By Sarah Carrillo
Staff Writer
“The rise and development of American history exists along a parallel and unspoken movement of white supremacy.”
This was the startling thesis of Dr. Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s Tuesday night Convo lecture about multi-culturalism in America. She contends that this is one of the reasons that America has such a difficult time dealing with diversity issues, despite the fact that the country is so diverse.
“I thought that her views on society were interesting and she was very honest and up-front,” freshman Jalayne Arias said.
Hu-DeHart was born in China and was a refugee at age 12. She said in her lecture that she actually felt fortunate to have been a refugee more than once because she was able to learn about different cultures.
“Knowing that Stanford had lowered its standards to let me in only made me work harder to prove to them that they had not made a mistake,” Hu-DeHart said.
The reason that diversity issues are such a big problem in America today, Hu-DeHart believes, is that America is only now beginning to change its white supremist ideals. “It is impossible to change hundreds of years of history in thirty years,” Hu-DeHart said. “Tremendous changes are taking place. It is self-defeating to think nothing has changed.
“America’s democracy has been racially exclusive,” Hu-DeHart said. She supports her argument with examples of legislation. Laws such as the Naturalization Act, the Alien Land Law and the Jim Crowe Laws show how non-whites were excluded from citizenship and basic rights in America until citizenship was allowed in 1924 and the Civil Rights Movement occurred in the 1960s.
“America identifies itself as a nation built on the ideas of freedom and democracy,” Hu-DeHart said. “It is also built on immigrants coming to seek happiness, freedom and prosperity. This is a central theme of American history.”
However, by this definition, Hu-DeHart argued that only white citizens are true immigrants.
She explained that nearly every other ethnicity that came to America did so under different circumstances. African-Americans, for example, came to America as slaves. Latinos, specifically the Mexicans, did not come to America but rather became part of America when half of Mexico was acquired in 1848.
The Native Americans were already here as well and so they are not immigrants. And the final group, the Asians, did come over seeking the same privileges as the whites, but the U.S. government denied them those same rights. Hu-DeHart showed that the only people included in the “American Dream” were the whites.
“The U.S. naturalization law regulated who could become a citizen and said that ‘only white immigrants can become citizens of the U.S.,’” Hu-DeHart said. “This is a troubling aspect of American democracy.”
January 31, 2002