Invention of the white race

Jim heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu May 28 12:41:24 PDT 1998


In a tone of rising hysteria,

In message <3.0.1.32.19980528151011.0068bae4 at popserver.panix.com>, Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> writes
>Jesus fucking christ, don't people know the first thing
>about American history.

What drove him to this rage?
>
>James's statement that, "Rather, the
>history of race and racism is more discontinuous that continuous, and the
>white/black counterposition that seems today to be the exemplar of race,
>did not feature prominently in the politics of race in the
>Northern states in the early part of the century."

Pedantically, Louis continues


>This does not seem
>"brilliant" to me. It rather seems a falsification.

Strong words. Why a falsification?


>The Ku Klux Klan was
>active throughout the North, including Indiana.

But as many people have commented on this list the preoccupations of the KKK were not exclusively black people. The KKK enjoyed a resurgence in small-town America in the period mass immigration from East and Southern Europe. Their propaganda was turned against the growing city populations.

Other movements like tempeance articulated a similar dread of the cities. These culminated in the propaganda for a limit on immigration. This was the key debate on race in the inter-war period. It is not about black v white, but about how to cope with relations between the wave of immigration of 1890-1910, and the WASPs. Both parties in this conflict were, what we would now call, 'white'. It was nonetheless a racial conflict, that was reslovd finally with the integration of these immigrants into the white (but no longer anglo-saxon or protestant) mainstream.

That was all I meant. There was no secret political agenda (least of all a campaign against Affirmative Action). Just an interesting juncture in American history to make the point that racial conflicts are not a simple, seamless continuous history, but have modulations and distinctive periods. History is like that.
>The Northern cities were becoming more and more
>polarized as Southern blacks emigrated to cities like Detroit and Chicago
>in search of employment. Immediately after WWI, there was a huge riot in
>Detroit as returned black veterans refused to accept racial attacks from
>white thugs peacefully.

Nobody is seeking to deny any of that, only to point out that in the inter-war period there was another ethnic conflict, one that shook the entire political organisation of the country, leading to the reconstitution of the Democratic Party as a party of the urban masses and the transformation of the ruling racial ideology. -- Jim heartfield



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