Tranquility Watch
Diasporas Are Bad Ideas
Pick a _Nosotros_
The USA is a lot of things, but one that it’s not is an empire. Russia, China and India are empires: meaning one country (= place/geo), with one umbrella super-state ruling a number of subordinate (possibly discontiguous) places and/or nations (= peoples), which may or may not otherwise rule one of those subordinates¹.
I start with that important reminder because our theme here will be the category differences between nations, countries and states.
Diasporas are dispersed nations, with or without a homeland. Some are a) rich, powerful and/or influential abroad, with strong and clear b) mother countries and states, and c) ties/affiliations thereto. Think the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. Some are powerless pariahs. Think the gypsies/Roma. Most are somewhere in between, with varying mixes of those three aspects above. Think the Irish of Boston, the Russians of Moldova, the Jews of Iraq, the Indians of Silicon Valley, the Filipinas of Dubai …
It’s that degree of affiliation part that’s the stress point. “Strangers among us” is a real impediment to social cohesion/solidarity/tranquility that can’t just be hand-waved away. It’s at the core of the global migration crises.
Here in the US, ‘diaspora’ is most often used when speaking of African Americans or Jews. The latter have Israel, while the former have a larger, but less precise “place-of-return”, a whole continent. Both are defined by a mix of biology/hardware and culture/software, and so set membership is somewhat fuzzy.
Exhibit A: Barack Obama, who certainly can be categorized as African-American (or black, if you prefer that label), but has zero personal ancestry going back to the period of American slavery. Does he consider himself part of the “African diaspora”?
I hope not. I claim him as simply one of us, Americans. For anyone who wants to claim him into a group that would exclude me, with (as far as 23andme can tell) nothing but various flavors of European haplogroup hardware (or white, if you prefer that label … I don’t, see below), I’d say not so fast: call in Solomon if you must, but there’s no question his maternal half² is ours, hardware wise, and his software/culture is well less than half archetype African-American. Add the Hawaiian and Indonesian to his white Kansan, and don’t forget the Columbia and Harvard.
One of the more baloneous radical woke identitarianisms is that the word ‘American’ is itself somehow an exclusionary tool of white supremacy. They need to get out of their echo chambers and read some history. I suggest they start with Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1915 speech on hyphenation.
What he said.
One of the truly vile MAGAisms at the other heel of the horseshoe is when it flirts with actual Jews-will-not-replace-us white supremacy/nationalism. The irony being that this dog-whistle is whipped by the half-swarthy/German Donald Trump.
(Yes, if you didn’t know it yet, no less a Founder than the $100 bill himself, Ben Franklin, thought ‘white’ only applied to nice pink British Islers. He considered continentals like Germans, Swedes and Russians ‘swarthy’. One of his powdered-wiggery misses. These labels — ‘black’ and ‘white’ — are imprecise, high noise:signal vestiges of troubled times past that have outlived adding any value to political discourse.)
Sensible moderates of all party persuasions, backgrounds and generations of residence can reject both of those extremist world-views. There’s nothing wrong with being “just American”. Don’t let the wokesters force you into adding a hyphenation. Likewise, don’t let the bigots say you have to be pure Ben Franklin white (= English ancestry) in order to qualify as any sort of American.
Writing from Northern California, the clear and present danger is that we’re amplifying diasporas, not damping them. There’s way too much talk of reparations, castes and reconquistas … or at least of “Raza” (capital R), “nosotros”, of “us-es” that exclude me and my family.
The US of America does not have DNA or land of origin qualification criteria for citizenship (= joining the nation) … for being one of us. It’s part of the value exchange when we welcome you in that you shed your previous national membership/affiliation.
As a nation, we do have a reasonable expectation that if you join, you’ll put our interests ahead of your old one’s³. That, say, you’ll always root for our national sports teams, as one small but symbolic expression of affiliation. Especially the US Men’s National (soccer) Team. Especially especially against arch-rival Mexico’s “El-Tri”.
“Dos a Cero!” 😉
Notes:
[1] Moscow rules not only Russians, but Tatars, Chechens, Kalmyks, Yakuts and Karelians among others in its 21 subject Republics … and of course Ukrainians. Within my lifetime it has also ruled Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Kazakhs, Poles, Germans, Hungarians and Bulgarians, just to name a few. Beijing famously rules both Tibet(ans) and the Uyghur Turks in Xinjiang, and a large slice of Mongolia(ns) as well. Delhi rules nations that speak 22 different official languages, as well as its empire’s second lingua franca, English. At sub-continent scale it had roughly the same number of sovereign states as today’s Western Europe before it was conquered by the British.
It might be fair to pick on European imperialism as a phenomenon with more recency, and so relevant impact to living persons. Let’s not give the Ottoman, Mongolian, Aztec, Ghana and Dahomey, Manchuria and Japan, Comanche and Inca empires too much of a pass, however. As if those had all been dominions of progress, peace, equality, liberty and justice for all.
[2] Minus the 1/4096th represented by his maternal ancestor John Punch (b. 1605).
[3] Yes, we allow for a generation or so of transition, and then some ongoing residual “ethnic” affinity. What doesn’t work is carpetbagging and passport shopping.
