Thank you for posting that. Peggy Noonan has always been wonderful, but after 9/11 she has become even more wonderful.
As you know, I am studying the history of the Great Depression, and other American depressions. One of the things I have learned is that when times are hard, white Americans become even more xenophobic and hostile to non-white Americans.
Can't remember who it was - maybe you? - who posted a while back in response to something I wrote about "becoming white in America" that she had grown up Slavic in Pennsylvania when Slavs were not considered "white." I remember my grandmother calling my Croatian grandfather a "Hunkie" but I never heard people saying "dirty Hunyak" like they did in places like Pennsylvania. They lived in Biloxi, MS, and I think Slavs were considered white in Mississippi.
Before that, Irish people weren't "white." And neither were Jews.
Where I grew up it was "dirty niggers."
Now I read people writing about "towelheads" and "ragheads" and "sand niggers".
And I read other people, people whom I otherwise respect, talking about "race suicide." If the "white race" becomes outnumbered, then we will have committed "race suicide."
If there are more Hispanic Americans, Afro Americans and Asian Americans than Euro Americans then the Euro Americans have committed "race suicide."
Well, I think that's wrong. Not just factually wrong, but also morally wrong.
Because when educated, civilized people just talk about "race suicide," uneducated, uncivilized people take action. They form vigilante groups and start committing violent acts against non-whites.
This always happens when times are hard, and lower class whites get shoved down the economic ladder and start competing with non-whites for the dirty jobs that whites don't want to do when times are hard. Over and over again.
Times get hard and all of a sudden white people start joining groups which have the goal of excluding non-whites from the US, and marginalizing them, and circling the wagon to prevent non-whites from having good jobs. Send all the Indian programmers back to India. Send all the Mexican laborers back to Mexico. America for (white) Americans.
I can't stop them but I can speak up and call it for what it is. It's racism, and it's xenophobia, and it's morally wrong.
And, while we are on the subject, it's risible, because (not that it matters), Hispanics and Middle Easterners and people from the Indian subcontinent are, by definition, white. They aren't black, they aren't Asian, they aren't American Indian, and that leaves just one race, and that's white.
BTW, I am aware that Latin Americans are typically mixed blood, but I am, too, and I call myself white. I have ancestors who were Cherokee and ancestors who were Chippewa, but that doesn't make me not white, any more than having a Hunkie grandfather makes me not white. |
