You and I and Tom and Lee all know exactly what makes the Mexicans different. They are brown. At least, the poor ones, and those descended from more Indian than Iberian stock. The rich, white, European-looking Mexicans blend right in at the mall. The Chinese were treated like subhuman scum too, in the nineteenth century, when we imported them to build our railroads. What made THEM different? They were yellow. The Indians were red, the Africans were black. In each case, none were white enough.

Everyone else was white, like the Irish, they could change their names, drop the accent and pass after a generation or two. And you're right about the Irish claiming the eastern seaboard as an overseas county of the Emerald Isle. The US allows dual citizenship to those with Irish mothers, I have a friend who has never been to Ireland who has two passports, useful for travel to places where they don't like Americans.

Dick Gregory once said (in a different context, of course), "In the South they don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too big. In the North, it's just the opposite." I'll be the first to admit America has done a terrific job officially removing racism from its laws and administration, it can be justifiably proud. But it lingers long and deep in the social fabric in very subtle ways those who aren't white can't even imagine. Even when it doesn't express itself in nasty or hateful ways, even if you're accepted and welcomed, you still always feel an outsider. I disagree with those protesters in Arizona, for reasons of my own, as I have declared here in an earlier post; but I understand exactly why they are so pissed off and I sympathize with their outrage. In America, you're never white enough, even if your family has been living in the same American town for the last four hundred years.

I may pass for white (I've been told I look EYE-Talian, or even EYE-Ranian, and even AY-Rab), and I speak unaccented English, but I know what it's like to get a dirty look because I speak Spanish to someone next to me in line at the stupor market, or sitting next to me on the bus. Some people actually think you shouldn't speak anything but English in "their" country, as if we didn't have anything better to say than to talk about them behind their back. It's company policy where I work to speak only English with our colleagues because someone complained about Spanish being spoken in the cubicles, and Creole around the water cooler. I've had people complain to me about how "those Cubans are taking over", not realizing I was one, or that my family has been here almost a century--maybe longer than the "American" doing the complaining. Of course, if we're successful, we're taking over and stealing their jobs, if we're not, we're sponging welfare off the REAL Americans. And most insidious of all, we're not Cuban or Puerto Rican or Columbian, or Guatemalan or Peruvian. We're Spanish, because the whites can't tell us apart so they lump us all into one amorphous brown tide in spite of our own profound differences.

Yeah, the Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans quickly blend in, lose the language and culture and the excess vowels or consonants in their surnames. They even forget how to recognize their own cheekbones and lips and Slavic warts and other betrayers of their origins and races. But we stick out. Even to those who are our colleagues, our friends, even our own families, in-laws and spouses who no doubt love and respect us, we're REALLY not Americans.

No, it doesn't hurt. It doesn't even bother us all that much, really, not any more. Honest. But it's always there, and we know it will never go away.