Racism and other bigotry

History final on (History 314) American Roots: Immigration, Migration, and Ethnic Diversity. Fall 2007. Dr. Robert Bauman, Washington State University Tri-Cities campus. Laurel Piippo, senior citizen audit student.Final exam: "The best essays will incorporate materials from course readings, lectures, class discussions, and videos into a clear, organized and thought thoughtful presentation. All essays MUST incorporate a discussion of at least one film (PICTURE BRIDE, GRAPES OF WRATH, or LA CIUDAD)."I chose this question, Part One: "In what way did the immigration/migrant experience shape and change those immigrants'/migrants' ethnic identity? Did that identity become lost in a process of Americanization? Or did immigrants/migrants maintain cultural and ethnic islands? Use at least four different examples to support your answer." [Here is my answer with my comments [ ] and the instructor's comments ( ).Immigrant/migrant experiences created great challenges. Immigrant/migrants uprooted themselves from all that was familiar in tradition, customs, surroundings and family ties. Some lost all their ethnic identity entirely and even in some tragic cases their very lives. The Hmong people of Southeast Asia come to mind as a small but heartrending minority, rural people who supported the Americans during the Vietnam War. They had a rural pre-literate culture in a mountainous area where each man was king. Forced to escape or die because of American politics and miliary actions and the wrath of the enemy, Hmongs were uprooted and plunged into a strange modern noisy motorized and electronic bewildering place, the USA, most of them in Fresno, where the older male Hmong, especially, found no place. Many sank into depression, unable to take advantage of programs offered to help them. Tragically, some of them simply died of grief and displacement. I wish I could remember the name of the psychological malady, the same condition that took the lives of some Africans captured as slaves, who died of grief and displacement even before boarding the slave ship. The Hmongs knew no English, which exacerbated their problems. They had NO PLACE. They knew it and died of that knowledge.Another tragedy in California occurred when blacks rioted over their economic conditions, their anger at having no part in the American success story, even though they were Americans and had been for generations. A group of immigrants, mainly Korean business owners, took the brunt of black rage... These were not the Watts riots we all heard about. Only after the destruction ended did the blacks and Koreans make an effort to understand what hit them and how their prejudices fed their mutual dislike. Koreans looked on blacks as lazy, criminal, no-good people and would not hire them in their ethnic business community. Blacks looked at Koreans as employers with businesses and prosperity, who looked down on them and would not hire or associate with them and were snobs. They had no understanding of each other. The Koreans were not deliberately snobbish or rejecting, but they were a rightly knit ethnic community who relied on close family ties in business and in social life, self-sufficient as an ethnic group with a shared language. Background, family and business ties. [I recall that first generation Koreans focused on independence and hatred of Japan, an attitude the second generation did not share. The second generation did not focus on taking care of their elders either, as was a Korean tradition shared by Chinese and Asian Indians.] The blacks were outsiders without jobs, often street people with no strong family bonds such as those common with Asians. Blacks rampaged through businesses that represented a lifetime of hard work and exemplary law-abiding conduct in a strange land that allowed them [Koreans] to prosper. Some of the old men felt their lives had been destroyed and we too old and tired to start over. The alienated blacks, unwelcome in their own country, were displaced citizens who resented the success of the newcomers. The Irish immigrants, mostly women, are a success story in migration, but they, too, were demonized in the 19th century as floods of Irish left after the Potato Famine of the 1840s. I was amused at the objections cited against the Irish -- too many of them, too Catholic, too many babies going to over-run our country, and too many Paddy Irish drunken men as well as not too bright "Bridget" Irish maids. Because the majority were Irish single women, too independent to want marriage, babies, and abandonment by a drunken irresponsible husband, the fears were not true [justified], but very similar to those expressed today about Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal [Did I lose track of where this sentence was going? My instructor says "Actually, this was a good comparison)]. Today we demonize the Mexicans, who are too Catholic, have too many babies, and don't speak English. [Like the Irish women immigrants, the Mexicans send money home to their families in Mexico.] I was fascinated to learn that the FIRST largest group of illegal immigrants in the USA is Mexican and the SECOND largest group -- the Irish!!! [So who is going to round up the Irish immigrants who pour into the USA TODAY??? An Irish cop? And efforts to round up illegal Mexican immigrants are lax BECAUSE OUR ECONOMY NEEDS THEM. Where are all the letters to the editor complaining about millions of ILLEGAL IRISH IMMIGRANTS?] By the second or third generation the Irish have assimilated, speak English with a brogue, but look like US. Their family ties enabled family members to follow in "chain migration," and they also sent big portions of their earnings home, especially the Irish women. These women worked as maids in middle-class homes, good living conditions, and quickly became Americanized while retaining their Irish family values. With education, they gradually upgraded into professions such as nursing and teaching. Irish men had a harder time getting jobs and all too often abandoned the wife and children. The smart single Irish woman had it made as city girl.The Mexican immigrants did not improve their lot because of race, language, manual labor, marriage, big families, and many being migrant agricultural laborers. I was surprised and pleased to learn in reading FIELDS OF TOIL about the efforts made all the way from the southernmost point of Texas all the way to Pasco to keep rack of the health and educational status of the children. Men have no power in the work place of fields, although Mr. Esquibel was valued and respected as described in [his daughter] Fran's book. Mexican agricultural workers are on the periphery of the American dream. These men have a life expectancy of 48! But second generation children do not want a life in the fields. Some, like Fran, focus on the American dream, and like Pit-Bull Fran, attain it. For others, the possibility is there, through education, but they will always look Mexican and not experience quite the same advantages as a white American male. Of all the four groups mentioned the Irish women were the most Americanized, ambitious Mexican migrant/ immigrants second, but with more attachment to their ethnic ways than the Irish. Asians today become part of the American culture to a degree, but try to retain family closeness. The displaced uprooted Hmong were the most tragic losers. American blacks are still at the bottom and in this bigoted culture, the majority [of the blacks] may always find that the darker the skin, the harder to become "Americanized" like US. *********************PART TWO, Question 6: "In contemplating the various immigrant/migrant groups we have studied from different time periods in American history, do you think the story of immigration to and migration within America is more about continuity or change over time? Thoroughly explain your answer and include a discussion of nativism and immigration restriction and post-1965 immigration in your response." "Nativism" -- a new word -- and racism and the reasons why certain groups come here an others not, as discussed in the handouts, were the most new ideas presented so I am going to plunge into what I know least about instead of playing it safe with Question 4. However, we must also remember the movies -- I loved PICTURE BRIDE and learning about immigration in Hawaii, how different ethnic groups finally learned to unite against the growers, who so cleverly used each group to undercut the others. I was saddened by the film THE CITY [New York,] and the emphasis on hopelessness and death for the Latino immigrants, so bright and smiling when their photos for visas were taken, but how despondent at the end. I cannot take John Steinbeck seriously as a chronicler of (new word?) of Great Depression history. A naturalistic writer is obliged to have a rotten downer ending. His artistic creation of GRAPES OF WRATH really turned me off, especially the ending, probably because of my own migrant experience during that era. Yes, Ma Joan held her family together. Women usually do.Immigration is not an "either-or" absolute of continuity or change. It has continuously been both. Since Benjamin Franklin spoke against German immigration in the late 1700s and the 1790 law excluding all but white races as immigrants, racism and "nativism" have had a strong effect on laws and attitudes in this century. "Nativism" is an attitude of "Be like me" (white, Protestant, of northern European ancestry), or you are somewhat inferior and maybe be even totally unacceptable. "Nativism" is expressed by the WASP who says, "My grandparents came from Norway, etc., etc., and had nothing, but worked hard and learned to speak English." ("Right.") "Nativists" do not want blacks/Mexicans/Jews ruining the neighborhood, taking jobs and scholarships away from the Entitled Us. "Nativism" passes anti-immigration laws by Congressmen who represent US with language describing Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, etc., used in Supreme Court opinions that made my hair stand on end.Immigration restrictions based on race lasted from 1790 until 1955 and 1965. For decades immigration quotas were based on a percentage of a given number of immigrants from a particular country, and for a long time excluded Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians. Laws allowing family members of naturalized citizen Asians to come in large numbers, in contrast to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the mid-1800s, a reaction against Chinese men -- NO WOMEN ALLOWED -- brought to build the railroads, and who came for the 1850s Gold Rush, too. This country has a love-hate relationship with groups for foreigners whom we recruit as cheap labor with no rights and no chance of becoming citizens. A Chinese was not allowed to testify against a white man in court or to own or lease property. This applied to Japanese who then were imprisoned during World War II for fear of spies. Our most generous policy was toward refugee immigrants in the 1970s when our South Vietnamese allies, as well as Laotian, Cambodian, and Hmong, fled to this country for safety. The 1980s was another important year [I meant "decade"] for immigration law when Congress wanted to shut off executive privilege in accepting too many Asian refugees. The Boat People escaping from Haiti, although facing persecution at home, were heartlessly sent back by the U.S. Coast Guard. Cuban refugees at first were wealthy and upper-class people who escaped Castro's Communist regime to Miami and continued to be followed by middle class Cubans who feel that Miami is an extension of Cuba. The most appalling laws was the 1994 initiative in California against Mexicans by denying illegals any services -- education, welfare, all but emergency medical care. This backfired. You can't deny children education and health care or prenatal care for women just because they are undocumented. Another law -- or perhaps part of this one --said that illegals must be sent back and that employers or landlords who accepted ”undocumented workers" or tenants would be fined. This put the burden of enforcement where it did not belong and created a huge industry of fraudulent documents because the law did not say the documents had to be checked for authenticity. This did not stop the continuity of immigrants. More came because we NEED THEIR LABOR and laborers are good for existing businesses, or create new businesses and pay taxes. Migrants come for better jobs and better lives, not to leech off our welfare system. Yet, immigration laws have changed over the years, moving toward fewer restrictions, as well as the occasional backlash law, such as California's Proposition 187 in 1994. Continuity was broken during the Great Depression when our government bribed Mexicans, even citizens, to go back home. How ironic that the Mexican War of 1848 turned Mexicans into aliens in New Mexico, Texas, etc., and that white folks in California want to get rid of the Mexicans who owned it in the first place!An especially fascinating article points out that that we attract immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Japan, the Philippines, and Korea because of American presence in those countries, military or economic, or both. The foreigners experience contact with Americans, learn about the United States, better jobs, more goodies they can buy, and here they come, followed by their relatives and half the village. Sometimes our economic presence in a foreign country screws up their village economy so coming here is better than staying home. Throughout history we have recruited foreign labor and then wonder why they want to stay. The Bracero Program, which ended in 1965, is an example. Our immigrants are not people whom we must consider as un-American. They are part of our country, and our country is bigger and better than the core group of privileged white male landowners [slave owners] who wrote the Constitution in 1789. Final comment: this course is not over for me. I need more reading to complete ALL the reading, and to reread. I just hated it every time you reminded us of how little time we had left. I KNOW, I KNOW!!! Why do you think I bought 15 watches in one month? I'm trying to find one that will STOP TIME, and you are not helping!Won't it be fun to see how making English the ONLY legal language will change everyone's speaking habits? ****************Final grade: A on Part One and A on Part Two, overall grade A Excellent, Laurel! Have a great winter break! Hope to see you next semester." ************ [January 2007. Next semester is already here, and I attended the first two classes of Dr. Bauman's course, Black Freedom Struggle, because I missed the first week when I took the course the first time. [My comment on immigration, migration, is that we can legislate language -- ENGLISH ONLY -- as much as we like, but people are going to speak the way they are going to speak, and laws will not change that. It will, however, cause much hardship to our non-English speaking citizens and non-citizens. As my wise friend Adam Fyall said when I threw a fit and told him in no uncertain terms, "THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS 'IRREGARDLESS,' "English is a living changing language." Neither you nor I nor the Glibists can stop change. [The Glibists are the people who state glibly, "They have to learn English." The Glibists usually speak only one language, English, and probably never learned a foreign language themselves because our culture is totally different from the European culture where countries are close together and people easily pick up multiple languages by necessity and proximity. Yet the Glibists glibly expect a Mexican migrant worker who works 14 hours per day in the fields to come home and learn English. Have the Glibists ever tried to learn a foreign language themselves?]