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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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There's nothing inconsistent. My ancestors conquered this continent, and won it through blood and sweat, and bequeathed it to their progeny. Not Haitians. Not Jews. The American people experienced an ethnogenesis on this continent, and it is our homeland. Not the African-Americans, or Jewish-Americans, or any other kind of hyphenated American, either, for anyone who says he is an American but also something else is no American at all.

But some of those who conquered the continent were Jews however, and there were Jews in America before it was America, so why don't they count? They were there before the nation was born, and bequeathed their part to their progeny, just as your ancestors did. What logic lets in your ancestors and not yours? Sure, white Europeans made up the bulk of settlers, but their were others. There were free Africans in the colonies as early as 1625, would their descendants not be just as American as you? And certainly African slaves were putting their blood and sweat into the continent before it was a nation.

What rule excludes descendants of Jews and Africans who worked to tame the continent prior to the nation being formed but includes only Europeans? Even if there are fewer of them, don't they have an equal claim?

Any man who says he is American and something else is no American at all. Jews have, for thousands of years, maintained themselves within but separate from the nations in which they live and people therein. It is not I asserting they are not American, it is they, I am simply noticing it and agreeing.

I didn't always think this way about blacks, but then they emphatically told me otherwise, and so I take them at their word.

But that's kind of the point isn't it? Not all Jews or all black people agree they aren't American, certainly not by your definition. There is no-one who can speak for all black people in America, for you to take their word that they don't see themselves as American. Who is the "they" that told you otherwise? And does that mean that if I as a white person assert we are not Americans but rather Europeans, I should be taken to be speaking for you?

You see how that is a problem?