“Their Experience is the Immigrant Experience”: Ellis Island, Documentary Film, and Rhetorically Reversible Whiteness

Abstract

Political advocates on the ideological right have long taken seriously what their counterparts on the left have not: white racialized affect. As left activists and scholars have alternately lamented and raged over the steady creep of the “middle” to the “right,” they have documented in detail the outcomes of whites' refusal to engage in “genuine” racial atonement. I argue in this essay that there is still much to be gained critically, theoretically, and politically by taking collective, rhetorical production of white affect, particularly the retrieval of immigrant pain, as seriously as those who manipulate it. Key to that construction in the past two decades has been the archival and circulation of “the immigrant experience” in popular documentary films featuring Ellis Island. The success of “white rights” rhetorics owes much to equating and substituting that story for the mythos of “the nation of immigrants” as a whole.