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Douglas Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris, posted a photo on Twitter celebrating the Jewish American Heritage Month.
I counted, give or take, 155 Jewish Staff Members. There are 474 White House Staff Members in total, meaning that Jews comprise 32% of all staff members. This is a radical over-representation of 1400%, or 14x what should be expected given the population of 2.2%. As everyone pictured is White, presumably this really is a photo with all the Jewish staff members who wanted to participate in the event (otherwise: why no black staffers present?). There may be some not pictured for various work-related or personal reasons, and perhaps some with Jewish spouses pictured. I had difficulty finding the figures on other demographics. According to an authoritative source, 14% of the staff are Black (this just happens to be the same number and is not a typo). I could find nothing on Asian members, but perusing the total list of White House Staff names I calculated give or take 50 with exclusively Asian names; this should be construed as a minimum because of high exogamy rates and names not always being obviously Asian. That puts Asians at 10.5%. Given that Black people sit at 14%, I would go out on a limb and say that the Latino constituents also comprise roughly their makeup in America; let’s peg it at a slightly lower 15% (if someone wants to check from the list of staffers’ names be my guest).
All of this puts the non-Jewish White percent at 28.5%, counting the Turkish and Arab names as White (and ignoring the probably ~2% Native American that Joe slipped in there). And so, among White House staffers, Whites are quite under-represented and Jews are enormously over-represented. This is problematic IMO, because the domestic founding population of a nation shouldn’t be so under-represented, and a single ethnic cluster with a strong activism network and their own influential nation state probably shouldn’t be 14x over-represented among White House staffers without anyone in established media criticizing or noticing. Alas, such topics have been posted frequently, but in previous cases the over-representation was among Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices and so on. This shows that even in a large sample size such as 474, the over-representation remains. If I could put my position into as few words as possible, I would steal from a random tweet on the subject: “Half of the White House staff is Jewish, but we get told that ‘White Supremacists’ run America lol.” What pains me is that while the default white Americans are so under-represented, they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic. It’s important to educate others on the problem of representation, I suppose.
I dislike the whole premise of this post. The phrase “default white Americans” is a categorization I’d wholeheartedly reject, as a supposedly positive variation of the Chinese robber fallacy hinted to be synonymous with “volk”. I assume most of the Jewish staffers are “default Jewish Americans” and the Black staffers are “default Black Americans,” absent any further info. “Americans who chose to be American by legal immigration” is a much more meaningful category.
“Jewish” and “white” also need some breakdown. Alexander Vindman, central to one impeachment of Trump, was a Soviet citizen at birth, to a Jewish family in Kiev (at the time). Without any of that knowledge, I’d think him one of your “default white Americans”.
I’m an American by birth and default choice in a land which accepts all comers. I care less about underrepresentation by bodies like mine and more about hearts and minds like mine. I want Allen West as President, David Mamet as White House speechwriter, Thomas Sowell as head of the Fed, and so-called Ultra-Orthodox Jews on the Supreme Court bench.
Nobody born outside of the country can ever be a default white American, they can only be a foreigner immigrant. I'd you want to be a default white American, you need both parents born in the country, and ideally at least three grandparents.
I'd apply the same qualifier to the default black American: both parents born in the country, and at least 3/4 grandparents.
But let's be real. You know what the phrase means, you just don't like the group it describes.
That's overstating the extent a little, I think.
One of my parents is an immigrant to the US, but the main ways that I deviate from the default are, I think, generally not connected to the immigrant status of my parent. I don't really think my parent is ideologically unusual for the US either.
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I am the group it describes. My ancestors came over on the Mayflower, in the New England Puritan wave, in the Pennsylvania Dutch wave, and whenever the Scottish (not Scots-Irish) came over. I drink cow milk and eat wheat and cheese with zero side effects.
What I don’t like is that “white” carries more weight than “American” for my political rivals, and hate that it’s carrying that weight for the enemies of my enemies.
This isn't going to make you feel any better, but for many, if not most, people outside of the US the term "American" carries more weight than "white" only because they are taken to be synonymous. It is considered patently obvious to my Asian relatives that their (American-born, monolingual English-speaking children) are not "Americans" and that neither are blacks or hispanics, regardless of how long they have lived here. If you learn any Asian language you will hear such sentiments expressed regularly.
While I think our experiment in separating the concepts of nationality and ancestry has been noble and well-intentioned, its modern defenders would do well to remember that what they are fighting against is nearly the full weight of human nature along with the culture and mindset of every other civilization on the planet.
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Twitter uses word "Amerikaner" for the group this thread is talking about - people descended from North-West European settlers in North America.
It is awkward, Germanic sounding name, but no one found anything better so far.
According to proponents, Amerikaners are separate nation with their own unique culture, nation colonized, oppressed and exploited, nation that is still unaware that it exists.
Some serious national revival movement is needed to save it.
Time to stop shitposting and start writing stirring poetry and plays, compose music and paint imposing works of art (or train AI to do it, we are not in 19th century any more).
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No. And this is an important point. You phrased it this way to sound witty, but for most people on this Earth it is a statement much more meaningful than you can imagine.
Being «the group» is a real feeling. You are not the group, you're just some descendant. You are incapable of comprehending the sense of being «the group». Your idea of being part of an ethnic group is atrophied to the point you believe it's about some historical record and food compatibility; not white-hot rage and bestial frothing at the mouth when it's criticized by an alien, not exhilaration at the sight of «your» men fucking «their» women (and this soft of sentiment is absolutely what the in-group preference of the majority of humankind entails). You are a team sports creature: the whole evolutionary gimmick of your «group» is being demonstrably lukewarm toward one's kin and creating moral communities bound by abstract verbal premises; and you personally are extreme in this regard.
This is a solid tactic so long as the group's morals endorse genocide, subjugation and discrimination against neighboring peoples. Not so much when you become civilized and welcome people smarter, more tribal and more loquacious than you into your polity, to have them warp your childishly simple good-faith agreements and underdefined premises into whatever they need at the moment.
Just the other day I was watching that congressional session with Altman and looked up Sen. Blumenthal. On the whole, I liked him more than I expected, both in the hearing and in terms of his policies. But, of course, he's a man of the Tribe:
I don't care about Palestinians or Israelis. But why can't Americans encourage boycotts against an illegal occupation in the Middle East? And why do people with such priorities get to decide whether Americans can have guns or GPUs?
Largely because he is a group and you lot are not. You are merely a dispersed biological population.
You do not belong to a tribe. You are born to signal being your own man, because this was rewarded in the ancestral environment. But it's not rewarded any more. Your moral community firmware is obsolete and executing it will be increasingly denied to you.
Then again, this is just evolution at work. If your elite sees any point to preservation efforts, maybe some of you will exist in a hundred years in a way that would matter.
Oof. As much as I enjoy your razor-sharp insight, it cuts deep because it is true. I have eschewed grouping myself with my biogroup because of the ugliness of those who do. In doing so I have consciously denied a power to be grasped.
For separate reasons, I still strive for something more excellent, the coming of the kingdom of God, which brings all the lost children of Noah into one great family. I could be paranoid about the originators of my faith being Jewish, but I think that blackpill is poison.
Christianity is interesting on ethnic groups.
The Jewish people were obviously their own ethnic group, but one thread found in Acts and several of the epistles is the broadening of that to all nations. See Ephesians, for example:
Ethnic tribalism is antithetical to Christianity, at least at this point in redemptive history.
It is the household of God, as the quote I put ends, that we should identify with instead.
Touching on your comment, @DuplexFields, I suppose I don't see why Christ's Judaism is a problem.
One of my dad’s favorite jokes goes something like this: Two men from the same small town, an African-American Baptist pastor and a Scots-Irish Presbyterian minister, were good friends. Sometimes when they had lunch together, the subject turned to whether Jesus was Black or white. The arguments got heated on occasion, and one day on their way home from a conference, the two men were arguing the topic when they died together in a car accident. On their way up to Heaven, one turned to the other and said, “I guess now we’ll find out who was right all along.” Finally, they floated up through the topmost cloud. Saint Peter asked their names, checked the book, nodded, and let them in. Immediately they beheld a glorious figure approaching. They squinted because of the brightness of the light as their new eyes started adjusting. It was clearly Jesus, but they couldn’t quite make out His features. He opened His arms wide, and in a big, booming voice, said "Buenos dias, amigos!"
The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, ineffable and infinite mind of God, devised a perfect plan outside of spacetime before He created the world. As part of that plan, God chose the people descended from Abraham the faithful, Isaac the obedient, and Jacob the trickster as His priesthood here on Earth, and also as the wetware which would house the human mind of the Son of God. That man, Jesus of Nazareth, was superbly Jewish in all three ways: by genetic descent, by His religion, and by culture. The God of Christianity is inseparable from Judaism, and that’s how He had always planned it. This is not a problem for me and my faith.
People who care a bit much about “the Jewish question” one way or the other are usually atheists or have some twisted religious beliefs about blood and/or covenants. I have some opinions on why God did it that way, but this really isn’t the thread for it.
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But that quote and the philosophy behind it is about a future happy hunting ground with no connection to this world. Saying the great hope is that you’ll be in heaven is abandoning this world and your responsibility to and for this world.
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Is this quote supposed to inspire hope, or further bitterness and derision?
"But consider this: if I lied to you, then you won't get everything I promised! Wouldn't you be better served to keep believing me instead?"
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I too would rather return to 1990s era race-blind meritocracy. But if we're going to have a racial spoil system (which we do), I'd prefer my group not to be uniquely disadvantaged.
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Default White is a regrettable term, but “non-Jewish” is even more regrettable, and saying the word gentile in this context seems off. Similarly, “plain” comes with negative baggage. I also don’t want to say European, because the majority of Jewish Americans very much have European heritage. There really aren’t too many options, and I think if I said Christian-ancestry I’d also find disagreement.
I use the term "Amerikaner" to refer to the white American ethnos-that-isn't-quite-an-ethnos, though this would in theory exclude people who still retain a strong European immigrant culture and include any Jews who are thoroughly assimilated.
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I think the problem you're having with the terminology here is due to trying to describe a coalition with varied heritages, interests, and purposes as a single group with solidarity.
Add in the Spain-ish whites, German-Mexicans (but not the German-Mexican Jews), Greeks, non-Jewish eastern Europeans, and the Roma, and now you have the entire pale rainbow.
Except the Ashkenazi.
I’d like to see people make noise about how underrepresented the Roma are in the Biden White House, for a change. Or perhaps overrepresented, but we don’t know because those aren’t the stats you wanted to retrieve and publicize.
But I don't know that that's entirely wrong—while various groups did start out more different, over time they assimilated. People complained when the Germans came. People complained when the Irish came. People complained when the Italians came. But there's been plenty of assimilation, and now they're viewed much less distinctly, and became much less distinct.
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I'd the Mexicans today got treated like the Germans of the 20th century, they'd be default white within two generations.
That requires brutal suppression of their heritage and language, though.
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I’m not 100% sure what point you’re making. European nationalities have had a shared culture for over a thousand years (nota bene: this is not mutually exclusive to unique culture). This is thanks first to Christendom, then to the proliferation of philosophy and music and art and literature. This is obvious when studying history. They are also genetically similar, due to prehistory but also due to genetic proliferation of Celts and Germanics. While Europeans did not define themselves like the Ashkenazi in premodernity as based on bloodline, it is quite silly to allege that European Americans have no shared genetics or culture. So, why would we single our Jewish Americans? Four reasons. (1) They are the group over-represented, and I would be as perturbed if the Irish were as over represented. (2) Absolutely every group but whites put themselves into larger groups, which includes Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. (3) They have their own unique religion, historical culture, (important in their minds) bloodlines, and intensive advocacy networks. (4) When people talk about white privilege, they may mean Jews if going by data, so a cultural correction is in order.
Let me know what you think. I see no argument for why it isn’t justifiable to mention Jewish over-representation when they are obviously their own unique cultural group within a large cultural tent, which any Rabbi would tell you.
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The groups you refer to split in a natural way into: Irish, Italian, French, Polish (Catholic) and German, English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish (Protestant). Russians confuse me. There might be some Catholic Germans, but if there are, they know who they are.
A split by ethnic religion would capture the main division, which is between those groups that arrived before the Civil War, and those that arrived after. The latter were poorer and might still be. Hispanic people would join the newcomers if they still are nominally Catholic.
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Bring back the word Aryan. Using "white gentile" is so incredibly cucked, it would be like if you made the word "Jew" taboo so Jews had to just all refer to themselves as non-Aryan whites. You could nitpick that term, but the nitpicks of that term would apply to "Jewish" as well.
The problem with using Aryan is that you end up including Indian Brahmins, which, though they are rapidly growing in influence within the American (and British) elite PMC, certainly wouldn’t count as white in the way you’re intending it.
That is far from the biggest problem with using the word Aryan. The biggest problem is that approximately everyone will instantly pattern-match you as an anti-Semite at least, and a Nazi at worst.
Well yes, that’s obviously true, but I’m pointing out why @SecureSignals specifically, who demonstrably is not concerned with being pattern-matched as an anti-Semite, would still be better off eschewing the term for his own purposes.
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Why would the word Aryan include Indian Brahmins? We don't call Mexicans Spaniards. Just because there was an Aryan invasion of India doesn't mean the caste with the most admixture remaining from that extinct ruling class are the same race as the invaders.
My understanding is that the Brahmin caste in India is directly descended from the Aryan overclass who ruled the Indus Valley civilization, although they have obviously taken on substantial admixture from the indigenous Dravidian populations in the intervening millennia. Certainly their religion, their cultural outlook - including their caste system - and their enduring position of prestige in India are directly continuous with their Aryan past.
As a follow-up, I came across a source I was looking for earlier:
David Reich described the Aryan invading population in 2019:
And the remaining 10% was of West Siberian Hunter-Gatherer origin, a population which is similar to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers.
That ethnic composition is nearly identical to modern Northern Europeans (note "Earthly Neolitic" == European farmers). Certainly Europeans have far greater genetic similarity to the Aryans than the Brahmin.
Even among the Brahmin, >70% admixture from the Indus Valley and the indigenous Andamanese.
That's not to understate the tremendous Aryan influence on Indian civilization. But the admixture profile of modern-day Northern Europeans is nearly identical to the Aryans- and even throughout other regions of Europe with relatively lower Yamnaya ancestry and higher European farmer ancestry, the ancestrial profile looks the same as the Aryans in comparison to the Brahmin.
cc: @BurdensomeCount
Interesting, thanks for this.
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The castes correlate with indo-european admixture, but it's still too low to resemble anything you would call a direct descendant, in the way you wouldn't call a mestizo a direct descendant of Europeans. It's a case of ethnogenesis. I haven't seen PCA/clustering with the caste systems compared to European groups but I imagine that would demonstrate this point as well.
It's also likely the caste system was created in response to racial changes among the ruling class, so substantial changes likely happened before the formalization of the caste system. Where are the conquistadores today? Even if a caste system were created in Latin America today, the upper castes would still have a substantial amount of indigenous admixture.
It's interesting to consider how the Spanish intermixed with the natives which the Anglos did not.
Actually, from what I understand the political/cultural/financial elite in Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay) has very little non-European admixture at all. In Mexico they’re descended largely from conquistadors (hence Steve Sailer’s epithet “Conquistador-American” for people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but in other parts of Latin America they’re just as likely to be of Italian and German ancestry. I can’t speak to the more undeveloped parts of Latin America.
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What does “it’s still too low” mean in this context?
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Except lots of American default whites are not aryan- even granting that aryan in racial use is kind of a fuzzy term, italian Americans and white hispanics are fairly large ethnic groups that most people would agree the term aryan excludes.
All racial terms are fuzzy, Israel manages to define an ethnic Jew in a way that works in practice. There should be some category to refer to "non-Jewish European-descended" and Aryan was used to denote that group historically. Italians were regarded as Aryan even by Nazi racial laws FWIW, the term wasn't nearly as exclusive as the post-war lore has made it out to be. White hispanics are more complicated because there are some with entirely European ancestry and some with much less.
Except it does not, there is no more contentious issue in Israel than "who is a Jew", and it is getting hotter every day.
On one side are people who want to expand already expansive Law of Return(for various reasons), and on the other side are ... people who feel about Gentiles as you feel about Jews.
Ask them.
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