The United States is not a White Nation
A friend’s brother found this taped to the wall in. a Wawa bathroom in South Jersey. He was offended, as I was, but that is to be expected, though I wonder if those are the correct responses. In fact, it’s almost too easy to be offended by this, to respond in outrage. It’s an offensive and outrageous flier, and I can see liberals and leftists being joined by Trump supporters and more traditional conservatives in condemning such rank nonsense.
And that’s what makes this flier so dangerous. As with the Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville last year, this kind of flier masks the real dangers facing American society, has us focused on the extreme right and not on the kind of white supremacist and authoritarian actions being taken in the name of more mainstream conservatives.
I received this photo just as I finished reading an AP report on recent U.S. Army discharges of immigrant “reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship.”
According to the report,
Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.
The Army did not comment initially, but a later AP story reported this:
The Pentagon said Friday that there has been no policy change since last year, when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said no one could enter basic training without completion of a background investigation.
And Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith said that any enlistee entering the military undergoes security screenings.
“Each recruit undergoes an individualized suitability review and the length of time for the review is dependent upon each individual’s unique background,” Smith said.
By itself, this action by DoD would be troubling — backing away from signed enlistment agreements with people willing to serve. When considered within the larger context of Trump’s immigration policies, his ban on transgender troops, his less-than-forceful condemnation of white supremacists (both during his campaign and after the Charlottesville riot), its difficult not to see this as part of an assault on those who fail to meet an outdated definition of American.
This is why the sign in the South Jersey Wawa is important. It makes explicit what many who support Trump are unwilling to admit — that this is about what it means to be American.
The flier makes the message simple, stating what even Trump won’t, that these supposed patriots believe Americanness and whiteness go hand in hand. One cannot be fully American unless one is white. White Americans have this “civic duty” to police citizenship, a dangerous mindset that sadly is consistent with historical precedent.
As books like Nell Irvin Painter’s A History of White People show, the construct of race has both been malleable and punitive, expanding and contracting as the needs of white power holders have changed. Before the Civil War, the Irish were not considered white and, therefore, less American.
The British historically depicted the Irish as apes in political cartoons, a practice later followed by American cartoonists, as shown in these two cartoons.
The narrative shifted after the Civil War. The Irish melted into the broader definition of whiteness — Americanness — as part of the mission to keep the newly freed slaves at arms length and under the boot heel of an oppressive Southern regime. (The North was equally racist, of course, but did not enact the elaborate legal edifice that existed in he Southern states.)
Other immigrant groups experienced similar trajectories. Italians, Eastern Europeans, Russians, all of these groups started as other, as foreign and reviled, even slaughtered on American soil, before they were comfortably brought under the umbrella of whiteness.
Jews have occupied a special place in these scenarios — as they have in Europe. We continue to straddle the insider/outsider line, rising to the heights of power and benefiting from our white skin, but also remaining under suspicion, viewed as a dangerous other. The ugly Shylock stereotype (greedy moneylender) remains near the surface, governing both positive and negative associations. Trump, remember, attempted to compliment a group of Jewish businessmen during his campaign by resorting to the “great negotiators” version of the trope, and I was told by a friend that the Rothschilds controlled the world.
Other groups have and continue to face more treacherous paths — Caribbean islanders, Africans, Chinese and other East Asian immigrants, South Asian immigrants, Muslims from the Middle East, and Latinos from a Mexico and Central America. Our immigration laws, cited by the immigration-control crowd, have never been constructed with neutrality in mind. They’ve always been a pillar of white supremacy.
As Kevin Jennings wrote earlier this year in The Los Angeles Times,
the first sweeping federal restriction on immigration … came in 1882, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Troubled by the influx of Chinese workers — who helped build the transcontinental railroads, among other things — Congress enacted a wholesale ban on their further immigration that year. To enforce the ban, a bureaucracy had to be created, leading in 1891 to the establishment of the federal Bureau of Immigration, the first body charged with enforcing federal immigration law.
Three decades later,
When a massive influx of new immigrant groups came at the turn of the 20th century — Italians from Southern Europe and Jews from Eastern Europe, largely — a backlash began to build. In 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the National Origins Act, the primary aim of which was to severely restrict the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new law required for the first time that immigrants to the U.S. have visas, introducing the concept of “having papers” to American immigration policy.
Immigration would now be done “by the numbers,” with the stated aim of maintaining existing racial and ethnic concentrations — and keeping America relatively white and Christian. Tony New Englanders like Prescott Farnsworth Hall and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge were avowedly anti-immigration, and editorial cartoons like this
were common in newspapers around the country.
Lodge, in an essay in the January 1891 issue of the North American Review, describes the new wave of immigrants from South and Eastern Europe as “races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes among those races. In other words, it is apparent that, while our immigration is increasing, it is showing at the same time a marked tendency to deteriorate in character.”
Restrictions on Chinese immigrants, he added, were the result of a
the American people, first on the western coast and then elsewhere, suddenly (being) roused to the fact that they were threatened with a flood of low-class labor which would absolutely destroy good rates of wages among American workingmen by a competition which could not be met, and which at the same time threatened the quality of American citizenship.
He goes on to add,
In a word, the continued introduction into the labor market of four hundred thousand persons annually, half of whom have no occupation and most of whom represent the rudest form of labor, has a very great effect in reducing the rates of wages and disturbing the labor market. This, of course, is too obvious to need comment, and this tendency to constantly lower wages by the competition of an increasing and deteriorating immigration is a danger to the people of the United States the gravity of which can hardly be overestimated. Moreover, the shifting of the sources of the immigration is unfavorable, and is bringing to the country people whom it is very difficult to assimilate and who do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States — a matter as serious as the effect on the labor market.
This is the same language we hear today from Trump and groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform use, the same rhetorical neutrality masking an agenda that is far from neutral — especially when placed alongside his comments about shithole countries and stated preference for Northern Europeans.
The point is that the debate hinges on definitions — particularly, on the definition of American. There is a lot of mythology surrounding that word, and it would be a lie to say the ideals that provide its meaning are even close to being realized.
But I think that something Michael Eric Dyson writes in his new book is the place we need to start. He is talking about James Baldwin and says that Baldwin saw a divided America, “split in two — not between North and South but between the powerful and the disenfranchised” (7).
Racism, that scourge that beclouded our democracy, remained —remains the nation’s greatest peril. But the powerful maintained the status quo by sowing discord among the disenfranchised. Poor white folk, rather than uniting with their socioeconomically oppressed brothers and sisters against the rich, trained their ire on poor black folk. They channeled their anxieties into a vengeance against blackness.
There remains a war on blackness and brownness, in the form of a badly distorted criminal justice system that starts with the laws beat cops are told to enforce, up through the cops and police departments themselves, into the courts, the prisons and that follows these men and women back into their neighborhoods when they get out. It is a war in the form of an economic system that distributes its spoils to those who already have, which perpetuates centuries of white theft of black labor and ultimately black wealth.
As Dyson notes, black Americans are not the only ones on which this war is being waged. Other brown people are targeted, as well, along with poor whites, women, the LGBTQ community, and so on.
So, this bathroom flier, which screams racism in a clear voice, also should be seen as a sign of broader economic dysfunction. We have to fight this on both fronts, or the slide into authoritarianism signaled by Trump and his supporters could become a fait accompli.