Ethnic History and the Construction Essay

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Essentially concerned with property rights and citizenship, the early American conception was fairly simple in that almost anyone who was not an Indian or a Negro was considered white. Since "white" America was fairly homogenous at the time, meaning mostly Anglo-Saxon, and still had a wide-open frontier, the main threats to white dominance came from the natives and the slave population.

By the time my great-grandparents were arriving around the turn of the century, decades of immigration by Europeans who were not from Great Britain and were usually not Protestant, made the Anglo-Saxon elite began to view the new immigrants as a larger threat to the republic. Therefore, the notion of who was white began to shrink and there was a fragmenting of races into nations. Italians, Celts, Finns, Jews, and Slavs were now all considered distinct races, unfit for assimilation and republican self-governance, as opposed to being part of a monolithic white race. In Jacobson's book, he quotes a journalist being asked if an Italian is a white man: "No sir, he is a Dago." (Jacobson, 56) This was the kind of treatment that my ancestors were subjected to, and it shows that they were viewed by native-born, Anglo-Saxon Americans as non-white and a different, and lower, race.

It is hard to say whether the treatment they received caused them to retreat into their own communities, or whether the fact that they chose not to assimilate, especially my mother's maternal grandparents, made them an easy target. By choosing to speak Italian and live their life in an insular community, it is somewhat understandable why other Americans could argue they were a totally different kind of people. Jacobson also talks about how Italians were seen as having an "innate criminality" and not "acting white" because they accepted "economic niches" that were seen as below Anglo-Saxon norms.

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(Jacobson, 56-57) This idea of "acting white" is very interesting because it assumes that peoples' ethnic and racial background mean they are pre-determined to act in a certain way, and it also means that somehow, social elites have to decide what it means to act white. Because my family did not assimilate in the first generation, they were able to be labeled as non-white by others.

Once immigration was heavily restricted in 1924, and the events of the Great Depression and the Second World War helped to integrate Americans of European descent, the idea of "whiteness" became bigger once again. The second and third generations of my family became more assimilated into American culture over time. (Albensi and Grey) This is fairly typical, I would think, as younger people have less ties to the home country of their grandparents. I also think that the idea of ethnicity and race has changed a lot since my great-grandparents moved to this country. Nowadays, it is ok for people to be proud of their ethnic heritage and it does not keep them outside of the mainstream. Also, pretty much anybody of European descent is now considered "white," so the concept of that racial category had widened, and there are now many ethnicities that fit within it. There is a natural process of assimilation over time, and my family is no exception. My mother and our family are considered white, and I think that this proves Jacobson's thesis that race is something that is socially constructed and not a biological given.

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