I enjoyed reading your article "On the Back of Blacks." I certainly agree with your overall point. One of the main ways that immigrant ethnic, racial or religious groups assimilated into the greater 'white' culture was through their difference to a homegrown minority. You focus on blacks although I would add Native Americans too especially from the early history of the American colonies to the last of the American-Indian wars. But still, I agree with your general presence that "only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimiliation complete."
However, I begin to differ where to try to overstate the problem. Your statement the immigrant's "nemesis is understood to be African American." This is simply not true. The most obvious example that come to mind is the togetherness experienced by soldiers in World War II where the white men of very different backgrounds were forced to come together and rely on each other for survival and victory. The nemesis here that brought all these men together was Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, not blackness.
Certainly there is much truth in your statement that "stability is white. Disorder is black." But this simply does not prove that blacks were the necessary enemy needed to gain access to the exclusive white club.
Matthew Jacobson
Questions:
1) Are we truly at a point today where the many ethnic groups that Jacobson describes are truly white?
2) Does whiteness become more accepting as it grows? i.e. is whiteness more, less or just as exclusive a club as it was 150 years ago?
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