Outside the Ethnic Box

Notes on a Form

My daughter is making out her college applications as I look over her shoulder. After the predictable requests for address, Social Security number and the like, the typical form--we’re looking at Cal State’s, for example--asks the candidate to “enter your ethnic identity.” What a curiosity this is. Instead of the expected chocolate-vanilla-strawberry categories--black, white, brown--there are some 27 boxes, with every race splintered down to an ethnic fine point: Mexican-American, or Central or South American, or Cuban, or Puerto Rican, or “Other Latino, Spanish-origin, Hispanic.” There are boxes for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Asian Indian or “Other Asian”; for Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Thai or “Other Southeast Asian”; for Guamanian, Hawaiian, Samoan, “Other Pacific Islander” and Filipino.

“What box are you going to check?” I test my daughter. “White.” I accept her answer as preferable to “decline to state,” but nevertheless I am uneasy. My daughter and I are, I suppose, white, or so argues UCLA Prof. Karen Brodkin in her book “How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America”. Being white is “good,” right? Jews were for too long--and without reason--regarded as a race, and it did them no favors, not just notoriously during the Holocaust but on this continent as well, barred from entry into American civic life as a pariah nation.

Now, except by the lunatic neo-Nazi fringe and thanks to financial and social largess including the GI Bill and the expanded post-war economy, Jews are belatedly following a path to acceptance laid by the Irish and the Italians before them into ethnic anonymity. Still being “white” is not an unalloyed blessing, especially in multicultural America today. It’s like being invited to a potluck banquet to which everyone brings spicy fare from their native cultures and you’re told to bring pudding.

Jews are more interesting than that. In fact, as America has re-racinated, Jews too have found power in their diversity, embracing their Sephardic (Spanish) roots and finding satisfaction in ancient rituals, texts and a vital community life that some expected would die out by now. There are nevertheless at least three good reasons why even the most highly identified Jews don’t insist upon their own special ethnic box: First, it is a dangerous regression to a discarded apartheid system and a time, only 50 years ago, when erroneous scientific categories such as race were used to enforce quotas keeping Jews, blacks and others out of “whites only” neighborhoods and Ivy League schools. Second, privacy: Whose business is it anyway if we are Jews? Third, true love of country, including a strong desire to be an unsegmented part of a nation that has been good to them. Too bad there is no “American” box, no way of selecting nationality over ethnicity. This lack strikes me as a troublesome oversight.

If my daughter could choose, say, “Japanese” or “Korean,” which contain both cultural and national attributes, why not “American”? The current obsession with ethnicity and country of origin (though they’re not the same) has ground down to a sterile multiculturalism: the politics of “difference” without any countervailing politics of “unity.”

What if, instead of thinking about creating yet additional boxes of isolation, we started drawing circles of inclusion? What if, instead of thinking as tribes, we began to behave as one people?

PostEthnic America

UC Berkeley Prof. David A. Hollinger defines the pick-your-box mentality as the destruction of the national culture. In his book “Postethnic America,” he writes, in what might otherwise be an obvious policy statement: “The national culture [is] an adhesive enabling diverse Americans to see themselves as sufficiently ‘in it together’ to act on problems that are genuinely common.” He identifies three competing forces as loosening the adhesive: a) a globalized business elite that has lost touch with the needs of the nation; b) multiethnic political groups that gain advantage by seeing the United States as little more than a series of diasporas with no central claim for its own nationhood; c) the “white” ethnic cohort--fundamentalists and white supremacists who feel they are losing authentic American roots.

But most of us are not part of the globalized business elite; we do not long for a return to another homeland, and we do not accept a limited whites-only version of American values. Yet we’ve gone silent. Why?

Disconcertingly, the idea of an American culture has fallen out of favor at just about the time when that very culture--Coke, movies and the Internet--is taking over the world. We seem plagued with self-doubt, as if the call to become “more American” would bring us back to the days of racist imperialism.

On some level we doubt that we can, as Hollinger says, “act on problems that are genuinely common,” notably the absorption of many cultures. “Whatever happened to integration?” asks Tamar Jacoby in her book “Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration”. “Do we as a nation recognize how dramatically we have changed course?” Jacoby’s book documents how dysfunctional racial thinking--especially the dominance of black power and white guilt--has backfired, depriving us of the will to keep working for integration, equality and universal tolerance. “Whatever the benefits of the new separatism in promoting pride and self-esteem,” Jacoby writes, “the overlay of anger and alienation that comes with it is poisoning our lives, both black and white.”

In Southern California, of course, where Latino and Asian populations have doubled in the last 20 years, fears of social breakdown are everywhere. In the aftermath of the 1992 riots, says Bong Hwan Kim of the L.A.-based MultiCultural Collaborative, Koreans are no longer the grocers of choice in South-Central, moving out of Koreatown, where Latinos are now the majority, rather than repeat the social misunderstandings of 1992. This choice to opt out of potential conflict is leading to what observers call social “fracture,” as if ours is a fragile society that could break.

“There’s a major exhaustion with questions of race and ethnicity,” says Arnold Steinberg, a political strategist who helped organize and shape the pro-Prop. 209 campaign that undid affirmative action. Recently he completed a series of focus groups on the subject of race in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. “They don’t like the way the media makes ethnicity an issue. They’re beyond that.” Students, too, are increasingly challenging the box. On the University of California application, students in 1998 could choose from among six boxes. The number is now up to 14. But they can also decline to state. In 1998, 13,575 students on the eight campuses refused to report their ethnicity, a 153% increase over the previous year. Some of those might be mixed race, others might be white/other; all may be afraid that there will be a quota against them. In any case, more incoming freshmen at, say, UCLA refused to report their race in 1998 (1,463) than all Hispanic (1,001) and black (280) admittees combined.

Intellectuals, too, even those on the political left, are resurrecting the idea of national purpose. Michael Walzer, a social science professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., has written that it is diversity that has made this country great, cultural diversity that eventually folds itself into the large public will. Even the most strongly identified ethnic or cultural group is changed by the experience of being in America: American Catholics are different from those elsewhere, while those same American Catholics and American Hindus may have much in common.

Searching for a Common Destiny

George Richter is showing off his squash plant. Its huge, raucous, untrimmed green vine grows off his sidewalk practically onto the street. “I love seeing what happens when the neighbors walk by,” he says. “The Koreans are interested in the leaves for their salad, the Filipinos like the flowers and the Latinos want the fruit, which they eat.”

The neatness of his metaphor does not escape Richter. The 56-year-old former college theater instructor, who was sporting a silver-gray ponytail when we met, now spends most of his time as the unpaid president of the Beverly-Kingsley Neighborhood Assn. He wants you to know: This forgotten, seemingly untamed area, once the home to Paramount employees, still has something for everyone.

Richter could be a very bitter man. When he saw the fires burning on Vermont during the riots in 1992, he suspected that this was the last straw for a sector of L.A. that had already been going downhill. But he decided to stick it out. “I’m not leaving,” he says. “There’s work to do.”

Today, George Richter, to my mind, is the best kind of multiculturalist, if preserving the best of many cultures has cultural currency. He has learned to use politics not only for the purpose of maintaining his property values but for the common good. First, he beat back a plan by the Los Angeles Unified School District to buy up the last remaining single-family homes for expansion of the overcrowded Cahuenga Elementary School. “The LAUSD was going to buy us up because we were cheap,” Richter say. “But they would be destroying history.”

Then, last fall, though he and his wife have no children, Richter began working with immigrants and homeowners through a policy group called New Schools/Better Neighborhoods to identify six alternative sites for new schools to serve the 3,000 children who live in overcrowded apartments nearby, more than half of whom must be bused out of the neighborhood for education. He did research used by the LAUSD to assess school needs, and he knows a vast number of children in the community.

Finally, he has worked with the Los Angeles Conservancy to establish as a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone the last remaining Hollywood bungalows in the area where Lucy and Desi once lived. The mere presence of these single-family dwellings is a delightful surprise and easy to miss against the wave upon wave of immigrants who, seeking a better life, have moved into overcrowded tenement-type apartments nearby.

Turnover in the overcrowded apartments is about every three to five years as new immigrants begin to improve their lives. If Richter has his way, the homes would be granted architectural status, but here ethnicity may defeat him. The Korean professionals who buy the clapboard homes regard wood exteriors as signs of poverty. Their preference for stucco threatens his claim that the homes are still in pristine form. He is not giving up.

Lose or draw on historic preservation, Richter is a multicultural champion, known to street-tough kids and aging grandmas who stand on corners for lack of nearby public parks; his beat-up van patrols the streets as he talks to groups of idle youths. He checks up on everyone from the elderly to the babies. He is, more than anything, a symbol to both new immigrants and landed gentry of what democracy is about.

“He’s my hero,” says David Abel of New Schools/Better Neighborhoods. “He hasn’t given up.”

It would be incorrect to say that Southern California is full of George Richters. Instead, what we have increasingly is ghetto politics, enclaves making special pleadings. “The only thing beyond ethnic politics is the hereafter,” writes L.A. Times columnist Agustin Gurza. “Why? Because everybody has an equal chance of getting into heaven, where greenbacks and green cards don’t count.” But Gurza has it only half right: Ethnic politics is of only short-term value, a bench press while testing political muscle. Over time, even the most tightly knit ethnic groups loosen up.

The “Jewish vote,” for example, long regarded as lock-step Democrat, split down the middle during the Riordan/Woo race and can no longer be taken for granted by any candidate. As groups feel safe, they find greater strength not in the blackmail of power politics but in coalition. Moreover, ethnic politics can backfire, which is the basic flaw of gerrymandered political districts created specifically to include more minority representatives. Former state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal’s district preposterously was thought to include the majority of Jews from Sherman Oaks through Beverly Hills to Malibu. Even so, it did not protect Rosenthal from defeat by Tom Hayden in 1992.

Similarly, though Latino leaders cried foul, the creation of a so-called Latino seat on the board of the LAUSD did not stop David Tokofsky from winning reelection fair and square. The big problem with ethnic politics is that it ultimately depends upon a monolithic value system that rarely exists.

Bruce Phillips, a resident of the Carthay Circle area and a father with children in the public schools, still feels betrayed at the decline of the local school during the tenure of Barbara Boudreaux. That Boudreaux was black didn’t matter: In fact, Phillips, a demographer at Hebrew Union College, chose the mid-Wilshire area because of its ethnic mix. “What bothers me is that Boudreaux didn’t know how much we all cared about education,” Phillips said. Last spring, he walked precincts in support of the eventual winner, Genethia Hayes.

Each morning, he told me, the black and Jewish children in the neighborhood get on buses taking them out of their inadequate neighborhood school, to magnet schools.

Ethnic politics certainly played a role in the fight last fall over School Supt. Ruben Zacarias. Latino activists tried to engineer a sea change in perception: The district, which has long been described as a system where more than 80 languages are spoken, instead was being defined as 70% Latino. Both facts are true, but Latino leaders were gambling that Latino parents would favor the new description to the old. The gambit failed. According to a poll taken at the time by Paul Goodwin of GLS Research of San Francisco, the parents did not see the ouster of Zacarias as an assault on their pride but merely as a ham-handed effort by reformers desperate to raise standards in a district performing near the bottom of the barrel.

Fear of immigrants, fear of difference and economic rivalries between neighboring groups are not new. In 1907, Henry James warned his fellow WASPs that they had to bend over backward to absorb the “aliens” they feared were taking over their country. James understood the feeling that the nation was getting ahead of him, losing its familiar taste and feel. But, he said, “we, not they, must make the surrender.”

The calendar of the LAUSD specifies more than 60 cultural commemorations, including Vasant Panchami, the Hindu Advent (Jan. 22); Black American Day, marking the death of black martyr Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre (March 5), Naw-Ruz, the Baha’i New Year (March 21) and Eid Al Adha, the Islamic celebration of the patriarch Abraham (March 28). Though every ethnic group receives its public honor, it appears that few groups feel like they belong. Even though they observe both Cesar Chavez Day for the Latino labor organizer (March 31) and Armenian Martyrs Day (April 24), Armenian and Latino students at Grant High School last year went at each other in a racial melee.

“I don’t hear anyone talking about common interests, but we certainly need to,” Joe Hicks tells me. Hicks, executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, sees the difficulties caused when ethnic entitlement overrides common cause. “We’re all puffed up with our differences,” he says. “Today, it’s all about ‘me.’ ”

“Politicians like to say that diversity is our greatest strength,” Ron Wakabayashi, head of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, told the Washington Post. “That is b.s. Diversity simply is. The core question is how do we extract its assets while minimizing its liabilities?”

Chief among the liabilities of living without a civic culture is the search for “authenticity,” the vain and treacherous search for who really belongs. But in a post-ethnic America, why must it be either/or? Without denying that residual bias exists, we do have more in common than what divides us, and we have the potential to bring ever more diverse groups into the fold, or why would 1.8 million people be waiting to become citizens?

At a public appearance at the Skirball Cultural Center in December, actor/activist Edward James Olmos made a passionate plea on behalf of indigenous “Americanos” who he says feel excluded from the nation’s identity. “I go all the way back from my great-great-great-great grandparents,” he told a mixed-race crowd. “We were here long ago. Yet we hear only European history,” which, he said, deprives youth of the esteem of being heroes.

But what, I wonder, does that prove? Does being here “first” invalidate the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? Does the desire to be included in history grant censorship rights over a larger poetic truth? Does the nature of America’s birth during, yes, the age of conquest eliminate the ideas of the Enlightenment, which taught the world how to be free?

And yet it is too late to go back to a WASP story. “The old strategies are not up to the task: the molding of a nation in a time of growing polyethnism,” writes Georgetown University law professor T. Alexander Aleinikoff in The American Prospect magazine. “A multiculturalism that denies the legitimacy or wisdom of a national idea is mistaken, but a multiculturalism that informs the national idea makes a valuable contribution.”

Citizens in Training

For a nation that absorbs 660,000 immigrants a year, we do an amazing job. One sign is the rise in interracial marriages, now about 4% of all marriages, up tenfold since 1960. Inter-ethnic dating, too, is up, with 57% of American teens, according to a 1997 USA Today/Gallup poll, indicating that they have dated someone outside their race and another 30% saying they haven’t, but see nothing wrong with it.

A 1999 study by the National Immigration Forum, “From Newcomers to New Americans: The Successful Integration of Immigrants into American Society,” found that within 10 years, the vast number of new immigrants speak English proficiently, and within 20 years, 60% own homes. Assimilation, despite its real-life struggles of competition and social “fracture,” is proceeding apace. And yet there is much to be done to smooth the way.

The Israeli “ulpan” is one model for the successful integration of widely diverse peoples. At the ulpan, new immigrants learn, over a series of months, not only the Hebrew language but the national history and culture. Getting new immigrants to accept themselves as part of the Israeli story has gone far in resisting right- wing fundamentalists who would, for example, challenge the Israeli Law of Return. There are simply too many Israelis who understand that the Law of Return is a crucial part of national identity.

Would ulpan work here? Periodically, Los Angeles floats trial balloons, meeting with Israelis informally to explore bringing the ulpan program here. But little has come of it, which seems to me to reflect more than the fear of returning to the coercive policies of the Progressives’ Americanization movement of the last century, in which civics and history lessons were taught to immigrants in their native languages at settlement houses. It also reflects America’s myth of “rugged individualism,” by which generations have come one by one and made it on their own. We may come here alone, but we are always at the mercy of public policy, of private charity and of a vibrant economy for whatever we achieve. A more profitable step toward respecting ethnic differences would be to treat new immigrants as “citizens in training,” as Aleinikoff suggests.

Short of importing the ulpan, the yearning to belong to something larger than our private tribe is obvious. I see it each year as a Selection Day Judge for the Coro Foundation, a leadership training organization that has served future political leaders of America, including California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. I never fail to be moved.

Over the years, the Coro semifinalists have been drawn from the brightest, most articulate of our nation’s college graduates--including an impressive number of first-generation Americans from around the world. What impresses me is that these candidates come to Coro entrenched in--suffused by--their own community politics.

Pacific Islanders are concerned with the affairs of Pacific Islanders, Latinos with Latinos and so on. Those involved in church work are slightly more cosmopolitan but not by much. In fact, we’ve trained our youth to think that they belong in their own communities and to worry when they are outside.

Nevertheless, during the year-long fellowship, even our most entrenched ethnics broaden and change. As Coro sends them on the rounds of city, county and corporate agencies, our young learn to feel safe everywhere. The narrowest, most chauvinistic ghetto-dwellers become worldly, able to build coalitions, to find common cause and to speak a language that will translate well beyond their own small towns, to Sacramento and beyond. They learn about the world outside their communities, the world of America. Like the Coro fellows, we all need to balance our ethnic isolation with real-world contact to create common goals.

And it can be done. Once on a KCRW edition of its show “The Politics of Culture,” I was a panelist with four others discussing the multiethnic challenge. The others had come to America in some form of duress, as a result of war or some other family struggle, and seemed so attached to their divergent pasts that they could not link themselves to America’s story. I began to fear that we were at cross-purposes.

But then near the end of the show, a brilliant Korean American filmmaker mentioned her recent trip back “home.” When she was in Korea, she said, she found that America is where she belongs.

That’s the hope of the current moment, that we give up our special pleading (though not our cultural integrity) and begin thinking, literally, out of the box. Whatever our origins, we can still embrace the idea of nation and country. However imperfectly, we belong to one people, not to cubes on a form.