Racial ideology can be confident and tolerant when no threat feeds it

Evidence

In curious ways the colonial experiment even helped to restore the ideology of assimilation by reviving the old quasi-cosmopolitan theory of nationality. … It is true that the events of 1898 popularized the Anglo-Saxon tradition as nothing had done before,’ and in the long run, whatever magnified the racial strain in American thought would prove damaging to an assimilationist outlook. But for the moment Anglo-Saxon imperialism actually worked the other way. It was the disgruntled opponents of a “large policy” who argued that colonial possessions would bring unassimilable races within the national structure and thereby shatter the country’s homogeneity. Exuberant empirebuilders spurned so defensive an outlook. Brushing aside nativistic fears of racial pollution from subject peoples or from the new immigration, triumphant imperialists recaptured the optimistic kind of Anglo-Saxonism which had flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. Race-thinking, in celebrating the fulfillment of an appointed task, assumed the air of promise and achievement that surrounded the new status it justified. The imperialists’ belief that the mighty impulse of the Anglo-Saxon race—now at the meridian of its strength—had driven America forth to conquer and redeem, expressed an exaltation transcending any fear of threat or dilution. It had no need of an adversary. … The newcomers, therefore, tended to figure among the lesser breeds whom the Anglo-Saxon was dedicated to uplift. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 640

Categorization

• XREF: Directly pivotal to the reader’s central question: this shows the enemy-category is what drives exclusionary feeling, not the racial ideology itself — race-thinking without an adversary becomes paternalistic, not nativist. — connects to: National confidence and optimism suppressed racial fear of European immigrants — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 201; Racial order responded to each mobilizing threat with formal legal equality — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 128
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, genuinely paradigm-shifting observation: the same race-thinking that later fuels restriction passes through a benign, confident phase when unthreatened — threat, not ideology, does the causal work.