In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigrants began seeking citizenship through naturalization. With a massive influx of immigrants that were not clearly White or Black, the government needed to establish racial definitions. There was a notion of superiority that was associated with being “white”. When immigrants soon realized the value and importance of “whiteness” in America’s society, they quickly applied for citizenship. In response to their movement, the government created racial and non-racial
end white citizenship, because universal inclusion will not address the root issue that white citizenship is inherently etched indelibly into the fabric of American politics. Opponents may argue
arrival of immigrants in the United States in the 19th and early 20th century created many problems with how to deal with new cultures and naturalization of citizens of different races. These immigrants faced much adversity in the process of gaining citizenship due to racial qualifications for naturalization and fitting into separate race categories. Since white was the superior race in the United States, immigrants fought to prove their qualifications to fit into the “white” category in many ways. Throughout
legal citizenship. For instance, the Naturalization Act of 1790 excluded both free blacks and Asian Americans from U.S. citizenship, while the 1870 revision expanded the white racial qualification to include “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” keeping aliens of Asian origin excluded. Even under harsh conditions, Asian immigrants did not give up attempting to be naturalized after 1870. However, it is remarkable that no Asian immigrants sought naturalized citizenship by claiming
Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color offers innovative insight into the concept of “race” and the evolution of “whiteness” throughout American history. Jacobson focuses his analysis on the instability of racial identification over time and how race has been created and perceived throughout different stages of history. He states in his introduction that “one of the tasks before the historian is to discover which racial categories are useful to whom at a given moment, and why” (p
Captain Ahab’s eulogy of whiteness shows that the word “white” implies more than a chromatic description. “White” is an untenable perfection that has haunted the American psyche since colonial times. The idea of “white spiritual superiority” can only be enforced by a terrorist politico-legal system, based on brutalizing the non-whites and creating a national fantasy. A national fantasy defined by Lauren Berlant as the means “to designate how national culture becomes local through the images, narratives
Postcolonial historian Matthew Frye Jacobson in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race traces the “racial odyssey” of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who were at first regarded as racial other, and then relegated to the status between black and white, and finally inclusive as Caucasian white. These in-between groups were classified as “Hebrews,” “Celts,” “Mediterraneans,” “Iberics,” “Slavs,” “Teutons,” and the like in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
The American political system has long been distinguished by debate surrounding Immigration and Citizenship. The arbitrary manner in which our policy has evolved, ensures exclusivity regarding access to citizenship. Despite the pervasive narrative of the United States being a republic created for and by immigrants, Immigration and Citizenship remains the longest running conflict in American politics. During the 2016 election we bore witness to a campaign run on nationalist rhetoric, mobilizing a
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt appointed the President’s Commission on Naturalization to gather opinions from members of the court system and immigration experts regarding ways to reform naturalization. Citizenship through naturalization, since it had previously been administered at the locale level, had been used by local groups to garner support for their political party. For instance, if a judge suspected that the person applying for naturalization would vote in favour of the party he supported in
“Miss America, National Identity, and the Identity Politics of Whiteness” by Sarah Banet Wieser and “The Patriotic American is a Thin American: Fatness and National Identity in the Biggest Loser” by Cassandra L. Jones tease out the intricate relationship between beauty, race and citizenship through the analysis of two popular beauty and fitness competitions the United States, the Miss America pageant and The Biggest Loser television show. Both argue that the contestants, particularly the winners