Are ‘Heritage Americans’ Real?
The term has caused controversy and confusion, but seems to have better legs than the alternatives.
I have a new column at the American Conservative this week. This article is on the Heritage American concept and how real it is with actual Heritage Americans:
Throughout American history, the core population stressed its distinctiveness in response to perceived foreign threats. Nativism expressed the fear that new arrivals would wipe out the real America and animated millions of Americans to demand immigration restriction in the early 20th century.
But the core population has long struggled to figure out what to call themselves. Sometimes they went with Native Americans, which fell out of use and now only refers to American Indians. For a time, Anglo-Saxon became the preferred term. But it’s now an anachronism only used as a pejorative by the likes of Vladimir Putin and other non-Americans.
Hence, the demand for a new term like “Heritage Americans.” There have been a number of terms proposed for this group over the years. Legacy Americans came to prominence thanks to Tucker Carlson, but it’s no longer used much. Some pushed for “Founding Stock” or “Old Stock,” but those haven’t caught on. Your humble writer suggested “Settlers” three years ago. Not even I use that anymore. Heritage American won out.
Read the rest here.
Obviously, the term heritage American is not 'problematic' in the sense that irritating leftists might use the term. But it is in this sense. For one thing, distinctions between heritage whites and non heritage whites are, for contemporary purposes, in the mind if they were ever real distinctions at all. Secondly, it opens the door, even if erroneously, to legitimize the historical legacy of tepees and scholars as Americans which was antithetical to anyone's intentions and needless to say, terrible for the country. I'm descended form a Portuguese merchant sea dog who had seen firsthand the devastating effects of black presence in his home country's colonial territories who fought for the Union to rid America of blacks, headed west to Missouri after the war, and fathered children who became Klansmen. That's not heritage, but it's white and that's what mattered to the founders, hence why they used the term. The founders did not say heritage, they said white, because they wanted good white men, not just ones of a certain strain, or going back to a particular epoch, and certainly not murderous apes or buffalo men. If white isn't an authentic identity, you can tell the founders, who cared a whole lot more about that then who was and wasn't this or that Christian. Fischer, for his part does a good job that showing, counter to what the trad boys would have you believe, that this dour sexual morality they fetishize was hardly ubiquitous as the tidewater virginia colonists were quite sensual and randy. Just my two cents.
Where do Ellis Islanders fit in this schema?