Racial nativists reframed discrimination as equal justice to justify the 1890 census base
Evidence
With these assumptions, Trevor formulated an attack on the percentage scheme adopted in 1921, and in doing so he completely turned the tables on the charge of discrimination leveled against Johnson’s proposal. Clearly, quotas based on the number of foreign-born of various nationalities in the United States in rg1o did not reflect the racial status quo: by 1910 northwestern Europeans had lost the preponderant position among the foreign-born which their descendants still retained among the native-born. By a racial yardstick, the existing law could be charged with actually discriminating against the old stock, because it gave northwestern Europeans a smaller share in the annual quota immigration than they had in the total American population. Thus the use of the 1910 census really favored southeastern Europeans! Congress should base quotas on an earlier census, when the old immigration furnished the vast majority of America’s foreign-born, in order to do justice to everybody’s ancestors. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1926
Categorization
- XREF: Powerful evidence for the reader’s hypothesis that moral correction against bias gets absorbed and inverted: anti-discrimination rhetoric was weaponized to serve the racial quota itself. — connects to: Mass immigration from 1830 to 1930 triggered nativist white backlash; Early twentieth-century US nativism racialized Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, and Mormons — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 248; Race historically shaped national population membership and its exclusions — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1773 (+5 more)
- SEED: An article angle on how ‘equality’ arguments get captured to launder exclusionary policy — the inverse of the correction-backfire hypothesis.
Broader Connections
- Mass immigration from 1830 to 1930 triggered nativist white backlash
#qualifies(0.75) - Race historically shaped national population membership and its exclusions
#expands(0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1773 - Early twentieth-century US nativism racialized Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, and Mormons
#expands(0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 248 - The same person is classified as different races across national contexts
#exemplifies(0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1171 - Colonial census categories could define away inconvenient poverty by racial reclassification
#exemplifies(0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 940