It makes little sense to define "ethnicity-as-such," since it refers not to a thing-in-itself but to a relationship: ethnicity is typically based on a contrast. If all human beings belonged to one and the same ethnic group we would not need such terms as 'ethnicity,' though we might then stress other ways of differentiating ourselves such as age, sex, class, place of birth, or sign of the zodiac. Ethnic, racial, or national identifications rest on antitheses, on negativity . . . Ethnic identity, seen this way, "is logically and historical the product of the assertion that 'A is an X because he is not a Y'"—a proposition which makes it remarkably easy to identify Xness. By the same token, the definition of Xs as non-Ys threatens to exaggerate their differences in such a way that if the Xs think of themselves as human, they may therefore consider the Ys as somehow nonhuman. . . . "X¹ [does not equal] Y" is the fundamental ethnic formula. The Greek word "ethnos"—from which the English terms "ethnic" and "ethnicity" are derived—significantly contains an ambivalence between the inclusive meaning, "people in general," and the dissociative sense, "other people," in particular "non-Jews" (to render "goyim," the Hebrew word for Gentiles), "non-Christians," "heathens," or "superstitious ones." In the modern world the distinction often rests on an antithesis between individuals (of the nonethnically conceived in-group) and ethnic collectivities (the out-groups). (288)

"Race" (perhaps derived from "generation") is, in current American usage, sometimes perceived to be more intense, "objective," or real than ethnicity. As in the cases of "Irish race" or "Jewish race," the word was, however the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century synonym for what is now, after the fascist abuses of "race" in the 1930s and 1940s, more frequently been discussed as "ethnicity" (an obsolete English noun that revitalized during World War II, that seems to have served as a more neutral term than the one in the name of which the National Socialists shaped their genocidal policies). "Race," too, can be sued both in the inclusive sense of "human race" and in the dissociative sense of "our race" or "that race," meaning "us" or "not us." What is often called "race" in the modern United States is perhaps the country's most virulent ethnic factor. It is used to make distinctions on the basis of such generalized propositions as "black ¹ white" or "red ¹ white" which mark more dramatic fault lines in this specific context than such oppositions as "Jew ¹ Gentile," which, especially since the late 1940s, may simply be subsumed under the common United States category "white," but formed the crucial distinction in Nazi "racial" theory.(289)

. . . . Especially since Herder and the Grimms, the notion has gained dominance that a 'people' is held together by a subliminal culture of fairy tales, songs, and folk beliefs—the original ethnic ("volkisch") subsoil of the common peoples' art forms that may culminate in the highest artistic achievements. . . . The ethnic approach to writing . . . is [however] in danger of making one generalization (the writer is an X, meaning not a Y) the central, if not the sole, avenue to a text; yet making this Xness central may be circular and tautological (X writes like and X, not like a Y) since it reveals first and foremost the very Xness, a quality which cumulatively achieves the status of the somewhat mystical, ahistorical, and even quasi-eternal essence. Literature plays a central part in naturalizing the modern process of ethnic dissociation and may help to create the illusion of a group's "natural" from "time immemorial." (290)

. . . Almost as far back as the earliest human writings, we can find more or less well articulated views about the differences between 'our own kind' and the people of other cultures. These doctrines, like modern theories of race, have often placed a central emphasis on physical appearance in defining the 'Other,' and on common ancestry in explaining why groups of people display differences in their attitudes and aptitudes. (274)

If we call any group of human beings of common descent living together in some sort of association, however loosely structured, a 'people,' we can say that every human culture that was aware of other peoples seems to have had views about what accounted for the differences—in appearance, in customs, in language—between peoples. . . . (275)

[The ancient Greek view explains] the (supposed) superiority of [Greeks] . . . by arguing that the barren soils of Greece had forced the Greeks to become tougher and more independent. Such a view attributes the characteristics of a people to their environment, leaving open the possibility that their descendants could change if they moved to new conditions. (275)

. . . . In the Old Testament, on the other hand, what is though to be distinctive about peoples is not so much appearance and custom as their relationship, through a common ancestor, to God. . . . [While non-Jewish people] are taken to have different specific characteristics and ancestries, the fundamental theocentric perspective of the Old Testament requires that what essentially differentiates them all form the Hebrews is that they do not have the special relationship to Jehovah enjoy by the children, the descendants, of Israel. There is very little hint that the early Jewish writers developed any theories about the relative importance of the biological and the cultural inheritances by which God made these different peoples distinct. (276) . . . [So, in this view,] the very distinction between environmental and inherited characteristics is anachronistic.

. . . . the modern notion of race . . . had at its heart a new scientific conception of biological heredity, even as it carried on some of the roles played in Greek and Hebraic though by the idea of a people. . . . [M]ost educated Victorians by the mid-century, [believed in the racialist doctrine] that we could divide human beings into a small number of groups, called 'races,' in such a way that all the members of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race. The characteristics that each member of a race was supposed to share with every other were sometimes called the essence of that race; they were characteristics that were necessary and sufficient, taken together, for someone to be a member of that race. (276)

Unlike the Greeks and Hebrews, racialists believed that the racial essence accounted for more than the obvious visible characteristics—skin-color, hair—on the basis of which we decide whether people are, say, Asian Americans or Afro-Americans. For a racialist, then, to say someone is "Negro" is not just to say that they have inherited a black skin or curly hair: it is to say that their skin color goes along with other important inherited characteristics. By the end of the nineteenth century most Western scientists (indeed, most educated Westerners) believed that racialism was correct and theorists sought to explain many characteristics—including, for example, literary 'genius,' intelligence, and honesty—by supposing that they were inherited along with (or were in fact part of) a person's racial essence. (276)

The twentieth century inherited these conceptions . . . [but] by our own day the idea that the concept of race should have any place—let alone an important one—in literary studies has been attacked from a good many directions. (276) Perhaps most surprising has been an attack in the name of 'science.' In a society like ours, where most people take their race to be a significant aspect of their identity, it comes as a shock to many to learn that there is a fairly wide-spread consensus in the sciences of biology and anthropology that the word 'race,' at least as it is used in most unscientific discussions, refers to nothing that science should recognize as real. (277)

And it is not just the claim that there is a racial essence that can explain a person's moral, intellectual, or literary aptitudes that scientists have rejected. They also believe that such classifications as Negro, Caucasian, and Mongoloid are of no importance for biological purposes. First, because there are simply too many people who do not fit into any such category; and second because, even when you succeed in assigning someone to one of these categories—on the basis of skin pigmentation and hair, say—that implies very little about most of their other biological characteristics. Even those scientists who still have a use for the term 'race' agree that a good deal of what is popularly believed about races is false—often wildly false.

But, of course, discussion of the literary ramifications of the idea of race can proceed while accepting the essential unreality of races and the falsehood of most of what is believed about them. For, at least in this respect, races are like witches: however unreal witches are, belief in witches, like belief in races, has had—and in many communities continues to have—profound consequences for human social life. . . . (274)

. . . .

American literature and literary study both reflect the existence of ethnic groups the very contours of which are, in a certain sense, the product of racism. For, however mythical the notion of race seems to be, we cannot deny the obvious fact that having one set of heritable characteristics—dark skin, say—rather than another—blonde hair, for example—can have profound psychological, economic, and other social consequences, especially in societies where many people are not only racialists but racists. Indeed, much of what is said about races nowadays in American social life, while literally false if understood as being about biological races, can be interpreted as reporting truths about social groups—Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jewish Americans—whose experience of life and whose political relations are strongly determined by the existence of racist stereotypes. (285)

The most prominent . . . reflection of racially understood ethnicity in literary studies in recent years is in the development of Afro-American literary criticism. . . . [T]he identification of a history of black literary production has been central not merely to Afro-American literary criticism but to the culture of Afro-Americans [because]: for almost the whole time that there have been people of African descent in the New World, a powerful European and American intellectual tradition has consistently denied that black people were capable of contributing to 'the arts and letters.' Starting before the fixing of race as a biological concept, influential figures expressed their doubts about the inherited 'capacity of the Negro' to produce literature. . . . In response to this long line of antiblack invective, black writers in the United States since the very first Afro-American poet—Phillis Wheatley, who lived in Boston in the late eighteenth century—have sought to establish the 'capacity of the Negro' by writing and publishing literature. . . . (286)