David Roediger

Eric Kaufmann

Whiteness -too blunt an instrument?

has, as one would expect, written an eloquent and impeccably documented reply to my debate article. I think we agree on a great deal, but our agreement weakens rather than reinforces the case for the whiteness paradigm.

I would summarize Roediger's response as essentially a defence of the importance of race -especially white racism, which he deems generally more important than ethnicity in explaining dominant-group social action in the United States. He writes that in the American context, white racism was responsible for slavery, mob violence and the denial of civil rights to non-white Americans. He notes that the actions committed in the name of dominant ethnicity were much less severe. Thus white racism against 'peoples of colour' proved a greater injustice than those committed by WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) against white ethnics. Roediger also returns to the idea that 'owning a white skin had tremendous value'.

I couldn't agree more. I say as much in my original article when I argue that being non-white mattered for Chinese and African-Americans much more than being non-'white' mattered for the Irish in Boston in 1859. But this precisely proves my point and undercuts the foundations of the whiteness paradigm, with its talk of whiteness as an entirely elastic social construction.

I want to begin with terminology. The way Roediger writes makes it clear that he understands the difference between race (based on visible phenotypical traits) and ethnicity (about subjective myths of origin). He agrees that that the key discriminant for social relations was/is between 'owning a white skin' and being a person 'of colour'. This key (racial) difference is contrasted with the less important difference based on religion and language: that between WASPs and other white ethnics. So why don't we stop conflating our concepts and speak about the first difference as racial and the second as ethnic. We can go a step further and unpack the elusive 'whiteness': we should instead speak of the dominant racial group as 'white' and the dominant ethnic group as WASP.

Along the way, we can get rid of the fiction that the Irish and Poles were ever in the same category as blacks. They were always racially white because people didn't need a mysterious ideology of 'whiteness' to discern colour perceptions -even in 1850 or 1900. The Irish may have be treated as subhuman at times, but as one nasty commentator remarked, they were DEBATE

'white chimpanzees'. True, some Mexicans and Sicilians occupied a grey zone, but they were very much the exception and not the rule for most immigrant groups. In short, nobody 'became' white. What actually occurred was a rolling process whereby white ethnics gradually gained greater economic, political and cultural success. This began with Catholic voting rights in the 18th-century and culminated in white ethnics' attainment of the presidency in 1960 and their widespread intermarriage and integration with WASPs in the 1960s. Today, the entire dominant white racial group (not only WASPs, but Catholics and Jews) has become the dominant American ethnic group, something that could not be said before 1970.

In my original article, I pointed to five serious omissions in the White Studies approach: (1) a constructivism that fails to recognize the cognitive and social processes that underpin social 'reality'; (2) an excessive emphasis on ethnic boundaries and the scope for identity construction, which underplays the importance of ethno-historical narratives and path-dependency;

(3) a tacit belief in white exceptionalism, that over-emphasizes the ideological character of whiteness and deifies whites; (4) an elision of the concepts of dominant ethnicity and race; and (5) a threefold parochialism in terms of place, time horizon and the role of race in ethnic studies.

I have already dealt with concerns (1),( 2) and ( 4), none of which I consider to be challenged by Roediger's reply. I will now move on to consider the third. The point was not to deny the very real history of white racism or the colonial domination of light-skinned peoples over darkerskinned ones since 1600, but to question how important a role the ideology of whiteness actually played in this sad drama. We need to question whether white supremacy really owes much to deliberate ideological fantasies or whether it is the 'psychic wage' that tends to accrue to politico-economically successful racial groups. This will likely fade by 2050 when whites make up 6 percent of the world's population, down from 30 percent in 1900, and China and India are economic powerhouses. Once again, I do not see any rigorous demonstration that the ideology of whiteness (whose hidden power the 'whiteness' scholars claim to expose) is a powerful source of social power akin to dominant ethnic nationalism, not to mention capitalism or technology. To maintain otherwise would require a systematic comparative history that contrasts the European 'racial' period (post-1800 or post-1850) with other slave epochs (pre-1800 European colonial, Byzantine, Ottoman, Roman, etc.).

The point about parochialism was addressed by Roediger through use of his fascinating Japanese examples. Here the response is that the Japanese can better apprehend their structures of inequality (i.e. Burakumin, Koreans) through an analogy with the 'workings' of whiteness in the United States. I agree only insofar as both societies had non-economic sources of inequality and 'dominant groups'. But a great deal more could be learned by unpacking 'dominance' into its caste, ethnic and racial components. Dominant ethnicity seems to me to be the most important aspect of the Japanese case -here the Japanese were informed by a myth of ancestry and a cultural marker based on language and not race. This set the Japanese apart from the Chinese, Okinawans and Koreans they colonized. Caste is another issue that can be investigated (here the relevant comparison is India). Finally, race seems to me to be the least important issue since, unlike the American case, phenotypical differences did not play a major role in Japan or its colonies.

In other words, in Japan, as in most of the rest of the world, inter-group conflict concerns people who look like each other but ethnically differ in terms of their subjective myths of ancestry/history/homeland. Language or religion, not race, is the key cultural marker. A language of ethnic superiority linked to heredity was invoked by the Japanese, and this definitely led to a harsher treatment of outgroups. But their mistreatment of the Okinawans, Burakumin and others predates the rise of any racial ideologies -core differences were instead rooted in popular myths and cultural differences based on language. Today, the racial ideologies matter a great deal less. On the other hand, differences based on visible racial markers are increasingly important as long-distance migration increases. Even so, the primary concern of dominant groups is with maintaining an imagined congruence between ethnicity and territory. This is about ethnic myths that mystically connect homelands, 'golden ages' and cultural markers, and has little to do with notions of white supremacy or an irrational fear of the 'other'.

The latter mattered at specific points and contexts in the modern period -especially the early 20th-century -but counts for much less today when direct contact with the 'other' in all walks of social life leaves less room for fantasy. The 'whiteness' paradigm, which emerged from a context in which white supremacy and an irrational fear of the 'negro' reigned, is thus poorly suited to the task of dissecting the very real conflicts of our age. Nor can the conceit be sustained that whiteness is a useful mirror with which to approach all non-economic inequalities. Instead, it is a blunt academic instrument that elides the critical differences between ethnic, caste and racial conflicts.

All of this should not obscure our debt to David Roediger and the whiteness school he inaugurated. This debate is a testimony to the important issues first raised by Roediger. Furthermore, there are societies where racial differences within ethnic groups matter. Lighter skin does bring advantages in much of Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, parts of the Middle East and in Africa. These are not ethnic or nationalist issues, but racial issues, and it is here that studies of whiteness should focus their efforts. Indeed, much more needs to be done to expose these inequalities.

However, when it comes to explaining the explosive contemporary issue

DEBATE

  of majority responses to multiculturalism and immigration, White Studies merely provides a set of intellectual training wheels that should be surpassed (though not 'abolished') to focus on dominant ethnicity. ERIC KAUFMANN is a lecturer in Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Address: School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College University of London, Malet Street, London. WC1E 7HX, UK. [email: e.kaufmann@bbk.ac.uk]


A response to Richard Alba MARY J. HICKMAN

London Metropolitan University, UK Richard Alba makes the case that the dearth of data about Catholic ethnics, for whom there are a number of reasons to seek information, is related both to the shift in focus to the greater disadvantages of women and of black and Asian minorities and to the cessation of interest in Catholic ethnics within sociology. This shift occurred once they were perceived as having accessed the middle class en masse. Alba takes Italian Americans as an exemplar and presents evidence of the possible underrepresentation of these groups on the faculties of elite American universities. The author contrasts the experiences of Catholic ethnics and Jewish Americans, citing the greater representation of the latter group among faculty at elite universities as the result of a collective struggle against anti-Semitism and collective experiences of mobility. He suggests that a prevailing pattern of individual mobility often involving self-presentation as emancipated from ethnic and religious traits contrived to work against the recognition of collective plight among Catholic ethnics.

Italian Americans are a useful and justifiable group to select in order to examine empirical data relating to the access of Catholic ethnics to the faculties of elite universities. The data examined reveal that Italian Americans form between 5 and 6 percent of the US population and are now between 4 and 5 percent of the professoriate in US universities. A comparison, which was restricted for greater rigour to US-born Italian-surnamed male professors, found that in elite universities they make up 1.9-2.6 percent of faculty compared with 3.3-3.6 percent among all male faculty. This suggests an underrepresentation in elite universities compared with all universities of the order of 30-40 percent and an even greater underrepresentation compared with the general population figures. There are problems, as detailed in Alba's account, in accessing data on Catholic ethnics. The above figures are therefore necessarily suggestive rather than definitive in conveying any underrepresentation. However, the argument would have been significantly strengthened, and/or more complex, if data on other prominent Catholic ethnic groups, to the extent these can be traced, had been included. In particular, the longer established Irish and German Catholic groups might have been contrasted with Poles as well as Italians, two emblematic groups in the 'new' immigrations to the US of the 1880s to 1920s. This might have teased out whether the underrepresentation of Italian Americans is typical of Catholic ethnics or specific. It might also have indicated whether, given the better picture presented for younger Italian Americans in the academy, we are witnessing the final throes, albeit of a much longer trajectory than has hitherto been assumed, of the eradication of prejudice towards Catholic ethnics.

Reference is made to the relatively better representation in elite faculties of Jewish Americans, many of whose ancestors immigrated from Europe in the same period of 'new' immigration as the largest phase of Italian immigrants. The discussion is therefore about differential progress among long-established European origin groups. This is worth exploring, as too often the discussion of the trajectories of recent post-1965 immigrant groups is based on a notion that apart from African Americans there has been a general levelling among all historical immigrant groups in the US. If this is not the case it is surely worth having our attention drawn to the differences that exist and suggesting explanations. But for a full picture of what accessing the faculty of elite universities might tell us about contemporary patterns of equality and mobility in the US, data about Catholic ethnics would have to be explicitly discussed in terms of what I assume is the underlying assumption of the article: that the groups who have the best and the worst chance of accessing elite university faculties are those who have been in America the longest. That is, for want of a better term, Anglo-Americans on the one hand and Native Americans and African Americans on the other hand. Bringing a range of historical groups together opens up a fuller discussion of diversity, and it seems important to always work across the white/black binary to address the intercutting cleavages of racial, ethnic and other hierarchies.

Alba's argument stimulates many questions and quite rightly highlights that accessing the middle class is not the end of the assimilation story. This last point particularly sparked my interest. Does the disappearance of interest in Catholic ethnics in sociology reflect assumptions about the class basis of the assimilation process for white ethnics? Or does it reflect the widespread acceptance of the 'ethnic options' thesis, even though that can be critiqued for its assumptions of relative homogeneity and for its rather static view of identifications and positionings upon arrival in the nirvana of American suburbia? Or maybe this absence reflects a general tendency among the intelligentsia of liberal, secular states to assign religion to the private sphere and castigate it as fundamentalist when it intrudes in the public sphere, and in the process ignore religion as an important component of multicultural societies for understanding both structural and identificational processes?

The idea that with the achievement of middle-class surburban status ethnicity becomes a lifestyle option, a costless form of community, whereas when it is correlated with class disadvantages it becomes a more complex phenomenon, seems to be uncontroversial. Today in the US, this complexity is deemed primarily to be a function of the racial/colour divide and, therefore, applies to African Americans and racialized groups among the post-1965 immigrants [START_REF] Waters | Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America[END_REF]). This appears a surprisingly reductive orthodoxy given the long history of complex theorizing about the assimilatory trajectories of European immigrants to the US. Labour historians, historians of racial identity and historians of immigrant ethnic groups have all elaborated revised assessments of assimilatory processes in recent decades. Perhaps what is really required is not only that these different groups of historians talk together [START_REF] Kazal | Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History[END_REF] but also that there should be a more interdisciplinary exchange, especially between sociology and history. Catholic ethnics are a critical group for whom the suburbanization thesis is thought to apply. My criticism does not stem from thinking it to be wrong in general outline but from thinking that the way this thesis has been appropriated tends to elide internal differentiations based, for example, on social class and generation, and the role of religion is not fully explored, as the article under review would seem to point.

Another interesting and it would seem pertinent issue raised by Alba is that stereotypes of Jews include that of a 'diabolical' cleverness while, whether they are Irish, Polish or Italian in origin, Catholic ethnics were stereotyped as stupid (as well as specific variants for each group). At one level, the explanation of this difference, and also the backdrop to the issues the data on Italian-American access to membership of elite university faculties raise in Alba's view, lies in the long history of endemic anti-Catholicism in American intellectual, social and cultural life. From the intensely celebrated Pope Days in 17th-and 18th-century Boston (on 5 November each year, transporting to another context what in England is Guy Fawkes Day celebrating the saving of the king, James I, from a Catholic plot in 1605), to the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-19th century, to one of the main appeals of the American Protective Association in the 1890s and of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s, anti-Catholicism was as constant a thread as race, one with which it was intertwined, in the formation and reconfigurations of the Union. It is easy to forget that the liberal, ultimately secularized, Protestantism that was/is the dominant ideological discourse of the United States was forged against Catholicism. Hostility to an ultramontane Catholic Church was articulated in terms of its supposed opposition to modernity and autonomous individualism. Catholic immigrants were positioned as ignorant dupes of a machiavellian organization, as for example in Friedrich Knapp's assessment in 1871 that 'the Irish element is the rank and file, which are pushed back and forward, like the pawns on a chessboard at the will of players in Rome' (quoted in McGreevy, 2003: 99). Little credit for independent thought was attributed to such pawns then or for many years to come.

Another question Alba's argument raised for me was: what does it take for ethnonational differences to be transcended and for collective action to be produced based on religio-cultural similarity? This happens, or has happened in the past, in many different contexts. Alba's argument is that this did not occur among Catholic ethnics in the same way as it did among the various Jewish groups that immigrated to the US. Another facet of the same discussion could be to explore the 'handicap' of belonging to a particular branch of Christianity in a nation founded on another, Protestantism. Is in fact the relative underrepresentation of Catholic ethnics on the faculties of elite universities a consequence of the 'inbetween position' of Catholics, the result of a form of subordinated inclusion? Have Catholics imitated the values and mores of the dominant Protestant elite to ascend the rungs of an ethnically and racially stratified society, rather than hammered down the door to gain admittance and recognition of their abilities? This could amount to the disadvantages, or advantages, of a despised similarity. Being white may have assisted the social mobility of (European) Catholic ethnics in the long term, but for the many post-1965 Catholic immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Africa and the Philippines their respective multi-positionalities will have to be addressed in order to assess the specific significance of religion, class, ethnicity and race for each grouping.

None of these reasons -entry to the middle class, apparent fading of anti-Catholicism, longevity of presence -seem good enough reasons to have lost interest in the trajectory of Catholic ethnics or in their significance for relations between religion, class, gender, ethnicity and race more generally. The United States of America was built on a foundational racial cleavage but it was not solely built on this bedrock. A variety of familial and social hierarchies have been the pillars and struts of the state and civic society [START_REF] Collins | Race Rhetoric in the US: A Family Affair[END_REF]. Understanding the intersections of these various props and their relative strengths in different periods is one of the main tasks of interdisciplinary study of the formation of the US and of contemporary heterogeneities. Catholic ethnics are hardly hegemonic in the US, there has after all only been one Catholic president and no Jewish president (rather similar to the situation in Britain where there has been one Jewish and no Catholic prime minister), let alone an African-American or a woman president. In fact, Episcopalians and Presbyterians make up 47.2 percent of all presidents and represent 20.2 percent of the population, while, if one adds in Methodists and Baptists, the four groups comprise 66.2 percent of all presidents and are 22.5 percent of the general population (statistics from http://www.adherents.com). These four religions emanate largely from the original English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Protestant settlements. So at the elite levels of US institutions there is something to be addressed as to the inadequacy of their representativeness of the nation as a whole, even including groups thought to be thoroughly assimilated, such as Catholic ethnics. Although it should be noted that with Samuel Alito confirmed as a member of the Supreme Court the membership is 56 percent Roman Catholic, driven by a conservative alliance on abortion and other matters.

There is, of course, a very real danger of essentializing ethnic and racial categories. It is arguable with intermarriage rates as they are between European ethnic groups, and as they increase between European and Asians groups and to a lesser extent Hispanic groups, that it is impossible to chart the trajectory of different ethnic groups. It has always been debatable that intermarriage has led to assimilation rather than to new hybridities. Nonetheless, it seems valuable to readdress religion and ethnicity per se, and for the historical European immigrant groups in particular, because at the very least it is a reminder of two things. First that entry to the middle class is not the sole determinant of acceptability and integration. Second, that the US national identity based on a liberal, secularized Protestantism was forged in part by its centuries-long encounter with Catholicism, combined with a powerful anti-Semitism, and now asserts itself against an Islam that it similarly demonizes.


European ethnic groups, and as they increase between European and Asians groups and to a lesser extent Hispanic groups, that it is impossible to chart the trajectory of different ethnic groups. It has always been debatable that intermarriage has led to assimilation rather than to new hybridities. Nonetheless, it seems valuable to readdress religion and ethnicity per se, and for the historical European immigrant groups in particular, because at the very least it is a reminder of two things. First that entry to the middle class is not the sole determinant of acceptability and integration. Second, that the US national identity based on a liberal, secularized Protestantism was forged in part by its centuries-long encounter with Catholicism, combined with a powerful anti-Semitism, and now asserts itself against an Islam that it similarly demonizes.

higher education: members of the Roman Catholic Church. The article draws on past research to recap succinctly the Protestant origins of many leading private colleges and universities in the United States and then goes on to discuss the content and prevalence of anti-Catholic stereotypes at various historical junctures. This review of historical evidence leaves little doubt that Catholics were systematically excluded from elite institutions of higher education in the past and were notably underrepresented on the faculties of the best schools.

I do not have any quarrel with this historical evidence. Indeed, I find it quite compelling. Nonetheless, when I was originally sent this article for a blind review I did not recommend its publication -not because I doubted the powerful effect of the Protestant establishment's anti-Catholic legacy in American higher education, but because I was not convinced by the evidence marshaled in the article to support the continued underrepresentation of Catholics at elite colleges and universities today.

As the present publication indicates, however, my views as a reviewer did not prevail. The journal editors wrote that while they 'understood [my] argument that the paper lacks data and no model of causal mechanism and so is inconclusive', they countered that 'if we always took such a strict view, many topics would remain closed'. They therefore elected to accept the article for publication, but invited me to participate in a symposium in which, for the purposes of discussion and debate, I would lay out my reservations about the analysis. I now do so in what I hope is viewed as a collegial and friendly spirit.

Although the continued exclusion of Catholics is certainly a plausible argument, given the historical evidence, and while the present underrepresentation of Catholics in faculty ranks is entirely possible, I do not believe these outcomes are at all demonstrated by the data presented in Richard Alba's article. The crux of the problem is the scarcity of data on religion. Owing to the constitutional separation between church and state in the United States, no question on religious affiliation is asked on the US census or any government survey. All religious data in the US come from privately sponsored surveys, which generally yield sample sizes that are insufficient for the kind of fine-grained analysis required to assess the religious composition of small occupational groups such as college professors.

To get around this fundamental data limitation, Alba uses the 2000 US census to assess the representation of persons with Italian ancestry among academics with doctoral degrees and then seeks to determine the relative number of persons of Italian origin on arts and sciences faculties at 10 elite institutions, including my own, Princeton University (readers should thus consider themselves fairly warned about any potential biases on my part). This analytic approach may be all that can be done given current data limitations, but as a social demographer I find the resulting findings to be unsatisfying and unconvincing.

First, even if one were to uncover data indicating a clear underrepresentation of Italians among college professors, Italian ancestry represents a proxy indicator for Catholicism that is imperfect, at best, and perhaps highly inaccurate. Even among Catholics descendent from the great waves of European immigration in the past, Italians are simply a subset of a much larger population that includes the descendants of Poles, Irish, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians and many others. In an age of mass immigration from Latin America, moreover, the share of Italians among all Catholics is rapidly declining. There are presently more than twice as many Hispanics as Italians in the US.

Whatever the imperfections of Italian ancestry as a proxy for Catholicism in terms of numbers, it is even more problematic in terms of substance, as it completely confounds religion and national origin, making it impossible to distinguish between anti-Catholic and anti-Italian bias. It is at least a plausible alternate hypothesis that any apparent shortfall in the representation of Italians among college professors reflects exclusion on the basis of national origin rather than religion. Hostility toward ethnic Italians cannot simply be equated, a priori, with hostility toward Catholics in general.

Even if one were to document an underrepresentation of Italians within the professorate, moreover, and grant this result as empirical fact, it still leaves open the question of mechanism. A shortfall of Italians compared to their share in the general population might stem from exclusion on the basis of ethnicity or religion; but it could also reflect the selective movement of Italians toward other, more attractive occupations. After all, when adjusted for years of schooling the income of college professors does not compare that favorably with other professions, such as business, law, or medicine.

A documented underrepresentation of Italians among college professors might be considered a civil rights issue if it were involuntary, but if it stems from voluntary choices made by individuals maximizing their own welfare, then it would not really constitute 'diversity's blind spot'. Without specifying and estimating competing models of exclusion and selection, it is impossible to eliminate the hypothesis that departures from proportional representation stem from voluntary occupational mobility rather than discrimination.

The foregoing criticisms are moot, however, if Italians are represented among the ranks of college professors roughly in proportion to their share in the population. It is very difficult to sustain an argument of prejudicial exclusion on the basis of either religion or ethnicity if the percentage of Italians in the professorate roughly equals their share in the US population. Surprisingly, given the tone of the article, this is precisely what data from the 2000 census reveal. Whereas persons of Italian origin constitute between 5 and 6 percent of the population, they now represent between 4 and 5 percent among doctorate holders who teach at American colleges or universities. Quoting from the article itself, 'the census data reveal the quiet intellectual ascent of Italian Americans who, though they have not yet reached parity among college and university professors, are not much below it'.

In other words, the latest census data do not provide much prima facie evidence in support of the argument that the relatively small numbers of either Catholics or Italians stem from discriminatory processes. The analysis therefore turns to Italian representation among professors at the nation's top colleges and universities, as identified by the well-known ranking done annually via the US News and World Report. Unfortunately, in doing so, the data problems become even more intractable, for not only do we lack data on the religious affiliations of professors, we do not even have information on their ethnic ancestry beyond broad categories defined by the intersection of race and Hispanic origin, and certainly nothing on Italian origins.

Analysts seeking to assess the representation of Italians on elite faculties thus reduced to counting people of 'Italian surname' is a very slippery exercise because Italians share many last names with people of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American origin and because intermarriage and name changes tend to obscure national origins over the generations. Based on a crude count of surnames among professors at 10 elite institutions, the article estimates that Italian Americans constitute 1.9 percent of full professors, 2.1 percent of associate professors and 2.3 percent of assistant professors, figures that in each case lie below the percentage observed among college and university professors holding doctorates generally.

There is not much that can be done about the problem of overlapping surnames among different national origin groups, but the problem of name change through intermarriage is partially overcome by restricting attention to males, who are still unlikely to change their last name upon marriage. Focusing on males indeed moves the figures on Italians toward greater representativeness in junior ranks, as one might expect. The percentage of Italians among associate professors rises from 2.1 percent in general to 2.6 percent when men alone are considered, and the shift is from 2.3 percent to 2.5 percent among assistant professors.

Focusing on men, however, only solves the problem of lost Italian surnames in the generation undergoing intermarriage. Any offspring of a union between an Italian surnamed woman and a non-Italian man would still likely be lost to observation, and given rates of intermarriage between Italians and non-Italians that Richard Alba himself has been instrumental in documenting, this number is probably substantial. It is thus likely that many faculty at elite institutions who are not counted as being of Italian origin based on their surname, nonetheless have an Italian parent or grandparent on their maternal side.

Given these data limitations, I remain skeptical of the empirical relevance marshaled here to argue for the continuation of exclusionary mechanisms directed against Catholics in general or Italians in particular. Although a legacy of anti-Catholic bias and negative stereotyping of Italian Americans is clear, and a hypothesis of continued exclusion from university faculties is justified historically, the outcome has not been convincingly demonstrated for the year 2000. The evidence adduced here does not show that Catholics are underrepresented either among professors in general or among faculty at elite institutions, nor does it sustain the argument that ethnic Italians are underrepresented among college professors generally.

The most we can say based on Alba's analysis is that persons of Italian origin may be underrepresented on the faculties of very elite institutions, but even here the evidence is equivocal owing to the likely loss of large numbers of second-and third-generation Italian Americans who trace their Italian roots through maternal lines. While Richard Alba's arguments about 'diversity's blind spot' may be provocatively plausible given the historical record, my bottom line is that the hypothesis of underrepresentation is not close to being proved scientifically in the contemporary era. I find it significant that the divergence in these commentaries coincides with the position of the writers as insiders or outsiders. The sympathetic

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is

  Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Sociology, Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania. Address: Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544. USA. [email: dmassey@princeton.edu] Beyond race: Recognizing minority status in elite contexts RICHARD ALBA University of Albany, New York, USA I am grateful for the opportunity that the editors of Ethnicities have provided by soliciting commentaries on my article and allowing me to respond to them. I am grateful also for the willingness of Mary Hickman, Douglas Massey and Stephen Steinberg to give their views, which in the cases of Massey and Steinberg come from friends of long standing, who are nevertheless willing to commit their disagreements with my argument to print.