Americanization has always required abandoning racial distinctiveness and any link to Blackness

Evidence

When Anglo-American elites realized the tidal wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe was drastically changing the demography of the country, they focused their efforts on integrating these new immigrants into Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. To survive, the “American race,” as defined by Anglo-Saxon ethnocentric notions of assimilation, would have to absorb and improve these allegedly inferior Europeans. Becoming an American, therefore, has always required immigrants to change their lifestyles, behaviors, clothing, diet, and language to comport with the norms and behaviors of Anglo-Protestant culture. Immigrants also have to abandon any claims to racial distinctiveness, most specifically, any association with Blackness. The African American poet and intellectual James Baldwin candidly described this process when he stated, “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 366 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This represents a project of governance that, even where relatively effective from the point of view of racial rule, was never quite complete. One might say it never could be complete, for subjection in both (and related) senses of the term promotes its resistance; imposition from the outside - the external - calls forth at least redefinition internally, in terms of the already (pre-) existing sum of defining conditions of the self, and at most outright, explicit rejection, denial, dismissal. The self accordingly is always caught - split - between the past and the present, the self itself (so to speak, as already socially defined and conditioned) and the social, between self-assumption and imposition, in short, between “my”-self and its other. This is especially so in the context of race: race as socially (and state) imposed and as taken on “freely,” assumed as a project, as a self-making. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1681 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: American racialism made Black assimilation impossible and therefore historically irrelevant — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1433; Becoming American has always required immigrants to renounce Blackness and adopt Anglo-Protestant norms. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 366; Assimilation theory cannot explain the permanent exclusion of Blacks from mainstream America — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 377 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Becoming American has always required immigrants to renounce Blackness and adopt Anglo-Protestant norms. #corroborates (0.95) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 366
• Racial subjection is never complete because imposed identity provokes internal redefinition #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1681