Front Porch: Nativism has racial overtones

So just who is an American?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot during the current political goings on, especially in light of the cresting nativist wave washing over us, and I find my brain revisiting some events from my time as a student at the University of Florida.

To look at us, my Asian American roommate and I were an odd pair. In those days I was still 5-foot-10 and kind of athletically built. She was barely 5-foot tall and thin as a bean pole. She was not an activist of any sort, just someone making her way quietly. But there were moments …

Once we were somewhere off campus when a stranger came up to her and asked in an exaggerated pigeon-English tone: “What part China you from?” She answered in the same pigeon-speak way: “Kah-lo-rah-doe” and just looked blankly at the questioner.

She understood that often such questions were not malicious, but when she perceived something in the tone of the question, she found a passive-aggressive way of handling it.

We talked about American-ness and what it takes to look American. She was born in America, as were her parents. Her grandparents on both sides were born in Japan. I was born in America. My father was born in Germany, and my mother’s parents were both foreign-born. So if time spent on this native soil was a measure, she was more American than me.

But then again, I’m white and she’s not.

I realized then that to a lot of people, you really do need to be white to be recognized as a genuine American. And for too many years our laws and customs codified that notion. Oh sure, you could be an American legally if you’re not white – but you’re somehow lesser, somehow not quite as good, not so valued. Would the events that brought about the Black Lives Matter movement have happened if that were not so?

I recall another time when my roommate, Karen, and I were driving to see our families in Miami over a long weekend. The husband of a friend in the journalism program caught a ride with us, and we stopped at a café along the way.

So there we were having something to eat. Lee, a very gregarious guy who, I should mention, was black, was telling jokes and we were all laughing and enjoying ourselves. Not excessively loud, just merry. Then suddenly I had one of those hairs-on-the-back- of-your-neck moments and looked around the restaurant. Everyone was staring at us.

Now in all fairness, most of the looks didn’t appear hostile. This was pretty rural Florida in the mid-1960s and I suspect a multicolored group like ours was not common. I didn’t say anything about it in the car, but once Lee left us, I asked Karen if she’d noticed. “The minute we walked in,” she said.

That kind of on-all-the-time radar was not something that had been part of my life. But then again, I’m white.

I don’t have to go back so many decades to find examples of “otherness” that is race-based, but these earlier ones are so large in my consciousness because they occurred at a particular time in my life when they made indelible marks.

As the population demographics change in America and the awareness is rising that we are getting browner, the fear is rising also that the unearned advantage of whiteness is likely declining, and the response to that is not pretty. In recent years I recall hearing the comment that “I may not have a lot of money, but at least I’m white.”

Another person from my high school days had disparaging things to say about President Obama when he was elected, such as “You forget, Stefanie, we (people from the South) just don’t like black people,” which no doubt fueled her belief that he was not a legitimate president because he was not a real American – you know, that whole birther thing.

I agree heartily that we need secure borders, but all this passion about illegal immigration, too, is largely about those who come over our southern border, people who are not so white. Most statistics show that about 50 percent of illegal entry comes that way, so it’s certainly worthy of attention, but 40 percent are visa overstays from all around the world. Not so much noise about that.

This new national identity movement is tapping some ugly things within us. Please let me acknowledge that good things have happened since the ’60s regarding race in America, but this rising tide of nativism – of how we define who is an American and who is worthy to be an American, even through legal immigration – clearly has a huge racial component to it. It surely always has, but its venomous reach backward to the bad old days now really scares me.

We can’t move forward if we’re looking in the wrong direction. We have to be better than that, we just have to.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@ comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/ columnists.