Intolerance American History Is Unfortunately

Intolerance

American history is unfortunately a history of intolerance. As Reid, Toth, Crew & Burton (2008) point out, "ironically, the American Revolution may have established a culture and destiny of intolerance in the United States by providing a model for the use of violence to support any cause that seems honorable," (p. 7). Intolerance stems from a belief in White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) superiority to all other social and ethnic groups from African-Americans to Jews to Native Americans and Latinos. Because WASPs have enjoyed political hegemony in the United States since colonial times, they have wielded this power to maintain economic and social status in order to subjugate others.

Intolerance started before the United States was a nation, before the war of Independence. The persecution of Native Americans revealed the roots of intolerance in America. The United States built itself on a foundation of bloodshed and violence by driving the Native Americans off lands they enjoyed for hundreds or in some cases thousands of years. The "ideology of pure hatred" and attitudes of condescension and paternalism carried over into all areas of Indian policy, land use policy, and then to the WASP interactions with other non-WASP groups (Reid et al. 2008, p. 8). Those other groups include the Spanish-speaking and Native American groups of Central America and the Caribbean, which have been labeled as outsiders and stigmatized because of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural difference.

It is therefore ironic is that one of the four main values that define WASP ethnicity is "a belief in democracy that promoted equality, freedom, and individualism," (Reid et al. 2008, p. 2). WASP Americans have persecuted nearly every non-WASP group imaginable and even spread intolerance among WASPs who do not conform to certain social norms. For example, women were and to a degree still are deprived of human rights, freedoms, and liberties. The dominant culture does not tolerate homosexuality either.

Often intolerance manifests merely as social stigma or being ostracized from the mainstream community. At its more severe manifestations, intolerance may mean a systemic lack of rights and freedoms or lack of access to wealth and cultural capital. The most severe evidence of intolerance in America has been the creation and maintenance of hate groups. For example, when slavery was abolished, the spirit of racism persisted in the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan is in some cases viewed as such an integral part of Southern American society, showing how entrenched bigotry and hatred is in the United States. The idea that the United States is a Christian and white nation is one that is strangely popular.

When Asian laborers were encouraged to work on Westward expansion projects in the nineteenth century, the WASP hegemony also created a system of intolerance and occasional hatred. The Japanese internment camps are but one manifestation of historic intolerance in the United States. The ghettoization of Jews and other perceived undesirable European groups during the early 20th century also proves that many American urban centers were founded on principles of intolerance. The geographic and cultural landscape of the United States continues to reflect intolerance: in the ways many if not most American cities remain visibly segregated into ethnic enclaves, and also how poverty and race are inextricably linked. Differential educational outcomes and income disparity are some of the hallmark signs that intolerance has become institutionalized in America.

"Since colonial times, Americans have used hatred as a common bond," (Reid, et al. 2008, p. 7). Hatred has permitted the creation of social and cultural barriers that prevent passage from one social stratum to another. An in-group/out-group mentality continues to inform American culture. In-group/out-group consciousness has created a plethora of subcultures and resistance movements that subvert and challenge the prevailing social hierarchies. Black nationalism is one of the most effective examples of ways oppressed groups create their own system of power. The means to resist and overcome systematic oppression is to stop tolerating intolerance. When racism and other forms of intolerance become entrenched in the political, social, and economic systems of a community as with Black Codes in the American South, the repercussions are tremendous. The repercussions include the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North, changing the social and ethnic composition of American towns and cities. Other repercussions include the use of crime and black market economies to subvert white supremacy.