So tweeted Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. That simple message set off a firestorm.
Anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo took issue with the tweet as a “rhetorical move.” Meghan McCain’s husband Ben Domenech denounced it more explicitly. “It’s dumb,” Domenech asserted. “White is a color. Be proud of being Irish or French or Dutch or, I dunno, American?”
“There is something more tangible to specific ethnic identities and traditions,” Rufo replied. “I am proud of my Anglo-American ancestry and my Italian ancestry, but do not find meaning in the concept of ‘whiteness,’ which signals a racial essence.”
Neither of these common refrains are true. “White” is not just a color in a society that celebrates Black History Month, promotes black studies at every college, and has a Black Entertainment Television network. It’s an operating, identifiable racial category. Everyone knows what it means to be a white guy. There are even a set of stereotypes attached to the label.
Saying that black is “just a color” would be a cancellable offense in contemporary America. That’s because black isn’t just a color, it’s considered a legitimate basis for the group identification of roughly 47 million people. The left generalizes even further from this. They say that People of Color also have a distinct and valid collective identity on the basis of nothing more than the color of their skin.
That’s no coincidence. In fact, it’s part of the left’s explicit goal. White has only been relegated to “just a color” status in the last 50 years. Over that same period, we have encouraged racial identitarianism for every non-white group.
Claiming ethnic identity is more important than race denies the historic and modern experience in America. Race has mattered more than ethnicity since our founding. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to free whites–and made no distinctions between ethnicity. Segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, which persisted in some states until the 1960s, did not make legal prohibitions against Italians or Poles. Since 1830, the US Census has asked for “Race” as a question.
The frontier forced different white ethnicities to unite together against the Indian. They didn’t see each other as German, Irish, or Anglo. They saw themselves as whites in a desperate fight for survival against a racial outsider. The famous “melting pot” referred to “the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.” It was supposed to turn various Europeans into White Americans.
The Civil Rights Regime enacted special racial set-asides. These statutes never applied to Italians or Irish, they only applied to blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and (sometimes) Asians.
Whiteness, not any European ethnic identity, has always been the defining feature of the historic American people.
