Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America

In his introduction and opening chapter Jacobson explores how "the roots craze" (4) began and how two co-existing ideologies underlay the theme of the book: "'Ellis Island white' (the long standing hegemony U.S. political culture . . .) and 'Ellis Island white' (myths and symbols of a distinctively immigrant whiteness jostled with the older icons WASPdom . . .)" Jacobson describes eight factors responsible for the white ethnic revival: the Civil Rights Movement; the "nationalist [homeland] fervor of many ethnic subcultures"; the appearance of "literary and cinematic texts" reflecting a new pluralist sensibility; academic works emphasizing the notion of ethnicity as culture, a fitting "analytic category"; federal funding of the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program in 1972; the sensational 1976 publication of Alex Haley's Roots; the movement in American political culture toward the conception of ethnic heritages and ethnic celebrations "as an idiom of American nationalism"; and the restoration of Ellis Island, "sanctifying" the revival and the predominantly white European immigrant sagas.