Editors’ Note: Lest anyone think we don’t have a problem today, just look at the recent remarks of the rap singer Kayne West. Or for that matter, the University of California at Berkeley and its antisemitic agenda. Or, Harvard and its admission discrimination against Asians. Culturally, we see a new regime of discrimination coming from left-wing “anti-racists” like Ibram Kendi, who contend the only way to fight past discrimination is with discrimination in the present. The Democrat Party is the primary vehicle for this movement in the political realm. Sadly, this is not the first time Democrats pushed a racist agenda (slavery, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan, et al) and it should be vigorously opposed. In the private sector, all we can do is request that people judge others by their character and their merit, not by the hue of their skin or their ethnic background. However, our government, which has a monopoly on the use of force, and those agencies the government funds, should absolutely get out of the racial category business and the racial spoils system in which it is currently engaged. Equality before the law and equal treatment by the government, both founding principles, should be the policy. The fact that this ideal was imperfectly executed in the past is no reason to promote it or tolerate it in the present.
How non-white victims of racism were transformed into white racists.
For much of the twentieth century, a number of ethnocultural groups now seen as white were seen as non-white. As such, they were subjected to ugly racial slurs and worse, and, in the true meaning of the word “racism,” were viewed and treated as inherently inferior by the ruling establishment of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
The maligned included Italians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Slavs, and others. They hailed from Europe or Asia Minor, unlike other victims of racism in America, such as Mexicans, Chinese, and, most egregiously, Africans.
Italians bore the brunt of the bigotry, because they were the largest immigrant group at the time, with more than two million of them coming to America in just the first decade of the twentieth century. (My maternal and fraternal grandparents came in the next decade.) Moreover, the vast majority of them were from hardscrabble southern Italy and were mostly unskilled, uneducated, illiterate, and dark-complected.
If there is any doubt that Italians and others were seen as non-white, consider an Alabama case in the 1920s. A black man was convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law for marrying a white woman. His conviction was overturned on appeal when evidence was presented that she was Sicilian and thus not white.
Or fast-forward 40 years to 1965, when Southern racists said that Vivian Liberto Cash, the wife of famed country singer Johnny Cash, was a black woman, due to her swarthy complexion and facial features. She claimed that she was Sicilian, as her maiden name and ancestry indicated. (Years later, DNA tests on their daughter Roseanne showed that Vivian’s maternal great-great-grandmother had been an enslaved black woman who had illegally married a white man.)
On a personal note, four years prior to the Cash controversy, this writer of advanced age worked as a teen at an exclusive St. Louis country club, on an otherwise all-black staff of janitors, porters, cooks, and waiters. Italians, blacks, Jews, and Catholics weren’t welcome as members. At least the club’s discrimination was an improvement over the injustice of 1891, when eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans.
Because the aforementioned groups are now considered white, new stereotypes apply to them. No longer stereotyped as inferior, they are now stereotyped as privileged, racist, and fragile—stereotypes that subject them to critical race theory and mandatory anti-racist training while excluding them from diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
It’s as if some sort of racial alchemy has occurred to magically transform them from being victims of racism to being racists.
To add current insults to past injuries, many of the promulgators of the new stereotypes are descendants of the WASPs who had promulgated the old stereotypes. Many of them are also progressive elites, just as many of their forebears were progressive elites. As will be shown, that’s a fact and not a partisan or political or ideological opinion.
A first blush, it would seem to be self-defeating for white progressive elites to promulgate negative stereotypes of whites and to endorse critical race theory, anti-racist training, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But as influential leaders in government, industry, media, and academia, they not only go unscathed but are rewarded and praised for adopting and disseminating the new stereotypes.
A similar intellectual somersault has taken place in American universities, especially prestigious ones. They were leaders in maligning the aforementioned groups and discriminating against them. But now they embrace a woke ideology that maligns the same groups in a different way.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the woke universities, in spite of a former president of the university, Francis Walker, being decidedly unwoke. He was one of the progressives of the early twentieth century who saw Italians and other southern Europeans as inferior. He warned that WASPs were committing “race suicide” by allowing the mass immigration of “progeny-producing, macaroni-eating Tonio,” a reference to Italians with vowels at the end of their names. He also said that southern Europeans were “beaten men of beaten races.” Lamenting the declining birthrate of WASPs, he asked rhetorically why they would want to bring children into a world populated by immigrants who were “unfit to be members of any decent community.”
The source of the foregoing anecdote is the acclaimed 2019 book by Daniel Okrent: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and other European Immigrants Out of America. Okrent can’t be accused of being a conservative or right-winger. He was an editor at the New York Times, an editor at large at Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. His grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe.
The law referenced in the book’s title is the 1924 Immigration Act, which was expressly intended to stop the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, among others. It’s a sign of current times that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often mentioned by the media and academia as an example of racism, but the 1924 act goes largely unmentioned. That’s because the Chinese, or in today’s parlance, Asians, are portrayed as minorities who have suffered from bigotry; but the ethnocultural groups affected by the 1924 act are not seen as minorities who have suffered from bigotry.
That’s changing, however. Asians are now starting to be seen as white—not in terms of physical features but in terms of having similar values as upper-income whites regarding education, work, and family. Due to their rise to the top in income and test scores, they are being discriminated against in college admissions and are no longer automatically considered disadvantaged minorities for purposes of diversity and inclusion.
An anecdote in The Guarded Gate shows how history repeats itself but in an opposite direction. At the start of the twentieth century, German Jews in New York City had become fairly assimilated into WASP society due to their higher education and secular leanings. Because they felt that impoverished orthodox Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe were giving Jews a bad name, they formed an organization in 1907 to fund the shipping of the new emigrants to Galveston, Texas, where they would then be transferred to other towns in the Southwest and West. In all, 10,000 were shipped to Texas over seven years. Fast-forwarding to 2022, the governor of Texas has bused Latin American migrants to New York City, to make a point about the Lone Star State being inundated with migrants crossing the border illegally.
Most of The Guarded Gate details the evils of the eugenics movement in the US, identifies the progressive elites and prestigious universities behind the movement, and connects their racist thinking to the racial policies of the Nazis—which is ironic, considering that today’s progressives readily label their political opponents as fascists. It is a chilling account.
One of the notable founders of the eugenics movement was Henry Cabot Lodge, who would become an honored US senator. He was joined by other esteemed Boston Brahmins, elite New Yorkers, and other WASPs of similar standing and social class.
Francis Amasa Walker was one of Lodge’s colleagues. His credentials included the past positions of brigadier general, the first president of the American Economic Association, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, the director of the U.S. Census, and the third president of MIT. An article of his in the Yale Review described eastern and southern European immigrants as “vast masses of filth” who came from “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe.”
As the book makes clear, Margaret Sanger was an early adherent of eugenics, a fact that gets politicized because of the polarized issue of abortion. Among other statements of support, she said that her birth control movement and the eugenics movement “should be and are the right and left hand of one body.” And she wrote in an essay in Birth Control Review that “the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.”
Eugenics was purported to be based on science, but it was bogus science. Its core notion was that humans could be bred like Gregor Mendel’s peas to have more traits that were desirable and fewer traits that were undesirable. Naturally, desirable traits were those that the ruling WASPs already had, and undesirable ones were those that the non-white immigrants had.
If that wasn’t frightening enough, the darker side of eugenics advocated that imbeciles, criminals, and other seriously flawed people not be allowed to procreate. That led to forced sterilizations.
A side note: One of the most powerful scenes in movie history was a scene in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the film that dramatized the trial of Nazi leaders after the Second World War. In justifying the Nazi practice of sterilizing undesirables, the defense cited the American practice of doing the same. A man who had been sterilized by the Nazis for being feeble-minded was called to the stand. The actor Montgomery Clift played the man in a tour de force of acting, in which he exuded anguish, embarrassment, fear, and confusion.
Eugenicists loved to judge people by various traits and contrived measures of intelligence and then put them into categories and treat them accordingly. They also excelled at convincing the nation’s major institutions that their methods were scientific and would lead to a better society.
The eugenics movement reflected the impulse of progressives to use government coercion to re-engineer people to fit their notions of a perfect society. That is quite different from the classical liberal idea of accepting the realities of human nature and instituting a pluralistic political system that allows people to flourish in their own way while protecting their person, property, and civil liberties from those who want to harm them.
The progressive impulse to categorize continues today, most noticeably in the widespread use and unquestioning acceptance of the six categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native Americans—categories that are an incoherent mix of skin color, ethnicity, geographic origin, and the social construct of race.
Under today’s identity politics and woke thinking, everyone in the White category is considered privileged, consciously and subconsciously racist, responsible for the historical social injustices committed against the other categories, and in need of shaming and reeducation. Everyone in the other five categories is seen as the opposite: a victim of white racism and privilege, a disadvantaged person of color, and someone deserving of special treatment in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
In closing, the following recent incident illustrates the point.
In October 2022, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate by the name of Rick Caruso was interviewed on Telemundo. Naturally, the interviewer brought up race and referred to Caruso as white. Caruso corrected him and said that he was Italian, which meant that he was also Latin.
Of course, Caruso was ridiculed in the press and on social media.
Granted, it probably wasn’t wise for someone running for political office in these woke times to break the rules on race, to step out of his assigned category, and to expect voters to think beyond the official six categories, to know the origin of Latin, and to know enough history to know that Italians were once seen as non-white.
Perhaps Caruso was unwise, but he wasn’t the one who deserved to be ridiculed.
