After reading Gerstle’s Liberty, Coercion, and the Makings of Americans and looking at 19ths and 20th century assimilation political cartoons, I wondered to myself, are the efforts to “become American” worth it? In the cartoons, we see Americans dehumanizing African Americans, Asians, and Germans. We see them poking fun at the Irish and Italian. In the excerpt we hear of politicians creating exclusion acts just to keep people out and prevent laws to prevent them from ever gaining citizenship. We even hear how immigrants need to poke fun of other marginalized groups (African Americans) in order to put themselves at a higher hierarchical position. Should immigrants subject themselves to all the persecution of their culture? Should the immigrant nativists do this just to create an”American” identity? After reasoning with myself, the answer is no.
First reason for why I think it’s not worth it: these immigrants need to give up everything. They “throw away their identity” but most of the time, their efforts will be in vain unless because they never receive the “American” identity status. Laws prevent them from gaining citizenship and to society they become “inbetween peoples,” they are never fully accepted despite giving up their original identity. They only become half americanized; “White” sometimes and “foreigner” sometimes.
Second reason for why it’s not worth it: There will alway be a part of them that identifies with the culture, whether is be their foods, religion, skin color, or physical features that will remind them of where they come from. By subjecting themselves to cultural harassment with the hopes of attaining the “American” identity, they allow themselves to constantly get stepped on and joked about. That little part of them that they can not change, the part that also keeps them from fully assimilating into America will forever haunt them, making them feel ashamed of their cultural heritage, embarrassed of who they are, which is something that they can not change.
Third and final reason: In creating this “American” identity, nativists are perpetuating racism. In contrary to what Zangwill says, creating this “American identity” the is not like throwing everyone into the melting pot/crucible. We are not throwing different ethnic groups to make a hodgepodge of beliefs where there is a homogenous mixture of everyone’s beliefs and where everyone keeps a little bit of their original identity. Rather, it is throwing everyone into the washing machine. This “crucible” is not made fairly to represent everyone that is thrown into it, it represents the white man’s identity, so entering this hodgepodge is most like telling everyone to cleanse themselves, to purify their own identity and and to white-if themselves. Ultimately I disagree with Zangwill, Crèvecoeur, and Hollinger’s optimistic views because, this American identity is not a worth it. It’s not worth all the pain and humiliation of the cartoons, the policies, the day to day harassment. This “American” identity that is created mainly with the white man in mind pays no attention to other cultures aside from the white man’s culture, thus adopting it would be perpetuating white supremacy, patriarchy and western ethno-centrism.
