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Republicans are 'wannabe' whites, Democrats are 'wannabe' POC
Inspired by @ymeskhout 's thread below
The culture war in America is less religious, or even strictly ethnic, and more about whether a given group ‘identifies’ as white.
In America the GOP is the white party. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the ‘white party’ in some absolute anthropological sense, it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment (cf Amerimutt memes). But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else. Even black Republicans, even if they won’t overtly admit it, identify as white; Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc. In several generations the modal black Republican with a white spouse will have white descendants.
Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white. Sure, they’ll tick white on a checkbox so they don’t get made fun of, Rachel Dolezal style, by their peers, but in the traditional, tribal sense they aren’t white. As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias. Even if they would never admit it, they are transracial. Some part of Robin DiAngelo believes that, even if she knows she isn’t ‘black’ per se, she is on the PoC team in a tribal sense, just like Candace Owens, in marrying an Englishman, has declared her lineage to be ‘white’.
My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew, even though he, his parents, his wife, his children and (some of) his grandchildren were of course Jews. He would only describe himself as a “man of the Jewish religion”. He was a socialist in his youth, then became a Republican in the 50s and, in his final years on this earth, a devout Trump supporter. Before 9/11, when as is often stated, Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.
The political division in the US is and will remain between groups who ‘identify as’ white and those who do not, regardless of their actual ethnic origin. Religion won’t really come into it.
In another edition of the woke are more correct than the mainstream, I have to admit that slavery really was America's original sin and there is nothing we can do to cleanse it. To be fair, the whole black-white thing wasn't really that much of a thing in the North until the Great Migration ensued and the conflicts were more along traditional ethnic lines, but once black Southerners moved North, the eternal American racial conflict was fully metastasized and shows no signs of slowing down. Nearly every political issue I can think of includes at least some gesture in the direction of racial justice. Even the conservatives feel the need to do it - abortion isn't just bad because they think it's genociding tens of millions of infants, it's especially bad because Margaret Sanger was a racist or something.
I always assumed this was a failed attempt by conservatives to use a lefty weapon against lefties. Master's tools, master's house and all that.
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