American Identities, in Theory and Practice

The United States, forcibly and otherwise, made itself a racially and ethnically diverse society. It facilitated innumerable abductions of Africans and assaults upon them by its slavers and slaveholders. It moved its borders to take in people who were Native Americans and Mexicans and Alaskans and Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans and Pacific Islanders and more and more. It has welcomed immigrants from almost everywhere. 

And like any society the United States has a wealth of human diversity in all forms, including but not limited to race and ethnicity.

As old as Donald Trump is, he puts on an act of a man born yesterday. Since this man doesn’t know much about history, since when he looks around America he mostly sees people like himself calling the shots, and since when he passed through school and when he watched television he was shown White men like himself doing most all the things deemed important and great—right up to being the only child that God has fathered—he figures he may as well define American identity as “White” identity, even as “cis White heterosexual Christian male born in the United States to parents who were born in the United States” identity.

Trump though did not create the “cis White heterosexual Christian male born in the United States to parents who were born in the United States” identity. Being born yesterday he would have to ask an intellectual friend like JD Vance to tell him who did create it—who fractured humanity, James?—and Vance would say it was the “liberal left socialist communist Marxist postmodernist feminist woke CRT DEI” people.

Now those excellent people indeed have theorized about and helped us understand identity. But centuries ago the pioneering American race theorists were White, such as those who made the decision in 1790 to have two racial categories in the first United States census: White, and Other. Elsewhere, very weird skull-measurers created “Caucasian” identity and posited its superiority. And of course the primary practitioners of human difference in the United States have been those out to dominate others. American slave society probably made a bigger deal out of race than any society ever has in human history. Property-owning White men identified the types of people who wouldn't be allowed to vote, not the other way around!

Yes. There are movements today to identify and thoroughly include exactly those types of people that the property-owning White men sought on one hand to include by encompassing them within the United States and binding them by its laws but also to exclude by identifying them as groups that should not be given the protection of those laws.

The Republican Party we have at the moment seems to want to carry forward the practice of excluding the same groups that property-owning White men identified and excluded in the past, but without taking notes on it. They no longer make serious public claims to have a theory that justifies these exclusions, though they sometimes bandy about paper-thin theories within their private chats, and occasionally some uncontrollable individual in the chat will assemble those theories in a manifesto or working paper, possibly dressed up with statistical hackery. 

Meanwhile, liberal, left, socialist, communist, Marxist, postmodernist, feminist, woke, and critical race theory scholars can and do make serious public claims about the meanings of identities and about the injustice of these exclusions. That rankles some intellectually minded conservatives, who would very much like to speak publicly about their own research, but whose current paradigm boils down to a desire to bin the whole thing, to forget the past happened, to somehow delete identity-related bytes from our brains, to declare the statute of limitations expired on all the abductions, the assaults, the family separations, the forced labor, the lynchings, the denials of rights and privileges. Oh, you just missed it. That case needed to be filed last week.

That paradigm of the conservative intellectuals, to which they sometimes give the aspirational title of advocating “colorblind” attitudes and policies, is not merely hostile to justice but is fairly hostile to honesty, to knowledge, and to inquiry itself—which is why their peers in the academy cannot grant it much status. A few of these conservatives have gone around the bend to where they hardly want to talk about history at all, and the state government of Florida is enlisted in their project. In the sphere of ideas they want us all to put on Trump’s act, to have us all be reborn, yesterday, as mere Americans, freshly fallen out of a coconut tree, who don’t know much about identity, and who in practice would allow White men to retake all the key seats of power, once more to exclude whomever they want to exclude from the protection of the laws, even as they offer no serious justifications for doing so.

Featured image is of coconut trees along the Wailuā River, Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i.