Europe

Is this the famous 'trickle down'?

The Nazis wouldn't have qualified by the standards at the time of the American Revolution in Benjamin Franklin's eyes. Nor even the Italian side of Bovino's family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.

https://www.profmarkbaker.com/blog/2017/6/3/whiteness

I recently read derogatory comments a prominent political leader made about non-white immigrants swarming into our towns and cities and ruining our way of life. It was not Donald Trump, but Benjamin Franklin. And the threatening masses were not Latinos from south of the border, but immigrants from Germany—my ancestors.

“Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” – what follows is an excerpt from the 1751 original by Benjamin Franklin

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

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. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

I have always been labeled as white—by myself and others. Yet not according to Ben Franklin. My ancestors are the exact people he sees as a threat to whites. They came from Germany and swarmed into Franklin’s beloved Pennsylvania. My father is a 6th generation German-American. And even after five generations in Pennsylvania they still spoke German. My grandfather did not learn English until he went to school. According to Franklin I am not white, but a swarthy German—a threat to the ways of whiteness.

It is common place to observe that most of those who complain about immigrants today are part of ethnic groups that once were slandered and scorned in similar ways. Franklin’s comments reinforce that important observation. Important, but not new for me. What was new for me was the realization that there was a time when some people would not have seen me as white.

"White" is a surprisingly mutable term over time as social norms change.

EDIT: I'd also add that you can also watch, over the course of America's history, "Protestant" morph into "Christian" and then morph into "Judeo-Christian" in political speeches and the like among people complaining about traditional American values being under threat.

Historically, whiteness doesn't exist.

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