The current national debate on immigration reminds me of a story Alex Haley tells in the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In the story, Haley is standing with Malcolm at the airport when a group of children dressed in their traditional clothing get off a plane from Europe. “Pretty little children,’ observes Malcolm X, “Soon they’re going to learn their first English word: Nigger.”

Forty years later, Malcolm X’s observation still rings true. To be sure, multiculturalism has gained widespread acceptance and overt racism is no longer publicly tolerated by mainstream society. However, racial inequities continue to exist in every meaningful quality-of-life indicator, including life expectancy (Centers for Disease Control, 2005), and immigrants are confronted with institutional racism and the corresponding racial hierarchy from the moment they first set foot on U.S. soil.

In this contemporary racial Zeitgeist, many White immigrants, like their non-immigrant White counterparts, deny both the existence of institutional racism and their own personal racial biases. In their defense, they cite their staunch color-blindness (or support of affirmative action), their diverse social circle (usually consisting of members of different immigrant groups), their own minority-group status and victimization, and their unfailing good intentions. They don’t want to be racist, they say, and so, in their own eyes, they’re not. And yet, despite these good intentions, White immigrants are not insulated from learning racism, just as immigrants of color are not immune from experiencing it (see Roediger’s 1999; 2005 for a sociological treatise on this phenomenon). “Nigger” may not be the first word immigrants learn today, but, in my opinion, negotiating the U.S. racial hierarchy remains one of the primary and most salient experiences for most immigrants, Black and White. As evidence, I offer my own immigration story.

*******

After a few years in the new country (my family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when I was 6 years old), my parents were able to accumulate the resources to move from Chicago, where I was starting to fall in with a “bad” (read “non-White”) peer group, to Skokie, a near suburb that at the time consisted mainly of Jews, other Whites, and a handful of Asian immigrants. Despite my own Jewishness, the move proved difficult for me. Moving to Skokie may have provided me with the opportunity to be a part of a bright, academically motivated peer group, but my accent, clothes, and lack of familiarity with U.S. cultural norms made me conspicuously different and therefore an easy target for bullying. I coped with the marginalization as best I could and gravitated toward others in similar circumstances – the Asian immigrants. At that time (in the 1980s), there was little in the school curriculum about the history of racial oppression (slavery was glossed over, the civil rights movement was not covered at all). Likewise, there was no discussion of contemporary racial inequities or the influence of group membership on personal identity and attitudes. Left to my own devices, I interpreted the racial reality I was experiencing (e.g., Blacks were less likely to be in honors classes and more likely to be shown on the news as being involved in criminal activity) as the product of some deficit in the underachieving group (Ryan, 1976).