MAGA's 'White Identity' Too Fragile To Survive America's Melting Pot

Embarrassing

Donald Trump nominated a straight-up white nationalist to serve as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. This is not a surprising development from an openly white nationalist administration. It’s like seeing fried calamari or chicken wings on a bar’s happy hour menu — obvious and tiresome but not unexpected.

It’s also not surprising that Trump’s discount David Duke nominee, Jeremy Carl, face planted epically during his Senate confirmation hearing when he attempted to explain his world view, which is what you’d find on a 4Chan board and doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy pushed Carl about his stated beliefs that “white identity” is being “erased” from American culture. Murphy asked Carl point blank, “Just tell me how you define white identity and what you think is being erased about white identity,” and Carl could only respond with 50 shades of white nonsense. (Also, I don’t want to fascist-shame but have you ever seen such a schlubby representation of the master race?)

“But I would say that, you know, they could be things like going to a certain type of Christian Church and that sort of culture, which is very different,” Carl blathered. “I mean, you can all be Christians, right, in a certain environment, but African American Christians might worship differently than Chinese Christians that might worship differently than white Christians. Of course, sometimes you have multi-ethnic churches, but things like that, certain types of Anglo-derived culture that comes from our history.”

White rural Southern churches have more in common with Black rural Southern churches than they do with white suburban New England churches. Carl’s conflating racial identity, which is superficial, with cultural identity, which racial identity influences but does not biologically determine.

Carl went on about “Scotch-Irish military culture” and even threw a bone to Italians, who were not always considered “white.” The Jeremy Carl from 1951 wouldn’t freaked out if his daughter or sister married an Italian. Murphy didn’t let Carl off the hook and pointed out that he was “now retreating to ethnic identity.”

“You don’t speak about ethnic identity, you speak about white identity,” Murphy said. “So tell me the values that stitch together white identity and make it different than Black identity.”

Carl’s answer was a verbal flood of flop sweat: “I would say that the white church is very different than the Black church in terms of its tone and style on average. Food ways could often be different.” Once again, the “food ways” at a white rural Southern church and a Black rural Southern church are not that different. In my experience, those food ways are equally delicious and take the same exit for Type 2 Diabetes.

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Some Super Bowl Half Time Show History For Super Bigot Megyn Kelly

Murphy reminded Carl that the presence of other cultures in America doesn’t mean that “white” culture is being erased. This is the zero sum game that white nationalists play, and they are terrified that they’re losing. Carl even mentioned — during a actual Senate confirmation hearing — the Super Bowl Halftime Show, “which was not in English.” This is pathetic but still dangerous.

Obviously, a supposed “white identity” does not mean you speak English exclusively. Carl had mentioned Italians, but there are also German, French, and Dutch immigrants. There is a Nordic History Museum in my former Seattle neighborhood of Ballard. “White” identity is still everywhere you look. Carl just can’t tolerate any supposed “non-white” identity sharing the spotlight, even for an American citizen from Puerto Rico performing in Spanish — a language derived from Latin like French and Italian.

Unfortunately, Carl is not alone in his extremist views. A metastasizing cancer within MAGA is the paranoid delusion that white people are being erased and forgotten, like old episodes of The Donna Reed Show, which MAGA would probably consider a radical feminist tract. (Watch below.)

Racially aggrieved billionaire Elon Musk spends most of his considerable free time posting white nationalist screeds on his Klan bake site. Last week, he shared this doozy:

For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture.

Nobody dies to defend a “multicultural economic zone”!

American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for.

Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here.

Musk famously doesn’t even go here. He’s an immigrant from South Africa, but he clearly believe his race makes him a better fit in the U.S. than immigrants from Haiti or even the Black residents of his native country. He first emigrated to Canada in 1989, shortly before the end of apartheid. He moved to California in 1997 to take advantage of the state’s significant business opportunities. California proved to “liberal” for him, so he fled to Texas in 2020. It seems as if he’s always pursued freedom as defined by “white man in charge.” It’s not as if California is hostile to wealthy white men, but Musk needed a true cultural safe space.

Why Trump's Racism Isn't Normal

Musk later agreed with the following message:

If black and brown people can be proud of their races, why not whites?

If black and brown people can’t be indigenous and native, why not whites?

It’s this lack of symmetry and equality that’s driving resentments on all sides.

This is not an “all sides” issue, unless we’re talking about all sides of a Klan hood. Although I’m personally not a supporter of racial essentialism, I still think there is a distinct difference between “Black” culture and the “whiteness” bigots like Musk crave. Enslaved Africans were stripped of their heritage, religion, and language. Richard Pryor observed how Africa had many distinct tribes but enslavers kidnapped them, brought them to America, and made them all one tribe — “nigger.” (Watch below.)

Yet, Black culture in America is still distinctly American. Segregation imposed artificial borders around our communities that were brutally enforced, but we were always here and contributing to society. There is little about U.S. culture that doesn’t bear our mark, and white Americans have never had any trouble freely sampling from Black culture.

Blackface minstrelsy was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States from the 1840s to the early 1900s. No one complained about the erasure of “white identity,” and white performers were literally slathering their faces with black greasepaint. Of course, they were mocking Black people and lampooning what they considered Black culture.

However, the actual English have celebrated Black contributions to American culture. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are the biggest rock acts from Britain and they acknowledge their debt to Black American music.

When Black Americans express pride about their historical achievements, they are expressing pride in America. That’s what the white nationalists don’t understand or willingly reject. They want a distorted history where “American culture” is the sole product of “English-Scots-Irish” influence, which is absurd.

Author Israel Zangwill — a complicated figure for reasons I won’t get into here — wrote the play The Melting Pot, which premiered in 1908 and popularized this metaphor for ethnic assimilation. The play’s lead, David, is a Russian Jewish immigrant who falls in love with Vera, a Russian Christian immigrant. In a pivotal scene, he tells her:

DAVID: There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east]—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—

VERA: Jew and Gentile—

DAVID: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross — how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward.

Over the years, the academic left has criticized the idea that America is a “melting point,” arguing that ethnic assimilation is effectively ethnic erasure. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I believe that in America we all share traits from disparate backgrounds, and we’re all stronger and more interesting for it. Jeremy Carl and Elon Musk both want an ethnically “purer” but altogether duller world. It’s fitting that if those two are selling white supremacy, they are the worst possible spokesmen.