A little relevant comic relief to get things started...

 Our historical memory is what could be referred to as chronic amnesia.

In case it was difficult to pick up on, this is a hilarious comic about colonialism. The debate is still raging in America about illegal immigrants and who is illegal. I know I bring this up a lot in the blog, but the idea of the floating signifier is one of the best tools the course literature has, in my opinion, offered us all year. This is because it is a powerful yet non-specific tool.
Here, the idea is that historical amnesia, which I would define as the convenient forgetting of a people's past by the societal managers so as not to discredit current activities or directives, functions to make sure the past doesn't get in the way of persecuting Hispanic immigrants in Southern States. States such as Arizona and Alabama have in the past year attempted to institute cruel laws that impose strict regulations on illegal immigrants, make it harder to get social services and to become full citizens. It sure as hell doesn't mean they will stop using them as cheap labour. On the contrary, these laws - being far what they appear to be on the surface - help maintain the servitude of a racialized group that threatens by sheer numbers to become the majority within the next generation, possibly earlier. 

The knapsack of white privilege is being stuffed by these laws and it is precisely the illegality of the whit presence on this continent that might possibly legitimatize these laws from the get go. The native peoples of the U.S., who are also second class citizens, would presumably look at the "they took awr jawrbs!" movement as ridiculous and hypocritical, and if they were provided with any type of voice in stead of subjected to ongoing systemic racism, people would surely get an earful about who the hell should stay and who should go.

The white man in the comic says that it is time to "reclaim" America from illegal immigrants. This is a big part of the colloquial white American, and even Canadian, discourse about the racialized other. Positioning the racialized other as an economic threat is one of the foundations of othering discourse, and stemming from this comes another part of the process which is the claim that through being an economic threat that the other has somehow occupied and taken over the job market. This creates a perceived threat to the American dream style livelihood of both the material and psychological white identity and survival in North America.