White supremacy is a mirage. The idea of whiteness is muddled in confusion and arbitrariness. Benjamin Franklin famously did not want German, Italian, Russian, and Scandinavian people to immigrate into the United States because he did not believe they could assimilate into Anglo-American culture. He thought only the English could be classified as truly “white”. He even viewed the Irish as being apart of the English identity as they were fellow victims of English domination. He was politically attacked for his xenophobic views against other Europeans and he relented when he saw his views were politically infeasible. At Franklin’s time, America clearly saw other Western European immigrants as white.
Later in the 1840s, American views changed. When the revolutions in 1848 and the Irish Potato famine produced a huge swath of French, Irish and German Catholic immigrants into America, xenophobic attitudes formed and intensified. So intense were these attitudes that a party called the “American Party” or colloquially called “The Know Nothing Party” formed in response to the mass migration of Catholic immigrants. It feared that the Catholics would undermine America’s democracy and be loyal to the Pope and not the President. It aimed to stop mass migrants of Catholic immigrants to save American society and democracy.
German and French immigrants were forced to change their names and cease speaking their ancestral language if they wanted to gain employment or advance in their careers. The famous piano-maker Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg had to anglicize his name to Henry Engelhard Steinway to get investors to invest in his startup piano-making company that became an international success. Through assimilation, German and French immigrants had an easier time because they were seen as well-educated, cultured and law-abiding.
Not so much for the Irish. In contrast, the Irish were seen as backward, ignorant, animalistic and subhuman. They were seen as “white niggers” and were often discriminated against in the areas they presided when they first entered into America. The speaking of Gallic was forbidden and programs of forced assimilate were encouraged. Benjamin Franklin’s sympathetic attitude towards the Irish was substituted with a very malevolent and unfriendly attitude later on. But eventually later on, the Irish, German and French Catholics assimilated and were accepted as white and good American citizens.
In the 1880s, Southern and Eastern Europeans began to come en masse to America. Many Italian and Polish immigrants were included in this mass migration. Many white Southern farmers relied on newly arriving immigrants to replace black field hands after the Civil War. These Southern and Eastern Europeans were looked down upon to the same degree as blacks were. They were also called “white niggers” and were seen as undesirable, lazy, uncouth, horrible citizens. They were not seen as white but as lacking the qualities that would qualify them as white. Polish immigrant farmers in the South for example, worked alongside black sharecroppers. They called their white overlords “master” like the black slaves once did. They lived in run-down, horrible accommodations. They held the same plights as the black sharecroppers and lived next door to them, too.
Italian immigrants, pejoratively called “dagos”, were also treated horribly. Italian immigrants were lynched just like blacks for breaking the Jim Crow strict social codes and for murdering other whites. The 1891 New Orleans massacre happened when 11 Italian immigrants were suspected of targeting and killing the New Orleans chief of police on his way back home. A angry white mob lynched them when they were not convicted of murdering the police chief. Their lynching almost caused a war between Italy and the United States when the US refused to bring the lynchers to justice and give a formal apology. Five Italian immigrants were brutally lynched in Tallulah, Louisiana in 1899 for allegedly killing a white doctor over a goat.
Other Eastern Europeans had to fight to get recognition as whites to avoid racial discrimination. Armenian immigrants were classified as Asiatic and not white until the 1920s when the United States v. Cartozian (1925) case held that Armenian should be classified as white instead of Asiatic to become American citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1790. And thus, over time, Southern and Eastern Europeans were accepted as white and treated with respect and dignity.
The second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) under William Joseph Simmons in 1915 formed to stop the spread of Catholics and Jews polluting white, Anglo-Saxon culture along with the black, mongrel race from race-mixing and depurifying the white race. The KKK attacked and killed other whites and lynched anyone it suspected of committing a crime unjustly. It was a huge political force in the 1920s, reaching up to 6 million by the end of the 1920s. It pushed the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe among other places.
Many commentators on racism always cite white supremacy against people of color as the historical picture of America. But that isn’t so. Indeed, blacks were seen as the very bottom of the barrel. But many “whites” were also placed alongside blacks as incorrigible, horrible citizens that weren’t worthy of being American. Yet when they obtained the coveted praise of being called “white”, they used this racial identity to castigate people of color for fear that they might fall afoul with the racial views of their time. “Whiteness” had no clear definition and so was arbitrary given the views of the time.
The whites that carried on the lynching and racial terror were the very whites that were on the periphery of whiteness. Their animalistic attacks against supposed “inferior people” should that they themselves were inferior since only uncivilized people would lynch people arbitrarily and without justice. And the rich, white aristocracy knew this. They used the phrase “white supremacy” to manipulate poor whites against people of color so they would not coalesce against them. And it worked for a while. But ultimately, it failed but it seems to be making somewhat of a comeback.
When one looks at the history very carefully, they will inevitably see that white supremacy was a mirage. Whiteness has no clear definition. It is an ideal in one’s mind and nothing more. The whites who act improperly aren’t deemed as white but as white niggers. White niggers are stripped of their whiteness and are treated with intense social opprobrium that marks them as no different from blacks and other people of color. Yet the Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) used the “common understanding” of whiteness to determine if Bhagat Singh Thind, an Aryan WW1 American veteran, can be classified as white to merit American citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1790. The Taft Court concluded that Thind could not be classified as white because he lacked the phenotypical characteristics of white people. And so whiteness for the Taft court dealt with phenotype yet whites like Italian, Russian, Poles and Croats were not considered white in American society because of cultural differences. Thus, the definition of “white” was too arbitrary and could not have any legitimate meaning.
If whiteness has no legitimate meaning, then what does white supremacy mean? It means nothing. And so white supremacists are fighting for a phantasm that isn’t real. Therefore, discussion on white supremacy must change to reflect this reality lest we keep making mistakes on it again and again. I hope it does.
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