Talk:White Americans

Removal of the following lines:

"However, the English and British Americans' demography is considered a serious under-count as the stock tend to self-report and identify as simply "Americans" (7%), due to the length of time they have inhabited the United States, particularly if their family arrived prior to the American Revolution.[14]"

The references used to support this assertion do not explicitly say this. Waters and Lieberson state, "As the distance from the immigrant generation widens for the vast majority of the white population, we expect increasing distortion in the true origins of the population."

Similarly in Pulera's "Sharing the American Dream", the author speculates that increasing numbers of "English, German, and Irish" Americans are losing their 'ethnic' origins and increasingly choosing to identify as "American" with no qualifier.

I mean, to single out "British Americans" in these references is not only cherry-picking the source, but is rather close to original research.

And, with the exception of Pulera (which doesn't support the statement in this article), these references are dated. We've had several censuses and ancestry surveys since the 80s, so what have contemporary demographers said about this ancestry group?Jonathan f1 (talk) 05:19, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

More deletions:

"The definition of White has changed significantly over the course of American history. Among Europeans, those not considered White at some point in American history include Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Irish, Finns, and Russians.[27][28][29] Early on in the United States, membership in the white race was generally limited to those of British, Germanic, or Nordic ancestry.[30]"

Please support this statement with actual scholarship from social historians who study these individual groups (not 'scholars' operating in the tradition of "whiteness studies"). Historians of the American Irish, for example, reject "race" as a tool for understanding Irish-American sociocultural exclusion and instead use religion as the most dominant factor. At every point in US history Americans knew the Irish were a European people and "white".

As far as these other groups go:

Were they ever segregated from all-white military units?

Were the males denied property rights? Voting rights?

Were they denied citizenship on the basis of not being "white"?

In all cases the answer is "no". People from Europe were always understood to be "white" as we would understand the term today. That certain pseudo-scientists ranked "human races" and that certain Americans discriminated against some of these groups has nothing to do with whether they were ever classified as "not white" in a legal sense. Even in the Jim Crow South, people of Italian or Spanish background were legally allowed to marry "white" men or women.Jonathan f1 (talk) 05:45, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Jonathan f1, regarding stuff like this? Do not mark deletions as minor. See WP:Minor edit.

You stated, "Please support this statement with actual scholarship from social historians who study these individual groups (not 'scholars' operating in the tradition of 'whiteness studies')." What are you talking about? There are various fields that can be validly used to source this article. WP:SCHOLARSHIP is what should be followed, not an editor's preferred field regarding this topic. Do not remove material simply because you don't like it.

Also, if you reply to me, do not WP:Ping me. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 06:02, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Wrong and wrong.

First, this has nothing to do with personal preference. My personal preference is that you support controversial claims with appropriate references.

Secondly, this is not merely an issue about whether or not the citation qualifies as "scholarship". You (or whoever) are citing authors who have no experience at all researching any of the groups mentioned in the statement I removed. There are subject-matter experts who study these groups professionally and if there's any credibility to the argument that a certain European group was considered "not white" at some point in US history, you should be able to find it in the relevant literature. Trawling through research in a controversial field such as "whiteness studies" is not sufficient to support what you're trying to say.Jonathan f1 (talk) 06:20, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Here's one of many references.

"To pose the well-known question of "how the Irish became white" presupposed that the Irish did become white. But this presupposition introduced an often fatal element of circularity into the argument. According to Arnensen and Fields, "whiteness" scholars first invented a subject of inquiry and then projected forms of identity onto past actors that the available historical evidence could not sustain."

And it just goes on to outline how fraught this field is with methodology concerns.Jonathan f1 (talk) 06:39, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

No. Not only are your deletions unwarranted, you're being actively deceptive, Jonathan f1: an article about demography and the U.S. Census from more than a quarter-century ago, or a law professor writing a thirty-page article in the Yale Law Journal about Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind and a whole bunch of other stuff, two decades ago, have nothing to do with "'scholars' operating in the tradition of "whiteness studies"."

(And the answer to Were they denied citizenship on the basis of not being "white"? from the latter article was All told, Justice Sutherland's revisionist contention that Southern Europeans were readily amalgamated into the white race revealed a poor sense of historical awareness. A true return to the intent of the 1790 authors of the naturalization statute would have required a cessation of citizenship rights to immigrants of Slavic, Mediterranean, and even Irish descent.—you may want to argue with it but random internet commentary does not trump a law professor writing in a legal journal.)

I have reverted. It's open-access now and I've added the link, so you can read the whole thing yourself if you actually have an interest in Wikipedia-standard reliable sources. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 17:24, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Jonathan f1 stated, "My personal preference is that you support controversial claims with appropriate references." The only thing I'm supporting on this matter is you not removing material because you personally disagree with it. The removals in this case should be guideline or policy-based. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 22:55, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

References

I have one major contention with this article and I'll explain it in two parts.

Firstly, it is a-historical to say that any "white" European (an immigrant group or individual) was ever denied US citizenship on the premise of race. That is quite clearly refuted in the scholarly literature (see, for example, here and here ).

Secondly, the field of whiteness studies, which has for the most part abandoned a legal basis for the "becoming white" thesis (because it's untenable and contradicted by the courts), is still fraught with its own methodology flaws. Since the turn of the 21st Century, several scholars (mostly historians who specialize in US labor history) have criticized the use of "whiteness" as an analytical approach, attacking it for incoherence, circularity, and reductionism. There are much better ways to view historical anti-immigrant sentiment than through the prism of "race". Differences in religion, politics, class and culture, or some combination, are much more useful in understanding 19th and early 20th Century nativism than these hackneyed and politically-charged theories about European immigrants not being "white" and then "becoming white" by participating in racism against black people. (Read all about it here, here and here).

And finally, I have already provided editors here with a review of 20 years of Irish-American historical scholarship which explicitly states that researchers who operate in this sphere have rejected the argument that the Irish weren't white upon their arrival in the US. This is one of the more peculiar arguments considering that nativist groups at the time were lobbying the government to extend naturalization periods, a move that was specifically aimed at curbing Irish immigration. If the Irish weren't "white", anti-Irish nativists would've simply argued that Irish immigrants weren't eligible for citizenship under the 1790 Act. But not even nativists believed that.

As far as this demographic business is concerned, I'll concede that I probably should've raised this objection on the talk page before deleting any content. Just note that I had raised this issue on other talk pages and that never resulted in any input. I have no problem with the argument that there's an "undercount" in the "English American" population. I would just continue to insist you use more recent sources to support that statement. The majority of your sources date to the 80s, which may as well be centuries old as far as demographic research is concerned. The most contemporary source you cite, Sharing the American Dream, doesn't even support the statement as it appears on this page. It lends credence to this view on page 57, which is the page referenced in the article, but then on page 58 the author directly concludes that "white Americans" are increasingly identifying with "American" ancestry on surveys, specifically naming German, Irish, and English Americans (the "big three" US ancestries according to your other sources). The implication here is that there are undercounts in all major white-American ancestry groups, not just English Americans.

It's also significant to note that modern academic textbooks that deal with this subject don't mention anything about any undercount in ancestral populations, but rather uncritically accept the numbers for reported ancestries as stated in surveys. For example, in the textbook Diversity and Society, sociologist Joseph F. Healey wrote a whole chapter on European immigrant history in which he matter-of-factly states in one section that "German Americans" are the largest ancestry group in the US; he then goes on to discuss how the regions of the US where major ancestries are self-reported correspond perfectly with historical settlement patterns. It's equally significant to mention that this chapter (Chapter 2) discusses anti-immigrant sentiment in rich detail (in particular discrimination against European immigrant groups) but makes no mention of the "becoming white" nonsense discussed earlier.

Now I don't know why you're guarding this demographic content so vigorously, but I suspect it has something to do with the political content about race in the subsequent section. I also suspect that you're using this page (and probably similar pages) as a vehicle to fight racism (an otherwise noble endeavor), which would explain why you're so aggressive in your defense of this material, even going so far as to getting me banned from editing this namespace on the bogus charge of disruptive editing. In reality, all you're doing is cherry-picking bad history and contributing to what's already a critical mass of ignorance regarding the racial status of early European immigrants - which, incidentally, contributes more to racist sentiment rather than discouraging it.

Quoting page 82 of Diversity in America,

"Without denying or trivializing the resolve and fortitude of European immigrants, equating their experiences and levels of disadvantage with those of African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans is widely off the mark, as we shall see in the remainder of this text. These views support an attitude of disdain and lack of sympathy for the multiple dilemmas faced today by the racial minority groups and by many contemporary immigrants. They permit a more subtle expression of prejudice and racism and allow whites to use these highly distorted views of their immigrant ancestors as a rhetorical device to express a host of race-based grievances without appearing racist."

Obviously I am going to protest this ridiculous ban. I will also take this issue to Reliable Sources for more input if no ground is made here. In the meantime I've left several references for objective editors to look through and, hopefully, use to fix this page.Jonathan f1 (talk) 22:34, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

WASP

Removed the reference on "WASPs" being a "dominant culture" in the US. Wikipedia has a page on WASPs and the sources agree that this term is an anachronism and has been for several decades. The statement also flies in the face of several decades of research on the assimilation of white Catholics.Jonathan f1 (talk) 05:57, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Albion's Seed

The section on Albion's Seed should also be removed in its entirety, but I'll wait for other editors before doing so. I should probably take this issue over to reliable sources since this isn't the only page which cites this book.

Albion's Seed is problematic as a source for several reasons:

One, it is a dated source by scholarly standards and receives very little attention in modern scholarship.

Two, it was not well-received by Fischer's contemporaries (true, the book was a pseudo-anthropological bestseller, but academics, unlike the general public, did not review it favorably).

Three, the whole book is reductionist. The belief that cultures are transmitted across continents and then handed down intact for generations or centuries (the "frozen in time" view of cultural inheritance) is not taken seriously by social historians and cultural anthropologists.

So, it is my opinion that this book is "fringe" as defined by Wikipedia, and for several reasons.Jonathan f1 (talk) 06:10, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Incorrect use of term “Caucasian”

Caucasian is not synonymous with the white race. Caucasian is a borrowed term that is factually incorrect as a synonym for white. Caucasians are labeled as specifically originating from the areas around the Caucasus Mountains (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran); this does not denote a race (which is absolutely linked to skin color - white, black, yellow, red, and brown are colors) but geographic/ethnic origin. A Black Armenian would be a Black Caucasian.

Race is a construct where ethnicity is not. To call all people racialized as white as Caucasian is not only co-opting an ethnic identity that may be false, but also allow a distancing from their racial identity and history. As much as it is a construct, it is woven intricately into our lives and unless all races are to be removed from our language completely, it is important to be accurate especially when this information is easily accessible by anyone and touted as fact.

Please make this important edit. Thank you Akpakpala (talk) 14:28, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

We go by what the sources state. And many use "white" and "Caucasian" interchangeably. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 03:11, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Capitalization

I noticed that the word "white" is sometimes capitalized and sometimes not capitalized in this article. Is there a reason for this inconsistent usage? Mysteryman blue 07:50, 29 November 2020 (UTC)