Who is a "good American" and how has this idea changed over time? Join our conversation to find out more about who historically got to become citizens, who was excluded, and why.
Transcript: Who is a Good American?
Will: The melting pot works in a different way for people of European descent than it historically has worked for people of Asian, Latino, or African descent. So American debates over immigration then going back to the early to mid-eighteen hundreds reflect that divide. Who can be who is a good American?
Penny: Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
So we're here today to unpack a little more about race in America by looking at the history of immigration and how race, categories of race and thinking about race, has really always been part of our immigration thinking and policies. I wonder if you can help us understand that a little bit better.
Will: The background to thinking about immigration debates probably is: How do you think about citizenship? And in modern history, there have been two rough ways, scholars say countries have thought about citizenship, one way we might think of as ethno-cultural. That is, people who are citizens share a common ethnic identity, a common cultural identity, a common religious heritage or identity, an ethno0cultural approach to citizenship is something you're born into. You're born German or French or Japanese, for example. You can't become Japanese if you're Irish, for example. You can't become French, if you're Polish. An ethno-cultural identity and an ethno-cultural definition of citizenship is something you're born into.
Another way of thinking about citizenship rather than ethn0-cultural, we might call civic. That is, it doesn't matter what your ethnic background is, what your cultural background, what your religious background is. To be a good citizen, you need to embrace the legal and political values of the nation. So in the case of the US, things like liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, rule of law and so on, and be a loyal citizen politically, a good participating citizen. So American debates over immigration, then going back to the early to mid-Eighteen hundreds reflect that divide. Who can be who is a good American. And the debate really got going in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s when you started to get new waves of immigration to the United States. They came from places like Germany and Austria and from Ireland. The immigrants who especially got native born Americans, most of whom were northwestern European or British descent and Protestant religiously. What really got most of them excited or concerned was immigrants who were Catholic, German or Irish, especially Irish Catholics. Those immigrant groups were considered culturally and ethnically and religiously different and undesirable. And here we can start to see racial elements. So I'll focus on the Irish. The Irish were, in a sense, not considered white. They're not-whiteness was partly because they were Roman Catholic rather than Protestant, because they were Irish rather than English, Welsh or Scottish or Dutch or another Western European group. And the Irish as an ethnic group were considered morally suspect, wild, passionate, prone to drink and other forms of immorality, relatively uncivilized. And so they were considered a danger to the American nation, ethnically and culturally, as well as religiously.
The idea religiously was that because Catholics had a pope, the equivalent of a monarch, they couldn't embrace American, Republican, Democratic and liberal values where leaders were elected rather than born into a position. So the Irish then were not considered white. They were considered a danger.
German immigrants, particularly Catholic Germans were similarly considered a danger, although they were generally considered more civilized than the Irish. So what you see then in American history, really from the first waves of Catholic-Irish and Catholic-German immigrants in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, all the way into the post-World War Two era, was a division of immigrants into preferred groups who were Western European, northern European and Protestant, and then less desired or non-desired groups who are southern European, Central European, Eastern European and typically Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Russian Orthodox or Jewish. Immigrant groups were also considered dangerous for reasons other than their ethnic identity or religious identity. They often were identified as carrying physical diseases with them, things like cholera or carrying dangerous political ideas, whether socialism or monarchism or something like that. But these things were taken as a package, and that's really the crucial degree. The idea that dangerous ideas, the wrong religious identities, less civilized, less developed ethnic groups came as a package. These were things that people were born with and that made some more suitable as potential immigrants to the United States or less suitable.
Immigrants from Europe, for the most part, were able to melt and disappear into whiteness, whereas people whose skin colors and hair types were more obviously distinctive couldn't do it in the same way.
Eric: Yeah, that's that's that's a real important point. Yeah, overall, I mean, what the whole phenomenon of passing it, it it argues for the existence of what we now call white privilege.
Will: Hmm.
Eric: If if you were a person of African descent, but you were you were light skinned, so light that, yes, you can you can pass for white and your hair texture was was was straighter than, let's say, the average person of African descent, You can go into spaces where, say, your brothers or sisters or your cousins were unable to go. That's been a theme in in in African-American history, especially in the 20th century. It's been a theme in Caribbean history as well, South American history and Brazil among Spanish speaking Caribbean folk saying in the Dominican Republic.
But yeah, this whole thing of getting access to privilege. And whatever amounts to privilege, a better job, a better social standing, so forth and so on. And what's interesting is that just last year, Brit Brit Bennett, the novelist African-American novelist, wrote an outstanding book, published outstanding book called Vanishing Half, which she basically unearths that theme of passing. That was a big theme in African American literature during the Harlem renaissance. You have James Willard Johnson writing the autobiography of a ex-colored man about a literary character who passes for white. I’m thinking of Larssen, who wrote a book on on passing during that time period. Then it seemed like it had gone away. But. That phenomenon is still with us in terms of passing. Maybe not as drastic as it was in the 20th century, but now we have this term called white passing. Maybe the person is light is light enough that people will mistake him or her as a white person or at least a quote unquote, non-black person. But the person may not be trying to to pass. But it still goes back to really the template of what is what is normal. Well, at least what is defined as normal normal, especially in United States, but this is this is also a new world phenomenon. Whose lens do we see people from? How do we measure ourselves in a context like the United States or in a context like in the Dominican Republic or Cuba or Brazil? I think that's that's the question regarding regarding passing, but also, again, is that if that access to economic privilege and economic opportunity and social social mobility.
Penny: So definitely at points in our U.S. American history. If you could pass, you could go into that restaurant or stay in that hotel because we have these laws. Right. The separation laws, the Jim Crow laws for so long. But still today, I think, as you're saying, there can be advantages to looking lighter, to looking whiter, because that's just it's associated in our minds with so many things, even unconscious things.
Will: One of the factors that made it possible for people of Irish descent to become white was they could lose their Irish accents. They could change their names if they chose to. But even if they even if those two weren't the case, their skin was white, they could melt into the larger native born American population, whether within their own lifetimes or their children and grandchildren could do it in a way that immigrants of Asian descent or Americans of African descent could not.
Penny: For this question of who is a good American, it's .. the white American, like that was the opinion, that's what what is considered good and preferable and what we want, and then the fact that some let's call them racial, ethnic, cultural groups like the Irish can slowly be deemed white. But some of us can never do that, right? Because of the way I look, I can never be white. Even if I am the loyal person, even if I'm Protestant and not Catholic, even if I, you know, really embrace liberty and democracy, I will never be white. So, in some ways, I don't know, I feel like what am I supposed to do with that, because I still feel like this understanding race in America by looking at the immigration history thing, and I'm really seeing that in history, at least --Let's hope it's changing slowly.--that white is what makes a good American.
Will: Histories of discrimination in the United States cross racial lines if by race we mean, say, white people versus non-white people. But the kinds of discrimination that people from different European ethnic groups experienced was, as you quite rightly say, Penny, different. The melting pot works in a different way for people of European descent than it historically has worked for people of Asian, Latino, or African descent.
Eric: Because, yeah, we can't deny that. All right, first generation, second generation Irish immigrants coming to this country faced discrimination based on their Irishness, as perceived by lack of a better word, Anglos and also Italians, you know, back back home in Louisiana, not just Italians, but Sicilians were lynched in in New Orleans is a there's a monument to to that on Canal Street downtown New Orleans. But in all these cases, though, you talk about this becoming white, these these bouts of violent oppression and discrimination were temporary in a sense. And for people of Asian descent, people of African descent, especially African-Americans who are a descendant of enslaved Africans, It's a it's a different story because it's been perpetual.
Penny: Race has always been part of determining for us in immigration who's in and who's out, who's desirable and who's not. And then there's this other layer of whiteness being seen as that sort of the pinnacle that's that's the best of the best way to answer who's a good American. And that initially whiteness included other ethn- cultural things, including like carful, Catholicism versus other religions, or I should say Protestantism versus other religions, as well as ethno-cultural things, and then embracing certain ideas like liberty and democracy. So it's not super easy to just a cookie cutter answer about how race and immigration have interplayed. But I still my takeaway is still very much that there's this idea of whiteness that develops and whiteness is seen as the most desirable type of American.
And then this idea of certain people could become white, could become the most desirable kind of American. And other people, because I'm just going to say, because of our skin tone or the type of hair we have or the shape of our eyes, we can never be seen as the best kind of American. And I just wonder how true that is still today. I hope it's not true. But sometimes when you look at the news headlines, you wonder, you know.
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