Sowell's Ethnic America: Conclusion

After telling the stories of Ethnic America, from Irish to Germans to Jews to Italians to Chinese to Japanese to Blacks to Puerto Ricans to Mexicans, Thomas Sowell has a conclusion or two.

He starts by reminding us that "factors that advance or retard the progress of groups" are not necessarily moral or immoral. We are born into a group, for good and ill, and its culture may make things easier for us, or not.

It is... simply good fortune to be born into a group whose values and skills make life easier to cope with.

And it is equally important to understand what skills help, and why.

Is wealth important? But Eastern European Jews arrived with nothing, and are now in 1980 the highest income group.

Does politics help? But the Chinese and the Japanese avoided politics and now have higher incomes that average whites.

The open frontier? But the Scotch Irish were on the frontier and didn't do too well.

Education? But Jews, Chinese and Japanese rose by hard work before they got education.

But there are patterns and conclusions we can draw from the American ethnic experience.

Patterns

All ethnic groups have risen and thrived in the United States. But all of them have faced obstacles and suffering on their ascent -- that were less than what they experienced before coming. Even the African slaves in the US did better than Africans sold to the Arabs.

It makes a difference whether migrants came here as "sojourners" -- trying things out -- or as committed migrants. It matters whether people came here when convenient, such as Scandinavians and Germans, or as refugees like the Irish and the Jews. Or as captives, as African slaves or indentured servants.

What we call "white flight" is not new. When the Irish flooded into Boston and New York slums, the existing residents got out. The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing tough Irish neighborhoods in midtown Manhattan.

Strikebreakers? First it was the Irish, then Italians and Negroes were used against the Irish.

Education? Jews were passionate about education; Southern Italians were hostile to education.

Family? Both Jews and Italians had strong families, but Jewish families pushed their children towards upward mobility, while Italians felt they betrayed their family by moving into a wider world.

IQ? Lots of immigrants scored low -- even Jewish soldiers in World War I! -- but improved their standings with time and education.

Culture

National recovery after the devastation of war -- such as the Germans after World War II -- reminds us that "human capital" is more important than physical capital. Migrants can come to the US destitute and rise by effort and thrift despite impediments like racial prejudice.

Police brutality? The Jewish Daily Forward reported in 1907 that "the police in the Jewish quarter of New York are the most savage in America."

Inequality? Immigrants often start way "below the level of existing members of their own ethnic group in the country, but eventually rise to not only equal but surpass them." Often it takes fifteen to twenty years. This suggests that 

migration is a selective process, bringing the more ambitious or venturesome or able elements of a population.

And culture matters. 

Groups today plagued by absenteeism, tardiness, and a need for constant supervision... are typically descendants of people with the same habits a century or more ago.

And businesses formed by the followers of Father Divine of the Black Muslims typically do better than the "government-sponsored 'black capitalism' programs of the 1960s and 1970s."

And acculturation is a two-way process. Anglo-Saxon Puritans were overwhelmed "by the German easygoing attitude of good clean fun." American popular music owes everything to black jazz and blues. American political machines were invented by the Irish. Nothing is more American than hamburgers, frankfurters, pizza and tacos.

The "melting pot" is now disdained, but is working better than ever before. It is after people are assimilated that they begin to intermarry. 

While the public square debates the differences and conflicts between groups, there is also the question of intragroup differences, sometimes generational, sometimes differences in acculturation and affluence. And intergroup conflict is often between similar groups, such as blacks and Irish.

Discrimination is a big question in our time, meaning everything from underpaying individuals to actual barriers inhibiting the development of individuals. But employer discrimination cannot explain income differences between, say Hong Kong Chinese and native-born Chinese Americans. Nor can the average employer distinguish between "free persons of color" and other blacks. And overt economic discrimination can be costly to "profit-seeking competitive firms" although less so for government, monopolies and the non profit sector. It is perhaps the most talented and the most brilliant -- the W.E.B. Du Bois or the Paul Robeson -- that suffers most from discrimination, and is most enraged by it.

The fact is that ethnic identity is a complex question. Some people wear it as a badge of honor; others are embarrassed by it. But, writes Sowell,

It cannot be a simple morality play. It is a story of similar patterns and profound differences, of pain and pride and achievement. It is, in one sense, the story of many different heritages. In another sense, it is the story of the human spirit in his many guises.

Sowell's Ethnic America: Puerto Ricans and Mexicans

After learning about the Chinese and the Japanese from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

The Puerto Ricans

Puerto Rico became part of the US in 1898 as a result of the Spanish American War, but its culture reflects "nearly four centuries of Spanish rule." There were 40,000 people there before Columbus discovered it, but most died of disease and in rebellions. What with import of slaves and Spanish and population explosion, the population was about one million in 1900.

Puerto Ricans didn't start migrating to the US in significant numbers until after World War II, and the migration has been notably two-way, with people maintaining contact with the folks back home. By 1970 the Puerto Rican population in the US was 1.5 million, half of the population back home. Most Puerto Ricans live in New York City.

In 1900 Puerto Ricans "worked in agriculture under primitive conditions. Illiteracy was 83 percent in 1898 and still 31 percent in 1940. They learned little English, and the Catholic priests were mostly Spanish. The family was important but broke up frequently. Female chastity was protected and young men had a machismo culture.

As an agricultural people Puerto Ricans were not big on education, and 70 percent of households speak Spanish. Children have not done well in school and "bilingual" teaching has not seemed to help. Puerto Ricans "have had high rates of crime, violence and dependence on relief." In 1969 "almost 80 percent of Puerto Rican men were either blue-collar... or service workers... and 60 percent of women." Incomes are lower than other groups because Puerto Ricans work less.

Although Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote, most do not do so, but when they vote, it is overwhelmingly Democrat. They mostly arrived in the US after the construction of the welfare state. As a result they have not built their own grass-roots organizations like the NAACP or B'nai B'rith. In some ways things have been easier for them, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. But the race wars have pitted Puerto Ricans against other ethnic groups. Minimum-wage laws and occupational licensing laws make it difficult for Puerto Ricans to get started.

Although Puerto Rican progress does not seem great, the bulk of the population is still the first generation of immigrants, where the young lack experience and the old lack education.

The Mexicans

Mexican Americans are both the oldest and the youngest of Americans. There were settlements of people from Mexico in the southwest long before Americans arrived. But most Mexican Americans arrived in the 20th century and especially after World War II.

The term Mexican American covers a variety of peoples, including the descendants of the original Mexican settlers in the southwest, illegal aliens from Mexico, legal migrants from Mexico, legal transients, and naturalized Americans. Altogether, about 5 million in 1980, according to the US Census, but probably 8 million. About 4 million live in five southwestern states, half of that in California where Mexican American well outnumber the black population. Racially and culturally they are both Spanish and Indian in various degrees.

Before Mexico there were the Aztecs, of human sacrifice fame. But when Cortez arrived the emperor Montezuma showered him with gifts, including gold. So the Spaniards had to conquer them. They were assisted by Indian tribes and by European diseases. Right from the beginning, Spanish soldiers began sexual liaisons with native women, and by 1800 the mestizos outnumbered the Spanish-born and the Negro slaves.

From Mexico the new rulers spread northwards into the American southwest. Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821; they allowed US citizens to settle in their northwest. But as the number of Americans swelled they wanted independence from Mexico: thus a Texas war of independence and US troops capturing Mexico City in 1847. Territory acquired from Mexico included what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. So the Mexicans in the US southwest became a minority and tended to lose their land from fraud, corrupt officials, and violence. The multicolored masses were "rigidly excluded from social and political participation."

But railroads, the Mexican revolution of 1909 -- one million killed -- and the rapid development of the US attracted Mexicans to the southwest where they could make double or triple the wage back home. As with the Italian padrone system, US employers employed Mexicans in gangs through a "coyote" labor contractor. This lasted until Mexicans learned the language and the country of the United States. As with other ethnic groups the whiter and more acculturated Mexicans were accepted into mainstream society but the new migrants were shunned and exploited.

In the Great Depression, migration stopped and a massive program of deportation was begun. The Mexican population of the United States declined from 600,000 in 1930 to 400,000 in 1940. But in World War II there was a sudden demand for labor and the bracero program of contract laborers began in 1942, starting at 50,000 per year and ended at 400,000 per year in the late 1950s. The program was terminated in 1964. But there were other forms of admission, including illegal immigration. There was also a program of expulsions: 0.5 million in 1951, one million in 1954.

The expulsion drive did not last long. 440,000 immigrated legally in the 1960s, and  small border force was not able to stem the flood of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile social agencies and civil rights organizations intervened in deportation cases and raised the cost of deportation. And the Mexican government did nothing to discourage Mexicans from migrating to the US; it has regarded enforcement of the border as an American problem.

The three great waves of Mexican immigration -- pre World War I, post World War II, and post-1960s -- mean that Mexican Americans differ in the length of time their families have been in the US. Today Mexican Americans are more urbanized than Americans in general, but they have been urbanized for a shorter time than most Americans. Half the high-income Mexican Americans in Los Angeles live in predominantly white areas, and half their daughters marry outside the Mexican American groups. Less than 10 percent of high-income Mexican-American family heads were born in Mexico.

Over the years Mexican-American incomes have risen, absolutely, and relative to other Americans. 

In 1949, the personal income of Mexican-Americans was 57 percent of that of non-Hispanic whites in the southwest... By 1971 they earned 73 percent of the US average.

But meaningful comparisons are difficult because Mexican Americans are younger than average Americans, and have larger families, and have fewer people working per family. Labor-force participation among women is less, and unemployment among Mexican-American men is about double that of black men and triple that of white men. And in addition, substantial numbers of Mexican-Americans are illegal aliens.

The family is central to Mexican-American culture. Female chastity is important, and leads to early marriage and low college attendance. And family breakups are much less common. Divorce is less than white and less than half that of blacks and Puerto Ricans. Family size is larger, but goes down with increased education.

About half of Mexican-American families speak Spanish at home, and this affects educational achievement. But their values have never centered on education.

In politics Mexican-Americans have not shown much interest, and not too many have, by 1980, risen to political prominence.

Still, Mexican-Americans hold their own with other ethnic groups. In 1979 family income was 18 percent higher than blacks and 54 percent higher than Puerto Ricans, and 73 percent of the national average. 

Next: Conclusion.

Sowell's Ethnic America: Blacks

After learning about the Chinese and the Japanese from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Blacks.

The Blacks

Black Americans are unique in that the vast majority came to America against their will, as slaves, and two centuries of slavery served to separate them from their ancestral culture, making them "a cultural and biological product of the New World rather than Africa." And their history is complicated by emancipation followed by Jim Crow and involved several massive internal migrations. Thus "many blacks are only in their second generation in the urban world... about where the Irish were a century ago."

However all blacks are not alike. Although most American Negroes were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, there were already about half a million "free persons of color" that were emancipated earlier. And there are immigrants from the West Indies.

It was the Arabs that began the massive trade in African slaves after their conquest of northern Africa in the eighth centuries. Some of these slaves were introduced into Spain and Portugal, so that when the Spanish started to colonize the New World they brought along African slaves to do the heavy work. In the mid 17th century 10,000 slaves a year were shipped across the Atlantic, reaching a peak of 60,000 a year in the eighteenth century, totaling more than 10 million over the centuries. About 400,000 were shipped to the American colonies, beginning in 1619, when Africans landed in Virginia were made into indentured servants and subsequently freed. Slavery appeared as "a perpetual condition" in Virginia in 1661.

Preventing escape is a central requirement of a slave system and this was achieved by making the slaves ignorant and dependent. It was easy to escape, but not easy to escape the white patrols. The dependency imperative created cultures of "foot-dragging, work-evading patterns that were to remain as a cultural legacy" long after the end of slavery.

But the slaves developed a unique, self-reinforcing culture. "Racial solidarity was basic and betrayal to whites unforgivable." Thus a violation of solidarity meant pariah status and "personal devastation." The most important relationship was the family. Slave marriages -- without legal standing -- "usually lasted for decades, if not for a lifetime." And slaves maintained their surnames, secretly, down the generations. Although slave owners could separate slave couples, they avoided it, because "the remaining partner might try to escape." However, owners were uncertain about slave marriages. They wanted to avoid fights over women, yet regarded slave families as inappropriate to slave status.

Slave labor is most suitable for "crops requiring routine, mass-production labor" easily monitored by overseers. With the invention of the cotton gin, this meant expansion of slave labor in the Deep South with its suitable soil and climate, and an associated forced migration of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South.

Opposition to slavery took many forms, ranging from the desire to avoid the problems of living in a society with a "racially distinct people held in bondage" to rabid defense of slavery and notions that the slaves were inferior "and lacked the feelings that would cause them suffering" from their bondage. And what would happen if the slaves were freed? 

Division between North and South heightened after the Revolution. Northern states avoided the problem by announcing a future ban on slavery, which sent all the slaves to the South. Meanwhile the South doubled down on its support of slavery, with "black codes" and censorship. Opponents of slavery migrated out of the South.

During the Civil War, relations between black and white were ambiguous. Some slaves escaped to fight for the North; one slave carried his wounded master off the battlefield and then escaped to join the Union Army. Whites were also ambivalent, praising and damning blacks.

And after the War, white resentment of blacks was widespread. Yet both whites and blacks had their lives utterly disrupted.

The position of newly freed blacks was made precarious by the undependable protection of the Union Army and the rampant terrorism of white mobs and vigilantes.

And that only got worse after the end of Reconstruction.

After the War, most blacks continued as agricultural laborers and a large minority worked as domestic servants. A major problem was lack of experience in budgeting or managing day-to-day life. Thus blacks worked in ways that were hardly different from slavery. Only as they acquired the skills and culture and education of free men did they begin to rise: from slaves to share-croppers to tenant farmers. And when there was competition for labor, incomes grew.

Politically, black participation was held back by Jim Crow laws, segregation, and lynching.

Under slavery, education for blacks was forbidden, and this was tightened after the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831 in Virginia. But after the War blacks, children and adults, flocked to education when they could find it. Various agencies, from the Freedman's Bureau to missionary associations, tried to help. And blacks went from nearly zero to 75 percent literacy in the fifty years after emancipation. But public education was slow to open up to blacks, and the new black colleges taught pre-college material for many years.

Black leadership was divided between former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington that pushed for raising up the masses and free-born W.E.B. Du Bois who advocated for the "talented tenth."

Migration of blacks towards the North began before the Civil War; thus antebellum "free persons of color" were more urbanizes than whites. Meanwhile black slaves were being moved southwestwards. Migration to the cities after the War began modestly, but ramped up in the 1880s and thereafter, with 0.75 million leaving the South in the 1920s. Reasons for the exodus included worsening race relations, the boll weevil, and demand for labor in World War I. By the end of the 19th century blacks were integrating fairly well into northern cities, sometimes earning more than Irish and Italian immigrants, and residential segregation into black ghettos was not a thing.

But acceptance of blacks in northern cities went down in the early 20th century.

The masses of unacculturated, ill-educated, rural southern Negroes who flooded into the northern cities were bitterly resented by blacks and whites alike.

And so barriers were raised against all blacks and some northern cities passed residential segregation laws.

Migration paused in the Great Depression of the 1930s but resumed in the 1940s. Over 4 million blacks migrated from the South between 1940 and 1970, a major population migration. It was a "mass uprooting from a rural southern way of life," the sort that takes generations to adjust to. Normal social pathology appeared -- violence, alchoholism, crime, delinquency -- and whites and the black middle class moved away from the new migrants, if they could. Most of the migrants were male, unmarried and unskilled. As late as 1925 72 percent of black males in New York were either unskilled laborers or service workers; the bulk of black women were domestic servants. But black family life typically featured two-parent households, with 80 percent headed by the father. "The unwed teenage mother emerged in a later era."

Literacy improved, but slowly. In 1900, about half of the black population was illiterate; by 1920 it was down to less than a quarter. In 1930 blacks averaged six years of schooling compared to ten for whites. As late as 1930 only 14 percent of black children in the South reached high school. But a few high-quality black high schools delivered a cohort that in later years were graduating from Ivy League colleges. And the new black masses in the cities developed a new cultural style, and their music developed into modern jazz.

The slow rise created a new black middle class that "displaced or merged with the old [black] elite in many northern cities." And some blacks made substantial fortunes.

Blacks from the West Indies started immigrating in the early 20th century. About 1 percent of the black population, they are overrepresented as professionals and public figures, and have not intermarried much with native US blacks. Although West Indian black slaves were treated worse than US slaves they grew and prepared their own food and sold surplus food in markets, giving them experience in running their lives and in buying and selling. They were emancipated in 1838 but were given a period of preparation for freedom, unlike the overnight emancipation in the US. Many West Indian blacks have risen to leadership positions in the black community.

President Truman made "civil rights" a major part of his platform in 1948, splitting his party and losing the South. But he started a process, with court decisions striking down discriminatory laws and practices. But black improvements in incomes, occupations, and education have not eliminated "gaps" as other groups have also improved their lot. Still, in the 1960s black income and college enrollment rose faster than white. The number of blacks in elective politics soared, quadrupling in state legislatures in the South. Overall black progress appears less than expected because half of American Negroes live in the South where incomes and living costs are lower.

Blacks have experienced retrogression in the proportion of one-parent families; the proportion of blacks on welfare has increased, and the proportion of blacks in work has declined absolutely and proportionately to whites. Government has attempted to advance blacks with "'affirmative action' or racial quota hiring" but economists believe these efforts have "little or no effect." These policies have "engendered strong resentment among whites in general."

Prominent blacks are disproportionately descended from black elite families and West Indians: Thurgood Marshall, Andrew Young, Roy Innes, Shirley Chisholm.

Blacks have progressed from a "position of utter destitution... to a place alongside other groups emerging the in the great struggles of life. None have to to come from so far back to join their fellow Americans."

Next: Latin Americans

Sowell's Ethnic America: Chinese, Japanese

After learning about the European immigrants from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the East Asians.

The Chinese

Chinese people started migrating away from China during the decline of the Ming dynasty. Migration to the US started with the discovery of gold in 1849. But nearly all the migrants were from one province, Kwantung, and even one area, Toishan. The immigrants worked as contract laborers in agriculture, railroad building, and worked in gangs under the supervision of a fellow Chinese. But they worked so hard, and for so little wages, that they provoked the fear and hatred of white workers. As in attacks and murders. 

Things got so bad that the US passed a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This created great hardship for the mostly single male workers, because they could not bring wives over -- especially given how family-centric Chinese culture is. There were special fees and taxes placed upon Chinese businesses like laundries. Because of these impositions, the Chinese kept themselves apart in "Chinatowns" and did not use the legal system to resolve disputes. So local Chinese leaders and the secret society "tongs" kept the peace.

The Chinatowns became notorious as centers of vice: prostitution, drugs, and gambling, and that attracted white "ruffians and hoodlums." But eventually they developed into tourist attractions and needed to keep the vice down to a dull roar.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was not relaxed until 1945, when a predominantly female immigration allowed husbands and wives to be reunited and provide partners to a predominantly male community. Many of the new wives were selected by matchmakers.

Although the economic rise of Chinese Americans was mostly in Chinatown business -- financed by Chinese credit associations -- by World War II there was a labor shortage and Chinese were able to move into the general economy. It didn't hurt that Americans felt sorry for China being invaded by Japan.

In education, Chinese American children did well, whether in segregated schools or not. And the Chinese sent their children to college, so the Chinese moved into the professions. By 1959 the average income of Chinese Americans was above that of other Americans.

After the Maoist revolution, the Toishan Chinese in America were invaded by refugees from Communism that came through Hong Kong. They did not speak the Chinese dialect spoken by the Toishaners, but neither did they speak much English. On the other hand the new immigrants had been partially westernized in Hong Kong and did not have the strict family culture of the Toishaners. Conflict ensued.

Today Chinese Americans have higher incomes than the average and "higher occupational status." A quarter of Chinese Americans work in "scientific and professional fields." But mostly their prosperity issues from the fact that Chinese Americans work more than the average American.

The Japanese

Migration from Japan to the US began after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in a culture that admired the US. The first migrants were contract laborers to Hawaii and did not work out. But later migrants, as sugarcane workers in Hawaii and mainland US laborers "on railroad and in mines, lumber mills, canneries, meat-packing plants," were so efficient that they were "feared and hated by American workers and American labor unions." As they moved up from agricultural laborers to tenant farmers they provoked hostility from white farmers. Thus the Alien Land Law of 1913 that forbade California land ownership by aliens -- Asians in general and Japanese in particular.

But, because of the rise of Japan, there was no Exclusion Act. Only the "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908."

Under the terms of this agreement, Japan itself severely limited the number of immigrants to the United States, and the American government allowed the wives of of existing Japanese in the United States to join their husbands and for parents and children to be reunited here. 

Thus the extreme sex imbalance of Chinese immigrants was avoided. And the immigrants and their children became Japanese Americans.

The first generation of immigrants, the Issei, had been selected by the Japanese government "for their health, character, and willingness to work." They were predisposed to "accept and emulate the American way of life."

The second generation, the Nisei, were significantly different. They spoke English, and very little Japanese, and the values they learned from school and American culture were in conflict with the values of the Issei.

But then came World War II and the internment of the Japanese Americans. Rising hysteria against the Japanese encouraged President Roosevelt, by Executive Order, to remove Japanese Americans from "military areas" into internment camps in the middle of nowhere. The impact of the mass internment was devastating, as the victims had to liquidate their property in hasty sales -- to the tune of $400 million in 1942 prices. And also devastating culturally, as the family-oriented Japanese Americans were forced to live in military-style barracks.

But the US needed labor. So in the spring of 1942 "some seasonal agricultural laborers were allowed furloughs to help ease farm labor shortages" and the furloughs were eventually changed to "permanent relocations." Then it was hundreds of railroad workers, then 4,000 Nisei college students -- to safe Eastern and Midwestern colleges. And in January 1943, the US started to recruit Nisei into the armed forces. Despite their bitterness, many Japanese American youth "seized the opportunity to prove their loyalty in combat." Then there were the Nisei in every military formation translating often un-coded Japanese military communications into English.

The internments proved a turning point for Japanese Americans.

Never had a group so proved their loyalty under impossible conditions.

In 1946 in California, an anti-Japanese initiative was defeated overwhelmingly by the voters. 

After the war, the Issei returned to their former lives and tried to rebuild their businesses. But the Nisei, educated and English speaking, were able to enter the mainstream. Their college degrees enabled them to build careers in "engineering, optometry, or business administration." By 1980 Japanese Americans were earning 11 percent more than ordinary Americans.  

Japanese American success is partly because they work more, and partly because they are educated more. But the Issei generation got its start in occupations with little education: "farming, contract gardening, small-business ownership." The new generation is assimilating, and intermarrying, reaching 50 percent in Los Angeles County in 1970. However, among the youth, grade point averages are declining towards the norm, and social problems are on the rise.

Next: The Blacks

Sowell's Ethnic America: Jews, Italians

After learning about the Irish and the Germans from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Jews.

The Jews

Three kinds of Jews migrated to the US. First the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; then the German Jews; then the Eastern European Jews after 1880.

Sephardic Jews were doing OK in Spain/Portugal until they were expelled in 1492. Many arrived penniless in colonial North America but soon recovered their wealth. There were about 2,000 Jews in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. But they looked down on the Ashkenazi Jews.

Ashkenazi Jews from Germany began as a trickle but ended up at half a million by 1880. They spread out throughout the nation, "working as small tradesmen and professionals". Many started out as peddlers on foot, then graduated to horse and buggy and finally opening local stores. The Guggenheims and Gimbels started out as peddlers. By 1880 40 percent of German Jewish families had at least one servant. Less than one percent were still peddlers or laborers.

Eastern European Jews came from the Russian Pale of Settlement that suffered pogroms after the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. These Jews had settled in Eastern Europe with the encouragement of Polish royalty in the 13th and 14th centuries. But then Catherine the Great confined them in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia.  Fleeing from persecutions over one third of he Jews in eastern Europe fled to the United States in the four decades after 1880.

The eastern European Jews arrived penniless, but about 50 percent were literate. The "uptown"German Jews in New York looked down upon them, the "downtown" Jews, that worked in the needle trades in the Lower East Side. But the uptowners still gave the newcomers the benefit of the dense network of Jewish philanthropic institutions.

Because of their distinctive appearance and limited language skills and strict religious rules, the eastern European Jews could not spread out, but had to work among Jews. So they worked in the "sweatshops" of the garment trade of the Lower East Side in incredibly crowded tenements using Isaac Singer's new sewing machines. The garment factories were mostly owned by German Jews; a generation later eastern European Jews owned the factories and Italians were the workers.

The sweatshop today is a scandal, but they enabled women to work in the home without leaving children unattended. But the workers managed to save from their earnings to help the rise of themselves and their children. The children worked in the sweatshops, but seldom full-time, because their parents wanted them to go to school. But they didn't all go to college. Not in the first generation.

The spectacular rise of the Jews -- to top of the income rankings by 1980 -- is a testament to the experience of Jews over the centuries. They knew about barriers but knew how to circumvent them. And they largely created the clothing production industry and the movie industry. Plus many of them already had centuries of experience with urban life and commercial activity.

The Italians

Immigrants from Italy are primarily from southern Italy, mostly peasants and agricultural laborers. The culture they brought to the US reflects the culture of their homeland. Southern Italy is all wrong for prosperous agriculture. The growing season is dry; the rain comes in torrents; the agricultural land is malarial; people live in the hills; the landowners are beasts. So southern Italians trusted no-one except direct family; they did not experience a culture of law and policing. They have learned that individual initiative is dangerous, and right wrongs with the old system of vengeance. They opposed the education system imposed on them from the north, and weren't that keen on the Catholic Church.

There is a big difference between northern and southern Italian immigrants. Around 1900 12 percent of northerners were illiterate, but 54 percent of southerner. The northerners liked to pass for Americans and separate from the embarrassing southerners.

Italian immigrants from the same village tended to cluster near each other, and didn't trust people from other villages. They interacted fairly peaceably with the Jews, but not the Irish. They were dependable on the job, but lacked initiative and thus required close supervision. Typically they worked for an intermediary, a padrone, rather than an employer.

The employer paid the padrone, and the padrone paid the workers -- after deducting his fees, expenses, advances, rent, and credit charge.

Social reformers hated the padrone system and it eventually died out, as Italians became better adjusted to American life. 

Immigrant culture focused on the family, and the church did not earn their loyalty. In Italy they had not attended church much, and in America they didn't get on with the Irish that ran the church and the Catholic schools. They created mutual-aid societies, but they were fragmented according to village or provincial origins. Italian immigrants were active in labor unions, but created few organizations themselves. They had lower crime rates than other immigrant groups, but because they immediately responded to an insult or an attack with a knife people learned not to provoke them. The famous Italian Mafia didn't take off until Prohibition.

Italians were anti-education, and took a while to change their minds. This meant that the experts regarded Italians as mentally inferior. Even in 1980, college attendance by Italian Americans was below average. Still, the Italians did rise. In 1910 in Boston, two-thirds were manual laborers, but only 38 percent at the end of their working life.

Italian Americans caught up with the Irish occupationally. Even in 1909, 22 percent of Italians in Boston were in business compared to 5 percent of the Irish. But they made their way in ways that did not require formal education. They did not just work; they saved.

When they first arrived Italians had less hostility to blacks than other immigrant groups. But later the groups grew apart. Partly that is because Italians are less inclined to participate in "white flight" from lower-income neighborhoods. Italians get on much better with Chinese than with the Irish.

Next: Chinese, Japanese

Sowell's Ethnic America: Irish, Germans

I was reading a piece by Charles Murray on "The Immortal Sowell" and he mentioned Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America.

Sowell sees his books on race and ethnicity as the product of his obligation as a black scholar confronted with destructive racial policies.

Hmm, I thought. Did I ever read Ethnic America? So I went downstairs and found Ethnic America on my bookshelf. But I had never read it.

Wow. What a book. Right away, it answered a couple of questions I had about the Jews. As in, how did they get to be in Eastern Europe? And how does Yiddish appear?

But first. The key thing to understand about immigration is that before steamships, the migrants came in sailing ships that were really designed for cargo. For instance,

[T]he Irish came to America in vessels that carried lumber [to Ireland] from the northeastern United States, so that is where they landed when the ships returned.

Naturally, the living conditions in these sailing ships was vile, "without adequate ventilation, toilet facilities, or enough food or water." The migrants slept on shelves -- except that made women rather vulnerable, so many preferred to sleep on the floor in a sitting position.

The Irish

In Ireland, the Irish lived as a conquered people. Under the Penal Laws, Catholic Irish could not be educated nor could Catholic churches operate legally. The result was that 

Clandestine, grass-roots organizations of all sorts developed among the Irish to serve their religious, educational, and political needs... Not only did the Irish develop considerable organizing skills from having to provide themselves with a range of institutions normally provided by government; they developed skills to circumventing governmental institutions that they regarded as illegitimate oppressions.

So when the Irish came to the US in the 1840s potato famine in the holds of sailing ships they arrived in Boston and New York basically prostrate and without urban skills or money. So most of them worked as servants or day laborers. But they had experience in underground politics. That plus their charm and blarney got them into US urban politics. 

The Germans

German Americans are the largest group after those of British origin. They started coming in the 17th century as "Pennsylvania Dutch" that were actually deutsch. Many started as indentured servants, and went out to the frontier to farm because that was the cheapest land.

[T]he early German settlers quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness.

They tended to live in isolated German-speaking communities in a single religious denomination, but gradually learned English and contributed scrapple, chocolate cake, cole slaw, and sauerkraut to American cooking. On the frontier they often lived in communities next to the Protestant Scotch-Irish. The Germans were quiet, frugal and friendly to the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were quick-tempered, hard-drinking, and often in feuds with each other or the Indians.

Early German immigrants were predominantly farmers, but during the 19th century more and more had urban skills. For instance in 1849 there was a German optician named Bausch and a German businessman named Lomb: both immigrants. Then there was Roebling, the suspension bridge guy, plus Steinway, Weyerhauser, and Heinz. Not to mention Studebaker, Chrysler, Wanamaker, Rockefeller.

Much "innocent public family entertainment... music, picnics, dancing, card playing, swimming, bowling" was introduced to America by Germans.

Prior to Hitler, most German Jews identified as Germans rather than Jews, and some American-Jewish newspapers were prosecuted in World War I for being too pro-German.

Next: Jews and Italians.

ABC of Politics: Tribes

We moderns like to think that we have grown out of tribalism, the way of primitive society. But according to CR Hallpike tribalism is new, dating from the time when humans started to live in towns where they no longer knew everyone.

And the idea that anyone has "grown out of" tribalism is absurd.

Back in the day, humans identified with their kindred, the people they knew that were related to them by blood. But as society has grown in scale humans have started to fake it; we imagine that we are related and are kin to the people around us, by virtue of our common membership in a clan or tribe or nation.

I say that all such identities are fake, an imagined kindred of "people like me." I call this "fake tribalism," an imagined community of kindred that is practiced in all societies larger than one of actual kinship where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows one's blood relationship to everyone.

But why do people create these imagined tribes? I say that every tribe is the expression of the eternal brotherhood of the men who fought to create the tribe and won.

This is most blazingly obvious in the dominant fake tribe of our time, the "nation," which is the tribe of the middle class.

Almost every nation in our time is the product of a victorious war that melded the men of the victorious army into a new fake tribe of a nation.

What made the United States into a nation was its revolutionary war against Britain. What made Britain into a nation was its Second Hundred Years War against France that ended on the battlefield of Waterloo. What made Germany into a nation was Bismarck's three cunning wars, against Denmark, Austria, and France, that conned the various independent states of the Holy Roman Empire into sending soldiers to fight for Bismarck, and thus for the subsequent united German nation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent the young men of the Great Depression to fight Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. After the glorious victory, the United States was united for a generation, until the youngsters born to the wives of the returning heroes grew up and rebelled against their fathers.

And what of the tribe of progressives the world over that are soldiers of activism, devoted to bending the arc of history towards justice?

The problem with the current crop of multinational organizations is that they are not brotherhoods of warriors bonding with each other in a fight to defend the homeland from aggressors. They are just privileged earls and barons watching their sons set lances against each other in knightly tournaments of activism. The only way to create a global tribe would be to fight an Earthly war of survival against an alien invasion from outer space, in which the surviving space warriors would form a new fake tribe of the heroes that saved the world.

Race Politics Ends When We Don't Care

Today is Martin Luther King Day and a holiday in the United States. Rev. King is famous for leading non-violent protests against racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s. It is said that he got his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent opposition to the British in India.

Now comes multiracial Ryan Bomberger to celebrate the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

A hard-fought Dream has become a reality here in America. The codified systemic racism heralded as “heritage” met its demise because good people—both black and white—refused to stand by and do nothing.

But actually, it should be added, the non-violence concept only works against governments that already accept your premise. The ruling class in liberal America believed back in 1960 in ending racial discrimination. The Brits in India, from just after the "Indian Mutiny" in 1857, knew they would have to get out of India. Just not yet, old chap.

In the years after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s concerns about racism declined, according to Bomberger. But not any more.

From the mid 1970s through 2014 (except during the early 90’s Rodney King riots) 2-4% of Americans cited racism as the most important problem facing our country. It wasn’t until Obama’s second term when it jumped to 13% and 18% after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Following a bumpy decline, it spiked again to 19% in 2020 under Trump as the rhetoric of Critical Race Theory spread like wildfire, sparking the very bitterness and hatred MLK denounced. 

So what is going on? Is racism increasing as a problem, or is it something else?

My belief is that it is "something else."  And that something else is the need of every politician or political party to have an enemy. It was such a glorious experience for liberals to fight the racist Jim Crow enemy in the 1960s, and it felt so good, that our liberal friends just cannot let go.

The over-under politics of the present day requires an enemy. Back in the day it was capitalism, employers, "robber barons," "malefactors of great wealth" who were pressing down upon the brow of labor. Capitalism, employers, bankers, exploiters were the enemy, and the Democratic Party would save the workers from their malevolence.

The Narrative, of course, to this very day is that but for beneficial legislation -- including wage and hour laws, unions, and government education -- the worker would still be exploited and poverty-stricken. I deny it. I say that the worker would be much better off today if the government weren't taking 35 percent of GDP and redistributing through a gubmint loot and plunder operation. But I could be wrong.

The Narrative today is that but for liberals and progressives the "oppressed peoples" would be as poor and helpless as blacks were in the South during the rule of Jim Crow.

Could that be true? The original Jim Crow was a cultural and political regime that deliberately discriminated against blacks. And there were laws to make sure that discrimination was the order of the day.

But today, our laws say that it is illegal to discriminate against blacks. And the whole of the ruling class is united to stop any re-emergence of a Jim Crow culture. And big corporations are along for the ride.

Yet the dreaded "white oppressors" are everywhere?

Actually, I'd say that 2014 mentioned by Bomberger is a tell. See, the first thing that happened after Barack Obama got elected as the First Black President in 2008 was that Republicans won 64 seats in the 2010 midterms. 

How could such a thing happen? President Obama was the liberal dream come true: I remember my university faculty wife friend expressing her emotional delight in that event at lunch in December 2008. A new era had dawned, so how come the Republicans won back 64 seats in the first midterm after Obama's election? There was only one possibility: racism, flat-out white racism.

It was after that that Democrats started with the race crisis in even -- i.e. election -- years. George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in 2012. Michael Brown was shot by a cop in 2014. George Floyd died under restraint while resisting arrest in 2020.

You might call these incidents merely lower-class small-time criminal blacks getting their comeuppance. Or you might call them representative of systemic racism in the United States. I don't know; more research is needed.

But Democrats and their pals in the media have built a huge narrative on the assumption that these events are examples of "systemic racism" arising out of a culture of "white supremacy" and executed by "white oppressors."

Only, of course the white ruling class of the United States is composed of liberals, progressives, lefties who have been spending the last generation or two doing a Gramscian "march through the institutions" and purging anyone that wasn't a card-carrying lefty. Eevil conservatives need not apply.

So what gives? in my narrative our liberal and lefty friends are finding that they are coming to the end of the era in which there is even a tenuous argument about helpless victims discriminated against by powerful right-wing whites. I dare say they were honestly shocked in 2010 when, instead of confirming the glorious new era of Barack Obama's First Black Presidency the American people voted against pedal-to-the-metal liberal agenda including Obamacare. But they couldn't admit that the world had moved on. And that Americans didn't really want huge new gubmint programs.

And like a businessman facing bankruptcy, they started to cheat, with fake racist incidents blown up into narratives of systemic racism.

There's another aspect to this. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats have spent the last 50 years insisting to black voters that, but for them, Americans would turn back the clock and institute Jim Crow 2.0. You can see how easily this narrative -- any narrative -- can work when you note how eagerly our liberal friends all drank the COVID KoolAid and bought the narrative of the moment on how to fight COVID, again and again. In other words, humans are tribal and they believe the narrative that their tribal leaders communicate to them. Doesn't matter how educated or racist they are. People are groupish and they believe the narrative. They believe the narrative up until the moment that it becomes inescapable that they have been roundly lied to. And sometimes even past that moment, because to abandon the narrative, the saving faith that defines their lives, is unthinkable.

My analysis of the liberal/progressive era involves what I call Little Darlings. Liberals operate their over-under politics by adopting and protecting a class of voters that they encourage to believe are hopelessly oppressed by "the system" and that but for liberal power would be ground into dust. And so these groups become virtual mistresses, serfs, of the ruling class.

But then the ruling class tires of their Little Darlings and leaves them in the lurch, as Democrats did for the white working class after 1965, and as, someday, they will leave blacks in the lurch.

I think the over-under politics with its necessary helpless Little Darlings is a monstrous injustice, for it encourages lower class people to stay as lower class, deriving their life and means of support on government loot and plunder and not from developing middle-class skills and culture. And when I get to set the Next Narrative I will create a politics where upper-class educated white liberals are the enemy, and are to blame for everything that went wrong in the last century.

Wouldn't that be fun! Actually, not really. I don't feel that liberals are evil, just fools and knaves.  They do need to be brought down a peg or two -- in their own best interest, you understand. But not made into enemies.

The Current Racial Frenzy Will Abate, But...

 George Will has a piece out prophesying the end of the current race frenzy: "National conservatives and racial identitarians have a common enemy: Individualism." But our problems will not be solved with the race frenzy abatement, because the nationalist right is almost as bad as the racist left. Both the nationalist right and the racist left are united in a war against individualism. Individualism, is something new under the sun, he says, invoking Michael Oakeshott.

Modernity’s greatest achievement, which was the prerequisite for its subsequent achievements, was the invention of the individual. Oakeshott argued that, in the 14th and 15th centuries, conditions emerged that were “favorable to a very high degree of human individuality,” meaning “persons accustomed to making choices for themselves.”

And the conditions were particularly favorable in Italian cities.

Well, I can understand that Buckley-era conservatives like Will would look askance at Trump-era populist conservatism; it's centered on the identity and the economic interest of the very ordinary middle class American rather than the business-owning middle class of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

Indeed, in 2021, U.S. “national conservatives,” who are collectivists on the right, recoil against modernity in the name of communitarian values, strongly tinged with a nativist nationalism and with a trace of the European blood-and-soil right.

Really? I have a better idea, a higher idea, that floats above the decaying remnant of Buckleyism and the eternal lefty search for the transformative community that will lead directly to justice do not pass go.

It is this.

All politics is built around the friend-enemy distinction. The point in any politics is to define who is one of "us" and who is one of "them," the enemy that "we" might have to fight and kill.

Once the size of human community has expanded beyond the hunter-gatherer band of the kindred the big man and the politicians and the clerics have to come up with a new narrative that explains the new community. Enter the age of "tribalism." And I maintain that all tribalisms are fake tribalisms, a likely origin myth and  "story so far" that explains and exalts "our community" and unites the community with feeling of belonging together.

In particular, I suggest, almost all political identities are forged by the veteran soldiers in the army, the brothers in arms that founded the state that we descendants come to think of as having existed for all time.

What is "nativist nationalism?" It is, presumably the tribe of people in a contiguous nation state that are native to the place. As opposed to more recent arrivals who maybe don't yet identify as natives, but as an immigrant community that still identifies in part with its identity in the old country. It is not hard to understand that the natives of a country would be suspicious of more recent arrivals, and vice versa.

And it is not surprising that politicians and priests would take advantage of this.

Obviously, this is the story of politics in the United States at least since the Irish started arriving in the 1840s in consequence of the potato famine. Immigrant groups arrived in steamships from Europe and coalesced in immigrant "ghettos" for a generation or two. And soon after they arrived the local political machine started to organize them into its own personal vote bank. 

Obviously the left has invented a new form of tribalism based not on place but on class and race. To me, this is just another opportunistic "fake tribalism" that teaches a group of people to feel an identity that just happens to benefit the educated ruling class that wants to unite various lower-class groups into a political army to fight against the middle.

And this is the game of all political ruling classes, to conjure up some kind of "fake tribalism" to unify the people you want to unify into a political identity, and then lead them to war against some enemy, foreign or domestic.

It is telling that the current leftist politics based on race or the slightly less racist notion of "oppressed peoples" has arisen in a time when an appeal to workers as a class is not as politically useful as, say, back in the 1930s.

But whatabout nativist nationalism and race identitarians?

Well, I would say they they are both led by political leaders that experience themselves as creative individualists.

In other words, I would say that all "individualists" are upper class people that see themselves as transformative and creative leaders. On the conservative side these might be people that see themselves as intellectuals imagining a political framework of limited government, or business start-up entrepreneurs imagining how they are going to transform the business world, or lefty political activists imagining how they are going to bend the arc of history towards justice.

And so all this fits into my reductive Three Peoples theory, where the nativist nationalists are people in the Responsible middle class who identify with nation and the race identitarians are lower class Subordinates who identify with their non-American national origin or class or race rather than with the larger political community. And Individualists are all members of the Creative class imagining that they are doing a great thing.

But I could be wrong.

Time for a White Trash Museum on the Washington Mall

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington DC at 1400 Constitution Av NW right next to the Washington Monument.

I expect that you, like all good people, are delighted that there is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC just across the Mall from the African American Museum. Just as the African American Museum is on the left hand of the Washington Monument, so the Holocaust Museum is on the right hand of God, er Washington.

And you are pleased as punch at the National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in the shadow of the Grant Memorial at 4th St SW in Washington DC at the Capitol end of the Mall

But I expect that you are shocked, shocked, as I was to discover that there is no National Museum of White Trash on the Washington Mall.

Because, as we all know, the story of White Trash, and the history of America as the dumping ground for the "waste population" of England, begins in 1584 with the arrival of the first ship of White Trash off the shores of Virginia to found the Roanoke colony, courtesy of Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of Good Queen Bess. I have written about this as my "1584 Project."

If you want a scholarly narrative on the subject, try Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Just like Dr. Jill Biden, Isenberg is a doctor.

Yes, I know, such a museum, fetchingly configured as a trash can, perhaps with different receptacles for plastics, and bottles and cans, seems an obvious addition to the glorious monuments of Washington DC. And there is a spare slot on the Washington Mall, right between the African American Museum and the Holocaust Museum.

That way we could have three Museums of the Victims, side by side: Jews, White Trash, and Black Slaves.

And then we Americans could spend the next one hundred years arguing about who is the biggest victim: Jews, poor whites, or descendants of slaves.

Of course, I am sure you can see my cunning plan behind this. It is to de-legitimize the lefty division of the world into three parts, the Allies, the Oppressed Peoples, and the White Oppressors.

Which White Oppressors would that be, cupcake?

And we all know the answer to that. The real oppressors are the whiteys in the Educated Elite, now commonly referred to among those in the know as "laptop whites."

Definition of Privilege: someone who can work at home and interact with co-workers and clients using Zoom. White Trash need not apply.

All is Narrative Including Civic Nationalism

The Zman has a post-Rittenhouse piece on Civic Nationalism, and he critiques it thus.

Civic nationalism is the argument that a country can be organized around a set of ideas, rather than people and land. The citizens, rather than connected by blood and history, are connected by ideas. 

Ideas being, e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But, of course, "people and land" and "blood and history" are just as much ideas as the idea of equality and government under law.

They are all "narratives." And the Zman understands this:

Civic nationalism, to a great degree, is a reaction to the internationalism of Western ruling elites who are post-national. The post-nationalists want to eliminate borders and the national sovereignty. In their place will be international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state. Civic nationalism is an effort to confront this old enemy of civilization with a nationalism free of past baggage.

In other words, the civic nationalists want nationalism without the Hitler baggage.

And narratives tend to be sacred narratives such as the Woke Religion narrative as described by Schellenberger and Boghossian. They have assembled a table of Woke Religion: A Taxonomy, describing -- for Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness -- the Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Creation Story, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, and Purifying Speech. It really is genius.

Now, my idea is that all politics is tribalism, and "fake" tribalism at that. I got this idea from reading C.R. Hallpike, who says that the original hunter-gather bands didn't have much of a tribal mentality. Tribalism, he writes, started when people started living the villages that were big enough that people didn't know all the other poeple in the village.

And, to put Nazi Carl Schmitt back in the mix, with his notion that politics is about friends vs. enemy, we can say that tribalism is about our good people vs. the enemy's bad people. 

See, once you get a society bigger than a band of kindred, where everyone is related to everyone else by blood, then people start to construct a tribal narrative that imagines everyone connected by blood. On the other hand, my Greek friend that was born into a village on a Greek hillside, talks endlessly of this cousin or that uncle or that grandparent.

So, in my view, all politics is based on a narrative of imagined kindred. It could be a clan which assumes that various groups of kindred are related by blood, and probably they are. But then we get to princely states where everyone is related by their loyalty to the prince. And then to the nation, which is a glorious story of blood and land. Or, if it is the United States it is the glory of its ideas, that all men are created equal and are delighted to live in a land ruled by laws and not by men.

Now our global overlords -- the "laptop whites" -- of which the Zman talks of the "internationalism of Western ruling elites" have a narrative of globalism, of "international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state." So, they have a narrative of internationalism, and political and administrative institutions to go with it.

I say, with my Three Peoples theory that the tribe of the "laptop whites" is the community of all educated and credentialed people all over the world; the tribe of the middle class is the nation; and the tribe of the lower class is race or ethnic origin, or class. My Three Peoples theory is one of a number of Three Layer theories.

So it doesn't matter what the narrative is. The middle class will create and recreate a narrative of nation, that the nation in which they live is the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, as middle-class people get super-educated then they tend to adhere to the "laptop white" narrative of globalism and the over/under politics of Allyism and declare war on the middle class using the lower class as their street army.

Of course, all narratives tend to be forged in the furnace of war, when the Founding leaders construct a narrative to inspire their followers with a sense of belonging to a sacred "band of brothers." So, we should expect that the leaders of the middle class in the current Cold Civil War would be constructing a new narrative of nation. Which is exactly what Donald Trump was doing in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Whether this new national narrative succeeds depends, of course, on whether the middle class can win the Cold Civil War that the educated class of "laptop whites" is conducting against it.

Race Reality vs. Colorblindness

On the one hand Jason D. Hill writes that whites invented blackness. And Dennis Prager appeals to the notion of colorblindness as the moral ideal.

On the other hand, the ZMan demands race realism.

Those who deny the reality of race are on one side of the great divide, while those who accept biological reality are on the other side of the divide. There is no middle ground. Those who think culture is a manufactured good are on the side of biology deniers, while those who think culture is the product of biology and time are on the side of the realists.

Well. Obviously, I would say, there are physical differences between humans. Humans that lived for millennia in West Africa clearly are physically different from e.g., people that lived for millennia in the high plateaus of East Africa. Humans feel comfortable around people that are like them. They feel uncomfortable around people physically different from them.

But equally, people who are physically alike can differ sharply on ideas and politics. They can enroll themselves into different groups and end up hating each other, much as people who are physically different can hate each other.

And people that are physically unlike can join together and experience a sense of belonging and togetherness similar to that experienced by people that are physically alike and closely related.

I think that the really-real is the attachment to kindred. Humans naturally trust the people closest to them in blood relation. (But they can also get really angry with close relations).

That is why I have come up with the notion of "fake tribalism." Yes, it is reality that people form themselves into the tribe of the kindred. But according to La Wik, a clan is a subset of a tribe.

Clan:

A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship[1] and descent. 

Tribe:

The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, nation or state.

See what is going on here? Right away, with "clan," we are getting into "perceived kinship." That is what poker players call a "tell."

Let us go with La Wik's hierarchy of clan, tribe, chiefdom, nation. Obviously, I would say, the farther you go from actual local kindred, the more likely the kinship is "perceived" or, more likely, made up and "fake."

If even a clan involves possible "perceived kinship" then all the group designations represent perceived kinship as well as biological kinship.

And that is what I believe. I believe that the natural feeling of groupishness that obtains among people that are closely related can be exploited by political, religious, and cultural leaders to mold humans into an artificial group.

This obtains in particular when men join together in an army to fight some enemy. Men who have fought together experience each other as brothers forever after.

Oh, and "fraternal associations" like the Masons and the Elks are based on an artificial sense of brotherhood that obtains among men that do things together.

But let us get back to practical politics, and winning elections and all that rubbish.

I would say that for conservatives and Republicans the smart thing to do is to accept subnational identities, like black and Hispanic and Jewish and Chinese, and a glorious thing is diversity. But then encourage everyone to think of themselves as Americans, people of all kinds that come together to celebrate the last best hope of mankind on Earth.

There is cunning in this notion. Because while our liberal friends celebrate racial and gender differences, they hate the nation of America. There's gotta be a opportunity in that as big as all outdoors.

Yes, let's be real about race. But let us not forget that you can get humans to feel and act upon all kinds of perceived connection other than race.

More In Common's "American Fabric"

The research outfit More in Common gets funding by, among others:

Luminate (UK), Social Change Initiative (UK), Robert Bosch Foundation (Germany), European Climate Foundation (France), Open Society Foundations (US/Europe) and Ford Foundation (US).

But here is its social fabric of "Hidden Tribes" in America:

Tribe Name	Percent in America
Progressive Activists	8%
Traditional Liberals	11%
Passive Liberals	15%
Politically Disengaged	26%
Moderates	15%
Traditional Conservatives	19%
Devoted Conservatives	6%

Here is how More In Common defines the Hidden Tribes (yes, More In Common is clearly Progressive Activist):

Progressive Activists are deeply concerned with issues concerning equity, fairness, and America's direction today. They tend to be more secular, cosmopolitan, and highly engaged with social media. 

Traditional Liberals tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions.

Passive Liberals tend to feel isolated from their communities. They are insecure in their beliefs and try to avoid political conversations. They have a fatalistic view of politics and feel that the circumstances of their lives are beyond their control.

The Politically Disengaged are untrusting, suspicious about external threats, conspiratorially minded, and pessimistic about progress. They tend to be patriotic yet detached from politics.

Moderates are engaged in their communities, well informed, and civic-minded. Their faith is often an important part of their lives. They shy away from extremism of any sort.

Traditional Conservatives tend to be religious, patriotic, and highly moralistic. They believe deeply in personal responsibility and self-reliance.

Devoted Conservatives are deeply engaged with politics and hold strident, uncompromising views. They feel that America is embattled, and they perceive themselves as the last defenders of traditional values that are under threat.

Here is how the Hidden Tribes and generations and races feel about "Pride in Being American."

Tribe Name	Pride in being American
Progressive Activists	34%
Gen Z 1997-	52%
Passive Liberals	60%
Asian	62%
Millennials 1981-96	62%
Traditional Liberals	65%
Black	70%
Gen X 1965-80	73%
Females	73%
All	74%
Politically Disengaged	75%
White	75%
Male	76%
Hispanic	76%
Baby Boomers 1946-64	85%
Moderates	87%
Silent Gen 1926-45	94%
Traditional Conservatives	96%
Devoted Conservatives	100%

Just Sayin'.

Tribalism: China will Divide, because Politics is Division

One of my maxims is that the only way you create a nation or a tribe or a race is by fighting a war. It is not true that people "of one race" -- whatever that "social construction" means -- are naturally united whereas a multiracial society is naturally divisive.

"Nowt o' the sort!" as they say in The Secret Garden. 

Now here is the Zman on Taki's saying that the Chinese are naturally united, because they are 90 percent Han.

The great chain of causality begins with biology, then culture, with institutions being culture-specific. Asian societies are biologically homogeneous. China proper is almost entirely Han. Their culture of conformity is mostly the result of being a unified people.

OK. So how come China keeps having its Time of Troubles in between dynasties? How come the Chinese willfully engaged in a civil war from 1921, when the Holy Roman Communist Party was founded, and 1949 when the son of a rich peasant, Mao Zedong, took power in Beijing.

And incidentally culturally appropriated the backdrop of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen, its Gate of Heavenly Peace. There are five gates, by the way, and only the emperor gets to go through the center one, peasant.

So the Chinese are all Han and therefore united. So why did Mao decide to do his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? If the Chinese were all united and stuff? Why bother, old chap?

So here is my philosophy, again.

You create a people -- whether a tribe, a nation, a class, a labor union, by  fighting and winning a war, because the experience of a war unites all the men that served and fought in the war. It's instinctive in men.

Women, on the other hand, do not unite in that way. But they do unite, as they did during COVID, by all being Good Little Girls and wearing masks and keeping social distance and crossing to the other side of the street when someone is walking their dog in the opposite direction. Let's say that women unite for a season in order to be safe.

But once the war is ended then normal politics resumes, and division appears again. Doesn't matter if it is feudal politics where the various barons and counts and dukes all conspire against each other and occasionally besiege each other's castles, or court politics as in the days of the absolute monarchs, or democratic politics where politicians divide the electorate with promises of more spending for the educated class and the underclass and lower taxes for the middle class, or neighborhood politics where the women all complain about each other with "I can't believe she said that."

Once the war is over, then the tribe begins to divide up again. Period.

So the reason why China is united and we can all talk about them being 90 percent Han is that normal politics has not resumed, what with the current single-party rule under President-for-life Xi Dingping.

But it will. I seem to recall that the southerners in China call the northerners wheat-eaters and the northerners call the southerners rice-eaters. I think that these are supposed to be insults, but not being Chinese, I wouldn't know. But, don't forget, there are plenty of dialects in China, from Mandarin to Cantonese. And I seem to recall from the delightful Crazy Rich Asians that the Chinese are as tribal as anyone. And snobbish? You betcha. But look at the Map of Chinese dialects: "China is a large and diverse country." Who knew?

No. No go. All tribes are fake tribes, gussied up to take men to war. And as I say, the tribe of the lower class is the ethnic group, the tribe of the middle class is the nation, the tribe of the educated class in the global educated class.

Notice that the preferred political division of our current ruling class, called "antiracism," posits a division of America between the "oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors."

Notice how there are three lies in the Allyism manifesto.

Lie 1: The so-called "oppressed peoples" are in fact the lower class that is particularly privileged by the rulers with diversity and inclusion and welfare-state loot and plunder.

Lie 2: The so-called "allies" are in fact the ruling class -- oppressors by any other name -- that uses the notion of "oppressed peoples" as a political formula to justify its power.

Lie 3: The so-called "white oppressors" are just ordinary middle-class whites that don't have any particular political power with which to oppress people. They are people that the rulers can cancel in a New York minute as "racist" if they step out of line.

I think that my concept that all tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up in war, is a profound and liberating concept.

Because, you see, in my vision of the good life, if people naturally accept that different classes have different tribes, then the educated Gentry happily lives in its global community of high-minded educated priests all over the world. But the educated class benevolently allows the Commoners to live and wive and thrive in their nations, because in its wisdom it understands that the natural tribe of the middle class is the nation, and the poor dears will never grow out of it. The middle class benevolently allows the Subordinates to live in their ethnic enclaves, but encourages the Subordinates to come out of their ghettos and join the middle-class world of responsibility and trust whenever they are ready.

What a world that would be.

For now, we should start erecting the bleachers so we can watch the Chinese people quarrel among themselves once the Emperor Xi no longer rules a one-party state.

How Whiteness Transformed China

China is celebrating the centenary of its Communist Party this week as a glorious liberation from western colonialism. Here is President Xi Jinping (hey, I thought that presidents were a white thing): 

The Chinese nation is a great nation.

Stop right there. Nation? What's all that about, whitey? 

With a history of more than 5,000 years, China has made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. After the Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.

To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people put up a courageous fight. As noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Yihetuan Movement, and the Revolution of 1911 rose one after the other, and a variety of plans were devised to ensure national survival, but all of these ended in failure. China was in urgent need of new ideas to lead the movement to save the nation and a new organization to rally revolutionary forces.

With the salvoes of Russia's October Revolution in 1917, Marxism-Leninism was brought to China. Then in 1921, as the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were undergoing a great awakening and Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the Chinese workers' movement, the Communist Party of China was born. 

In other words, China's rebirth was nothing but Whiteness, Whiteness, Whiteness.

Let's start with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement. This was started by a young Chinese man that read a Christian missionary pamphlet after he had failed the state examinations. La Wik:

The uprising was commanded by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka (a Han Chinese subgroup) and the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. Its goals were religious, nationalist, and political in nature; Hong sought the conversion of the Han Chinese people to the Taiping's syncretic version of Christianity, to overthrow the Manchus-led Qing Dynasty, and a state transformation. 

Can you spell Whiteness? Then there's the Reform Movement of 1898 initiated by the Guangxu Emperor and canceled by Dowager Empress Cixi. It included.

abolishing the traditional examination system... eliminating sinecures... establishing Peking University... building a modern education system (studying mathematics and science instead of focusing mainly on Confucian texts)... changing the government from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy... applying principles of capitalism to strengthen the economy, modernizing China's military and adopting modern training and drill methods... rapid industrialization of all of China through manufacturing, commerce, and capitalism... establishing a bureau for railways and mines[.]

 Whiteness squared. Then there was the Yihetuan Movement (or the Boxer Rebellion). Now we are talking. It really was an anti-western, anti-Christian anti-Whiteness movement.

Villagers in North China had been building resentment against Christian missionaries and the growth of foreign spheres of influence after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. In a severe drought, violence and murder spread across Shandong and the North China Plain, targeting foreign property, Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians.

Then the Revolution of 1911. It established the Republic of China. Republic? That's Whiteness, if ever I saw it.

Then in 1921, "the Communist Party of China was born." But, but, but, Communism is a western idea. Whiteness. Now read this, from Unherd, the Brit opinion site: "China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism."

Trigger Warning: the following hate speech may blow your mind.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession.

Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

There were, of course, a ton of Christian missionaries in China.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire [Wales] named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese.

A group of 2,000 Chinese studied in France during and after World War I.

After their exposure to the radical ideas circulating among workers and activists in Europe they returned home and, in January 1921, formally adopted the creed of Marxism-Leninism. 

How dare, how dare the French indoctrinate those 2,000 innocent Chinese with their Whiteness ideas!

My favorite quote to illustrate the experience of the Chinese people encountering the West is this, the comments of a "Dr. Wu," at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Yes. And now our lefty friends are determined to eliminate Christianity from the West. Because Whiteness or something.

Personally, I have enormous compassion for the Chinese and their "century of humiliation." There is nothing harder than living in a political and cultural world that is coming to the end of the line. Who is to blame? What do we do? Will these foreign ideas help us or will they destroy us? And, you can bet that the ruling class of the time is going to be up to all kinds of tricks as it tries to hang onto power and blame anyone and everyone else for the problems.

Kinda like our own ruling class that, after a century of spend and elect, seems to be hitting the wall. It sees that something is wrong, but can't even begin to figure out what it is. Whiteness! Yeah, that must be it!

My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay

I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here. Now let us discuss Thesis Two, that racism Does Not Pay.

Really there should be no need to go beyond the fact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States after the end of Reconstruction -- i.e., the military occupation of the South -- after the Civil War.

Why did the South need Jim Crow? Because otherwise people would not discriminate against blacks. At least, not enough.

Yes. Political folk have a real problem with businessmen and employers and corporations. They really don't want to discriminate. It's costly to have racially segregated railroad trains. It is crazy not to hire marginalized minority workers at a lower wage than privileged majority workers -- if it is more profitable. It is annoying to have to send blacks to the back of the bus. It means unhappy customers.

And clearly, the racism in employment since the Civil Rights era, half hidden by a score of euphemisms such as Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, Equity, and so on, costs money. Because all the HR and race-counting and Human Rights Commission busy work that a modern corporation is obliged to perform is a pure cost. Oh boy, what it would save not to have all those busybody women in HR collecting race and gender data so that the government can use it against the corporation!

But let us not just blame the racists for screwing the economy. Basically all wage and hour laws are put there to stop eevil corporate chieftains from using employees to get the maximum profit out of them, just like Marx said. 

Only, of course, nobody knows what makes the most money. Is it treating the employee as a widget? Is it treating an employee like a human? Is it reducing everyone to contractors with no benefits and no tenure? Encouraging and subsidizing employees that improve their skills? Firing everyone over thirty? Providing extensive benefits from pensions to health insurance? Paying premium wages? Paying low wages supplemented by profit-sharing in the good years?

Basically, I believe, the culture of capitalism is that you are the slave of the consumer. Whatever the consumer wants, and whatever price the consumer is willing to pay, that is final. And then there is trust. The point of trust is not that it is a good thing, although it is. The value of trust is that it reduces costs. That is why diamond merchants are often Hasidic Jews: they have a closed community and trust and reputation is everything, so they can exchange valuable diamonds and have faith that none of their fellow merchants will cheat them.

There is a Science to explain this. It is called the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. It does not pay to cheat unless you will never see the other party to a transaction again.

This capitulation to the market is hard, very hard, for humans to do because we are all social animals and instinctively look for protection from our kindred and from the people that we know. Capitalism is an utter revolution in social relations that says that you trust those people that are trustworthy. It says that your life and prosperity depends on you serving your fellows, doing things that they are willing to pay for. And the customer is always right.

Racism is the old way, the way of the hunter-gatherer band, the way of the village, the clan, the ethnic ghetto in the big city. And it Does Not Pay.

Next up: We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws?

Over the weekend, thanks to John Derbyshire, I got to read Richard Hanania's "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law." I'll have my American Thinker piece up soon.

Let's say the piece cured me of my faith that the Civil Rights laws were a Good Thing, even if the quotas and diversity and wokism are a Bad Thing.

But politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." So now what?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that. Let's start at the upstream source.

My "Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left" is all about the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" in a world that, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, has at least three different kinds of people in it. That means that society's ruling class needs to accept that creative people have needs and wants different from responsible people different from subordinate people. I develop an idea of how a society with three different sorts of people could work in An American Manifesto.

I say that creative people -- and I have the conceit to imagine that I am one such -- should accept the path of the Sacrificial Hero, in which life is a journey to the underworld of the unconscious followed by a creative attempt at the border between Order and Chaos, which will probably fail. This means, e.g., that if you want to get creative about sex as a transgender, you should understand that the whole thing is likely to end up as a total disaster for you and yours. That is the meaning of creativity: you will probably fail. But creative people need to understand that most people do not want this kind of life and do not understand why anyone would.

I say that responsible people should have the right to live boring responsible lives within the guardrails, living according to a fixed agenda set forth in one of the Axial Age religions or later modifications, such as the Code of the Bourgeois as developed in my Road to the Middle Class. But responsible people should understand that subordinates, the new migrants to the city, are scared and properly live in ethnic enclaves run by virtual ganglords until they learn the Code of the Bourgeois. But do not expect responsible people to understand creative people.

I say that subordinate people since time began have looked to a family patriarch or tribal chief or urban ethnic leader to provide a safe haven from a brutal world. But, in our modern world this is a mean and cramped life, for subordinate people since time began have been cruelly used as political cannon fodder by their leaders. If subordinate people want to live in their ethnic ghettos, so be it. But if they yearn for something higher and better, we noble creatives and responsibles should extend a hand and help them learn the Code of the Bourgeois as per my Road to the Middle Class. But do not expect subordinate people to understand responsible people or creative people.

Then there is the question of the religions that come downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." We already have religions for responsibles and subordinates. The problem is the religion of the creatives, that right now is the false religion of Wokism. I say that the problem with the creatives' religion is that it has as its human ideal the Ego Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero. The Ego Hero is the revolutionary that kills millions on his millennial quest, the activist that leads a community of subordinates to social hell, the nice liberal lady with virtue-signalling yardsigns in front of her house. Obviously our wokey friends will not change their religion until their current one fails them utterly: we can hope.

Then there is the question of the culture of the future. Well, obviously it would not be the current culture that only allows cultural expression by the creatives that endorse the current religious cult of wokism and cancels everything else. In other words, the culture of the future would feature cultural expression and experience not just for wokey college graduates that celebrate revolution, activism, peaceful protest, anti-racism, and gender bending. It would also have cultural space for ordinary responsible people that want to celebrate marriage, family, children within the context of a religion issuing from the Axial Age. It would also have cultural space for subordinate people and their cultural preferences -- I am ignorant enough not to know what that might be.

Now we get to politics. Politics is the art of uniting "us," the people, against "them," the enemy. It is pure tribalism, and, I say, all tribalism is "fake tribalism. Why? Because once humans get beyond the community of the kindred we invent a fake kindred, that might be a clan or a tribe or a class or a race or an order of nobles. Our wokey lords and masters have a politics of race, in which they are "allies" fighting for the "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors." My politics would be a politics of class, in which "we" ordinary Americans unite against "them," the wokey upper class of educated snobs and cancel cultists, while looking after the lower class of subordinates with a modest program of paternalistic support and understanding. It is totally fake, but every politics is fake.

Funny, isn't it? This politics has already been invented. That is what Trumpism is all about. It is nationalist, in the semse of America First -- or ordinary Americans first. It issues mean tweets to various ruling-class swells and functionaries and toadies and Democratic operatives with bylines, and it is avuncular towards the traditionally marginalized, with a below-the-radar offer to join the great American mainstream, any time you are ready, friend.