As a student of the nineteenth century, I think one of the outcomes of studying race in terms of black and white has been to oversimplify racial and ethnic issues. In the nineteenth century, and when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, ethnicity was far more important than simply race. Whites were not whites, they were Italians, Irish, Catholic, Protestant, blue collar, white collar, .... . One small example; a study of Boston in the 1830s shows that many of the same discriminatory practices common in use against African Americans in the twentieth century were common in use against the Irish in the nineteenth century. For the twentieth century, I think viewing racial issues in broad boundaries misses many of the important internal conflicts within racial groups. For example, American born blacks do not necessarily have the same set of cultural values as Haitians. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
