Eight Decades of Ethnic Dilemmas
Iconic sociologist Nathan Glazer on the problems of group identity, affirmative action and Donald Trump.
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By Jason Willick
Sept. 14, 2018 6:07 p.m. ET
Cambridge, Mass.
Like many young people, Nathan Glazer was once a socialist. After enrolling at New York’s City College in 1940, Mr. Glazer, whose parents were Polish Jewish immigrants, joined the radical wing of a Zionist group called Avukah. Looking back, he says, its ideology wasn’t so profound—“something about Jewish and Arab proletarians coming together” against British imperialism in Palestine.
City College in the 1930s and ’40s was a politically active haven for aspiring Jewish scholars, whose admission to Columbia and other Ivy League schools was restricted by quotas. This was the milieu that incubated the “New York intellectuals,” a loose cohort of left-wing, anti-Soviet writers and thinkers—including Daniel Bell, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol—who shaped American intellectual life in the mid-20th century.
Eight Decades of Ethnic Dilemmas
Photo: Terry Shoffner
Mr. Glazer, 95, is one of the last living members of this group. As young radicals often do, he drifted rightward as he grew older. After college, he decided “America would be fine if it was more like Sweden.” Then he concluded “it can’t be, it’s too diverse.” Now he has doubts about social democracy altogether: “It runs into its own problems.”
But Mr. Glazer, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, drifted only as far as the political center. He is sometimes labeled a “neoconservative,” like Kristol or Norman Podhoretz. But he tells me he’s never voted Republican except once in Massachusetts, as a protest against “the fact that some Kennedy was being elected from the district again and again.”
Mr. Glazer’s interest in Jewish identity deepened after World War II and the Holocaust. It eventually drew him to the wider question of how the U.S. accommodates ethnic pluralism, to which he devoted much of his career. His best-known work, “Beyond the Melting Pot”—written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and published in 1963—described the limits of “assimilation” for Jews, Puerto Ricans, Irish, Italians and blacks in midcentury New York City.
Moynihan and Mr. Glazer argued that ethnic identities—especially “those not close to the Anglo-Saxon center,” as they put it—tend to persist in the U.S., shaping politics and social life for generations. Ethnic groups “became interest groups,” Mr. Glazer says, “not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of their occupational concentrations. When you’re talking about the Italian Americans,” for example, “you’re talking about the sanitation men’s union.” The Irish were the police, the Jews the small shopkeepers, “and so on.” Ethnic residential clusters also persisted for decades, even after Congress severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in 1924.
Ethnic politics has existed throughout American history, as the country absorbed successive waves of immigrants. But Mr. Glazer sees contemporary identity politics as something new—an offspring of the civil-rights movement. “What happened was black identity became the model. It became the model for a revival of feminism,” Mr. Glazer says. “It became the model for all kinds of groups.”
Many sociologists of Mr. Glazer’s generation expected that black Americans after civil rights would follow the pattern of ethnic Europeans: They would continue to face discrimination and retain some ethnic distinctiveness, but the process of integration would be possible without state interference like quotas or set-asides. “We didn’t think of blacks in the North as we thought of blacks in the South,” Mr. Glazer says. “The blacks in the South have to be freed from a political oppression—separate schools, separate public facilities.”
Mr. Glazer hoped the Northern model of race relations could spread to the South after civil rights. Instead, liberals began thinking about race in the North along Southern lines—an unfortunate turn, in Mr. Glazer’s view. “I kept on fighting the word ‘segregation’ of blacks in the North,” he says. Northern blacks “didn’t have money, they lived where they could.” But they “were not segregated in schools; they were concentrated because that’s where they were”—just as ethnic neighborhoods in midcentury New York had schools that were heavily Puerto Rican or Italian.
The degree of discrimination against blacks under Jim Crow was unparalleled. Yet elite opinion blurred the distinction between the contentious ethnic pluralism depicted in “Beyond the Melting Pot” and legally mandated white supremacy. America’s identity problem “became merged, North and South,” Mr. Glazer says. New ethnic groups, although they faced different obstacles, replicated the language, tactics and institutions that had successfully liberated Southern blacks.
As an example, Mr. Glazer cites “the last big fight over microaggression, I suppose, or misappropriation—over this Indian figure in ‘The Simpsons.’ ” He means Apu, owner of the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store and subject of a 2017 documentary, “The Problem With Apu,” which condemns the cartoon character as an invidious stereotype. Fifty years ago, “who would argue about what you thought of Indian immigrants?” Mr. Glazer asks. “There weren’t enough of them to think about.” Now South Asians, along with myriad other groups, have been assimilated into the civil-rights tradition.
Mr. Glazer sees today’s racial preferences in college admissions as a legacy of this expansion of the civil-rights model, which has come under strain as new immigrant groups join the fold. A few miles from where we sit, unintended contradictions of this system are coming to a head as Harvard defends itself in a lawsuit whose Asian-American plaintiffs allege they are the victims of discrimination.
In Mr. Glazer’s view, preferences have expanded far beyond their original purpose, which was to lift blacks. “The only legitimacy for affirmative action,” he says, “was to make up for the fact that they were enslaved, or more or less treated as enslaved for a very long time thereafter.” He adds that “we never made it up, and there is no way of making it up”—and observes that today even many black beneficiaries of affirmative action “have at least one white parent” or are immigrants from Africa. “We aren’t doing much for the people we are trying to do something for.”
Ironically, the civil-rights movement’s central idea, colorblindness, precluded policies to help blacks in particular. Instead they had to be justified in ethnically-neutral terms, such as helping minorities in general, or promoting diversity. Mr. Glazer worries that the Asian plaintiffs suing Harvard are misusing the civil-right’s era’s “no-discrimination dictum,” whose purpose was recompense for Jim Crow.
Moreover, he sympathizes with the idea of trying to achieve some ethnic balance at elite schools—notwithstanding the discrimination he faced as a Jewish college applicant nearly eight decades ago. “I think it would have been bad for the country if the Ivy League had maintained a purely meritocratic basis for admissions,” he says. “The Jews would have risen to 40% or something.” As “national institutions,” these schools “had to be representative nationally in some way.” Mr. Glazer believes Ivy League admissions preferences often went too far—especially in medical schools, where the quotas were sometimes as low as 5%. But his pragmatic view of ethnic compromise balances meritocratic fairness with other values.
Comparisons between anti-Jewish discrimination then and anti-Asian discrimination now are complicated by the diversity within the latter category: “The Asian group—we are talking about Indians, we are talking about Filipinos, we are talking about Chinese, Japanese. There is such mixed history.” Still, Mr. Glazer is troubled by reports that Harvard admissions officers gave low “personality ratings” to Asian applicants they’d never met. And he admires the California Institute of Technology, which ignores race in favor of a model of diversity that consists in “having enough particle physicists to match the theoretical mathematicians,” as Mr. Glazer says with a laugh. Caltech’s student body is 43% Asian.
In Mr. Glazer’s ideal world, private institutions would have leeway to practice racial preferences or not, in accord with their public mission. But by now that kind of pluralistic approach has grown hard to sustain because “government has gotten too deeply involved.” With Congress funding billions of dollars of research and student loans, and federal regulators statute-bound to scrutinize campuses for discrimination, “the distinction between public and nonpublic has become meaningless,” Mr. Glazer says. Federal law mandates colorblindness, so the courts will have to continue tying themselves in knots if they are to permit racial preferences.
What about the politics of all this? Mr. Glazer doubts the issue will drive Asian-American voters to the GOP. “I think the Democratic position on immigration will outweigh Asian-American concern about discrimination in college admissions.”
Yet he disagrees with liberals who insist opposition to immigration is born primarily of “racism”—which he understands the old-fashioned way as the view that some races are inherently superior. Instead he emphasizes the economic changes that have affected the white working class. “It’s a terrible divorce that’s occurred” he says, “between those who get educated and who lead stable lives” and those who don’t. He does not believe that a “nationalist” fear that immigrants “are changing a traditional American society, its culture, its norms, its language” is in itself bigoted. But he remains confident in “the power of American culture to integrate new immigrant groups,” and he doubts the radical restrictionism advocated by some on the right is economically or politically practicable.
Mr. Glazer is a critic of President Trump, but a temperate one. He believes Mr. Trump has benefited from white identity politics, appealing to the “merged white ethnic classes,” but regards comparisons with 1930s Europe as absurd. “I saw the real fascism,” Mr. Glazer says. “I don’t see any relationship—I just don’t.” He dismisses claims that Mr. Trump’s clashes with the intelligence community and law enforcement amount to a bid to destroy democracy. “I can’t get interested in the Mueller thing,” Mr. Glazer says, “in part because I am so against what previous special counsels did, particularly in the Clinton case.”
He believes anti-Semitism in the U.S. has been all but eliminated in his lifetime, and adds: “I don’t see it connected to Trump—if his daughter marries a Jew and converts, if his grandchildren are being raised as Jews and no one cares.” As for open racists and anti-Semites who describe themselves as “alt-right”: “I don’t think anybody in the alt-right these days is going to get elected.”
Mr. Trump has made the presidency “a very undignified position,” Mr. Glazer says. “It’s too bad, because it was a grand position.” But he thinks the country can withstand it, and he cites the Adam Smith quip that there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, Mr. Glazer arrived at a similar middle ground amid the “free-speech movement.” He engaged extensively with radical students and sought to understand their demands. He wrote later that their campaign for social reform was overwhelmed by a desire for “the humiliation of others,” and “for the destruction of authority—any authority, whether necessary and worthwhile or not.” Yet he opposed Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1967 decision to fire the president of the UC system: “Like ex-communists and Trotskyists who go only as far as being social democrats, rather than going all the way to the right on politics, I thought that was far enough.”
Mr. Glazer thinks today’s campus activists are characterized by a “discomfort at discussion that looks seriously” at important social issues—just as the Berkeley revolts, in their later stages, ended up seeking to silence opposing ideas. Yet he thinks today’s student protesters are likely to be less successful than their 1960s predecessors in pushing society leftward. Perhaps instead they will put off sympathizers and thereby help produce more centrists like Mr. Glazer.
Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
