This paper offers a critical rebuttal to Nathan Glazer's essay "The Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern," in which Glazer contends that affirmative action is producing a fragmented, tribal America at odds with a unified national identity. The paper argues that Glazer's position idealizes American history while ignoring the long-standing social and psychological effects of slavery, segregation, and institutionalized discrimination. It defends affirmative action as a necessary corrective to deeply ingrained inequalities that formal legal reform alone cannot address, and champions a pluralistic, mosaic model of American identity over forced assimilation.
In The Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern, Nathan Glazer argues that affirmative action is creating a "tribal" America. Rather than fostering a cohesive American identity, Glazer contends that Americans are becoming increasingly identified with their personal racial, religious, and ethnic differences. Glazer states that this stands in defiance of the fact that "the United States has become the first great nation that defines itself not in terms of ethnic origin but in terms of adherence to common rules of citizenship." However, Glazer confuses this idealized view of American history with the realities of discrimination that have been perpetuated upon minorities — discrimination that minorities continue to suffer today. He argues his case as if America were not a nation with a history marked by racial divisiveness, despite the goal of racial harmony advocated by contemporary laws.
It is true that civil rights and voting rights legislation has remedied some of the abuses codified in American law. Still, the social ramifications of the legal disenfranchisement of African Americans, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups persist within those communities. The social realities of lynching, local laws discriminating against Chinese and Catholic Americans, the denial of land rights to American Indians, and other historical abuses continue to exert long-standing social effects. These effects do not disappear simply because the words of Jim Crow laws were removed from the law books of the South. Discrimination today exists not necessarily in law, but in fact and in common, often unspoken practice.
Not every minority has been excluded with the same totality as African Americans were during slavery and segregation. But even if not every group has suffered all of the abuses imposed upon African Americans, the persistence of social discrimination creates barriers that affirmative action helps to alleviate for all groups. Even communities designated as "model minorities" — such as Asian Americans — face discrimination. The reality of Asian American poverty in certain communities may be ignored due to the presumption that such suffering does not exist among, for example, recent immigrants from Cambodia or Vietnam. Affirmative action addresses these overlooked inequalities precisely because legal reform alone cannot reach them.
"Oppression itself created existing ethnic group identities"
"Legal equality cannot remedy ingrained institutional racism"
"Pluralism and dual identity as an alternative to assimilation"
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