@joefromchicago,
Check out the late 19th century cartoons newspaper cartoons depicting simian like irishmen: the "No Irish need apply" warnings in New England job solicitations; and the similar slanders directed at Jews, Italians and Poles. Neighborhoods in East Coast and Midwest cities were often defined by their ethnic boundaries, and the epithets used by nearly one and all to describe the "other" were uniformly derogatory and meant to be offensive.
The early Labor movement in this country, particularly pin the coal and steel industries was led by militant groups od Irish and Czech workers, and violence was usually the main tactic.
You are (knowingly I believe) distorting my meaning. I was explicit in noting that we had stopped the clock on Black assimilation and economic rise by organized, sometimes legally mandated, segregation for nearly a century. I didn't suggest (as you assert) that the situation of Blacks in this country, say, sixty years ago was equivalent to that of the earlier ethnic minorities. Rather I was pretty clear that today's situation for Blacks is comparable th those of the earlier minorities when they arrived.
joefromchicago wrote:. It's difficult to take you seriously when you say, in one paragraph, that every group has had it tough, and then, in the very next paragraph, you say that everyone got along just fine after all.
It is even more difficult to take you seriously when you fail to grasp the very obvious effects of the passage of time and the repeatedly successful adjustments of people from various and often very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to living together and developing a common culture with ingredients from all of them. That was the very obvious central point. Perhaps you are merely feigning stupidity in order to make an argument in the absence of reason for it.
Can you point out another country that has achieved such long-term success in assimilating large, repeated waves of immigrants?
(Brasil comes to mind as a candidate, but on close inspection - and I know it well - it falls very far short.) -
