How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person,” develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from “free white person”? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people’s freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist? In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries? They’re rapists.” When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. But as I listened to Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. “George Washington freed his slaves?” someone else would inquire. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired.
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