I DIDN'T MAKE any of what I said up. I'm not interested in writing again on the subject right now, I'm going to get back to attacking the Supreme Court. I'll give you a couple of articles knowing the likelihood that you're going to read them is too insignificant to guess a number for.
From The Smithsonian Magazine, an article-interview by Anna Diamond with Jia Lynn Yang.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act marked a schism in the country’s immigration history. How did the nation get to that point?
Before the act, there were these smaller attempts to restrict immigration. The most important was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was quite a bold law that singled out, for the first time, an ethnic group for restriction.
Starting in the 1880s you have this historic wave of immigrants coming from southern and Eastern Europe. Jews, Italians. Lawmakers are continually trying to kind of stem that wave, and really it’s not until 1924 that they truly succeed. Because everything else they've tried [such as literacy tests] either gets vetoed by a president or doesn't really work.
1924 is really a watershed moment. Once you add a whole visa process, once you add these strict quotas, you’re just in a whole different regime of immigration. The system really just changes forever, and it’s a moment when the country I think symbolically says, ‘We’re not going to do things like this anymore. You can’t just show up.’
How did the theory of eugenics play a role in the new immigration system?
It became very important, because people with a lot of social influence really embraced it. These are leading economists, leading scientists, people who are really kind of dictating intellectual American life at the time. And [eugenics was] completely mainstream and considered very cutting edge, and just very current. If people could figure out a way to make a better society through this science, people didn't question why that was necessary or why their methods would work. And these experts began to testify before Congress as they're looking at immigration.
One of the primary examples would be [prominent eugenicist] Harry Laughlin. He hasn't spent his whole life being trained as a scientist, but he gets very excited about eugenics, joins people who are really hardcore scientists, and gets involved in the political side. Lawmakers treat him as kind of an in-house expert, essentially. He’s writing up reports at their behest, and pointing out, if you do the laws this way, you will actually improve the American bloodstream, and that's why you should do this. [Eugenicists] are people who were already very nativist and wanted to restrict immigration. But once they get the sort of scientific backing, it really strengthens their arguments, and that's how they're able to push this dramatic bill through in the ’20s.
Notice that it was far easier for American racists to get a law against Asians forty-two years before they got one targeting white People from Europe. And never forget during that entire time American Apartheid was the law of the land in a large number of states and a de facto practice in almost all of them, the genocide against Native Americans was ongoing, and lynching terror, mostly against Black People but also other People of Color as well as some targeted populations, especially Italians, was rampant. No populations were more in danger of mob and individual violence than Black People and other People of Color who could not pass for white.
The article doesn't explicitly say it but the thing that made the racists efforts successful in 1924 was the adoption of the theory of natural selection. Eugenics is a legal-medical scientific application of natural selection in America even as it was the basis of Nazism. Laughlin and his colleagues were in constant communication with Nazi scientists up to and even into WWII. As I mentioned, the Nazis collected the records of American eugenics programs and used them to plan their mass extermination programs.*
As to the question that got Whoopi Goldberg in trouble, here's a 2016 article by Emma Green who I can't see got into any trouble for pretty much presenting the same question and coming up with a huge range of answers and presenting a lot of the same problems I've brought up here.
The vast majority of American Jews—94 percent, according to Pew—describe themselves as white in surveys. But many Jews of color—black, Asian, and even Mizrahi Jews—might identify their race in more ambiguous terms. Whiteness isn’t a simple, static category that can be determined by a quick question from a pollster.
I'll break in here to say, YES!, she got that right, these questions are not simple enough to get any kind of meaningful answer from the dodgy sampling and questioning of pseudo-scientific polling companies. Yet almost all discourse and media talk about it pretends that it is simple and "common sense" when Peoples' experience and sense of it is anything but common and often not very sensible.
“‘White’ is a kind of cultural construct—a way of thinking of yourself, and a way that other people think about you,” Goldstein says. “Whiteness itself is a very fluid and contested category.” Race is not just a matter of skin pigmentation or ethnic background. It is determined by both individuals and their observers, and the boundaries of who’s in or out of one group or another change constantly.
So, are Jews white? “There’s really no conclusion except that it’s complicated,” Goldstein says. This is not the kind of question that searches for an answer, though. It’s a question designed to illuminate. It can be difficult to understand why many, although not all, Jews are scared of what’s to come in a Trump administration. Even Goldstein, who studies Judaism and anti-Semitism for a living, says he finds it “hard to believe … that Jews are in any real danger of losing their status in American society. Jews today are integrated into all of the mainstream institutions of American life: They’ve held the presidencies of all the major universities that once restricted their entrance; they are disproportionately represented in all the branches of government.”
And yet, no matter how much prestige Jews may amass, their status is always ambiguous. “White” is not a skin color, but a category marking power. American Jews do have power, but they are also often viewed with suspicion; and having power is no assurance of protection. According to the FBI’s hate-crime statistics, a majority of religiously motivated hate-crime offenses are committed against Jews each year. This has been the case every year since the FBI first began reporting hate-crime statistics in 1995, when more than 80 percent of religiously motivated crimes were against Jews. These days, that percentage is closer to 50 percent—a sign not that Jews are safer, but that other groups have been increasingly targeted.
“It’s not that unprecedented that groups of disillusioned, disaffected populations of workers … lash out and use Jews as a scapegoat for problems that are really caused by a quickly changing society,” Goldstein says. “It is instructive to know that Jews have been in situations in which they were integrated and had status, and that hasn’t necessarily protected them. Sometimes, it makes them vulnerable.”
“Are Jews white?” is another way of asking, “Are Jews safe in this unknown future that is to come?” To some, it seems unthinkable that they would not be. To others, it seems unthinkable that they would.
That gets into the question of what "race" means depending on the context and motives of those who talk about it:
1. When someone is defining what "race" they identify themselves as being, what racial grouping they want to consider themselves as being.
2. When someone is defining someone else as being of a different "race"
a. when they see that negatively and especially to target someone for bad treatment in some way.
b. when they see that neutrally or positively and have no bad or positive intentions with their act of classification.
3. When someone rejects such classification:
a. when they do so to diminish negative consequences for those otherwise classified.
b. when they want to pretend that such classification is a thing of the past and so nothing has to be done to address the effects of it.
Of course that last one is bullshit because if those evils of inequality and discrimination and violence and ongoing bigotry were truly in the past we wouldn't find such conversations so powerfully emotive and important to have.
It would be possible to look at how the Irish Catholic population went from violent discrimination to wealth and power as an example of how what may have been a very relevant topic of conversation in the 19th century is effectively moot now. It certainly isn't for other groups of Americans who are ever newly targeted for violence, murder and discrimination, in American media in 2022 and, so, the culture whose minds are poisoned by it.
I'm certainly not going to do what you demand, refrain from talking about this, certainly not when I don't say stuff without being able to back it up from credible sources.
* From the U.S. Holocaust Museum:
Well known as an educator, scientist, and sociologist, Dr. Harry L. Laughlin was a major advocate of eugenics in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. In recognition of his contributions to that field, Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in Nazi Germany in 1936.1 Laughlin's gratitude at the receipt of this "high honor" is detailed in the featured letter to Dr. Carl Schneider, Dean of Heidelberg's Faculty of Medicine.
This correspondence demonstrates the connections between the American and German eugenics movements. Both American and German eugenics promoted racial hierarchies, which Laughlin noted in his letter.2 Many other leading American scientists also advanced the so-called "science of race."3 Laughlin was instrumental in promoting policies that targeted forcible sterilization for people diagnosed with epilepsy, certain mental and physical disabilities, or alcoholism. People with extensive criminal records were also targeted.4 In part due to Laughlin's efforts, dozens of American states enacted laws that forced certain people to be sterilized. According to one scholar's estimate, more than 62,000 sterilizations had been performed in the United States by the 1960s.5
American eugenics lent credibility to the Nazi regime in its efforts to promote the supposed superiority of so-called "Aryans." In 1933, Nazi Germany passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, based in part on the practice of forced sterilization in the US.5 Under this legislation, an estimated 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized by the end of the World War II.
In the featured letter accepting his honorary degree from Heidelberg, Laughlin remarked that "To me this honor will be doubly valued because it will come from a nation which for many centuries nurtured the human seed-stock which later founded my own country and thus gave basic character to our present lives and institutions."
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