Melting Pot
The birth and death of racism in America
America is a nation of immigrants. From our foundation to today, this has always been true. That being said, we are surprisingly unapproving of immigrants. Fear of the foreign and unfamiliar, or xenophobia, has plagued our country ever since it was settled by outsiders from Europe. To be clear, I should say resettled. America was already inhabited by native tribes of hunter-gatherers and farmers. Native peoples, or “savages”, to the Europeans, had their own distinct culture and values. Unlike the Europeans, native Americans worked in synergy with nature, could live easily without firearms, and had never read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The idea of coexistence proved to be too much for the white man to handle; he feared the things he did not understand, and stole the things he did. White settlers were determined to make a living for themselves, and refused to respect those they saw as inferior, which happened to be… almost anyone who didn’t look or act like them.
Origins
The first “wave” of immigration to America occurred in the early 1600’s. These people came mostly from Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and France. The majority did not leave their home countries for fun, but because they were fleeing hardship. What kind, exactly, varies. War, famine, disease, poverty, religious persecution between Catholics and Protestants, and the rule of dictatorial figures all contributed to mass migration to “the New World”, or North America. A smaller, but substantial number were focused on profiting off new lands by expanding trade. The means of doing so, however, would have devastating effects on the environment and its “most profitable inhabitants”
The colonies established by the British Crown were essentially the “seeds of America”. Our first metropolises arose on the east coast. As many know, the transition from British colonies, to “the United States” was long, bloody, and had something to do with taxes. Long story short, after 170+ years of settlement in the colonies, Americans refused to submit to a British king while receiving no representation in parliament, fought a war of independence, and established a sovereign nation comprised of states. Indeed, many changes were made in the name of freedom, but one constant was that suffrage was dependent on property ownership. One cannot refute, the new governments were created by white male settlers, for white male settlers. In this way, our government was flawed from the beginning.
While some newcomers to America were escaping a cruel life, others were just entering one. The cheapest labor around was a slave, and the second cheapest was a convict. Basically, the less freedom you have, the easier you are to exploit. This applied then, and it still does today. It may seem strange, but some people have a hard time acknowledging that people were actually kidnapped, bought and sold, tortured, raped, and worked to death, and that they were primarily Africans, and that slavery had the power to impact generations of people, free and bonded. Its no stretch of the imagination to think that the people who committed these acts in the first place are the same ones who wish to cover them up.
If racism is a stain on our history, de jure racism is a deep, deep scar. The first step in solving any problem is admitting you have one, and it’s time to admit America was built on a foundation of racial inequality. God and greed drove the Europeans to conquer and exploit innocent people wherever they went, even before they left Europe. America is one of many places it occurred.
The genocide and displacement of Native American tribes, as unbelievable as it sounds, was legal and encouraged. However, it wasn’t until settler populations reached the Mississippi River that desires for land and “safety” (aka ethnic homogeneity) overflowed, manifesting itself in the form of renegade settlers, the Indian Removal Act, and other treaties designed to acquire land for the United States, and send the natives packing.
Gross economic gains and racism go hand in hand. Too many instances come to mind: forced and coerced removal of Native American tribes to acquire land and water resources, slavery of Africans fueled the cotton industry in the Southern states, and slavery of the Taino fueled the sugar and mining industries in the Caribbean…
Reconstruction
When slavery went out of fashion as a cheap source of labor, imported workers and convicts filled the void. Why? They could not successfully unionize, they had little legal protection in the states, and they were often desperate for money and willing to work in poor conditions to make ends meet.
American and British owned sugar plantations in the Kingdom of Hawaii boomed with workers from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Quite literally, sugar led to corporate takeover and American purchase/theft of the land. We wouldn’t have our notorious trans-continental railroad if it weren’t for the blood and sweat of Chinese and Irish immigrants. Much of the labor intensive agriculture of the west, from San Francisco to San Antonio, relied heavily on Mexican and Filipino immigrants, and the industry still does today.
The relationship between industry and government allowed for commodity producing giants like the J.G. Boswell Company and U.S. Steel to exploit and perpetuate racial divides in labor with their use of convict leasing and peonage. Convicting minorities of criminal acts was quite easy given attitudes of xenophobia and racial superiority among whites, and law enforcement has, sickeningly, used this to their advantage.
American Apartheid
Apartheid is a strong word, to those who know what it means. In simplest terms, it is racial segregation. The nation of South Africa experienced apartheid from 1948 to 1994 under rule of the National Party, a government determined to keep economic control and social dominance in the hands of whites, who were a minority there. History provides us with several parallels.
The infamous 1896 supreme court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in America, determining that races were “separate, but equal”. This would be the beginning of Jim Crow laws, which one could easily call, “White America’s resistance to integration and equality.” Everything from voting, to housing, to education, to policing, and employment was, affected by race. Things have gotten better with regards to racial equality, but that doesn’t mean our goals have been reached and we “can all go home.” Just as in the past, the disenfranchised have to fight for their rights and make their voices heard.
Isolation only heightens racism and ethnocentrism. When you put up walls, physical or ideological, to prevent movement, you guarantee a prolonged feud. History will, and has, repeated itself. You need to look no further than the state of Israel to see this. The nation happens to be America’s largest recipient of foreign aid, as the U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for $3.7 billion dollars, or over $10 million dollars a day.
The U.S., South Africa, and Israel, are all guilty of the same crime. Whether you call it segregation, apartheid, or hafrada, it is the same vile ethnocentrism and de jure racism that has been practiced by settlers across the globe. The acts walk hand in hand with the ideology. There used to be flourishing tribal populations in North America, with vast amounts of land; where have they gone? Palestine used to be a country. Where has it gone?
Looking forward
Do you remember the melting pot? If you went to elementary school in America, I have a feeling you do. When your teacher described immigration and integration in America, it always came back to the “melting pot.” It gives people the idea that culture and ethnicity is blended, mixed, and homogeneous. To some degree, this is true, cultures and ethnicity do mix. However, the melting pot is a model of assimilation to a unified “American” culture. It is not reality, but a myth to propagate uniformity. To put it plainly, some things don’t melt, and that’s OK. If you want a more realistic model of integration, go with “cultural stew.” No joke. This is the model one of my teachers used to describe Canada. I hear they’re doing pretty well…
I’d like to offer some helpful advice as we search for the long overdue “end of racism.” But first, I’d like to offer a quote from Elie Wiesel. I think of it often, and I hope you will too.
“I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”
Here’s my advice: Don’t let the worst of you get the best of you.
