Posted on 04/20/2010 6:36:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Is white the new black?"
So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of "Beyond the Pale," his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing "the slow birth of a people."
Sanneh is onto something. For after a year of battering as "un-American," "evil-doers" and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as "the real Americans," Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.
Ethnonationalism -- the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart -- is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.
Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his "Disuniting of America," Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.
It has happened before -- and here.
In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama.
In 1754, the 13 colonies consisted of South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king.
But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act and the Quebec Act, by 1775 a new people had been born: the Americans.
In 1770, New York colonists had erected a statue of George III in Bowling Green in grateful tribute for his repeal of the Townshend taxes. In July 1776, they pulled it down and melted it for lead bullets after Washington read his soldiers the Declaration of Independence portraying George III as another Ivan the Terrible.
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people," said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.
Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other.
Obama in the campaign of 2008 recognized that "out there" in Middle America existed another country, far from the one he grew up in, far from the privileged Ivy League community to which he belonged.
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and ... the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Palin and Tea Partiers now repeat Obama's disparaging line about their clinging to Bibles and guns -- with defiant pride.
As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically.
Sioux gather at Little Bighorn to celebrate the massacre of Custer's command. Hawaiian natives demand a new ethnically based government -- and receive Obama's blessing. Hispanics march under Mexican flags in Los Angeles to demand citizenship for illegal aliens.
Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding.
In 2004, when Howard Dean reached out to "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," Shelby Steele wrote that this was "absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America" because of their history and white guilt.
This, Sanneh suggests, is changing. The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them.
When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there was no hesitation in blistering her for showing contempt for the rights of Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven, cheated of the promotions they had won in competitive exams.
When black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by Cambridge cop James Crowley, most Americans, despite Obama and media suggestions of racial profiling, sided with Crowley.
Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?
First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.
Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Crist. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.
Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.
this is the nonsense pandered by that weirdo from Yale Univ.
He is upset that the caucasian people have not balkanized to become ethnic. IOW they are too egalitarian.
This is a step backward pushed by the race baiters.
wtf is that hoss?
just inherently because the tea party is mostly white it must be racist
BULLSHIT
Instead of reading the article, they read his name and automatically jump to conclusions
Yep, that and some tar, feathers and a rail!
Yes, I think that is what I object to...the knee-jerk attacks on Buchanan, instead of grasping what he’s talking about.
Do I agree with him on everything? No, but I do think he has interesting things to say from time to time.
And, then, what are all the folks who don't fit into a neat, clean Census category going to do?
Look at our puppet-in-chief: whatever "color" or "race" you think he might be, think about where he's coming from, culturally and idealogically. Then again, if you've not had your breakfast, you might not what to think about that right now.
Jesus..what naive idiots this forum attracts these days..reminds me of the amnesty fight or the minority defense fund nest sent out marching orders today
conservatives without a clue..maybe..who knows
you numbnuts really think there is broad appeal of non whites outside Viets and Cubans for the right?
so anyone points out the obvious then they are racist?
no wonder we allowed Obama to win and now have the most anti-American socialist govenment we ever imagined
so many spineless conservatives kneejerked falling for any race card tossed at their feet.
blacks voted 95% for obama
latinos 70% something percent for Obama
Asians 60% something for Bro
white 55%
so who’s ehtoncentric and racist?
minorities voted to some degree against what they say as a wcontinuing white power structure vote....and look what we got...this formula worked like a charm for the Dems...you get amnesty and they will do this over and over
frigging fools
the sheer naivete and brainwashing of those in whitelandia never ceases to amaze
btw...I was at tea party national convention...95% white...so sorry to disappoint...guess we were all racist
we are a long long way from ideological parity without race as a consideration.....unless whites are doing the choosing then we LOVE minorities...stumble all over ourselves to support lackluster ones like Powell and Steele....in the meantime minority vote has ushered in socialism
this is just fantastic isn’t it?
let’s call ourselves racist one more time shall we....I’ll go first:
I am a racist because I think more like most white folks than I do most minorities...I am so ashamed. Please forgive me race God.
amen..i see one decent freeper I know here failed to read the article and just quipped
he might ought to sneak back and looksee
Wow, interesting post.
Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042, with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050. By 2023, minorities will comprise more than half of all children.
The non-Hispanic, single-race white population is projected to be only slightly larger in 2050 (203.3 million) than in 2008 (199.8 million). In fact, this group is projected to lose population in the 2030s and 2040s and comprise 46 percent of the total population in 2050, down from 66 percent in 2008.
Meanwhile, the Hispanic population is projected to nearly triple, from 46.7 million to 132.8 million during the 2008-2050 period. Its share of the nations total population is projected to double, from 15 percent to 30 percent. Thus, nearly one in three U.S. residents would be Hispanic.
The black population is projected to increase from 41.1 million, or 14 percent of the population in 2008, to 65.7 million, or 15 percent in 2050.
The Asian population is projected to climb from 15.5 million to 40.6 million. Its share of the nations population is expected to rise from 5.1 percent to 9.2 percent.
folks don’t even read it....they just preen how Pat must be racist
he wrote the truth...on this...his Holocaust rants are nuts indeed
The issues they see as constituting freedom aren't all the same as ours. As long as we aren't starving they can't understand why we're complaining.
They share with the "progressive" elitists the belief in a divine right to bring order in ways of their choosing.
A nation must have leaders but we are getting buried in potential rulers, from all sides of the politcal spectrum.
The royals want their power back!
As regards the treaty power it sure as hell does.
The problem is activist judges that read anything into this clause that they want.
That's only a small part of the problem.
This most ignored part of the constitution is the tenth amendment below:
There is legitimate conflict between the tenth and the fourteenth. The latter was never ratified legitimately.
then you can count on a left wing lock...I won’t live to see but my kids will
unless minorities change
or whites do
or conservative whites have more kids and amnesty doesn’t pass...a tall order
we have been waiting for blacks to vote right for 50 years no
latinos have gotten more left..ole Cubans dying off
and Asians too except Viets
it is just is what it is
folks like it then enjoy the fruits it will bring...like I said I’ll be dead and my kids will know how to fight
Nevertheless, I don't see us degenerating into a "race war," no matter what Pat (who is the political equivalent of the first Black Sabbath album) says, for several reasons, some of which are outlined above. "Whites" (an odd category that includes Arabs, Armenians, Persians and Jews, but NOT descendants of Europeans from Latin America), will have a large plurality for some time, and the various "peoples of color" could never unite in a solid coalition to declare war on the "whites."
I still see us going the way of Brazil demographically, albeit with more screaming from the politicos about race related issues. The balkans and Africa are very poor points of comparison.
Much like you, I see this country moving to the left, as the "new Americans" provide the votes to put the palefaced Chardonnay Socialists in power. Add to the fact that "traditional Americans" are already in a minority, and the increased secularization of the populace as a whole outside of rural areas, and the "traditionalist" vote will be at best a component of a political coalition, but far from a dominant one.
Americans should have an opportunity to decide whether our immigration policies are to serve the long-term interests of all Americans or the short-term interests of corporate and special (often political, religious and ethnic) interest groups. Legal immigration is a controllable variable that can be adjusted in the national interest if we have the political will to do so. We don't need 1.2 million legal immigrants a year, most of whom are poor and uneducated. And illegal immigration can be stopped and reversed if we as a nation make a resolute commitment to secure our borders and enforce our existing laws.
As it was written? Like in legalized slavery? Like in the importation clause? Like the 3/5 clause?
So many asians at these rallies. ok.
Southern Europeans? What on earth are you talking about? Italians not white?
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