A letter from a Black citizen to White America

To my fellow Americans,

As a black citizen in the United States, I see the vast implications race possesses in our country. Black people went from physical enslavement to years of economic enslavement that we have yet to completely liberated. This dehumanization has existed by the hands of White America. Today, the White majority of our country is a thorough mix representing a wide variety of European ancestry. I cannot, and I believe most people can’t, discern a White Americans country of origin merely by there appearance. But as salient as the White race is today in America, many of you profiting from your whiteness may have not had the privilege to be part of this desirable group less than a century ago.

Today people carry their white ethnicity with pride, but their great-fathers may not have done the same. In the mid 1800’s Irish were hardly part of the White race, one man observing that the Irish were, “pot-bellied, bowlegged, and abortively featured” merely representing a “diseased stock.” And the Irish were not the only group that was “other-ed” by the white English Americans. Germans were accused of “driving ‘white people’ out of the labor market.”

So how did these peoples become able to claim the white identity that is so desirable and beneficial in our country? In part, it can be credited to the existence of my ancestors. The existence of black people in early America supplied other subjugated groups with a path to whiteness. Shaping blackness as the ultimate “other”, the “other” that will never assimilate and forever represent an inferior form of humanity, gave peoples such as the Irish and Germans access to whiteness and the true American identity.

The story of race in America is the ultimate display of race’s trivial nature. My plea is that we begin to reconsider the racial hierarchy in our country and realize that ideas of essentialism are completely disproven by our own nations history. We have made whiteness beneficial by making blackness detrimental.

Sincerely,

Your fellow Countryman

Questions:

1. How does economic status influence access to whiteness? Does economic affluence have to come before moving into the white category or does becoming white help in climbing the economic ladder?

2. How is the white population in our country still changing today? Are more people being included into the category or is whiteness becoming more exclusive?