The Structure of Huntington's Anti-immigrant Ideology
Samuel Huntington's recent assault on Mexican immigration ("The Hispanic Challenge"), while it can properly be called "racist," actually reveals a structure analogous to that of traditional European anti-semitism. For European anti-semitism, the Jews constituted an alien influx, a community of foreigners whose culture and ethics were incommensurably and irreconcilably different from Christian society. From the 12th to the 20th centuries, anti-semitism said about Jews that they didn't mix, that they only identified with their own kind, that they were hermetic and kept to themselves, and that they didn't want to assimilate. The daily comportment of the Jews were seen negatively as unmotivated or cunning, seeking to take advantage of Christians, or acquire benefits to which they were not entitled. Ultimately, anti-semitism charged them with wanting to take over everything. The handful, in pre-19th century Europe, who could rise out of impoverishment, and even become rich, were used opportunistically to justify these charges, while they in turn were charged with seeking to assimilate.
Those who accused the Jews of all this left out the fact of laws against Jews owning land or farming, the segregations in employment, the over-crowded slum ghettos in which they were forced to live, often with a real wall around it ("ghetto" is a Yiddish word meaning "wall"). The ghettoization, social ostracism, and restriction to society's bottom rung was designed to foster endless derogation against the Jews, and to prepare the violence that maintained it (from beatings and rape to massive pogroms that sporatically tore through the ghettos). Thus, they were kept in second-class status and hated for it. As Albert Memmi has said, in his book called "Racism," the anti-semites didn't oppress the Jews because they hated them; they hated the Jews because they oppressed them.
Huntington runs through the same gamut of traits with respect to Mexican immigrants. His first accusation is their refusal to assimilate. They come to the US as a foreign influx that he foretells will be never-ending. Because they have a community coherence, as well as a language of their own, he proclaims their culture incommensurable with the "American creed" (that is, with an exclusive homogeneity he calls "Anglo-Protestant culture"). He accuses them of wanting to take over whole regions of the US, cunningly opportuning on the "doctrine" of diversity (as if that too were an alien ideology, and not the very heart of democracy). And after making these accusations of non-assimilation, he opportunistically uses an assimilated Mexican (Sosa) to list the "negative characteristics" of Mexicans.
In all this, Huntington forgets about the vast Mexican population annexed to the US after its Manifest-Destiny aggressions against Mexico in the 1840s. Conceptually, he has cleared the land, so that Mexicans can be labelled only as a foreign rather than indigenous presence. He trivializes the segregations, exclusions, and impoverishments that Mexicans and Chicanos have faced at the hands of "Anglo-Protestant" society, by which they have been limited for the most part to agricultural or sweatshop labor, and restricted to living in certain neighborhoods. He ignores the discriminations that render assimilation impossible by all but a small handful of people. He decries the fact that "Mexican children overwhelmingly [do] not choose "American" as their primary identification," forgeting that they don't have to because "American" is too general, referring to residence in two whole continents. In fact, only for a perspective derived from white supremacy does "American" refer only to the US. And herein lies the double bind in which the demand for assimilation places Mexican immigrants. They are proclaimed to be brown, to be alien, and then told to engage in an assimilation that means an acceptance of white supremacy; that is, the demand is accompanied by conditions that render fulfillment of the demand impossible.
Finally, in reasserting the homogeneous monopoly of "Anglo-Protestant culture" as the "only choice" available, Huntington is preparing an atmosphere of violence and aggression against the Mexican and Mexican-American population. He runs through a thought-experiment of all the benefits that would accrue if Mexican immigration were to stop. Based on that, his implicit council to Mexican immigrants is either to assimilate or get out (that is, "leave us to the benefit of your absence"), amounting to an expulsion order. When he makes reference to the "new white nationalists" believing in "racial self-preservation," he is adverting to the idea that whites mobs will be justified in assailing immigrants pursuant to the fiction of self-defense. "They contend," he says, "that the shifting U.S. demographics foretell the replacement of white culture by black or brown cultures that are intellectually and morally inferior." Self-defense is always the rationalization for the aggressions of bigotry. It is one of the inversion that insulates its aggressions against reason or argument in response. Thus, the double bind of assimilation is accompanied by a threat, just as the pogroms were held as a threat over European Jews. If Mexicans do not properly identify, according to Huntington, they will face the ire of the white mob, the "new white nationalists."
In sum, Huntington has reproduced the structure of anti-semitism with a different content. He has proclaimed the Mexicans alien, and their culture incompatable. He has attributed to them a system of negative characteristics by which to devalue their culture and persons as different. And he has thereby prepared potential violence against them in the name of "self-defense."
We should perhaps note that anti-semitism, and its anti-immigrant variety, differs from anti-black racism in a number of ways. Let us call the first "ethnocentrism," to differentiate it from "racialization." Ethnocentrism is a relation of dominance and hierarchy between peoples previously constituted as separate cultural traditions, whose aim is to subordinate one culture in second-class status to the other. As a system of oppression with its accompanying derogations, it renders equitable interaction between those cultures impossible, while demanding assimilation by the subjugated culture, failure in which is blamed on the subordinate people. Anti-black racism has many of the same appearances (prevention of assimilation, second-class status, etc.), and both occur for the purposes of exploitation. Indeed, today, those subjected to either one face police profiling, the criminalization of color, covert segregations, and a prison-industrial complex. But the second-class status of black people in the US is something they have fought up to (rather than been reduced to) from a condition of enslavement (or debt-servitude under Jim Crow).
In early colonial times, concomitant to their enslavement, Africans were racialized black as the necessary condition for whites to racialize themselves as white. That is, Europeans had to racialize others as non-white in order to be able to racialize themselves as white. That specific colonial process of racialization is what constitutes origin of the concepts of race, whiteness, and white supremacy in the first place. Enmeshed in a system of oppression that had fragmented prior African cultural identities, black people were thrust into the core of white identity and its white supremacy, which depended (and depends) on them for its fundamental ability to define whiteness and white identity for itself. When Ian Heany Lopez asks, what does it mean to be white? he answers, it means to be not non-white.
If whites find the center of their white identity in black people, then it is not in themselves. That is why they have to assert their socio-political identity so strongly (as Anglo-Protestant, or "freedom-loving"), to compensate. They depend on black people for their very intimate sense of themselves as white, while having to evict black people continually from that centrality in order to pretend to be independent in their white identity. And anti-black racism is the system of social mechanisms by which white supremacy guards and maintains white racialized identity. It insures the continuation of the historical role played by African Americans as central to the construction of white identity, through preserving their derogated status interior to white society, rather than alien to it. This structure of racialization is the foundation for all cultural, social, and political structures (its "Anglo-Protestant culture") in the US.
In effect, white society's relation to black people is on a different order of obsession from its relation to brown people (as Latino immigrant, as Chicano, as Native American). The white supremacy that expresses itself toward Mexican immigrants has its origin in the structures of racialization. The structures of racialization establish the social identity that then assaults Mexican immigrants as alien across a divide of ethnocentric domination and bigotry. In other words, the relative oppressions of black and brown people, which overlap with similar appearances, differ structurally because they exist at different levels of the social operation of white supremacy, and thus different levels of social identity.
In effect, racialization and ethnocentrism, as identifiably different social structures, have different inner dynamics, modes of exclusion, and modes of oppression (though those oppressions may be maintained through similar strategies or social institutions by white society). It is the sense of structure that allows one to see beyond the ideologies of a situation to its underlying relations of domination. For instance, though Jews have suffered a specific form of ethnocentric oppression called anti-semitism in Europe, the state of Israel, despite its remembrance of that early oppression, have established an ethnocentric relation of domination to the Palestinians that evinces the same structure of domination as the anti-semitism the Jews suffered in Europe (second-class status for Palestinians, a proclaimed incommensurability of cultures, a prohibition against owning land, ghettoization, arbitrary deportations, denigration as Arabs, and violence). It is this same structure that Huntington's description of Mexican immigrants repeats.
In order for Latinos to end the anti-immigrant bigotry that they face, the Anglo-Protestant pretension to supremacist monopoly must be dispelled and thrown off. But that cannot be done without a strong alliance and common struggle with African Americans, upon whom white supremacy depends for its very identity. White identity is not generated by anything inherent in whites, but is the operation of a social structure of racialization, through which whites racialize black people, racialize themselves, and establish systems of oppression of immigrants based on that.