HOW CONVENIENT,LET THE CONVO BEGIN.. The history of IMMIGRATION and assimilation in the United States is the history of the evolution of whiteness. As recently as 1988, I remember a limo driver in southern New Jersey explaining to me that Princeton was so ritzy “you had to be white or Italian to live there.” The Italians, Irish and Jews eventually overcame enough stigma to be considered white, but they were not “white” from the beginning. The color line is still decisive: Visible shades of brown or gold are an insurmountable impediment. Beinart’s conclusion is that the obstacle to the Tsarnaevs’ whiteness is Islam, which in contemporary America has the effect of adding invisible layers of brown to otherwise pale SKIN. This makes sense as far as it goes, but it leaves out a crucial component for understanding the Tsarnaevs’ position on the color wheel: their racial identity before their arrival in the United States. Back in the Russian Federation, were the Tsarnaevs “white”? If they weren’t, what were they? Billngual speakers of Russian and English all recognize the disconnect between the terms “Caucasian” (i.e., “white”) and “Caucasian” (person from the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union); for Russian speakers, the two terms are functionally opposite. What, then, are “people of Caucasian nationality” (as the Russian bureaucratic phrase would have it)? Can their difference be mapped onto a grid of whiteness and non-whiteness?
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 08:33:22 +0000
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