From: betsys@cs.umb.edu (Elizabeth Schwartz)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Re: Others did it, why can't you?
Date: 12 Dec 92 10:21:37 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts at Boston

Up front: I agree with what Wayne is saying about the difficulties
faced by blacks, and I don't want to rate or compare sufferings, I
just want to share that we've suffered too. Hoping that mutual
sympathy comes from mutual understanding of each other's histories.

In article <1992Dec8.232920.25008@tse.uucp> wayne@tse.uucp (Wayne Hines) writes:
>* White ethnics immigrants have faced discrimination but were still usually 
>preferred to blacks
>* First-generation white ethnics quickly learn how to hide their ethnicity.
>* Second-generation white ethnics are often fully integrated into
> North American society, have no noticeable cultural differences, and
suffer little  discrimination. 
The truth is somewhere in the middle. A lot of 'ethnic' Americans were
forced to come here or starve, and moved from repression at home to
working starvation in America's ghettoes.
  Assimilation was POSSIBLE for some whites, particularly Irish, but not
really for others. Those of us who kept our names and our religions,
or had markedly non-northern-european features, haven't fully
assimilated yet. 
  I've certainly seen racists who have  a hierarchy of inferiority who
would rank white "hyphenated-Americans" higher than blacks. That
doesn't mean that ethnic whites aren't discriminated against.  It DOES
mean that some whites have a choice, of "passing," that is denied to
most blacks. But, destroying our culture is an awful price to pay for
it. 
  It's the worst side of our unequal society that people end up
fighting each other on the lower and middle rungs  instead of working 
together to solve what really is a shared problem.

>* Ethnic Immigrants tend to come to the U.S. willingly with an intact family
>structure.
  Umm, my family came over because they came from a country where
invaders were burning villages, raping women and children and killing
men or taking them prisoner and forcing them into the army. 
I'm very grateful that my ancestors had the strength and the
imagination to get themselves over here. 
   
   My family didn't work as slaves on arrival. They worked in
shoe factories and clothing factories, 14-hour days that didn't pay
enough to feed a family and buy coal.  Houses burned, factories
burned, children died of malnutrition-related diseases and TB. 
It took my family three generations to escape into the middle class.
If it weren't for the GI bill, my father wouldn't be the only one of
his seven siblings to go to college. My mother is also the first one
in her family to go to college, taking ten years of night classes in
New York City College, which was free to all.
   My uncle came here from a prison camp in Shanghai in WWII. I don't
have any relatives who survived Hitler's slave camps, mostly because
what remained of our family was wiped out by the pogroms (which were
racist mass murders, in the ugliest form.)

>* Most U.S. blacks descended from slaves. Black slaves' family infrastructure
>was destroyed, black culture was destroyed, black learning/education was 
>retarded.

Again, that's true. Our group, we kept our family structure but lost
our religion , our languages, and our culture in the struggle to
survive. Without completely becoming a part of this new, Christian,
culture, we lost a lot of what made us Jews. 

Japanese prison camp in Shaghai in WWII. I don't have any relatives
who came here from Hitler's slave camps because none of our relatives
survived that time. 

It's hard to convey emotion over the Net. I'm not saying all this to
put down black struggles. I'm saying it because I believe that
understanding where people are coming from is really necessary to
communication. If you say that all immigrants with white skin had it
easy, then you deny the very real suffering and disillusionment that a
lot of them went through. The point isn't to compare suffering, to
rank it from one to ten. The conditions faced by slaves in our country
were possibly the worst conditions faced ever in history to that time.





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