“No matter who was here first, whiteness and American identity have been joined at the hip for centuries; the sons and daughters of England, Ireland, Germany, Scotland and the like, have long been able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as the living embodiment of the American ideal. No matter their prior presence on these shores, the black, brown and red have forever and always had to lobby, petition, plead, scrape, fight and even die for the right to lay claim to that ideal as their own.”
