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Notes -
America has not been multi-ethnic since its inception.
I think we may be using different definitions. Was pre-1990 South Africa multiethnic under your framework?
But if for some reason the United States doesn't count as a long-term stable multiethnic country, Israel certainly does, as do Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia and Chile.
Singapore isn't even as old as my parents, and neither is Malaysia, and neither is Israel. None of them have survived a single human lifetime.
Chile and Brazil are at least old enough to even bother looking at, but at inception they were not multi-ethnic, either. Chile and Brazil were founded, much like the USA, as former colonies, and made up primarily of people from those home nations.
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Enslaved Africans (and indentured servants from, among other places, Ireland) have been here since before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, and only about a decade after the establishment of Jamestown. Even if you exclude the Amerindians (which, fair enough, so do I) it’s simply a fact that a substantial portion of non-Anglo-Saxon people have always been a sizable part of the populace of this country, even if they were not integrated into the political fabric of society.
It's not like I'm ignorant of that fact. I excluded them, just as you did the Indians.
The country itself was very clear that they were excluded, too, when it was founded.
The key difference is that unlike the Indians — who lived in geographically-distinct territory and with whom colonists were in near-constant explicit military conflict and treaty negotiations — the Africans and indentured Irish lived side-by-side with Americans, interacting daily with them and participating in cultural exchange. (This is especially true of free blacks, who were a non-negligible part of the population of northern states from pretty early on. I don’t think it’s a situation remotely comparable to the Indians.
Nevertheless, the founders of the country deliberately excluded them, making the assertion that America is multi-ethnic since its inception a lie.
It has predominately been mono-ethnic, and that ethnicity deliberately sought to exclude other ethnicities.
It's only really been multi-ethnic since 1964.
Again, you’re playing pretend. Even if you want to discount blacks and Indians and the Irish (who became a massive and politically-enfranchised population long before 1964) you still have to explain the millions of (basically non-assimilated) Germans and Scandinavians who filled the American Midwest as the country expanded westward. You also have to explain the masses of Eastern Europeans who started coming here eighty years before Hart-Celler, and who were assimilated only with great effort and friction.
Look, man, I’m the direct descendant of Mayflower stock. My ancestors, the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Protestant (I have one Irish great-grandparent, although I’ve so far been unable to discern whether she was Protestant or Catholic) have lived in this country for centuries. I would like it to be true that America has been a mono-ethnic Anglo-Protestant project from the beginning, and I fully agree with you that the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin conclusively illustrate that they wanted that to be the trajectory of the country.
However, they realized very early on that this was not going to be a viable path to populating a continent. The native fertility of the founding stock simply was not sufficient to produce the sheer numbers of laboring adults to achieve the settlement of the western half of the country, and within a couple of generations the Anglo stock accepted this and started letting in masses of Europeans, and the ones in the South imported so many slaves they were outnumbered. Sure, efforts were taken to maintain the political disenfranchisement of those elements of the population, but those were transitory as well. Tammany Hall was already powerful as early as the 1850’s. The Freedmen’s Bureau secured significant political power for blacks in the 1870’s. The founding stock of this country simply has not been in sole control of its political and cultural trajectory for over 150 years, as much as I would like it to be otherwise.
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