Thursday, August 9, 2018

White people should take a calming breath, or go for a walk

Of course, paying any attention at all to Laura Ingraham cuts into our limited time on this side of the turf, but people are posting some particularly ignorant remark of hers, and it irritates me. Here it is:

"The America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like ... this is related to both illegal and legal immigration."

I realize that some white people are nervous about the prospect of having to treat non-white people as if they were fellow human beings and citizens or something, but let's look at the record.

African-Americans have been here since 1619, and a great many did not arrive voluntarily. This means that there are black people in this country today whose ancestors have been here longer than Laura Ingraham's. They have been citizens since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and they vote as citizens, despite repeated attempts to repress their franchise.

Puerto Ricans have been American citizens, by the Jones-Shafroth Act, since 1917.

There are Spanish people in the Southwest whose ancestors were here before there was a United States.

We know that our national history shows repeated anxieties about strangers, strangers usually including anyone not white and Protestant. Benjamin Franklin worried about all those German speakers in Pennsylvania. Some people were so exercised about the arrival in the 1850s of Irish and Italian immigrants, with their weird papistical practices, that they formed a political party (the American Party, natch, though the nickname Know-Nothings is more resonant) to halt their arrival.

And on and on until the current moment of white fragility and the opportunists keen to exploit it.

Two things to keep in mind:

1. These people are not going away.

2. This is the nation we chose to make.

Love it or ...