CHAPTER 1

RACISM ANDETHNIC MYTHS

Racial beliefs and practices harm large segments of our population.Yet few of us see society's current state as unnatural or unjust;most deny that race or other structural forces limit the life chancesof individuals and groups. We do not believe that our attitudesor actions are based on racial considerations. Instead, race hasbecome commonsense: accepted but barely noticed, there thoughnot important, an established fact that we lack the responsibility,let alone the power, to change. The color line has come to seem afiction, so little do we apprehend its daily mayhem.

Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial

The United States has a fabled history of immigration, culturally signified inthe sonnet by Emma Lazarus, who implores foreign nations to send "your tired,your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / the wretched refuseof your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I liftmy lamp beside the golden door!" in a "world-wide welcome" to them all. Thesonnet is inscribed on the interior of the pedestal of the "Mother of Exiles"(as the verse names the Statue of Liberty). This iconic sonnet encapsulates themythos that the United States is a nation built on the labor of immigrants andstill welcomes immigrants from around the world. Histories that look at thetravails of nonwhites since the inception of the first Thirteen Colonies and onuntil today could testify that the reality has never quite lived up to the wordsthat Lazarus issued from the Statue of Liberty's "silent lips." Those histories,instead, read as a complex contest for resources, one that was from the beginningcontextualized in a language that demarked the deserving from the undeserving,arranging the humans involved into unequal ethnic groups.

The American polity is legendarily characterized as a "melting pot," a nationbrought together under Lady Liberty's torch of enlightenment and crownof seven spires (representing the seven continents and seven seas), welcomingthe world's "tired" and "poor" who are willing to work or "pull themselves up bytheir bootstraps." Although people from all over the world have come and stillcome to "America" (read "the United States") to restructure their lives, they arenot all seen as equally endowed with the ability to fit in or become American.For example, the American Protestant Association (APA1) was formed in fearfulresponse to the spread of Catholicism, which they believed was "subversive ofcivil and religious liberty," in 1842 in Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love."The American Protective Association (APA2, formed in 1887 with an identicalagenda) never saw any of its favored legislation passed but claimed two millionmembers in 1895. Members of APA1 were encouraged to swear that they woulddenounce the Catholic Church, never join a workers' strike with a Catholic,and never knowingly allow a Catholic to join the association; APA2 sought toban Catholics from elected office, remove Catholic teachers from schools, andmake speaking English a prerequisite for citizenship. These sentiments aboutwho made appropriate compatriots were far from isolated. At around the sametime, the U.S. government instituted the first of many laws declaring populationsinappropriate for immigration, naming the Chinese as the first ethnic/national-origin group to be so deemed. Still, Catholics kept coming, as did theChinese and other previously undesirable migrants, even though they receivedunequal welcomes and were not equally considered real "Americans."

But that does not mean that each group would prefer and eagerly adoptthe unhyphenated version of the term "(ethnic)-American" in lieu of theirother ethnic options, for many are quite fond of and embrace their separateethnic identities. Well, that is true to a point. We have known for some timethat people will change ethnic identifiers as they pick and choose among possibleancestries in order to portray themselves in the most positive light. MaryWaters (1990), in her book Ethnic Options, explains how people decide whichethnicities to choose, preferring, for example, to say they are "part-French" butfailing to acknowledge that they're also part-Polish.

How do some ethnicities become more desirable and others less so? Howwere all these ethnic groups incorporated into the American polity and howdo we develop legend and lore about who is better than whom? Despite theinequality that persists among ethnic groups in the United States, ethnic conflictis minimal compared to many other parts of the world. How has incorporationoccurred with so little ethnic conflict? And what does the process ofethnic group inclusion and the differential outcomes tell us about how oursociety is organized? Is there a way to explain differences in outcomes that canbe reasonably applied to several cases?

Two interrelated histories can provide answers to these questions. The first isa demographic record of the lands that comprise the United States of America,one that involves encounters with people who were living their lives when theywere "discovered" by Europeans who chose conquest over community alongwith voluntary and forced migrations. A chronicle of the inclusion or incorporationof these disparate peoples, the circumstances that brought them here,and what happened to them afterward is helpful in interpreting the commonalitiesand differences among groups of various ethnicities. The second historyexplains how these people from the Americas and lands farther away were drawntogether into an economically and socially stratified American society. Thesejoint histories frame the ways various groups were differentially integrated intoAmerican society. But if incorporation has happened for nearly all groups inU.S. history, why is ethnicity still relevant? My answer is that these histories describethe racial and economic interactions that have kept ethnic, racial, gender,and class divisions alive, allowing them to persist even beyond the births anddeaths of generations of now-homegrown "Americans" who remain ethnicized.

We have mostly folkloric histories about who got here and when, and whysome succeed and others do not, all retold as if people used only their...