The Rip Van Winkle media just woke up to realize that the U.S. is diverse.

Like a well-rehearsed church choir singing from the same hymnal, the American media recently sang in perfect harmony about the latest U.S. Census showing that America is now so diverse that whites are in the minority.  Not one media outlet that worships in the Church of Diversity dared to sing out of key or deviate from the official lyrics.

To paraphrase Santayana, those who don’t know history are doomed to become journalists.

Here’s some remedial history for them:

One hundred years ago, America’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment was so concerned about becoming a minority “race” in the face of skyrocketing diversity that it passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. The act was followed by the National Origins Act of 1924.

Both acts had the same objective of restricting the emigration of “undesirables” from eastern and southern Europe, especially Catholics and Jews from Hungary, Poland and Italy, but also Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks, along with non-Europeans from Syria, Turkey and Armenia. My Italian grandparents barely made it through Ellis Island before the immigration door was shut.  

Using cockamamie theories of genetics, academics at the time claimed that America was committing “race suicide” by letting so many non-WASPs into the country. Such nativist thinking was also a driving force behind the despicable eugenics movement, which was part of the larger Progressive movement of the WASP establishment.

The Census of 1920 had racial categories that were just as misleading, incomplete, and contrived as those in official and popular use today. Warning!  The categories might make you wince. The six categories were White, Negro, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and all other. 

As with today, the diverse ethnic groups force-fitted into the White category were not homogenous in skin shade, facial features, customs, religion, income, education, outlook, or political power. Many didn’t see themselves as white and weren’t seen or treated as white by the WASP establishment. For instance, neither my parents nor my grandparents ever referred to themselves as white. They saw themselves as Italian.

Establishment WASPs saw Italians as wops, dagos, guineas, greasers, and swarts, which was short for swarthy, a derogatory term even used by the New York Times. Likewise, the ethnic slur of “dago” was in such common usage that the hilly Italian section of my hometown of St. Louis was known as Dago Hill, a term that was still being used when I was in high school. And discrimination against Italians was so common downriver in New Orleans that eleven Italians were lynched there. All in all, Italians weren’t treated as badly as blacks in the South, but many worked in the fields alongside blacks and were restricted to black schools.

Other ethnic groups got similar prejudicial treatment. The Jewish section of St. Louis was called Jew City or Hymie Town, the inhabitants of the Polish section were called pollocks, the Irish were called mics, Catholics were known as papists, and other non-WASP ethnic groups were known by other slurs.  

Speaking of papists, a key objective of the public school movement of the latter nineteenth century was to put papist schools out of business so that Catholics would attend public schools and be taught the King James Bible.  

The Thirteen Colonies were initially established and settled by WASPs, who would go on to establish the United States. Naturally, this gave them an edge in accumulating property, wealth and political power. But in forming a market economy and a constitutional republic with a Bill of Rights, the WASPs enabled later arrivals to slowly but surely accumulate property, wealth and political power—and to eventually intermarry with WASPs as they assimilated.   

In other words, WASPs created an economic and political system that furthered diversity and turned them into a minority, statistically speaking.

Of course, North America was diverse prior to the American Revolution. The Spanish Empire had tromped through or settled the Southwest, most of the West Coast, the South all the way up to the Carolinas, and the Mississippi River basin all the way up to the Ohio River. The French Empire had done the same in the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to St. Louis and New Orleans.  

Thousands of years earlier, Asians had crossed the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska to become the people known today as Native Americans. Tens of millions of Native Americans were living in the Americas before the white man arrived to conquer and brutalize them. They had previously split into hundreds of diverse tribes, many of which brutalized each other and took slaves while others built complex civilizations, such as the Incas, Aztecs, and Cahokia Indians across the Mississippi from present-day St. Louis.

All of the foregoing groups would go on to mix their DNA in different degrees, either willingly or unwillingly, just as Homo sapiens had done since their common ancestors left the African savannah hundreds of thousand of years ago. In that sense, we’re all Africans, genetically speaking, with some of us, including this writer, having some Neanderthal genes thrown in for good measure.   

Africans of course would be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese (i.e., Hispanics) and then in lesser numbers but equally horrifically by the English and Dutch. Yet history and racial nomenclature have been rewritten to cast Hispanics as a minority group that has been victimized by whites and not as past victimizers of Africans or a group that consists of many whites, including privileged descendants of the Spanish aristocracy in Mexico.

In summary, there have always been so many unique ethnocultural groups in America that a case can be made that no group has ever been in the majority, including WASPs. But that would be news to journalists who don’t know history and don’t question the government’s official racial/ethnic categories.