As whites become increasingly distant in generations and time from their immigrant ancestors, the tendency to distort, or remember selectively, one's ethnic origins increases. Distortions and inconsistencies in ethnic reporting are shown to vary with age, educational attainment, and marital status and even to exist within families when parents report the ethnic ancestry of their children. These examples of inconsistency, simplification, and systematic distortion all demonstrate the flux of the ethnic categories among white Americans. It is concluded that ethnic categories are social phenomena that over the long run are constantly being redefined and reformulated.
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References
1.
1. Stanley Lieberson, “A New Ethnic Group in the United States,” in Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life, 4th ed., ed. Norman R. Yetman (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1985), p. 444.
2.
2. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, supp. report PC80-S1-7, Persons of Spanish Origin by State (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), p. 5.
3.
3. Melville J. Herskovits, The American Negro (New York: Knopf, 1928), chap. 1.
4.
4. Calvin L. Beale, “Census Problems of Racial Enumeration,” in Race: Individual and Collective Behavior, ed. Edgar T. Thompson and Everett C. Hughes (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), pp. 537-540.
5.
5. The various types and causes of change are described in Stanley Lieberson, “Unhyphenated Whites in the United States,”Ethnic and Racial Studies, 8(1):159-180 (Jan. 1985).
6.
6. The reader should note that the relative distribution of categories is different from Table 1, not only because Table 2 is restricted to the third generation, but also because Table 1 includes people who have not specified any generation.
7.
7. See the analysis of ethnic distortions in the Soviet Union by Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Estimating Russification of Ethnic Identity among Non-Russians in the USSR,”Demography, 20(4):474-475 (Nov. 1983).
8.
Lieberson , “Unhyphenated Whites in the United States,” pp. 173-175.
9.
9. Census procedures make it hard to examine the offspring when one or both parents report multiple origins. With certain exceptions described earlier, the census truncated the ethnic histories of persons reporting multiple ancestries, listing only the first two ancestries. As a consequence, we do not know if parents with two ancestries had listed additional ancestries for themselves and/or their children.
10.
Stanley Lieberson and Mary C. Waters, “Ethnic Mixtures in the United States,”Sociology and Social Research, 70(1):43-52 (Oct. 1985).
11.
11. Lieberson, “Unhyphenated Whites in the United States,” pp. 171-173, 175-176.
12.
12. Although education clearly affects the response, the overall level is due to more than merely the lack of education. It is still the case, even among rural fourth-generation Southern whites who do not give one or more specific European ancestries, that some 38 percent have at least a high school diploma.
13.
13. Information based on personal communication from Tom W. Smith, for which we are most grateful.
14.
14. Lieberson and Waters, “Ethnic Mixtures in the United States,” tab. 2.
15.
15. For example, see Micaela Di Leonardo, Varieties of Ethnic Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 3.
16.
16. See Lieberson, “Unhyphenated Whites in the United States,” pp. 159-180.
