Letter to Stavros from Young Black Man from America

Dear Stavros,

I hear that things are coming along well for you here in New York City. I’m not sure if I ever told you this, but I was actually born and raised here. I love New York because it is the city of dreams and many people are eager to move here. I am always fascinated by the amount of aspiring models, writers, Broadway stars, and Wall Street executives that I come across through shoe shining. By the way, I am happy that you have been able to get along well in New York by shining shoes. I wish that I could say the same for myself.

Stavros, even though you prevented me from gaining customers at Grand Central Station, I am not angry with you. I do wish that you understood the importance of sharing. Especially given that I am also a member of an aggrieved group in this country. But, the truth is that I may have done the same to you if my skin color allowed me to. As you have come to understand, the best way to make it in this country as a foreigner is to fashion yourself as a white person by creating distance with the black populations.

Like I said above, I am not angry with you because I know that your feelings towards blackness are rooted in the racial history of the U.S. You were just treating me the same way people that both whites and non-whites have since the days of slavery. I would escape my blackness in a heartbeat if it meant that I had access to the greater opportunities. The funny thing is that if I could fashion myself as a white person, I would probably be your boss since you are Greek and I would be Anglo.

Stavros, I am not writing to make you feel guilty or that you are not entitled to the promises of citizenship in this country. I just wanted to let you know that I understand how difficult it is to carve out a space for yourself within American social, economic, and political institutions. The only difference between the two of us is that I have been struggling to find a place for myself within this country since the day that I was born to a black father and mother. I urge you to take full advantage of your position within the upper reaches of the American racial hierarchy because it gets pretty lonely at the bottom.

Sincerely,

Young Black Man from America

Questions:

1) In Becoming Mexican American, George Sanchez argues that national boarders are socially constructed. In contrast to the europeans immigrants who enter the U.S. via the Atlantic ocean that are described in Matthew Frye Jacobson's chapters, in what ways does the shared border between the U.S. and Mexico complicate the story of racial identity formation for Mexican Americans when compared to Europeans?

2) In "On the Backs of Blacks," Toni Morrison asserts that one's struggle to gain access to full citizenship and/or white identity is greatly contingent upon one's ability to distance themselves from black Americans. In what ways does Morrison's arguments both contribute to and challenge Jacobson's emphasis on the role that academic, legal, and scientific authority played in making europeans immigrants white?