Word: pattersons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fact, Patterson argues that all symbol-laden nationalist movements are inherently fascist, in that they sweep up people's personal racial anxieties into a mass identification with the glory of the state. He goes on to argue that Leopold Senghor's theory of "Negritude" and similar mystical notions of black "soul-brotherhood" come dangerously close to the basic model of fascist ideology. It gives you an idea of how provocative Patterson is willing to be that, as a black sociologist, he consistently brings his criticisms so close to home...
...this elaborate sociological discussion of ethnicity, as fascinating as it is, only serves as a prelude to Patterson's commentary on the current new ethnicity debate. In his sixth chapter, "The Modern Revival of Ethnicity: With Special Reference to the United States," he moves in for the kill. Here again, the first target of his attack is the American black community. For although he sympathetically argues that the black nationalism of the '60s served as a defiant response to the racial shame American blacks have suffered for two centuries, he also points out that all the posturing and celebration...
Perhaps the most provocative part of the book comes in Patterson's analysis of what he calls the "intellectual treachery" of America's group of neo-conservative once-liberal Jews. These champions of new ethnicity are, he observes, by and large second or third generation immigrants, uprooted from their European cultures and, as Jews, haunted by the idea of being exiled from the homeland, or belonging to a pariah class. Via intellectual cosmopolitanism, and either political left-liberalism or socialism, they compensated by making the world their home. But in the past 50 years, the holocaust and the subsequent creation...
Concern over Israel also brought back traditional Jewish anxieties over the future of the "race," and with a vengeance. With the reaffirmation of Jewish ethnicity that ensued, as Patterson puts it, "the Jewish intellectual was on the spot." For Patterson, the apostacy of the Jewish liberal intellectuals who for years have made Commentary one of the most respected liberal organs in the country best exemplifies the reaction of the Jewish intelligentsia to this crisis: a distressing turn rightward and the abandonment of their courageous conviction that all issues should be open to tough, non-partisan intellectual scrutiny in favor...
...critique of American Jewish intellectual reaction only highlights the chief problem that Patterson perceives in the continuing fashionability of ethnic loyalty--that ethnic subcultures are now acting as political interest groups in the increasingly competitive scrap for America's, and the world's, shrinking social and physical resources. Drawing on his classification of ethnicity prototypes, Patterson notes that this politically revolutionary trend is inherent in the nature of what he labels "the revivalist ethnic group." Ruthlessly pursuing his argument, he summarizes the phenomenon by arguing that...