The Fate of White America
Thoughts on the latest book by Constantin von Hoffmeister
It’s easy to find books about how Whiteness is the original sin, the root of all evil, the great genocidal contamination that wiped out innocent people who were living in noble savagery before the White Supremacists came and LITERALLY MURDERED them. It’s not quite so easy to find books explaining why White Supremacy is a Good Thing, but there are plenty of them out there. If you expand your search to blogs, you’ll find quite a few White Supremacist sites on Substack and other free speech-friendly corners of the web.
What’s less common is a measured, reasoned examination of what Whiteness means, where the concept originated, and what Whiteness will look like in the future. Thankfully, my friend Constantin von Hoffmeister has stepped up to the plate with his latest book, The Fate of White America. If you’re tired of breast-beating laments or chest-thumping declarations of superiority, you’ll find this book a marvelous antidote.
Whiteness makes its debut in 1758, when Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus drew up the four subspecies of H. sapiens. Alongside the copper-complected H. Americanus, the “grave, haughty, and covetous” H. Asiaticus, and the dark-skinned and frizzy-haired H. Afer, he described:
European.— H, Europaeus.
Of fair complexion, sanguine temperament, and brawny form. The hair is flowing, and of various shades of brown; the eyes are mostly blue.—Of gentle manners, acute in judgment, of quick invention, and governed by fixed laws.—Dress in close vestments
But, as Constantin notes, Whiteness really takes off on the post-Revolutionary American continent. Whiteness reminded the new Americans of their European heritage even after their break with the British Crown. The definition of “Whiteness” expanded over the years to include Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. While our founding documents explicitly rejected nobility and the idea of American kings, America’s social registers were largely reserved for WASPs.
Unlike Europe, America imported a sizable African slave population and inherited a land that contained a large number of indigenous Indians. This gave European-Americans an Other by which they could define themselves. Europeans more often Othered their neighbors by language or religion rather than skin tone. Europe has seen a sharp spike in non-European immigration since Windrush and the rise of the EU, but it is of comparatively recent vintage. From our inception, White Americans have been dealing with a sizable population of non-White people.
To be fair, White Supremacy—the idea that White people were inherently superior to non-Whites—was the default setting for most of America’s history. But the identity of Whiteness, convoluted and ambiguous though it may be, still remains. For some it remains a reminder of ancient evil. Others see it as the flowering of a great and powerful people. Few want to consider the possibility that these states of being are not mutually exclusive.
There’s no denying that relations between White and non-White people in America have frequently been tense and even violent. But this has more to do with technology than genetics. The Bantu Migration that brought the ancestors of many of today’s Africans into central and southern Africa happened soon after Cameroonian tribes developed iron ploughs and spears. Today the hunter-gatherer Twa and Bushmen are found only in a few isolated areas, much as indigenous Americans were driven into reservations. Also consider the fate of the indigenous Ainu during Japan’s colonization of Hokkaido.
This is not intended as a justification, just a bare fact about a hard situation. We are quite capable of feeling guilt about the atrocities committed during colonialism. That is why we wrap them up in pretty phrases like “civilizing the savages” or “bringing democracy to the benighted.” Or why we distance ourselves from those evils by rejecting our heritage altogether.
Once we prayed and put up totems and crosses to ward against evil. Today we behave as if our slogans and yard signs can somehow heal old wounds, as if by rejecting our ancestors we can absolve ourselves from our past while still holding on to the advantages their bloodshed won for us. But what results is racism turned inward instead of outward; a loathing of people who share our appearance and language but who do not share our beliefs and ethics.
Today we see new identities popping up every other day. Young people identify themselves by sexual preferences, gender presentation, diagnosed and self-diagnosed medical conditions, weight, height, neurodiversity, and a whole host of other markers that tell them and their peers who they are and what they want. But behind all these flags, slogans and logos we find a remarkable sameness of opinions. There are a wide range of labels to choose from, but only a very few acceptable thoughts.
In an ideal bureaucratic society, all parts are interchangeable. Their idea of “Diversity” can be seen in the brightly-colored “Corporate Memphis” graphic designs so beloved of contemporary HR and marketing departments. Interchangeable, faceless individuals perform tasks. Their skin tone, hair color and clothing is the only thing that sets them apart. The only identities that matter to a bureaucracy are “enthusiastic consumer” and “compliant employee.”
The Fate of White America provides a very different vision of identity.
Identity, in its more reflective form, speaks through the language of presence and belonging. A White American who rediscovers the meaning of his heritage does not necessarily pursue authority over others. Rather, he searches for a hearth, a center of gravity within a world that often rewards fragmentation and rootlessness. The metaphor of the hearth captures the essence of cultural loyalty. Around a hearth, families gather, stories circulate, and memory flows from elders to children. Such loyalty does not require hostility toward neighboring communities. (38)
The fragmentation of identity can provide camouflage for a monoculture; it creates the illusion of diversity where none exists. Organically defined identities rooted in time and place are more lasting and more satisfying. At times different communities living in close proximity to each other can build up lingering grudges and hostilities. But they can also build close friendships and cross-cultural engagement. Boundaries can make those engagements and friendships possible. You cannot share cultures if you do not already possess one.
We are imperfect beings living in an imperfect universe. We take the good and try as much as we can to avoid the bad. We cannot create a One-size-fits-all America by getting rid of “Whiteness” any more than we can wave a wand and make non-White America vanish. Instead of top-down solutions based on lofty ideals, we should focus on the practical and the pragmatic.
America has been multicultural since the first settlers landed. We have not always dealt with each other fairly; there’s certainly room for improvement in our race relations. But we must admit there is more engagement and understanding between America’s different ethnic groups than at any time in the past. We are in a place where we can build bridges from a position of mutual trust and understanding. We can work to improve the diverse society America has always had, or we can waste our time in performative self-loathing or self-aggrandizement.
The peoples of Europe emerged through repeated migrations, conquests, alliances, and acts of assimilation. The arrival of Yamnaya-associated steppe peoples transformed the continent’s earlier farming societies. Later the English population rose from Brythonic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Norman roots. Ethnicity cannot be wiped away by fiat, but neither can it be set in stone as an eternal ideal. We cannot RETVRN to a White America that never existed, or to a pre-mass immigration Europe. We cannot escape multiculturalism, but neither should we worship it.
Twenty-sixth century America and Europe will look very different than our world of today. Our languages, our religions, our cultures will have mixed, matched, and clashed in ways that we can neither imagine nor anticipate. Our words will seem as strange and distant to them as the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare sounds to us today. Some of our dialects may become mutually unintelligible new languages. Others may be gone entirely, like the lost melodies of many Child ballads.
Will there be White people? A time traveler would almost certainly see people whom we would call “White” today. It is anybody’s guess as to how they might view their ethnicity. New ethnicities may move into new enclaves and claim the land for their own. The blending of different groups will create new ethnicities the way Whiteness transformed Europeans into Americans.
If I were going to place a bet on one group of White Americans surviving, I’d put my chips on the Amish. The decline and fall of an oil-driven society will barely touch the most conservative groups. They have been tilling the soil and harvesting their crops without the petroleum fertilizers that make corporate agriculture possible. They also have large families, something that we rarely see even among the most ardent self-proclaimed White Supremacists.
As our Hispanic population grows, I would expect Americans in 2600 to move away from the British “One Drop” rule and toward the complicated charts that defined ethnicity and social position in Colonial Spain. I also expect that 26th Century American will have a large admixture of Spanish words and phrases, much as al-Andalus incorporated a fair bit of Arabic into what became modern Spanish and medieval French combined Latin with Gaulish and Frankish influences.
This, ultimately, is the fate of White America: neither preservation in amber nor disappearance without a trace, but transformation. We can transmit memories, customs, stories, and ideals, but we cannot dictate what distant descendants will make of them. Constantin’s hearth may survive, though the people gathered around it will almost certainly understand themselves differently. We can plant seeds; history and fate will determine which of them grow.
Overall, I give Constantin’s book my highest recommendation. You may not agree with everything he writes, but you’ll find yourself thinking about White America in a different way. Given our various dysfunctional takes on Whiteness, The Fate of White America is an invaluable, carefully researched and intellectual diamond amidst an ever-growing heap of dung.