Quotes from The History of White People

173:
"Emerson began teasing out the characteristics of southerners in the 1840s, when southern belligerence over slavery began to roil the nation's politics and those of his state of Massachusetts, divided as it was between upholders and opponents of slavery. Rising sectional tensions in the wake of the annexation of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the immense territory acquired after the defeat of Mexico in 1848 pushed along Emerson's perception of innate differences between northerners and southerners. Boston, indeed all of New England, serve [sic] as synecdoche for the North, in Emerson's concept a smarter but weaker "race" than southerners. Southerners -- meaning white male slaveholders -- appear stronger and more brutal, but plainly lacking in intelligence.
174:
"In terms of manhood, the balance between smart and strong tips against northern opponents of slavery. In 1852, even as Emerson deplores the success of proslavery forces, he surmises that "Democrats carry the country, because they have more virility: just as certain of my neighbors rule our little town, quite legitimately, by having more courage & animal force than those whom they overbear." Once again, Emerson was undermining his own claim to manliness in the construction of this nutty but commonplace notion.

"Emerson may not have invented such stereotypes, but certainly his intellectual prestige lent them weigh and longevity. That New Englanders were smarter and better educated than southerners appeared a reassuring fact in light of the looming conflict. But for Emerson southerners' brute strength embodied a kind of savage masculinity."

193
"Why did Morton's equations of prominent ancient Egyptians and the 'modern white man' make sense to race theorists? The answer has everything to do with the wealth and power of nations of their own time. Again and again, racial hierarchies set the poor and powerless at the bottom and the rich and powerful at the top. The early twentieth-century sociology Max Weber says it well. While the nobility believe their superiority grows out of their 'underived, ultimate, and qualitatively distinctive being,' no one in favored circumstances wants to admit the chanciness of privilege. 'The fortunate man,' Weber says, 'is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a
194
right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he "deserves" it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others.... Good fortune thus wants to be "legitimate" fortune.' Innate qualities are needed to prove the justice--the naturalness and inalterability--of the status quo. In the United States, in Samuel George Morton's Philadelphia, where the buying and selling of laborers extended into the nineteenth century, that often turned into a justification for African slavery."

202
"The Civil War offered a huge opening. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants volunteers for military service on both sides. Not surprisingly, the Union Army, about one-fourth of whose personnel came from abroad, benefited from immigrant support more than the Confederacy. Some immigrants were well integrated into heterogeneous Union forces as Irish and Germs scattered throughout a panoply of regiments. In addition, and quite shrewdly, the Union Army organized itself along national lines. Among its thirty-six Irish units were the New York Fighting Sixty-ninth, the Irish Zouaves, the Irish Volunteers, and the St. Patrick Brigade. Italians made up the Garibaldi Guards and the Italian Legion. The Eighty-four German units included the Steuben Volunteers, the German Rifles, and the Turner Rifles. Confederates looked askance at the Union's polyglot ranks, and for decades afterwards Civil War Decoration Day holidays offered embittered former Confederates occasions to characterize their side as 'American' and to impugn the Union Army as 'made up largely of foreigners and blacks fighting for pay.'"

204
"Irish workers had shown little hesitation in brandishing their new-found whiteness as a tool against others. In the West of the 1880s, Irish workingmen agitated as "white men" to drive Chinese workers off their jobs and out of their homes. This anti-Chinese movement produced the country's first race-based immigration legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Although not all Chinese immigrants fell under the law--merchants, teachers, students,diplomats, and other professionals were exempted--the Irish and other whites continued to attach the Chinese in a series of western pogroms called the "Driving Out." As it would again, 'racial' violence addressed economic competition.

"In the 1870s and 1880s, politics began to serve the economic interests of Irish and German immigrants in many walks of American life.
205
The right to vote, for instance, opened a path to employment through government patronage and civil service jobs. Labor union control meant that their sons and brothers stood first in line for steady work and, later, skilled jobs. The figure of the Irish policeman owes its longevity to this system of public employment. Thanks to patronage jobs and government contracts, fewer in the second and third generations suffered the grinding poverty that had dogged their famine immigrant ancestors. Along the way they learned, in true American fashion of the time, to profit from the vulnerability of nonwhite Americans barred from voting--hence barred from the fruits of bloc voting. Color mattered, even for Ralph Waldo Emerson, that preeminent Saxonist."

248
"Controversy reigned over whether Americans or Englishmen or even Germans had inherited the self-governing genius of medieval German forests."

254
"With their working-class readership, Italian and Yiddish newspapers cam to reflect the anarchist and socialist views of their readers. The earliest Italian and Yiddish newspapers sprang up in New York in the 1880s, with the left press appearing in the following decade. The anarchist Il Proletario was founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1902, as the organ of the Italian Socialist Federation, joining the socialist Jewish Daily Forward founded in 1897. Such papers depicted American society quite differently from the tony journals that couched their race theory in quasi-scientific terms.

"Italian anarchists especially heaped scorn on American self-righteous blindness, above all when it came to injustices inflicted on blacks in the South. True, other immigrant workers had become targets of labor abuse, but Italians had suffered a special wound, the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. As though to echo David Walker's 1835 accusations, Il Proletario skipped over the idea of white races and stressed the injustices of black Americans at the hands of native-born whites. A blast from Il Proletario in 1909 asked,

"'Who do they think they are as a race, these arrogant whites? From where do they think they come? The blacks are at least a race, but the whites...how many of them are bastards? How much mixing is their "pure" blood? And how many kisses have their women asked for from the strong and virile black servants? As have they, the white males, desired to enjoy the warm pleasures of the black women fo the sensual lips and sinuous bodily movements? But the white knights care little for the honor and decency of the black women, whom they use and abuse as they please. For these, race hatred is a national duty.'

"Sounding a note that grew louder and louder, Il Proletario reached a ringing conclusion: 'Not race struggle but class struggle.'

"But it was too early, and Il Proletario's exhortation fell on ears attuned to another sort of analysis, one that interpreted class status as permanent racial difference with African Americans largely cornered in the South; the "race" in this race questions was as much white as black."

300
"Before the war Henry Ford had set up one of the longest-lived one hundred percent Americanism systems in his Michigan automobile plants. Ford's Sociological Department, a model of Americanization, taught autoworkers 'how to live a clean and wholesome life,' according to Ford's own idea of 'living aright.' Speaking English, passing regular home inspections, remaining sober, keeping a savings account, and sticking to 'good habits' were mandatory, while riotous living and roomers were strictly forbidden.

"The Ford school was intended to Anglo-Saxonize an immigrant workforce, as symbolized at graduation. At center stage stood a huge, papier-mache melting pot with stairs on both ides. As the and struck up a rousing tune, graduates in their national clothing went up the stairs on one side, entered the melting pot, and came out on the other side signing the 'Star-Spangled Banner' and waving American flags. They were now dressed in derby hats, pants, vests, jackets, stiff white collars, polka-dot ties, and a Ford Motor Company badge in each lapel. For women, Americanization meant conforming to social workers' notions of proper housekeeping, cooking, dressing, and child rearing. In sum, Americanization imposed the use of English and patriotic conformity. Socialistic notions were nowhere to be found here or, indeed, anywhere in the American power structure."

365
"For Italian Americans, highly-segregated in slum neighborhoods and routinely called 'wops,' 'dagoes,' and 'guineas' before the war, the 1940s brought brand-new money for college and homes. Before the war, Italian Americans had rarely achieved a higher education. But around 1940 their rates of college attendance quickly approached the national norm. Educational mobility led to economic mobility, which fostered political clout."

383

"Reminders that Jews and Italians had been labeled as 'races' a generation earlier might have prompted a retort that 'race' was used more loosely in the past. This is true. But every use of "race" has always been loose, whether applied to black, white, yellow, brown, red, or other. No consensus has ever formed on the number of human races or even on the number of white races. Criteria constantly shift according to individual taste and political need. It was clear, however, that in the olden days, Jim Crow had kept the 'colored' races apart from whites and African Americans largely hidden behind segregation's veil. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the end of legalized segregation began to propel black people into national visibility as never before."

A Conundrum

What would be the right combination of work and belief? The perfect balance between dedicating yourself to a rhythm – an expectation able to be fulfilled in a workingman’s fashion – while calling out with a clear voice for the policies and structures you believe are needed. How to not succumb to crushing defeat when facing the hardships of those very structures you know must change in order to lift the weight from the people’s shoulders. Being one of those people yourself to experience that pain, and thus avoiding the trappings of abstracted advocacy (or ideology in absence of practice), and yet living a healthy life full of joy, rejoicing in curiosity and compassion and play. This is the dilemma of a radical.

Does one work in a progressive charter school, where there is support for social and restorative justice work, in order to keep one’s sanity in terms of expectations from administrators and the school district. Under a system of “do what you want,” holding oneself accountable to one’s own beliefs, having faith and trusting that they are good and true beliefs, and that one does not need an outside accountability framework. The idea that accountability through public schools to the government is not truly accountability to the community, as public education once sought to be, but accountability to a bureaucratic nightmare, a ship whose sails are not guided by experience, mission, and vision but by fads, veneer, and profits. As a radical living under a corporate-capitalist state, is it truly radical to toil away in unsupported futility? To organize in addition does not add sanity to the equation; it stretches one further thin. Better just to organize? But then in absentia.