Where Did the Racial Boxes People Check on Forms Come From? – Part 4

White ethnic groups and black immigrants.

David Bernstein, in his book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, describes the long, sordid history behind America’s current, arbitrary racial classification system.  In this essay, we’ll explore Bernstein’s recounting of how certain white “ethnic groups” didn’t come to be granted their own official “identity” classification.

As Bernstein writes, at the time when the current, and exceedingly arbitrary, racial and ethnic classification system was being developed in America, some Members of Congress were wondering why certain white ethnic groups weren’t being considered:

At a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing in 1974, two Congressmen, Democrat Mario Biaggi and Republican Jack Kemp, grilled EEOC chairman John Powell about the commission’s approach to combatting discrimination against white ethnics:

Mr. Biaggi: I keep hearing Mr. Powell saying Spanish surnamed [as examples of victims of discrimination needing redress]. The thought that comes to my mind is why Spanish surnames and not Italian surnames?

Mr. Kemp: Polish surnames. What ethnic groups are included in this heterogeneous society? …

Mr. Biaggi: Under the law, form EEO-6 [regarding staff at institutions of higher education] requires the administrator to break down statistics and it goes down to “(a) black, (b) white, including Pakistanians and East Indians,” and you come to (c) Spanish surnamed, and why was that distinction made?

Powell responded that African Americans and the Spanish surnamed complained the most of discrimination. Biaggi retorted that whites facing discrimination based on ethnicity believed that the government did not care about them, so they did not bother reporting discrimination to authorities. Powell rejoined by highlighting the special problems African Americans faced with employment discrimination. He did not address the Spanish surnames versus Italian surnames query.

(The discussion of Polish surnames brought to mind that when I was a kid, I remember going into the local mall bookstore and finding in the humor section a collection of “Dumb Polack [Polish] Jokes.”  I pointed it out to my mother, who was Polish, and she said “Don’t pay any attention to that.”)

Bernstein continues:

A few months later, Congress directed the US Commission on Civil Rights to prepare a report to Congress about “denials of equal protection … involving Americans who are members of eastern- and southern-European ethnic groups.” The commission produced the report in December 1979. The report documented past and present discrimination against white ethnics. It suggested that the government collect data about which groups were being negatively affected by discrimination and to what extent. The relevant government agencies ignored these recommendations.

Regarding Italian Americans, Bernstein writes:

Italian Americans have always been considered white by law. They have, however, historically faced significant anti-Catholic discrimination. Many also faced prejudice because of their relatively dark complexions, a product of the fact that most Italian Americans are of southern Italian and especially Sicilian ancestry. Italian immigrants sometimes faced organized violence, most infamously when a mob in New Orleans lynched eleven men in 1891. President Benjamin Harrison declared a national Columbus Day holiday the following year. The idea was to help Italian immigrants integrate into American society by officially recognizing a figure associated with Italy as a national hero. The development of Columbus Day as a national holiday thereafter was a product of efforts by Italian immigrants and their descendants to be recognized as full-fledged Americans. By the early 1920s, anti-Italian stereotypes had proliferated and become entrenched in American society. Italian Americans were associated with organized crime. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial of 1921 associated Italian immigrants with violent anarchism. Anti-Italian sentiment was sufficiently high that the 1924 immigration law almost entirely barred immigration from Italy. Italy’s participation in World War II as an enemy of the United States fed negative perceptions of Italian Americans. Many Italian Americans born in Italy, including naturalized American citizens, faced restrictions such as curfews during the war … When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted, Italian American activists hoped the government would combat persistent discrimination against Italian Americans in elite Protestant strongholds like elite law firms, banks, insurance companies, and universities. A Census Bureau study published in 1969 showed that Italian Americans were near the bottom of the American ethnic hierarchy by almost every socioeconomic measure. Significant discrimination against Italians in white-collar executive positions continued into the late 1970s … In a 1977 editorial, Chairman of the National Italian American Foundation Jeno F. Paulucci argued that Italians should be eligible for affirmative action. But with no one collecting data on Italian American employment, there was no way to show the sort of “underrepresentation” that would facilitate recognition of Italian Americans as an official minority group.

Regarding Polish Americans, Bernstein writes:

Polish Americans have mostly assimilated into the general white population. This was much less true in the 1960s and ’70s, when distinctly Polish neighborhoods in cities like New York and Chicago were still common. Like other Eastern and Southern European Catholic groups, Poles had faced significant discrimination. The 1924 immigration law strictly capped immigration from Poland. WASP-dominated corporations, law firms, and other elite institutions excluded Poles already in the US from their institutions. As late as 1972, Polish Americans were overwhelmingly concentrated in blue-collar jobs … The leading Polish American organization, the Polish American Congress (PAC), advocated that Polish Americans be eligible for minority preferences … PAC Executive Director Leonard Walentynowicz … testified before the federal Civil Service Commission. He argued that the commission’s affirmative action plan improperly favored some minority groups over others -- such as Polish Americans -- without justification. Walentynowicz questioned why the commission favored providing preferences for white Hispanics but not for members other white ethnic groups with below-average socioeconomic standing. He noted that unlike the vast majority of Polish Americans, many Hispanics had recently immigrated to the US and therefore might never have been subject to ethnic discrimination by their fellow Americans … In 1978, Walentynowicz wrote to EEOC Commissioner Eleanor Norton. He requested that the agency collect data on white ethnics so that discrimination against them could be more easily identified. Walentynowicz also testified before the US Civil Rights Commission in 1979. Representing the PAC, he made essentially the same plea for improved federal data collection on employment of white minority groups. Walentynowicz noted that while some people dismissed Polish Americans’ discrimination claims because they are of European origin, the same is true of people from Spain, who are included in the Hispanic category. Polish Americans had no data available to show discrimination in the corporate world, he added, because the government only collected data regarding official minorities.

Regarding Jewish Americans, Bernstein writes:

Jews in the Western world suffered from both religious and racial hostility, the latter culminating in the Holocaust. American Jewish organizations have therefore consistently been opposed to singling out Jews in government statistics, whether as a religious or as a racial group. American Jewish organizations believed that any official classification of Jews by the government carried more risk than reward. After World War II, Jewish organizations were especially fearful that if a question about religion was added to the census, cross-tabulations with other data would reveal that Jews’ incomes were higher than average. This revelation might stoke antisemitism … American Jews are among the most economically successful American ethnic and religious groups. Nevertheless, for much of the country’s history institutionalized antisemitism meant that Jews were essentially barred from working in many industries, especially at high levels, including finance and insurance … Jews were also barred from many private clubs where executives made connections and closed business deals. Through the 1950s, elite universities enforced quotas on Jewish enrollment and discriminated against Jews in faculty hiring … When the Office of Management and Budget issued Statistical Directive 15 in 1977 designating official minority groups, the document made no mention of Jews … Jews found themselves uncomfortably in the center of the debate over affirmative action in higher education when Marco DeFunis, a Sephardic Jew, sued the University of Washington Law School over its preferential admissions policies for other minority groups. Ironically, DeFunis, whose immigrant grandparents only spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), would qualify for affirmative action preferences in admission today if he chose to assert a Hispanic identity … Hasidim [a strictly orthodix Jewish sect] got a hard lesson in the consequences of not being deemed an official minority group in the early 1970s. Federal civil rights officials determined that New York’s 1970 apportionment of state legislative districts violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of African American residents of Brooklyn. The officials ordered a redistricting that concentrated African American voting strength. The same redistricting plan, however, divided the Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who had previously been concentrated in one district, into two different districts. A Hasidic organization sued. The lawsuit alleged that the Hasidim were being disadvantaged and their voting strength diluted to create a “quota,” that is, to ensure that an African American legislator represent a particular district. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the government by a seven-to-one margin. The court treated the Hasidim as part of an undifferentiated mass of white voters, rather than as a minority group protected from dilution of their voting strength by the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. Justice William Brennan, in a concurring opinion, gave a nod, but only a nod, to the Hasidim’s concerns. Brennan noted that evidence was presented to the court that the same level of African American voting strength could have been “attained through redistricting strategies that did not slice the Hasidic community in half.” But state authorities “chose to localize the burdens of race reassignment upon” the Hasidim. The “impression of unfairness,” Brennan concluded, “is magnified when a coherent group like the Hasidim disproportionately bears the adverse consequences of a race assignment policy.” Only Chief Justice Warren Burger objected to the court’s failure to recognize Hasidim as a distinct subgroup with unique interests. Burger wrote, “The assumption that ‘whites’ and ‘nonwhites’ … form homogeneous entities for voting purposes is entirely without foundation. The ‘whites’ category consists of a veritable galaxy of national origins, ethnic backgrounds, and religious denominations.” He argued that the Hasidim have a “constitutional right not to be carved up so as to create a voting bloc composed of some other ethnic or racial group through … racial gerrymandering.”

Bernstein then describes how the modern American racial classification system accounts for – or fails to account for – black immigrants and people with multi-racial backgrounds. Regarding black immigrants:

Approximately 10 percent of black Americans were born abroad … As the black immigrant-derived population has risen, some of the ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves) population have argued that recent immigrants and their descendants should be classified separately; so have some immigrants, who believe that, e.g., being a Nigerian American is quite different from being an “African American” in terms of cultural background and life experience. When this issue arose in the late 1980s, the Census Bureau clarified that immigrants and their descendants are placed the same Black/African American category as ADOS. This imposed “a collective black identity on members of disparate national-origin groups, who may have chosen to identify otherwise if given an option.”  This classification controversy has not been settled. Fueling the debate is the fact that black immigrants and their children make up a highly disproportionate percentage of the black students who attend elite universities. The issue came to public attention in 2004. The New York Times reported that almost two-thirds of the black undergraduate students at Harvard University were West Indian or African immigrants, the children of such immigrants, or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples … Harvard is one of many elite colleges that has attracted many more immigrant black students than ADOS students relative to their respective percentages of the population. Controversy over whether immigrants and mixed-race students are reaping affirmative action benefits that were intended for ADOS students continues to occasionally bubble up. For example, in 2017 ADOS students at Cornell University protested that the “black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students.”

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine how children of multi-racial parents are classified.