You Became White—But the Government Still Sees You as Mexican

[00:00:00]Christianity is not a European religion.

[00:00:02]It didn't originate in Europe. It arose from a Jewish religious tradition in the Middle East.

[00:00:08]And then it later spread into Africa and then went to Europe. Before Christianity, Europeans followed different religious systems. They were the Norse people. They worshipped Odin, Thor, Freya, and other gods.

[00:00:22]The Aesir gods.

[00:00:25]The Greeks worshipped Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and Hera. The Romans worshipped uh Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Saturn. The Celtics and the Germanic peoples, they maintained their own rituals and sacred uh sites and story and and deities.

[00:00:42]These were distinct people, not one big white race with some unified culture.

[00:00:50]Whiteness brought them together politically, primarily by placing them collectively above black people and brown people and red people and Asian people. But that unity often required them to surrender the ethnic differences that made them culturally rich.

[00:01:07]Was it worth it?

[00:01:10]Was it worth it?

[00:01:13]All the white people in the audience that are looking, was it worth it?

[00:01:18]And see that cultural loss explains why black American culture has been co-opted so aggressively by white people or white Americans, I should say.

[00:01:28]Foundational black Americans were denied the ability to preserve intact African national identities because slavery separated our ancestors from languages, regions, names, kinship systems, and established religion. We had our own religious system, too, African spirituality.

[00:01:47]So, guess what we did?

[00:01:49]We created a people here.

[00:01:52]We created music here, religious traditions, cuisine, language, humor, fashion, dance, political movements, educational institutions, churches, fraternities, sororities, social customs, and entire ways of interpreting American life. We didn't simply inherit culture. We built one under pressure.

[00:02:13]And that's why black American culture is American culture, and that's why it remains so attractive.

[00:02:20]It's alive. It's recognizable. It's emotionally expressive. It's rooted in struggle. And it's filled with rhythm and and humor and language and style and memory, pain, resistance, and triumph.

[00:02:30]It is uniquely American.

[00:02:34]People who abandoned much of their own ancestral identity, i.e., white Americans, often look toward black Americans for cultural energy. That's why you the hip-hop, the rock and roll.

[00:02:49]What we eat.

[00:02:51]Y'all not eating what they eating in Ireland.

[00:02:56]And so you're left to imitate our speech. When you want to be cool, you talk like a black dude.

[00:03:04]You wear our fashion. You copy our dances and consume our music and and adopt our attitude and profit from our inventions. And sometimes you resent the people who created them.

[00:03:15]And so my advice to European descended Americans is very simple. Recover your own heritage. It's rich. It's thousands of years old.

[00:03:24]Learn the language your grandparents stopped speaking.

[00:03:30]Study the village your family came from and learn the music, food, literature, folk traditions, religious history of your actual people. Become Irish again.

[00:03:45]Become Polish again. Become Italian again. Become Swedish and German or whatever your ancestors were before America reduced them to a color.

[00:03:56]You'll be culturally richer for it.

[00:04:00]But again, that brings me back to these white Latinos because while European descended Americans are beginning to question the value of whiteness, you got white Latinos who are running behind them trying to pick it up. You trying to pick up their trash. Somebody type trash man in the chat room.

[00:04:21]White Latinos are running behind white folk trying to pick up that.

[00:04:29]They're treating whiteness like a valuable inheritance when it's increasingly becoming abandoned property.

[00:04:40]They're picking up leftover trash.

[00:04:42]They're picking up leftover trash that has failed. They're not inheriting a a living culture. They're trying to inherit the remains of a political category whose original beneficiaries are increasingly uncomfortable uncomfortable defending itself. This whiteness thing is covered in blood.

[00:05:01]That's what you need to understand. Who wants to grow up in that leg? You got white kids that don't even want to hear about white American history cuz it makes them feel bad. They won't even teach it anymore. Think about that. Why would a child want to embrace that? You wonder why you got so many white folk running away from their own history, why they can't embrace it. Look at the blood on their hands. If you white American, that means you're responsible for slavery, you're responsible for um uh atrocities against the Native Americans.

[00:05:31]Hell, the Eastern Europeans didn't have anything to do with that. They weren't involved in the slave trade.

[00:05:36]We always try to and I don't want to go off on a tangent. It was the British and the Spanish largely and the Portuguese were involved and the Polish didn't have a damn thing to do with that. Poland we What we do? The Germans wasn't even Germany. There was no Germany.

[00:05:52]It was just a bunch of little enclaves.

[00:05:54]Hell, the the British colonized the Irish. The Irish didn't have anything to do with slavery. But they fall into the category of white Americans. So now they all get lumped in the same category.

[00:06:05]Colonizer. But most of these European countries didn't even colonize anybody.

[00:06:10]Think about that. So when you say colonizer, you're really talking about largely Great Britain. Shout out to all the the Brit the Brits.

[00:06:18]You talking about England.

[00:06:20]You see?

[00:06:23]So when we put all white people in the cat same category as colonizer, the Czechs didn't have anything to the Romanians did the hell they were getting whooped on, too.

[00:06:31]All white people are not equal. Greeks didn't do it.

[00:06:35]The Romans didn't do it. The Czechs didn't do it. I want you to understand that.

[00:06:40]Okay? But when you say I'm white American, you inherently you you you you instantly get that blood on your hands.

[00:06:48]And that's why you see a lot of European Americans, white people, saying now I'm not going to be white. I'm going to go be a Scandinavian. I'm going to be Norwegian. My grandma was from Sweden.

[00:07:00]Pass me some little wooden shoes.

[00:07:07]Now, if European descended Americans are retreating from that generic whiteness and they're rediscovering their heritage, be it Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Scottish, Scandinavian, and whatever other ethnic identities, what exactly do Latinos believe they're gaining by chasing that discarded shell?

[00:07:26]They're attempting to inherit the identity without possessing the institutions that made it powerful. They don't automatically control the centuries-old universities and banks and churches and political families and law firms and neighborhoods and media companies and foundations, corporations and inherited networks that converted Anglo-American identity into power. You don't have that.

[00:07:50]Here.

[00:07:52]Checking white on a government form does not make you the fourth-generation owner of a law firm or the fifth-generation owner uh of of of a uh of a bank system.

[00:08:09]It doesn't transfer ownership of this Anglo-American establishment to you. A racial classification is not an inheritance. A census box is not a is not political power. A lighter complexion is not institutional ownership and anti-blackness is not going to give you a deed to the United States of America.

[00:08:29]And that's why chasing whiteness is so is such a dangerous substitute for building durable power.

[00:08:35]Political acceptance can be withdrawn.

[00:08:38]Immigration status can be changed.

[00:08:40]Citizenship can be questioned.

[00:08:42]History can be minimized and contributions can be erased.

[00:08:47]A person could be treated as white when the government wants to deny minority protection and treated as Mexican when the government wants to raid your community. Somebody type ICE in the chat room.

[00:08:59]You are white when the system doesn't want to acknowledge discrimination against you and Mexicans when the system wants to wants you gone. And that is the trick and the manipulation and no amount of anti-black rhetoric is going to change that. United States developed through a Anglo-American political framework.

[00:09:19]But foundational black Americans were present from the beginning and we are an indispensable part of of America's labor force, the economy, its population, its military history, its political conflict and its constitutional development of the country. We have always been patriots.

[00:09:41]We are only loyal to this country.

[00:09:44]This is our country.

[00:09:47]We were here before the Constitution.

[00:09:50]The 14th Amendment, we were here before that.

[00:09:52]We were here before many of the immigrant groups who are now negotiating their place in this nation. We were here before you.

[00:09:59]We were Americans before America was willing to recognize us as citizens.

[00:10:03]That's why black American history is not some optional minority chapter added on to the American story. It's the American story.

[00:10:12]Our enslavement shaped the Constitution.

[00:10:14]Our labor generated national wealth. Our resistance produced constitutional amendments. Our lawsuits transformed civil rights. Our military service defended the country. Our music and language became American and our political struggle expanded the citizenship and equal protection for every group that came afterward.