Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America - Hardcover

Jacobson, Matthew Frye

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674018982 ISBN 13: 9780674018983

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2006

Synopsis

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration.

In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies at Yale University.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this intriguing and closely argued book, Jacobson tells the story of how it came to be fashionable for white Americans to rediscover their ethnic heritage-be it Italian or Irish, Jewish or Catholic-and how many of them made this into a "usable past" to forge a sense of identity, a quasi backlash to the civil rights movements of the '60s that occurred less on the front page than on the big screen (think Godfather, Rocky, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding). One of the book's strongest assets is the large number of examples and case studies Jacobson provides, including accounts of Michael Dukakis's relentless invocation of his Greek background during his failed presidential campaign and how artist Judy Chicago's "evolving sense of Jewishness" became central to her work. (Though Jacobson can let these stories run too long and lose track of his arguments.) He also discusses books like Portnoy's Complaint and movies like Working Girl in an excessively serious and jargony manner that's at odds with the rest of the book, which is intelligent without coming off as stuffy. Jacobson's considerable achievement is how he avoids reducing ethnic revival to simple multiculturalism or the inevitable result of the fabled hard-working Ellis Island immigrant. Photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0674018982
• ISBN 13: 9780674018983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496