“Whoa, you said what now!?”
*Makes “oh well” face at the computer screen*
When immigrants come to the United States to be White, it contributes to the anti-blackness in this country.
I took a class called Sociology of Race in college and after learning extensively about immigrants (of all colors and ethnicities), the main takeaway from that class is the title of this article. I hope this article can provide some insight as to why this statement is made and show how a lot of immigrants are obsessed with assimilating into whiteness.
Immigrant Minority Groups and Colonized Minority Groups are different.
In the book “Diversity and Society: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender” by Joseph F. Stepnick and Robert Healey, there is a theory called Blauner’s Hypothesis that defines a Colonized Minority group.
Here is a quote from the book:
The dominant group assigns minority group members to positions such as slaves, from which any form of assimilation is extremely difficult and perhaps even forbidden by the dominant group. Thus, minority groups created by colonization experience harsher and more persistent rejection and oppression than groups created by immigration.
Colonized minority groups (i.e. African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Indigenous Mexican-Americans) in a nutshell are minorities that don’t have certain privileges as any other immigrant groups as a result of them being here without a choice.
A lot of immigrants who come to America wonder, “Why is it so hard for African-Americans to make progress? Why can’t they just work hard like my family did?”
Well, that’s because African-Americans were forced to come to America with no food, water, money, or even knowledge of the land — and that was if they were lucky enough to survive the Middle Passage to America.
For most immigrants, this is not the case. They usually have one of these two things:
The privilege of getting the choice to come to America
Some sort of game plan and a good amount of human capital (i.e. education, money)
Immigrants want to assimilate into American culture so they can get their part of the pie. That means assimilating into whiteness.
Most immigrants are eager to create a better life for themselves (Who wouldn’t). Unfortunately, that means getting as close to whiteness as possible since White people are the standard of assimilation in America.
But assimilating to whiteness means that you are also contributing to anti-blackness too. We can’t forget that immigrants can contribute to the racism that already exists in America towards Black folks.
For example, we all know that infamous picture of George Floyd laying on the ground while that bitch ass White cop wouldn’t get off his neck. If you look at the other cops involved in the incident, one of them is Asian.
My sister has had a personal experience of this since her neighbor is an African man from another country. He’s never acted friendly to her, yet when she sees him interact with her White neighbors, all of a sudden he’s no stranger to a conversation.
This line of thinking can get destructive, further keeping Colonized Minority Groups at the bottom of American society.
Final Thought
For the record, refugees who leave war-torn countries are exempt from my overall statement. While they are still immigrants, they have a lot of struggles similar to that of Colonized Minority Groups (i.e. Cambodians, Haitians, etc).
As we all know, White supremacy is a game that everyone has to play. Some are equipped to play it better than others.
All in all, immigrants have some sort of privilege because they had the option to come to America and/or they have capital with them already. They can participate in an anti-black system so they can assimilate into whiteness.
All minorities aren’t the same. They have different experiences that affect their status in America. So please, don’t call me a person of color.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Chris Barbalis on Unsplash