Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in American History

By MICHAEL BARONE

the role of race in American politics cannot be understood except as an example of the role of ethnicity in American politics. In spite of the long-standing elite opinion that ethnicity should not play any role in politics, that voters and politicians should act without regard to ethnic factors, in fact ethnicity has always played an important part in our politics. This is what we should expect in a country that has always had forms of racial and ethnic discrimination, and in which civic and university and corporate elites, for all their tut-tutting about ethnic politics, have often been more hearty practitioners than ordinary people of ethnic discrimination— of anti-Jewish discrimination up through the 1960s and of racial quotas and preferences since the 1970s.

Over the long course of our history politics has more often divided Americans along cultural than along economic lines—along lines of region, race, ethnicity, religion, and personal values. This is natural in a country that has almost always been economically successful and culturally multivarious, in which economic upward mobility has been the common experience and in which cultural and ethnic identities have often been lasting and tenacious.

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Copyright: MICHAEL BARONE Hoover Press