Often times I wonder why White Americans are so willing to take anti-white rhetoric without a grain of anger. But, if you’ve gone through the public school system, you will be very familiar with the idea that, at some point in time, only Germanics, or even only Anglos, were considered White. Usually either the Irish or Italians are used as evidence of the contrary, which generally relies on the force-feeding of cherry-picked anecdotes and satirical political cartoons depicting Irishmen as apes to unsuspecting teenagers just trying to get through the school day and pass the next test. This is not rigorous, like most clown world history and sociology, and it amounts to a “noble lie” on which America 2.0 is built.
In all truth, Europeans have always been considered White by popular consensus. There’s a quite simple way to show that this is the case. From 1790 to 1952, naturalization was limited to peoples classified as racially White by the U.S. Government. During this time, all European ethnic groups were eligible for naturalization. On top of this, despite the many attempts (some successful) at challenging the whiteness of certain ethnic categories, none of them have ever even dealt with European ethnic groups. The closest is a district case in Minnesota where someone tried to suggest that Finns weren’t white, which was thrown out by the judge.
All of the cases involve either people of mixed ancestry, Asian peoples, or peoples from the Middle East (whose Whiteness status has tossed and turned over American history, unlike the status of European ethnic groups). If a majority of Americans — especially a majority of the American elite — believed that these groups weren’t White, then surely they would have challenged it in the courts several times at the very least? And these cases would have, y’know, gotten off the ground? But no, let’s look at an off-the-cuff statement made by some random politician, or a political cartoon. Or an anecdote from someone’s great grandfather. That’s a big one.
“Oh, but what about anti-immigration sentiment!” They will cry. And this is just moving the goalposts. Acknowledging a like racial heritage does not mean you can’t dislike subsets of this race — or simply not like the circumstances in which you are interacting with them. Athenians had their gripes with Dorians, and vice versa, but they acknowledged that they were Greeks and that all of them belonged to this pan-group called “Greeks”. You can see this in other historical “pan-ethnicities” like Iranians, Germans, Slavs, Celts, and Turks.
Anyways, the anti-immigrant attitude is somewhat overexaggerated on racial grounds. There was a racial element to it, but a lot of it is based off of anecdotes from grandparents which are very biased. The main target of these is usually the Irish, as they were the first big non-Anglo immigrant wave. Since Ireland is in the news, I’ll talk about them a bit.
The Irish were always considered white, but on top of this there isn’t that much evidence of the Irish being especially socially segregated on account of their ethnicity. The Irish assimilated maritally and economically at a similar rate as German-Americans. Much of the anti-Irish discrimination came not from native-born Whites, but from recent English, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish immigrants who also made up a large swathe of America’s early immigrants.
That discrimination which the Irish did face often came from a religious point of view rather than something related to blood. The leader of the famous Know-Nothing Party was Lewis Charles Levin, the son of Jewish immigrants, who stressed that the Irish were papists who would undermine America’s religious freedom (although he himself had converted to Protestantism) and national sovereignty. By the early 20th century, the Irish had among the highest quotas in Europe under the immigration restrictions.
Speaking of which, what about those Immigration restrictions? Weren’t those racial in origin?
Well, partially. It was also inspired by religious, ideological, eugenic, and hygienic concerns. But, yes, there was a racial aspect to it. However, please look with me into the Dillingham Commission, the immigration-critical congressional investigation which inspired decades of anti-immigrant legislation. Surely, it is concluded in this legislation that Whiteness, or at least Aryan-ness, is limited to Northern and Western Europeans?
Well, umm, no.
Once again… The Finnophobia speaks volumes!
I’m kidding, of course. We do think Finns are white here. In fact, Finns have less East Asian than Northern Russians. But that’s a discussion for another day… Look further into the Dictionary of Races and Peoples and they do clarify that Bulgars, Finns, and Hungarians are almost entirely of European origin at this point.
Even Lothrop Stoddard, perhaps the most famous Nordicist in American history, still identifies Southern and Eastern Europeans as members of the Aryan race. Both Stoddard and those on the Dillingham Commission do seem to exclude a certain race previously endowed with Aryan status by the Immigration Bureau… That is ehh… Oh, sorry. I can’t talk anymore. Mossad has a sniper aimed at my forehead.
“But what about that one quote by Benjamin Franklin!?!?!??!”
First of all, Benjamin Franklin is not the end-all-be-all of Founders’ opinions on race. There is no evidence of any other founding fathers considering other European peoples, such as the French, Italians, Spaniards, and Germans to be nonwhite. The founders considered Romans and Greeks to be White. And on the topic of Franklin’s quote, a lot of people don’t actually read the whole thing.
“Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”
To read this, and consider it a serious call to action against continentals, I think is kind of ridiculous. Franklin isn’t even talking on the grounds of racial status so much here so much as he is suggesting that the English are the whitest people in Europe. Swarthy does not mean “brown” like it has come to mean on the internet, it’s always been used as a term for sort of dark-complexioned White people a la Mr. Bean, Sean Connery, and Christian Bale. Dark hair, dark eyes, and ruddy or slightly tan skin. Hence the description of America as being for “Whites and Reds” as opposed to Tawnies (Yellow-Brown) and Blacks (Dark Brown), not just “Whites” particularly. Franklin even acknowledges his own bias here as an Englishman, which puts into question if this was ever meant to be something serious.
By the 20th century, it is seemingly considered common knowledge that, to the founders, Whiteness was just synonymous with European-ness.1 Certainly, any commoner who has read the Bible would associate Whiteness with the Biblical descendants of Japheth, which includes the whole of Europe. I have my own opinions on Biblical taxonomy. I think that Japheth represents something of a Bronze Age recollection of the Indo-Europeans, as the Medes and Anatolians are identified with him as well. The timing of this is nothing out of the ordinary for other extremely old events recorded correctly in antiquity. Keep in mind that the Greeks said that Egyptian historians knew things much more ancient than the Greeks knew, and the Egyptians were always exchanging with the peoples of the Levant.
Going to the roots of Whiteness (etymologically. The concept of “European Race” dates at least back to Antiquity) we see that Whiteness as it is considered today was something largely typified by groups who we may consider “less white”. Spaniards and Portuguese were the first to actually use the term White. To the Spaniards, Whiteness was actually rather important. Many considered the Basques to universally have the status of Petty Nobility, on account of the Basque Country avoiding the miscegenation induced by the Umayyad Conquest, and perhaps receiving the blood of the prestigious Godos, or Goths.
Anyways, let’s get back to the topic of America. The myth of ethnics “becoming” white is extremely important in the effort to make White people deny their White identity, and pretend that it is irrelevant and something dirty, despite it being functionally very real in the present day especially in America. Where White immigrants in the past were eager to assimilate into the English culture, today they are interested in distancing themselves from it, which results in an extremely skewed perception of White Americans. A majority of White Americans are part British, and if you were to model White Americans from any given state you would end up with an average genetic profile that hovers around England. Anti-immigration measures in the 20th century actually were quite successful, because if the melting pot did really melt together you would find something not too different from an Englishman or, at worst, a Frenchman or Belgian.
Honestly, I thought this would have taken much longer. But it’s really quite elementary.
Dow v. United States. Circuit Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. 14 Sept. 1915. Nexis Lexis Academic. Web. 28 Sept. 2011.
So Italians (including southerners) are white and have always been considered white?