A bunch of Americans are telling us America is white -- in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It was white when "we" got here, and it stayed white until the original "owners" were permitted to stray off the reservations and African slaves were released from slavery and moved into the other side of town.
Our history is largely about whites; our heroes are mostly white; the "best" things about America are white. Face it. The trouble began, the story goes, when blacks got the vote, people of all kinds moved in and assumed they had become co-owners of a basically white land. All that was a big mistake and should not have happened.
"Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged. ...Hua Hsu, Atlantic
It's not just the weird fringe of the Republican party who have made up their minds to believe all this. Many of us have mothers or grandmothers or uncles who, in the privacy of their families, admit that they believe whites are a naturally superior race. They have no problem being nice to those Others, but only up to a point. Giving over "our" leadership would kill/is killing this nation.
Ownership of America is a point of pride to many white middle-aged and older Americans. They continue to believe in "manifest destiny" -- one of those quasi-religious beliefs that justified vile behaviors on the part of the white majority.
Did I say "white majority"? In a few years, America will be a majority non-white country -- 2042 at the latest. The change over began decades ago. Whole generations of Americans of all colors and shapes have grown up in an America which is multi-ethnic. For many, tighter borders is about simplifying immigration procedures an getting our act together as a nation no longer protected by two oceans -- not about excluding Mexicans.
The New York Times describes the demonstrations in Phoenix yesterday where "two sides of the immigration debate converged."
[Yesterday's] demonstrators against the [Arizona] law were mostly Latino, with young people and families making up a large share. They played drums, whistled and chanted and gave speeches in Spanish and English denouncing the perceived racism behind the law. Many carried posters or wore T-shirts with the message: “Do I look illegal?”
They don't sound exactly dangerous, do they! A lot of Americans don't like hearing Spanish, don't understand it and resent having to deal with a non-English language population. Those other, older white Americans were out on the streets yesterday too. But it turns out that "far more attended the earlier rally opposed to the law..."
At the rally in favor of the law, which began with the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, any mention of Mexico or supporters of the law brought lusty boos — a video clip of President Felipe Calderón of Mexico especially fired up the crowd, which was mostly white and middle-aged or older. Placards like “Illegals out of the U.S.A.” were typical, though speaker after speaker ridiculed the idea that the crowd was racist.
Racist? The very idea!
But, of course, they are. They say they're just against the illegality of some immigrants. That's fair, but they're not using that old Reagan thing about "bring back law and order." That's not really what they're about or they wouldn't be claiming the national anthem and booing Mexico's legitimate president. (Were there questions about the status of immigrant Brits, I doubt we'd hear Tony Blair or David Cameron or the Queen being booed.)
What many white Americans want is a return to that dream (it wasn't reality) of a white America, the storybook America when the tales were written by old-fashioned, fact-averse children's book authors. There never was such a thing as a white America, only an America in which non-white people were put down with brutality.
Jill Lepore wrote a detailed piece in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago about a Tea Party gathering in Boston -- up there in ye olde Tea Party territory. It's a great article, definitely worth a read. The crowd wore the usual costumes and carried the usual signs. Except for the political content (and the nutty costumes) they weren't much different from the Latino demonstrators in Phoenix yesterday who also "played drums, whistled and chanted and gave speeches."
In response to Lepore's article, David Kanin, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins, wrote a letter to the editor with some comments on Tea Party misconceptions about American history, right down to their chosen name.
The so-called Tea Partiers may portray themselves as heirs to American Revolutionaries, but they are actually the descendants of those who lost the debate of 1788—in particular, the strain of constitutional opponents who violently resisted federal authority until Washington took to the battlefield against them (“Tea and Sympathy,” by Jill Lepore, May 3rd). American Revolutionaries opposed taxation without representation. These people oppose any taxation at all. Despite their “We the People” T-shirts, the visceral drivers of this fragmented formation are not conservatives striving to defend the Bill of Rights and strictly define constitutional language. They are anti-federalists, opposed to any meaningful central government, hostile to the principles of America’s founders, and determined to re-create the loose association of local authorities that fell apart within a few years of its establishment.
That's a really good point: what became a fractious, dead-end "protest" could have broken our union apart then as it could now.
Kanin pretty much sums up what others among us fear about the Tea Party. We are dismayed by their racism but we fear their opposition "to any meaningful central government." Their ignorance is not the ignorance of the uneducated but deliberate, confrontational, and bigoted ignorance, right down to their distorted view of this country's history.
There are healthier ways of looking at history and change.
For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it. ...Hua Hsu, Atlantic
