Ethnicity in Contemporary America

Abstract

It is just under a decade since the historian Theodore Hershberg, a close student of American minority groups and a founder of the then new Journal of Ethnic Studies, announced the demise of the “Age of Aquarius,” pronouncing at the same time its displacement by the “Age of Ethnicity.” In so proclaiming he also, figuratively at least, announced the passing of one of the oldest of American ideals: the notion of the “Melting Pot,” that social process by which the ethnic elements of American society would all be boiled down into a national cultural amalgam by way of their “Americanization.” In announcing the advent of the Age of Ethnicity, Hershberg gave tacit recognition to the fact that the melting pot model of ethnic group accommodation to American culture had now been pre-empted, officially and normatively, by the notion of “cultural pluralism.” There was no further need for amalgamation at all: each group was now to proceed to celebrate its origins, its distinct culture, and its fellowship in any way it pleased, as one of its fundamental American “rights.”On reflection, it may seem that in some respects the timing of the Hershberg prophesy is odd, even perverse. Many specialists were even then about the business of eliminating ethnicity altogether as a major factor in American culture, pronouncing the vestigial ethnic elements in US society virtually “assimilated.”