Symbolic ethnicity and Herbert Gans: race, religion, and politics in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to assess some of Herb Gans’s influential contributions, not only in his important paper on symbolic ethnicity, but also his wider discussion of the changing role of race, ethnicity, and religion in American society. In a period spanning more than half a century, he has helped to raise key questions and to suggest avenues of research that have stimulated debates and the re-evaluation of a complex, controversial, and highly dynamic field of social science research and policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Symbolic ethnicity
• assimilation
• immigration
• race relations
• religion
• warfare and conflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. What to include, or exclude, from a definition of ethnicity remains an interesting question. Despite Gans’s claim that “there is no intrinsic connection between ethnicity and religion” (Gans 2014b, 801), a failure to explore the role of religion in this situation appears surprising. The same might be said of another dimension of ethnicity – language – that is frequently associated with, though not always linked to, a “sense of peoplehood” (our definition of ethnos or ethnicity). Language retention, revival or disappearance has been an important factor in a variety of ethnic encounters in America which sheds light on the overall assimilation process. The flourishing and later demise of the Yiddish Theatre in New York City, the silencing of German as a major language due to the two World Wars, and the current controversies over Spanish all point to the dynamic interplay between this particular component of ethnicity and the outcome of inter-group relations. Religion, like language, may or may not be part of every ethnic bundle, but in a society as “religious” as the United States, it is hard to leave it out of the equation.

2. In a poll taken in June 2015, it was shown that while 38 per cent of Americans rejected the idea of a Muslim President, 40 per cent were opposed to a candidate who was an avowed atheist. See Justin McCarthy, Gallup Poll, 22 June 2015.

3. As Nazli Kibria points out in her study of the Bangladeshi diaspora:

In the societies of North America and Europe, there is a tendency to see Muslims in homogeneous and one-dimensional terms and concurrently to assume that identities other than that of Muslim are of no great significance to them. But just like any other identity that of Muslim coexists with others in fluid and contingent ways. (2011, 149)

4. In our case, the authors are a first-generation Anglo American (Stone) and a multiple-generation African American (Harris).

5. Brazil, as Gans also mentions in his later discussion of the issues, does raise fascinating questions about different patterns of racial categorization. This is clearly demonstrated in the late adoption of affirmative action policies by a society whose ideology of “racial democracy” acted as an impediment to taking the issue of racial justice seriously. Given the much higher ratio of Afro-Brazilians in the society, as compared to African Americans in the United States, and the genuine complication of using the North American model of affirmative action based largely on appearance as the method for defining who is eligible for such actions, gives added weight to using class rather than race in such a strategy (Bailey 2016, 276–285).

6. All data were generated from national exit poll results from interviews with 24,537 randomly selected voters. Edison Media Research for the National Election Pool, The Washington Post, and other media organizations were the lead investigators. The full breadth of collected data was originally published in The Washington Post on 9 November 2016: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/exit-polls/.

7. For an interesting analysis of the mindset of many of the Tea Party supporters who have managed to combine their religious beliefs with Trump’s personal behaviour and statements, see Hochschild (2016).