Letter From Morrison to Sanchez

Mr. Sanchez,

I was really struck by your chapter in Becoming Mexican American on the Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant. It appears implicit in your rhetoric that to assimilate to American culture means to assimilate to white culture. In fact, you write very specifically about the ways in which European immigrants and Mexican immigrants tried to assimilate one another to the industrial order of the U.S. "Yet even Anglo Americans new to the region took it as their mission to integrate foreigners into southern California." What is that industrial order you speak of? Where are the blacks? You even talk about black migration to Los Angeles, why were these blacks not part of the assimilation programs?

As you may know about me, I believe the immigrant in the United States as consistently allied with the white man at the expense of blacks, as if the black man is the common enemy, further subjugating blacks to inferior treatment, despite being even native to the United States.

I know you are not to blame for any of these phenomena, but you should consider them more in your analysis of the Americanization of Mexicans, because blacks are also a part of what it means to be American.

Sincerely,

Toni Morrison

Questions:

1. Is there a parallel between the ways rich whites and poor whites allied themselves during the early slave period to find a common enemy in blacks to the way Morrison writes about how European immigrants try to find a common enemy in blacks with American whites. (That is really poorly written I hope it makes sense).

2. In what ways did the formation of ethnic-specific communities (whether by choice or by force) compare to the ways blacks and whites have self-segregated (and forcibly segregated)?

Transcribed Interview between Henry Lodge and Zeferino Velázquez

Lodge: When and how did you get to these Great States of America?

Velázquez: My first time in America I caught a train from Guadalajara to Kansas to work on in a mine. The second time I walked from Cuidad Jaurez.

Lodge: Do you have a passport?

Velazquez: No

Lodge: How did you get here without a passport?

Velazquez: I told you, the first time I caught the train, a guy told me he would give me a job and pay for my ticket. The second time I didn't have train money so I walked from a friends house in Cuidad Jaurez, then worked in Texas, then caught the train to California.

Lodge: Did you take a literacy tests?

Velazquez: No. I hear that you oppose immigration from Europe, Why?

Lodge: Well, to give you a brief summary of eugenics, Anglo-Americans have a more refined, civil temperament. Those from other regions have a more savage-like nature. And so the issue is that these aliens are overpopulating our nation.

Velazquez: Have you ever been to Mexico? Or Arizona, or Californa, or Kansas?

Lodge: No

Velazquez: Then how could you call these states your when you have never been to them. I have worked their and lived their for all of my life. My homes is in these places.

1) How the pseudo-scientific essentialist argument for Anglo supremacy reconcile the hypocrisy in the violence that Anglo-Americans inflicted on their "barbaric" racial inferiority?

2) The inclusion of non-Anlgo Europeans into the concept whiteness reflected a political fear of Anglos being outnumbered by immigrants and developments in eugenics and scientific racism that focused on macro-racial groups. Is this political threat relevant in the shift to a Latino majority in 40 or so projected years? Does the U.S. Census, in constructing Latinos as an ethnic group and non-racial group, reflect a political move to address this threat?

3) What is the relationship between geography, construction of race, and constructed borders?

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?

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?

Letter from a black immigrant to a white one

This letter is inspired by Jacobson’s quote in the Introduction: “The saga of European immigration has long been held up as proof of the openness of American society, the benign and absorptive powers of American capitalism, and the robust health of American democracy.”

Dear Mr. O’Malley,

First, I would like to congratulate you on coming to this country with absolutely nothing and turning it into a whole lot of something. You’ve made quite a name for yourself here in America, and I admire that. But I’ve got to ask you why it is that only a European immigrant can be the poster child of the American Dream? Why is it that African women and men coming to this country were hardly considered humans, while you and yours are valorized as the epitome of the American capitalist system? We, the hard-working black women and men, were only included in the fantasy of the American Dream after the Civil Rights Movement, after the whitewashed, saintly U.S. government liberated us and gave us our supposedly inalienable rights. This myth that consumes the American imagination—the myth that anyone can climb the ladder from poverty to wealth—is limited to those who can prove their whiteness. You and your European brothers and sisters have become the model of a true American success story, while us dark-skinned citizens are portrayed as criminals and bums. You forget the barriers to success that are positioned directly in front of people that look like me as you climb your way up our backs just to get a taste of fancy cocktails in spacious corner offices. All immigrants deserve to be appreciated, not just the ones who can claim to be free and white.

-Mr. Jones

Questions:

1) Why do we take so much scientific fact for granted? If supposed infallible science regarding race, sex, etc. has been proven arbitrary and downright wrong, what other scientific “facts” should we be dubious of?

2) Why is there rarely a notion of essentialized whiteness, when there is so frequently a notion of an essentialized blackness, one that is either imposed upon black Americans or assumed by black Americans as a political tool? Is it because white people have never had to fight for rights as a group that we have never been subjected to an essential white identity? Or is there a negative notion of whiteness that embodies wealth, masculinity, and privilege and greatly disadvantages poor, non-masculine, underprivileged white Americans?

Letter from Jacobson to Morrison

Dear Toni,

There is little difference between Stavros and Teague O’Regan. You recount a Greek character becoming white—becoming American—by exhibiting his “racial contempt that transforms this charming Greek into an entitled white.” I explain the story of the Irish immigrant who turns from barbarian to Caucasian simply because of his proclamations against Native Americans. How, based on our countries economic, political, and social history can we say that race is fixed? Or that race is biological in any regard?

Allen and Roediger, as you must know, present the relativity and mutability of how race is defined in very compelling ways. However, you must have also noticed that there are certain limitations to their work since their arguments are primarily based on economics and class. They do not really examine the variability in whiteness and the political and social role that categories like white, Caucasian, and Celt have played over time; how have these definitions and hierarchies changed? Neither examines whiteness against centuries of historical movement and shifts—looking at merely decades of history is not enough for how much conceptions of whiteness have changed. Finally, neither author analyzes the privileges of whiteness in arenas like social and class power (they only look at the economic motivations).

Based on your article, I am pleased to notice that we understand each other and this issue of white privilege and whiteness as a conception. I find it interesting that you see the discussion of race, as evidenced in Stavros’ case, as a symbol for “pressing African American’s into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.” This is one point in which I would somewhat disagree—I would argue that this “race talk” that you refer to changes over time to establish new hierarchies with different races being at the bottom. While I would agree that African Americans have fairly consistently been pressed to the bottom of this hierarchy, as seen in Teague O’Regan’s case other “races” such as Native Americans also find themselves at the bottom of this hierarchy. The pyramid, in my opinion is heavily dependent on the historical time period.

Both George Sanchez and I seem to agree that there is a constant tension between the American “ideals” of how our nation should be organized and our need for cheap labor. This is one facet that has shaped our race relations—it is what allows for us to create these hierarchies and justify low pay or mistreatment of certain races. You mention that “race talk is forced to invent new, increasingly mindless” delimitations of racial identity as old stereotypes of race become inapplicable. Perhaps our nation will inevitably continue to create new divisions and sections—call them race, ethnicity, or some new term. Is there any way for us to stop this pressure to “become white”? Perhaps one way to thwart this shift is to write as you do—in a way that reaches out the more people than our community of scholars.

Yours truly,

Matthew Frye Jacobson

Questions:

1) What is the best way to shift this pressure in our society (and in many societies around the world) to "become white" or attain the privileges associate with becoming white? Do we attempt to erase the color-line or in some way overturn the race hierarchy? These are, I suppose, the big questions in this class, but they seemed especially prominent in these readings.

2) Are you convinced by Jacobson's argument that historical background in missing from the economic explanations of shifting definitions of race in Allen's and Roediger's arguments? Is history the most important analytical tool in examining the theory of "whiteness" in our nation?

Thomas' Response: A Letter from Carlos to Benjamin Franklin

Dear Benjamin Franklin,

You lament that the world is primarily made up of "swarthy" or dark/tan-complexioned folks--and that the English are the only purely white race. You further lament that the initially English-colonized Pennsylvania has begun to be overcome by these swarthy folks, specifically the Germans. I will neglect to expand on the irony that you and your pure-white kind were the first immigrants to take over this land from those who lived here--but I do have one concern. How did white become the gold standard--or more accurately, "the white standard." I'm less concerned with the fact that the people you initially considered dark and un-white became white--I am more concerned that white was something that everyone should try to achieve.

A certain amount of assimilation will always be in order, and I understand the need for people to meet certain language requirements. I myself started as a farm boy but became educated and of higher rank. Yet that was not enough, was it?

Immigrants of all colors have been or are mistreated in this country. But some are able to get absorbed into the larger white category--a totally unfair category--a category that no one should have to fit into in order to be treated fairly and considered an American.

My question is--what makes being white so inherently great? People of different colors from around the world have had great empires, technological and philosophical advances, and great cultural achievements. What did the English do that was so great or so much better than France or Italy or Spain or China or the Aztecs?

Respectfully,

Carlos