Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America” (2006) – I could do a whole personal essay on this, having witnessed first-hand a number of different ways people in my life have interacted with white ethnic identity, and having interacted with it in various ways in my own life. Let’s just say that “Roots Too” begins with a recitation of Hansen’s Law. This was a proposal by a sociologist early in the twentieth century who said that the second generation of any given ethnic group in America rejects its ethnic heritage, while the third generation goes looking for it again. Well, I’m fourth-generation, and I don’t think Hansen had anything to say about that. What I do know is that however it was for my parents or grandparents, for me, white gentile ethnic identities have had virtually no meaningful impact on my life, and none in comparison to race, class, sexual orientation, even region seems to be a bigger deal. I think this is fair to say for most of my white age peers.

I guess it fits with my dismissal of white ethnic identity that I don’t turn this into a personal essay, given how personal narratives of self-discovery constituted much of the white ethnic revival of the late twentieth century. We hear a lot about these in “Roots Too.” This is very much cultural history, so we get extended chapters about white ethnicity in movies and books as produced by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Norman Jewison, assorted Roths (Henry and Philip!), and numerous people I’ve never heard of who apparently made a splash in the late twentieth century.

In fact, I’d argue Jacobson basically buried the lede. To me, most of the interest in this story is the way white ethnic identity politics became one tool in the toolbox of America’s denial of its ongoing race problems after the recession of the Civil Rights/Black Freedom movement. It’s proved a remarkably diverse tool. From the right, you have the white-ethnic-bootstraps narrative, “our ancestors became successful through hard work and no handouts blah blah blah.” From the (notional, liberal) left, it’s basically proven to be a busy-box, a distraction, and there’s nothing the declining white seventies left loved more than a good distraction. This is how you got embarrassing spectacles like former SDS head Tom Hayden (never the sharpest tool in the shed, frankly, though he seemed an earnest enough old guy) trying to defect to befuddled Irish cops at the Dublin airport and briefly changing his name to something more Irish-sounding, or radical feminists trying to construct pre-Indo-European spiritualities for themselves. Forty, nearly fifty years on, this stuff is just cringe-making, especially because we know it helped weaken and distract from the fights to come. Jacobson tells all these stories, but only after long chapters on the movies and books, much of which focused on technical aspects of their construction, like the way the films emulated old photos of immigrants. I guess it’s nice that he’s not too thesis-heavy, but he could have gotten to the point quicker.

In fact, as Jacobson argues, New Left and New Right joined hands (and sometimes shared personnel, like ex-new-left-er-turned-neocon-white-ethnic-whisperer Michael Novak) in their criticism of the “melting pot” concept so popular in the 1950s and in their embrace of white ethnicity. In classic form, the right used the concepts to advance their own power and the left used it on journeys of self-discovery. Arguably, we are still dealing with the fallout, not only in the form of toxic memes like “Irish slaves” blobbing around like turds in a pond, but in the form of the fetishization of supposed pre-modern “community” forms and values you still see on much of the left today. It’s not the biggest problem we face, by a long shot, but it’s not helpful.

Jacobson uses the language of there being a transition from a “Plymouth Rock” America to an “Ellis Island” America. You’d figure that’d be a good thing- maybe a baby step, but it’s still nice that white ethnics aren’t facing prejudice anymore, right? Well, for one thing, Jacobson couldn’t have known this in 2006 but the most enduring of the Ellis Island prejudices, antisemitism, has seen a revival in recent years. The white ethnic revival treated Jews more or less like it did Italians, Irish, etc. They all “succeeded,” fanned out into the suburbs, went looking for their roots afterwards, etc. But it seems antisemitism is more persistent, tied in more deeply with historical dynamics, than the other prejudices facing contemporaneous white immigrant groups. There’s been no QAnon-style revival of anti-Catholicism, for instance, to go along with their revival of the blood libel. Meanwhile, Jacobson admirably resisted the blandishments of “whiteness studies,” which was going strong at the time and insisted that the Irish, Italians, etc. “became” white. Nope- as Jacobson points out, according to the law of the land, the Naturalization Act of 1790, they were considered “free white persons” from the very beginning, whatever other prejudices they faced. The embrace of “Ellis Island America,” with its hyphenate-identites taken on board as fully American, indeed, the bedrock American, signaled a circling of the wagons, not a liberation. ****

Mia Bay, “To Tell The Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells” (2009) – Ida Wells was barely in her thirties when she began her campaign against lynch law in the south. Born to slaves in 1862, she came of age concurrently with the collapse of Reconstruction and the betrayal of southern black people by the federal government. After her parents died when she was sixteen, she took charge of raising her siblings and became a schoolteacher and then a journalist in Memphis. It was after a race riot — for most of American history, “race riot” meant white pogroms directed at black people and other people of color — and lynching of three black men there that she began the work that would define her legacy.

As the title of this biography indicates, Wells did something simple but courageous in response to the epidemic of lynching: she did basic reporting and told the truth. Her reporting laid the foundation for what is now the basic historical understanding of lynching as a social phenomenon. Southern white leaders declared that lynching was necessary to protect white women from depraved black rapists. Ida Wells looked into lynchings and found that in only a minority of cases were the victims even accused of rape. Moreover, she reported that many of those who were accused of rape were in fact involved in illicit but consensual interracial relationships, typically initiated by white women. And of course, the rape defense only went one way- no one, black or white, was ever lynched, barely anyone was ever brought to law, for sexually assaulting a black woman. Wells’s conclusions were commonsensical and strike the reader as quite “modern:” lynching, like rape, is about power, not sex, and specifically about reenforcing white supremacy by terrorizing black people. She called for both federal anti-lynching legislation and armed black self defense in response.

In the 1890s when she began her antilynching crusade, this was controversial on a number of levels. Southern whites were offended and she was publicly threatened with torture and dismemberment by “respectable” newspapers in Memphis, forcing her to leave the south for New York and then Chicago. She struck a chord with black readers, who made her for a time the most well-known black woman in the country, and made a number of allies, including Frederick Douglass in his later years. But many established reformists, both black and white, had issues with her. She was feisty and not afraid to fight. This upset established gender norms of the time, especially for black women, who were under extra pressure to “prove” their femininity. People (like Susan B. Anthony) criticized her for being unmarried in her thirties and then criticized her for carrying on the work once she married lawyer and reformer Frederick Barnett. She ran afoul of Booker T. Washington, unofficial leader of black America at the time, who insisted that political agitation for his community’s rights was pointless and who punished black figures who disagreed. Wells allied with more radical figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and helped found the NAACP, but quickly found herself — a woman without a college degree — out of step with the increasingly professionalized world of early twentieth century reform politics.

In general, Wells’s life certainly did not lack for incident, but it’s arc isn’t exactly the stuff of Hollywood. There was no big confrontation or victory, either with the forces of lynching or with her fairweather friends in the reform movement. She kept plugging along until she died in 1930, mostly removed from the national stage after World War One but staying active in Chicago reform and antiracist politics. Mostly, this is a record of Wells writing and giving speeches, getting polite (or not so polite) reactions, and then the world going on it’s merry way, unfortunately. Historian Mia Bay does a fine job putting Wells in her context, succinctly explaining things like the history and full extent of lynch law, Victorian social codes constraining women, and post-Reconstruction black politics. This is a highly readable as well as commendably complete book. Wells is an admirable figure by any fair reckoning, but it is a little concerning to think how much she echoes our own time: a figure with a very correct analysis but no way to implement it. ****