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Notes -
(First of all, thank you for the informative and honest reply - and I apologize for my relentless edit-preening of my own posts - luckily I'm pretty sure I didn't add or remove anything of substance while you were replying, just streamlining phrasing and other minor choices.)
This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.
The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.
My impression is that claiming whiteness for myself would be widely seen as not only incorrect, but essentially fraudulent - whiteness, as it exists in the American perspective, is about not being mixed-race. It's what I understand the point of whiteness to be. I don't mean to point this out in a way that implies that it's unjust or that I feel that I deserve entry into whiteness and that it is being denied to me - it is what it is, value-neutral.
I concede that I might be wrong about this, and that say, Barack Obama could've been welcomed with open arms into the 'white' (or 'American') racial ingroup had he simply chosen to, but I am skeptical.
(Maybe one difference between the traditional 'white' ethnic group and your 'American' ethnic group is that biracial people can opt-in to the latter and not the former.)
Neither of my parents ever explicitly called me anything but "mixed" -- that was the terminology of the day, I think "biracial" has superseded it, I don't really know or keep up either. Neither side of the family ever called me white, but interestingly, neither side of the family ever called me black, either. That I picked up afterward, from friends (white and black and otherwise) calling me black, then later sampling the broader world for clues about what I ought to call myself. It always boiled down to "If you're half black, you're black. And, if you're half black, you're not white."
So, I don't know on this point. Like I said, in a vacuum, I agree with you that it should be equally appropriate for me to claim the race of either or both of my parents.
Yeah I'm more or less with you on this one, although I also think the treadmill is inevitable. I can't tell you the last time I heard someone unironically call themselves "African-American" in a casual context. To me it sounds impersonally clinical and weird, like when someone says "females" instead of "women" in a casual conversation.
But I'm on the back end of the treadmill, too. "People of color" has always been a very clunky phrase to me, and makes me feel bad for how disorienting it must be for people who had to unlearn "colored people" within their own lifetimes. Plus it's too broad, since it just means "not white people" it implies a coalition or community that doesn't exist for any practical purpose. I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color), which I don't see having a lot of mileage outside of identity activist spaces, but hey, I've been wrong before.
In actual American black communities, people don't say "people of color" unless they're specifically doing race identity coalition activism, which they ... usually aren't. And anecdotally, the very small number of people I've ever heard say "BIPOC" out loud have been white terminally online leftists. We're ... safe from that one I think, fingers crossed. My condolences to all the Latinxs out there.
The good news I bring is that it's fine to say 'black', it's fine to say 'black' if you're white, it's way simpler than anything else, it seems pretty stable as an identifier, and it's what the vast majority of black people in the US talk about and think of themselves as.
Personally I think 'mulatto' should be allowed back and should bring fun hyperspecific terms like 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' back along with it, but I don't control these things.
I'll give it to you that your perspective is self-consistent from where I'm standing. I think it's an unusual method of identitycraft, but I understand where you're coming from and why you want to do it and see it come into being. I was thinking at first, is there any particular reason you don't think of your new ingroup as "White American" or "Anglo-American" (vs. just "American") if American blacks and indians both have comparable and non-exclusive claims of ethnic primacy on the American continent? But I am assuming "American" in this sense has to do with the specific founding stock of the American colonial project and specifically its state system and cultural institutions, and has nothing at all to do with people who are white or European who weren't part of the country at the time of its founding or soon after. I can also see why there is not really an intuitive term for that.
Your position made a lot more sense to me once I understood that you are defining the bounds of a new ethnic group based on ancestral proximity to a particular series of people and events at a particular place at a particular time in history, and are not defining terms of entry into an existing political or cultural class, or defining what US citizenship should mean (at least not inherently, I'm sure you separately have a perspective about that).
From that perspective I understand completely why Robert E. Lee is within the bounds of that group - his ancestors were part of the founding settler stock of the United States, and that's what it means to be within the bounds of the group. (I don't actually specifically know anything about Robert E. Lee's genealogy but I assume you know this to be the case.)
I think your project is understandable and worthwhile, and I don't know how I would solve your terminology problem (what I see as a terminology problem) any better.
Btw, I read about the NFL anthem thing while looking into the matter to reply to your post, and I'm as disappointed as you are in that use of it, and I also believe it signals the thing you think it signals. I don't think the people who agitated for that to happen are as representative of the views of the average black person in America as they believe they are, and I think the distinction is important, but there's no way around conceding that that contingent does exist and they are apparently making things like that happen.
This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.
He admittedly could have done better, but you're probably being just as if not more inflammatory with your description. KMC managed to find his footing and have a civil and productive conversation, you seem to be determine to derail it again.
I'm talking about "a statute glorifying a war over the right to own people "
That's what most of the Confederacy was fighting over. Most of the Union was only fighting over preventing secession. Evidence includes the presence of slave states in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluding those states, and that quote where Lincoln literally said "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it".
It's awesome that the Civil War ended up abolishing chattel slavery in the US anyway, but that seems to have been a final "screw you" aimed at the Confederate slave states and John Wilkes Booth fans, combined with a "we really need to make sure this doesn't get out of hand again" aimed at the Union slave states, not a foreordained victory of steady principles.
That said, there were many awesome people in the Union who were in the fight specifically because of their opposition to slavery ... but admitting that, I have to admit that there were probably people in the Confederacy, and far more people in the South afterward, for whom "Southern pride" was about something other than "the right to own people". Even clearly-not-pro-Southern "The Onion", when trying to speculate about modern root motives of "The South Shall Rise Again" pride, imagined an end state that would "build us a bunch of big, fancy buildins and pave us up a whole mess of roads", not "resume slavery". We had the "General Lee" car in a movie as late as 2005. Was everyone upset because this was an obvious dog whistle from the populous pro-slavery faction of the Hollywood community? Of course not! They were just upset because the movie sucked.
Today we're well down a vicious signaling spiral, and maybe it's too late to stop or unwind that. If your favorite color is blue, and a crazy person says "but only racists like blue!", you're going to laugh and ignore them. But if that goes viral and the most sensitive half of the population decide they don't want to risk any association with racists so they disavow blue ... well, now blue-lovers really do have twice the rate of racism as the rest of the world, don't they? Maybe the 25th through 50th percentile are kind of creeped out by a real correlation, and learn to love green ... and now racism among the holdouts is 4x overrepresented and still rising! Eventually the last remaining people who admit they like blue are either unrepentant racists, stubborn fools, or confused autists. Maybe the remainder are all pathetic by this point, but the last two at least deserve more pity than disdain.
Your comment made me face the truth that while I don't have objections on principle to people calling for public monuments of general Lee to be torn down and removed, the mere thought of someone vandalizing or destroying a General Lee for political reasons pierces right into my classic-American-car-respecting soul.
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