As American as Apple Pie

October 16, 2022

      It seems like our country is irretrievably broken.  Everywhere we turn, we see the full throated embrace of hatred and violence.  Anti-blackness has become so fashionable that Black people proudly sport it on the runway.  White supremacy is so widely seen as a ticket to power that Latinx elected officials casually dehumanize Black children while conspiring to deprive Black adults of political power.   The siren song of whiteness is so seductive that nearly 50% of us will forgive a corrupt vulgarian for fomenting insurrection and stealing state secrets because for them, whiteness trumps everything (pun intended).

      In such a scenario, despair seems not only understandable, but unavoidable.  We must remember that none of this is new. Kanye’s antics are a sideshow.  He is merely a troll mining the attention economy for money, and there have always been Black people willing to publicly work against the interests of Black people for profit.  The L.A. City Council is another matter entirely. It fits into a depressingly familiar pattern that Black people have seen again and again— that the quickest road to acceptance as a “true American” is to be virulently anti-Black.

      American history is replete with examples.  The Irish immigrants who fled famine and British persecution in the 1840’s were derided as criminal and subhuman by bigoted nativists. They were depicted as monkeys in newspaper cartoons and confined to the most menial jobs, (Source:  “When America Despised the Irish:  The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis,” by Christopher Klein, History.com, (3/16/2017)).  

      Almost twenty years after their arrival as destitute refugees, Irish American New Yorkers erupted in a spasm of anti-Black violence that left 3000 Black New Yorkers homeless and caused millions of dollars in property damage.  In the years leading up to the Civil War, cotton represented 40% of the goods shipped out of New York’s ports and the city’s economy was dependent on the continuation of slavery.  Newspaper editors and politicians fomented white working class antipathy to abolition by warning that ending slavery would “flood the city with cheap” labor who would undercut white workers’ ability to earn a living, (Source: “White Riot:  Why The 1863 Draft Riots Matter Today,” by John Strausbaugh, The New York Observer, 7/11/2016). These fears were exacerbated by an 1857 recession that caused high unemployment.  

      When the Civil War began, some New Yorkers even considered seceding from the Union, rather than fighting on its behalf.  When President Lincoln passed a federal draft law in 1863 with a lottery that wealthy New Yorkers could buy their way out of, mobs of Irish Americans rioted, killing Black men, stringing their corpses up on lampposts and most notoriously, robbing the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue before burning it to the ground, (Source:  “New York Draft Riots,” by the editors of History.com, History.com, updated 9/6/2022).  

     Only 67 people were tried and convicted for their part in the New York Draft Riots and by the 1880’s Irish Americans, who had built a robust political machine that elected Irish American mayors in New York and Boston, “were considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life,” (Source:  “When America Despised the Irish,” citing “The Irish Americans:  A History,” by Jay P. Dolan).

     Successive waves of immigrants replicating this pattern led inexorably to where we are today— with a significant percentage of people who equate white supremacy with patriotism and believe, based on the evidence, that violent anti-Blackness will not be punished. Our only recourse is to elect people who will prove them wrong.  For some of us, it may be the difference between life and death.  We have 23 days.

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