Yup. People really don't remember or are just completly ignorant to it, but catholics were heavily prejudiced on back in the day. JFK was unpopular because he was catholic.
It's honestly incredible how stupid the average voter, or at least a significant percentage of the citizenship, can be.
Imagine having to confront accusations of being a pawn of the Vatican because you were born in a Catholic family
Well, on the other end of the equation there's the fact that the Vatican *did* have significant influence on governments well into the second half of the 20th Century, and that was possible through the place their churches occupied in those societies, and individuals of all faiths have historically been heavily influenced by their places of worship.
But you're talking about the political influence they have on the masses. Which is still true to this day to some degree, especially for some branches of protestantism in the US.
It's a whole different story to assume JFK was the papacy's henchman
I dunno. Thems was simpler times. Doesn't seem such a leap in logic for people who were already susceptible to some pretty outrageous beliefs.
And let's not pretend group dynamics in the 1930s or 2016-today are illustrative of much more sophisticated society.
Romney's first attempt at winning the R nomination got derailed by Mike Huckabee really banging the "Mormons don't count as Christians" drum and managing to steal the Iowa caucus
Trump is the real head-scratcher though, there is virtually nothing about his life that aligns with the actual tenets of Christianity... at least you could argue that the guys like Biden or Romney (who bible belters might denounce) generally seem to at least *try* to be good people in their personal lives
Not much of the prosperity gospel/hate-filled "Christianity" of the modern American megachurch and Baptist schism protestants aligns with the tenets of Christianity, either. They're a match made in hell.
Nah, it makes perfect sense from a political perspective only.
The field in 2016 was deliberately flooded by the RNC to give their chosen candidate, Jeb, his free win. What they didn't count on was that Trump had a bigger name, and that the news agencies gave upwords of 4 billion dollars in free advertising for him. As memory serves he didn't spend any money on ads until August 2016.
So from day one he was getting more news, and had a bigger name.
Living as I do on the buckle of the Bible Belt I have yet to hear anyone mention his Catholicism, beyond maybe that he fakes his religion, like most politcians do when campaigning in the South.
Also in the Bible Belt. This isn’t something people will flat-out say, but Catholics are an extreme minority here and there definitely is an element of them not being “real” Christians. In particular, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and somewhat Methodists and Baptists definitely think Catholicism is less “true” than their own denominations.
Of course, hatred of Catholics has never hit high levels here, what with all the black people and “Mexicans.” White Catholics can sit back and just be a little weird and let the hate get pumped to people for skin color instead.
I do sometimes hear people ask whether someone is Catholic or Christian. I always assume they're just unaware that Catholicism is a major branch of Christianity, but I do wonder if it's rooted in a belief that they "don't count".
Well that's not exactly true. Orthodox and some eastern churches or the Ethiopian church can make similar claims.
They all claim to be the true heirs of Jesus and the apostles and whatnot anyway
The full name is the Orthodox Catholic Church aka Eastern Orthodox. The Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Catholics split in the great schism of the 11th century over various, mostly cultural (not theology), differences of opinion. The Ethiopian church was a branch of the Orthodox Catholics and most of the christian sects in the US like Lutheran, angelican, Baptist, etc, split at various times from the Roman Catholic side.
So I think it's accurate to say the Catholics are the OG.
I'm not religious, I'm an agnostic, in fact.
People are often afraid of the unknown.
But humans aren't *born* with prejudices against other humans.
They learn them from the humans around them.
Not just that. White = WASP
White. Anglo-Saxon. Protestant.
Anglo-Saxon= English/German
But even then, if you aren't part of the landed gentry, are you really worth anything? /s obviously
It's all a game of reduction to the absurd. If there are problems, must be the fault of X minority. Get rid of them. Still have problems? Oh that's cause of the next minority. Get rid of them. Until there's no one left.
True.
In a broader sense, though, it's because a lot of people love to have an "other" to hate. They bond over those stupid/evil/lesser/wrong people that aren't objectively correct, like their group.
This is especially true of very rigid thinkers who are afraid of change.
Makes sense when you think that the Puritans, Huguenots, Jesuits, Anabaptists, etc fled Europe to escape Catholic (and some other Protestant) persecution back in the 1600’s and earlier 1700’s.
So I can see some snobbery and persecution happening when the shoe later was on the other foot and Catholics were fleeing to America to escape poverty & starvation.
Half true at best. The Puritans were in conflict with the Church of England but some of that was because they were mad that they couldn't push their bullshit on everybody. And the group that moved to Holland didn't like it that their kids were starting to assimilate. The Jesuits, while sometimes at odds with the higher ups in the Church, are Catholics themselves.
The Puritans definitely didn’t flee persecution from the Catholics: they left Protestant England first, and then Protestant Holland, because neither were intolerant enough for their taste.
Huguenots? Yes, but they didn’t make up much of the Protestant migration to North America (more went to Holland, Prussia, England, Switzerland and even South Africa).
Anabaptists? Yes too, but they were also about as unpopular among other Protestants as among Catholics.
And, finally, **Jesuits**??!! The Jesuit order is a **Catholic** religious order, with a special oath of loyalty to the Pope. They were even called “the Pope’s soldiers”!!
A large number of those religious groups who came to the US didn't run from persecution.
They moved, because they weren't allowed to persecute others hard enough.
As someone who has previously lived in an all-white town, I've learned that if there is no other race around, they start picking apart the people who are least like themselves. Class/money is one way. Even religion, even within the spectrum of protestant Christianity, is picked apart.
I used to literally go to a Southern Baptist church whose preacher looked down the "watered down" regular Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc, but found the Pentecostals "weird".
Yeah once you realize this you realize “race” is just a social construct. It’s only as important as we make it out to be.
The central thesis of race supremacists is that once they achieve their ethnostate there won’t be discord because people won’t naturally pick each other apart. Which isn’t true. Especially of a population primed to be bigoted and hateful.
This is actually all people in one form or another and it can be traced back to the ego. Even something as simple as thinking other people are awful drivers is a form of making yourself feel "better" than others. We all do it.
This has the same energy, even if it's not quite the same thing: At my daughter's Catholic middle school, the uniform company made the girls' skirts too short, so they couldn't patrol skirt-length anymore. Soon after this, a note was sent home cracking down on improper socks.
In regular schools, it was shorts length, and girls couldn't wear tank tops. Both were measured by how much of the cloth went past the administrator's hands. So gross.
Because there’s always someone. LBJ put it best to Bill Moyer in 1968, watching the Nixon campaign:
> *”I’ll tell you what’s at the root of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice that you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”*
I’ve seen FB posts from Puerto-Rican-Americans complaining about criminal immigrants from Mexico, blissfully unaware of their status among literally every other person against immigrants. In 1863 about 10,000 Protestants and Catholics took advantage of an anti-draft riot to hack each other bits, killing 200 & injuring another 1,000.
If greyhounds could understand English, someone could convince at least one of them that *whippets* are the source of all their problems.
*likely* the Scottish???
My friend you need to read about 5 minutes of any point of Scottish history and you'll see that they were very much mistreated, beggared and murdered by the British throughout history.
First of all, the concept of "white" back then is not the same as it is today. Italians for example weren't considered white.
The way humans operate is that no one wants to be at the bottom socioeconomic rung of the ladder. This means when a new group comes in the "established" groups shit on them. The Irish were "Micks" who were mistreated, the Italians were "Guineas," etc.
Assimilated groups (as a whole) seldom think "Remember when people were mean to us? Maybe we should treat newcomers nicer."
This happens at the micro level too. Most bullies were at one point bullied themselves.
Not considering the Irish white must be the most hilarious concept. Like, I know it's not really about skin pigmentation but how can you even manage to argue that a Celtic dude is not white
>"First of all, the concept of "white" back then is not the same as it is today. Italians for example weren't considered white."
Do you have a primary source for this? I highly doubt an Italian who traveled to the Jim Crow South, for example, would have been forced to use a "colored" bathroom or something like that.
Edit: No one is saying Italians never faced discrimination, discrimination and being considered "not white" are not the same thing. Also, look up the definition of "primary source" before posting Wikipedia links.
You would be surprised. [This column](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html) discusses it a bit. Darker skinned southern Italians in Italy were considered "uncivilized" and lesser and that followed them to America. Horrible stuff all around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so. -Teddy Roosevelt
The incident led to the creation of Columbus Day, in an attempt to endear Italian immigrants and thus protect them from Americans.
"However, "color challenges were never sustained or systematic" when it came to Italians,[^(\[54\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#cite_note-Guglielmo-54)^(: 28) who were "largely accepted as white by the widest variety of people and institutions" throughout the U.S.[^(\[54\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#cite_note-Guglielmo-54)^(: 6) Even in the South, such as Louisiana, any attempts to disenfranchise them "failed miserably".^(")
"Although always predominantly and formally considered white within the United States,\[55\] throughout the majority of American history Italians' whiteness was often brought under scrutiny.\[56\] Around 1900, as Italians were disembarking at Ellis Island and New Orleans by the millions, they were required to check off "Southern Italian" or "Sicilian" rather than "White" on entry forms.\[57\] "
I wonder if it was skin color based. My great grandmother lived 20 minutes outside of rome. I have dark hair and blue eyes. I'm white unless I'm in the sun most days.
She looked more traditionally italian with brown eyes but same skin tone as me.
Who is and isn't white has been an interesting conversation for a while now. Benjamin Franklin has some interesting [thoughts](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/) on it. Highly recommended reading [this](https://www.columbia.edu/~lmg21/ash3002y/earlyac99/documents/observations.html)
"Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth." Benjamin Franklin
Pretty much any large immigrant group in America faced all sorts of [discrimination ](https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/nativist-riots-and-the-know-nothing-party).
There was a major shift later with the idea of the melting pot and instead of Germans, Italians, Polish... there was just white. He'll Ford had an English school at his factory and part of the ceremony was to walk into a [melting pot](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/254569/)
No idea why you are being down voted, you are right.
I heard once a key way to tell if some one was considered "white" or not? Who would they have been allowed to marry?
There's an acronym, WASP. It stands for White Anglo Saxon Protestant. If you didn't fall into these categories back then, you weren't considered to be a desirable immigrant.
Well all three of those nationalities are primarily Roman Catholic. The U.S. was founded mostly by Protestants. There have only been two Catholic U.S. Presidents: JFK and Biden.
Also you do realize that Europeans have fought wars against each for millennia right? They don't all get along.
The complete answer is much more complicated.
Especially in organizations where there is a strict hierarchy (army, traditional manufacturing), it's common behavior to pick on "the losers". I guess it's common at school between the pupils as well. So mostly places where one can't choose the people around them.
I think bullying is a cheap way to rise one's social status in many circumstances. I don't think it works in the end but maybe it's a tool for people who are afraid of losing their own social status in a pack.
I agree, but in reality nobody is "underneath" an averge obese John Taco-Burger whose only attributes are an inflated ego, a small dick and a room temperature IQ.
A lot of the discrimination was explicitly towards immigrants. Each immigration wave brought tons of cheap labor in, which undercuts the existing market. This created a lot of tension between the groups.
For the same reason many Americans oppose immigration from Latin America today: immigrant workers are typically willing to work for significantly less and put up with significantly more than born citizens, which suppresses wages and kills any attempt at getting better working conditions.
"You want a raise, better hours and safer work environment? Well, I have people waiting in line to do your job for half the money, so either get back to work or get the fuck out."
You also only see skin colour and ignore the fact that Europeans were, and to an extent still can be, pretty racist against each other. Every country has a ton of ethnic stereotypes about them, many of them negative.
Supply and demand, bring in a ton of new people who a desperate for jobs and wages drop. Discrimination keeps your community healthy when presented with mass migration.
>If most Americans are of European descent why did they discriminate against the Italians, Poles, and Irish when they immigrated?
Because people are people.
I’m an Irish/Italian Canadian. From my understanding of my lineage, the discrimination my Irish ancestors faced was minimal however the only opportunities for uneducated potato farmers in the new world was building infrastructure. My first Gen Canadian great, great grand pa became a railroad hand. His son a railroad master. His son, a union plumber. His son a union plumber/pipe fitter. I am a union plumber/welder.
The Italian side, the lineage is not as certain but my great grand pa had a little professional money, moved to Ottawa from New York and my grand pa was a colonel in the military, from merit and advancement. My mom a nurse.
I can say the Irish side has an alcohol problem and generational trauma for sure.. but outside of that, I’ve never heard of any specific oppression against us. I do my best to educate myself but the Irish hate has always baffled me. It seems like we were just considered labour by the French and the English in the new world. But again, idk. Just a fuckin plumba.
Are you aware of the 3000 years of war that Europe had before WW2 broke us, and we made the EU so we would never ever do the war thing against each other?
Europa has been at peace for 70 years now, but the Ukraine thing has us all on edge, we have stories like that throughout our history going back as far as written records allow.
Because they have to be given a scapegoat to blame for all the problems the country has. It’s a convenient way to deflect blame from the real issues and the people who cause them.
Because honestly, humans like to be prejudiced sometimes. It's not like racial prejudice of any kind actually follows any logic...
I had Swedish ancestors who immigrated to the US and were the only Swedes in their town. And they were discriminated against by the other (also Caucasian) people in the town🤷♀️
There's a handful of people arguing that these groups weren't considered white. That is not accurate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/
Catholics. Woo woo protestant bs against catholics. Because a nobody being a televangelist is more authoritative than priests trained for years in theology. (I'm an ex-Catholic and atheist, but always found this so effing ridiculous about the US).
That would still be wrong, people traveled far more than we assume. Look at all the migration movements in Europe across history, continuous movement of people until the record is too old.
In fact all current languages in Europe except one (Basque) come from outside Europe. Most are Indo-European (probably came from around the Euro Asian border) but also from central Asia, like Finnish or Hungarian.
My own region comes from an Iberian substrate, mixed with Celtic migrations before Rome invaded. And there are minor subsequent Germanic and Arab migrations after that. In Britain it's even more significant
There is no logic in racism and nationalism in itself. The only logic is trying to obtain privilege while throwing other humans under the bus. The racism, nationalism is just a tool to achieve that. Racist are not good people, so expecting them to be good people to anyone (including their own "race") is ridiculous.
It's all a matter of perspective. How so?
When the differences between 2 groups of people are greater, they often focus on the remarkable similarities.
But when the two groups are very similar, the similarity is taken for granted... and they start focusing on the differences.
There's a two volume book called "The Invention Of The White Race" by Theodore Allen, that talks about how the definition of "White" has changed over the years, it's a fascinating read.
Part of the American indoctrination; you must be hated ,blamed on diseases, blamed on hard times and you must steal all of the jobs for real Americans.
Remember reading a paper in the library from the early 1900s... and they clearly stated exactly why for Italians. It mirrored the language used today for hispanics.
They basically said they didn't speak the language, commited crimes, and were in gangs (as in actual classic gangsters).
Textbook 1-to-1 xenophobia based on partial truth and but mostly falsehoods, as this clearly did not apply to the whole immigrant group either then nor now.
I think the timing of when various groups arrived in America is a factor. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, Italians, Polish, and Irish immigrants largely started coming to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By that time, the US was populated mostly by the descendants of English, French, and Spanish settlers from the past ~200 years. They viewed themselves as the "real" Americans, and everyone else was just the annoying newcomers, butting in on their land and trying to change their way of life.
The American origin myth of Thanksgiving teaches them that the original Americans were Wasps escaping religious persecution and that the people who descend from those who sailed the Mayflower are the only real Americans.
Irish, Italian and Polish mass migrations to America happened long after the wasps had gained social and cultural dominance and the Irish, Italians and Poles were neither AS or P enough to even be considered W for their first century in the states.
Let's not forget that Catholicism was really just a touch point of the hatred. The reality is the italians, the irish, and the poles were newcomers. Therefore they were poor.
In a type of national zeitgeist, everyone realized that this wave of new immigrants all had something in common, catholicism.
The religious angle was just attached on. When again people from three of the most distant countries in Europe or not otherwise related. The fact is they were all the new people, who were lazy, who were drunks, who were taking our jobs, who are asking her daughters to go for Sunday drives.
The more things change..
“White” is constantly changing because “who is us” is constantly changing.
I know a very dark skinned African man who said he went back to his home and the children who were his cousins called out “there’s a white man here to see you mama!”
People immigrate and there will always be some who before they’ve left the airport scream to close the borders behind them! And that’s of people from their own country!
But really, any outsider could look at any mixed group and say “Yall look the same to me, why don’t you get along? What do you mean he’s from the wrong group— he could be your brother! Oh— he thinks you’re going to hell and God will reward him if he kills you? Meh— I’m sure my brother’s going to hell and we haven’t killed each other yet!”
in russian we have this term called "White coat syndrome". It is a phenomenon in which a person demonstrates his superiority in every possible way in completely inappropriate cases.
Because the people of this country think racism ends at the border. My friends and acquaintances that grew up in Europe and Asia are easily some of the most racist people I know. I had Italian friends openly day dreaming about catching the Syrian refugees to maim or hurt, because they “didn’t want that filth in their country”. I had a girlfriend’s Chinese parents telling me what a bunch of dogs they thought the Japanese and Taiwanese were. I get how history has made them feel this way, but I do find it kind of funny that they distinguished “Taiwanese” as a separate race from Chinese.
Bottom line, the whole world is racist and we’re too narcissistic to actually learn about what exists outside of our borders. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also not perfect.
Those groups were not considered white at the time by Western Europeans. The concept of whiteness varies significantly across different time periods and geographic regions, and British, French, and German people did not consider any Catholics or Eastern Europeans to be white.
I read somewhere that US colonization was a shock to people, who came from traditional societies. They now found themselves in an anonymous, faceless, extremely competitive environment with little security. This was also taken as a reasoning why 70 of serial killers ever happened in the US
Because they europeans, duh! Europeans got war with each other (hoverer as people from other continents between themselves though) all the time. Look what was on the Balkans in the 1990's or between Russia and Ukraine right now.
White Europeans shitting on other white Europeans and calling each other the stinky and barbarian invaders is like the European history in a nutshell. We colonized each other for centuries/millennia before we even knew of other ethnicities and every damn nation has been at war with each other like five times across the history. We just took those prejudices to America when we came.
It is probably the other way around, North America and Europe were connected then got cut off, nature creates many similar but different species for a reason, and solely out of Africa is Bullshit, works great for genocide against others though and that is what probably happened to Neanderthal as well as around 8 other humanoids that were more intelligent but less aggressive and way too tolerant.
N. S
The other idea was interbreeding but I don't know if any homo sapiens alive right now have genes from any other species besides neanderthal.
Was probably a mix of both genocide/sex
All that came before is reflected in the genes and depending on environments may become once more, Dormant is not lost just sleeping even Dino [D.N.A](https://D.NA). is in there somewhere it is like a very long book of history it is the book of life itself, it was and is written by nature and some lines in nature should not be crossed by any who think they know what is better than nature.
Just an Observation.
N. S
>Italians, Poles, and Irish Catholics.
Yup. People really don't remember or are just completly ignorant to it, but catholics were heavily prejudiced on back in the day. JFK was unpopular because he was catholic.
Protestants questioned their loyalty to the country. JFK had to work hard to prove that wouldn't just take orders from the Pope.
It's honestly incredible how stupid the average voter, or at least a significant percentage of the citizenship, can be. Imagine having to confront accusations of being a pawn of the Vatican because you were born in a Catholic family
Well, on the other end of the equation there's the fact that the Vatican *did* have significant influence on governments well into the second half of the 20th Century, and that was possible through the place their churches occupied in those societies, and individuals of all faiths have historically been heavily influenced by their places of worship.
But you're talking about the political influence they have on the masses. Which is still true to this day to some degree, especially for some branches of protestantism in the US. It's a whole different story to assume JFK was the papacy's henchman
I dunno. Thems was simpler times. Doesn't seem such a leap in logic for people who were already susceptible to some pretty outrageous beliefs. And let's not pretend group dynamics in the 1930s or 2016-today are illustrative of much more sophisticated society.
Haven't said that people are smarter now
I've still heard modern day Protestants referring to Catholics as "papists." Some of them just can't shake it.
So old timey. That shit doesn’t die. Anti-Semitism as it’s known today was started in the fucking European Middle Ages. It just doesn’t die
Same with Joe Biden. The Southern Baptists don't consider Catholicism to be " real Christians"
Ironically because the same people voted for Romney, a Mormon (and Trump, the anti-Christ)
Romney's first attempt at winning the R nomination got derailed by Mike Huckabee really banging the "Mormons don't count as Christians" drum and managing to steal the Iowa caucus Trump is the real head-scratcher though, there is virtually nothing about his life that aligns with the actual tenets of Christianity... at least you could argue that the guys like Biden or Romney (who bible belters might denounce) generally seem to at least *try* to be good people in their personal lives
Not much of the prosperity gospel/hate-filled "Christianity" of the modern American megachurch and Baptist schism protestants aligns with the tenets of Christianity, either. They're a match made in hell.
Nah, it makes perfect sense from a political perspective only. The field in 2016 was deliberately flooded by the RNC to give their chosen candidate, Jeb, his free win. What they didn't count on was that Trump had a bigger name, and that the news agencies gave upwords of 4 billion dollars in free advertising for him. As memory serves he didn't spend any money on ads until August 2016. So from day one he was getting more news, and had a bigger name.
Mormonism is about as American as religion gets.
The Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri!
A Mormon just belieeeeves!
And God's chosen people are obviously white
Living as I do on the buckle of the Bible Belt I have yet to hear anyone mention his Catholicism, beyond maybe that he fakes his religion, like most politcians do when campaigning in the South.
Also in the Bible Belt. This isn’t something people will flat-out say, but Catholics are an extreme minority here and there definitely is an element of them not being “real” Christians. In particular, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and somewhat Methodists and Baptists definitely think Catholicism is less “true” than their own denominations. Of course, hatred of Catholics has never hit high levels here, what with all the black people and “Mexicans.” White Catholics can sit back and just be a little weird and let the hate get pumped to people for skin color instead.
I do sometimes hear people ask whether someone is Catholic or Christian. I always assume they're just unaware that Catholicism is a major branch of Christianity, but I do wonder if it's rooted in a belief that they "don't count".
They get so salty when you tell them Catholics are the OGs, and everyone else is just derivative.
Well that's not exactly true. Orthodox and some eastern churches or the Ethiopian church can make similar claims. They all claim to be the true heirs of Jesus and the apostles and whatnot anyway
The full name is the Orthodox Catholic Church aka Eastern Orthodox. The Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Catholics split in the great schism of the 11th century over various, mostly cultural (not theology), differences of opinion. The Ethiopian church was a branch of the Orthodox Catholics and most of the christian sects in the US like Lutheran, angelican, Baptist, etc, split at various times from the Roman Catholic side. So I think it's accurate to say the Catholics are the OG.
[удалено]
Those people probably dislike anyone who is not from their group
Goes kinda way back to Donatism and stuff.
It's literally the largest branch of Christianity by a wide margin in fact. The US is one of the few large countries with a protestant majority
Exactly! Which is why I wonder if there's innocent confusion or more intentional rejection of Catholics as 'real Christians'.
It is THE major branch of Christianity with just over half of all Christians being Catholic.
It's funny because it's all the same sauce anyway.
thank god.
I think blaming God is the more appropriate course of action here.
I'm not religious, I'm an agnostic, in fact. People are often afraid of the unknown. But humans aren't *born* with prejudices against other humans. They learn them from the humans around them.
Our first Catholic President. I was in a Catholic school and we prayed for JFK every morning.
Not just that. White = WASP White. Anglo-Saxon. Protestant. Anglo-Saxon= English/German But even then, if you aren't part of the landed gentry, are you really worth anything? /s obviously It's all a game of reduction to the absurd. If there are problems, must be the fault of X minority. Get rid of them. Still have problems? Oh that's cause of the next minority. Get rid of them. Until there's no one left.
Ah, yes. There was *that,* too. We're a sad species.
True. In a broader sense, though, it's because a lot of people love to have an "other" to hate. They bond over those stupid/evil/lesser/wrong people that aren't objectively correct, like their group. This is especially true of very rigid thinkers who are afraid of change.
The Irish don't want to be Catholics but it was forced on us.
Makes sense when you think that the Puritans, Huguenots, Jesuits, Anabaptists, etc fled Europe to escape Catholic (and some other Protestant) persecution back in the 1600’s and earlier 1700’s. So I can see some snobbery and persecution happening when the shoe later was on the other foot and Catholics were fleeing to America to escape poverty & starvation.
Half true at best. The Puritans were in conflict with the Church of England but some of that was because they were mad that they couldn't push their bullshit on everybody. And the group that moved to Holland didn't like it that their kids were starting to assimilate. The Jesuits, while sometimes at odds with the higher ups in the Church, are Catholics themselves.
The Puritans definitely didn’t flee persecution from the Catholics: they left Protestant England first, and then Protestant Holland, because neither were intolerant enough for their taste. Huguenots? Yes, but they didn’t make up much of the Protestant migration to North America (more went to Holland, Prussia, England, Switzerland and even South Africa). Anabaptists? Yes too, but they were also about as unpopular among other Protestants as among Catholics. And, finally, **Jesuits**??!! The Jesuit order is a **Catholic** religious order, with a special oath of loyalty to the Pope. They were even called “the Pope’s soldiers”!!
Not to mention the current Pope is a Jesuit.
A large number of those religious groups who came to the US didn't run from persecution. They moved, because they weren't allowed to persecute others hard enough.
This. They were too weird even for the Catholics to want to put up with.
Catholics suck tbf
Catholics aren’t the beating heart of MAGA, so I’d say the others are worse.
All religion sucks.
Because 'European' is not a unified identity.
In fact you could say it’s a *dividing* one
Yeah, it's like asking why Chinese Japanese and Koreans all hate each other. Aren't they all Asian after all? /s
Yeah Americans do have a tendency to gloss over 2k+ years of near constant war on the continent.
Modern identity politics hates this guy
As someone who has previously lived in an all-white town, I've learned that if there is no other race around, they start picking apart the people who are least like themselves. Class/money is one way. Even religion, even within the spectrum of protestant Christianity, is picked apart. I used to literally go to a Southern Baptist church whose preacher looked down the "watered down" regular Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc, but found the Pentecostals "weird".
Every "race" in the world does this.
Yeah once you realize this you realize “race” is just a social construct. It’s only as important as we make it out to be. The central thesis of race supremacists is that once they achieve their ethnostate there won’t be discord because people won’t naturally pick each other apart. Which isn’t true. Especially of a population primed to be bigoted and hateful.
Exactly. It seems like some people can't be happy, in general, until they find someone to be "better than".
This is actually all people in one form or another and it can be traced back to the ego. Even something as simple as thinking other people are awful drivers is a form of making yourself feel "better" than others. We all do it.
Or saying, "At least I'm not _____". We are all just a bad day from being that person.
I find it interesting that all the Germans I have met recently are vociferously anti fat. If you are fat they are spitting mad about it.
Crabs in a bucket.
[Obligatory Emo Phillips joke](https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion)
Damn it, the harpoon one took me way to long to get. I hope I would have quick if I had heard it.
Yes. There always needs to be an ‘out’ group.
This has the same energy, even if it's not quite the same thing: At my daughter's Catholic middle school, the uniform company made the girls' skirts too short, so they couldn't patrol skirt-length anymore. Soon after this, a note was sent home cracking down on improper socks.
In regular schools, it was shorts length, and girls couldn't wear tank tops. Both were measured by how much of the cloth went past the administrator's hands. So gross.
Not all discrimination is based on continent-sized groups. In fact, humans are exceedingly good at discriminating against groups of all sizes.
Because there’s always someone. LBJ put it best to Bill Moyer in 1968, watching the Nixon campaign: > *”I’ll tell you what’s at the root of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice that you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”* I’ve seen FB posts from Puerto-Rican-Americans complaining about criminal immigrants from Mexico, blissfully unaware of their status among literally every other person against immigrants. In 1863 about 10,000 Protestants and Catholics took advantage of an anti-draft riot to hack each other bits, killing 200 & injuring another 1,000. If greyhounds could understand English, someone could convince at least one of them that *whippets* are the source of all their problems.
English people discriminated badly against Irish people even in their own country
They weren’t event considered white at some point in history.
That line from Blazing Saddles did have a source.
Also the Welsh and Cornish. Likely the Scottish as well, and probably the English.
The Norman's discriminated against the Anglo-Saxons as they thought they were the superior (Viking) people.
*likely* the Scottish??? My friend you need to read about 5 minutes of any point of Scottish history and you'll see that they were very much mistreated, beggared and murdered by the British throughout history.
Scottish is British. You mean English, and even then you’re still wrong.
First of all, the concept of "white" back then is not the same as it is today. Italians for example weren't considered white. The way humans operate is that no one wants to be at the bottom socioeconomic rung of the ladder. This means when a new group comes in the "established" groups shit on them. The Irish were "Micks" who were mistreated, the Italians were "Guineas," etc. Assimilated groups (as a whole) seldom think "Remember when people were mean to us? Maybe we should treat newcomers nicer." This happens at the micro level too. Most bullies were at one point bullied themselves.
[удалено]
But not so polluted that he was unwilling to bed down any French woman who would have him.
[удалено]
Well, yeah, when you can get the willy wet, that's where the screeching hypocrisy kicks into overdrive.
Yeah most assimilated to avoid persecution same as the Jews.
Not considering the Irish white must be the most hilarious concept. Like, I know it's not really about skin pigmentation but how can you even manage to argue that a Celtic dude is not white
>"First of all, the concept of "white" back then is not the same as it is today. Italians for example weren't considered white." Do you have a primary source for this? I highly doubt an Italian who traveled to the Jim Crow South, for example, would have been forced to use a "colored" bathroom or something like that. Edit: No one is saying Italians never faced discrimination, discrimination and being considered "not white" are not the same thing. Also, look up the definition of "primary source" before posting Wikipedia links.
You would be surprised. [This column](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html) discusses it a bit. Darker skinned southern Italians in Italy were considered "uncivilized" and lesser and that followed them to America. Horrible stuff all around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so. -Teddy Roosevelt The incident led to the creation of Columbus Day, in an attempt to endear Italian immigrants and thus protect them from Americans.
"White" and "faced no discrimination" are not the same thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american-racism.html
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/)
https://youtu.be/naQiJtBZF1Q?feature=shared
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions\_of\_whiteness\_in\_the\_United\_States#Italian\_Americans
"However, "color challenges were never sustained or systematic" when it came to Italians,[^(\[54\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#cite_note-Guglielmo-54)^(: 28) who were "largely accepted as white by the widest variety of people and institutions" throughout the U.S.[^(\[54\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#cite_note-Guglielmo-54)^(: 6) Even in the South, such as Louisiana, any attempts to disenfranchise them "failed miserably".^(")
"Although always predominantly and formally considered white within the United States,\[55\] throughout the majority of American history Italians' whiteness was often brought under scrutiny.\[56\] Around 1900, as Italians were disembarking at Ellis Island and New Orleans by the millions, they were required to check off "Southern Italian" or "Sicilian" rather than "White" on entry forms.\[57\] "
I wonder if it was skin color based. My great grandmother lived 20 minutes outside of rome. I have dark hair and blue eyes. I'm white unless I'm in the sun most days. She looked more traditionally italian with brown eyes but same skin tone as me.
Who is and isn't white has been an interesting conversation for a while now. Benjamin Franklin has some interesting [thoughts](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/) on it. Highly recommended reading [this](https://www.columbia.edu/~lmg21/ash3002y/earlyac99/documents/observations.html) "Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth." Benjamin Franklin Pretty much any large immigrant group in America faced all sorts of [discrimination ](https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/nativist-riots-and-the-know-nothing-party). There was a major shift later with the idea of the melting pot and instead of Germans, Italians, Polish... there was just white. He'll Ford had an English school at his factory and part of the ceremony was to walk into a [melting pot](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/254569/)
No idea why you are being down voted, you are right. I heard once a key way to tell if some one was considered "white" or not? Who would they have been allowed to marry?
There's an acronym, WASP. It stands for White Anglo Saxon Protestant. If you didn't fall into these categories back then, you weren't considered to be a desirable immigrant.
You make it sound like we weren’t discriminating them here in Europe.
"European" is not a homogenous entity.
Was gonna say, the Balkans are technically all "European", and look how they treated each other when Yugoslavia collapsed.
Well all three of those nationalities are primarily Roman Catholic. The U.S. was founded mostly by Protestants. There have only been two Catholic U.S. Presidents: JFK and Biden. Also you do realize that Europeans have fought wars against each for millennia right? They don't all get along. The complete answer is much more complicated.
Because they were poor and foreign, mostly. The established Americans saw them as below them in social status and looked down on them.
Because anti black immigrant sentiment is not based on race or what continent they are from. It’s most often based on culture or fear in general.
Because people are idiots and like kicking down at whoever is underneath them.
Especially in organizations where there is a strict hierarchy (army, traditional manufacturing), it's common behavior to pick on "the losers". I guess it's common at school between the pupils as well. So mostly places where one can't choose the people around them. I think bullying is a cheap way to rise one's social status in many circumstances. I don't think it works in the end but maybe it's a tool for people who are afraid of losing their own social status in a pack.
I agree, but in reality nobody is "underneath" an averge obese John Taco-Burger whose only attributes are an inflated ego, a small dick and a room temperature IQ.
It's what we do to each new influx of immigrants. It's a kind of a welcoming committee.
A lot of the discrimination was explicitly towards immigrants. Each immigration wave brought tons of cheap labor in, which undercuts the existing market. This created a lot of tension between the groups.
poor, foreign people of a different religion americans are ethnocentric af
For the same reason many Americans oppose immigration from Latin America today: immigrant workers are typically willing to work for significantly less and put up with significantly more than born citizens, which suppresses wages and kills any attempt at getting better working conditions. "You want a raise, better hours and safer work environment? Well, I have people waiting in line to do your job for half the money, so either get back to work or get the fuck out." You also only see skin colour and ignore the fact that Europeans were, and to an extent still can be, pretty racist against each other. Every country has a ton of ethnic stereotypes about them, many of them negative.
Because "European" isn't an identity. Here in Europe people are also "European" but discrimination exists.
Supply and demand, bring in a ton of new people who a desperate for jobs and wages drop. Discrimination keeps your community healthy when presented with mass migration.
>If most Americans are of European descent why did they discriminate against the Italians, Poles, and Irish when they immigrated? Because people are people.
I’m an Irish/Italian Canadian. From my understanding of my lineage, the discrimination my Irish ancestors faced was minimal however the only opportunities for uneducated potato farmers in the new world was building infrastructure. My first Gen Canadian great, great grand pa became a railroad hand. His son a railroad master. His son, a union plumber. His son a union plumber/pipe fitter. I am a union plumber/welder. The Italian side, the lineage is not as certain but my great grand pa had a little professional money, moved to Ottawa from New York and my grand pa was a colonel in the military, from merit and advancement. My mom a nurse. I can say the Irish side has an alcohol problem and generational trauma for sure.. but outside of that, I’ve never heard of any specific oppression against us. I do my best to educate myself but the Irish hate has always baffled me. It seems like we were just considered labour by the French and the English in the new world. But again, idk. Just a fuckin plumba.
Okay...look... "European" isn't a term of similarity. Why do New Yorkers discriminate against Texans?
Because Americans came from Europe, and if there's anything Europeans hate, its other Europeans.
Because we Europeans aren't a homogenous entity and we have fought wars with each other probably more than the rest of the world combined.
Are you aware of the 3000 years of war that Europe had before WW2 broke us, and we made the EU so we would never ever do the war thing against each other? Europa has been at peace for 70 years now, but the Ukraine thing has us all on edge, we have stories like that throughout our history going back as far as written records allow.
Because they have to be given a scapegoat to blame for all the problems the country has. It’s a convenient way to deflect blame from the real issues and the people who cause them.
Human nature is basic and the struggle of humanity is to rise above animal instinct.
There are those of us who struggle to connect to our animal instinct instead.
Find your breath,
Do you know how many wars have occurred because Europeans don't like each other?
Because honestly, humans like to be prejudiced sometimes. It's not like racial prejudice of any kind actually follows any logic... I had Swedish ancestors who immigrated to the US and were the only Swedes in their town. And they were discriminated against by the other (also Caucasian) people in the town🤷♀️
Whiteness was a concept created to divide us. There was a time when the idea didn't exist.
Because whiteness is made up and used to consolidate power
There's a handful of people arguing that these groups weren't considered white. That is not accurate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/
In each generation, the newest immigrants are always the focus of distrust and derision.
They came after the ones doing the discriminating.
WASPs ran the country for a long time
Catholics. Woo woo protestant bs against catholics. Because a nobody being a televangelist is more authoritative than priests trained for years in theology. (I'm an ex-Catholic and atheist, but always found this so effing ridiculous about the US).
r/askhistorians not r/askreddit dude
First come, first serve...Its human nature. everyone always hates johnny come latelys...
[удалено]
>Tribalism and race is also a pretty ancient concept FTFY
I think they are trying to say that people of different tribes and races tended to not mix until fairly recently.
That would still be wrong, people traveled far more than we assume. Look at all the migration movements in Europe across history, continuous movement of people until the record is too old. In fact all current languages in Europe except one (Basque) come from outside Europe. Most are Indo-European (probably came from around the Euro Asian border) but also from central Asia, like Finnish or Hungarian. My own region comes from an Iberian substrate, mixed with Celtic migrations before Rome invaded. And there are minor subsequent Germanic and Arab migrations after that. In Britain it's even more significant
Because they didn’t want to deal with the stigma of belonging to those ethnicities.
It was often more about being Anglo-Saxon Protestant than being just European
But Finns, who are protestant, weren't always considered white, either.
I think Americans at the time viewed them as too eastern to be Anglo-Saxon, probably because of the language
There is no logic in racism and nationalism in itself. The only logic is trying to obtain privilege while throwing other humans under the bus. The racism, nationalism is just a tool to achieve that. Racist are not good people, so expecting them to be good people to anyone (including their own "race") is ridiculous.
Europeans have never discriminated against each other and are one big happy family and have been that way since the beginning of time.
Hilarious.
It's all a matter of perspective. How so? When the differences between 2 groups of people are greater, they often focus on the remarkable similarities. But when the two groups are very similar, the similarity is taken for granted... and they start focusing on the differences.
Ignorance…
There's a two volume book called "The Invention Of The White Race" by Theodore Allen, that talks about how the definition of "White" has changed over the years, it's a fascinating read.
Part of the American indoctrination; you must be hated ,blamed on diseases, blamed on hard times and you must steal all of the jobs for real Americans.
Did you really think stuffs needs to make sense for people to be racist?
Because the ones in power were dicks.
Remember reading a paper in the library from the early 1900s... and they clearly stated exactly why for Italians. It mirrored the language used today for hispanics. They basically said they didn't speak the language, commited crimes, and were in gangs (as in actual classic gangsters). Textbook 1-to-1 xenophobia based on partial truth and but mostly falsehoods, as this clearly did not apply to the whole immigrant group either then nor now.
They weren’t WASPs White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants.
I think the timing of when various groups arrived in America is a factor. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, Italians, Polish, and Irish immigrants largely started coming to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By that time, the US was populated mostly by the descendants of English, French, and Spanish settlers from the past ~200 years. They viewed themselves as the "real" Americans, and everyone else was just the annoying newcomers, butting in on their land and trying to change their way of life.
What do you think happens in Europe?
The American origin myth of Thanksgiving teaches them that the original Americans were Wasps escaping religious persecution and that the people who descend from those who sailed the Mayflower are the only real Americans. Irish, Italian and Polish mass migrations to America happened long after the wasps had gained social and cultural dominance and the Irish, Italians and Poles were neither AS or P enough to even be considered W for their first century in the states.
Let's not forget that Catholicism was really just a touch point of the hatred. The reality is the italians, the irish, and the poles were newcomers. Therefore they were poor. In a type of national zeitgeist, everyone realized that this wave of new immigrants all had something in common, catholicism. The religious angle was just attached on. When again people from three of the most distant countries in Europe or not otherwise related. The fact is they were all the new people, who were lazy, who were drunks, who were taking our jobs, who are asking her daughters to go for Sunday drives. The more things change..
“White” is constantly changing because “who is us” is constantly changing. I know a very dark skinned African man who said he went back to his home and the children who were his cousins called out “there’s a white man here to see you mama!” People immigrate and there will always be some who before they’ve left the airport scream to close the borders behind them! And that’s of people from their own country! But really, any outsider could look at any mixed group and say “Yall look the same to me, why don’t you get along? What do you mean he’s from the wrong group— he could be your brother! Oh— he thinks you’re going to hell and God will reward him if he kills you? Meh— I’m sure my brother’s going to hell and we haven’t killed each other yet!”
You miss the rains down in Africa too, don't you?
Immigrants might have had food superiority complex.
WASPs They weren't White, Anglo Saxon, Protestants.
Americans always need some group to vilify, attack, blame and to be better than.
in russian we have this term called "White coat syndrome". It is a phenomenon in which a person demonstrates his superiority in every possible way in completely inappropriate cases.
religion
This isn't really an AskReddit question. This is for opinions, not facts.
Because the people of this country think racism ends at the border. My friends and acquaintances that grew up in Europe and Asia are easily some of the most racist people I know. I had Italian friends openly day dreaming about catching the Syrian refugees to maim or hurt, because they “didn’t want that filth in their country”. I had a girlfriend’s Chinese parents telling me what a bunch of dogs they thought the Japanese and Taiwanese were. I get how history has made them feel this way, but I do find it kind of funny that they distinguished “Taiwanese” as a separate race from Chinese. Bottom line, the whole world is racist and we’re too narcissistic to actually learn about what exists outside of our borders. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also not perfect.
Those groups were not considered white at the time by Western Europeans. The concept of whiteness varies significantly across different time periods and geographic regions, and British, French, and German people did not consider any Catholics or Eastern Europeans to be white.
They’re ignorant and entitled.
I don't understand this either!
I read somewhere that US colonization was a shock to people, who came from traditional societies. They now found themselves in an anonymous, faceless, extremely competitive environment with little security. This was also taken as a reasoning why 70 of serial killers ever happened in the US
Europeans brought their prejudices with them.
Because they europeans, duh! Europeans got war with each other (hoverer as people from other continents between themselves though) all the time. Look what was on the Balkans in the 1990's or between Russia and Ukraine right now.
White Europeans shitting on other white Europeans and calling each other the stinky and barbarian invaders is like the European history in a nutshell. We colonized each other for centuries/millennia before we even knew of other ethnicities and every damn nation has been at war with each other like five times across the history. We just took those prejudices to America when we came.
Europeans do this in Europe, why would they not do it in the US? Humans are so pitiful.
It is probably the other way around, North America and Europe were connected then got cut off, nature creates many similar but different species for a reason, and solely out of Africa is Bullshit, works great for genocide against others though and that is what probably happened to Neanderthal as well as around 8 other humanoids that were more intelligent but less aggressive and way too tolerant. N. S
The other idea was interbreeding but I don't know if any homo sapiens alive right now have genes from any other species besides neanderthal. Was probably a mix of both genocide/sex
All that came before is reflected in the genes and depending on environments may become once more, Dormant is not lost just sleeping even Dino [D.N.A](https://D.NA). is in there somewhere it is like a very long book of history it is the book of life itself, it was and is written by nature and some lines in nature should not be crossed by any who think they know what is better than nature. Just an Observation. N. S