Reddit reviews Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
We found 10 Reddit comments about Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
> For example the Irish weren't exactly looked upon fondly when masses of them came over to seek a better life, but over generations they mixed in and form part of today's American culture.
They became "white." It's a fascinating historical transition.
Well, white people haven't had to fight for our rights in America. Nobody's racially profiling us, or saying that we aren't "really American." White people (well, guys, anyway) have always had the right to vote and to live anywhere we want, or join any club we'd like to. As straight people (I'm assuming you are) we haven't had to fight for marriage rights. Roe vs. Wade was decided in the 70s but Republicans still keep trying to roll that back and restrict women's legal right (wasting time and money on this, I have to add.) Minorities get some additional focus because they're still working on being treated legally as equals. That doesn't mean that someone who has these legal rights already is being left out. One of the things the Obama administration introduced is the time and a half overtime law for workers making under $47k. That affects plenty of white men too, and the GOP is about to roll that back. As well as looking at Social Security cuts that will affect all of us who aren't making over $200k a year. And Medicare. These are "all people" issues, not minority ones or white people issues, unless you want your grandparents to move in with you or to pay for their hip replacements yourself.
From what I've seen, the Trump machine used refugees and illegal immigrants to boost fear (we are more likely to be shot by a toddler or die falling out of bed than to be killed by a terrorist in the US) and distract from the fact that their overall policies pretty much benefit big business and CEOs and not the other 99% of us.
Though there have been, historically, times when various groups of white immigrants have been discriminated against because of national origin, like the Irish in particular, Italians, Poles. Now everyone in these groups are considered white people...but it wasn't always like this. (You might find this one a good read.)
The correct answer is that race is a social construction. Blackness has no value beyond what our culture has given it. Which, ideally, shouldn't be very much. But the comments you've gotten in this thread already show you that your skin color matters a lot.
So what is blackness?
Whatever white people say it is.
No, I'm serious.
If race is a social construction we should look at who makes up the rules for a society (i.e. who does the constructing). And this society (in my context American society) was made by white people. And for a long time, those white people tried to keep non-whites down and out. The rules of this society reflected a white supremacist racial preference for a really long time and we're still living with its effects.
This racial agenda was carried out in lots of subtle and non-subtle ways. Non-subtle ways include out and out discrimination. Subtle ways include appropriating aspects of "black culture" and repackaging/whitewashing them in order to claim that discrimination doesn't happen or isn't as bad we think it is. The cliche appropriation example is rock music, but the best example is Booker T. Washington. Or really pretty much any successful black person who "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps." Their hard work and determination shows that discrimination doesn't affect us anymore! If they can do it, so can you!
Blackness is often defined as thug life, gangsta rap, fed by nihilism, poverty, drug addiction, and crime. And the ghetto. Though you rarely hear anyone discuss why inner city ghettos exist (because whites didn't want blacks living in the whites-only suburbs) and why poverty is a problem (because it's one of the latent effects of segregation and discrimination).
What is acting black?
I don't know. Blackness is an identity largely created specifically to keep you oppressed. This is done by dehumanizing people with dark skin and denying that you, or anyone with dark skin, is fully human. Superficial example - when black people are compared unfavorably to monkeys. Or really every negative stereotype you've heard of black people being lazy - which is ironic in the American context because blacks were imported as slaves because they knew how to do important things very well. Like grow rice (which is very intensive work).
Now Black Consciousness philosophies (advocated by people like Stephen Biko) argue that a real black identity would build up a sense of humanity within black people, BUT without reference to the white man, his history, his accomplishments, his religion, or any aspect of his way of life.
Some people think this is just black sepratism - but given that whites kept blacks out of white society for centuries, the counterargument is "so what if it is?" White society was premised on separation of races - when the apartheid government criticized people like Biko (in America it was Marcus Garvey) for advocating racial separation (when at least Biko actually wasn't doing so but that's another story) was a little like the pot calling the kettle black.
There's one comment in this thread I should respond directly to:
>Or you can be a human being and just do whatever you want to do.
When people tell you that they don't see race, they're saying a few things by implication.
This just tells you that when someone decides you're acting a certain way, they've already decided you're not they're equal. What I would do is call them out on their ignorance. "I don't see race" is just willful ignorance. They're ignoring that race has consequences even today, and those consequences have nothing to do with how they see you. Call them on it.
TL;DR: Blackness is culturally constructed to oppress, and I'm not sure a positive black identity can ever be created successfully.
And before the white people jump in saying "well, my people were oppressed/characterized as imperialists/rapists/oppressors," I would like to point out that:
By the way, did you know that for a long time only Anglo-Saxons were considered white? Everyone else only became white over a process of acceptance. True story. So yeah, "acting white" doesn't mean anything other than "you have now been accepted into the socially dominant group in this society."
That won't happen for black people, I don't think.
-----
SOURCES:
I write ad nauseum about this stuff so here's a comment post with sources on the history of housing discrimination in the 1940s and how it created lots of the problems we have today - specifically within education, thug culture, and crime.
Here's a book about how immigrant groups earned whiteness.
Slaves taught slave owners how to grow rice.
How the Irish became white.
A dramatization of Stephen Biko's beliefs.
It wasn't me. If you didn't know that about the Irish, I don't know what to tell you.
Here's a book I can recommend you if you're interested in the subject: Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs
If you haven't read them, you may also be interested in some of this author's previous work... specifically, The Wages of Whiteness and Working Toward Whiteness.
Also, Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White.
PS The promotional flyer for the new book includes a code for 20% off preorders from the Oxford University Press website.
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744
> u kike.
So, that's a yes on your name having been changed to pass as white.
> you dont have a single incident of a pole being not considered white.
Hello, McFly? Ben Franklin explicitly said you weren't white. Look, none of this is a secret, I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Its well established, uncontroversial history. if you weren't a WASP, you weren't white. You weren't black, but you weren't white either. You were considered inferior to real whites. There are literally thousands of books and papers discussing it and it was all simply common knowledge at the time because that's just how people saw it, some examples:
Italian/American Literature
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744
Just a little taste of the huge amount of literature about this subject.
"As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom.
This has resulted in a system where centuries later race is still how class is lived in America."
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/5/6/1382872/-Matters-of-Race-and-Class-How-Whiteness-is-One-of-the-Greatest-Scams-in-Modern-History
https://www.amazon.com/Invention-White-Race-Oppression-Control/dp/1844677699
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744
If you're interested in learning about what I'm talking about:
https://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744
https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2/168-2189300-6694546?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QVMJFTWQ9WRGVNSMMGD1
Or, you can just make jokes and not learn anything, it's up to you.