Not My America

What is happening to us?  Who is us?  Well, us, you know, Americans.  We come in all colors.  We come in all religious persuasions.  We all come from somewhere else.  Well, except for me - half my family is American Indian, Cherokee to be specific.  But, notice:  I said half.  The other half is Swiss, Italian and English.  At least I think so....  And, that about says it all, doesn't it?  Some of us are fearfully looking at other Americans like they are lesser beings.  If you are an American citizen, or struggling to become an American citizen, you are never lesser.  It's time to stop being fearful because someone doesn't look like you.

Do you think this angst over ethnic identity is new?  No.  It isn't.  Immigration to the United States has occurred in 'waves'.  What historians now call the First Great Wave occurred between 1880 to the mid 1920's.  How many people came?  About 600,000 per year.  Oh, and the problems that mass wave of immigrants caused.  They were dirty.  They ate funny, food.  They didn't speak English.  They acted weird.  They dressed strangely.  Some of them actually weren't Christians.  From 1900 to 1910 the total population grew from 76 to 92 million.  And it was all those foreigners having babies.  The mill owners and manufacturers were thrilled.  They need bodies.  Far more bodies than the native born population could supply.

The 21st century also does not have the corner on nativists (people who think only persons born in a country should have rights).  There were also active nativists in the 19th century. These were people totally opposed to large groups of people having the rights of citizenship. They were Anti-Chinese and Anti-Japanese.  They were Anti-Negro.  They were Anti-Jewish. They were Anti-German, and above all they were Anti-Catholic. And they were violent.  They carried torches in night time parades, and if you were the wrong persuasion, in the wrong place, you could easily get beaten up or even killed.   If you lived in the South, the nativists were called the Ku Klux Klan, and if you were black, you could be beaten and even lynched since the Klan operations were sanctioned by the ruling class which was lily white.

Looking backward 100 years, those attitudes seem sort of sad and un-American, don't they? The fury over immigration in the first part of the 20th century was all about white protestants feeling overwhelmed in some of the major cities by the influx of Catholics immigrants (Italians, Irish, Polish), who seemed to be flooding into the country.  And they were all jockeying in the labor market for jobs.  In the South it was all about perpetuating the 'lost cause' through virtual slavery.  The Great Migration in this country was not east to west; it was south to north - the movement of 12 million people of color realizing second class citizenship had become institutionalized and legalized in the South.

Then, the manufacturing system stabilized, and there was less need for foreign labor. The Great Depression arrived, and all the tensions of world politics - can anyone say WWII and the following Cold War?  This all resulted in what historians call 'The Great Pause'. Very few immigrants came into the country, and the quota system was instituted.  Segregation had become so firmly entrenched in the South no ordinary white person even questioned it.

Post 1965, the United States birth rate began dwindling.  Dwindling birthrates mean the social contract between the young and the old breaks down.  What social contract? The young work and take care of the old, and this system perpetuates itself - but you need enough babies resupplying the system. Immigration restriction was loosened. The second great wave of immigration began. Between 1965 and 1990 there were 1 million immigrants per year. By 1990 there were 1.5 million new immigrants each year (1 million legally, and 1/2 million illegally.), and that level of immigration has continued.  Currently, we have a population of about 335 million, of which 61 million are  immigrants since 1965.  Although, it seems to me after 50+ years, can you really be labeled an immigrant?  And this second wave of immigration is what is keeping the social contract in the United States healthy since historically immigrants tend to have more children.

In reaction to the Second Great Wave of immigration, we once again have people marching. Are they asking for the right to vote, to own property, get bank loans, or live anywhere they choose? Nope.  This time it's all about anger over the changing demographics of the country.  This time the marginalized feel it's OK to wave Nazi flags and flaunt Nazi insignia and spout the racial nonsense of white supremacy.  The America I want to live in respects others and lives the Christian ideal that we are all neighbors no matter what color we are.  I neither need nor want white supremacy.
 
It doesn't matter who did or didn't have a permit to assemble in Charlotte.  That's a trivial smoke screen to obscure the main issue:    Anyone who arrays themselves with Nazi symbols or in Ku Klux Klan regalia has no place in the United States of America.  My father, my uncles and cousins fought against those Nazi and fascist  bastards who exterminated people they didn't think were up to their purity standards. The despicable Klan still stands for terrorizing and lynching people.  Using those symbols is like throwing a bomb. It's using a car to deliberately try to kill someone you think is 'lesser' than you are because he or she is non-white.  

Collectively, we stood by and did nothing in the 1880's and the 1890's when the "Jim Crow" laws were passed.  (FYI:  A Jim Crow law legally sanctions racial segregation.)  The Klan became the violent enforcers of these types of laws in the South. Their tactics involved secrecy, terror, and mob violence.  A sidebar to that enforcement was the erecting of monuments to a Confederacy whose sole purpose was to withdraw from the Union to perpetuate slavery. It was no accident the Confederate monuments were mostly built at the same time the Jim Crow laws were being passed, and their real intent were as visual reminders of just who was still in charge.  It took approximately 80+ years to unravel the travesty of justice that effectively denied citizenship to Southern blacks.  

Now the Klan is marching again.  They are being joined by people who are spreading Nazi ideas.  This is not the time 'to be nice'.  This is not the time to 'look the other way' and turn back to the trivial pursuits of sports, fashion, food, and gossip.  It's time to stop the veneration of people who stood for destroying this country.  It's the time to stand up and proclaim The United States of America does not sanction racial supremacy.  Read the Constitution.

Is it really so very important to continue to have visual reminders of the Jim Crow laws which legally enforced segregation, knowing your place, and being denied the rights of citizenship?  Is that really the history we want venerated?  If you truly feel the Confederate statues of generals on horses are 'part of our history', then let's really show ALL our history and cast some new bronzes of slaves in chains, dressed in rags at the feet of these great heroes who fought against the United States.  Put that picture in your mind, and see if the current statues don't seem to be pretty tarnished.