Is This A White Country, or What PDF

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Is This A White Country, or What...

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OCT

23

Is This A White Country, or What

Is This A White Country, or What? by Lillian B. Rubin explores the nagging questions, asked most often within the working class, of what has happened to white America and the rights and privileges that go along with being white and the dominate culture in America. This question of losing jobs and competing for a shrinking economic pie is not only a “white” concern but it is also felt deeply within the native-born Black community too.

The respondents that Ms. Rubin interviewed complained about a vaguely conceptualize “them” who are taking jobs, getting benefits, changing the culture and cutting, in particular, the “white American” out of what is their God given rights as Americans since America is a white country. “If we keep letting all them foreigners in, pretty soon there’ll be more of them than us and then what will this country be like?”

To those who have studied the history of the United States this is not a new phenomenon. “When during the nineteenth century, for example, some Italians were taken for blacks and lynched in the South, the incidents passed virtually unnoticed. And if Mary Anne and Tim Walsh, both of Irish ancestry, had come to this country during the great Irish immigration of that period, they would have found themselves defined as an inferior race…”

As each wave of immigrants came to the Unites States, many whom now fit the ethnic grouping of “white”, they were reviled, held in contempt and the target of many of the same slurs and descriptives used for present day immigrants. One has only to think of the Polish, Irish and Italian jokes that until racism and racist remarks left the sidewalks and entered the back rooms of our culture, were commonly told, printed and laughed at as a matter of course. Lazy, dirty, stupid, and lacking in common decency is not a new view held by many of the people already established in this country about newcomers.

The big difference is that the new immigrant groups coming to the United States can never be

assimilated as “white” unlike the Irish, Polish or Italian who did after all arrive from Europe. “Until the new immigrations shifted the complexion of the land so perceptibly, whites didn’t think of themselves as whites in the same way that Chinese know they are Chinese and Africa-Americans know they are black. Being white was simply a fact of life, one that didn’t require any public statement, since it was the definitive social value against which all others were measured.”

For the new ethnic groups, whose bodies reflect another culture that is not “white” or “black”, the ability to blend becomes harder. The new immigrants bring their languages and ethnic cultures with them and often vividly express them in the neighborhoods they live and in the new social media and internet connections. “But for the first time, the new immigrants are also people of color, which means that they tap both the nativist and racist impulses that are so deeply a part of American life.”

Now there are so many ethnic minorities living and moving to the United States that the “white” historically dominate culture is in danger of being its own minority; of being strangers in their own land. This, I think, is a deep fear within the groups of working people whose jobs, neighborhoods, public assistance programs, and schools are most impacted by immigration and who for the most part do not see a variety of ethnic groups but a mass of “colored people” out to get what historically belonged to being white. Being white no longer automatically assures dominance in a multiracial society....