Honestly, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Irish people were always still considered white. Even during the worst of discrimination against them, if they had to go to the bathroom, they did not go to the "colored persons" bathroom, they went into the white one. To tell the truth, my guess is that Asians did too. There's no equivalent to Jim Crow laws in the white-ethnic-minority-in-America experience.
I know you're acknowledging the difference, but I feel like in today's society every ethnically-based discriminatory practice is lumped into "race," whereas back-in-the-day, there definitely was a pretty serious distinction. I'm still not sure that I accept, even now, the practice that people make of lumping the Hispanic/Latino population into some separate race, when such a large proportion of that population is not recognizable as such on sight, and a lot of the bases for discrimination are clearly language, culture, and immigrant status, not physical features. I'm aware that stereotypes about language/culture also true of racial minorities, but a black person who behaves indistinguishably from most white people will still be treated as black, and an Asian person who has never learned a language other than English will still run into people who assume, on sight, that they will understand Chinese. It's just a very different phenomenon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 06:09 pm (UTC)Honestly, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Irish people were always still considered white. Even during the worst of discrimination against them, if they had to go to the bathroom, they did not go to the "colored persons" bathroom, they went into the white one. To tell the truth, my guess is that Asians did too. There's no equivalent to Jim Crow laws in the white-ethnic-minority-in-America experience.
I know you're acknowledging the difference, but I feel like in today's society every ethnically-based discriminatory practice is lumped into "race," whereas back-in-the-day, there definitely was a pretty serious distinction. I'm still not sure that I accept, even now, the practice that people make of lumping the Hispanic/Latino population into some separate race, when such a large proportion of that population is not recognizable as such on sight, and a lot of the bases for discrimination are clearly language, culture, and immigrant status, not physical features. I'm aware that stereotypes about language/culture also true of racial minorities, but a black person who behaves indistinguishably from most white people will still be treated as black, and an Asian person who has never learned a language other than English will still run into people who assume, on sight, that they will understand Chinese. It's just a very different phenomenon.