Unbeautiful Losers

I am being asked to express an opinion about one of Simp's favorite stupid things to say, denying that he's a white man because he's Jewish, claiming that most Americans don't consider Jews to be white.  That he's white is a lot less debatable than that he's Jewish, I'd guess, not that I want to debate the second and to debate the first one is ridiculous.  I have never heard an American claim that Jews were not white except when it was the rare but unremarkable Jewish person who is not white, something which is, in fact, a somewhat more reported inverse phenomenon among racists in Israel.  

Jews, like just about every other largely white population in the United States, have never been discriminated against in this country like Native American People, Black People,  Latinos, Asians, and other People of Color have been.  They have not been discriminated against to the extent that even many groups of white people have at some times and in some places, Italians, Irish, French Canadians, and others who have been subjected to higher rates of discrimination and violence.   Anti-Catholic content figured in the Founding Fathers, complaints that George III wouldn't discriminate against Catholics in Canada to the extent they wanted to was part of the First Continental Congresses complaints,  John Jay, one of the fabled founders and a governor of New York wanted Catholics to be disenfranchised.  And he was hardly alone. 

I have, in the brief time since I got the request to weigh in, tried to find any proposed legal discrimination against Jews made by such eminent Americans as is contained in this record and have not found it.  I'd challenge Simps to produce it, keeping in mind that a lot of the anti-Catholicism had strong strains of anti-French-Canadian, anti-Irish and anti-Italian, Polish, etc.   content BUT KEEPING IN MIND THAT EVEN THESE LEVELS OF DISCRIMINATION PALE IN CONTRAST TO THE LEGAL AND WIDESPREAD HATED OF PEOPLE OF COLOR, quite a few of them Catholic, at times. 

Anti-Catholicism has deep roots in American political culture. A trace of its one-time prominence remains evident in the oath of allegiance for US citizenship. The oath of Allegiance requires prospective US citizens to "renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty". The "potentate" was the Pope.

Jay and other Americans of the revolutionary era cared little about Islam, and knew even less. On the other hand, anti-Catholicism enjoyed a vibrant career at all levels of American society. It was Jay, for example, who wrote the Continental Congress's 1774 address to the people of Great Britain. The address alleged that, with the Quebec Act, the British parliament's policy of religious toleration for Quebec Catholics advanced a plot against America. Recognising the right of Catholics to religious freedom in North America, Jay wrote, would encourage "swelling" waves of Catholic immigrants from Europe. It would soon "reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies" to a "state of slavery."

Approving Jay's address, the Continental Congress expressed its "astonishment" that parliament had recognised "a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world". The Quebec Act, Jay's address warned, might well lead to Britons themselves reduced to the "same abject state" of subjugation as the American colonists. In a war with more than its share of hyperbole, few flights of patriot conjecture surpassed the address to the people of Great Britain. Its combination of slander and speculation compelled the historian of Canada Gustave Lanctot to remark that Jay's "terror tactics did not exclude prophecy".

The fact that the author of such a menacing act of diplomacy as Jay's address to the people of Great Britain became the first United States secretary of foreign affairs speaks to the depth of American anti-Catholicism. From before the American Revolution through the 19th century (and beyond), anti-Catholicism was one of the few things that American Protestants shared. In 1750, Paul Dudley, the chief justice of Massachusetts supreme court, endowed the Dudleian lectures at Harvard College for the purpose of exposing the "idolatry … damnable heresies" and "abominable superstitions" of Rome. Even the great Hispanist William H Prescott, author of works on the history of Spain and Mexico admired in the Hispanic intellectual world, described his work as an investigation into a barbaric, backward world. In 1816, the same year that Jay advised Americans to elect "Christians", Prescott advised Protestants to write the histories of Catholic countries. It is, he wrote, "interesting employment for the inhabitants of a free country, flourishing under the influence of a benign religion, to contemplate the degradation to which human nature may be reduced when oppressed by arbitrary power and papal superstition".

In 1834, the influential Presbyterian intellectual Lyman Beecher's published A Plea for the West, a popular and sharply anti-Catholic tract. Beecher called on Protestants to settle the frontier and thereby save America from an alleged Vatican plot to take over the United States by peopling the west with Catholic immigrants. Rome, Beecher warned, would then direct Catholic settlers to elect priests, who, subverting the US national mission of freedom, would deliver America to the hands of the Vatican. A year earlier, when Beecher first preached A Plea for the West as a sermon, in Boston, it instigated an anti-Catholic mob that burned down St Benedict's, a local Ursuline convent and girls' school.

Jay, Prescott and Beecher had the same message. Catholicism had missed out on progressive historical development. It is not rational, but imprisoned in a benighted culture. Catholics are susceptible to malign clerical influence. They are perhaps not fit for American citizenship. They are certainly a threat to the US, and they are taking advantage of American freedom to live among us, plotting, dissembling. This discourse of conspiracy and counter-subversion has also, with some variations, been turned against Masons, Mormons, Bavarian Illuminati, communists and others, but it cut its teeth against, and for most of American history targeted, Catholicism. Its durability in American political culture is more suggestive of a brittleness in American nationality than it is revealing about the nature of America's alleged enemies.

More recent than that, when he joined the KKK, after its resurgence inspired by the movie Birth of a Nation, the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, helped get off a murdering protestant minister who had shot to death a Catholic Priest using open anti-Catholic bigotry during the trial, one of a number of such incidents that mirror the lynching of Leo Frank and several others, targeted probably because they were Jews.  Ironically, considering our brawl over the historical fact that Birth of a Nation was Hollywood inspiring the revival of that worst of American terrorist groups, some scholars believe the lynching of both Frank and other white victims of lynching during that period was, as well, inspired by the "great film".  

Interestingly, when you showed me what Stupy had said, it reminded me of the scene in the great but very uneven Leonard Cohen's quite dirty, sometimes quite beautiful, sometimes quite repellent novel, Beautiful Losers in which the chief character, "F" and the narrator come across a group of Quebec Independence demonstrators and "F" declares it beautiful because, "Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a man can have in this century."  Remembering that Cohen wrote his book in 1966, about the same time Simp's has remained stuck in for the past fifty-four years.  I'd recommend anyone read the book for a view of a rather bizarre, I'd say flirting with racist, window into that kind of thinking.  It's clear that Cohen had issues with Catholicism but hardly the same kind that a bigot like Simps has.  

Psychology is too individual to get pinned down the way a habitual bigot like Simps wants it to be.  Bigots are bigots are bigots, they are bigots in some ways that are predictable in some cases, in other cases in ways you don't anticipate or have been prepared to expect from second-rate media and gossip.  Sometimes those bigots you want so much to be there aren't anywhere except in your own bigoted imagination and desires, especially if you want to feel special.  That's Simps, that last one.  He wants to feel special and he's not, he's just another bigot.