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.
Tribes are an African cultural thing.
Not American.
Some of the comments in this thread read like they were posted by the MSM.
Read the article, people. He’s not talking about race; he’s talking about a reassertion of the traditional American “tribe.” I think he’s right about that. Middle America is tired of the elites promoting every cultural tradition except traditional America’s.
Because we are not racists. We believe in the Constitution as written. We believe in "original intent" of the Constitution.
All that believe in that document as written are welcome at a Tea Party.
rednecks welcome the addition of more rednecks, of any color
The racial paranoia that I hear from Buchanan is a bit alarmist. While we will never be sitting around a campfire singing kum ba ya, nor are the cultural contexts there for the equivalent of the Balkans, nor is the racial/ethnic ratio skewed to the extent that it was in South Africa, Algeria, or Rhodesia.
Pat is brilliant. And right. You are living in the type of world Bill-O believes in. And that’s why he was booed when he tried to pretend there was racial unity after 911 recently.
So those of us who think that the supremacy clause needs clarification and that the means of treaty ratification should be equivalent to ratifying an amendment are to be banned?
I'm heartbroken.
Pat Buchanan! Have I got a present for you! You’re going to love it! Now take your time, you’ll want to savor this gift:
In memory of the aryan kings of iran - Pahlavi dynasty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quobgxv1l00&feature=related
Iran-Land of the Aryans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8o4AelGsug&feature=related
IRAN Persian Pride - Islam is my enemy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBxR1f8ULRA&feature=related
Aryan Race in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan,India
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0TQ1gj8GQo&feature=related
(I’m Jewish, both groups want to kill us, it’s rare we get a chance to pop some popcorn and watch for awhile.)
Damn! I guess Calypso Louie is going to have to dig Khalid Muhammed up and tell him the bad news - Nation of Islam is going to be at the bottom of that totem pole too. Damn, hate it for them! I guess that’s what happens when race is the way a person judges others. Hmmmm should I put salt on my popcorn before it gets outlawed?
I will not be maneuvered into a “white” pigeonhole. Just a human being, thank you.
Did you read the article? It starts with:
"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."
And concludes with
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.
Pat's not talking "American values," he's talking about "White American values."
I see Pat’s off his meds again.
If you want to see what the TEA party looks like, walk into a Vietnamese nail shop and ask the question:
So what do you think of Obama?
Be prepared to duck flying scissors.
The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.I think he's wrong to predict a "conflict"...but I do think the Tea Party movement represents a reassertion of Traditional America, especially its cultural norms.
It has little to do with race or ethnicity. Remember that "white" Americans are made up of many different ethnicities, many of which were once not considered "white." What changed? It was the cultural assimilation of those groups into the traditional American culture.
I think culture and race are often conflated, wrongly. They are different things. Race is unimportant. Culture is very important.
I should also add that the conflation of race and culture is, I believe, often done intentionally as a means of attacking traditional culture in a way that is difficult to defend.
The narrative is: if you defend traditional American culture, you are really just a racist. We see this being used against the Tea Partiers today.
"Can't we all just have a Constitutional republic?"
The supremacy clause does not need clarification. The problem is activist judges that read anything into this clause that they want. Similarly they have twisted the constitution in other areas to make law where none exists. The commerce clause among the most abused.
The judicial elite have also chosen to ignore parts of the constitution that does not fit their ideology. In effect the judiciary has become the legislative branch of government.
This most ignored part of the constitution is the tenth amendment below:
The Tenth Amendment (Amendment X) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. The Tenth Amendment restates the Constitution's principle of federalism by providing that powers not granted to the national government nor prohibited to the states by the constitution of the United States are reserved to the states or the people.
“...Americans are made up of many different ethnicities, many of which were once not considered “white.”...”
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.
For example, consider southern Europeans. In the early 20th century, they would not have been considered to be truly “white,” but now clearly are.
To the degree we still make such distinctions, you can probably see the same happening now with Asians.
Well, that's really part of traditional American culture, isn't it?
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