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Jilly_in_VA

(14,178 posts)
Thu Feb 19, 2026, 02:44 PM 4 hrs ago

The right's latest buzzword is just racism by another name

At the outset, it’s appropriate to recognize that the recent uptick in rhetoric about the importance of America’s “heritage” is nothing more than repainted racism. It is no more complicated than Southern insistences that an embrace of the Confederacy is similarly about heritage, when the defining characteristic of the Confederacy was its unrelenting commitment to enslaving Black people.

When we see a social media account for President Donald Trump’s White House share a message about being “unapologetic in our heritage,” we correctly understand that as an extension of “making America great again” — unwinding America’s evolving diversity in favor of a society that continues to hand advantages to whites and men while pretending they are simply the natural state of things.

When we see Trump ally Elon Musk and others insist that this heritage is inextricably white — a culture of “English-Scotts-Irish origin,” in Musk’s verbiage — the point is not hard to perceive.

This language, cribbed in spirit (and, occasionally, actual wording) from white nationalists, gets America’s story willfully wrong. Being “American” has often been conflated with being “white” by those in power, largely for self-serving reasons. But the ethnicities placed under the “white” umbrella have evolved. An America in which Europeans were collectively white and immigration from other places was limited is not the historical norm for the U.S. It was, instead, a mid-20th century aberration.

“The baby boom grew up in the whitest, most native-origin population in U.S. history,” demographer Douglas Massey explained when we spoke several years ago. “In 1970, the percentage foreign-born fell to its lowest point ever in American history, 4.7%. The average immigrant in 1970 was somebody’s grandparent.”

https://www.ms.now/opinion/elon-musk-white-immigration-american-heritage

That would kind of eliminate Eloon, as he is a Suid-Afrikaner and maybe at least partly DUTCH. And it also ignores the fact that some of our earliest immigrant forebears (mine included) were DUTCH and GERMAN and SWEDISH. So screw them.

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The right's latest buzzword is just racism by another name (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA 4 hrs ago OP
Sometime back, I figured out that when they say heritage, they mean slavery Walleye 4 hrs ago #1
What took everyone else so long? Aristus 4 hrs ago #2
As a southern born liberal myself Hey Joe 3 hrs ago #3
Well put! Aristus 2 hrs ago #4
Does anyone remember the little project that MTG and Matt Gaetz... keep_left 1 hr ago #5

Walleye

(44,231 posts)
1. Sometime back, I figured out that when they say heritage, they mean slavery
Thu Feb 19, 2026, 02:47 PM
4 hrs ago

Didn’t Mike Johnson take a black boy into his household? Was he using him as a servant?

Aristus

(71,935 posts)
2. What took everyone else so long?
Thu Feb 19, 2026, 02:59 PM
4 hrs ago

Southern-born liberals have known all our lives that, to Southern white supremacists, "heritage" has always meant racism, oppression of people of color, subjugation of women, and the maintaining of white, straight, cisgender men, however competent or incompetent, in positions of social, economic, and political power.

Every time the rednecks, hillbillies, and the evangelical and Baptist God-botherers used the word "heritage" (ad nauseam, I might add), they have meant a nostalgia for, and a determination to restore, ante-bellum white supremacy.

Bottom line.

Hey Joe

(525 posts)
3. As a southern born liberal myself
Thu Feb 19, 2026, 03:36 PM
3 hrs ago

You are absolutely correct!
And they can shove their Heritage Society up their asses.
Sideways.

keep_left

(3,195 posts)
5. Does anyone remember the little project that MTG and Matt Gaetz...
Thu Feb 19, 2026, 06:00 PM
1 hr ago

...were trying to get started a couple of years ago? IIRC, they wanted to create a white think tank...er...a "heritage" think tank that would advocate for a bleach-bath America. Essentially, no one outside of the whitest, WASPiest enclaves would be acceptable as Americans. If that sounds bizarre...it was. Their argument was that "later" immigrants (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, etc.) were suspect in their loyalties as American citizens. It was like going back 100+ years to a time where Sicilians were just a little too swarthy to be considered "white"; a time when "no Irish need apply".

As one might expect, when word got out about this, it was abandoned pretty quickly. Here's one of the very few articles I could find about this little dustup. I know it got some attention on DU at the time.

https://apnews.com/article/politics-marjorie-taylor-greene-immigration-eefdf9c180f69008d60ed92b9ef2ce03

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