Ethnicity, Persistence of (Perspectives in Education)

When most historians and sociologists of American life discuss the term ethnicity, they generally focus on people who have different roots from those in the dominant group, that is, foreigners, minorities, and other so-called outsiders. But the fact is that all Americans are ethnics, including the Yankees and other groups from the British Isles who came to the Americas and established their communities of faith and enterprise in several geographic regions on America's eastern seaboard. They may have had different reasons for migrating, but in the aggregate the members of the various Anglo-American communities had more in common with one another than with other nationality groups. Whether fighting or negotiating the numerous indigenous groups they encountered and whose lands they occupied or struggling to establish their New Jerusalem, they felt a keen interdependence of cultural identity.

For 4 centuries, those with roots in Britain promulgated the idea that they—who came to be known by the euphonious acronym WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants)—were the only “true” Americans, and many from other lands accepted this idea. Some people believe this to this day. This is a classic case of what the Dutch sociologist Rob Kroes calls “the persistence of ethnicity.”

WASPs have all the traits social scientists following Max Weber have called “ethnic,” and they share a sense of what he called Gemeinsamkeit, meaning commonality or ethnicity. This feeling is said to be based on a shared history and a common culture, which includes means of communicating, rules of conduct, values, and ideologies, sometimes called “creeds.”

Like many scholars in Weber's day (early in the 20th century), many contemporary scholars claim that membership in such groups is fixed, an ascribed rather than an achieved association. The extent to which many Americans of English origins have clung to their “Mayflower roots” seems to confirm such a position. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that such identity, mostly transmitted through prime agents and agencies of socialization—particularly but not exclusively the family—may be modified, even compounded. This is especially noteworthy in situations where people of different backgrounds meet and interact. Such contexts vary from conquests and colonizations to migrations, both temporary and permanent.

Many have described the result of such interactions in terms of confronting “strangers.” Not surprisingly, such encounters may quickly engender suspicions of “the other,” leading to a heightened awareness of one's own cultural identity and further contributing to a “We versus They” mentality. But such encounters may also trigger the necessity to learn more about those others, either to maintain the upper hand or to survive as a minority.

Among those who first wrote about this phenomenon was the sociologist Georg Simmel. In several classic papers, including “The Stranger” and “The Web of Group-Affiliations,” he noted that the stranger imports qualities into new situations and affects the dynamics of social relations, leading to all sorts of results, not least the altering of identity itself.

Although the English colonists had created a new country steeped in a Calvinist ethic and developed by those of their own background, their society eventually would come to include many others eager to exploit opportunities and advantages said to abound in the country and, often, hoping to become Americans, too.

...