Post-election shifts showed increased support for the president among some non-white communities, provoking feelings of betrayal and skepticism within Black communities. Many Black people perceived terms like people of color and BIPOC as masking limited cross-racial solidarity and reflecting adjacency rather than genuine alliance. Those reactions sprung from long-standing historical memory about how newcomers to America's racial hierarchy often sought status by aligning with whiteness, even when that alignment was harmful. Historical examples include European immigrant groups who became assimilated through processes that equated Americanness with whiteness and incorporated anti-Blackness as part of social acceptance.
And still others condemned the hollowness of terms like people of color and BIPOC for falsely suggesting non-white solidarity where there is mostly just adjacency. Those reactions, contrary to what both centrist and right-wing commentators suggested, weren't about Black resentment over mere political divergence. They arose, instead, from the weariness of a collective historical memory that prompts Black folks to read between the lines of the newest chapters in a very old story.
For generations, Black Americans have watched new arrivals enter America's racial hierarchy and, when given the chance, move to gain status and power by aligning themselves with whitenesshowever toxic, tenuous, or self-harming. It's a means of getting a leg up that has always involved stepping on Black folks along the way. That was how it worked for waves of Europeans.
Italians, Greeks, Irish, and Slavic arrivals from the 19th century to the early 20th found themselves classified as not-quite-fully white by eugenicists proclaiming Nordics superior to Alpines and Mediterraneans. Assimilation, then, as scholar David Roediger writes in Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White, meant whitening as well as Americanizing. Those immigrant groups learned real fast that Americanness was tantamount to whiteness, and that whiteness was incomplete without anti-Blackness.
Collection
[
|
...
]