A Traitor to my Heritage

To hear David Duke tell it, a vote for anybody but Trump is a vote wasted. He tells us white folks that it would be treason against ‘our heritage.’

What David Duke does not seem to understand is that there is no one ‘white’ heritage. There are a tapestry of stories that his beloved ‘white’ identity erases. Though it is politically convenient for Duke and others to consider ‘whites’ as a bloc, the fact is that European-descended Americans have a broad range of heritages nowhere near as cohesive as the former Klan leader would wish.

I am Irish-descended on one side of the family, and of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on the other. The Klan would consider the Irish side of me ‘white’ but draws a line in the sand regarding the Jewish side of me. Further complicating the issue is that the political ancestors of today’s close-the-border crowd considered the Irish sub-human. To these “Nativists” (Ironic, seeing as the US was still swindling and fighting actual Native Americans on the frontier), the Irish were a Fifth Column of Catholicism in their precious Protestant republic, a lazy people who wished to live off the goodwill of others or otherwise drink, fight, and steal to make their way. They smeared my kin, saying we were criminals on the run, drunkards, rapacious animals. They said all this shamelessly, and won political points for doing so. Sound familiar?

These sentiments were still alive when my fathers’ parents’ families made the crossing from Russia and Germany respectively in the twentieth century. The Irish had begun to gain power and respectability, and be considered ‘white,’ but the suspicion of immigrants had shifted, as the bulk of the European immigrants began to come from Italy and Eastern Europe. White America’s reaction to Jews was interesting — they loved Jewish entertainers like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers, making huge stars out of them, and yet Henry Ford circulated the well-debunked ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as though its claims were fact. In his day, he was hardly the only prominent American to think that way. But after World War Two and the horrors it brought in its wake, fear and hatred toward Jews lost its broad respectability, and survived openly among the nascent White Nationalist movement, and only slyly in the culture at large.

My family is a patchwork, like so many white folks in America. But one thing all sides of my family shared was an America that, at least on paper, welcomed them, and by and by accepted them. Voting for Trump, with his proposed border wall and ban on Muslim immigration, with his smearing of just about everyone except White Nationalists, and with his constant fear mongering, would be an insult to everyone in my family who crossed an ocean to get here. Voting for Trump, who seems convinced that people come to America not to better their situation but to worsen ours, would be the worst betrayal of my immigrant heritages that I could commit behind the curtain of a voting booth.