Your grandparents didn’t know your parents would be taught the palmer method of penmanship and spend many hours of each school year making long rolls of script across page after page, like rolls of barbed wire disguised as tumbleweed rolling across an endless prairie. They didn’t know this barbed wire would become a fence. And they didn’t know America would line up on the desert side the Negroes (even though they had become Christians); the Jews (though they were white, had crossed the Atlantic in steerage and worked hard); the Mexicans (who preferred corn meal to flour); the Chinese (who had been given work-study grants to build America’s railroads but had not had the decency to return home); the Japanese (who ate seaweed and raw fish, like seals); and whooping red Indians who couldn’t handle liquor. The real Americans were on the good side of the fence, the side where the water was and carrots grew, row upon row waiting to be cut into tiny cubes, mixed with peas, and frozen.
White History Month (Patricia Eakins in Race Traitor)