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ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 229

an oligarchy of Euro-American ethnic groups jointly lording it over the little
more than 20% of the whole population in the so-called minorities,^^
The core of this ethnic oligarchy are the W^S,P.s, who stem from the
older English, Dutch, and German settlers of the North East going back to
the 17th Century and seem to have developed some racial and cultural
homogeneity that sets them off both from the European groups they came
from and from the Southern European, Slav, and Mediterranean as well as
of course the Native American and African American groups that have been
present for a comparable duration, not to speak of more recent immigra-
tions. Probably the Low Land Scottish fit easily into the WASPs, but not
the Highlanders and Irish who are not only Celtic but Catholic, Now,
however, in discussions about America, 'White" almost always signifies
"non-Black, non-Hispanic, non-Indian, non-Asian," Perhaps now the wealthy
Hispanics—of New Mexico, for example—are as much into the hegemony
as the Italians were in the 1950s, Nevertheless, if we look more closely
America has hundreds of ethnic groups. There would appear to be this
grand coalition against the others, the latter regarded as the more different
ones. The 'Whites" suppress their internal differences, while they intensify the
differences distinguishing them from the "others," Thus they evoke an
us-them structure.
The foremost scholar among the ethno-racially concerned post-mod-
ernists in America is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at Harvard.^* He has posed
two problems. One I just mentioned, is concerned with how to dis-pri-
vilege what is called the White canon and to neo-privilege or "canonize"
the as yet unrecognized complement of Black texts. However, the nature
of what he wishes to include in the Black canon requires that he adopt
an even more complex post-modernist orientation. One the one hand, he
wishes to claim that what appears to Whites and to sophisticated Blacks
as vulgar Black speech, ghetto patois, and the argot of the inner city
slums, is in fact a literary expression that on proper examination ought
to be regarded as canon-worthy. On the other hand, he wishes to subject

^^ See the entries on the hundreds of ethnic groups that reside in the United
Sates in Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
(Cambridge: The Belkap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980).
^^ See three works by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Figures in Black: Words, Signs,
and the "Racial'' Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).