For all the Newsweek agitprop, it should be noted that “Whiteness” isn’t clearly defined. Its a political definition that can include East Indians and exclude Poles and the Irish, depending on who is writing the law.
In a city like NY, with a very long and tawdry record on race politics, it can get confusing for a person wandering through a history exhibit to understand how and why certain ethnic cohorts gain or lose their “White” qualifier. So a museum establishing some kind of historically informed guideline to clarify can be helpful. Particularly when so much of their audience may be themselves or have relatives in their own living history who did not qualify as they do today.
I found it funny that when applying for jobs with the NYC government, Italians were not actually considered white. They were included in the affirmative action policies with other minorities. Definitely shows how the category of whiteness can evolve.
I mean, its amusing at first glance. But half my family is Italian. Quite a few of them have stories from parents/grandparents, etc about the genuinely nasty racist policies the city had towards Italians, Latinos, and Irish ex-pats - everything from redlining policies and employment blacklists to police gangs brutalizing relatives and government officials refusing to honor debts or outright stealing property unimpeded.
The social and legal justifications used are all common to the Smithsonian “Aspects of Whiteness” list above. Italians were generally described as a lazy, untrustworthy, dimwitted, and even sub-human population. They were accused of everything from vagrancy and slobbery to organized pedophilia. And that, unsurprisingly, had an impact on Italian immigrant community abilities to accrue wealth and status in the city and the surrounding areas.
That’s much less true now (although curiously not entirely absent, depending on who you talk to). But the legacy of discrimination has a real downward impact on plenty of people’s livelihoods to this day. If nothing else, there’s a ton of NYC real estate in the hands of grandchildren of kleptocrats who profited by seizing it from folks lower on the racial totem pole.
As far as political leaning goes, Newsweek is pretty much right in the center
Citing “Forbes”, a magazine owned and operated by a former Republican Presidential candidate and The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch publication, in the center of the spectrum is… definitely one way to weight the scales. Bloomberg, a publication entirely by and for Wall Street, is center-left? Hell, the State Department’s favorite news network, MSNBC, is in the same column as Jacobin and The Intercept?
I’m not saying it’s the pinnacle of intellectual achievement but they DID officially put that out: https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333
For all the Newsweek agitprop, it should be noted that “Whiteness” isn’t clearly defined. Its a political definition that can include East Indians and exclude Poles and the Irish, depending on who is writing the law.
In a city like NY, with a very long and tawdry record on race politics, it can get confusing for a person wandering through a history exhibit to understand how and why certain ethnic cohorts gain or lose their “White” qualifier. So a museum establishing some kind of historically informed guideline to clarify can be helpful. Particularly when so much of their audience may be themselves or have relatives in their own living history who did not qualify as they do today.
I found it funny that when applying for jobs with the NYC government, Italians were not actually considered white. They were included in the affirmative action policies with other minorities. Definitely shows how the category of whiteness can evolve.
I mean, its amusing at first glance. But half my family is Italian. Quite a few of them have stories from parents/grandparents, etc about the genuinely nasty racist policies the city had towards Italians, Latinos, and Irish ex-pats - everything from redlining policies and employment blacklists to police gangs brutalizing relatives and government officials refusing to honor debts or outright stealing property unimpeded.
The social and legal justifications used are all common to the Smithsonian “Aspects of Whiteness” list above. Italians were generally described as a lazy, untrustworthy, dimwitted, and even sub-human population. They were accused of everything from vagrancy and slobbery to organized pedophilia. And that, unsurprisingly, had an impact on Italian immigrant community abilities to accrue wealth and status in the city and the surrounding areas.
That’s much less true now (although curiously not entirely absent, depending on who you talk to). But the legacy of discrimination has a real downward impact on plenty of people’s livelihoods to this day. If nothing else, there’s a ton of NYC real estate in the hands of grandchildren of kleptocrats who profited by seizing it from folks lower on the racial totem pole.
Great points!
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Citing “Forbes”, a magazine owned and operated by a former Republican Presidential candidate and The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch publication, in the center of the spectrum is… definitely one way to weight the scales. Bloomberg, a publication entirely by and for Wall Street, is center-left? Hell, the State Department’s favorite news network, MSNBC, is in the same column as Jacobin and The Intercept?
Come on, dude.
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I can name at least one