Thursday, November 8, 2018

"We are NOT a Civil Rights organization"


As late as 1954 Dr. [Hector] García claimed, “We are not and have never been a civil rights organization. Personally I hate the word.”... 
Dr. García, did not wish to alienate whites in Texas–or anywhere else–by appearing to join the struggle of black people for civil rights... 
By the early 1950s the American GI Forum, while still denying that it was a civil rights organization, sought to end discrimination in Texas schools, in employment, and in the use of public spaces. The core strategy depended on educating Anglos that “Americans of Spanish-speaking descent” or Latin Americans were Caucasians and that to identify them as anything but white, whether on birth certificates or traffic citations, was illegal. Making any distinction between Latin Americans and whites, he wrote, was a “slur,” an insult to all Latin Americans.

Neil Foley, "Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line," in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest

5 comments:

  1. And to think that today we have full-on White Latin American descended people(e.g Cuban-Americans)identifying as "People of color" or worse "brown".So sad

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  2. To add some anecdotal reality to this story...My grandfather's birth certificate and on the 1910 Census from Puerto Rico identifies him as "Blanco" (White), which was true because his family was European-born (Corsica, Mallorca, France, Germany, Spain and Ireland) and someone once said to me..."Oh he just 'thought' he was White"...to which I responded..."THAT birth certificate and census was filled out by WHITE American Jesuits and Federal employees who had come to the Island as part of the Council of Churches attempt to carve up the Island into Catholic, Protestant and other Christian denominations and they new "White" when they saw it. Not surprisingly his parents were also "White" and his 12 children were "White" also...even the red-heads, the blue-eyed and freckle-faced grandchildren.

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    Replies
    1. very unlikely, purtoricans were never white, in the sense italians, irish and pole were not white eater.

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    2. Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America by Jennifer Guglielmo

      How Italians Became ‘White’
      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html

      Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
      by David R. Roediger
      Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
      by Matthew Frye Jacobson
      How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America
      by Karen Brodkin
      Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance
      by Jacqueline Battalora
      How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev

      Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers by John Jung

      The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White by James W. Loewen

      "What if we were not white?"
      https://youtu.be/94uDG5iHWnM

      India, South Asian Americans, and #ADOS
      https://archangelcleo.blogspot.com/2019/10/india-south-asian-americans-and-ados.html

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