The Books of My Life: America for Americans (Lee)

 

Identity, who we think we are, who we perceive we are, or who others think and perceive we are, perceptions that can feed back into who we think we are, is at the heart of human life. Economically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen by others as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists, farmers, auto workers, teachers, and managers. Demographically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen as male, female, kin, children, adolescents, and young adults. Culturally speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as the People, White, African, and a devotee of the Dallas Cowboys. Politically speaking we have seen ourselves or been seen as kin of a particular totem, a subject, a citizen, and a member of a particular political party. Geographically speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans. Generally speaking, all of these identities intersect and interact in a variety of ways. Hunters, gatherers, males, females, the masculine, and the feminine, can all be somewhat discreet identities in Hunter-Gatherer societies, for instance.

As historian Erika Lee reminds us in her superb historical synthesis, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic, 2019), identities, which are historically contingent and fluid, are sometimes if not generally xenophobic. She, unfortunately, does not seem to recognise that xenophobia along with racism, sexism, classism, and cliqueism are simply varieties of ethnocentrism, the notion that one identity or a group of identities are superior to others. Some may and some have, for example, believed that industrial societies are superior to the economic adaptations that preceded them. Some may think and some have thought that being male is better than being female. Some may believe and some have believed that being White is superior to being non-White and that Western culture is superior to Asian culture. Some may think and some have thought that being masculine is superior to being feminine or that listening to Metallica is better than listening to the Carpenters. Some may think and some have believed that their monarch is better than other monarchs or that being right wing is better than being liberal. Some may think and many have believed that being American is better than being Canadian.

In the United States, as Lee notes, being White, a fluid, historically speaking, category, was, because of migration patterns and the economic, political, cultural and demographic dominance of the, initially, Protestant migrants from England and Great Britain, seen as being the mark of a real or "native" American. As Lee notes, xenophobia sometimes accompanied this notion that Whiteness was the mark of being American. Initially, Germans, as Lee notes, were considered other (demographically, economically, politically, and culturally) and, as a result, inherently threatening and dangerous, to Colonial America and Colonials. With the decline in German xenophobia, others, in a seemingly ever repeating cycle, such as the Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, and Muslims, became economically, demographically, culturally, and politically other and, as a consequence, perceived as threatening and dangerous to America and Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over time, Irish and Italian Catholics, and I would add Greek and Russian Orthodox, for example, were grafted onto the White category. Only grudgingly, hesitantly, and incompletely, have some of these non-White groups, many of whom fall outside of or are perceived to fall outside of the Christian category, and Jews been accepted as American by "real" and "native" Americans, Americans of European extraction. America's indigenous and its Black slaves and segregates, were, of course, as Lee notes, considered inherently other.

Lee's America for Americans is a book everyone who wants to know about the real history as opposed to the mythic and manichean history of the United States should read. As Lee notes, the US has long been a contradictory nation. It has been a nation which welcomes the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and the wretched refuse of the world, variously defined over the centuries, while at the same time that it puts roadblocks in the way of certain of the globe's and even America's tired, poor, huddled masses, and wretched refuse in the form of immigration restrictions and quotas and incarcerations and deportations. 

My only substantive issue with Lee's book revolves around what I see as her limited attention to some forms of economic, demographic, cultural, political, and geographical forms of ethnocentrism. Mormons, for instance, many of who were White New Englanders, were considered other by "native" Americans for such cultural practises as polygamy, something Lee mentions in her discussion of xenophobia about Muslims, theocracy--a criticism also made of Catholics who were, as Lee notes, considered loyal to a tyrannical pope by equally theocratic Protestants--block voting, communalism, and because of their notion that America's indigenous were the descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel. Despite this concern, I highly recommend Lee's America for Americans, an important history of xenophobia for those of us living in the Trump era, an era in which several ultimately socially and culturally constructed forms of ethnocentrism have become mainstream again.