Abstract
From the very beginning of America’s formation, there has been a witting attempt to forge a single American cultural identity in spite of the presence of culturally and physically diverse groups of people in America.1 First Nations2 were already in America before the arrival of Europeans; blacks were, by force, transported to America; Chinese came during the gold rush; Mexicans were, in the beginning, enclosed by America’s expanding border.3 Racialized ethnic groups including First Nations, blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans, viewed as unlike whites, were looked on as racially and culturally inferior. Nonwhites’ presumed inferiority served as a basis for their exclusion from an American cultural identity, which justified the discriminatory practices toward them. This I openly dub as the Americanization of America’s cultural identity. Accordingly, the quest to construct a homogeneous American cultural identity was paramount.
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Notes
Michael Walzer begins his essay, “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?” by reminding us that there is no country called America. It is the United States of America. See Walzer 1990, 591. Also, see Richard Mayo-Smith, “Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States” (1894, 427).
Jim Sleeper has pointed to the “apparent sense of self-contradiction” in the term Native American. See Sleeper 2001, 311. In this book, I am using the term First Nations to mean Native Americans. First Nations is a contemporary term referring to persons registered as Indians in Canada. It also refers to the communities of Indians in Canada. In the United States, First Nations have continued to identify themselves in terms of Mohawks, Cree, Oneida, Kiowa, Navajo, Comanche, Apache, and Wichita, for example. See Martin E. Spencer, “Multiculturalism, ‘Political Correctness’, and the Politics of Identity” (1994, 557–58).
See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1997b.
Here, I am thinking about the hiring in American universities of nonwhite professors to teach classes in Ethnic Studies or Women’s Studies. However, according to Manning Marable, education in the United States “remains a character of elitism and cultural exclusivity” (2004, 164).
Also, see Laura A. Harris, “Notes from a Welfare Queen in the Ivory Tower” (2002).
Scholars include Roediger 1991, Dyer 1997, Frankenberg 1997, and Gallagher 1995. For a good overview of the ways in which whiteness is discussed by whiteness scholars, see Eric Arnesen, “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination” (2001, 6–9).
Hartigan 1999, 184. In addition, Cheryl I. Harris’s sophisticated concept of “whiteness as property” is useful. See Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1993).
Osajima gives an example of Asian Pacific American students who confessed that they wanted to be white. One student confessed that all through his childhood, he wanted to be white. See Osajima, “Internalized Racism” (2007, 142).
There is a resistance that cannot bring to the forefront its resistance. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a slave woman, instead of resisting the master’s brand, claims it as her own, so that her child can identify her when they are separated. This means of resistance is powerful because it becomes a quiet force of empowerment. See Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987).
Intersectionality is an alternative to identity politics. See Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality” (2004). The term was first developed in 1989 by critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, in Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. Crenshaw points “to the tendency of treating race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis … thus casting aside the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience” by employing “a single-axis analysis” (1989, 139).
Also, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1999).
See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994, 3).
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© 2010 Sherrow O. Pinder
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Pinder, S.O. (2010). Introduction: The Brevity of the Argument. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106697_1
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