ABSTRACT
Both journalists and scholars highlighted the ethnic basis of a white conservatism that at the time seemed the principal spear of opposition to black advance. While that view might have been adequate at mid-century, the strength of assimilation brought the ethnics en masse by the last quarter of the century into what can fairly be described as a “white” mainstream. Nevertheless, the processes of assimilation have continued, and further erosion of Italian American ethnicity and its social bases is evident. The whiteness interpretation also casts the assimilation as a homogenizing process–the ethnics wound up as fully white, thus sharing the ethno-racial status of the established majority group. The magnitude of assimilation–the number of minority individuals drawn into its field of force–depends also on external conditions. In the post-Second World War, most assimilating Jews and Catholics retained their distinctive identities and even at times asserted them.
