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Comment by KittenInABox | Hacker News Reader

The concept of "white" is not a consequence of the melting pot idea. The concept of "white" was explicitly born as a way to justify enslaving and treating a group of people as property for generations.

If one wants to solve the injustices of the past, its important to actually acknowledge the reality of those injustices and how they feed into modern day. The "melting pot" theory I suspect was always a form of injustice in of itself, because it expected people to simply forget what happened to them and accept that they'll never get an apology have amends made for them.

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Most “white” people in America today were not considered so 100-150 years ago. Irish, Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Levantine Arabs, and pretty much everyone other than English, Germans and French.

My point is that this identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing, but now let’s rename it to just “American” and include all ethnic groups, instead of going backwards.

French-Canadian were too considered like most other catholics as different and undesirable : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Maine

Yep, White used to be more or less synonymous with WASP. White Anglo Saxon Protestant.

Most "white" people in America today were never treated like property the way black people have been in america for generations. Most "white" people in America have never dealt with the degree of dehumanization that occurred to black people in America. The degree of what has happened to black people in America is overwhelmingly moreso than any other race save for Native Americans.

It's extremely important to acknowledge that the barriers to social cohesion for certain races are significantly higher than others. We are in living memory where black children had to be accompanied by the military for their protection because they dared attend the same school as white people.

I didn’t say it would be as easy for everyone. Just that this is a better route (melting pot) than a return to separatism.

I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to what I’m saying.

The word ‘white’ means a lot of different things. Those groups may not have been considered white socially but they were always legally white for the purposes of immigration, not being enslaved, not being subjected to Jim Crow.

As a result, populations poorly represented in 1890 were prevented from immigrating in proportionate numbers—especially affecting Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews, as well as Poles and other Slavs.[1][3][4] According to the US Department of State's Office of the Historian, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

Of course they didn’t have it as bad as black Americans, but that isn’t the topic of this discussion.

> "[white] identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing.."

Social cohesion largely as a means of sharpening anti-Blackness and of labor control, particularly during and after the defeat of Reconstruction and due to growing relevance of the industrial organized labor movement. Du Bois did an immense amount of work critiquing pretty much exactly this.

The entire history of cultures becoming Americanized was not purely an anti-black project. The history of Jews in America is a good example and they were subject to Ivy League quotas well after WW2.

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