I Am An Immigrant
There are few places in the world where I feel more rooted and at home than in my
“native” Minnesota. Even here, though, in my birthplace, I use the term “native” with great caution, almost irony: one can really only call oneself a “native” of this place if one is Dakota or Ojibwa. For the rest of us, the question is not whether we are immigrants, but only how many generations we need trace backward to the movement that made us immigrants.
Minneapolis is a city of immigrants, and always has been. In my own case, it was my great-grandparents’ generation who were the invandrara, from Sweden. Some started rural farms. Others ultimately settled in an area around Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis–referred to in those days as “Snoose Boulevard”–a district of recent immigrants, where Swedish was commonly spoken on the streets, where there were Swedish-language newspapers and theaters (as a colleague pointed out to me, the sign on the lower-left of the above image actually says something like “All Swedish language newspapers sold here”). My father remembers his early downtown-Minneapolis church where his grandparents’ generation still worshipped in Swedish-language services. Swedes in Minnesota in that era did not assimilate quickly, and made a point of maintaining dual loyalties–as naturalized Americans on the one hand, but as people still proud of their language and culture of origin on the other. This drew the usual prejudices that large groups of immigrants draw in any place and era. Echoes of the image of the “dumb Swede”, smelling of pickled herring, persist in present-day representations like Fargo and the lighthearted self-deprecations (read: Sven and Ole jokes) of we third-generation Minnesotans.
It might be surprising to some that Swedish-Americans, like many other European immigrants, and despite many generations of melanin-depriving Northern European climes, were not always initially accepted as “white people” in the germanic/Anglo-Saxon sense of the term: “whiteness,” of course, has never been a category based on biology, but a cultural construct made of many components. Being “white” meant being accepted as a certain kind of “us,” and Swedish immigrants were still initially regarded as a “them,” unqualified for (full) participation in the privilege of whiteness, regardless of skin tone. (This is not to suggest, of course, that Swedish immigrants were in any sense equally as oppressed as those of African origin who were violently captured and taken to the U.S. as slaves. My point here is about the ways in which “whiteness” is a cultural idea that is much more complex, such that pale skin per se did not automatically confer full access to that category.) First-generation Swedish immigrants were a community, in many ways, of “others” holding on to dual identities. By the 1930’s, less of that Swedish-language culture remained in the area, as Minnesotans of Swedish descent slowly became the cultural insiders rather than the outsiders, thus gaining the cultural status of “whites.” But they also held on to components of their Swedishness that had become unique to immigrant culture: I grew up with “Swedish” words and dishes that are incomprehensible to present-day Swedes. And the cycles of immigrations continue: The area around Cedar Avenue where they lived out those dual identities is still a place of immigrants who negotiate similar opportunities, problems, and stereotypes, the sounds of Swedish and German supplanted by those of Somali, Hmong, and Spanish (among others).
So I am an immigrant from a city of immigrants. My Swedish great-grandparents were the products yet another, earlier, emigration: from Scotland. They were, in some ways, refugees, fleeing famine in Scotland by signing up for service in mercenary regiments that fought for Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years War, and who, paid with land in Sweden by a cash-poor Gustavus, settled there. Members of the Scottish Family of Bruce, in turn, were also transplant: not a “clan” of indigenous Celts but a family of Anglo-Normans given land in Scotland by William the Conqueror after 1066. Those Normans, as the name indicates, were themselves immigrants: Norse Vikings who had settled on the continent. And back the line goes, in an endless cycle of removes, emigrations, and ever-changing ethnicities.
In the argument that follows, I’m going to speak from a particular position of identity and ethnicity: as a white, male, protestant of (in part) Scottish descent, who is both intensely interested in and proud of that Scottish component of my own heritage. I offer the foregoing personal history, as an immigrant at several removes, to try to lay bare, at the outset, the ethnic, cultural, and historical complexity–not to mention the artificiality–of what might at first seem a simple kind of identification. I am not a “white person” because of some kind of traceable genetic reality. The very concept of “whiteness” to which that previous statement refers would have been available to my great-grandparents’ generation. It might possibly (in an earlier, less-defined form) have been available to the seventeenth-century generation that emigrated from Scotland to Sweden (though certainly religious difference mattered more to them than matters of ethnicity or skin color). But that concept was certainly not available to the generation that emigrated from Normandy to Scotland, and all those generations that came before it. That “whiteness,” just like its companion terms such as “blackness” or “brownness”, is a product of culture and history, not of biology. This does not mean that such concepts are not real in the sense that they don’t have real effects on real people–they most certainly do. But it does mean that they are concepts that have been imagined into existence and not hardwired into human biology. When I claim identities like “Swedish-American” or “Scottish-American,” I want to recognise those things as important contributors to who I am, but I also want to recognise the degree to which they are artificial, and the ways in which such identifications can gloss over much more complex and significant realities. I also want to acknowledge the history that has created the present-day sense of those two ethnicities as “white” ones rather than something else, and the history of cultural and actual violence against those who didn’t fall into that category.
All of which is preamble to this: In the few posts that follow, I’m going to address what I think is an egregious–even evil–appropriation of something I value highly: that Scottish component of my own identity and ancestry. I’m going to focus on a particular component of that history, a fourteenth-century Scottish baronial letter to Pope John XXII known as the “Declaration of Arbroath.” I’ve worked on this document extensively as a student of medieval Scottish literature and culture, and became aware some time ago that there were white supremacist groups in the United States that printed and sold their own translations thereof, but I hadn’t looked into the matter deeply. Over the past few weeks, I have been doing just that, attempting to trace the history, sources, and reasons behind such a strange (mis)appropriation. The more I’ve delved into the matter, the more chilling the findings have become, uncovering traceable links from white-supremacist extremists to much more mainstream rhetoric, both about the Declaration and about Scottish and Celtic identities in general. This is why, for one thing, I’ve decided to publish the results of this work as a series of blog posts rather than as an academic paper: this information needs to be more widely accessible than a piece in a journal of which only scholarly specialists are aware.
Before I do, however, I want to make one additional prefacing point: I have been active, over the past decade or so, with several American organizations that bring together people of many different ethnicities and walks of life around a shared interest in Scottish history and culture. One, Family of Bruce International, is an organization that connects persons of that surname (or with interest therein) around the world. The other, The Minnesota Coalition of Scottish Clans, focuses on similarly bringing together “every Minnesotan who is Scottish by birth, by heritage, or by inclination.” Before I launch into a series about the appropriation of Scottish and Celtic identities by white supremacists, I want to acknowledge that I have not experienced any trace of the phenomena I’m about to discuss within them. These are organizations dedicated to the positive celebration of a culture and history and are not exclusive to those with some kind of imaginary “white” pedigree. They include diverse faces, skin tones, and origins. The people I have met, and with whom I’ve worked, played, and even shared my research, are a diverse crowd, and I’ve never experienced prejudiced attitudes. On the contrary, what I’ve witnessed has been an openness to anyone, from any background, who is interested in the history and culture of Scotland.
I mention this because I want, at the outset, to make a distinction between the downright evil appropriation of the ideas of “Celticness” or “Scottishness” for the purpose of naturalizing a false idea of a “pure white” biology and the positive celebration of interest in a fascinating set of cultures, histories, and individuals. A fondness for kilts and bagpipes does not a white supremacist make. At the same time, as I will argue, the fact that such American organisations can sometimes focus overmuch on stereopically “Scottish” phenomena (the kilts and bagpipes, haggis, etc.)–to the exclusion of a broader view of both historical and contemporary Scottish culture–may be part of what has left the ideas of “Scottishness” and “Celticness” strangely open to spurious white supremacist appropriations of those categories. In other words, I do fear that we of the Scottish American community may in some ways have (for the most part inadvertently) made American cultural ground more fertile for the extreme-right-wing hijacking of Scottishness.
In fact, one of my reasons for publishing this work in a more public space is to warn my colleagues in those organizations that such appropriations are taking place, and are–quite disturbingly–more prevalent than I had ever imagined. FOBI and MSCSC have long promoted historical and cultural accuracy and made specific efforts to counter destructive mythologies about the cultures and histories they hold dear. They are also effective vehicles for disseminating more accurate and balanced ideas to a broader public. I know that they will remain at the forefront of those efforts, and suspect there are ways we can do even more.
surfingedges 