Here’s the biggest open secret there is: the thing driving America’s national crisis to its boiling point is racism. In America, that only means one thing: white people being racist toward literally everyone else. Our problem isn’t Black people hating on Asian people, Asian people hating on Latinos, Latinos hating on Jews or Jews hating on LGBTQ people. Only one group has historically expressed open, violent hatred toward all the others and even enslaved some of them! Only one group regularly writes laws specifically designed to keep all the other groups in their places. Only one group wants to keep America’s playing field tilted violently in their direction – as if they were terrified of actually having to compete with the people they’ve been denigrating. Only one group invented “originalism” – as dishonest a concept as “trickle down economics” – to try and cripple all attempts to make America the fair place promised by E Pluribus Unum while insisting that “All men are created equal” must be understood as it was written. “All men” meant ONLY men – and it only meant “white, land-owning Christians”.
Let’s be brutally honest here: America’s founders had a terrific idea born of the French Enlightenment for self government. We tell ourselves that both idea and execution were perfect! They weren’t. The founders didn’t mean what they wrote. And to further drive home the point that these white, Christian, land-owning men believed themselves superior to all other men and all women, they made a Devil’s bargain with slavery (stolen labor on which the South built its entire economy) – the thing most antithetical to the democratic republic they were founding. America was born of a contradiction. We’re still dealing with the after effects.
What do people who think they’re “supreme” because of their whiteness, who think they are “more equal” than the rest of us, bring to the table other than their resentment? Answer? Nothing.
Let’s bore in a little on what “whiteness” even is. As I said – only one group has behaved abominably and consistently toward every other group: white people. But, as some white people will tell you, not all white people are created equal. “White” does not apply to everyone who appears white to the rest of us. As with most tribes, even among white people, there’s a hierarchy. Some white people honestly think their particular sub-group of white people is superior to every other sub-group of white people! The context for this, of course, is that skin color is one of the least significant genetic differences between two human beings. Skin color is a detail of the icing when all that really matters is the cake underneath.
Quick side note: I’m Jewish. In America, I count as white. I get most – but not all – of the privileges of being white. But, truth is truth. My whiteness is always provisional. I’m less a white American than a Jewish American to those who treasure their whiteness and its purity. I think of Jews as “white adjacent”. Our whiteness can always be revoked by “real” white people – and our tribe sent packing as our tribe has been for a thousand years at least in our dealings with white Europeans.
In America, “real” white people lorded it over what it considered sub-groups of white people: Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans (Poles, Russians, Slovaks) and made their introductions to America a lot more painful and challenging than they needed to be. “Real” white people have always imagined thenselves as the center around which the American universe was meant to circle. Anglos. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. WASPS. They think they own the American franchise, that the American franchise is THEM and their money and whatever THEY say it is. That THEY are what makes America “exceptional”.
They could not be more wrong – and, frankly, their attitude after all this time is insulting. And unacceptable.
American exceptionalism does indeed exist and always has. It’s the E Pluribus Unum on our Great Seal: out of many, one. That is our secret sauce – the thing that never happened before in any country: all the other tribes on earth meeting together in a “new” country (emptied of its Native populations mostly by white pathogens before white people arrived en masse). America is where the whole world comes to reinvent itself. To realize their biggest dreams and most ambitious ambitions – provided they were willing to work their butts off. That promise is what drives American innovation – out of many cultures and ways to problem solve, an American solution that benefits from all the cultures that comprise it.
When left to their own devices and desires, all but one of the tribes that make up America thrive. Only one culture regards the others suspiciously. And then attacks them. Burns them out. Takes their wealth and crushes their dreams.
Only one culture in America regularly murders all the others because of who they are. It’s time for THAT culture – white culture – to go back where it came from. America does not want these angry haters, anti-democratic pirates and racist thugs anywhere near us. We don’t want their energy or their thinking in the mix anymore. They’re counter productive. They’re un-American.
Imagine if we could ship white people back to Europe the way white people want to ship all the rest of us back where we “came from”? I bet we’d all get a far better reception than the white people returning to Europe. Ironically, a lot of the countries where the “superior white people” come from – England, Scandinavia, Germany – have gone pretty socialist compared to America. America’s white people would bump on that immediately. They’d hate having universal, single payer health care. They’d hate not going bankrupt because they got cancer. They’d despise having their children educated all the way through university and their old folks looked after better than they are here. They’d hate how diverse the Old Country has become. Hey, you want to colonize the world? You better be ready for the ripple effects.
America’s white people simply wouldn’t fit in anymore in Europe. They don’t fit here anymore either.
Sucks to be them, amiright?