ABSTRACT
The ethnic revival among many whites in the 1960s and 1970s has been described as a “‘dying gasp’ on the part of ethnic groups descended from the great waves of immigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Steinberg 1989:51) to reassert or return to a real or imagined ethnic heritage. If this period was a “dying gasp” at attempting to revive a moribund sense of ethnic identity for whites, then the end of the twentieth century could be viewed as its funeral. A majority of white respondents I interviewed came from families so ethnically mixed, so far removed from the immigrant experience, and so thoroughly reconstituted through assimilation, divorce, remarriage, and relocation that the traits that once distinguished ethnic groups from various parts of Europe have become incidental background information. The overwhelming majority of whites in this study did not live in ethnic neighborhoods, did not feel compelled to date within their own ethnic group, did not have the ethnic traditions of their older kin, and did not obtain employment through ethnic networks. Most have undergone such extensive generational, spatial, and cultural assimilation that the “option” to engage in the activities or traditions that forge and give shape to an ethnic identity no longer exists (Waters 1990).
