“Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing the lovely white and red?”— Ben Franklin
“I advanced it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time or circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”- Thomas Jefferson
“There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together... while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor having the superior position assigned to the white race.”- Abraham Lincoln
MarlonRando — those perfectly illustrate the prevailing attitudes of the Founders and leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries. They are historically significant, but they actually reinforce my point rather than refute it.
They demonstrate that the ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ boundaries were constantly being drawn and redrawn. The fact that figures like Franklin or Jefferson categorized people based on those rigid, narrow definitions—even excluding groups we now consider fully ‘white’—proves that these labels have never been static.
My point in bringing up the historical anxiety surrounding German and Dutch immigration wasn’t to suggest that the 1800s were a period of enlightened equality. It was to highlight that the ‘American mainstream’ is a moving target. The people who were once viewed as ‘swarthy’ like the Germans or culturally incompatible eventually assimilated into the very category they were initially excluded from.
My point remains that we should focus on the cultivation of shared values and a common culture—those are the true pillars of a stable society, not the rigid maintenance of past racial definitions.
For that matter even the Japanese — they assimilated the Jomon people and were ethnically mixed until the 7th century, but then become isolationist except for their conquest of Okinawa - and the Okinawans were ethnically distinct