What MTV’s Jersey Shore Means for White America
by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
I admit that, despite its train wreck-like qualities (which Racialicious Special Correspondent Arturo so dutifully detailed in his post ”Jersey Shore’: Believe the Hype“), I really enjoy watching MTV’s newest reality show Jersey Shore. In its attempt to portray the summer activities of a group of guidos and guidettes, the male and female versions of a subculture that sprang from groups of Italian-American youth only to spread like wildfire to a variety of other ethnicities, primarily in the northeastern region of the United States, MTV has created reality tv gold for people like me. In a voyeuristic way, I have always liked peering inside the television versions, albeit edited, of others’ lives. Jersey Shore is no different on the surface, really, though this show is a bit of an exception in another way. Unlike its glossy counterparts, The Real World, My Super Sweet Sixteen, and The Hills, Jersey Shore takes on an explicit case of ethnicity as its main focus. Sure, there are typical displays of salacious summer behavior: hot tub hook-ups, drunkenness, and a lot of semi-nudity. Where Jersey Shore differs, however, is in its cultural significance.
When I say “cultural significance,” I am not implying that archives of Jersey Shore episodes will make it into the annals of American life to be uncovered centuries from now. But what I mean here is that the show and those who participate in the guido/guidette subculture who also identify as Italian-American are making the choice to articulate their take on their ethnic identity through behaviors, styles of dress, and other aesthetic expressions despite Italian-Americans having been long-accepted as whites. In an odd way, this privilege of whiteness that was gained by the Jersey Shore cast’s ancestors by way of legal battles and hardcore assimilation in the past is exactly what gives them the privilege to then assert fabricated markers of their ethnicity in the present.
As Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times notes in his piece “The Dark Side of White,” which expounds on the upcoming census categories and the most recent struggle surrounding whiteness for Arab Americans, being considered “white” always takes a hard fight and comes with a cost:
Claiming whiteness has always been a Faustian bargain. Ditching the ancestry question on the decennial census makes the nature of the exchange all the more clear. In our culturally, geographically, economically mobile society, the embrace of ethnicity — real or imagined — has long served as a source of protection and rootedness. As the concept of ethnicity vanishes into whiteness, society’s alienation abounds.
Claiming ethnicity and claiming whiteness, though polar opposites, both pose a threat to one’s identity. For those white ethnics (hyphenated European-Americans, i.e. Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, German-Americans) who arrived during the 1800s during the heyday of phrenology, eugenics, and some serious talks on race and its validity and significance, becoming white was the key to success. Without whiteness, access to resources and social acceptance were basically rendered null and void. Despite the color of one’s skin, the social state for white ethnics was more or less reduced to that of recently emancipated blacks. The comparison is not direct, of course, particularly in consideration of the very fact that some white ethnics could and did pass as Anglo-Saxon or Nordic whites, and those who did not were at least a tiny bit closer on the racial continuum than say blacks or Asians (who, at various times in history, were completely banned from entry into the U.S.) in the phenotypic sense. Yet the other side of assimilation, of course, is the ugly act of erasing ethnic identity. Language, food, styles of dress, and lifestyles of these white ethnic immigrant groups were often demonized, leaving many to conceal and/or destroy cultural ties with their country of origin altogether.
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