My mom’s parents immigrated from Mexico to Texas in 1920 and raised there kids in a derelict railroad boxcar up until after WW2. Mom could not go to the white movie house and worked at the “other” movie house (actually a tent). My mom was the youngest of six kids and by 1948 she was “allowed” to go to the all whites school and was the first to graduate from there. Buddy Holly was two grades behind her.
My uncles were allowed to serve in regular fighting units in WW2, all three seeing service on D-Day. My one uncle told me that black soldiers normally were assigned to support roles in the rear and was proud of the fact that he was white enough to fight, but not white enough to go to the same diner back home.
When my white dad married my mom in 1954 he could not get a job in the small west Texas town they were both raised in. They had to move to Houston, where they could blend in more easily and hide there marriage from the employers. Still, when my mom was seen giving my brother a spanking in the yard a truck load o red necks stopped and told her she was not allowed to punish a white baby.
The Germans and Italians that were interned tended to be recent immigrants who hadn’t been naturalized. It would’ve been impossible for the government to round up every American who had German or Italian ancestry. Were Japanese-Americans living in the East also sent to camps?
She’s flat wrong. Even today, most American whites (and some blacks) can’t tell one Asian face from another - especially between Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I rarely make an error on this, but even I may occasionally mistake a Korean for a Japanese, especially if they’re very fair-skinned. And, of course, may mistake a darker-skinned Japanese for a Korean. Skin tone is, of course, not the only difference, but there can be considerable convergence in appearance between the two ethnicities. If it were not so, the Japanese would not have such a hard time detecting ethnic Koreans living in Japan and passing (or trying as hard as possible to) as Japanese.
I usually have no difficulty whatever in telling ethnic Chinese (regardless of where their families have been living, or for how long - like East Indians, there are pockets of ethnic Chinese scattered throughout the Pacific rim). I can usually make accurate determination of several of the southeast Asian ethnicities, but they are harder.
I can nearly always tell which American blacks have a distinct strain of Amerind ancestry - something very few people are able to see. You see a lot of that here in the deep south where I currently reside.
In general, “marginal persons” (anthropology-speak for people not of the dominant ethnicity and/or culture) are better observers of others, and learn how to tell “fish from fowl”. It’s a survival trait. Members of the dominant culture/ethnicity have no need to discriminate finely. They merely want to know whether you’re “one of us”. Since my father was Scandinavian-blond (but not that ethnicity), my hair and complexion are light enough that only a careful observer (like a white friend from North Dakota) is likely to notice that my face does have certain Indian characteristics. OTOH, a few years ago, the manager of a Chinese restaurant asked if an Apache friend and I were sisters or cousins. Martha is quite dark, but she saw a similar cast in our features - another indication of the typical observational keenness of marginal persons.
Absotively, posilutely not. The sign possesses nothing whatever in that sentence - and that’s assuming a sign could possess anything in the first place. An apostrophe is an indicator that the noun is possessive (and serving as a modifier, or adjective). In material written by people whose educations began around 30 years ago, at least 80% of you use apostrophes in ways that are both superfluous and incorrect.
The American Indian experience. My maternal grandparents were Cherokee; my gramma was full blood, my grampa was nearly. Approximately a hundred years ago, living in Kentucky near the Ohio River, my grandfather was unable to get a job most of the time. He fished and raised nearly all of the family’s food. My grandmother, OTOH, was able to work in a factory. They also ran a boarding house, to make ends meet. My mother had to leave school after the 4th grade, to help in the boarding house.
That was similar to the situation for blacks in that era. The men found it very difficult to find work (other than farming). The women found it much easier to get hired, and to keep jobs.
Sometime before my parents met, my mother’s younger brother went to Georgia to look up distant relatives. While there, he was insufficiently deferential to local whites, and wound up spending two years on a chain gang for a trivial offense (concocted, as best I could learn; my mother died when I was 13, and there was little contact with my mother’s family thereafter).
Even today, things are pretty rough in the northwest. A few years back, someone took out a full page ad in a big city (or what passes for one, on the northern Great Plains and adjacent areas) either asking for or announcing a hunting season on Indians (1999, IIRC); I no longer have the data I had at the time on that event, alas. Indian women in that area are raped by whites with impunity, and Indian men are beaten to death and doused with alcohol, so that their deaths can be written off as due to intoxication. The FBI does very little to help. If you want to read a horror story, read about WoundedKnee, and Leonard Peltier. I was greatly disappointed that Bill Clinton didn’t pardon him, in that rash of pardons he handed out just before he left office.
(On a tangent, though, as with many grammatical terms, it is misleading to think the grammatical possessive/genitive as being very tightly coupled to the actual ordinary language concept of possession (as in comments like “assuming a sign could possess anything in the first place”). After all, one is perfectly within one’s rights to say things like “The sign’s message is hateful” or even “I’ve been praying for the sign’s removal”, even though there’s not actually any real possession there)
(On a tangent, though, as with many grammatical terms, it is misleading to think the grammatical possessive/genitive as being very tightly coupled to the actual ordinary language concept of possession (as in comments like “and that’s assuming a sign could possess anything in the first place”). After all, one is perfectly within one’s rights to say things like “The sign’s message is hateful” or even “I’ve been praying for the sign’s removal”, even though there’s not actually any real possession there)
I doubt there were enough to bother. In Hawaii, Japanese Americans are currently the majority, as they were back then. Although Hawaii wasn’t a state, they were also excluded from internment because of the major logistical and economic hurdles (Wikipedia says they were 35% of the population).
Regarding Native Americans and segregation, let me introduce you to a man named Dr. Walter Plecker
Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Office of Vital Statistics. In 1924, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act”, which established two categories, “white” and “colored”, required all births to be registered as white or colored, and banned marriage between whites and coloreds (it was part of that act that the Supreme Court overturned in the Loving decision). Plecker made sure that all Indians in Virginia were classified as colored, using his power to change existing records, launch investigations, and generally make a racist ass of himself.
His actions have an effect even in the present day. In order to get federal recognition, a tribe has to prove that it’s existed as an American Indian entity on a continuous basis since at least 1900, and since Plecker was so aggressive in wiping out Virginia Indians as a distinct group, the Virginia tribes haven’t been able to do that.
All very interesting (sad as this all is). Thanks to all for the replies.
I think kunilou’s example goes a long way to answer my question in that the language was changed from “of African descent” to “of color” to make sure no other ethnicities escaped segregation. And even without reading the cases in Captain Amazing’s post, it is clear that the issue of how other groups fit into the whole mess was topic of discussion.
What about white Europeans that were obviously non-Americans (by virtue of their accents or phenotypes)? I can see how they could get away with using the bathroom if they kept quiet, but were they also supposed to be segregated?
In short it was migration within the British Empire. A lot of Indians formed the bureaucracy iin African countries --m probably because the native Africans weren’t considered “fit”.
As far as I read this thread nothing was said about Jews (or other invisible minorities). On the one hand the Vice President of the Confederacy was a Jew. On the other hand in 1955 my parents were unable to buy a house in the Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon because the property deeds in that town required selling only to Christians and also required that any future deeds contained the same provision (actually, they probably specified white Christians) and these deeds were enforced by the courts until the civil rights acts of the late 50s and 60s.
And during the depression, according to my father, businesses often specified that no Jews or Irish need apply. My father changed his name around then (not that it helped him find a job since when he got a job it was with my mother’s uncle).
Yeah, this is piquing my curiosity. There are several groups that could easily get away with passing as all-American whites. Were they ok because they looked ok and segregation was not meant to affect them, or were they also supposed to be segregated and effectively getting away with something by passing unnoticed?
Jews did okay for the most part. Before WWII, there was a much sharper separation between mostly Reform German Jews whose lineage could be traced back several decades, and the more recent wave of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe, who were more likely to be Orthodox or from more socially isolated ghettos and shetls.
Jews were generally working-to-middle class, but they faced some soft discrimination. For employment, businesses that generally didn’t hire Catholics probably wouldn’t hire Jews, either. Many country clubs were off-limits; the large number of predominantly Jewish country clubs that remain today are a legacy of that discrimination. Colleges and universities had quotas restricting the number of Jews admitted in a year; they were thought of as the Asians of the day in that regard.
Some housing developments had restrictive covenants prohibiting sales to “those of the Hebrew, Malay, Ethiopian, and Asiatic races”, but they were often loosely enforced in the case of Jews. For example, Shaker Heights used to have such covenants, but if a neighbor vouched for a homebuyer, they would be considered an “honorary Christian.” Pretty much, no problem for an assimilated Jew of German decent, but not so for someone off the boat.
Some resort hotels would not allow Jews to vacation there, but why not I have no idea.
My father grew up during the era, and he said it really didn’t affect the day-to-day life. He got served in restaurants, found employment easily, had no problems making hotel reservations, and never faced open anti-Semitism. That doesn’t make it right, of course.
Some Jews did NOT do ok. If you “looked” Jewish, or if your name was “Jewish” you very well could have had trouble, as your peculiar statement alludes to:
The reason that they didn’t allow it was that they were prejudiced against Jews. Gordon Allport (The Nature of Prejudice) and others documented experimentally what many people experienced directly (by sending identical letters to hotels asking for reservations and signing one Goldberg and the other Johnson. The results were widely different).
This is why many Jews changed their names.
And it wasn’t limited to restricted country clubs and corporations. One very prominent Big Ten school had very obvious quotas for Jews, and it was well known that chances of acceptance there rested in part on that factor.
Prejudice knows many versions.
Completely off the topic of the OP but I was looking at an anthology of an Irish Republican newspaper from about 1909 within which there was at least one advert for a furniture store with the disclaimer “We do not do business with the Jews”.
It was spottily enforced is my understanding, with some people charged with the duties not feeling that it was something that needed to be done. Preston Tucker had to get special permission to keep his engineer, Jimmy Sakuyama, out of the camps, however.
My father was a Greek immigrant, my mother a Scots-Irish West Virginian. On their 1948 marriage license (issued just over the border in Oakland, Maryland, which was the West Virginia version of Las Vegas, for couples unwilling to wait three days), Mom’s race was ‘White’, Dad’s race was left blank.
I’m 49, and I was in junior high before I learned that older kids rolling pennies at me thought I was Jewish.
Having noted all these confusing experiences at the 1960’s boundary of white in WV: I can’t remember ever being denied any legal rights, accesses or services.
I believe that the people back then payed much more attention to distinctions in appearance than we do today, so that they might pick up on a Jewish person or an Irish person or what have you quicker. Plus they guarded the cultural signifiers that separated them from other people more jealously. So it was probably harder than you might think to “pass”. Still, I’m sure that it was easier to do it if your phenotype was closer to the WASP look.