Read the Book(Uploaded) and write about the questions(each 1150~200 words)

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self-identities, whites make up 66 percent of the U.S. population, minorities (African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) 32 percent. Between 1 and 2 percent claim membership in two or more racial–ethnic groups.

As you can see from the Social Map below, the distribution of dominant and minority groups among the states seldom comes close to the national average. This is because mi- nority groups tend to be clustered in regions. The extreme distributions are represented by Maine and Vermont, each of which has only 5 percent minority, and by Hawaii, where mi- norities outnumber whites 75 percent to 25 percent. With this as background, let’s review the major groups in the United States, going from the largest to the smallest.

European Americans Perhaps the event that best illustrates the racial view of the nation’s founders occurred at the first Continental Congress of the United States. There they passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, declaring that only white immigrants could apply for citizenship. The sense of superiority and privilege of WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) was not limited to their ideas of race. They also viewed white Europeans from countries other than England as inferior. They held disdainful stereotypes of white ethnics—immigrants from Europe whose language and other customs differed from theirs. They despised the Irish, viewing them as dirty, lazy drunkards, but they also painted Germans, Poles, Jews, Italians, and others with similar disparaging brushstrokes.

To get an idea of how intense the feelings of the WASPs were, consider this statement by Benjamin Franklin regarding immigrants from Germany:

Why should the Palatine boors (Germans) be suffered to swarm into our settlements and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so nu- merous as to germanize us instead of our anglifying them? (In Alba and Nee 2003:17)

The political and cultural dominance of the WASPs placed intense pressure on immi- grants to assimilate into the mainstream culture. The children of most immigrants embraced the new way of life and quickly came to think of themselves as Americans

Racial–Ethnic Relations in the United States 281

Lower than average: 5% to 18.2%

Average: 18.8% to 33.7%

Higher than average: 34.8% to 75.1%

UT OH

AZ NM

MS AL GA

NH MA RI

CT NJ

DE MD DC

HI Percentage Minority

FIGURE 9.6 The Distribution of Dominant and Minority Groups

Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 2011:Table 19.

white ethnics white immi- grants to the United States whose cultures differ from WASP culture

WASP White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; narrowly, an American