Assimilate This! Is it possible or desirable to assimilate into a white supremacist, colonial settler, and imperialist nation?
Assimilation is this political plasticine that is frequently at the core of newspaper editorials, scapegoating by politicians, and ideological constructs of what it is to be a citizen of the United States of America (U.S.). As such, it refers to a myth-soaked narrative of the history of the U.S. as a nation; who is assumed to belong to it, or who can be allowed to earn a spot in that ark of glorified passengers known as “Americans.”
The term “American” sits at the center of this chauvinistic and exaggerated conception of who is a “red-blooded” inhabitant, and therefore a bona fide “citizen” of the U.S. It is a misguided and vainglorious term that robs the rest of the inhabitants of the Americas of such self-designation. For everyone born or naturalized in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean—or the two other countries of North America (Mexico and Canada)—is also an American. Therefore, from this point forward, I will refer to the inhabitants of the U.S. as U.S. Americans.[1]
The heated arguments surrounding assimilation into U.S. society are frequently reserved for issues pertaining to immigrants. I intend to place the notion of assimilation in a more extensive context. Contrary to knee-jerk assumptions, it is not only conservative individuals (as represented by the Republican Party and other outfits to its right) who hold close to their hearts the basic tenets of the U.S. interpretation of assimilation. Furthermore, I intend to emphasize the distinction between 20th and 21st century immigrants, and the waves of individuals who engaged in the dispossession, displacement, and genocide of Native Americans. These were nothing else but colonial settlers, who received as compensation part of the lands and resources they plundered on behalf of the colonial settler state, first under British rule, and afterwards as part of the U.S. republic.
Finally, I must highlight the history of African peoples kidnapped and brought to toil in slave plantations for centuries, and that of their descendants. Only a reactionary demagogue would characterize them as immigrants. For a more thorough discussion of the relationship between white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism, please see my essay “U.S. imperialism in the Americas: the function of colonialism and racism, and how they are different,” previously published in Puntorojo.
At the core of the ramblings of the most racist sectors of U.S. society, is the issue of who is a “legitimate” U.S. American. It is defined by their self-identification with whiteness, a lionized and misogynistic christianity, the primacy and exclusivity of the English language, a narcissistic and chauvinistic individualism (euphemized under the rubric of “individual rights”), and a hardcore affinity with U.S. military prowess and imperialist hegemony. Ultimately, this panoply of psycho-social warts is made to imply an identity of purpose with the workings of the particularly ruthless version of U.S. capitalism. As I will argue below, these notions have been at the core of the state apparatus and the ideological priorities of the U.S ruling class since the U.S. became an independent nation.
The class and national dynamics of immigrant assimilation
There are various strands to the assimilation of immigrants: political, economic, social, and cultural/ideological. They all interact with each other, and for the most part cannot be surgically disentangled from each other. Assimilation, above all, is highly political. It is about immigrants accepting the lot they have been assigned in the hierarchical spectrum of society, and absorbing as theirs the rules that maintain these hierarchies.
It entails discarding any preexisting notions and practices that may be in contradiction with these rules. An immigrant who overtly does not accept the stratified workings of the U.S. political edifice will be promptly labeled not only “unassimilable”, but worse, will very likely be a target of unrelenting harassment and expulsion from the U.S.
Assimilation undeniably takes place as a social class process.
The frequent display of the U.S. flag by immigrants, particularly by small business owners, exudes not only the fervor of acknowledging the rules for “belonging”, but also the fear of being targeted for not being “American” enough. I remember the immediate proliferation of U.S. flags in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in storefronts and restaurants belonging to immigrants across Chicago, and could appreciate the self-protection effect these families were pursuing in light of the crowds of right-wingers who were besieging mosques in the immediate suburbs of the city.
Assimilation undeniably takes place as a social class process. Immigrants not only get suctioned into the dynamics of society as a function of the class through which they managed to secure their entrance ticket, but also as a function of the class-climbing aspirations they may have (which finds expression ideologically).
The largest proportion of immigrants will enter at the bottom of the economic pile, doing the jobs with the worst pay and working conditions, lacking in stability and compensated benefits like health insurance. Yet a smaller segment of immigrants will arrive to perform highly technical jobs, with much better pay and benefits, job stability, and political legitimacy. And there are those wealthy immigrants who can bring in millions of dollars, and who can skirt for the most part the vicissitudes of securing legal legitimization through the acquisition of citizenship; for they are essentially buying their naturalization or an extended stay.
In a society as brutally atomized as that of the U.S., those immigrants who fail to attain a sufficient level of economic stability, and who are compelled to function at the margins of the economy, including surviving through petty crime, are said to be “downwardly assimilated.” The notion of “downward assimilation” is a very peculiar one. It requires a distancing from the dynamics of society that lead to the poverty, marginalization, and abandonment of urban neighborhoods. They are deemed to have fallen ill to social pathologies, from the long historical curve of the workings of capitalism and class, and from the core structures, mechanisms and priorities that sustain them in the U.S.
Rather than acknowledging that all those sectors that are deemed pathological (which include not only immigrants but poor whites and segregated African-Americans) are at best partially assimilated into the rest of society, there is an assumption of intractability of this social marginalization as permanent for practical purposes. Therefore, this portion of immigrants are assumed to have been assimilated anyway—negatively assimilated—that is.
The cultural and social assumptions and practices that immigrants bring (regardless of their “progressive” or “backward” proclivities) are embodied within an ideological universe into which they were born and raised in their countries of origin. That is, they were previously assimilated in their native countries into the set of norms and beliefs that their ruling classes prioritized. Once they take residence in the U.S., a new set of norms and priorities must be imbued in them. From this perspective, everyone born and/or raised in the U.S., regardless of race or ethnicity, undergoes their own process of assimilation. In the case of immigrants, if they arrive as adults, they have missed that process of indoctrination, and the onus is placed on them to catch up to the rest of the population.
I use the term indoctrination very purposely. There is a body of national myths and mores that is shared by most of the U.S. population, regardless of political proclivity. These are mostly assimilated since childhood, and consolidate as people socialize through the institutions of society, family units, their social environment. They actually become indoctrination in the sense that the core of these myths and beliefs are absorbed over time, mostly without questioning the basic assumptions that serve as their foundations. This does not mean that the absorption of these core beliefs and myths is absolutely successful or that must remain as an unchanging monolith.
On the contrary, it is once these assumptions come under questioning by larger groups of people, that periods of substantial political and social transformations can take place—if the size of these groups of people attains a critical mass and political militancy. Such is the context that we are currently living in the political climate of the Black Lives Matter movement and the destabilization brought about by how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the crisis of the U.S. economy.
The mythology of the “nation of immigrants”: Assimilation in a white supremacist state
Most researchers of assimilation will agree about the qualitatively different obstacles posed to the assimilation of immigrants in the era of European migration of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in contrast to the era of migration of peoples from non-European countries that took off in the 1960s. Although non-European immigration took place during the second half of the 19th century and throughout all of the 20th century, it is after the enactment of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act that the elimination of national origin (and therefore racial) quotas allowed for a significantly larger influx of nonwhite peoples as immigrants.
The previous immigration law dated back to 1924, when the U.S. effectively ground to a halt most official immigration. The first major implementation of immigration legislation to curtail the immigration of nonwhite peoples was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884. The 1924 Immigration Act aimed not only at preventing Asian immigration, but also ended up slowing down the migration of people from Southern and Western Europe.
The history of the migration of Europeans to the U.S. is packed with evidence of the priorities and tendencies dictating who is eventually allowed to claim absolute legitimacy as a U.S. American, which essentially means that they are entitled to claim whiteness. In essence, being a genuine “American” becomes unavoidably entangled with being white. The core nationhood narratives of the U.S. extrapolate from the political, ideological, and social imperatives of the social layers that lead the war of independence against the British Empire.
This is a crew of people lionized into the mythology of the so-called “Founding Fathers.” This was a very select group that proceeded to organize the newly independent republic along the grooves that matched their own class interests. This, in turn, reinforced their ideological universe. This characterization did not require a monolithic agreement among these leaders—there were political factions, indeed—but it did require a consensus of the majority around key political and social structures and procedures.
This leadership proceeded to build a nation in which the monopoly of the fledgling ruling class over the highest levels of power was secured for this class by the structures and mechanisms of the version of bourgeois democracy they installed. This was a ruling class of plantation owners, wealthy merchants, and speculators. The democracy that they built was essentially a democracy for the upper layers of society; not too different from the democracy of the Patricians of the Roman Empire, yet with enough leeway to invoke the allegiance of the lower classes while excluding African slaves and the indigenous peoples of the continent.
The national narrative that developed thereafter was one in which the claim of democracy developed and coexisted with institutionalized chattel slavery (with white supremacy as its ideological justification). It also claimed to coexist alongside the genocide and dispossession of the indigenous peoples of the continent, as an extension of the settler colonialist project of the British Empire, which was nothing more than westward imperialist expansion into the lands of indigenous peoples. The rise of this new nation developed within the ideological framework of superiority and exceptionalism, i.e., white supremacy. (See my essay in Puntorojo referenced and linked above.)
In the mythology of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants”, the ethnic cleansing carried out by colonial settlers is whitewashed by transforming settlers into humble immigrants. In her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes how the largest share of ethnic cleansing and plunder of the indigenous peoples was carried not by the military apparatus of the republic but by the colonial settlers. They were promised land and its resources as compensation for their successful occupation of these lands.
Dunbar-Ortiz describes how the core group of frontier settlers was of Ulster-Scots (also known as Scots-Irish) origin. These “were protestants from Scotland who were recruited by the British as settlers in the six counties of the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland.” The Scots-Irish brutally displaced Irish peasants, stealing half a million acres of land from them. It was these seasoned colonial settlers, and additional detachments recruited from Scotland that the British –and then an independent U.S.—used to carry out the massacres, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of indigenous peoples all the way to the Pacific coast.
The nation that was built was at its core the frontier rendering of the British Empire. All the colonial settler nations that spun off from the British Empire as independent nations aimed at maintaining their European-ness in terms of racial purity, cultural/political mores, and institutions; while highlighting an element of frontier mystique. They appropriated and deformed an indigenous “quality” to their nationhood that distinguished them from their imperial progenitor. The late Australian historian Patrick Wolfe clarifies this apparent contradiction (in his essay “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”):
On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the mother country. Hence it is not surprising that a progressive Australian state government should wish to attach an indigenous aura to a geographical feature that bore the second-hand name of a British mountain range. Australian public buildings and official symbolism, along with the national airlines, film industry, sports teams and the like, are distinguished by the ostentatious borrowing of Aboriginal motifs. For nationalist purposes, it is hard to see an alternative to this contradictory re-appropriation of a fundamentally-disavowed Aboriginality. The ideological justification for the dispossession of Aborigines was that “we” could use the land better than they could…
The purposeful reproduction of a British way of life within the colonial settlements mandated the establishment of regimes that maintained European (white) purity, and as such required a consistent set of norms that forbade miscegenation. In the U.S., it meant the elimination of the “Indian”, as a goal, and the maintenance of the African slavery in perpetuity. The U.S. has the distinction of being the only imperialist/colonial settler state spun off from the British Empire that relied for centuries on chattel enslavement of Africans and their descendants for the mass production of wealth for its ruling class. This created two parallel tracks in regard to the priorities of the settler state regarding the treatment of its dispossessed indigenous subjects in contrast to its enslaved ones.
In the same essay referenced above, Patrick Wolfe summarizes the contrasting terrain upon which the racialization of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. and that of Black slaves took place:
For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black. For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus, we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness. Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians.
The U.S. was therefore born, and has existed for centuries, as a white supremacist state. White supremacy is at its core, and was inscribed in its core institutions and laws since its founding. Any and all significant push-backs against this basic structure have come to be only in the context of a civil war, insurrections, and major and sustained struggles—which also explains the vulnerability and potential reversibility of the gains resulting from such events. The current regime of Donald Trump makes this assertion more evident than usual.
The capacity for assimilation of any individual takes place in this landscape. At play there is always this interaction between what is allowable and what is desirable. To thoroughly assimilate into society, one must first meet several external (to the individual) criteria imposed by the priorities and structures of society that has as its core a white supremacist/colonial settler/imperialist state. On the other hand, to thoroughly assimilate one must desire and consistently pursue this assimilation. The desire to assimilate and the obstacles or supports afforded by society do not need to be constant nor uniform.
A new arrival does not need to be even conscious of these dynamics or self-imposed goals—and both of these elements are neither constant in their expression nor linear in their development. It is not rare for many immigrants to arrive with a strong desire to return back to their countries of origin, as soon as the circumstances that propelled them to depart have changed enough to justify their return (in their own individual interpretation). A return that frequently does not take place.
After the war of independence, and as the colonial settlers pushed west, the Scots-Irish were joined by waves of Europeans from countries other than Britain. Originally, these newcomers came from Northern and Western Europe. These peoples proceeded to populate and exploit the lands that had been cleansed of indigenous peoples. Besides being white, these Europeans shared a similar set of assumptions and mores as to the place of Europeans in the world. This was the period that soon enough would lead to the second major wave of colonial occupations by European powers of Africa and Asia, specifically in the second half of the 19th century.
Let’s take the German arrivals as an instructive example. As Germans began to build their settlements and grew in numbers in the first half of the 19th century, they spontaneously tried to continue going about their lives the way they lived in Germany. Their attempt to think of themselves as Germans living in another place was met with opposition by the U.S. ruling class. When the German settlers tried to normalize their schools and continue instruction in the German language, they were rebuffed by the U.S. ruling class.
The late Samuel Huntington was a liberal intellectual, and key ideologue of the Democratic Party for decades. In his book Who Are We? (2005) he defends the core identity of the U.S. as Anglo-Protestant, as reinforced by and reinforcing of the key political institutions and values created by colonial settlers that took over the continental U.S.:
Throughout American history, people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Saxon culture and political values. This benefited them and the country. American national identity and unity, as Benjamin C. Schwarz has said, derived ‘from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples coming to this country. That elite’s religious and political principles, its customs and social relations, its standards of taste and morality, were for 300 years, America’s and in basic ways they still are—despite our celebration of “diversity.”’…Hence there is no validity to the claim that Americans have to choose between a white, WASPish ethnic identity, on the one hand, and an abstract, shallow civic identity dependent on commitment to certain political principles, on the other. The core of their identity is the culture that the settlers created, which generations of immigrants have absorbed…
The Germans, as white Europeans, were capable of being assimilated into the U.S. Yet, they needed to be willing to assimilate by accepting the cultural and political premises of the white supremacist/settler state. This, of course, included being willing to part with their language and a number of other cultural norms.
Another key example is that of the Irish. The Catholicism of the Irish and their settlement in urban areas placed them in proximity and economic competition with the colonial settlers who had already ethnically-cleansed these places—or their immediate descendants—which generated a resentment toward the Irish that had a deep ideological underpinning. This is what is usually referred to as “nativism” by most scholars and commentators.
Grotesque Nativism
The grotesque omission of the fact that these “nativist” folks who physically eliminated the presence of the true natives, the indigenous peoples, and who then claimed to be the true natives themselves, and then opposed the Irish newcomers is not an oversight. For the legitimacy of these replacement “natives” is one of the myths of nation-building of this country. (See Dunbar-Ortiz’s for a thorough discussion of this matter.) The so-called nativist response by the original clique of settlers included the formation of a political party, the Native American [sic] (Know-Nothing) Party. This group declared itself an explicitly anti-immigration political formation. As the late historian Howard Zinn described in his book People’s History of the United States, the self-proclaimed “nativists” and the Irish were absorbed into the political parties of the era. The Irish flocked to the Democratic Party, which was the party of slavery, and after the end of slavery, the party of Jim Crow segregation for a century thereafter.
After its independence, the U.S. proceeded to participate in numerous wars of expansion and territorial acquisition, and in the process incorporated new layers of European immigrants into the nation on the basis of their “whiteness”. For the Irish, the Civil War provided an opening. Nevertheless, full-blown Irish assimilation required that they transform the Catholic Church in from being “Roman” to becoming “Americanized.” Samuel Huntington approvingly quotes a study of the period just before WWI in Who Are We?, highlighting how the efforts of the Irish Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. were key in the Americanization of the Catholic Church:
The Roman Catholic Church used its clergy, schools, press, charity institutions, and fraternal organizations to persuade immigrants to give up their foreign cultural patterns and conform to American customs. Archbishop John Ireland…an Irish immigrant, was a leader among the Americanizing bishops…He struggled against efforts of immigrant Catholics to preserve their languages and traditions.
The sweeping notion and practice of Americanization deserves unpacking. It is the same process that has been continually used since the successful campaigns of dispossession and forced relocation of the surviving indigenous peoples of the continental U.S. after the 1880s. Once the period of ethnic cleansing and physical extermination came to an end, the tactics of genocide shifted from physical extermination to social, cultural, and political erasure of the various indigenous nations. The practices, sometimes more overt and harsh, and at others more oblique and ostensibly progressive, can be summarized under the grotesque formulation “Save the man, kill the Indian,” as detailed by Dunbar-Ortiz.
Once U.S. imperialism leaped overseas, the colonization efforts of the people it subjugated employed the same strategy. The eradication of the languages of the colonized peoples in the Pacific and the Caribbean was explicitly stated as a goal in the Americanization of the new colonial possessions. In Hawai’i the U.S. imperialist state almost succeeded in vanishing the language of Native Hawaiians, the Kanaka Maoli.
It took the great struggles of the Kanaka since the 1970s, during the rebirth of their sovereignty movement, to stop this trend and begin to reverse it. (See the anthology A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty.) In the Philippines, the U.S. imperial/military apparatus attempted the same. And in Puerto Rico, after the 1898 U.S. invasion, under the military government that was immediately imposed, the colonial rulers decided that the Americanization of the Boricuas was to be accomplished through the education system by imposing the English language as the language of instruction.
For the following five decades the Gringo officials that administered the Island tried to unsuccessfully accomplish the replacement of Boricua dialect of the Spanish language with the English language, not in small part due to the resistance of the population. (See La Americanización en Puerto Rico y el Sistema de Instrucción Pública, 1900-1930.)
A similar version of this process occurs during the Americanization of immigrants. Americanization is nothing but the fulfilment of the core criteria laid out by Huntington, as encapsulated in his quote of Benjamin Schwarz: “American national identity and unity, as Benjamin C. Schwarz has said, derived ‘from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples coming to this country.” Ultimately, a direct line can be drawn connecting to the present this stamped image and the structures, institutions, and non-negotiable tenets of the so-called “Founding Fathers,” which built a nation that at its core was (and is) white supremacist, settler colonialist, and imperialist.
As the dynamics of European immigration shifted to those coming from Southern and Eastern Europe, the question about their “assimilability” rose again. This particular group of new arrivals was considered even more backward and alien than those who came earlier from Northern and Western Europe. Yet again, the key questions were whether they would be allowed to be incorporated into an expanded version of whiteness (i.e., “red-blooded Americans”), and whether they would be willing to accept those terms.
For example, Italian immigrants also suffered rejection and marginalization. But much like the Irish, the combination of ideological pressure from the Americanized Catholic Church, and the overwhelming imperative of choosing sides before and during WWII, ended up with the Italians being accepted as U.S. American and embracing the notion of Americanism, a la Huntington. In other words, they assumed their own hue of whiteness to be part of the White nation.
Many of these dynamics have been addressed before in books such as How the Irish Became White and Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Yet, the key issue is what are the ethnic/racial limits of assimilability in the context of a republic that has a state apparatus that was built as a white supremacist, colonial settler, imperialist entity.
White supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialism are not mere garments that can be separately disposed of and replaced with nicer ones. They are entangled with each other, they infuse each other, they are inseparable. Settler colonialism entails the superiority of the colonizers in their dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this case it is the white, European colonizer. Settler colonialism is the context in which U.S. imperialism developed and expanded within the confines of the continental U.S., and later into Hawai’i and Alaska.
Modern imperialism is nothing more than the competition between nation-based conglomerates of capital, that finds international expression through economic, political, ideological, and military antagonism.
Modern imperialism is nothing more than the competition between nation-based conglomerates of capital, that finds international expression through economic, political, ideological, and military antagonism. It is the contest that takes between the advanced capitalist powers, with the world as the terrain of competition, with the less powerful capitalist powers vying for their survival by allying with one or another major capitalist bloc, and with the weakest countries becoming the victims of colonialism or neocolonialism. It is no accident that the imperial abuse dispensed by the U.S. is justified in the context of its supposed superiority, which despite all the euphemisms used by its ruling class spring backs “from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples,” as Huntington proudly quoted.
Can Black, Brown, and other nonwhite peoples ever assimilate?
A quick survey of the real life that Blacks currently live in the U.S. will belie the notion that they have been assimilated. The fact that at the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, a Black person has to fear for their life every time they leave their home because they can be wantonly murdered by the official agents of law and order, betrays any notion of assimilation. Yet this is one of so many aspects of the wall erected by the white supremacist state against the assimilation of the descendants of slaves.
The jaw-dropping inequities in housing, education, jobs, wages, healthcare, incarceration rates, poverty rates, death and infection rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more, reveal a stark picture of non-assimilation. It is a feature of the white supremacist character of the U.S. that the most overtly racist sectors of society will openly blame the Black population for ostensibly failing to assimilate, when in reality it is the white supremacist structure of society that impedes it.
However, even the liberal sectors of society will indulge in the same process of victim-blaming, although their accusation will be uttered in the guise of an alleged compassion, and their language obfuscated by sophisticated and pitiful euphemisms. Using his characteristically grandiloquent language, the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama, frequently scolded the Black population for failing to assimilate:
Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if [they] had no agency in [their] own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.
There is a huge gap between the relatively small number of nonwhite people who have been able to be incorporated into the socio-political establishment, and the crude and cruel reality faced by the majority of ordinary nonwhite people. Once a person’s non-whiteness becomes impossible to ignore or accommodate, they do not receive the avenues afforded to Southern European immigrants to “join the club”.
Racism is a social phenomenon triggered by sensory information, potently visual, but also fed by sound (language, accent, music), and smell (e.g., food odors), that then operates on the basis of the ideological, antagonistic constructs of superiority over and contempt toward the identified targets for racist rejection. The overwhelming majority of the peoples from the various Asian countries, from indigenous Pacific Islanders, from Africa, from Latin America and the Caribbean do not pass the whiteness test.[2]
The overwhelming majority of the peoples from the various Asian countries, from indigenous Pacific Islanders, from Africa, from Latin America and the Caribbean do not pass the whiteness test.
Asian-Americans have been the subject of extensive debates about their caricatured virtue as the so-called “model minority.” This is not only a characterization resulting from very selective pickings of a set of peoples with significantly different national, religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. It is also a pliable and ultimately unstable one. Once the coronavirus pandemic exploded, President Trump’s racist manipulations instigated a wave of violence against Asian-Americans who were attacked by racists obsessed with punishing anything they could construe as Chinese.
As I wrote above, assimilation is intensely political. While various nonwhite sectors of society remain excluded from the notion of “American-ness” (essentially whiteness), and will suffer the relentless assumption and assertion of their “outsider-ness”, their desire not to be excluded, to “belong,” propels them down the road of accepting many of the major political precepts and limits that perpetuate the white supremacist state. In this sense, the ruling class is quite successful in accomplishing its only absolutely acceptable element of assimilation of nonwhite peoples: the vowing by most nonwhites (as well as most whites) to uphold the priorities, rules, and core tenets of the state that sustains the ruling class; a state that is at its core a white supremacist, colonial settler, imperialist state.
Sisyphus’s Path
This political assimilation is a contradictory imposition, destined for recurrent bouts of conflict between the ruling class and its governing apparatus on one hand, and those who suffer directly from white supremacy and colonialism on the other. The system has always resorted to the reestablishment of stability by a combination of force (e.g., the police and other paramilitary law and order bodies) and cooptation. Cooptation entails political assimilation. In his book Stamped from the Beginning, African-American scholar Ibrim X. Kendi describes how throughout U.S. history, the status quo benefited from the assorted manifestations of (political) assimilation of individual leaders or organizations of Blacks fighting against the various expressions of racism they faced. From slavery to Jim Crow, and thereafter. Kendi frequently deploys to the notion of uplift suasion to refer to these assimilationist strategies:
Historically, Black people have by and large figured the smartest thing we could do for ourselves is to partake in uplift suasion…Beginning around the 1790s, abolitionists urged the growing number of free Blacks to exhibit upstanding behavior before white people, believing they would thereby undermine the racists beliefs behind slavery…Everyone who has witnessed the historic presidency of Barack Obama—and the historic opposition to him—should know full well that the more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash. Uplift suasion, as a strategy for racial progress has failed.
However, Kendi himself fails to acknowledge that Obama’s persistent scolding of the Black population for their “bad choices,” as discussed above, is nothing but a continuation of the uplift suasion strategy, and an overwhelmingly assimilationist stunt. Kendi’s alternative is far-reaching legislation, within the same framework navigated by Obama. The whole project of finally overcoming all racist injustices by attempting to partake in the political horse-trading of an inherently white supremacist polity; to play by its rules and to limit itself to what is acceptable to this polity is nothing but a prescription for an unending pursuit—akin to Sisyphus’s perpetual rolling of his boulder up the hill.
During the 1960s, out of the great struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, a segment of the militants went on to found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panthers understood that the white supremacist state was not an instrument for their liberation, but instead the instrument of their oppression, and that it needed to be destroyed, in their quest for liberation. That is why they were labeled “un-American,” and mercilessly brutalized.
Once again, we are at a crossroads. Much water has run under the bridge since the Black Panthers were politically and physically nullified. The most recalcitrant and racist sectors of society transferred their political loyalties from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party after the Democratic Party chose to coopt racial/ethnic minorities and women. President Nixon actively courted these hardcore racists during his presidency. The cooptation maneuvers of the Democratic Party proved to be successful in the path toward political assimilation. The revolutionary aspirations of the Black Panther Party were quickly buried. Five decades of political uplift suasion and assimilation have produced a history of firsts (e.g., first Black president, first Puerto Rican Supreme Court justice) while the continued and overt marginalization, abuse and neglect of the majority of the nonwhite population cannot be denied at the height of 2020.
Furthermore, the issue of assimilation into a white supremacist state for the victims of colonialism (for example, the Indigenous peoples of the continental U.S., the Kanaka Maoli and other Pacific Islanders, Puerto Ricans, Native Alaskans) entails their elimination as a people. As such it is an existential matter, and if successful, a crime against humanity.
The response of large swaths of the liberal white population to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is very instructive, as was the response of the politically assimilated nonwhite sectors. Ginsburg was celebrated as an icon that ostensibly held the line against an emergent dictatorship, yet this is a member of a Supreme Court that has for centuries (and to this day) upheld the right of the colonial settler state to hold absolute sovereignty (and power) over the peoples and lands it colonized. The acknowledged mistakes made by Ginsburg in her judicial history, treated as blemishes in an otherwise “exemplary career,” explicitly constitute the reliable role she played in sustaining and upholding a system that at best considers us colonized people as expendable. Her “mistake” is our erasure. Thus, we continue to be sacrificial.
The acknowledged mistakes made by Ginsburg in her judicial history, treated as blemishes in an otherwise ‘exemplary career,’ explicitly constitute the reliable role she played in sustaining and upholding a system that at best considers us colonized people as expendable.
If assimilation is not possible, nor desirable, what is the alternative then? Is a permanent state of circling the wagons an alternative? Let’s take as an example a neighborhood of immigrants. For nonwhite immigrants, these neighborhoods tend to be segregated in parts of the cities that are considered dangerous, undesirable, eyesores, frequently in disrepair, and for practical purposes abandoned by municipal and county governments (except for brutal policing practices). Yet these are also vibrant neighborhoods in which recent arrivals find support from previously arrived immigrants, tools for economic survival, and the possibility of continuing to practice their own customs.
Since the 1990s, many of these neighborhoods, and also those of Black communities have become the target of gentrification, which has been described as a new form of urban colonialism. The desperately needed resources necessary for these neighborhoods are rarely on offer, or in sclerotic supply, and rehabilitation of the physical infrastructure and services is only conceived under the auspices of gentrification, which ends up destroying, displacing, and scattering these communities.
Multiracial militancy
Truncated assimilation into a white supremacist polity and/or precarious segregation are not alternatives. The source of the problem lies in the nature of the system; in its foundations. If true justice is going to be available to the overwhelming majority of nonwhite people inhabiting the U.S., the foundations of this state must be dismantled. This is a project of a tall order, particularly because as a minority of the population, our power to dismantle it is not sufficient. Proponents of Black Marxism, Shemon and Arturo, explore this consequential hurdle in their recent essay “The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising”:
[W]e nonetheless believe that some basic realities need to be grappled with. If revolution is on the horizon, our strategy must take white people into account. The first and most obvious reason is that they constitute a gigantic part of the population. According to the US Census, this country is 60.1% European-white. Let that sink in. The next largest group is Latino at 18.5%, followed by Black or African American at 13.4%. Next is Asians at 5.9%, and Indigenous people at 1.3%. While the idea that white people are immutably racist is understandable, it leaves the question of how to deal with this massive segment of society unanswered—that is, other than by means of race wars or racial balkanization that would only end up reinforcing white domination and the genocide of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color.
Shemon and Arturo go on to make a distinction between racist and anti-racist whites, in the context of struggle and class politics. They describe the white members of the working class as historically slow to engage in mass militant activity, yet they highlight plenty of examples of periods in which they have engaged radical struggle against capitalists and their state. It should not be surprising that Black and other nonwhite sectors of the population have broken out more frequently in militant struggle, and questioned the organization of society at its most basic levels, before white workers, particularly since the second half of the 20th century.
After all, the urgency of self-defense, of mitigating a miserable existence directly placed them in sharp conflict with the white supremacist state. Shemon and Arturo point out to the undeniable multiracial character of the current Black Lives Matter uprisings, and the participation of working-class youth, in which a number of them have been killed by the police or by organized white supremacists.
The violence of the state against young white activists also expressed itself in the Occupy Movement of the early 2010s, and in the anti-globalization struggles of the late 1990s. The impunity with which the white supremacist state displays wanton violence against people of color establishes as a fact on the ground that it can be as also be applied to other sectors of the population, in the case of their insubordination to the priorities and interests of the ruling class.
The opportunity of wide sectors of white workers to recognize the role of the police and the state in general (e.g., the courts) in suffocating their own lives has been smothered by the notably long absence of sustained mass working class militancy, in the form of strikes, strike waves, and other work-related actions, for several generations. They have not experienced on a large scale, over a sustained period of time—as opposed to localized, relatively isolated events—the actions of the police in smashing picket lines, arresting strikers, judges imposing draconian punishment, etc. Therefore, they have not been able to generalize these lessons regarding the sanctioned violence of the state.
The impunity with which the white supremacist state displays wanton violence against people of color establishes as a fact on the ground that it can also be applied to other sectors of the population, in the case of their insubordination to the priorities and interests of the ruling class.
Yet it is no secret that the quality of life of wide sectors of white workers has eroded sharply in the past four decades. The levels of despair of these white workers, expressed in sobering rates of alcoholism, the opioid crisis, and suicide rates, reveal not only a deterioration of their lives, but of the objective conditions that can ideologically tie these workers to the ways of a society grounded on a white supremacist state.
To be more accurate, white workers subscribe to these ideas and conclusions to various degrees. Some white workers may be ready to jump into a racial civil war in pursuit of a full-blown white supremacist social rearrangement. Another segment would not be able to stomach such a development yet remain politically paralyzed. Others will readily fight along nonwhites as committed anti-racists. Which way they will go is not written in stone.
As Shemon and Arturo indicate, layers of these white workers have already been pulled into the recent anti-racist struggles. The degree to which the white working-class youth have been economically obliterated in the past three decades is a propelling factor. The issue at hand is not whether struggles for significant reforms are useless. Of course, they are not. A successful push back against police brutality saves lives.
The key issue is whether that is enough and whether these gains can become unassailable while we live submerged in a society that was born and continues to be built upon white supremacist, colonial settler, and imperialist foundations. The U.S. ruling class may at times show a degree of flexibility and tactical cooptation to smother struggles that have the potential to destabilize and overthrow their rule, but that is far from surrendering the foundations of its power and wealth.
The viciousness that the state apparatus has displayed toward nonwhite people struggling militantly against the basis of their oppression, such as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, is not only due to racism. At its core lies the fact that these movements question the legitimacy of the white supremacist and colonial state.
What our rulers fear the most is a successful alliance between white and nonwhite workers. It is no wonder that once some leaders of these historical struggles reached the conclusion that a multiracial and anticapitalist struggle was ultimately necessary—they were murdered (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton). Once again, we are at a crossroads. Do we take the Sisyphus road, or do we organize to destroy the beast?
I want to propose that as a first step we loudly say, “Assimilate This!”
Notes
[1] In some instances, I will make exceptions, in order to avoid cumbersome formulations. For example, I will avoid using Mexican U.S. Americans or African U.S. Americans, in favor of Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, respectively. At times, I will use quotes to highlight the chauvinistic and racialized meaning of the term “American.”
[2] The legacy of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, with its imposition of slavery much earlier than in the U.S., and with its own particularities regarding miscegenation with the conquered indigenous subjects, created a context for the manipulation of the various national myths of mestizaje, in which, nonetheless, the ruling classes aimed at maintaining their Europeanness, and have thus presided over their own racist hierarchies. In such a context, a portion of immigrants from those regions may be recruited into whiteness in the U.S., if they choose to do so. This is an issue that requires inquiry in a separate essay.
Héctor Reyes has been a Puerto Rican independence and socialist activist for 38 years. He is a retired, tenured teacher of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he served as Chapter Chair and Vice Chair of his faculty union. In the U.S., he has been a leader and activist against racism, white supremacy, police brutality, the death penalty, and for immigrant rights and those of the wrongly convicted. During his first experience as a college activist he helped lead a student strike against a tuition increase at his University of Puerto Rico campus in the early 1980s. He has written many articles about the issues described above in various journals, magazines and other publishing outlets.
