Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Whiteness has been an obstruction to the narration of European immigrant experiences, as both the whiteness of these populations and their cultural differences that were consumed by this whiteness must be considered.

Whiteness has thus both determined and obscured immigrant experiences, and the ethnic revival of the 1970s arose in response to this obfuscation, propelled by the work of Michael Novak, who published The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1971. This revival is simultaneously anti-elitist and culturally conservative, insisting on ethnic whites as occupying a liminal racial space that is not fully white. For Novak, this comes down to ethnic whites not feeling white in the midst of possessing public power that is conferred with whiteness. Novak argues that ethnic whites did not want to be pitted against African Americans; this opposition was imposed on them because of their (partial) absorption into whiteness, which was systemic and futile to resist. For Novak, of paramount importance is ethnic whites’ internal reality of not feeling like they belong within a category that they did not ask to be a part of, and this must be considered.