Why do we call it Nativism?
Definition of nativism. 1 : a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants.
“Native,” of course, means “born here.” Natives are people who were born here. We make it more complicated than that, because we have a complicated history. None of us can claim to come from a family free from immigration.
It’s actually more complicated than mere birthplace: John McCain was born in Panama, but he is a “native” because the US military had his parents stationed there. Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii to an American mother, somehow was constantly questioned about his citizenship. It seems that nativism has less to do with birth than we would imagine, and more to do with culture, and a certain, shall we say, familiarity.
When we talk of Nativists today, we mean people like Jeff Sessions, and, most days, his boss Donald Trump, who seem to talk of America as a place of limitless opportunity, but are constantly afraid of being overrun. We also mean those White Supremacists who marched in Charlottesville; they are Nativists, too.
“Nativists” are people who want to kick the “immigrants” out. By “immigrants”, they explicitly mean people who were born elsewhere. But implicitly, we all know that they mean people not like them.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European settlers began coming to the continents called America, there were no national boundaries to divide them up, but there were Natives. Their skins were brown, whether they were born in Colorado or Mexico. For neither Colorado nor Mexico existed when their ancestors were born “here.”
It wasn’t until 1776 that the settlers invented the United States of America and declared themselves to be “natives” of it. Yet when we declared ourselves to be “natives” we didn’t exactly stop calling those browner people natives, too. Instead, new immigrants gave the previous inhabitants the capital N, yet kept the honor of the word “native” to themselves. Native morphed in meaning, from “people born here” to “people in power”.
We have lost track of what the word means, and why it matters. We all have ancestors who kicked someone else’s ancestors around and caused a Diaspora. And we all have other ancestors who got kicked out. Native sounds eternal, but history teaches that it is very, very temporary.
That is what this fight is about — it’s about power, not birthplace. We have gotten past the point where quiet hints can be noticed, so let us be blunt: ‘Native’ has become synonymous with ‘white, conservative, and Christian’. This has for decades been brewing angrily below the surface, but Trump and Sessions have given it form, and with Trump’s latest executive order, substance.
Trump and Sessions are frightened by diversity, and they have put that fear above honor in their latest decision, choosing to enforce a rule that 82% of Americans believe is unjust. So let us be clear that we believe that America can be better than this.
Everybody’s got a Diaspora in their family tree, except maybe some folks who live where Obama’s other parent was born. Today’s immigrant can sire tomorrow’s President. Let those who have worked so hard to come to America teach us how to be courageous, and how to lead. We appear to need the lesson.
Originally published in The Weathervane No 16 on September 7, 2017. [Subscribe]
