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Monday, November 26th, 2018

A historian busts the poisonous myth at the heart of white nationalist ideology

Author:     Joe Krulder
Source:     Alternet
Publication Date:     November 25, 2018, 4:53 AM GMT
 Link: A historian busts the poisonous myth at the heart of white nationalist ideology
Stephan:   This is a badly flawed but important essay on a subject that is rarely discussed. Let me speak to the flaw first. Benjamin Franklin's comments are taken out of context and misrepresent him. Franklin recognized the importance of immigrants and owned a newspaper published in the German language for immigrants -- the German were a large early immigrant cohort in the colonies and early republic. As a young man Franklin was clearly ambivalent about slavery, publishing ads in his papers about runaway slaves. But he died while he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. It is also flawed because it does not recognize the presence of the Indian population, from whom the Whites stole the land that became America. And it seems to imply that the French, Spanish, and Dutch aren't White. That said, the central argument of this essay is correct, which is why I am publishing the piece despite its flaws. America is a nation of immigrants, and was never, at any time, a single race White nation. That's just a White supremacist christofacist fantasy.

Events in Charlottesville recently cascaded into domestic terrorism. Three dead and dozens wounded as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other “alt-right” members descended upon the university that Thomas Jefferson built; their purpose, it is alleged, to defend a statue – a monument – to the Confederate Civil War soldier, General Robert E. Lee. These radical rightists arrived from all across the United States upon the college town of Charlottesville to protect, in their words, their “white” heritage. Among the many problems I have with so-called “white supremacists” is their purposeful mixing of “heritage” with “history,” rhetorically pining for a once proud “white” America.

But history proves that America was never white.

That I need to make this statement, and worse, that some may take offense from it, shows the blurring rhetoric between what is Heritage and what is History. I’ll return to this later. For now, some History.

The first successful colonial holding in these current United States was Spanish, at St. Augustine, Florida, established 1565, four decades plus prior to Virginia’s Jamestown.

America was never white.

Speaking of Jamestown, the first Africans were brought into Virginia on a Dutch trading ship in 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.

America was never white.

And […]

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