Small Business and Japanese American Ethnic Solidarity

An important issue in the field of ethnic relations is the relationship between class and ethnicity or race. Is ethnicity a phenomenon that cross-cuts cIass divisions in a society and is independent of them? Is there a special bond, a primordial kinship-like tie, which leads people of putative common ancestry to join together in a shared Sense of peoplehood? Or is ethnicity really a disguised form of class (in the Marxist sense of economic interest group), in which ethnic loyalties are only evoked when there are class interests to be pursued? In other words, is ethnicity a fundamental social force, or is it an epiphenomenon governed by more fundamental class forces?