Lots of progress on race over the past century. For white people especially.
by digby
Dara Lind at Vox has a fascinating story today about how “race” was once understood in America. Let’s just say it was a lot more complicated than it is today. Even when I was growing up there was a ton of “ethnic” humor and stereotyping about “Eyetalians” and “Polacks” (and, of course, the usual hideous stuff that persists to this day.) The world of my father seemed to be organized around much finer differences of ethnic and racial identities to a much greater extent than they are today.
The article features an interactive map which shows how each state categorized their population at the turn of the 20th century. Here’s a handy list of the various ways it was understood back then:
Lind explains:
The hierarchy of the table reflects the conventional wisdom of the time — eugenics and social Darwinism hypothesized that the Nordic races were the most evolved, that southern and eastern Europeans were less so, and that non-Europeans (who are barely worth a mention on the immigration map) were the “lowest,” least-evolved peoples.
There wasn’t universal agreement on what the races actually were, but the federal government appears to have used “Nordic, Celtic, Slavic and Iberic” regularly to categorize the immigrants coming into America. A medical journal article published about a decade after this map expresses concern about the “preponderance of the Iberic and Slavic races” among recent immigrants, because of “their poorer physical and mental equipment, and their radically different ideals and standards of living as compared with the Celtic and Teutonic races.”
By the point that article was written, the government was beginning to respond to fears like the ones the authors expressed — by moving toward widespread restrictions on immigration. (Asian immigrants had been excluded since the 19th century, but the US government didn’t put global immigration restrictions in place until the early 1920s.) Under the strict quota system set by the Immigration Act of 1924, only 164,667 immigrants would be allowed to come into the US per year — fewer than settled in the state of Pennsylvania alone in the year 1903.
It’s tempting to point this out as a sign of our incredible progress as a civilization but to my way of thinking it doesn’t really prove much. We have simplified our racial categories to make all those Europeans and Slavs equals which is nice. For white people. Unfortunately, all those “others” are still …. “others.”
.