Ethnics All

Back in 1909, Jewish Immigrant Israel Zangwill had an idea whose time had come. Zangwill wrote a play about American immigrants and called it The Melting Pot. It ran for months on Broadway, and the phrase entered the language as an expression of faith in American homogeneity. That faith lasted until the 1960s, when blacks first challenged its homey apple-pie vision and prepared the way for a similar awakening among other ethnic groups.

Whites Ignored. The latest challenges to the old melting-pot theory come from the "new ethnicity," a movement that began in the early '70s and is continuing to spread among the descendants of Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups, including Italian, Polish, Portuguese-and just about every other variety of American but old-line Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the well-publicized blacks, American Indians and Hispanics. "White ethnics have been ignored in favor of blacks and Hispanics," claims Mary Sansone, executive director of New York's Congress of Italian-American Organizations. Now, taking a cue from the blacks, the white ethnics argue that what is good for blacks is good for other minorities. They too are demanding public recognition, federal funds, their own school and college studies--like "The Armenian Immigrant Experience" to be taught in Belmont, Mass., public schools--proportional representation in local government and television time. Among their gains to date: bilingual elementary-school courses for Portuguese Americans in the San Francisco area, and 42 "ethnic heritage" grants to the Belmont Armenians and similar groups from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Prophet of the white-ethnic movement and founder-editor of EMPAC (Ethnic Millions Political Action Committee) is Michael Novak, 42, a Bayville, N.Y., Catholic intellectual and former seminarian, who hopes to shape the new white consciousness into a "creative and progressive force." Novak, author of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), attributes traditional animosity between Catholic blue-collar whites and blacks to "elite Protestant politics" that pitted the two groups against each other in a war for economic survival.

Novak wants a coalition of minority whites and blacks based on equal ethnicity for all. Others disagree. Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson, himself black, thinks ethnicity was "possibly the only way blacks could mobilize" but sees white ethnicity, its successor, as an alarming "symptom of fragmentation" in society, and he believes it is tacitly or potentially antiblack. Some white minority groups would actually rather be all-American than be seen as a separate ethnic group. Carlos Almeida, whose Portuguese Union of the State of California pushed through the Bay Area bilingual program, says that all Americans should learn English, "but if you're going to have a Spanish program and use federal funds for one ethnic group, we should have it for all."

Then there is Englewood, N.J., where to strengthen support for an imperiled minority-employment program in a population that is almost 50% black and Spanish-speaking, the city council has also designated Jews, American Indians, Asian-Americans and women as minorities. According to Rabbi Isaac Swift of an Orthodox Englewood synagogue, the "absurd conclusion" is that "no one will be a minority because we'll all be a minority. And then we can start from ground zero again."

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