Race and Ethnic Relations
Darryl Hall
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Reno
European Americans
English Americans
• Although the English were not the first Europeans to come to North America, they were the first to colonize it in large numbers. By the early eighteenth century, there were approximately 350,000 English and Welsh colonists in North America. At the time of the revolution, this number had increased to between 1 and 2 million.
• English advocates of establishing North American colonies put forward a number of explanations to explain the practice. The need for trading posts and for new sources of raw materials, as well as new markets for English goods, received much attention. Others emphasized Protestant missionary objectives, the search for a passage to Asia, the need to stop Spanish and French expansion, and the need for a place for England’s surplus population.
The Invention of the “White Race”
• Nineteenth century European immigrants did not initially define themselves as “White” but rather as Irish, German, or Italian; they constructed themselves as “White” as they moved up economically and politically in U.S. society.
• The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of the “white race” as a deliberately constructed social group for the first time in North America or, for that matter, world history. From the beginning, English settlers and their descendants saw themselves as quite different from Native Americans and African Americans, whom they initially stereotyped as “uncivilized,” “idolaters,” and “savages.” In contrast, English Americans saw themselves as protectors of the new nation who were to reserve it for the “worthy part of mankind.”
• By the early 1800s, the growing importance of southern cotton plantations for the U.S. economy as a whole (northern entrepreneurs and bankers were often linked to the southern cotton economy) increased the demand for Native American land and African and African American slaves.
• As a result of these developments, a White Anglo-Protestant elite developed and circulated the idea of an advantaged “White race,” in part as a way to provide racial privileges for propertyless British and other European immigrants and to prevent them from bonding with Americans of color.
• Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that these White workers came to accept a lesser economic position and lower wages in return for the “public and psychological wage” that went with “Whiteness.” In return for acceptance of their subordinate class position, white workers were allowed or encouraged by the White elite to be part of a racial hierarchy in which all Whites enforced deference from African Americans and other Americans of color. Racial privileges also generally included the right to substantial personal liberty, the right to travel and immigrate, and the right to vote.
The Dominant Culture and Major U.S. Institutions
• Most analysts of the U.S. racial and ethnic scene have assumed that the dominant culture and major institutions are substantially English or Anglo-Protestant. During the first century of colonial settlement along the east coast, an English heritage integrated most of the colonies. Political, legal, and economic institutions were generally based on English models. However, the major U.S. institutions were not identical to those in England; traditional English ways were often modified under new colonial conditions.
• The United States has no official language, but the continuing dominance of the English language signals the huge social impact of early English settlers and their descendants. When Europeans first came, perhaps a thousand Native American languages were spoken; several hundred of these are still spoken. Today, however, the number of Americans speaking these original languages is far smaller than those speaking the languages of the European conquerors.
• The principal U.S. language over the past two centuries has not been a thorough blend of Native American and early immigrant languages, but an English language that has incorporated words from both European and U.S. sources.
• English Americans have had a major impact on the development and operation of political institutions in the United States. The first president of the United States, George Washington, was of English ancestry, as was the forty-third president, George W. Bush, more than two centuries later.
• English Americans have filled a disproportionate number of major offices at various political levels throughout U.S. history. Of all U.S. presidents, about two-thirds had English ancestry and all the rest had other northern European backgrounds. A study of the origins of the Supreme Court justices from 1789 to 1957 found that more than half were of English or Welsh ancestry. In all periods, including the present, northern Europeans have dominated the nation’s highest court.
• The Declaration of Independence was signed by fifty-six European American men, thirty-eight of whom were English by background or birth; nine were Scottish, three Irish, five Welsh, and one Swedish.
• A majority of members of the Constitutional Convention were also English, and the Constitution was framed around their concerns not only for democratic institutions reminiscent of English institutions but also for the protection of their own property and wealth. As a result, most people of wealth in the new nation—including merchants, slaveholders, financiers, shippers, and wealthy farmers—supported the new U.S. Constitution out of economic self-interest. Slaves, indentured servants, poor farmers, laborers, and women had no say in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Not surprisingly, the framers of the Constitution perpetuated social class lines similar to those in England.
Irish Americans
• The Irish came to the New World as early as Columbus. The wave of newcomers would later swell to the extent that people of Irish descent in the United States today outnumber those living in Ireland by three to one.
• The Irish Catholics were an oppressed ethnic group in their native homeland as well as in their adopted homeland, the United States. In the 1640s, when Oliver Cromwell’s English troops defeated the army of Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, they forced thousand of Irish Catholics off the land to which they had legal title, executed thousands more, and sent others to live in the bleak, infertile western territories of Ireland. Many more were transported as slaves to Virginia.
• In the 1690s, the discriminatory Penal Laws were enacted by the British Parliament. These laws reduced the Catholics, a numerical majority (about 75 percent) in Ireland, to the status of minority group.
• At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ireland was the most densely populated country in Europe—a situation that would soon change. In the 1820s the first potato crop failure in Ireland occurred, and starvation followed. By the 1840s a much more devastating form of potato blight destroyed almost half of the basic subsistence food crop of the Irish Catholics. Many saw no choice but to abandon their country and move to the United States. This massive movement of people has been referred to as the flight from hunger, and the Irish immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s became known as famine Irish.
• The potato famine was one of the greatest disasters of modern Western Europe. In the space of a decade Ireland lost 2.5 million people, probably less than half by migration. Between 1847 and 1850 somewhere between one million and 1.5 million Irish Catholics died while the British government did little to save them. Indeed, it continued to export agricultural products from Ireland and to clear tenants off the land.
• The crossing of the Atlantic was a life-threatening experience for the Irish, and those who survived could hope for only a slight improvement in their lives. Many of the ships were called “coffin ships” because they did not supply adequate food and water, they were overcrowded, and they were unsanitary.
• The Irish immigrants were exploited from the beginning—even before they got off the ship. “Runners” employed by hotels or saloons boarded the ship and “took charge” of the newcomers’ luggage, bringing it to the hotel for “safekeeping.” Often the immigrants were tricked. The hotels overcharged them for meals or rooms and then took their luggage in payment. Another common fraud practiced by the runners involved the sale of passage tickets; only after the immigrants began their journey did they discover that the tickets were no good, or were good only for part of the distance.
• The initial reaction of the dominant group to the Irish was overwhelmingly negative. Although workers were needed in the new nation, the general response of the dominant group to the Irish immigrants was marked by conflict, hostility, violence, and exploitation. The treatment of the Irish was similar to the reception bestowed on the Africans; in fact, it has been argued that the dominant group saw early Irish arrivals as less valuable than slaves.
• The Anglos regarded the Irish as dirty, disorganized, confused, and incapable of assimilation. Puritan New England, which was 90 percent Protestant, was particularly hostile to Irish Catholics, characterizing them with negative stereotypes. For example, historian James Ford Rhodes discussed the “hereditary bent” of the Irish toward incest, murder, and rape. Rutherford B. Hayes, who in 1877 would become president of the United States, wrote that “The Negro prejudice is rapidly wearing away, but is still strong among the Irish, and people of Irish parentage and the ignorant and unthinking generally.”
• Even though some Irish did come to the New World as slaves, they did not experience the ongoing, institutionalized, and systematic violence that was used to control African and Native Americans. Although direct violence against the Irish immigrants certainly occurred, it was more often indirect; injury and death resulted from poor living conditions instead of warfare or beatings.
• Most of the Irish who came to the United States were very poor. They had no money to move out of the eastern port cities where they arrived. Locked into port cities, the Irish were directed by the dominant group into “Little Dublins” and “Shanty Towns,” where miserable living conditions often led to disease, sickness, and death.
• Dominant group indifference, hostility, and violence toward the Irish were evidenced in many areas. Discriminatory employment practices and harassment by police accompanied poor living conditions. Although there was little serious crime among the Irish, they were frequently arrested for minor offenses. Employers often would not hire Irish workers, especially for nonmanual work, resulting in a “no Irish need apply” stipulation that accompanied many ads for employment.
• The Irish became an urban proletariat, crowding together in tenements or in wood and tarpaper shanties in neighborhoods where earlier Irish immigrants had already established themselves.
• Although some Irish left the cities to try their hand at farming, most remained in or returned to cities. Farming did not connote the Jeffersonian image of the noble yeoman enjoying abundance, independence, and contentment. Rather, it meant poverty; long, arduous, unrewarding labor; dependence on an alien master; and possible starvation.
• Many of the poor people leaving Europe for the United States had an understandable distrust and fear of central government. Government persecution, either direct or indirect, is one of the main reasons that many left their homelands. Although the Irish suffered from government persecution in Ireland, they understood the possibilities of politics in the United States.
• Because they were poor in a land of plenty, most Irish were acutely aware of the potential for community gains. The immigrant Irish saw in politics a profession offering social status and economic security. Mass voting in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago not only led to control of municipal governments but affected state, and, ultimately, national governments as well. The ability to speak English and their understanding of English democracy were major assets in creating effective political organizations.
• The Irish came to the New World with little economically, but they had a basis of unity in their religion and heritage. They also arrived with skills honed in Ireland that allowed them to organize effectively. Because they were a minority group in Ireland, they were familiar with oppression based on ethnicity. They understood the political realities and knew what needed to be done to gain power.
• However, the dominant group did not acquiesce willingly. They reacted sharply to the Irish American attempts to gain power. Fear of the Irish turbulence, their increasing political power, and the new assertiveness of the Roman Catholic Church helped to produce a resurgence of nativism in the 1880s. The dominant group saw the Irish American forays into unionism and politics as a diminution of their power and control.
• Although the Anglo Americans who dominated the colonies and the United States had political differences with Britain, they had retained many of the anti-Catholic—and particularly anti-Irish Catholic—attitudes that had prevailed in England at the time of their departure. Thus the Irish Catholics in the United States found their Anglo hosts virtually as intolerant of their Catholicism as the English had been.
• Protestant propagandists began to attack the “foreign” religion and spread wild rumors. By the 1840s, a broad network of nativist societies, religious propaganda organizations, magazines, and newspapers existed. Books attacking Catholics had become staples of the publishing industry. Irish Americans did not want to send their children to public schools, where every effort would be made to convert them into good Americans, which meant good Protestant Americans. Catholic Churches were burned and Catholics were occasionally murdered in anti-Catholic riots.
Italian Americans
• Italian explorers, including Christoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus), played a major role in opening the Americas to European colonization and exploitation. An Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, made a number of voyages to the Americas shortly after Colombo’s voyages. Because of his early maps, the continents came to be named after him.
• Since 1820, more than 5 million Italians have migrated to the United States. Between 1880 and 1920, immigration was heavy, with more than 4 million immigrants. Prior to 1880, most immigrants were from northern Italy; after 1880 very large numbers came from southern Italy.
• As with the Irish, land and agricultural problems triggered much of the Italian emigration. National unification under a government controlled by northern Italians had brought heavy taxes to southern Italy. Low income, poor soil, a feudal land system, unreasonable taxes, and government corruption were important push factors. The often exaggerated image of the United States as a place of expanding opportunity was a major pull factor. Some came to stay, but the majority of the early immigrants saw the United States as a temporary workplace.
• The Italians had much in common with the Irish, Germans, and other early immigrants: they were from Europe; they arrived poor; they were Christians (Catholics) as were many Germans and most Irish; they were seeking opportunities in the New World; they kept to themselves and maintained their own culture and community; and they experienced prejudice and discrimination at the hands of the dominant group.
• There were also important differences between Italian, German, and Irish immigrants. Unlike the Irish, the Italians spoke little English, and they did not have a long history of interaction with the English. The Italians came to the United States later than the Irish and Germans. Also, the Italians came by steamship rather than sailing ships, making it easier to return to Italy. Many arrived with the idea of returning home, and about one-third did.
• The Immigration Act of 1924 established a small discriminatory quota for Italians. By 1929, the annual quota for Italians was only 5,802, compared with 65,721 for Great Britain. The quota system was based on nativists’ belief that those countries that had furnished the most “good American citizens”—that is, Protestant immigrants prior to 1890—should receive the largest quotas.
• By the time the 1965 Immigration Act replaced the national-origin quota system, there was a backlog of 250,000 immigration applicants. Gradually, by the late 1970s, that backlog was exhausted, and since that time the number of Italian immigrants has dropped sharply.
• More that 11 million Americans listed Italian as their first ancestry in the 1990 census; most of these were U.S. born. Counting both first and second ancestries listed by respondents in the census 2000 supplementary survey, the census bureau estimated that there were 15.9 million Italian Americans in 2000, making them one of the largest ancestry groups in the United States.
• Most immigrants worked as unskilled laborers, often on transportation systems such as canals and railroads and on water and sewer systems. Pay was low, and individuals as well as families were usually poor. Segregated in “Little Italy ghettos” within cities, Italian immigrants and their children frequently faced economic, political, and social discrimination.
• Italian Americans were funneled into urban ghettos in two ways:
1) Most members of the the dominant group and other groups, such as the Irish and Germans, did not want to live in the same communities as the Italian immigrants. Many of them could afford better neighborhoods and left the poorer ones to the Italians. Because of their poverty and the prejudice against them, the Italians were forced into Little Italies.
2) Italian Americans wanted to be with their families, their relatives, and other compatriots (particularly those from the same region or district in Italy who spoke the same dialect). Such enclaves allowed Italian Americans to sustain themselves, and in the long run these colonies facilitated the assimilation process. They created and nurtured institutions centered on the family, employment, mutual benefit organizations, and the Catholic Church that would support the immigrants in the new country.
• By the end of the nineteenth century, nativist stereotypes of the “apelike” Irish were giving way to negative stereotypes of southern and eastern European immigrants, especially those who were Catholics and Jews. Italian immigrants were scorned by nativists as dangerous, contemptible, inferior, and disloyal. Popular writers, scholars, and members of Congress warned of the peril of allowing these “inferior” stocks from Europe into the United States; it was held that newer immigrants would make Americans a mongrel race.
Stereotypes of Inferiority in Intelligence
• In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Anglo-Protestant stereotypes of southern and eastern European immigrants’ intellectual inferiority were based in part on misreadings of the results of the new psychological tests that were often inaccurately labeled intelligence (IQ) tests. These tests measure only selected, learned verbal and quantitative skills rather than a broad or basic intelligence.
• In 1912 the American analyst Henry Goddard gave Alfred Binet’s diagnostic test and related tests to a large number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. His data supposedly showed that 83 percent of Jewish and 79 percent of Italian immigrants were “feeble-minded,” a category naively defined in terms of low scores on the new English language tests.
• During World War I prominent U.S. psychologists developed verbal and performance tests for large scale testing of wartime draftees. Although the results were not used for military purposes, detailed analyses were published in the 1920s and gained public and congressional attention because of the racial-inferiority interpretation many Anglo-Americans psychologists placed on the test scores of the southern and eastern European immigrants among the draftees.
• In 1923 Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who drew data from army tests, argued for the intellectual inferiority of white immigrant groups, including Italian Americans. Brigham argued that low-scoring groups were not only unintelligent but also were “inferior racial stocks.” Brigham also argued that the sharp increase in southern and eastern European immigration had lowered the general level of American intelligence.
• The political implications of Brigham’s analysis were proclaimed: Immigration limits were necessary, and political means (e.g., government-ordered sterilization) should be ordered to prevent the continued propagation of these “defective strains” in the U.S. population. Thus, pseudoscientific support was granted to such government action as the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which severely restricted southern European immigration.
• In the early decades of the twentieth century, few analysts and political leaders seriously considered the possibility that the linguistic (English), cultural (northern European-American), and educational bias in the tests and in the psychologists’ interpretive procedures could account for the so-called “racial” differences. Instead, results were interpreted in aggressively racial terms and were assumed to reflect the inferior genetic background of the undesirable European “racial” stocks.
The Mafia Stereotype
• The most persistent Italian American stereotype has been the image of serious criminality. As early as the 1870s, Italians were depicted as lawless, knife-wielding thugs looking for a fight. One report of the influential U.S. Immigration Commission, issued in the early 1900s, argued that certain types of criminality were “inherent in the Italian race.”
• However, the validity of the criminality stereotype is disputed by government data. In 1910, the imprisonment rate for Italian immigrants was much lower than public stereotypes would suggest: 527 prisoners per 100,000 for the Italian-born, compared with 727 for the English and Welsh foreign-born.
• Although the Sicilian word Mafia has been used to describe organized crime, many of these gangsters have been neither Sicilian nor Italian. Significantly, Italian Americans had low crime rates in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Small-scale crime, fostered by poverty and discrimination, was a problem in most central city communities, but it usually did not involve a criminal conspiracy. Prohibition catapulted some Italian Americans into organized crime, which at the time was controlled by Irish and Jewish Americans. By 1940 two dozen Italian American “crime families” were operating in major cities. For many immigrant groups, including Italian Americans, such crime has been one of the only avenues for economic mobility.
• Reports in the 1990s indicate that, except in a few New York City and Chicago areas, the power of Italian American “crime families” had declined significantly. Current FBI statistics show that only 4 percent of the 500,000 Americans estimated to be involved in organized crime belong to Italian American crime networks.
Extent of Assimilation
• It is clear that there were cultural gaps between the Italian immigrants and other, more powerful groups in the United States. Pluralism existed in language, religion, education, family, and cultural values. Such differences either caused or were excuses for sometimes aggressive dominant group hostility.
• In America, for example, where compulsory school attendance lengthened the period of functional childhood, the immigrants had difficulty in accepting the American concept of a longer childhood and often believed that their children should leave school to go to work. Many such conflicts in intergroup relations took place.
• Assimilation may not have been what all the Italians wanted; many wanted to preserve their distinctive culture and social group. However, the fact that Italian Americans chose to learn English to get a better job was assimilation, regardless of the intention.
• Italian Americans have assimilated to a very large extent. This feat is remarkable considering:
1) the recent mass immigration, just over 100 years old
2) the significant cultural gaps between the dominant and subordinate groups
3) the impoverished state of most immigrants
4) the temporary status of many immigrants
5) the desire to maintain a separate community
6) the virulent prejudice and discrimination against them
