I come from an Italian family. Many members of my family sadly are bigoted against the Hispanic community and especially against Mexicans, for the usual reasons - usual Trumpian logic. I have pointed out to them that a white person a hundred years ago would’ve made the very same arguments against our ‘swarthy’ Italian ancestors. This seems to be a common facet in American society - after each new immigrant group becomes “white”, they hate on the next group and seem to forget that their own ancestors were thought of in the same way. The Germans were mistrusted by the Anglo settlers, and then the German Americans in turn mistreated the Irish, who in turn disliked the Italians and other groups, who then in turn now feel animosity toward Hispanics and Asians.
My question is, why is this such a reoccuring phenomena in our history? Is there any psychology behind it? Why are people so quick to forget their own roots and hate on others who are more similar to them, than different?
I love John Kennedy, and all he stood for, the same way I love Obama and all he stood for. I don’t see why being Italian American would be mutually exclusive to that. I was born long after Kennedy died and yet his death is one of the few things in our history that can provoke tears from me. I admire men like him, and FDR, who were able to overcome their handicaps and lead millions. This is a man who required a cabinet full of medication daily to not be in agonizing pain and yet he led this country with grace and dignity. His death is something I feel America has never fully recovered from. While we have advanced technologically and in the fields of civil and gender rights, I feel we lost something when he was murdered like an animal.
Actually there’s an American, if not universal tradition of minorities resenting other minorities even before they “make it” themselves.
Example: Irish immigrant hostility towards black people, as in Civil War days. And virulent prejudice in western states against Chinese immigrants came in part from the “lower classes”.
Well, my question is why in both cases. You would think minority groups would have solidarity with one another, having similar experiences, and I do not understand why “old” immigrant groups have it out for “new” immigrants. This goes back to even before the formal founding of the country, when Ben Franklin wrote how German immigrants were essentially violating the Anglo Saxon culture of the Colonies.
“Now that I’m in the club, I deserve to say who gets to be in the club.” The American identity has always been constructed around a “they” that isn’t “us”. If you have become accepted as “us”, then it becomes necessary for you to be against “they”. Because if you don’t, then you might just be mistaken as “they”.
Second explanation:
“My ancestors were different”. Everyone is capable of rationalizing why the condemnations they apply to others don’t apply to them and theirs. People can think the “poor and dirty” label applies to other ethnic groups because look at that all that poverty and dirt! But because they have a romanticized version of their ancestors in their minds, they don’t see all their poverty and the dirtiness. They just see the good qualities.
Third explanation:
“Times are different now”. People think that society was different back when their ancestors came to this country with just the shirts on their back. Society back then could absorb poor people relatively easy. Back then, poor people hustled or they died. But now, everyone’s got their hands out, begging for something. Why should poor immigrants get charity when so many native-born are in need? Don’t they know that times are different now?
It makes sense, but the hypocrisy bothers me deeply. Especially when the hypocrisy negatively impacts the wellbeing of innocent people who get an unfair shake, or are mistreated, simply for being “them.” I have felt almost guilty as an American lately, when I saw those children locked in cages. I wish people would devote less energy to hate and more to making this land a better place. But I digress.
Go ahead and be surprised then. It’s universal. Often called “tribalism”.
It is far, FAR more common than not, everywhere and under all circumstances, that human beings only feel that people who are the mostly exactly like themselves have feelings like themselves, and people who are different are lesser, and less deserving as well.
It is only surprising because in recent history, western civilization invented humanism, and in some ways the apotheosis of humanism, its logical development, was the open and welcoming political philosophy espoused by the United States. Mostly honored in the breach – but still.
That was recently, as in the past 250 years. It’s looking pretty ugly for humanism though. Really gets in the way of tribalism, and tribalism seems to be pretty pissed off about that.
People are very skilled at creating “us” and “them” groups. If you convinced them not to use this method (excluding immigrants), their first impulse would not be to stop making “us vs them” groups, it would be to find a new method.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Kennedy too. It’s just ironic that it’s your username since it’s like the least-Italian name on earth. But good on you for honoring his legacy. The space program is another big part of it.
There is also the pressure to assimilate into “American” culture. That was especially strong in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The immigrants and their children were encouraged to speak English and in general get rid of all those old European traditions. Everyone else was an outsider.
My grandparents were immigrants. They tried as much as possible to “Americanize.” Their children had very little interest in the old culture. I asked my father about it once and he shrugged and said, “If we had liked it that much, we would have stayed.”
I agree that it is universal, though the particular expression may vary from culture to culture. As a heavily immigrant nation, it has been felt here most often by successive waves of immigrants.
In the old Ottoman state( and in a pattern frequently repeated in the Islamic world generally )anti-Semitic agitation usually started first in subject Christian populations, spread from their to the poorest Muslim communities and only gradually ascended to the top of the government. For Muslim rulers Jews were usually “safe” subject minorities, not prone to rebellion or outside agitation due to their cultural isolation. But for the poor they were the easiest target to vent frustration on for the same reason.
It’s all part of the same pattern and it is usually the lowest rungs of society precariously trying to survive that are the first to resent “others.”
Q: How do you keep the X’s out of the country club?
A: Let one in, he’ll do it for you.
Where X = unspecified ethnic group
An immigrant steps off the gangplank onto American soil. He picks up a rock, and throws it at people on the gangplank, yelling “Go home you lousy foreigners!”
Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans have a great deal in common, not least their religion. They were both despised 19th-century mainly peasant immigrants from western Europe, both settled mainly in east coast cities where they together were a dominant part of the working class.
Maybe not true today but for many years they often intermarried because of their shared faith.
Kennedy really isn’t the least-Italian name on earth.
It’s not always irrational, though, because immigration isn’t always the same. The result of immigration goes all the way up to conquest. My own country (England) was formed that way during the migration period. The English (who weren’t exactly the English then, but that’s more detail than necessary) didn’t conquer this land by military force. There’s very little evidence of fighting. They conquered it mostly by migration. Yet they conquered it so thoroughly that they changed the law, the religion, the language and the way people here identified themselves. The difference is between changing yourself to the country you migrate to and changing the country you migrate to to yourself.
So when people who migrated here in the 50s and 60s and their descendents object to the immigration we have now (and many of them do), they’re not being hypocritical. They’re not being irrational. They’re making a different judgement of a different thing and it is a different thing. A very different thing.
Regarding the title, I’ll use myself as an example. I’m in the first generation of my family born in England. I’m English. I haven’t forgotten my ethnic roots - my ethnic roots are English. My entire heritage is English, regardless of the fact that as far as I know none of my ancestors before my parents were English.
My parents became English when they set foot in England. They changed themselves to the country they migrated to, not the other way around. If I ever emigrated to America, I would become American. Not English. Not English American. American. No qualifiers. And my ethnic roots would become American, because I would be American.
It’s simple: There is a STRONG incentive to fully assimilate. And will always be a lesser-than if you don’t. To do that, you can’t put your ethnic culture first. It has to be secondary or even discarded completely. Plus, a lot of people have a significant amount of European blood which is generally accepted as white, or “passes” for it. Plus they are are so mixed by now it’s impossible to really identify with anything. If you’re European, you probably are mixed European after only a few generations. I know I got some Scottish in me, some German, some French. What do I pick to identify with? Why bother?