Unit III. Multinationalism in the usa

Key terms:

1. apartheid

2. assimilation

3. discrimination

4. citizenship

5. ethnicity; ethnic identity; dual identity

6. fascism

7. genocide

8. nation / nationality / nationalism

9. patriotism

10. prejudice

11. “primary races”: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid

12. race ; racism

13. segregation (traditional, voluntary, forced)

14. xenophobia

15. multiculturalism

16. assimilation

17. integration

18. racial diversity; race mixing

Basic vocabulary and notions

alien (illegal, legal) asylum seeker old-stock American disadvantaged minority economic hardship ethnic make-up / diversity ethnic enclave immigration debate / reforms melting pot / salad bowl / vegetable soup a cookie-cutter approach Nativism political oppression WASP culture The African-American Civil Rights Movement literacy test ghetto peaceful / non-violent means of protest freedom from oppression by whites desegregation of public education Fair Housing Act (1968) affirmative action (preferential treatment) reverse discrimination to alter the hiring process to bridge the differences to close the income / inequality gap to extend equal privileges to ( Blacks) to outlaw racial discrimination to prohibit housing discrimination to reduce employment discrimination to reestablish voting rights to restore suffrage / fundamental rights

to be assimilated into (a culture) to be of (British) origin / ancestry/ descent to be underrepresented (in government) to abolish slavery to accommodate refugees to arrive by millions to come on a (temporary/ visitor) visa to convert to (Protestantism) to deny smb the right to encourage / forbid intermarriage to endure degrading conditions to exclude women / blacks to excel in / at (showbiz, sport, etc) to exploit smn / smth to flee (religious persecution) to force assimilation / integration to gain / acquire legal status to keep illegal immigration to a minimum to lower the minimum wage to possess inalienable rights to prohibit employers from hiring illegals to promote harmonious race-mixing to remove cultural / language barriers to threaten (jobs, healthy competition) to tighten immigration restrictions to wrestle with the problem of identity

Text 1. Making of a nation

The United States has often been called “a nation of immigrants”. There are two good reasons for this. First, the country was settled, built, and developed by generations of immigrants and their children. Secondly, even today America continues to take in more immigrants than any other country in the world. Actually, since its early days, the country has admitted more than 50 million newcomers, a larger number of immigrants than any country in history. It is not surprising, therefore, that the United States is counted among the most heterogeneous societies in the world. Many different cultural traditions, ethnic sympathies, national origins, racial groups, and religious affiliations make up “We the People”.

FIRST IMMIGRANTS

Stories of the New World’s gold attracted the first Spanish explorers, who in the 1500s established outposts in what is now Florida. Prospects of wealth also motivated French fur traders, who set up trading posts from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. The British, who were the first to colonize on a large scale, came for profit and also for religious freedom. The first successful English colony founded at Jamestown, Virginia, was financed by a London company that expected to make money from the settlement. English Puritans¹, Protestants who disagreed with the teachings of the Church of England, established settlements in the northeastern region. In the New World they could worship as they pleased.

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s² permanent settlements were rapidly estab­lished all along the east coast. Most of the early settlers were British. These early immigrants were soon joined by people of other nationalities.

Puritan – a member of a English sect of Protestants, who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advocated simplifications of the creeds and ceremonies of the Church of England and demanded strict religious discipline.

² In 1776, the thirteen weak British colonies came together, stood up, and told what was then the world’s greatest power that “from now on they would be free and independent states”. The British were neither impressed nor amused, and a bitter seven–year war followed, the Revolutionary War.

Africans, America’s unwilling immigrants, provided slave labor in the southern colonies. Immigrants also came from France, Spain, and Switzerland.

When they settled in the New World, many immigrants tried to preserve the traditions, religion, and language of their particular culture. The language and culture of the more numerous English colonists, however, had the overriding influence. American society was predominantly English – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP¹). Those immigrants who did not want to feel separate from the dominant WASP culture learned English and adopted English customs.

AMERICAN INDIANS

European settlement changed the fate of America’s only non-immigrants, the Native American Indians. Europeans arrived in great numbers and needed land and game for their survival. They seized Indian lands through war, threats, and treaties, and they hunted game, cut forests, and built big cities. To the Indians the white men were unwanted trespassers. They did not want the “white man's civilization”. They had their own which had been successful for centuries. The clash of cultures led to many battles, among them General Custer’s² famous Last Stand at Little Bighorn³ in 1876. By the end of the nineteenth century disease and warfare had almost wiped out the Indian population. Those that remained tried to resist the U.S. government’s efforts to confine them to reservations. The Plains Indians’⁴ final defeat in 1890 at the Battle of Wounded Knee⁵ symbolized the end of the Indians' traditional way of life. From the Indians’ perspective, the story of European immigration is a story of struggle and displacement.

OLD IMMIGRATION

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States received the greatest influx of immigrants ever. During this period, 10 million people came to America. By the middle of the century the United States, with over 23 million inhabitants, had a larger population than any single European country. The proportion of newcomers increased rapidly so that by 1860 about 13 of every 100 persons in the U.S. were recent immigrants.

WASP – W(hite) A(nglo)-S(axon) P(rotestant) – an American of British or northern European ancestry who is a member of the Protestant church. WASPs are frequently considered to form the most privileged and influential group which formerly dominated U.S. society.

² Custer, George A. (1839 - 1876) – U.S. general who fought the Indians and was killed in the battle of the Little Bighorn.

³ the Little Bighorn – a river flowing northward from Wyoming to join the Bighorn in southern Montana where Custer and his men were massacred by Indians in 1876.

⁴ Plains Indian – a member of the mostly Nomadic tribes of Indians who once inhabited the great plains of the USA and Canada. They were also called Buffalo Indians.

⁵ Wounded Knee – the battle at Wounded knee Creek in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, marked the final act in the tragedy of the Indian wars. Shortly after the famous Indian leader Chief Sitting Bull (1834 – 1890) had been killed, soldiers opened fire upon unarmed Indian men, women, and children leaving more than 200 dead.

In the mid-1800s, thousands of Chinese emigrated to California, where most of them worked on the railroad¹.

Up until 1880, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, however, came from northern or western Europe. Many left Europe to escape poor harvests, famines or political unrest. Between 1845 and 1860, a serious blight on the potato crop in Ireland sent hundreds of thousands of Irish people to the U.S. to escape starvation. In one year alone – 1847 – 118,120 Irish people settled in the U.S. German immigration was especially heavy. During the peak years of German immigration, from 1852 to 1854, over 500,000 Germans came to live in the U.S. The northern and western Europeans who arrived between 1840 and 1880 are often referred to as the “old immigration”.

SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEANS

A new wave of immigration began in the late 1800s. Northern and Western Europe were no longer providing the majority of the immigrants. The new immigrants were Latin, Slavic, and Jewish peoples from southern and eastern Europe. Among these new arrivals were Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Rumanians, and Greeks, all people whose languages, customs, and appearance set them apart conspicuously from the earlier immigrants of Celtic or Teutonic origin. This new wave of immigration was so great that in the peak years of unlimited immigration between 1900 and 1920 the number of immigrants sometimes rose to as many as a million a year.

The flood of immigration affected American cities. Immigrants were crowding into the largest cities, particularly New York and Chicago, often forming ethnic neighborhoods – “Little Italys” or “Chinatowns” – where they preserved their language and customs. These ethnic enclaves grew at an astonishing rate. In 1890 New York was a city of foreigners: eight out of ten of its residents were foreign-born. In 1893 Chicago had the largest Czech population in the world and almost as many Poles as Warsaw.

ASSIMILATION PROCESS

The assimilation of these new southern and eastern peoples was a source of conflict. Many Americans treated them with prejudice and hostility, claiming racial superiority of the Nordic peoples of the old immigration over the Slavic and Latin peoples of the new immigration. Religious prejudice against Catholics and Jews was another factor underlying much of the resentment towards immigrants. Many old stock Americans observed with alarm that the ethnic composition of the country was changing and feared that America was losing its established character and identity. Growing industrialization in the late nineteenth century led industries to favor an “open door” immigration policy to expand the labor force.

Many American workers resented new immigrant laborers who were willing to work for lower wages. Americans feared the immigrants were taking away their jobs.

¹ Railroad – building of railroads played an important role in the opening up of the American West. Private companies supported by both state and private funds competed in this enterprise and hired vast numbers of laborers, especially during the great wave of railroad building in the 1850s.

The government responded to the prejudices of an older wave of immigrants. In the 1920s Congress passed quota restrictions which favored immigration from northern and western Europe and drastically limited the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Chinese immigration to the Pacific coast had already been halted in 1882.

The descendents of these turn-of-the-century arrivals were gradually assimi­lated into American society. The first generation typically faced obstacles to assimilation on both sides: society’s discrimination and their own reluctance to give up their language and culture. Their children, however, were better able to identify themselves as Americans. By the second generation, these families spoke mostly English and they practiced fewer ethnic traditions. Members of the third generation, usually no longer able to speak the language of their grandparents, often became nostalgic about family heritage, desiring to regain the ethnic identity before it was lost. By the fourth or fifth generation, intermarriage between ethnic groups usually worked against any yearnings towards reestablishing the ethnic identity.

AFRICAN AMERICANS

The 20th century saw a hardening of institutionalized racism and legal discrimination against citizens of African descent in the United States. Although technically able to vote, acts of terror (often perpetuated by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan¹), and discriminatory laws kept black Americans disenfranchised particularly in the South but also nationwide. This time period is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations because racism in the United States was worse during this time than at any period before or since. Segregation², racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. So did anti-black violence, including lynching.

But prominent African American politicians, entertainers and activists pushed for civil rights throughout the twentieth century, quite noticeably during the 1930s and 1940s. The 1950s and 1960s saw the peaking of the American Civil Rights Movement and the desegregation of schools. The pastor and activist Martin Luther King, Jr. was the catalyst for many nonviolent protests in the 1960s which led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This signified a change in the social acceptance of legislative racism in America and a profound increase in the number of opportunities available for people of color in the United States. Substantial gains were made in the succeeding decades through middle class advancement and public employment.

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – was the name of several past and present secret domestic militant organization in the USA, originating in the southern states and eventually having a national scope, that are best known for advocating white supremacy and acting as terrorists while hidden behind conical hats, masks and white robes.

² Racial segregation – separation of different racial groups in daily life, such as eating in restaurant, drinking from a drinking fountain, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home.

RECENT IMMIGRATION

Although immigration dropped after the 1920s, the numbers have again risen dramatically, so that recent statistics indicate an increase to perhaps 600,000 or even 700,000 per year, when refugees are included. America is again faced with an assimilation problem. The majority of the newest immigrants come from Mexico, Latin America, or Asia. Among these newcomers, the Asians seem most willing to assimilate. Many are Cambodian and Vietnam refugees who fled the destruction and upheaval of the Vietnam War¹. Cambodians and Vietnamese have usually shown a drive to succeed as Americans. They encourage their children to speak accentless English and play American games.

Cubans, many of whom were wealthy property owners before Castro’s regime, often show a similar drive to fit in and become prosperous. Mexican-Americans, now comprising about one-fifth of California’s total population, are not so easily assimilated. They generally have a strong sense of their own culture and often marry among themselves

REFUGEES

Under the 1980 Refugee Act the United States has admitted some 50,000 refugees per year who, as defined by this act, are fleeing their country because of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. Some Americans, most notably activists in the church sanctuary movement², would like to broaden the concept “refugee” to include economic refugees, i.e. persons suffering from severe poverty. American society, they point out, has always given people the opportunity to help themselves. The argument against recognizing and admitting economic refugees is that the nation’s resources could not accommodate a sudden influx of the world’s poor and provide them with jobs and assistance.