Not So Black and White: Ethnicity versus Identity Politics in Newark
Last October, I made my way down to St. Lucy’s Church in Newark’s North Ward, as I do every year. I waited in a seemingly endless line of cars to cram into a makeshift parking lot, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see a diverse crowd of people under bright decorative lights intertwined with red and green garland, a sea of food trucks, and the steeple of a nearly century-old Romanesque church.
After parking, I followed the voice of an amateur Sinatra impersonator doing a 1950s-standards rendition of Palestrina’s “Ave Maria,” eventually finding my way into the church, as I stepped over children running around with toys won at boardwalk-style game booths and burly men shoveling sausage sandwiches into their mouths. The English-Italian bilingual mass offered by a Nigerian missionary priest began, over the din of “Chreaster Catholics”—mostly Italian Americans—making conversation in the pews, interspersed with pockets of more reverent trads covered in chapel veils, Ecuadorian abuelas, and West African couples in colorful garb from the motherland.
Since 1899, St. Lucy’s has hosted the annual Feast of Saint Gerard. Initiated by the parish’s southern Italian and Sicilian communities, the weekend-long feast—with its numerous masses, music, food, games, and the famous tradition of pinning dollar bills on the statue of the saint which is processed around the neighborhood—offers a snapshot of the city’s ethnic vibrance. Though Newark’s Italian community mostly uprooted to the suburbs in the 1970s, along with the city’s numerous other white ethnic populations, they continue to flock back to the old neighborhood every second weekend of October.
The ethnic makeup of the crowd at the feast nowadays raises important questions about how the politics of identity have shifted over the last century. On both left and right, talk of “identity politics” is based largely around categories of race, gender, and sexual identity. Ethnicity struggles to find a place in today’s identity politics, having been collapsed into the race-focused collectivism of today’s Left and the laissez-faire, individualistic, bootstrapping logic of today’s Right. Despite being tied to political and economic realities, ethnicity is primarily a cultural—and thus, a communitarian—phenomenon. Its aesthetic and existential weight implicates a more profound social imaginary loaded with ontological depth that today’s debates lack.
Numerous proponents of ethnopolitics once had a significant platform in America’s public discourse. Among figures ranging from Mario Cuomo, Michael Novak, and Andrew Greely to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Camille Paglia, it was once in fashion to consider the role that ethnicity played, not only in America’s cultural fabric, but as a key factor in the nation’s politics. The viability of ethnopolitics has faded over the last century due to the rise of identity politics and the reactions against it. But I would argue that the deadlock and divisiveness of today’s identity politics merits a reconsideration of the potential of an ethnically focused political discourse, and the value that it can bring back into our increasingly polarized society.
A Brief History of Ethnic Politics in Newark
The history of ethnopolitics in Newark is emblematic of patterns that have played out in countless American cities. Its changing yet still very much palpable role in the city’s politics and culture today is worth our attention.
Originally home to the Lenape tribe, the colony of Newark was established by Connecticut Puritans in 1666. Though the city’s population consisted primarily of Anglo-Saxon Protestants during its agricultural period, this changed after the shift toward an industrial economy. As factories replaced farmland, new immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe (most of whom were Catholic) flocked to the city’s ports. During the mid- to late nineteenth century, these immigrants clashed with the city’s WASP establishment, falling victim to nativist, anti-Catholic sentiment. As they gained their footing in the city and eventually came to outnumber the Anglos, however, the various immigrant communities made Newark their long-term home. The turn of the century brought with it a new crowd of Greeks, Chinese, Ashkenazi Jews, Spaniards, Portuguese, and, in the 1930s, African Americans from the South.
Upon arrival, most immigrant groups found work in the city’s numerous factories and settled in homes near their fellow countrymen. Though some neighborhoods were more porous, the majority consisted of a homogeneous ethnic makeup, usually anchored by community gathering points like the local parish, union hall, sports club, and civic organizations—which also served to preserve the cultural heritage for the next generations. Those who managed to work their way up the career ladder were able to purchase property, and tended to send their children to college. Though plenty of college-educated second- and third-generation children would leave the neighborhood and assimilate into American culture, a significant amount would return to the old neighborhood or at least maintain ties to it.
For those who stuck around, careers in education, law enforcement, and owning businesses of their own became more accessible, thus affording them a newfound level of influence in the city. Many would move on to run for political office. While the nineteenth century saw mostly Anglo and German mayors, among the first of the communities to establish a distinctly ethnic political bloc were the Irish, thanks in part to English being their native language. After the election of Charles Gillen in 1917, the Irish expanded their influence over city politics. The Jewish community of Weequahic, despite having only one of its own serve as mayor, also played a key role in city politics in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Though they wouldn’t see one of their members elected as mayor until 1949, the Italian community was quickly establishing a power of its own over city affairs through a parallel means of politicking. Infamous mobsters like Richie “the Boot” and Tony “Boy” Boiardo imposed their influence on neighborhoods, before the Italians would eventually come into official positions of power in the city. At times, such figures protected community members and looked out for their well-being. In other cases, they looked out for themselves.
As the First Ward was overcrowding and housing conditions worsened in the 1950s, and the project of “urban renewal” swept across the nation, Governor Rodino, with the support of Italians like Mayor Vilani and Tony Boiardo, set out to raze the Italian neighborhood’s “slums.” Displacing over three thousand residents, the Columbus Homes project built eight thirteen-story housing complexes, as well as creating space for the new Route 280 interstate highway to pass through the neighborhood. Needless to say, the Le Corbusier–inspired monstrosity destroyed any sense of the old neighborhood’s charm, and opened the door to neglect and crime.
Surely, this is part of the reason Italians (at least the ones who could afford it) began fleeing to the suburbs. Yet, of course, the growing racial tension in the city also played a considerable role in provoking the infamous “white flight.” Since the days of the Great Migration in the 1930s, the city’s blacks had established stable, thriving enclaves in the city’s Central Ward. But the job losses faced by those who worked at the factories that were beginning to ship their production outside of the city, and other failed attempts at urban renewal, ate away at the fabric of Newark’s black communities.
The city’s economic and housing crises took a toll on many of its ethnic communities, and exacerbated tension between them. Blacks who made their way into the North Ward clashed with the neighborhood’s Italians, many of whom harbored resentment toward blacks who received greater welfare benefits. And despite being among the white ethnic groups most willing to collaborate politically with blacks, the Jews of Weequahic found the threat of violence in their neighborhood to be increasingly intolerable.
The language of ethnic pride soon took on the tone of supremacy and separatism. When Hugh Addonizio was elected mayor in 1962, he saw the city’s declining Italian population and growing black population as a threat, and his antagonistic attitude toward blacks was an attempt to hold on to the last vestiges of Italians’ control over the city. His decision to uproot a black neighborhood in the Central Ward in order to make way for the profitable real estate investment of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey was among the last straws for black residents.
Black nationalists, who already were skeptical of the city’s white leadership, took this as an opportunity to radicalize black residents. Among the most influential black nationalist leaders in the city was Amiri Baraka, a Howard dropout, poet, playwright, and political organizer. His at times erratic, anger-filled tirades against white people are said to have inspired acts of violence, most notably the riots of 1967. Some deemed the riots a “rebellion” or “revolution” against police brutality toward blacks, while others saw it as a planned attempt to overthrow white leadership in the city. Regardless of one’s reading of the event, the violence and chaos led to numerous deaths, the closure of businesses, and the flight of countless residents—white and black—from the city and into the suburbs.
The city’s ethnic makeup radically changed in the aftermath, with blacks making up the city’s majority. Portuguese and Spaniards filled the “Ironbound” East Ward, and a growing number of Puerto Ricans began moving in with the few remaining Italians in the North Ward. In 1970, Kenneth Gibson, an African American, ran against Addonizio—who was desperate to maintain the Italian hold over the city. But with the support of some dissident Italians (my own family members included), who campaigned for Gibson in the North Ward, Gibson was able to pull off a victory over Addonizio by 20 percentage points.
After Gibson’s election, blacks took hold of the city’s government. Newark would go on to have African American mayors up until today. The booming Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in the 1980s and ’90s took on major roles in city governance as well, thanks in part to their having founded numerous community development and cultural organizations of their own. And the Portuguese have kept their hold over the Ironbound section, despite a slow but steady departure of many to the suburbs.
And though they may not have reached positions of power in city politics, other immigrant communities—including Brazilians and Ecuadorians in the East Ward, and West Africans and Haitians in the West and South Wards—have established lively enclaves, owning numerous restaurants, small businesses, and homes of their own.
Newark’s Ethnic Politics Today
Poverty and violence continue to weaken the city—though with current Mayor Ras Baraka’s police reform initiatives, violent crime rates have decreased significantly, more and more lower-income families have gotten access to home ownership, and small businesses have received protection and benefits from the city. The construction of corporate offices and luxury apartment buildings in the Central Ward has vastly changed the dynamic of the city, which is pressed for ratable real estate. Still, Baraka and a number of City Council members have made it clear that, as much as these developments are necessary, they are committed to keeping rent affordable for current residents and maintaining the businesses and local cultures of the neighborhoods in which they are being erected.
Ethnicity continues to pervade the life of the city, both as a cultural and political force. According to North Ward councilman Anibal Ramos, there is “a good level of cohesion between ethnic communities,” at least more so than in his youth. Born to parents who came to Newark from Puerto Rico in the 1960s, he tells me he “was filled with a sense of pride” when he became the second Puerto Rican to take a seat on the ward’s council.
He acknowledges that Puerto Ricans have a bit of an easier time making themselves a part of the city’s life as they are already American citizens and thus “are eligible for entitlement programs that the U.S. offers us.” Recognizing that other immigrant groups face greater challenges, he decided to be one of the first to endorse making Newark a sanctuary city, and voted against using the police force to regulate immigration. He’s also made it a point to help immigrant families open and protect their small businesses, teaching them how to take advantage of economic development programs and PPP loans. He also cited several community development organizations like La Casa de Don Pedro and the North Ward Center, which play a key role in maintaining the ethnic pride and cultural heritage of North Ward residents while also responding to issues having to do with job training, housing and loan access, and immigration. Councilman Ramos is proud of the ethnic diversity in the city, and enjoys frequenting the businesses and restaurants in the city’s newer ethnic enclaves.
But tensions remain. According to Central Ward chairman Rev. Dr. Andre Speight, city residents could do a better job frequenting each other’s businesses—namely, people from other Wards should make greater efforts to support flailing businesses in the majority Black Central Ward. “The businesses doing well in Newark are usually non-black-owned ones.” He cites the booming restaurant industry in the Ironbound, which Central Ward residents patronize, but wonders why Ironbound residents won’t do the same for their neighbors the next Ward over. While many express concern about the higher crime rate in the Central Ward, Speight insists the gesture should be returned for the sake of solidarity. Further, the Portuguese own businesses in the Central Ward, but few blacks own businesses in the Ironbound. “Something needs to happen to improve relationships.”
He went on to tell me that while the development in Newark’s Downtown (he cited the corporate offices, primarily those of Prudential, and the luxury apartments) has indeed benefited the city’s economy, he wonders why their growth “hasn’t reached the rest of the Central Ward.” Though corporations like Prudential and ShopRite have donated to local nonprofits, he insists that their funds would be better spent if put toward building quality, affordable housing. “Housing,” he says, “is what made America great. The country is built on this, owning property. Housing and land create wealth. It’s all about the land. If black people don’t own land, how are they going to survive?”
“Black people,” who make up a plurality of the city’s population at 47 percent, “should not be paying rent to people who live in the suburbs who are other races. The city needs to be investing in more black families owning homes.” He suggests that aside from the city government initiating such programs, church communities can play a part if they join forces with community development organizations to build housing and create credit unions for community members. He acknowledges that the city has implemented such programs, though he’s yet to see many local residents benefit from them, at least not as much as they benefited from federal programs like the EIDL and PPP loans made available during the early days of the pandemic.
Jack Costa, president of the 103-year-old Sports Club Português—one of nearly twenty Portuguese social clubs in the Ironbound—similarly highlighted the issue of local home ownership. Though the Ironbound continues to be one of the largest Portuguese enclaves outside of the motherland, a considerable number of residents have left their East Ward homes (which they still own) for the suburbs. While Costa, like Speight, claimed that renting puts residents at an economic disadvantage, he emphasized the social and cultural toll it takes on the neighborhood. “Not living in the home you own makes it harder to be invested in the local community. You’re less likely to run into people as they are working on their lawns and gardens.”
Such fortuitous encounters were an essential element of the Ironbound’s “old-world” charm. Costa maintains hope that even if they leave the neighborhood, the Portuguese community will hold onto their numerous cafes and restaurants, and that the new ethnic groups will go on to open restaurants, churches, and cultural centers of their own, which will stave off the onslaught of a corporate monoculture. “Our neighborhood’s diversity is enriching . . . it keeps us from being ‘vanilla.’ I mean, who wants to live in a boring neighborhood where your only options are Applebee’s or Panera?”
Costa is also concerned that the new luxury housing developments will drive up rent, forcing residents to move out, and attracting upwardly mobile residents who will be less likely to plant their roots in the neighborhood and invest in meaningful third places. But others deem such new developments as a necessity for the neighborhood to stay afloat. Lui Nogueira, who has sold real estate in the Ironbound since the early 1980s, insists that if we want to see the neighborhood thrive fifty years from now, we need to “get real” and invest in more expensive housing. He, like Costa, laments the potential loss of the area’s old-world charm, but says that “the status quo cannot be maintained.”
Lifetime Ironbound resident, former police detective, and current East Ward councilman Michael Silva also affirms that if Newark is to grow, it must be realistic about bringing in real estate projects that will bring money into the city. That being said, he, like Mayor Baraka, believes that such projects should not be embraced “blindly.” What’s needed is “smart development” that takes into account the community’s input and maintains the zoning and local culture.
While rents are often subject to factors outside the city’s control (he cites the rents in neighboring cities like Hoboken and Jersey City), he told me that 20 percent of the apartments in all new complexes will have to be offered at affordable rent costs between 40 to 60 percent of Area Median Income (AMI), not to mention a new complex that will be erected offering rents at 30 percent of AMI.
He cites a new development, “The Iberia,” on Ferry Street, the neighborhood’s main avenue, which he assures will not disrupt the block’s “aesthetics.” He’s determined to protect the neighborhood’s restaurants—its claim to fame—and is even planning on constructing a “European style” block that will be closed off to traffic and dedicated solely to restaurants and cafes.
“The ethnic flair,” says Silva, “is what makes the neighborhood unique.” This is something he’s committed to maintaining as much as possible. Though he’s deeply proud of his Portuguese heritage, Councilman Silva is committed to empowering and collaborating with representatives of the Ironbound’s other ethnic communities. “I’ve made sure to have Ecuadorians and Brazilians on staff,” so he can get a feel for what each community’s needs are. He also makes a direct effort to be close to the people, going for daily walks in Independence Park and making conversation with residents.
Cultural and community development organizations in the Ironbound, like Mantena Global Care, provide such services on the ground. Solange Paizante, director of Mantena, tells me that the organization, which works primarily with the neighborhood’s Brazilian community, offers both cultural education and social services, ranging from health education classes and assisting with domestic violence cases, as well as helping youth facing an “identity crisis” to embrace both their Brazilian and American heritages. She especially emphasizes the role that the arts, music, and dance play in developing a healthy sense of one’s identity.
Newark’s legacy of ethnopolitics has changed over its nearly four-hundred-year history. Racial and economic strife, assimilation and uprooting to the suburbs, and gentrification have drastically changed the playing field in the last half century, for better and for worse. In a national climate oscillating between cultural deracination and political sacralization of identity categories, cities like Newark, where ethnicity continues to play a significant role in city life and politics, shine a light on the shifting landscape of identity in America.
Ethnicity and Identity
In the introduction to the second edition of their 1963 study Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan chart the ways that ethnicity in the United States has been shaped by other identity markers like religion, field of labor, and socioeconomic status. Even with the force of assimilation considered, Glazer and Moynihan maintained that ethnicity will always play some role in American society due to several “strong elements in the social structure of the United States.” Identifying as “simply American” is “inhibited by a subtle system of identifying, which ranges from brutal discrimination and prejudice to merely naming,” and above all by “the unavailability of a simple ‘American’ identity.”
Yet the duo prophetically warned of the potential of racial tension in the 1960s and ’70s to shift America’s ethnic paradigm away from categories rooted in communal, lived realities to abstractions, with race and skin color as sole reference points. On one hand, they critique those who fought to defend “white” institutions, since “whiteness” is largely a concept constructed to “exclude blacks.” Some, they acknowledge, argue “by the same token” against defending “black institutions.” Yet they insist that contrary to the assertions of both white supremacists and black radicals, “black” defines not just a race but a “cultural group.” From soul food and Gospel music, to a particularly charismatic mode of Protestant worship and styles of dress, “‘blackness’ in this country . . . is the American Negro cultural style,” one that, though perhaps finding its roots in the cultures of numerous of West African tribes, is very much distinct from them.
“But,” they concede, “the matter is not so simple.” The fact that the invention and idolatry of “whiteness”—as artificial of a category as it may be—and the systemization of racism in the legal system have played such a considerable role in the nation’s development makes race impossible to ignore. They expressed reservations about both naïve “color-blind” approaches that completely downplayed the need to confront explicit discrimination and the resulting disparities, as well as simplistic, “exclusive fixations” on “racial formulations” that decry the “common oppression of all ‘colored’ races by all ‘whites.’” Such narratives that are devoid of nuance “will undoubtedly encourage the final tearing apart of the community and the country between groups that see each other as different species rather than as valued variance of a common humanity.” Thus, Moynihan and Glazer insisted that “politically” it would be “wise to recognize these varied sources of conflict.” Yet their construal of ethnicity as a nuanced cultural reality—a set of beliefs, traditions, social and moral values, transmitted through communities and families— proved increasingly out of step with the dawning of a neoliberal individualist paradigm, including both its conservative (economic) and progressive (cultural) modes, that soon pervaded American politics.
Former Newark resident Jack Cashill’s recently published book Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities illustrates the stifling deadlock caused by the latter style of identity politics that arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Presented as a defense of white ethnics who left Newark after the days of the 1967 riots—who were often accused of racism—Cashill pins much of Newark’s turmoil on the interest of profit-hungry federal bureaucrats who imposed their imprudent “urban renewal” projects on the city, as well as on vengeful black radicals like Amiri Baraka.
Cashill’s harsh critiques of self-interested bureaucrats and divisive radicals are certainly merited. Echoing much of Moynihan and Glazer’s arguments, Cashill documents how black power movements like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam sowed seeds of violence and chaos in inner cities, which served to worsen the plight of black communities rather than liberating them. Yet his simplistic calls for blacks to lift themselves up by their bootstraps fail to account for the early deindustrialization and job losses that were already destabilizing these areas. His determination to argue against the discourses of radicals past, like Baraka, and present, like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, also leads him to an extreme position that lacks nuance and ignores the “varied sources of conflict” that Moynihan and Glazer pointed to.
Cashill’s work is certainly not to be dismissed. It offers compelling arguments that are worthy of consideration in today’s discourses of race, which are dominated by simplistic poststructuralist tropes. Its inclusion of numerous, vividly told, firsthand accounts of Newark’s glory days and the horrors of the riot are impressive. Yet I find it alarming that Cashill largely ignores those who proposed more moderate, common-sense solutions that transcended the radical-versus-libertarian binary.
My grandfather, Steve Adubato Sr., is mentioned in passing toward the close of the book for protecting the North Ward from one of Baraka’s divisive pushes for an all-black housing project in the middle of the mostly Italian neighborhood. But little is said about the fact that he was one of the only Italians who worked tirelessly to convince his co-ethnics to stay put and build coalitions with their black and Puerto Rican neighbors. He also campaigned to win Italian votes for Kenneth Gibson, a black mayoral candidate, in 1970 (without which he would not have been able to win the election).
Steve Sr. (affectionately known as “Big Steve”) was no respecter of white liberal pieties or of black radicalism—namely in the form of excessive government handouts aimed exclusively toward black individuals. “There is no program that the government can ever set up that can duplicate a neighborhood, with its responsibilities, its communication, the feeling of belonging that it imparts. If you put buildings and people together,” he continued, “it’s still not a real neighborhood. It will not be right because there is no common interest or responsibility.”
Nevertheless, he recognized the need for government programs that aimed to uplift businesses and communal organizations. And as much as he advocated for his fellow working-class Italians, he had no interest in the Italian isolationism and supremacism of others like Addonizio and Anthony Imperiale (who is lauded as a hero by Cashill). His main interest when supporting Gibson and going on to found the North Ward Center (a community center and social service organization) and the Robert Treat Academy charter schools, was to uplift all of the neighborhood’s communities, teaching them to value their own cultures as well as those of their neighbors as a source of enrichment, empowerment, and existential meaning. All ethnic groups, he believed, “had a vital role to share,” with the potential to enrich and be enriched by others. “A [multiethnic] situation promotes better race relations. A multiracial city is what America is all about.” Thus, Adubato favored universalist approaches in terms of policy, but he also recognized that the ethnic community was the decisive actor in city politics, economics, and daily life—not the atomized individual.
His push to halt the North Ward’s Italians from moving to the suburbs was not driven by moralistic “anti-racist” posturing. “I’m not a white liberal,” he once said. “I’m a practical guy who wants to live in a society that gives people of all kinds, of all backgrounds, a chance to share.” Above all, he feared that the Italians and other ethnic whites would lose their cultural heritage in the suburbs and would miss out on the chance to build a substantial and powerful coalition with working-class people of other races and ethnicities. While he certainly criticized the whites who flocked to the suburbs due to racial animus, he was especially critical of suburban whites who congratulated themselves for supporting liberal policies—which, though seemingly benevolent, were often cynically motivated—rather than “getting their hands dirty” and working side by side with people of color in the old neighborhood.
My grandfather’s mission was inspired by the work of figures like Monsignor Geno Baroni, a Catholic priest of Italian descent who established a model for building urban multiethnic coalitions. His willingness to walk the nuanced line between conventionally progressive and conservative discourses of race placed him in the line of fire from all sides. He was subjected to harsh criticism from ethnic whites for being too protective of blacks and from blacks for being too hospitable to proponents of ethnic white pride. Despite the vehement backlash, his National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs attracted numerous supporters in favor of multiethnic coalitions, including Senator Barbara Mikulski, Representative Marcy Kaptur, and Professor Arthur J. Naparstek.
Beyond Newark
In The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argues that the ideal of a city is not comfort and autonomy but convivium—a dynamic sharing of life that she likens to that of a ballet, each of the residents playing a particular role and harmonizing with each other in order to bring the show to life. Michael Novak, perhaps one of the most vocal pro-ethnic evangelists of the last century, described how such “old neighborhoods” lent themselves to maintaining one’s roots in cultural traditions, and to the lively, spontaneous “social mode” characteristic of most eastern and southern European, Latin American, and Afrodiasporic communities.
Similarly, Camille Paglia, who grew up in an Italian family in rural upstate New York, lamented that suburban children lacked contact with the “eternal realities” that children growing up in cities and the country encountered regularly. She reflected on how such differing childhood environments went on to color her experiences in academia, where the “genteel,” “repressed” style of many of her assimilated suburbanite colleagues clashed with the more brash style of her Jewish, Black, Latino, and fellow Italian coworkers.
“Marooned in the suburbs,” continues Paglia, suburban families are “frantically over scheduled and geographically transient . . . with few ties to neighbors and little sustained contact with relatives.” “[W]here the parents are white-collar professionals who do brainwork,” suburbanites are “seething with frustrations and tensions.” Elsewhere she writes that while middle-class culture may be affluent, it is “spiritually empty. The attractive houses of the Columbine killers are mere shells, seething with the poisons of the isolated nuclear family and its Byzantine denials.” “Bourgeois ‘niceness,’” she concludes, “is its own imperialism.”
Although plenty of suburbanites have managed to maintain ties to their ethnic heritage, it is hard to deny the fact that the landscape of suburbia lends itself more to atomization and predictability than togetherness and spontaneity. Cashill critiques the tendency of assimilated ethnics who moved to the suburbs to veer toward simplistic moralizing, with their aversion to the grittiness and complexity of human nature. Similarly, Novak warns of the “Enlightened” humanism, the rootless globalized ideal of assimilated elites. I am inclined to think that much of our contemporary discourse is informed by this mode of thought, whether in its libertarian abstractions or its left-identitarian forms.
Proponents of ethnopolitics stand outside of this binary thinking. Their nuanced appreciation of ethnicity and the role it can play in American politics reflects their reliance on a social imaginary that transcends the limited scope of power dynamics and individual “success.” Ethnicity reflects a broader communitarian view where human fragility is redeemed not by bureaucratic measures, nor by the sheer force of an individual’s will, but by the bonds of belonging, which provide the person a depth of purpose and meaning that is not afforded to them by the flat neoliberal imaginary. The more hopeful communitarian discourse of solidarity and subsidiarity provides a level of creativity that can forge a path out of the deadlock between bureaucratic identitarians and proponents of an atomized individualism.
The prospect of recovering a space for ethnicity in both the public and private spheres opens us to new possibilities in politics and culture. Today’s monocultural landscape, despites its hollow appeals to “diversity,” is crying out for a new, substantial foundation—one full of meaning and beauty. “Every human being,” says Novak, “is ‘rooted,’ and . . . each one’s social history is important.” We are born into an inescapable matrix of “givens,” which are “gifts” and not “occasions for despair. . . .” He continued,
Each of us is born from the womb of a single woman into a particular segment of human experience, at a time, in a place, within a language and a particular set of cultural symbols, beliefs, rites, gestures, emotional patterns, and a not-universal sensibility. . . . Our roots are our material, our concrete limits, our purchase on a finite, real, earthy earth—our liberation from the land of pure spirits, disembodied presences, and gnostic hoverings. . . . Ethnicity is not a matter of genetics; it is a matter of cultural transmission, from family to child. The new ethnicity is a form of historical consciousness. Who are you? What history do you come from? And where next? These are its questions.
Paglia, in a speech to students at MIT, made a similar, though more blunt appeal, telling the crowd to simply “be ethnic!”