index 217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Well, if race isn’t biological, then what is it?” Students would ask this ques-
tion over the many years that I have worked to teach them that race is socially
constructed. And I always thought it was wholly insufficient to tell students
that race isn’t real, but racism is. Surely, as analysts of our social world, we so-
ciologists could come up with something more theoretically sophisticated than
simply saying to our students that race is no more than the trope that allows
racism to happen. I am especially grateful to those undergraduate students who
journeyed with me in the classroom as I moved toward a more complex and
satisfying answer to the question, for that journey led me to writing this book.
With my graduate students, I explored and taught them what I call “race
theory”—works of writers who had grappled with questions about where race
comes from, what it accomplishes, or whether it had structure. I developed
a course that I called “Comparative Racial Structures,” where I taught (and
learned) that what we know about race is best understood in a comparative
context, because its transparent and “unreal” nature makes it inordinately dif-
ficult to put a finger on race when you’re standing right in the midst of it. The
lessons I learned from bringing comparative material together for my students
are the subject of chapter 2. The ideas behind subsequent chapters of this book