David A. Hollinger

The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions

Nearly all of todays confident dismissals of the notion of a “post-racial” America address the simple question, “Are we beyond racism or not?” But most of the writers who have used the terms post-racial or post-ethnic sympathetically have explored other questions: What is the significance of the blurring of ethnoracial lines through cross-group marriage and reproduction? How should we interpret the relatively greater ability of immigrant blacks as compared to standard “African Americans” to overcome racist barriers? What do we make of increasing evidence that economic and educational conditions prior to immigration are more powerful determinants than “race” in affecting the destiny of population groups that have immigrated to the United States in recent decades? Rather than calling constant attention to the undoubted reality of racism, this essay asks scholars and anti-racist intellectuals more generally to think beyond “the problem of the color line” in order to focus on “the problem of solidarity.” The essay argues that the most easily answered questions are not those that most demand our attention.

What is Intellectual History

The labels of all the various branches of history are flags of convenience not names of essences, and the real question concerns the distinctiveness and validity of their claims to occupy a separate room in Clio’s spacious house. For intellectual history most certainly is a part of history, part of the attempt to understand past human experience.

Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained Instead of Avoided or Mystified

IN THE CLOSING SCENE of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (New York, 2000) two white men, one a Jew and one who might be called a ‘‘poor white,’’ confront one another while standing on a sheet of white ice beneath which is an expanse of blackness. The dark water beneath the ice is an obvious symbol for a dead man the reader has learned was born black but had managed to pass as white, although at enormous personal cost. Indeed, his whiteness was like the ice, easily broken in the event of a change in the social weather. The Jew knows that the man born black had died some months earlier in the very waters of the now-ice-covered lake, murdered by the crude, uneducated man he was facing. But he can’t prove it. After a few minutes of tense and evasive dialogue the Jew turns and walks away. The Jew, as a well-to-do, highly educated, self-aware person, is able to drive then to New Jersey to engage the black family of the dead man openly and honestly. But the local poor white, who never had much going for him to begin with and lost what humane capabilities he had when the government made him into a killing machine in Vietnam, remains on the white ice of the remote Berkshire lake. The ‘‘cracker’’ is imprisoned by his war-related clinical depression and by the petty prejudices against which his class and culture have given him all too little protection. This scene, created by a writer whose unyielding preoccupation for more than thirty-five years has been the psychology of Jewishness in the historically specific conditions of late-twentieth-century America, displays features of American life that invite the sustained attention of historians: the success of Jews, and the relevance of a Jewish background to lives lived outside communal Jewry. Neither Roth nor his protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, is significantly defined by the communal framework that is central to what we normally understand as ‘‘Jewish history.’’ Yet

The American intellectual tradition : a sourcebook

This is an anthology of classics in American social, political, religious, philosophical, and cultural thought from the 17th century to the present, designed primarily for use in undergraduate courses. The volumes make easily available some of the most historically significant documents in American intellectual history. Writers include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln amongst many others. The publication is available as a two volume set.

Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.

Introduction Haleys Choice and the Ethno-racial Pentagon From Species to Ethnos Pluralism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Diversification of Diversity Toward a Postethnic Perspective The Ethnos, the Nation, the World Epilogue.

In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas

American intellectual historians need to pay more attention to how elites relate to broader audiences. Hollingers work is in the vanguard of recent intellectual history and it is a joy to observe a true intellectual in discourse with his peers. -- History: Reviews of Books.