(S)tereotypes are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is judged with the appropriate sentiment. Except where we deliberately keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100 percent American. -WALTER LIPPMANN, Public Opinion (1922) AMERICA'S attitude towards its multitude of ethnic groups follows the credo of Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." We proclaimed that all men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence but recognized slavery in the Constitution, opened the golden door to the "huddled masses" but barred the entrance with national origin quotas and gentlemen's agreements, promised equal protection of the laws but in law and custom discriminated against minorities, and declared with Justice Harlan, "There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind," but upheld Jim Crow laws. Even when our laws have lived up to our ideals of ethnic equality, our folkways have been ethnocentric, replete with negative stereotypes, discrimination, and social exclusiveness. Two main principles explain most of the variation in the social ordering of ethnic groups. First, race breaks ethnicities into two large distinct groups, Europeans and non-Europeans; there is virtually no overlap between these groups, with Europeans filling all the top and middle positions and non-Europeans making up the bottom third. Second, within the large European group, the period of predominant immigration orders ethnicities. At the top of the lists are the members of the old stock, host culture-the British and derivative WASPs who dominated the initial waves of colonial immigration, supplied the Founding Fathers, and established their culture and institutions as the cornerstone of American society. Next come the middle stock groups such as Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians who immigrated to America in the mid-nineteenth century, also largely from the northwest quadrant of Europe. They are followed by Europeans from the three remaining quadrants, the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, and Jews who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth