EUROPEANS:
One way or another, either taught by the left or by the racist public schools, the history of Europeans in the Americas always begins with the history of those who initiated and profited from the genocidal slaving conquest. This is a piece of the history that cannot be ignored or understated. Yes, two continents were conquered and another was robbed of millions as slaves, and yes, the conquistadors were from Europe.
For sure, there has always been a class of Europeans that stockpiled stolen gold and silver, that burned natives alive and buried the corpses in mass graves, that owned vast plantations and sold the sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton and indigo on the international market, that owned the ships that carted Africans across the Atlantic as cattle, that called for the mass distribution of smallpox blankets, that came to brutally Christianize "ignorant savages," that slaughtered millions of buffalo and harp seals with reckless abandon, that established themselves as the new government, and so forth.
And yet, saying this only tells the very crudest beginning of the story of Europeans in this country. The vast majority of settlers, in general, and even among the armies of colonization, were not the wealthy speculators and bishops that really spearheaded the initiative. Many millions of European migrants were impoverished folks, criminals or criminalized revolutionaries and religionists, thousands of whom were forced to migrate for exactly these reasons. Very little has been done to understand and describe this process (certainly by the white radical movement in the u.s.) but we can begin with the sparse knowledge we do have, and build from there.
For example, there is the story of the Irish peasants crammed into ships strikingly similar to slaving vessels (often a third to a half of the "cargo" died or was sickeningly ill upon arrival) and sent to america during the famine of the 1840s. These Irish folks were forced to migrate to america because it was cheaper for the landlords to ship them abroad than to wait for starving people to pay rent.
Then there's the English revolution - technically understood as the civil war to overthrow the king - that gave birth to a number of more radical currents among the English peasantry. Many of the soldiers who fought against the king became disillusioned by the fact that once the king was gone, the new parliamentary system still treated the poor as slaves and benefited the state church and the landowners. These folks mutinied and were violently repressed. Many of their leaders were killed, and the living were given two choices: go to Ireland to put down freedom fighters there, or go to america. Most chose america rather than murdering their Irish brothers.
These stories, as well as the simple understanding that what is now Georgia began as a British penal colony, begin to make clear that at least a good portion of the European Diaspora came downtrodden and persecuted, rather than (or as well) as greedy, racist Christians. In fact, the concept of race as we now understand it, and particularly of whiteness, grew out of this interaction between European migrants and African slaves on stolen Turtle Island.
The creation of "white" people in america began as an attempt to maintain the fragile balance of the slave economy in which the vast majority of the population were either slaves, indentured (or landless) Europeans, or natives. The slaving class had to ensure that events such as the Baker's Rebellion, where poor Europeans linked up with Africans and natives in revolt against the rich, would not continue.
Colonial lawmakers created this category of white people and gave white people certain material privileges, such as the ability to own land and the "right" to work slightly less menial industrial jobs and Europeans became white to the extent that they aligned their own interests with those of the slave holders and industrialists. Early in the colonial process, there were dozens of examples of European migrants organizing in vocal opposition to slavery, but by the turn of the twentieth century, this almost entirely gave way to a situation in which, even most so-called revolutionary white people advocated for the "naturally inferior" status of Negroes to be maintained.
So, becoming white had two key components. one was this acceptance of certain human beings as "niggers," barely above animal status, and fit only for brutal exploitation. Second was the decimation of all European cultural or spiritual heritage and the willingness to assimilate into america. Both were dramatic shifts from their condition upon arrival to this country.
For example, many of the Irish migrants identified not necessarily as Irish but more specifically by the county that they had left. They mostly spoke Gaelic and practiced a version of Catholicism that was a combination of Roman Catholicism and the pagan spiritual customs of pre-colonized Ireland. Many of the Irish peasants had lived in townlands, which were stateless, communal means of living, almost entirely unaffected by British rule. All of this had to be either forgotten or undermined in order to consider oneself a white american.
This transition from an identity firmly rooted in land, spirit, ritual and ancestry to an identity of loose affiliation to all peoples from Ireland, and then all of Europe, and then more abstractly to all of those currently deemed white, is a rather gross perversion of the notion of solidarity.
Inherent in the alliance of all European migrants in america into one distinct group of white people is the violent suppression of all that once allowed the European to know herself (ancestral history, custom, language, and spirit) as well as the violent subjugation of all those classed as "non-white." Thus, fundamental in this agreement to be understood as of the white race is the absolute negation of the possibility of legitimate connection with the majority of the world's peoples.
So while the localism of indigenous systems of living in Europe guaranteed the individual's survival through the vibrancy of the community, the transition to whiteness guarantees only the mutual alienation of all those participating. And perhaps the third key component of whiteness is that very near to everyone must participate or the power of the consensual lie tends to dissipate.