Angela Merkel deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. She was very brave morally and politically in her position on the Syrian refugees, as were many Greek citizens who defied their own panicked government in order to help desperate families in flight. Jihadist terrorist attacks in Europe are as much aimed against these Arabs as they are against Europeans—secular Arabs, middle-class Arabs, moderate Muslims, people trying to get away from the kind of regimes we would also be trying to escape. The attacks are designed to isolate such people further. [...]
In the aging societies of Western Europe, youth is being wasted. Young men are growing up excluded and policed, because of race, because of the past, because whiteness is the only form of wealth some of the people in these societies have. Meanwhile, young Greek people emigrate to Australia, and Portuguese youth are moving in significant numbers to Angola. But how weird is this: the Pakistani community in Birmingham, England, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, although many Brexit backers were that kind of obnoxious white British anti-immigrant toff or lout. [...]
It has also been true of American life that one of the ways in which despised white immigrants gained acceptance and a share in national identity was by subscribing to the racial order of segregation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put a stop to competition from Chinese laborers for jobs in the West. The Dawes Act of 1887 created Indian reservations and was celebrated by white politicians as an honorable conclusion to the “Indian Problem.” In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation as law in Plessy v. Ferguson. European immigration all but stopped in World War I, and white agents who went South in search of black people to fill places in factories were sometimes met with violence from white landowners. But 500,000 black people rushed northward during the Great War, having escaped “the idiocy of rural life,” as Marx once described it. Segregation existed in the North, enforced by real estate companies that controlled where blacks and whites could live, as Lorraine Hansberry’s family tried to tell us.
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