“Why can’t they be like our grandparents?" And other racial fairy tales

The City on the Hill has always willfully confused race with righteousness. Since the Puritans’ arrival, dominant American political narratives have emphasized the differential moral worth of racial/ethnic populations: whites versus Native Americans, Yankees versus Irish, planters versus slaves, native-born whites versus “the refuse of Europe�?, and, on the West Coast, whites versus Mexicans and Asians. This Puritanical inheritance has been transformed, however, in the climate of center-right convergence in national politics and in the process has lost its overtly racist character. The white ethnic community construct arose from an extraordinarily complex historical ground, and this complexity was reflected in its multiple expressions and political uses. “Women’s culture�?, a locution in increasing use over the 1970s, evokes both the American feminist shift in emphasis from male-female to female-female relations and what historian Alice Echols has labeled the decline from radical to cultural feminism over the course of the late 1960s to early 1970s.