Whose America?: Is America a White Nation & A Failed Multicultural Experiment

The recent increase in utterances by White nationalist and 'alt-right' leaders like Richard Spencer about America being a White, Christian, English speaking nation has spurred me to debunk the claim. I will assume, against my better judgment, that these people actually believe this assertion out of sheer ignorance and aren't just using it as a rhetorical tool to incite racial pride and multicultural backlash.

Race, Ethnicity, & Nationality

What is White?

Ironically, the founding of America as a nation and the concept of Whiteness began around the same timeThe current understanding of White is a rather recent invention. Most people understand it as meaning people, regardless of language and religion, who descended from continental Europe, The British Isles, and Scandinavia. This concept, however, dates back only to around the 1960's before which eastern and southern Europeans (i.e. Poles and Italians) and non-Protestants ( ie Catholics and Jews ) were not considered White. Between the 18th century whiteness was synonymous with being a WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Irish, Swedes, Germans, Finns, Russians and French.[25][26][27]

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as “white.”Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson,

http://www.salon.com/2010/03/23/history_of_white_people_nell_irvin_painter/

Religion

Language

#NewAmerica #Racism #History