American #Immigration: A Century of Racism | by Sarah Churchwell | The New York Review of Books
▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/09/26/american-immigration-century-racism
Discussions of eugenics and other fascistic ideas in American history tend to provoke the defense that, while such arguments have been made, they never took root. But if they never took root, why do they keep flowering?
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History matters, as was made all too clear when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was lambasted for her entirely accurate description of the prison camps on the southern US border as “concentration camps.” Hitler is not fascism’s only test case: he was neither its beginning nor its ending.
Those with power have a vested interest in misreading it, viewing the social rules that benefit them as reflecting the natural order of things, an order their dominance lets them replicate and justify. As Okrent quotes one opponent to restrictionism aptly commenting, the world has “suffered more from the vices of the rich than from those of the poor.” The Guarded Gate sharply reminds us that nativism has never been limited to its most savage enforcers, like the Klan or #neo-Nazis. It always has its “civilized” voices, too, with lobbyists, funders, and advocates giving it respectable cover, domesticating it, putting it in Good Housekeeping rather than in Der Stürmer. But it keeps turning back to the same old-time religion, singing the same sad lament: “Lo, the Poor Nordic!”
#racisme #fascisme des #civilisés #états-unis