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Being born in a barn does not make a man a horse. They are foreigners, Indians, obviously, and that's the case no matter which barn they were born in.
I've met, had lunch, and argued about politics and baseball with Akhil Reed Amar. He's a better American than you.
Good for you, but no he isn't. He's not an American nor is he my countryman. He's the son of Indians, he married an Indian, and he has Indian children. I will give his parents credit for the middle name, though (Reed).
I'm sure he's nice to have lunch with, that was never in question.
Politely: quit it. "Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans. You can claim to only recognize WASPs as your "countrymen" if you want, but "WASP" is not, nor will it ever be, the legal or the everyday, common-sense definition of the word "American"; insisting otherwise will only breed needless confusion. Like, dude, this isn't about political correctness. You'd have to search pretty far even among white supremacists for any significant numbers of people who think the sentence "Martin Luther King was an American activist" is somehow using the word "American" incorrectly.
I don't even know what you're trying to do here. I can understand some forms of insistence that Americanness is more than a piece of paper. There can be an actual, coherent political agenda behind that kind of linguistic warfare: for example, if you don't think paper citizens who barely speak English and don't meaningfully identify as American or participate in American culture should, in fact, be allowed to keep their paper citizenship, or to stay within the country's borders. That's a coherent, achievable political project, and the definition games make sense within that project.
But like. There's no constituency for expelling all non-WASPs or stripping them of citizenship. It's just not gonna happen. So what's the point of insisting, against all common usage, that you're only a real "American" if you're from the same ethnic group as the Founding Fathers? Literally what is the point? If you got your wish and everyone started using that as the definition, all you'd get would be a needlessly obnoxious situation where "Americans" are a hazily-defined plurality within the much, much broader cohort of "American citizens", and are one of several groups who participate in "American culture" and "American politics". That helps exactly no one. If what you want is just the dubious self-esteem buzz of getting to say "I'm a real American™" with the full blood-and-soil weight you give to the word, please just try to be happy with "I'm a Heritage American" or some other suitably complimentary turn of phrase, without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.
Trying to fix this:
Not yet. Not until you build it. Not until you say it out loud, and declare that it's what you want, and goal worth pursuing.
I'm happy to stake out, believe in, and defend the extreme stance of where I want to be in the knowledge that the only way to get what you want is to decide what you want, and then start going there. I want to break the assumption that American means "man of any race or none in particular." I want to regain my own national character.
National character is not merely the past. National character is not merely ethnicity. National character is not merely the line "nationality of father" in the birth certificate.
National character can be directly and plainly observed.
I don't see you building national character, for now I only see you advocating for no immigration. I'm afraid a certain Scottish Deutchman has you beat there.
You seem to be slipping between ‘national character’ in the sense of ‘at X we believe in building character in our students’ ie a chosen set of virtues, and ‘character’ as in ‘characteristic’ as a description of group traits.
You can simply go to countries and observe that different groups of people across the word have markedly different traits and that this is partially attributable to descent. Aggression, deference, conformism, stoicism, garrulousness, sensibility … these are not things taught purely in school. And what is taught in school bears a strong relationship to the traits of who decided the curriculums, who taught it, and who learned it.
Nobody is surprised when a child does something and people say fondly (or angrily), “he’s just like his father”. How can it be any different at scale? And why should people who liked their group, and the ‘character’ it had, not publicly lament its dissolution and call for reversing the damage?
I know that groups of people have different traits and they can be partially attributed to descent. I do not observe, and refuse to nakedly believe, that specific romanticized expressions of those traits magically pass through dozens of generations, intact, despite since then intermixing dozens of times and being subjected to environments that are unlike the one that brought out those expressions in the first place.
In other words, no one is actually just like their father.
If someone wants to instantiate a breeding program to make more people with as high percentage of 1776 American blood as possible, that's the motte to the "national character of pioneers and settlers" bailey.
Of course not, but IMO you have to remember:
To put it more provocatively:
You can paint the Stars-and-Stripes on any number of substrates: wood, steel, plastic, paper. For a while they will all look the same. But in fifty years they’re going to look VERY different.
Personally, I just miss an ‘Englishness’ we used to have. It brings me immense comfort and joy to go back to the countryside, which is still majority British, and be amongst my own familiar people. Then for work I have to return to London which is just fundamentally alien. Not just in its languages but in the attitudes and looks and behaviour of everybody around me.
We imported vast numbers of non-British and it’s now completely impossible to defend any sort of right to our country, our government or our institutions without stepping on the toes of people who don’t all hate me now but will the moment I suggest that Englishness should be anything more than a historical relic. We (the native English) lost our country, and the only way to even begin getting it back is to be able to freely distinguish between what and who is English and what and who is not. So I appreciate @KMC for being forthright about it.
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