| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. By Matthew Frye Jacobson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 438 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01898-2.)

Instead of resulting in a truly multicultural society that embraces all of the nation's peoples, Matthew Frye Jacobson insists that the "white ethnic revival" of the past four decades has replaced "Nordic" supremacy with "Caucasian" hegemony. It has merely transformed white supremacy into white primacy by changing the "normative whiteness from what might be called Plymouth Rock whiteness to Ellis Island whiteness," creating "a new national myth of origins whose touchstone was Ellis Island, whose heroic central figure was the downtrodden but determined greenhorn, whose preferred modes of narration were the epic and the ode, and whose most far-reaching political conceit was the 'nation of immigrants'" (p. 7). It has enabled white ethnics to claim a history of suffering and striving comparable to that of racial minorities, to reject any responsibility for the latter's systematic mistreatment, and to deny that they are still benefiting from "white privilege." Incredibly, it has also enabled the descendants of those who imposed the infamous national origins quota system to claim kinship with its victims, whose experiences they have arrogated to themselves.

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