Engel allows Italian-Americans and Greek-Americans and other lesser breeds into the Heritage America tent, notwithstanding that it “was a significant sociopolitical mistake” to admit “the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation.” The likes of Andrew Cuomo, it seems, will be tolerated — but only if they “are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II.” (Maybe there should be a lustration process, in which swarthy Ellis Island Americans ritually denounce Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.)

According to Engel, Heritage America “includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T. Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation.” Ah, there are stipulations. So black and Native-American membership in Heritage America is conditional on their agreeing with Engel’s ideology — otherwise, no Heritage for them. Meanwhile, “peoples like Indians, or Southeast Asians, or Ecuadorians or immigrated [sic] Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately.” Under the New Order, then, Vice President JD Vance will have to visit his Indian-American wife and mixed-race children in South Asia.

All of this turns my thoughts turn to an important question: Am I a Heritage American?

My earliest ancestor in the New World, according to family tradition, was a Scottish pirate who practiced his trade in the Chesapeake Bay in the early 17th century, following the founding of Jamestown. In 1648, another ancestor, Thomas Lane, was one of 47 people “transported” from England to labor on the plantation of a gentleman who had been granted 2,350 acres in Virginia that had been carved out of “Indian lands” only three years earlier. His descendant William Lane Sr. became a wealthy slaveowner in Fairfax County and a captain in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution.

More from this author

Post-racial nations are the future

By Michael Lind

One Tennessean ancestor of mine fought at the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson and died of a disease contracted in camp. Another had his farm in Georgia burned by Union forces during Sherman’s march in the Civil War. Still another ancestor, a member of the US Cavalry, was shot while fighting Indians on the western plains during the Civil War; he survived and came to central Texas as part of the federal Reconstruction forces. The family heirlooms I own include a small arsenal: a stiletto dagger; two flintlock pistols and a powder horn; a vintage Colt Walker revolver; some Civil War minie balls and a grenade; the sword given by the Army to my great-grandfather, who served in the Spanish-American War.

Last but not least, after the Civil War, my great-great-great grandfather, a Texas cowboy, proposed to his bride by handing her a letter from horseback before he rode off to join a cattle drive. And a distant relative of mine in a collateral line was Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman of O.K. Corral gunfight fame. Sounds pretty Heritage-y to me.

But those are all maternal ancestors. On my father’s side, I am a third-generation Swedish-American, and according to Pastor Joel Webbon, another white-nationalist firebrand with growing influence these days, “first-generation immigrants can never be true Americans. But neither can [the] second generation, even if born and raised here.”

He has a point. It takes diasporas a while to dissolve, if they are not replenished. My Swedish-born great-grandmother would ask her children, when they brought home friends from the one-room prairie schoolhouse, “Ar de svenskar eller Amerikaner?” (“Are they Swedes or Americans?”)

Then again, the immigrant Swedish-American pioneers and their children were white and Protestant, and they cleared land for small family farms. One of my ancestors on the Swedish side worked as a cowboy on a cattle ranch. Heritage or Hyphenates?

To complicate matters further, I am also one-eighth Jewish (the Union cavalryman shot by the American Indian during the Civil War was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant). Can Jews be Heritage Americans? According to Pastor Webbon, America is “not for Hindus. It’s not for Muslims. And it’s not for Jews. It belongs to Christians.” Non-Christians “can be in the car … but they don’t get to drive.” Now I’m worried that my driver’s license will be revoked in the Heritage American Regime.

My identity crisis deepens. To be fair, I have been confused about my racial identity for most of my life. According to the US Census, I was born a simple “white.” But then, in the 1970s, the federal government resolved that I’m a “non-Hispanic white,” a term made up by the Census in those years as a catch-all encompassing every white ethnic group that doesn’t know how to make good tamales. Under the Biden administration, the Census added a new category, “Middle Eastern and North African,” or MENA, that includes many ethnically Jewish people (in addition to Persians, Gulf Arabs, Levantines and Mesopotamians, and Amazighs, among others). Am I still a non-Hispanic white, or, as a one-eighth Jew, am I a MENA?

Confusing matters further, under halachic law, I am Jewish because my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish. And yet under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, I would have been classified as a non-Jewish Mischling of the second degree, rather than a Jew.

Bottom line: I don’t know whether I am a simple white, a non-Hispanic white, a MENA, a Jew, a second-degree Mischling, or a Heritage American.

Let’s turn from biological race to American culture. According to Ben R. Crenshaw, a doctoral student at Hillsdale College and another race-Right theorist: “Liberalism only ‘worked’ in America because these [white British Protestant] identities were commonly known and accepted… Thus, if America hopes to regain her strength, to preserve her historic people and way of life, and not be plundered of her wealth and inheritance by international pirates, then she must recover her own identity politics. She must ask and answer with force and conviction what her identity is. And then, she must have the political will to once again practice a politics of exclusion and preservation if she hopes to remain America much longer.”

Who knew that everything good in this country was done by my old-stock ancestors before all those non-British Europeans at Ellis Island and recent immigrants from elsewhere in the world arrived and screwed everything up? Is there a club I can join, like Sons of Heritage America? A secret handshake? Discounts on Heritage Americana on sale at the local Cracker Barrel?

I have to confess that I like the idea that, if I qualify as a Heritage American, citizens of other ancestries should ritually offer their thanks to my progenitors. It would be nice if, when I am on an airplane, the pilot would announce: “We have a Heritage American on the flight today, please give him a round of applause.” And I would smile benignly as strangers shook my hand, saying, “Thank you for the service of your British Protestant ancestors.”

To be honest, though, I’m not convinced my British ancestors really deserve to be retroactively thanked for taking part in a heroic, visionary effort to found a new society. Most of them just wanted to buy land and maybe slaves and make money. Many of my colonial-era English ancestors in the 1600s seem to have been indentured servants, brought over as contract laborers to work for fixed terms for this or that Southern tobacco farmer with a headright granted by the Crown, before obtaining their freedom.

Suggested article

Save us from the crank Right

By Sohrab Ahmari

As for the Scots-Irish in my family tree, they didn’t cross the Atlantic from Northern Ireland in the 1700s because they had a bold spirit of adventure and wanted to wrassle bears, wear coonskin caps, make moonshine, and invent NASCAR. They were victims of rising rents charged by English landlords who gentrified Ulster, after having used the Scots-Irish as their shock troops in subjugating and ethnically cleansing the Catholic Irish.

As far as I know, neither my English nor my Scots-Irish ancestors before 1776 had any intention of creating a nation-state organized as a democratic republic that would be independent of the British Empire and a beacon of liberty to the world. Only a few zealous Puritans in New England had grand visions of the American future, hoping that the saints of New England would launch the conversion of humanity to Calvinism — not liberal democracy.

To be fair, pan-racial categories like non-Hispanic white and “MENA” and Asian and Pacific Islander are just as absurd as the idea of a pan-white, pan-Christian, or pan-Protestant Heritage American. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has observed that the US system since the 1970s has been one of “asymmetric multiculturalism” — pan-racial categories get to have their own official “cultures” and “traditions” and “symbols,” but that is not allowed for whites — sorry, non-Hispanic whites.

Forget, for a moment, domineering white Christian nationalism. Why not allow symmetrical multiculturalism, in which the color white is added to the rainbow in a non-aggressive way?  Why not White Pride Week and White Heritage Month and a White History Museum on the national mall, where tourists can learn about the many contributions to our country of white Americans like George Washington and Thomas Edison and Lady Gaga?

The problem is that many stereotypically “white” cultural traditions are not, in fact, white in their origins. For centuries, despite division along the lines of racial castes, American culture has been a mixed-race melting-pot culture. The archetypical corn-fed Midwestern farm boy was fed on maize, developed originally in Mesoamerica by Native Americans. Barbecue? From barbacoa, a loan word in Spanish from the Taino Indians of the Caribbean for a meat smoker.

The American cowboy is a version of the Mexican vaquero, from his lariat (la reata) to his chaps (chaparreras) to his boots. In the 1950s and ’60s, a majority of American suburban houses were ranch-style homes, popularized by Cliff May, whose one-story designs with patios (another Spanish word) were inspired by the homes of his Spanish and Mexican ancestors in California. The banjo? An African instrument, brought to the New World by slaves and popularized among whites by 19th-century minstrel shows.

If you throw out everything in white American culture except colonial-era British Protestant imports, you’re left with — what, exactly? Boston baked beans? Buckled shoes? So maybe we should think twice before inventing Kwanzaa for white people.

Like pan-racial “cultures,” pan-racial political solidarity of any kind is rare in the United States. The slowly eroding bloc voting of black Americans is the exception to the rule. Though tilting toward Democrats, Hispanics and Asian-Americans have long divided their votes between the two parties. So have so-called Heritage Americans.

The Patriot and Loyalist factions in the Anglo-Protestant majority fought each in the Revolutionary War. A few generations later, Northern Anglo-Protestants and Southern Anglo-Protestants fought in the Civil War, which killed more Americans — mostly white Protestant Americans — than all other US conflicts combined.

Plus, white Americans have always been found in rival parties. In the 2024 election, white voters, who made up 71% of the electorate, were pretty evenly split, with 57% voting for Trump and 42% voting for Harris. To the perpetual dismay of white nationalists, the political divisions among white Americans — regional, religious, cultural, class-based — have always defeated any pan-white consciousness, even in the most racist eras in American history. Though a few of its members may infiltrate the Republican Party now and then, the fringe Right will remain on the fringe because there is no chance that normal, sane white Americans will ever be persuaded that they must set aside their other differences and unite in politics against domestic racial and religious minorities and nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants.

Suggested article

How woke and anti-woke erase blackness

By Glenn Loury

Darryl Cooper, the online autodidact who provoked outrage when Tucker Carlson let him spread his revisionist views about Nazi mass murder, made this obvious point in a podcast with the nativist writer Scott Greer: “Most of the Southern racialists I know are closer to neo-Confederates than white nationalists, and don’t labor under the illusion that they share much of a common destiny, let alone a common identity, with Portland hipsters or Upper East Side Jews, or even liberal Yankee elites, for that matter.”

Given the many divisions among Heritage Americans, the United States isn’t going to become a white Protestant ethno-state any time soon — certainly not under President Trump, with his Jewish in-laws and Jewish-convert daughter. Indeed, the only way in which the GOP can hope to obtain a sustainable political majority is to build upon the gains made by Trump in the 2024 election among working-class Hispanic and black voters.

Contra the Heritage Americans, the racial divide is weakening in US politics and giving way to the “diploma divide” among all races. Nothing could undercut the growth of the Republican coalition more than toleration by mainstream Republicans and conservatives of fringe white nationalists, who have podcasts and fly-by-night churches and rural compounds, but no significant number of voters behind them. To quote Tennessee lawmaker and frontiersman David Crockett, a Heritage American if ever there was one: “That don’t make sense. It don’t even make good nonsense.”

Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments, a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes” to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed, the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it would investigate the findings.

On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable — and not just for non-native speakers. The Census asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” Even assuming you successfully parsed its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain.

Is a “gender” a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity? According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it could be any of these. So, whether or not you “identify with” a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a “gender you identify with”) will partly depend on what you think “gender” is. It also partly depends upon what you think “to identify with” means, since this is hardly an everyday term. And then there’s the awkward fact that, if you are an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to have a “sex registered at birth” at all.

One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don’t invite false positives. By the ONS’s own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of “community testing at LGBT History Month events”, which is a bit like gauging atheists’ understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the Vatican. Why didn’t those in charge anticipate that a question couched in obscure genderese might stump noninitiates, even if it would please their Stonewall overlords?

The most obvious hypothesis would be that the ONS was cajoled, guilt-tripped, befuddled and emotionally blackmailed into linguistic compliance, like many a fellow national institution before it. Maybe so, but a wider explanation is also available: that those who designed the question didn’t even realise it was couched in obscure genderese. They took their own standards of linguistic apprehension to be universal and binding.

This is a tendency that extends well beyond transactivism. Word choices can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is to convey the status of the speaker or author. Now that many of us spend our days sitting around scrolling emails and timelines, reading snippets and writing things with our thumbs, word choices are one of the main opportunities to socially signal. Slang, jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords are all ways to imply that you’re in a particular crowd.

Suggested reading

What Posie Parker learnt from Brexit

By Mary Harrington

Belonging also requires knowing what words not to use. As social animals, we can’t help but practise what linguistics expert Deborah Cameron calls “verbal hygiene”: trying to purify language of socially problematic word choices. If you’re a well-off Tory, you’ll want to avoid terms such as “toilet”, “lounge” and “settee”. If you’re a well-off Lefty, you’ll want to avoid phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen”, “cancel culture” and “lab leak”. The Right dislikes grammatical solecisms, especially when committed by Angela Rayner; the Left is much more concerned with moral solecisms. Either way, though, it’s at least partly a way of indicating who’s in and who’s out.

Many of us practise verbal hygiene simply in order to have an easier life. Some enjoy throwing the rulebook at others as a means of social control. Still more hubristic individuals — usually with PhDs — try to rewrite the rules altogether, inventing new lexical standards out of the blue and then associating any deviance from them with a suspect character. In certain circles, serious disagreement about meaning is cast as linguistic violence, and semantic power grabs are attributed to everyone but oneself. They want to “create divides” ,“police” categories and “colonise” minds and vocabularies. We are simply building a better world from our book-lined offices, one enforced redefinition at a time.

Whatever their provenance, knowing the speech codes for your own social group is consistent with relaxing them for others. It is possible and indeed desirable to understand that not every deviation from a group norm is a deliberate rule break; that sometimes people just aren’t familiar with the rules in the first place. Children and pensioners should get leeway for most forms of expression; either it’s too early for them or too late. Sometimes a white person will say “some of my best friends are black” simply because some of her best friends are black. She isn’t automatically to know that some count it as a racist dog whistle. And sometimes a man will enthuse innocently about feminist causes on behalf of his “wife and daughters” without realising his supposedly terrible anti-feminist error. He just means it.

Familiarity with your own group’s linguistic rules is also consistent with recognising that observance is a poor general guide to much else about a person. Manipulative types will mould their language in ways that invite confidence and disguise true motives. History is littered with gullible upper-class people, lured into handing over their assets to con artists who can accurately state the difference between “less” and “fewer”. The gunman who killed five people in Louisville last week was reported as having listed his pronouns on LinkedIn.

Trouble also arises when you’re an unreflective type who only ever encounters people in your own tribe, and who takes your intuitions about verbal hygiene to determine everyone else’s impurity. In institutions dominated by those of a certain age, income bracket, political sensibility or educational background, this is a real risk. Exacerbating this risk is the widespread reduction in meeting others face-to-face at work and in socialising outside of the office, both of which remove valuable opportunities to get to know human nature in the wild. If life is a series of highly straitened, professionalised encounters with people like yourself — if, say, you never meet a working-class person who you aren’t paying for something — it’s no wonder that failures of imagination occur about what others might be saying or hearing, by way of the very same words.

Suggested reading

The problem with 'trans women are women'

By Kathleen Stock

At worst, this myopia can lead to serious miscarriages of justice, especially when the semantically short-sighted have influence on the judicial system. This week also brought news of Christopher Mitchell, a welder from Caister-on-Sea convicted of aggravated “hate crimes” for making statements critical of a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a local library. For writing in a Facebook post that the drag queen in question was “grooming children” and that the parents of attendees “clearly have serious issues and should have their devices checked”, Mitchell received a 12-month community order including 20 rehabilitation days, 150 hours’ unpaid work, and a fine of £1,500. To anyone not already mired in rainbow-sanctioned speech codes — according to which the word “grooming” must never be applied to brave and stunning LGBT+ folk — this looks like a serious overreaction to the exercise of free speech.

But if fear of harming others doesn’t lead to more circumspection in interpreting others by one’s own lights, then perhaps the fear of harming personal reputations will. Mindlessly following unacknowledged tribal speech codes can result in extremely lazy thinking. Those responsible for the Census debacle at the ONS now look ridiculous; as does the BBC reporter who interviewed Elon Musk on Wednesday, so sure of received wisdom that Twitter is awash with hate speech that he hadn’t bothered to memorise any examples before confronting Musk about it. In a similar vein, the FBI were also made to look daft this week, when FOIs revealed they rather histrionically had classified common internet slang such as “redpilled” or “based” as indicative of “violent extremism” linked to the incel movement.

But when it comes to second-hand embarrassment, perhaps nothing tops Stonewall CEO and self-described “data geek” Nancy Kelley, cheerfully tweeting on Census publication day about how happy she was that her manor in Newham was so full of trans people. As Kelley’s fellow Newhamites might put it, it’s amazing what confirmation bias can make you Adam and Eve.