The Ethnic Project – Transforming Racial Fiction Into Ethnic Factions (eng)

Treitler, Vilna Bashi

ISBN 10: 0804757720 / ISBN 13: 9780804757720

Published by Stanford University Press, 2013

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 0030e515e8f7a5003e4b8ac3452bb63a

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Ethnic Project ? Transforming Racial Fiction Into Ethnic Factions (eng)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804757720
• ISBN 13: 9780804757720
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: new
• Weight: 0.34 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Race is a known fiction―there is no genetic marker that indicates someone's race―yet the social stigma of race endures. In the United States, ethnicity is often positioned as a counterweight to race, and we celebrate our various hyphenated-American identities. But Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that we do so at a high cost: ethnic thinking simply perpetuates an underlying racism.

In The Ethnic Project, Bashi Treitler considers the ethnic history of the United States from the arrival of the English in North America through to the present day. Tracing the histories of immigrant and indigenous groups―Irish, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Native Americans, Mexicans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans―she shows how each negotiates America's racial hierarchy, aiming to distance themselves from the bottom and align with the groups already at the top. But in pursuing these "ethnic projects" these groups implicitly accept and perpetuate a racial hierarchy, shoring up rather than dismantling race and racism. Ultimately, The Ethnic Project shows how dangerous ethnic thinking can be in a society that has not let go of racial thinking.

About the Author

Vilna Bashi Treitler is Professor of Sociology at The Graduate Center and Professor of Black and Hispanic Studies at Baruch College, CUNY. She is the author of Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World (Stanford, 2007).