I got in an argument with Chris Rufo on Twitter over the weekend about “white culture.” Twitter is, of course, the worst place in the universe to have any kind of productive disagreement about anything, but as I don’t regard Chris as a good faith interlocutor in the first place, maybe the platform doesn’t much matter. Chris has a political project, the goals of which take precedence over everything else for him, especially honesty and accuracy. It’s why he eagerly jumped into the “Haitians eating pets” hoax, and then invented a connection between the Somali fraud scandal and the Al-Shabaab terrorist group.
But the discussion about “white culture” is a good one to have out in the open, as the Republican Party drifts further into overt white nationalism. The kind of discourse that was shocking back in 2017 when Charlottesville happened is becoming normalized. If we don’t talk about this stuff explicitly, we’ll wake up one day and half the country will take for granted that there’s a white genocide afoot, having absorbed it more or less by osmosis.
My argument with Chris is just one little clamor in a cacophony of noise over the last few days that was ignited by this exchange in a Senate confirmation hearing. You can watch it if you want to; the details of it don’t matter that much outside of the fact that it shoved the idea of “white culture” and it’s supposed disappearance to the front of the public discourse. Chris is of the opinion, shared by many, that it’s self-evident that there’s such a thing as “white culture,” that’s it’s synonymous with “European culture,” and that it’s the bedrock of American civilization. He’s of the further opinion, also shared by many, that that culture is under attack from mass immigration, and that America is losing something vital and existentially precious in the process. It’s basically The Great Replacement but on a level of abstraction that makes it plausibly respectable to the right-of-center.
There are three steps, as far as I can discern, to the argument. First, that there’s a singular culture that united Europe over the course of the continent’s history. Second, that there is a biological race called “white people” that is synonymous with “Europeans,” such that we can speak of European culture as “white culture.” And third, that this “white culture” was the foundation of an earlier, purer, better American culture that has been contaminated and degraded over the last 65 years by immigrants from non-European countries.
All three are questionable, in my opinion. A couple of them are asinine.
Let’s start with the first.
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Europe, unlike Australia, Antarctica, Africa, or North or South America, is not a discrete landmass. It is contiguous with the continent of Asia, and the borders between the two have always been a matter of debate. In my opinion, the boundaries between them are defined more by culture than geography. Specifically, Europe is the part of the world that was historically unified under the religion of Christianity. Asia is the the land to its east that Christianity was never able to dominate.
Before Christianity’s arrival, large parts of what we now know as “Europe” were integrated under the Western Roman Empire. Roman conquest created a common culture throughout southern Europe and as far north as England, with, of course, regional variations. That common culture is reflected in stately architecture, urban planning and in the Romance languages.
While extensive, however, the Roman Empire neither fully enveloped what we now call “Europe,” nor was it limited to Europe’s current borders. Vast swathes of Germany and Scandinavia lay beyond its reach. At the same time, the empire stretched to North Africa and the Middle East, and was centered not just in Rome but also in modern Istanbul.
When the Western Roman Empire fell, the European continent, both within and beyond the empire’s former borders, underwent a millennium of commingling of once distant and alien populations. This was the Age of the Great Migrations, also known as the Age of Invasions. During this time, the Germanic “barbarian” tribes, once beyond the direct control of the empire but nonetheless subservient to it, descended into the formerly imperial lands, settled into Roman ruins and became feudal kings.
The ninth century saw the Viking invasions. Scandinavian invaders colonized almost all of England and the swathe of France that would come to bear their name, Normandy. In the east they established Kiev, from which would emerge, after much genetic mingling with the Slavs, the Russian people. During the same period, the Carolingian Empire unified many of the Germanic kingdoms under the banner of Christendom. Eventually, the Vikings, too, would embrace the new faith. Then, in the eleventh century, the Norman kings invaded England, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the only domain to survive the Viking conquests of the ninth century, would finally fall to their descendants.
Emerging from this violence and bedlam were the embryoes of the various national cultures of Europe. As kingdoms consolidated into nation-states, the outlines began to appear of countries such as England, which developed a national culture that blended Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences, as reflected in its syncretic language. It would be centuries, however, before England would unite politically, and even longer — within the lifetimes of some of our parents and grandparents — for the continent of Europe to do so.
But politics isn’t everything, and one could make a reasonable case that Europe had unified culturally far before the twentieth century. Doing so would suit Chris Rufo’s argument. The world wars, from this perspective, were more like blood feuds between distantly related clans than clashes of mutually distinct civilizations.
I think that argument is partly true. But what was it that unified Europe culturally? It wasn’t language. It wasn’t politics. It was religion.
Over the course of the centuries that separated antiquity from the modern age, Christianity claimed one kingdom after another in Europe. The church was able to achieve this largely through a top-down strategy of persuading rulers to convert. Those newly baptized rulers then imposed their new religion on their subject populations, though often with enough lenience to allow them to fuse it with their traditional pagan folkways.
Christianity had much to offer these monarchs, even if they had to cede some of their formal authority to the Pope. It provided them with political legitimacy. It lent them a doctrine that allowed the state to more minutely control the day-to-day lives of its subjects. It gave them a bureaucratic administrative system through the dioceses, which facilitated things like tax collection and military conscription. And it afforded them membership in the club of great European powers.
The borders of historical Christendom became those we now recognize as “Europe.” Rufo is thus not entirely wrong that there emerged, in this time, a common “European culture.” The values of Christianity were the foundation of what we understand today to be “European”-descended beliefs in such things as the equality of humankind, individual rights, and democracy.
But to call Christianity “European” is to reject the entire premise of the religion, whose hallmark is its universalism. Christian values became European values, to be sure, but the religion’s constituency was never the population of Europe, but that of the entire human race. It is also ahistorical, insofar as Christianity spread beyond Europe, even during the Roman era, to North Africa, and, of course, throughout much of the Middle East. There is, undoubtedly, huge overlap between Europe and Christendom, but they are not interchangeable terms. The faith began, of course, outside the European continent; its origins were oriental, not occidental. Europe didn’t invent Christianity, it submitted to it. The moral philosophy that came to characterize the continent, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, were as much borrowed as created.
At a certain point, however, this distinction becomes semantic, as it quickly did in my quarrel with Chris. When I pointed out to him that, while Europe was unified by the culture of Christianity, Christianity isn’t “European culture,” Chris chose, for the purpose of dunking on me on Twitter, to interpret this claim as some kind of nonsensical logical paradox. To me it’s as simple as a Venn Diagram. But it’s a waste of time to get caught up on this point. Though I reject the characterization of Christian values as “European culture,” I’m willing to go along with it for the sake of argument. The more important point is that this isn’t “white culture.”
The conception that there’s a “white race” of humans is only a couple of centuries old. Some would put its origins in the eighteenth century, when American colonists were compelled to define themselves against the Indians. But that would be a mistake. As Peter Silver documents in Our Savage Neighbors, while the American colonists routinely referred to themselves as “white,” it was used as an adjective, like “short” or “blonde.” The term “white people,” as used by the colonists, didn’t purport to describe a biologically distinct race of human beings in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the idea that there was a separate white race was an Indian concept before it was ever an American one. In the eighteenth century, Indian nativists such as the Delaware prophet Neolin began to understand their conflict with the whites as a war between two mutually alien races of human beings, made separately by the Creator. That conclusion was harder for the colonists to swallow for a straightforward reason: it stood wholly against the teachings of their religion. Christianity taught of a single creation of humankind. For many generations, this was a conceptual obstacle with which would-be Christian racists and slavery apologists were forced to grapple. It took Social Darwinism and the “discovery” of eugenics in the nineteenth century to square that circle.
But square it they did. By the nineteenth century, with Southern slavery under political attack, there was enormous demand in the United States for an ideology that could reconcile the contradiction between the practice and Christian doctrine by dividing humans into separate “races.” We’re so familiar with this reasoning that it’s hard now to fathom that at the time, it was something new under the sun. Slavery had been practiced for thousands of years all over the world, but not until Christians adopted it did it become necessary to justify it morally on racial grounds. Neither the Vikings nor the Saracens nor the ancient Greeks and Romans felt obliged to argue that the slaves they sold and kept were a different order of human being. Having no conception of universal, inherent human rights, there was no need to justify their violation. But slavery in the United States existed against the backdrop of Christianity. Its practice flew in the face of the conception that all of humankind were God’s creatures, and that the oppressed were closer to God than their oppressors. This brazen contradiction was impossible to ignore, invoked, as it constantly was, by Christian abolitionists. In response, as Barbara and Karen Fields show in Racecraft, slave owners contrived the notion that blacks were a distinct and lesser “race” of humans than whites were, and, accordingly, undeserving of the moral equality mandated by the Bible. This loophole was fused with the idea that it was slavery that brought the African heathens to Christ, so that their subjection was, in fact, part of the divine project of soul-saving. The idea that there were separate races of blacks and whites was, in other words, cope.
In objective reality there is no such thing as biological race, or to the extent there is, it’s a social construct — real only insofar as we choose to believe it’s real. Yet it’s so firmly baked into the American worldview that Chris Rufo and others who share his assumptions can use “white” interchangeably with “European” without anyone as much as scratching their heads. And now, Rufo and his allies are reifying the fiction of a “white race” yet further with the claim that America has a “white culture” that is being destroyed by non-white immigration.
Which takes us to the third and final point. Rufo appears to conceive of the founding culture of America — the Anglo-American, “European” culture — as some kind of pure form of American culture that has been corrupted over the centuries by the influence of foreign settlers. This is, at heart, a simple expression of prejudice, of valuing Anglo culture over the many other admixtures in the mongrel culture of the United States.
But it’s also ahistorical. The American colonies were never unified under a common English culture; they were divided among multipe, irreconcilable English cultures. Even after confederation, their moral and philosophical disagreements with one another were so intractable as to culminate in the Civil War. And even that didn’t result in the cultural integration of the country. Those wounds lay open and oozing through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, all the way up to the 1960s. They still resonate in our politics today.
Mainstream American culture didn’t really cohere until westward expansion. But westward expansion was exactly the period when that culture became far less exclusively English. The settling of the West ushered in the globalization of the United States, creating a new ethnic pecking order in the process. The Gold Rush brought seekers from China to South America, as well as Europeans from all over the continent. The conquest of the southwest integrated the Hispanic cultures of the former Mexican territories into American culture, fusing it into Western cowboy culture. The ten gallon hat evolved from the Mexican sombrero; the term “buckaroo” derived from the Spanish word for cowboy, “vaquero.” It would be overstating the case to say that these foreign influences had a discernible impact on the political structures and ethical values of America; these were already set more or less in stone by the founding generations. But they merged into our lifestyles just as the cultures of every succeeding wave of immigrants has.
Rufo and his allies would have you believe that there is a before-and-after story to America; that once upon a time, we were united as a nation, but then the foreigners came. The reality is closer to the inverse. We, ourselves, were once the foreign-born, and we brought the divisions of the Old World with us to the new one. But as we traveled west, we began to forget where we came from. We lived among each other, married one another, and our ancestral ties became lost in our common identity as Americans. That process continued with the wave of mass European immigration through Ellis Island and the global wave of immigration that began in 1965. Rufo insists that this integration of outside cultures has made us less American. It has in fact made us much more so.
