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

[Jilly_in_VA]

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.