Welcome to America!
What I want to talk about is communities, and how we build them, and how the United States became the melting pot it is claimed to be.
Let me begin by asking, “Where is Chinatown?” “Where is Germantown?” “Where is Little Italy?” We all know the answer to those questions, don’t we?
My spell-checker agrees; there are no red squiggly lines of doom on my screen. Chinatown, Germantown and Little Italy --- all acceptable according to my spell-checker.
But, let’s now ask where is Africantown? Okay, that didn’t work. Where is Africatown? Nope.
Maybe there’s a racial bias in my spell-checker? Maybe?
I think this is a curious problem.
Let’s see if we can understand this alleged bias of my spell-checker a bit by taking a broader look at how the United States came to be. Maybe if we wonder about the reasons there are no Africantowns, we can arrive at an answer.
Starting with our european predecessors, we can see that when they came to the new land that among their human cargo was a community. They landed as a community, and, as a community, they went to work. They built trading posts that eventually became villages and towns. There were early struggles and life was tough for the first few frontiersmen, but the communities ultimately established themselves well enough that future immigrants knew, before departing their homes from abroad, that they would have a safe place to land when they arrived. Stores and supply lines awaited their arrival; trade routes were established; the natives had been quelled (as was the regrettable fashion of the time); there was a safe harbor. There was a criminal element, to be sure, but safety and opportunity awaited.
The Chinese, Italian, Irish and German immigrants who also came to our shores might have been met with some hostility by the mostly British and French locals on arrival, but they were allowed to piggy-back their way into our country and build their own communities, too. They came by ship, had a place to land, and communities sprang up. They, too, came seeking something better, or, at least, different, and found it through hard work and the support of a well-established ethnic community where they could at least have some familiar surroundings in an unfamiliar land. Life was tough as they made their way, as a people, with many or most working in sweatshops or mines for pittance wages, but they at least earned real money and were allowed to spend it --- and by spending, they built communities around themselves.
These communities evolved, too. First, there was nothing, then, over time, the community built itself, member-by-member and ship-by-ship. Hardships gave way to bounty. A few adventurers, or a military expedition, gave way to forts, villages, towns and, eventually, cities. And, it all happened in the natural course of things. People came in droves and there always seemed to be space to hold them and a place for them to go and socialize among familiar faces as they acclimated themselves to their new surroundings.
These communities were also built upon the shoulders of visionaries who saw a prosperous future. It wasn’t just the poor and downtrodden who came to our shores; the prosperous, too, came, and through their efforts, they helped to drive the evolution of these communities.
Even today, we see the marks of these communities. We still know where Chinatown is in San Francisco, for example; it’s right near the port of disembarkation the Chinese immigrants used as they came to our shores into the waiting arms of their community. They came here, positively, to work and find a new life, and did so on the railroads or in the gold mines, doing menial tasks that no highborn european was willing to do, thus making them a commodity among that class. But, they were paid, and, with their meager wages earned from their menial labor, they also built stores, restaurants, saloons and opium dens, houses of prostitution, religious centers and homes. They too, eventually had the advantage of knowing before they departed their homeland that there was a safe landing that waited for them. It was a support system they had that helped transition them into our socio-economic world.
So it is across our nation. Every major city has a remnant of an ethnic neighborhood that was created by the immigrant community as they established their roots on our shores. I hear, for example, that the Great Lakes states like Minnesota and Wisconsin have a representative Scandinavian heritage. These days we go to theaters to watch movies and laugh at the peculiarities of the community that sprang up and eventually became Minnesota and Wisconsin. They left their mark.
The legacy of our immigrants is there for all to see: The Melting Pot, so it is called. The bottom line is that entire populations of immigrants were absorbed into the local economies without warfare or bloodshed, and, in many cases, were actually welcomed in the process.
And, when I take the long view on all of it, I see no welcoming committee for our African immigrants. None. There was no community waiting to welcome them when they stepped off the boat. They didn’t even come here seeking a vision; they were simply carried here not knowing what awaited them. And, rather than trickle themselves into a convenient ethnic community, they were instead herded into pens and cages and traded, like horses or mules, among the very same people who welcomed the Germans and Italians as equals, despite their cultural peculiarities.
And, as I recently learned when researching the US Census from 1860, these humans, who were treated as semi-intelligent mules, numbered in the millions, comprising about 13% of the total US population. And only 5% of them were free, where freedom meant something as simple as being paid for work, owning property, and being allowed some degree of self-determination in their future. Those who were held as property saw no such luxuries; they saw nothing like an education, or learning how to use money or how to run a business or be a tradesman, or even enjoy the simple possession of personal property in any real sense of the word. One didn’t even know from day-to-day whether they’d be allowed to stay with their family, for even that wasn’t allowed if it proved to be inconvenient to the slaveholder, and a sale could mean that you were packing light for the trip and would lose whatever you had in the first place.
Now consider that, one day in 1865, they were all released, roughly 4-million people, at once, without education, money or property, into a mostly hostile society that, for more than a hundred-years after, was resistant to integration, and in a large sense continues to resist to this day, doing what they can to skirt the boundaries of the law.
It really requires a pause to grasp the enormity of the situation: Four-million people without property or education, turned loose, into well-established and resistant communities. Just like that. It’s a daunting vision. It’s an economic nightmare trying to absorb that kind of change, overnight.
To put it into perspective, let’s imagine that over the next year or so, we had to “absorb” an alien population of 45-million uneducated poor people into our economy, and, to make matters worse, they are all distinctly identifiable as aliens on sight - a visible target for hostility. Presently, conservatives are screaming about illegal immigrants numbering significantly less than than 45-million, and what few they complain about have active and vital communities for their transition.
Under these circumstances, who has time to build a community? It’s a shock to the system.
The ultimate reality is that our wronged African brothers and sisters, well, they needed us to welcome them into their freedom, and we let them down. While turning them loose was a good move, by all means, we didn’t take the additional and necessary step of bothering to welcome them into our communities. And, in the south, it was actual hostility, resistance, and even sabotage that they were met with.
And we wonder now, 150-years since, why there are ghettos.
Some ignorant people will now try to argue that this only supports the idea that they were better off as slaves, and I will smite you for saying that. This does not support that conclusion at all.
We - and I say “we” with the knowledge that I was born after a hundred-years had passed - had an obligation to welcome our black friends, with open arms, into our communities when the horrible age of slavery ended in this country. The circumstances demanded that.
And we let them down. We continued to treat them as less than human and like an unwelcome invasion, even though it was “we” who had brought them here in the first place.
Seriously, folks. We eventually had to legislate their equal treatment in society. It needed to be legislated because the “natural course of things” failed us. Can you believe that? A law had to be written and voted upon --- several hundred-years after the original mistake was made - as a weak attempt to make it all right.
The mere necessity of such legislation appalls me. There are no laws on the books begging equality for Italians or Irish, are there? There was never a need to write such legislation. The reason is that we welcomed them as equals. In 1860, in fact, the immigrant population was growing faster than the slave population, and the census-takers seemed downright pleased about it. We were all groovy with that back then, weren’t we?
The grand irony is that some of those new immigrants adopted the American custom of hostility toward Africans in our society.
And, there were naysayers in 1965 who said that legislating things would make it worse, that it would trigger resentment. Nowadays, I really wonder if those naysayers might have had a hand in fulfilling their own prophecy, because the hate still persists; one side of their mouth was saying that it would be harmful to black people, but the other side of their mouth was barking orders on how to use the legislation to cause that harm.
It still burns. Tragically, the legislation was needed, even if only because 100-years of “natural” integration had apparently failed, and it was never for lack of black people trying. White people, it turns out, weren’t too hot on the idea of lending their sympathies to their black brothers and sisters; no one wanted to spend a moment and consider that maybe that African-American’s great-grandfather might have had severe disadvantages, disadvantages no other immigrant group to the United States has ever had, when he found himself standing on a street-corner in a hostile south, wondering where he was and how he was going to get-by, in 1865.
I, personally, don’t know the particular answer to how we solve this problem today, other than try to do my own part and spread the word where I can.
But, such matters are always best dealt with through an attitude change, and I encourage that we change our attitude. If we look at a black ghetto neighborhood, then we should probably spend less time condemning the denizens as layabout no good hoodlums who are getting what they deserve, and instead take a moment and realize the role that we played in putting them there, whether it was you and I, personally, or someone else from a century ago. The fact is, regardless of who is at fault, it is a problem now.
To solve it, we merely have to extend a welcome to these people. It can be as small a gesture as a greeting, or as big as lending our sympathy and trying to help. That’s all we have to do.
The present situation isn’t really my fault, or your fault, or our government’s fault. The initial problem that sparked it all is buried in the past --- a long dead part of American history --- perpetrated upon this latest generation by a generation of dead people who didn’t know how to welcome a flood of newly freed humanity. They didn’t realize the gravity of the situation, or the economic and social impact of their actions at the time. It’s their fault, to be sure, but we can forgive them because they are dead.
But, we the living, need to make this thing right. We can make it right. Forget about the past except as a lesson and let’s do what we need to do. Somehow.
Let me begin by asking, “Where is Chinatown?” “Where is Germantown?” “Where is Little Italy?” We all know the answer to those questions, don’t we?
My spell-checker agrees; there are no red squiggly lines of doom on my screen. Chinatown, Germantown and Little Italy --- all acceptable according to my spell-checker.
But, let’s now ask where is Africantown? Okay, that didn’t work. Where is Africatown? Nope.
Maybe there’s a racial bias in my spell-checker? Maybe?
I think this is a curious problem.
Let’s see if we can understand this alleged bias of my spell-checker a bit by taking a broader look at how the United States came to be. Maybe if we wonder about the reasons there are no Africantowns, we can arrive at an answer.
Starting with our european predecessors, we can see that when they came to the new land that among their human cargo was a community. They landed as a community, and, as a community, they went to work. They built trading posts that eventually became villages and towns. There were early struggles and life was tough for the first few frontiersmen, but the communities ultimately established themselves well enough that future immigrants knew, before departing their homes from abroad, that they would have a safe place to land when they arrived. Stores and supply lines awaited their arrival; trade routes were established; the natives had been quelled (as was the regrettable fashion of the time); there was a safe harbor. There was a criminal element, to be sure, but safety and opportunity awaited.
The Chinese, Italian, Irish and German immigrants who also came to our shores might have been met with some hostility by the mostly British and French locals on arrival, but they were allowed to piggy-back their way into our country and build their own communities, too. They came by ship, had a place to land, and communities sprang up. They, too, came seeking something better, or, at least, different, and found it through hard work and the support of a well-established ethnic community where they could at least have some familiar surroundings in an unfamiliar land. Life was tough as they made their way, as a people, with many or most working in sweatshops or mines for pittance wages, but they at least earned real money and were allowed to spend it --- and by spending, they built communities around themselves.
These communities evolved, too. First, there was nothing, then, over time, the community built itself, member-by-member and ship-by-ship. Hardships gave way to bounty. A few adventurers, or a military expedition, gave way to forts, villages, towns and, eventually, cities. And, it all happened in the natural course of things. People came in droves and there always seemed to be space to hold them and a place for them to go and socialize among familiar faces as they acclimated themselves to their new surroundings.
These communities were also built upon the shoulders of visionaries who saw a prosperous future. It wasn’t just the poor and downtrodden who came to our shores; the prosperous, too, came, and through their efforts, they helped to drive the evolution of these communities.
Even today, we see the marks of these communities. We still know where Chinatown is in San Francisco, for example; it’s right near the port of disembarkation the Chinese immigrants used as they came to our shores into the waiting arms of their community. They came here, positively, to work and find a new life, and did so on the railroads or in the gold mines, doing menial tasks that no highborn european was willing to do, thus making them a commodity among that class. But, they were paid, and, with their meager wages earned from their menial labor, they also built stores, restaurants, saloons and opium dens, houses of prostitution, religious centers and homes. They too, eventually had the advantage of knowing before they departed their homeland that there was a safe landing that waited for them. It was a support system they had that helped transition them into our socio-economic world.
So it is across our nation. Every major city has a remnant of an ethnic neighborhood that was created by the immigrant community as they established their roots on our shores. I hear, for example, that the Great Lakes states like Minnesota and Wisconsin have a representative Scandinavian heritage. These days we go to theaters to watch movies and laugh at the peculiarities of the community that sprang up and eventually became Minnesota and Wisconsin. They left their mark.
The legacy of our immigrants is there for all to see: The Melting Pot, so it is called. The bottom line is that entire populations of immigrants were absorbed into the local economies without warfare or bloodshed, and, in many cases, were actually welcomed in the process.
And, when I take the long view on all of it, I see no welcoming committee for our African immigrants. None. There was no community waiting to welcome them when they stepped off the boat. They didn’t even come here seeking a vision; they were simply carried here not knowing what awaited them. And, rather than trickle themselves into a convenient ethnic community, they were instead herded into pens and cages and traded, like horses or mules, among the very same people who welcomed the Germans and Italians as equals, despite their cultural peculiarities.
And, as I recently learned when researching the US Census from 1860, these humans, who were treated as semi-intelligent mules, numbered in the millions, comprising about 13% of the total US population. And only 5% of them were free, where freedom meant something as simple as being paid for work, owning property, and being allowed some degree of self-determination in their future. Those who were held as property saw no such luxuries; they saw nothing like an education, or learning how to use money or how to run a business or be a tradesman, or even enjoy the simple possession of personal property in any real sense of the word. One didn’t even know from day-to-day whether they’d be allowed to stay with their family, for even that wasn’t allowed if it proved to be inconvenient to the slaveholder, and a sale could mean that you were packing light for the trip and would lose whatever you had in the first place.
Now consider that, one day in 1865, they were all released, roughly 4-million people, at once, without education, money or property, into a mostly hostile society that, for more than a hundred-years after, was resistant to integration, and in a large sense continues to resist to this day, doing what they can to skirt the boundaries of the law.
It really requires a pause to grasp the enormity of the situation: Four-million people without property or education, turned loose, into well-established and resistant communities. Just like that. It’s a daunting vision. It’s an economic nightmare trying to absorb that kind of change, overnight.
To put it into perspective, let’s imagine that over the next year or so, we had to “absorb” an alien population of 45-million uneducated poor people into our economy, and, to make matters worse, they are all distinctly identifiable as aliens on sight - a visible target for hostility. Presently, conservatives are screaming about illegal immigrants numbering significantly less than than 45-million, and what few they complain about have active and vital communities for their transition.
Under these circumstances, who has time to build a community? It’s a shock to the system.
The ultimate reality is that our wronged African brothers and sisters, well, they needed us to welcome them into their freedom, and we let them down. While turning them loose was a good move, by all means, we didn’t take the additional and necessary step of bothering to welcome them into our communities. And, in the south, it was actual hostility, resistance, and even sabotage that they were met with.
And we wonder now, 150-years since, why there are ghettos.
Some ignorant people will now try to argue that this only supports the idea that they were better off as slaves, and I will smite you for saying that. This does not support that conclusion at all.
We - and I say “we” with the knowledge that I was born after a hundred-years had passed - had an obligation to welcome our black friends, with open arms, into our communities when the horrible age of slavery ended in this country. The circumstances demanded that.
And we let them down. We continued to treat them as less than human and like an unwelcome invasion, even though it was “we” who had brought them here in the first place.
Seriously, folks. We eventually had to legislate their equal treatment in society. It needed to be legislated because the “natural course of things” failed us. Can you believe that? A law had to be written and voted upon --- several hundred-years after the original mistake was made - as a weak attempt to make it all right.
The mere necessity of such legislation appalls me. There are no laws on the books begging equality for Italians or Irish, are there? There was never a need to write such legislation. The reason is that we welcomed them as equals. In 1860, in fact, the immigrant population was growing faster than the slave population, and the census-takers seemed downright pleased about it. We were all groovy with that back then, weren’t we?
The grand irony is that some of those new immigrants adopted the American custom of hostility toward Africans in our society.
And, there were naysayers in 1965 who said that legislating things would make it worse, that it would trigger resentment. Nowadays, I really wonder if those naysayers might have had a hand in fulfilling their own prophecy, because the hate still persists; one side of their mouth was saying that it would be harmful to black people, but the other side of their mouth was barking orders on how to use the legislation to cause that harm.
It still burns. Tragically, the legislation was needed, even if only because 100-years of “natural” integration had apparently failed, and it was never for lack of black people trying. White people, it turns out, weren’t too hot on the idea of lending their sympathies to their black brothers and sisters; no one wanted to spend a moment and consider that maybe that African-American’s great-grandfather might have had severe disadvantages, disadvantages no other immigrant group to the United States has ever had, when he found himself standing on a street-corner in a hostile south, wondering where he was and how he was going to get-by, in 1865.
I, personally, don’t know the particular answer to how we solve this problem today, other than try to do my own part and spread the word where I can.
But, such matters are always best dealt with through an attitude change, and I encourage that we change our attitude. If we look at a black ghetto neighborhood, then we should probably spend less time condemning the denizens as layabout no good hoodlums who are getting what they deserve, and instead take a moment and realize the role that we played in putting them there, whether it was you and I, personally, or someone else from a century ago. The fact is, regardless of who is at fault, it is a problem now.
To solve it, we merely have to extend a welcome to these people. It can be as small a gesture as a greeting, or as big as lending our sympathy and trying to help. That’s all we have to do.
The present situation isn’t really my fault, or your fault, or our government’s fault. The initial problem that sparked it all is buried in the past --- a long dead part of American history --- perpetrated upon this latest generation by a generation of dead people who didn’t know how to welcome a flood of newly freed humanity. They didn’t realize the gravity of the situation, or the economic and social impact of their actions at the time. It’s their fault, to be sure, but we can forgive them because they are dead.
But, we the living, need to make this thing right. We can make it right. Forget about the past except as a lesson and let’s do what we need to do. Somehow.