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.
Well, I suppose these folks should be told what they can DO about 0bama,
and then you’ll see them start showing up.
I see Brasil in our future too and it is a horrible place to live compared to here.
as you know I know this from having lived there when it was actually better
it’s too late to grab that destiny I fear....we have tried for a very very long time
‘most minorities simply are not interested by and large and many of these poorer immigrants today are not like the Irish, Jews etc
they work..many do...but they vote entitlement and identity
we give amnesty to 30 million illegals and we are done fro generations and what we are dealing with now with Bro will seem quaint
why do most minorities vote different than most whites?
it’s debatable
I’m a tea partier, and I am a rather swarthy Jewish guy.
I still wonder if the demographic shifts and the respective effects on politics will cause a turn away from ideology to politics based on personality (as is the case in Brazil and, interestingly enough, New York City).
We didn't get to the welfare state until the 1930s. LBJ just expanded it and the 1965 Immigration Act opened the floodgates to the Third World. The past immigration waves of the 1800s and early 1900s did not occur with a welfare state in place. Between 1924 and 1965 we had a stable immigration rate of 300,000 a year. Now we have a permanent and increasing wave of immigration coupled with an expanding welfare state. 53% of immigrants are on welfare. We are importing poverty.
why do most minorities vote different than most whites?
The Democrats created the artificial category of “Hispanics” in the 1970s as a way to create another class of victims, which they could imbue with special rights and privileges, including affirmative action and minority business set asides. The result is another minority group that votes Democrat. It doesn’t matter that, according to the Census Bureau, 51 percent of Hispanics self-identify themselves as white. The Census Bureau has even created the phony category of “non-Hispanic whites,” which are now 66 percent of the population and will be 50 percent in 2042. The reality is that “whites” will still be more than 70 percent of the population in 2042.
The Democrats are the party of free stuff. Bringing in more and more poor people, most of whom are minorities as defined by the USG, translates into more people dependent upon big government. The out of wedlock birth rates for Hispanics is 50% topped only by the black rate of 68%. School drop out rates for both groups is above 50%. The social pathology for failure in this society is coming from single family households and poor education. We are creating a permanent underclass.
Historically, minorities and immigrants have vote more for the Dems. Immigrants settle primarily in large cities, virtually all of them run by the Dems. Immigration just imports more Dem voters.
The late Irish Gangster Mickey Spillane (NOT the mystery writer) once remarked that he couldn't get control of the waterfront unions because "there is not one white man working there these days." This was in the 1930s, when Italians dominated unskilled dockwork in New York.
Do you have a sister? Swarthy and Jewish are a nice combination.
"Whiteness" in America has actually had little to do with European ancestry, and more as a construct of "social acceptance" by the host population, which is why folks of non-European ancestry were incorporated into the "white" category decades ago, and why certain ethnic groups from Europe (Italians, Portuguese, Slavs, etc.) were considered "nonwhite" until they assimilated.
“Do you have a sister? Swarthy and Jewish are a nice combination.”
Two older, two younger, the single one (youngest) is a reserve sniper. I believe her profile is on JMatch. Very pretty.
Now I get you. My father tells me that he wasn’t considered white where he grew up. He is Sicilian. I didn’t get your point earlier. Sorry.
Yes. Our founders gave us the mechanism by which to change this and it was changed via the 13th amendment and that wretched period of our nation became a thing of the past. Slavery was an abomination and justly and legally abolished. The same can be said for women's right to vote. The 19th amendment did this in 1920.
I do not fear my constitution. I do fear judical activism taking over the role of legislature. If you do not like something in the constitution, change it by amendment.
I much prefer the wisdom of Anthony Scalia's quote, "The only problem with a living constitution is that it destroys the constitution."
As it was written? Like in legalized slavery? Like in the importation clause? Like the 3/5 clause
Please do not throw me anymore red herrings and straw men. I will not reply.
> Which ethnicities were previously not considered to
> be ‘white,’ but now they are? I’m not saying that you’re
> wrong, I am just curious about this.
As the son of Italian immigrants, I can assure you that we were not considered “white” in the New England Yankee sense of the word.
We were considered dagos, wops, guineas, greaseballs, spaghetti benders, ant-men, etc.
You get the idea.
Our parents and grandparents spoke with funny accents, we had a different appearance than our gaelic and anglo-saxon predecessors and neighbors, and our food smelled weird to them. Imagine! Our mother would pack our lunches rather than give us a quarter to eat the slop in the school caf.
“folks don’t even read it....they just preen how Pat must be racist”
I read through this without first noting who the author was, and got thoroughly offended by Pat anew. There is nothing racial in the Tea Party argument for limiting government and supporting the Constitution. To suggest, as he does, that this is some sort of “Whiteness” associated with it is asinine and insidious. How typical of him.
Wrong! (and stupid!)
It's Conservatives that are a house divided. The Republican leaders aren't even Conservatives - they're Liberal Lites.
And do we want fiscal Conservativism or social Conservatism?
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.
Wrong! (and stupid!)
It's Conservatives that are a house divided. The Republican leaders aren't even Conservatives - they're Liberal Lites.
And do we want fiscal Conservatism or social Conservatism?
I never heard “ant-men”. Do you know the origin of that one?
50 years ago, the black people that were allowed to vote were predominantly Republican. It wasn't until Nixon's "Southern Strategy" that the black vote began shifting to the dems.
wrong..blacks voted Democrat after New Deal...LBJ’s entitlements cemented it....Nixon’s Southern Strategy ..lol
Southern whites flocked to the GOP min droves because black entitlements affected them far more than it did Yankees
and the Dems lost any social conservatism they once had and the GOP picked up some anew from the Dixiecrat newcomers
go to a tea party event and see how it is overwhelmingly white and then see how whites 55% fort McCain was not enough because of minority growth and then tell me how come whiteness has zip to do with whether conservatives win
you may not like that fact but it doesn’t change it
we have pandered our britches off to minorities for 3 generations
most simply don’t buy it
by all means put minorities out front and center for the media but it doesn’t change diddly..90% or more of tea partiers are peckerwoods
average tea partier is white and old....which doesn’t bode well for the future does it?
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