ABSTRACT
Jennifer Hochschild has chosen to approach the matter of democracy and its condition in the United States by discussing race, ethnicity, and identity. She thereby narrows her field of vision, but in fruitful ways. The problems of American democracy involve political, institutional, social, and cultural difficulties above and beyond race and ethnicity. Yet any discussion of our larger subject, democracy, must, when turning to the United States, examine race and ethnicity as crucial themes. To do otherwise—or to treat these themes complacently, as many generations of scholars before 1945 habitually did—would make a mockery of American history, as well as of contemporary American life.
