Confusing Whiteness With "Americanness"

Newswise — STORY: The recent public fervor over immigration and the future of undocumented or illegal immigrants is a recurring theme in U.S. history and culture, says University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Associate Professor of English Linda Frost, Ph.D., author of the 2005 book "Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture: 1850-1877."

Frost argues that in the 19th century, depictions of minorities and immigrants in popular magazines illustrated who was and who was not considered American and played a major role in fusing "Americanness" with whiteness.

WHAT: "In fact, the actual status of 'Americanness' " who gets to claim it, and of course, who gets to reap the economic, political, and social benefits of that claim " is linked quite emphatically to notions of racial whiteness. Today, the non-American group most visibly seeking American status is a Latino and predominantly Mexican one, but in the 19th century, the Irish and Chinese were the two groups who most clearly fit this category. The larger and more visible the number of immigrants " despite their usefulness, their contribution to society, etc. " the less white they seem to be.

"In 1869, for instance, popular writer Ned Buntline described a group of Chinese workers in a story of his in the San Francisco Golden Era as 'dirty, opaque-eyed Chinamen' who grin 'like ring-tailed baboons'; another short piece more transparently notes that a group of Chinese have been driven away by 'the white people of Unionville, Nev.' largely because 'it was feared that the superior industry and intelligence of the Chinese would effect a monopoly of trade and labor in that locality.' The ability to designate whiteness here bespeaks a deeper anxiety " one about maintaining control of resources.

MORE: "The conversation about immigration and the rights of immigrants in the United States, despite our national mythologies of a racially blended society, ultimately says much more about how fragile and insecure the nation's members feel about themselves as authorized 'Americans' and the strength of that identity than they do any truth about the immigrant group in question. This is certainly not surprising in a time of tremendous fear about 'homeland security' and the ability to shore up our economic and physical safeties.

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