“Consider Phlebas”

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land [1]

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Combining gender, race and class analyses and employing these comparatively (i.e., not just to African American migration but to immigration generally), reveals the fact that both positive and negative characterizations of black migration and community formation which have dominated scholarship are products of a historical archive that places barriers in the way of the achievement of both racial equality and a society oriented towards multiculturalism. It is important to stress that both positive and negative characterizations obstruct us. We cannot simply substitute positive stereotypes for negative ones and believe that we have accomplished our task. This has been one of the failings of some of the major American theorists of cultural pluralism, people like Randolph Bourne and (during the earlier part of his career) W. E. B. Du Bois. Such intellectuals attempted to imagine a world where different cultures, each seen in its “best” light, could exist in harmony together, where Du Bois might sit with Shakespeare without the latter wincing, where the Jew might live alongside the Gentile in a “trans-National America”. [2]

Reaching for the highest expression of each culture, particularly at a time when cultures tended to be reduced to their ethnic and racial essences, imposed a hierarchy upon each one, and this hierarchy often matched that supposed to exist by theorists of “high culture.” In other words, these multiculturalists tended to make culture static and valorize aspects of a culture bearing a very similar code to that valorized by Social Darwinism within mainstream culture. Certain, gender, color, class and religious practices were privileged at the expense of others. One of our objectives as historians, therefore, should be to contest, simultaneously, those notions enabling hegemonic culture to reproduce itself with only minor modification, and those that enable essentialist and hegemonic ethno-nationalist cultures to reproduce themselves too.

Of course, one of the prime objectives of trying to do this is to enable us to question policies initiated for dealing with what used to be called the “Social Question”, but which now goes by the name, “the problem of the underclass.” Such policy initiatives, ranging from the periods of the “Great Society” programs, to that of “benign neglect” and the current open war on the poor, must be contested on the grounds that they are products of a history of thinking about lower-class people that has either denigrated them or given them agency in such a way as to leave fundamental American hegemonic (imperial, if you will) assumptions unchanged. Rather than contesting policies on these grounds, however, poverty theorists, of either the right or the left, have tended to work within an American framework that leaves debates at the level of whether it is possible or desirable to institute social programs that endeavor to uplift the poor.

Often it is conservative thinkers, who, in spite of the obvious selfishness of their position, are the more aware of the truly American parameters of this debate. They, after all, often believe that the perquisites of American society cannot be shared by all (that they then use malicious arguments to justify the exclusion of those who do not get a piece of the pie is contemptible), while a liberal is inclined to believe that those benefits can be extended to all Americans, without recognizing that the nature of “American” itself is one that is strictly controlled and exclusionary. The liberal, often unwittingly, will displace his animosity toward the urban poor onto those beyond U.S. boundaries. If unwelcome foreigners should cross those boundaries in order to share in the perquisites of American society, they become a threat as real as that seen by the conservative among the urban poor. If they, through their national governments, threaten the trading position of the United States, by which perquisites can be secured, they too will be vilified.

Theorizing migration is central to this response to poverty. “Success” and “failure” have been attributed to different migrant groups according to their ability to rise out of the poverty associated with the group’s early days in the United States. This in turn is dependent upon the group being able to overcome the rampant prejudice and discrimination by challenging negative stereotypes employed against them. Historically, those discriminated against have not challenged the way in which those negative characterizations were initially constructed and then reconstructed. For some groups eschewing such a challenge has been a most successful approach to improving their position in the United States. And, one might add, the myth of American progress and the almost unchallenged assumption of progress underlying American history, gave the appearance that this method of assimilation might be employed by all groups, so that the perquisites of American society might be shared by all Americans.

Here the division between American conservative and American liberal resurfaces. The former sees the limits of American growth (if it is to be parceled out to everyone and not carefully managed) and argues that some groups have succeeded while others have failed according to their innate intellectual capacities or the kinds of cultural baggage they brought with them from the “old world.” The latter believes that if the “last of the immigrants” or “the sons and daughters of the slaves” could be taught (and funded) to give themselves a historical and cultural facelift, then all would be well. Again, what liberals miss is their own conformity to the limits of nationhood; fluctuating immigration levels and trade imbalances define the extent of their liberality. Moreover, emphasis on culture still remains crucial to this position. “Underclass” culture, according to this view, differs from “mainstream” culture only because members of the “underclass” are not given the opportunities that “mainstream” people have. While this position is preferable to the conservatives’ ridicule and dismissal of lower-class people, it nonetheless exaggerates the extent to which people cut off from mainstream opportunities create alternative cultures, and ironically leads to the liberals’ disgruntlement when members of the underclass seem unwilling to take advantage of all the opportunities given them.[3] The position also ignores the ways in which difference is imposed on non-mainstream cultures from the mainstream, or, where it is present, how it has been transmogrified in mainstream political discourse from difference into deviance. In such a situation, the potential for change is circumscribed because the social relations that gave rise to the ethnic and racial stereotypes remain, even while ethnic and racial discourse undergoes transformation.[4]

The unraveling of the American consensus in the 1950s and 1960s showed that the American dream could not continue indefinitely – the “New Frontier” could not remain open forever – and that not all groups would fit within the Civil Rights' agenda of inclusion into an open and expansive American society. First of all, some groups were less able to challenge negative stereotypes. African Americans employing an assimilationist tack were in a severely disadvantaged position. Labeled as a result of their previous condition of slavery, or because of “racial” characteristics like skin pigmentation, escaping from the bottom rung of American society has been most difficult. Occasional use of the Irish, the Chinese, the Koreans, and others, as the group that ought to replace them at the bottom of society led to momentary advances; in some instances, however, some African Americans advanced at the expense of others by highlighting their own worthiness and, implicitly, degrading other members of their “own race”.

Second, the positive statements about one group used to advance its position were necessarily either implicitly or explicitly relational. Each statement was based upon assumptions about what was considered worthy or unworthy, and all institutions created to help advance the position of a particular ethnic group used this currency. In the process, those groups which had more resources – cultural capital, financial and occupational security – on the whole, ended up displacing those with fewer resources, and endeavored to use the assumed inferiority of the less well-endowed group to advance their own position. African Americans, in particular, did not have equal access to such resources. The apotheosis of the free labor/slave labor dichotomy within nineteenth-century republican ideology, along with the increasingly widespread assumptions about race (white/black) and gender (masculinity/emasculation) associated with these two concepts provided barriers to advancement for African Americans within a society that was reconstructed after the Civil War on the basis of free labor. In such a situation, people arriving in America from countries where they lived in virtual or actual slavery, could elide some of the most negative characterizations that dogged African Americans, not because they were better prepared or more capable, but because they simply were not automatically associated with the condition of servitude and emasculation.

The truth of this can be found in the relative “success” of Afro-Caribbeans in the United States, compared to their lack of such “advancement” (employing the terminology of the migration discourse for the moment) either in Britain or in Caribbean countries. In the United States Afro-Caribbeans have taken on a position above that of African Americans. They are often associated with small-scale businesses and both celebrated and lampooned for being acquisitively minded. They are considered to be successful immigrants. In Britain and the Caribbean, however, the same groups of people (often directly related to those in the United States) have been dislodged by Chinese and South Asians, who, merely by the process of migration and redefinition have been able to throw off imperial characterizations of servitude attributed to them in their place of origin.

Such ability to redefine oneself, seemingly inextricably linked to migration, is in fact linked only in varying degrees. The process of migration is indeed one of possibility, but, especially when such movement occurs within the bounds of one state or constitutional system (the United States or the British Empire/Commonwealth, for example), this potential is circumscribed by hegemonic assumptions that prevail about the nature of the group migrating. In part, the differentiation between those people who move and those who migrate, between those classed as migrants and others called refugees, depends on the ability of the individuals involved to define themselves and their journey.

What, then, are the specific characterizations of African Americans which have been thrown up by immigration and migration literature? Given the relational aspect to such stereotypes, the best way to describe them is in relation to those of other ethnic groups. A useful text for our purposes is Philadelphia: A Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace, one of the American Guide Series put out by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1937.[5] This work provides a very clear sense of the various stereotypes of different ethnic groups living in Philadelphia during the 1930s, many of which remain with us to this day, though in muted and modified form.

“City Tour number 4”, which guides the reader through the heart of the city, up and down Broad Street, is entitled “Through the Melting Pot.”[6] Along this street can be found, “the persistence of peasant folkways – weddings, funerals, and christenings conducted with all the ceremony which custom demanded in European villages.” The authors proceed to describe each ethnic group. The Irish, “who have long been the dominant element in the section, are represented by an array of political organizations and athletic clubs”:

Spicing the melting pot with Celtic aggressiveness are the Irish.... Prime factors in the military and civil work of forming the new Nation, they are attracted by the hurly-burly of politics – perhaps because the element of competition in a political fight appeals to their traditional pugnacity, or perhaps because a successful politician must be successful “mixer,” a type to which the Gaelic sense of humor and love of conversation are peculiarly adapted. (102)

The Jews are represented by their religious organizations: “Until a decade or so ago, synagogues, bearded orthodox rabbis, and devout women in shawls and wigs recreated the atmosphere of an Old World ghetto.”

Meanwhile, “a slice of Locust Street, between Tenth and Eleventh, is largely Greek,” and these people are noted for the “Hellene's unabashed love of gaiety...” By contrast, the Italian is noted for anything but gaiety. “The heart of Little Italy,” the Guide tells us, “throbs at Eighth and Christian Streets – the scene of numerous gang murders in the days of prohibition.” The Italians’ streets are lined “with undertakers’ establishments, displaying elaborate candlelit coffins, music stores plastered with bravely colored chromos of the reigning sovereigns of Italy, and poultry markets, smelling of their cackling wares.” Italians, the Guide suggests, “do not assimilate as easily as some of the other groups” and “are inclined to settle in sharply defined districts,” because they prefer “the foods and customs of their homeland.” Nevertheless, since they are “naturally light-hearted, fond of music, spicy food, and sour wine, this group has done much to soften the sterner ways of earlier Quaker and German settlers.” (101) Clearly negative characterizations associated with Italian communities did not begin with The Godfather and The Sopranos!

Three other groups, the Germans, the Polish, and the Chinese, are mentioned elsewhere in the Guide. Germans assimilate easily. “Intermarriage is common, and the average German is quick to adopt many American customs and to acquire a facile knowledge of English.” The German-American clubs and the two German language dailies in the city, however, suggest a desire to maintain “a strong attachment to the Fatherland.”(101) “Rigidly trained in his homeland to respect all forms of constituted authority [this was the age of Hitler, after all], and imbued with the Teutonic ideal of “Church, Home and Children,” the “transplanted German makes a good citizen.” The city’s Polish population, meanwhile, is a “stabilizing influence.” “Home-loving, hard-working, and unobtrusive, they maintain in large measure the customs and language of their native country.”

Each ethnic group, then, has earned a particular description, fitting into a hierarchy of sorts. The Irish, always noted for their political acuity, are perhaps to be preferred to the Jews with their religiosity and learning. The Greek’s gaiety is certainly to be preferred to the Italian’s morbidness. But regardless of the exact position that each group holds on the hierarchy, the stereotypes are important as they bind each group together in the face of internal division. As the title of the tour suggests, the myth of the time was one of a “melting pot.” For the authors, the ethnic traits seem to be vanishing with the atmosphere of the “old world ghetto.” They are becoming mere curiosities, at a time when economic forces seem to be pulling “white ethnics” into a single white working class. But as curiosities, they are still important. Each ethnic essence connotes masculinity and success. The Irish are noted, not (as an Upper-class Anglo-American might have described them) for their maids, but for their politicians and athletes; the jolly Greek, is not the over-burdened and, perhaps depressed, Greek mother trying to keep a family together in the face of so much jollity; the Italian is a gangster, clearly a legitimate image in America, despised by some but also loved by many; and, the Jew is a man of religion. In such a “melting pot” peoples can be melded together in what David Roediger and others describe as a process of “becoming white,” but in such a process accentuation of ethnic culture remains important.[7]

African Americans, though, could not be whitened (though they could pass), and the guidebook maintains a separate-but-equal posture toward black Philadelphians. While the guide informs the reader that South Philadelphia is “the home of one of the greatest Negro populations in the North,” this seems mainly to refer to size rather than anything else. No positive adjective that might have been used is employed to describe African Americans. They are not hard-working, gay (though with the “Sambo” stereotype, this would have negative associations for black people anyway), nor are they athletic, political, or religious (though once again, the type of religious experience could have been made to seem negative through words like emotionalism” and “animalistic”). In fact, the only characterization of black communities comes in a description of the poverty-stricken areas of South Philadelphia. Such areas included Europeans, as the guidebook, noted, but the association with such ethnic groups was not sufficient that they be recategorized as “insufficiently political,” “emaciated,” “somber,” “victim,” “urchins unwilling to follow religious instruction,” and so forth. Only members of the black community remain tarred by the following brush:

More evident, however, than their color and quaintness is the paralyzing poverty of South Philadelphia's Negro and foreign sections.... [T]he prevailing note, particularly in the older quarters, is dull and depressingly minor in key.... Slum areas splotch the scene like open sores, exhibiting the unlovely aspects of all slums. Neglected children swarm about dingy alleyways. Ramshackle hovels, built without benefit of bathtubs, huddle forlornly together. Through broken window panes, sometimes patched with paper, an ancient iron bedstead is occasionally outlined or a chipped bowl and pitcher – and society pays the usual price of its apathy in a high mortality, disease, and crime rate. (p. 443)

At a time when the New Deal was unwittingly dividing off blacks from whites in many of the federal welfare programs, it is easy to see how texts like this WPA guide could contribute to the conceptualization of whiteness and the process of becoming white.

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Notes

[1] T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland."

[2] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Randolph Bourne, War is the Health of the State.

[3] For example, the liberal becomes extremely disillusioned by the nationalist response to the great society programs. If only these people had attempted to take a more assimilationist course then the programs could have achieved all that was intended. What is missed is the way other groups were able to both be nationalist and assimilationist, and that the nationalist response to government programs (accentuating nationalist ties to increase the amount of resources sent to one’s group) was a fundamentally American response to exclusion. By the same token, “welfare queens” and all the other epithets used to describe people of the lower class who are trying to “manipulate the system” similarly provide the liberal with sleepless nights. But are they not also responding in an “American” way. In short, the liberal’s position is so perilous and tenuous that it is not surprising that he or she often manifests a great deal of disgust with those who betrayed the reforms that s/he was attempting to institute. Notions of worthy and unworthy poor are fundamentally liberal, demarcating the line between those who seem to want to cooperate and those who do not wish to do so. See William Julius Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987); Katz, The Undeserving Poor (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Wilson is more mainstream than Katz, though it has to be said that the latter’s position is a radical version of the American liberalism. Katz wishes to push the boundaries of reform further than most liberals, but fails to bring into consideration the limits of these reforms both nationally and internationally.

[4] This contributes to the phenomenon of racial backlash. When a new group redefines itself and raises its position in the workplace and in society generally, then members of other groups, still conforming to old labels of themselves as “white” or “ethnic American” (and encouraged to do so because of the past successes of nationalism and the seeming advances made by African Americans as “black”, “African”, “people of color”, and so on) see the advance of others as necessarily a loss to themselves. This is particularly the case in the post-Civil Rights era, when the economy has not been expanding to allow for the advance of all “peoples” together. The racial aspect to the American mainstream, then, gives rise to opposition of a racial nature, which in turn consolidates the discourse of race in American society.

[5] Philadelphia: A Guide to the Nation’s Birthplace (Philadelphia: William Penn Association, 1937).

[6] Ibid., p. 441.

[7] David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; James R. Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the New Immigrant Working Class," in Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, American Exceptionalism? U.S. Working-Class Formation in an International Context (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 181-220. The exaggeration of the importance of systems of production and a crass-economism, led many commentators to downplay ethnicity and accentuate ideas of American at this time. This reached its peak in the idea of the bland organization man, which became such an easy target during the 1960s. However, ethnicity was never lost; it fluctuated between the celebration of ethnicity and an apparent dormancy, but even in the latter case, the accentuation of a lowest common denominator of traditions remained. Such a denominator involved, in particular, the denial and exclusion of anything that might bear an association with African or blackness.