Page 226 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 219

"Stampp Report" that resulted sparked a movement that took off.
California at that time already had substantial Chinese and Japanese
communities, a large African American population, an ever growing
proportion of Hispanics, "Chicanos," and Latinos, as well as many people
of Euro-American background, e,g, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans,
German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc. So the Ethnic Studies programs
developed in what was already a ''multi-cultural" situation, a situation of
peoples living ''beyond the melting pot, '* Then it spread across the country,
in various programmatic forms established in colleges and universities. This
is correct.
In terms of broad points of view within the field of multi-disciplinary
Ethnic Studies, my thought is that there are probably three major perspec-
tives One is Marxist; another derives from Positivistic social science and is
heavily quantified; finally, there is a qualitative-interpretive point of view that
in fact is your own approach, I am most sympathetic with the latter
perspective, one that relies on ethnography, Le,, where one goes into the
community and talks with people, sympathizes and empathizes, and produces
discursive representations of how the people researched view and relate to
things, people in the same and in different groups included.
This is right. Let us start with the Marxists. It's interesting how their
approach challenges everyone, both the assimilationists and the pluralists.
In a Marxist approach emphasis is placed on the significance of class
over all other forms of social solidarity. For Marxists, then, the rise in
racial and ethnic consciousness is considered to be a false consciousness
and one that must somehow be either understood contextually, explained
away, or seen as a stage in the development of interethnic consciousness
and, hence, in its own ultimate disappearance. Let us make a further
distinction between Academic Marxists and the practicing Communists of
an earlier era. The latter had a terrible problem in attempting to recruit
the various national, ethnic, and racial minorities into its international
organization. In late nineteenth century America, followers of Marx (1818-
1883) and Engels (1820-1896) organized themselves in ethno-national cells
representing the different language groups from Europe. Friedrich Sorge

* Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The
Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd. Edition.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970). Fore the pre-national period, see Joyce D.
Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York, 1664-
1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).