American Ethnoracial History and the Amalgamation Narrative

DAVID A. HOLLINGER

WHEN I WAS A CHILD in Idaho, I learned that human beings were divided into groups. There were "church people," who were good, and "not church people," who were bad. Within the ranks of the church people, there were more refined distinctions. Mormons, Catholics, and Pentecostals went to the wrong churches. Methodists, Presbyterians, Brethren, Mennonites, Lutherans, Quakers, and Congregationalists were prominent among those who went to the right churches. I did not know that it was possible to divide people up into groups on any basis other than what churches they went to, or whether they went to church at all, unless they were Japanese or German. I knew about the Japanese as a separate group because my parents told me how dreadful it was that Americans of Japanese ancestry had been taken from their homes and put into camps during World War IL I assumed this had been done by "not church people," but later found out that it was more complicated. I knew about the Germans because when my mother sent relief packages to her cousins in Germany right after the war I discovered that having German ancestors was an important part of me, and that because of my father's German heritage from a migration much earlier than my mother's, our family was "Pennsylvania Dutch" even though we did not live anywhere near Pennsylvania and had no ancestors from Holland. Most Germans in Germany were "not church people," my mother explained, and that's why there had been a war, but her cousins most definitely went to a Lutheran church. I did not meet a black person until I moved away from Idaho, and I did not realize that Jews were a contemporary presence, rather than merely a group that flourished in Biblical times, until I was in the seventh grade in California and met a boy named Stan Swerdloff who went to church on Saturdays but who was not a Seventh-Day Adventist.