“The United States has reaffirmed its commitment to being a melting-pot society adhering to Anglo-Saxon standards, as opposed to a mosaic nation built on the diversity of multiple cultures.”
This chapter dives into a common myth about America—that it is a “melting pot.” It is, if by that you mean that everyone is baptized with fire to lose their heritage and identity, to be reborn as a WASP-y character—as long as they have visibly white skin and features.
The stories here match some of the experiences of my mother’s side of the family—she was an immigrant from World War II, and when she went through Ellis Island (figuratively; I’m not sure if she actually landed there), she got a new name and a new identity. This fits in with Debby Irving’s statement “immigrant families [shed their] native language, dress, and even names in order to adopt Anglicized versions of each.” This was doubly true of our indigenous, who were not asked for their consent to be so treated, and the result was the creation of ghost people, with no indigenous heritage to come home to, and no place in a white society which recognized and excluded them as indigenous.
”I have to remember the power of internalized superiority to enable one to believe good intent ensures positive outcomes.”
This is where we are in many of our attempts to “fix” things. As white people, we just assume we have the power to fix things, and the unique intelligence to know what to do to fix things. We’ve spoiled many a positive value in America because we thought we knew better. Left unstated in the chapter, of course, is that we thought we knew better because our goal was to erase the irritating existence of the “other.” For example, the Eisenhower Interstate Act tied America together with ribbons of concrete and steel, so everyone could travel to wherever they wanted without worrying about the condition of roads. Often as the roads approached the larger cities, they were routed through black neighborhoods, destroying them and scattering the black population. Urban renewal, a goal to eliminate the ghetto, destroyed the housing of the urban poor, often also the urban black, and in countless cases the new housing either never materialized, was built to such low standards that it could not stand the test of time, or was designed in ways to make them unlivable and undesirable. Pruitt-Igoe was designed with the best of intentions but with little thought given to how people might live in the communities. These projects often became open-air meta-prisons where we isolated black Americans away from everyone else. (The original design was to have buildings segregated by black and white.) We funded schools through local property taxes, so that affluent white people had better schools than poor black Americans living in substandard housing—without a substantial tax base of higher-valued homes and higher-paying jobs, black schools could not compete with white schools for resources and quality education. The fix was always to benefit white rationalizations. Time after time, colorless policies ended up grossly benefiting white people to the deliberate exclusion of non-white people, especially black Americans. (There are simply endless examples…)
“The [Supreme Court declared] that whiteness would…be determined using ‘the common understanding of the white man,’ and noting that ‘it is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.’”
The Supreme Court has not been consistent on the interpretation of the Constitution, and for about 200 years it was seen as perfectly normal that the default American was white, and from northern Europe, typically England and Scotland. Germans were a larger percentage of the population for some time, if I recall correctly, to the point where some locations used German as the default public government language. (That changed due to World War I. Words like “sauerkraut” became “Liberty cabbage, for example, as we attempted to expunge any Germanness of the white American culture.) SCOTUS was used to defining who could be American—in World War II they assented to the incarceration of American citizens for no crime other than Japanese heritage.
“[It was reserved for] white men, would decide who was white and who was not.”
This is also key. Along with the idea that the white “race” is normal and the default is the idea that the white “race” can decide who’s white and who’s not. Like SCOTUS said, it’s not even genetic heritage—people from South Asia are literally Caucasian, but because they don’t look white, they can’t be “white.” It’s comfortable to have such an assumption, and the assumption is supported by law and society.
Questions
Think about your ethnic heritage. If you are white and know little about it, why do you think that is?
I’m the default, the graham cracker crust that can be the base of every pie. I do not need to check a box as “white” because it’s always assumed. In my religious faith (Christianity) there is “theology” and there is “black theology” or “feminist theology” or “queer theology” or “liberation theology” or… but never is the theology developed by white men from Europe and the United States ever called “white theology.” Diving into “whiteness” is a weird rabbit hole because it is like having a class topic of “ubiquity and immanence.” Where would you start? You could start anywhere.
Do some ethnicities in your mix get played up and some down?
I’m mixed, of English heritage and German-ish. (German, with French and Romanian as added flavors.) We don’t talk a lot about the German side for various reasons, mostly having to do with the sad nature of German history in the 1900s. The English heritage is better known, going back to about the 1880s, but our family history also peters out before we really investigate the American Civil War and antebellum society where the family heritage of the southern branch includes white slavers and white slaver prison and labor camps. (The northern branch has Unionists who fought with the Federal army, including one with a commission signed by A. Lincoln himself, but while we’re proud of that, we kinda turn the picture to the wall for our Southern side.)
What family stories have held fast through the generations?
Really, not much from past my father and mother’s childhoods on two continents. There are many sad parts of children growing up in the time of the Greats—the Great Depression, the Great Revolutions, the Great Wars, and the Great Destructions. When the family landed in California we seemed to have smoothed over the past with a gauzy veil of watercolors. My German grandmother, for example, lived through two World Wars, the Soviet Revolution, the German Nazification, the chaos of the collapse of Germany in the 20s and in the 40s. She stockpiled supplies for the next war, and I never, ever understood, because we never had a moment when a grocery store wasn’t around the corner and stuffed with food.
How have they shaped your understanding of America as a meritocracy—a society in which everyone succeeds or fails on their own merits?
Essentially my family succeeded because my dad was in the right place at the right time, and we were largely untroubled by the big issues of life. We all just assumed we could get an education or a job, and that would be it.
I have absolutely no grid for understanding how this is not true for everyone. By listening to my friends whom I’ve acquired in the past ten years I’ve had some knowledge poured out on me that rendered me speechless about our America. I’m ashamed to say that in the beginning my first responses were to doubt their sincerity or clarity, but I’ve grown a little better at listening and empathizing with the stories of pain and debasement and abandonment, all things I never, ever experienced.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-10/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
The interstate highway system is a Thing that Happened during your lifetime. For me, it is a thing that has ‘always” existed. As you talk about how poor neighborhoods were destroyed to make them, I wonder if that was known to you at the time? And if so – did you wonder why?
I’m sure there was good logic for the route that was chosen, or the lower cost of eminent domain where property values were lowest. But did you ever hear anyone discuss what would happen to the poor people who lived there? Were there any plans to assist them – or did all the help go to the building *owners whose property/wealth were being condemned?
As you’ll see from my post a lot of this chapter was, to me, about how we think of, and what we do with, the people that we decide “don’t matter.” So when I read your comment about the highways, my first thought was “of course they did – if you’re going to disrupt someone’s life, put them out of a home, and generally mess things up for them in the name of the Greater Good, of course you’d do it to the People Who Don’t Matter and not to the people who have the ability to complain about it.
Was this a part of the Civil Rights conversation? Of the Viet-Nam and Watergate-Era protests against unsavory government practices? Or was it just a thing that nobody talked about, until it just ‘went away’ and people like me never heard of it til someone like you mentioned it?
As far as the Interstate Highway System, I don’t recall much about the route planning as going through poor neighborhoods. I seem to recall either the Long Beach Freeway (CA7/I710) or the Harbor Freeway (CA11/I110) was routed to connect to the Foothill Freeway (CA134/I210), but it stopped 4 miles short because it was going to go through richer neighborhoods. The other segments of the freeway that were routed through poorer areas were constructed without much opposition, for the reasons you might imagine–poor or working class neighborhoods without political clout. As one article put it: ” Already dissecting certain parts of the communities surrounding its southern sections, the 710’s impacts around its northern sections were just as significant, gutting through established communities, such as East Los Angeles and City of Commerce, that already housed dozen of freeway lane miles. In East Los Angeles, nearly 11,000 residents were displaced due to freeway construction and widenings, consuming some 7% of total land area. (https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/the-710-long-beach-freeway-a-history-of-americas-most-important-freeway) Back when I was in an enrichment program for gifted kids (I have no idea how I was selected because I was not like the other kids in the program–I really was a dreamer), we spent the summer as fifth graders to classes held at USC. We had daily science and math classes, and I was more interested in the wonder than in learning the science, I’m sorry to say. (But we also got to freely roam all the museums surrounding USC as well as the rose gardens.) And on the trip there and back, I seem to recall that we’d pass by a section of neighborhoods of single-family tract homes that were being boarded up and moved out to prepare for the Century Freeway (CA42/I105), but I’m not sure now which freeway it was being prepared for. All I remember is that the vacant land of once-populated neighborhoods stretched for miles, homes torn down or moved to make ready for a freeway that wouldn’t be built for years. If it is the Century Freeway I remember, then a significant reason for the slowdown was due to community objections: “By the early 1970s, most of the areas in the freeway’s path (and thus slated to be demolished) were predominantly African-American. Resentment over previous freeway projects’ effects on other black communities resulted in significant modifications to the original route.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_105_(California)#Design_and_local_opposition) While growing up in Los Angeles and Orange County, I simply didn’t see any of this. Before the interstates and the local freeways (such as CA60 or CA101 or even CA91) we traveled by farm roads to visit sites. Getting to San Juan Capistrano, for example, meant driving in the school bus through miles and miles of orange groves, all which have vanished. (One reason I like watching “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” is that so much of my childhood experience in Southern California is captured in that film–I see so many familiar landmarks and buildings.)
As far as the people affected by the freeways–I never considered them or saw much about them. In speculating about the neighborhoods being cleared for the freeways, I don’t remember that I thought about the people except as abstractions. As far as I can remember, the idea that freeways would push people out when they put cars in was just not talked about. And now that I think about it, I think one of my favorite parts of the museums were the dioramas. You would go into a darkened room, press a button, and the lights would slowly reveal a massive, detailed recreation of a site in time and place. One such diorama, and one of my favorites, was the general set-up of Southern California, stretching from Santa Monica to Santa Ana, from the San Gabriels to the ocean, with all the new freeways and bridges linking everything together. That was the future of Los Angeles, and it was entrancing. I don’t recall any discussion about the people. They were invisible, to be honest.