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were broadly assimilated into the dominant, amorphous white American identity.
Of course, certain European ethnic remnants often remained among "whites
ethnics" and were reproduced for generations in such forms as secondary notions of
personal identity, holiday ritual, and sentimental attachment to country of origin.
Such remnants can have significant impact on behavior and do alter the character
of the overall white population, especially in certain conjunctures. But past the
second or third generation the remaining features of European nationality seldom
function to constitute anything approaching distinct peoplehood or, in the strong
sense of the word, ethnicity.
The system for peoples of color, most especially African Americans, has
operated in a diametrically opposed manner. Blacks have been continuously
subordinated and re-subordinated to all peoples defined to be white. Their
economic mobility has been severely circumscribed, their ability to disperse into the
larger population all but blocked. No matter how distantly separated from the
lands and cultures of their ethnic origins African Americans became, they were
never considered to be assimilated into the dominant national culture of the U.S.
As a result, the production and reproduction of a separate, evolving Black ethnicity
and ethnic culture over many generations has resulted.
It is important to emphasize, though, that European ethnic cultures were
immigrant cultures that rapidly faded as their heirs became "Americanized."
African American culture was also a complex of immigrant cultures in origin
(slaves, in a sense, were forced immigrants); it however has not faded away. Of
course, its continual reproduction and evolution over many generations means it
has long been a thoroughly American culture, as American as any form of "native"
white American culture. But the dominant racialist culture continually casts the
Black American people as the other, not truly and fully American — indeed, not
truly and fully human. To put it differently, nationality in the United States is
formed in a permanent two-tier manner, the top tier for whites, the bottom tier for
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