ABSTRACT
The interrelationship between ethnicity and social responsibility is a highly complex one that intertwines with some of the anomic problems about social responsibility endemic in contemporary American society. Whatever the motives, one is witnessing to some degree, and for our society as a whole, the passing of passing – the passing of being Catholic, Mexican, Black, Polish, or some other form of Slavic or Jewish middle or eastern European. A great deal of American conformity and loyalty, which is particularly visible in lower- middle-class individuals and strikes the European visiting the United States as frantic emphasis on nationality, is a reflection of second-generation ethnic immigrants' uneasiness over the legitimacy of a claim to be American. In the process, forms of ethnic loyalty defined in terms of past heritage are being reemphasized defensively or offensively, sometimes in an aggressively conflictful way. The whole topic of individualism and alienation is related to problems of ethnic maintenance.
