Some 60 years ago, I saw two water fountains at a railroad station in Virginia. One was marked “white only,” the other, “colored only.” I flashed on that image a few days ago on seeing a sign at San Francisco State University announcing the locations of four different graduation celebrations: one for black students, another for Filipinos, another for Asians, another for Hispanics.
These split celebrations were neither mandatory nor suggestive of any group inferiority, so one wonders why they caused that old Virginia image to pop up at all. The answer is that the San Francisco sign was a portent of segregation, even if only self-segregation, a growing trend that should make Americans uneasy. It certainly should make Jews uneasy as well as a little confused, because of some of our own experiments in separatism.
The subject is ripe partly because of the dramatic immigration of Hispanics and Asians who are destined to become the majority of Californians. In the last such massive infusion of “new Americans” a century ago, 4 million Italians as well as 4 million mostly Jewish Eastern Europeans poured into this country in about three decades, resulting in restrictive and racist immigration laws.
Typically, a prominent novelist, Kenneth Roberts, wrote that “if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.”
Today few would make such racist remarks about the current immigrants. And our experience has taught us that they are good for the country, raising levels of both economic demand and energy. There will be no mainstream effort to pass anything like the National Origins Quota law of the 1920s. However, this new immigration does raise the basic American “tribal dilemma” question as it has not been raised for a century: Can these groups find a balance that will allow them to maintain their identity and still be integrated? It is the Jewish dilemma as well.
Some modern separatist trends are understandable. The intermarriage rate of Italian-Americans is now about 80 percent, that of the Irish even higher. As a result, those older European-American groups have virtually disappeared as cohesive communities, with only nostalgic traces.
Hispanics and Asians could conceivably go the same way. In 1974, the intermarriage rate for Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles was 34 per cent, that of some Asian groups was even higher. But since then, immigration has accelerated, along with an organized “identity industry” that did not exist a century ago. In a book titled “The Disuniting of America,” the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acknowledges the validity of ethnic pride but worries about the efforts of some self-serving ethnic politicians to go too far, to promote “a counter-revolution against the original theory of America.”
The core of that American theory is integration in common spheres of life. And the “counter-revolution” against that idea is most insidious at the colleges of this country where the minds of the future leaders are shaped. Oberlin College in Ohio, once known as a model of ethnic and racial integration, was recently visited by a Jewish journalist who wrote that students there “now think, act, study in different racial and ethnic groups,” living apart in Asia House, Spanish House, African-American House and others.
One of the “others” at Oberlin was J House, for Jews. Such separate dormitories have been supported by the Jewish community, which recognizes that the future group identity of young people, including Jews, is most vulnerable in college years. However, in our proper anxiety to avoid the fate of the older European groups, we cannot — and need not — help to destroy the distinctive American idea.
Integration is not just the key to equal opportunity and civic peace for all Americans, but the main way in which Jews are able to exert influence on public policy. We have to draw the line thoughtfully between strengthening group identity and eroding integration.
We should, for example, encourage frequent activities that bring students of a particular group together on matters of group interest. But, for both Jews and others, we should be very wary of “ethnically correct” tendencies that wipe out the integrative experience, especially in the formative years. That sign at our local university — more unicultural than multicultural — was just not reassuring.