Jacob Rosenberg at Mother Jones writes—“Love It or Leave It” Has a Racist History. A Lot of America’s Language Does:
[...] We reached out to Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, to learn more about the meaning of the phrase “America: Love It or Leave It” and the long history of nativism as a campaign tool.
“My living here, being born here, and being a citizen here—none of those fine details matter,” Kendi wrote recently in The Atlantic. “To [a Trump supporter], to millions like him, to their white-nationalist father in the White House, I am not an American. They want me to prove, like all the Barack Obamas, that I’m really an American.”
What happens in your mind when you hear a phrase like “America: Love it or leave it”?
My initial thought is that it sort of conveys—particularly to people of color—that this is not our home. Because it’s almost this idea that, “How dare you come “Historically, when people of color criticize America, they’ve been deemed un-American and unpatriotic, but when white people criticize America, it is normal.”into my home and criticize it?” And so it makes complete sense if this is not our home that we have no right to criticize it. But if it is our home, then I have just as much right to criticize and want to make it better as anyone else.
And the idea of who can criticize America has been discriminatory?
I think this is fundamentally the point. Historically, when people of color criticize America, they’ve been deemed un-American and unpatriotic, but when white people criticize America, it is normal. It is deemed the way of life. It is deemed essentially American. And therein lies the contradiction.[...]
Can you think of similar moments to now where phrases like this become rallying cries for a political candidate?
In the 1840s you had a political party [the “Know-Nothing” party] that was literally founded on nativist ideas specifically targeting Catholics, and particularly Irish Catholics—pretty much anyone who was not Anglo Saxon. You also had a situation during the Civil War when the Lincoln administration was trying to figure out what it was going to do with free black people. The Lincoln administration began advocating, particularly among black people, that they should accept colonization back to Africa, and of course, black people resisted that.
It seems like part of the equation has been that white people are willing to accept a certain kind of equality of other people, as long as it involves them leaving America or leaving the community that’s been created. I’m curious how that squares with the other founding myth of America, which is that we’re a nation of immigrants.
I think America historically is a nation of immigrants and, of course, indigenous people. But what’s also the case is that every single time a large group of immigrants has come into this country—except if they were from places like England, or even Germany (but only to a certain extent)—they faced a withering backlash from “the natives”; particularly the white, Anglo Saxon natives. Yes, literally, the United States is a nation of immigrants and indigenous people, but all of those immigrants faced nativist ideas. So some of the very same people who were chanting “send her back” or “go back to your own,” their own ancestors faced the same chants. Now, whiteness—or Americanness—has become much more broad today, such that they rarely hear it, if ever. But that’s the huge irony. Their ancestors faced the same type of issue—particularly if the ancestors are from Ireland or Southern or Eastern Europe or Jewish.[...]
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QUOTATION
“Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.”
~~Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—Shelby says Cordray nomination to CFPB 'dead on arrival':
No surprise to anyone since he's said it before, but Richard Shelby asserts that the nomination of Richard Cordray to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Board is "dead on arrival." Unless, that is, President Obama gives in to Republican demands to restructure the bureau into a watchdog with neither bark nor bite.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published today (available to subscribers only), amid blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the housing crisis, the Alabama senator (who is the ranking member on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs committee) rejected accusations that proposals Republicans have made to change the bureau are an effort to eviscerate it.
That's not how consumer groups see it for the obvious reason that the GOP has been trying to gut the CFPB since failing to strangle it in its crib after failing to ensure it was stillborn. What could be more rancid than Shelby posturing as an advocate for consumer rights against a "concentration of power [that will be] abused or misused to the detriment of American businesses and consumers"?
This is the guy, you may recall, who just four months ago labeled as a "regulatory shakedown" the settlement proposal sought by state attorneys general to get mortgage lenders to provide modest restitution for their larcenous abuses of American borrowers and credit card holders. There is a concentration of abusive power he's concerned about all right. The one that has him firmly wedged in its back pocket and another part of its back side.