What’s My Identity?

People in the dissident right are fond of quoting Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew as saying, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”  Now I understand the rationale when it comes to a place like Singapore.  The cultural and social views of the Chinese, Malay and Indian populations are strikingly different and in a zero-sum game where losing means living in a society that would be highly antagonistic to your way of life, I could see how voting your “race” would be critical.

But how would that relate to the United States?  It seems to me that the popular culture is currently so strange to me that it couldn’t get any stranger if this became a Latino or Chinese majority society.  But in fact, what I notice is that younger, assimilated Latino and Asian Americans mimic the same weird standard culture that their white American friends use.  All of them use a sort of hip-hop patois that seems to have been formulated on TikTok or some product manufacturer like Nike.  Well, I can’t imagine anything more alienating than that.  So, I’m not sure what I should expect from the majority minority (or is it minority majority) future we’re waiting on.  In fact, because the worst proponents of anti-white bigotry all seem to be really pasty white, I can’t make up my mind how I want to fit into this scary future.

My experience has been that most of the problems with minorities in the parts of American life that I have had experience with occurred because the government (or schools or corporations) run by white people decided that affirmative action was a good idea.  Even in the terrible situation we find ourselves in today with the urban black underclass committing unsustainable levels of property and violent crime we could still improve our situation immeasurably if we just put an end to all forms of affirmative action and reestablished equal treatment under the law for everyone by getting rid of all the protected classes we’ve invented.

But what about the idea that I am better off sticking with my own kind?  The truth is my own kind doesn’t exist.  I’m a mutt.  Both my parents’ ancestors came from Southern Italian stock.  There is absolutely nothing standard about that population.  Just within my siblings I have a mixture of blue, hazel and dark brown eyes.  Hair (where it still exists and isn’t gray) is either dirty blond or close to black.  Skin color varies from very light to olive.  There are tall and short people and a whole slew of intellectual and personality traits exhibited.  I grew up in an Italian ghetto of Brooklyn.  But my neighbors included Irish, Jewish, Polish and Russian people and to be honest it wasn’t like the Italians were some quantum leap closer to me personally than the other types.  In fact, in grade school, my two closest friends were a German kid with ash blond hair and a kid whose parents were Irish and Italian.  A lot of the Italian kids I knew in the neighborhood (not all of them of course) wanted to be mafiosi.  Later on, they found out the hard way that they weren’t.  But they wanted to be and this made them extremely unpleasant neighbors.

Now growing up in Brooklyn in that time I was well aware that there were black and Latino neighborhoods where I shouldn’t go.  These were dangerous because the inhabitants were welfare recipients that existed in a lawless environment.  But as I grew up, I went to school with and worked with black and Latino New Yorkers that were just regular people doing their jobs.  Some of them I got along with and some I didn’t.  A lot like the various varieties of “white” people I lived among.

And in the engineering field over the last thirty some-odd years I have worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people.  Like their white counterparts some were good people and some were real jerks.  But once again, all the trouble I’ve seen surrounding them has had to do with attempts to satisfy affirmative action.  In fact, the most egregious cases seemed to be attempts to have women, mostly white women (and strangely mostly blonde white women) promoted above their levels of competence.  So once again this reinforces my thoughts about affirmative action.

So, to drive this home, who are my people?  Are they random white people that include most of the woke young people?  Are they Americans of Southern Italian ancestry?  To be honest, I think my people are people who identify with the culture that was forged in mid-twentieth century America.  They grew up believing that they could raise their families in an America that was based on working for a living and obeying the rules.  It was a simple place where regardless of race or ethnicity they respected the Founding Fathers for setting up the Constitution that guaranteed us freedoms and allowed us to live together without chaotic violence or poverty.

Of course, opening up the borders to millions of poor immigrants that won’t be assimilated into the American culture is an obvious disaster that must be stopped.  But the problems have been purposefully exacerbated by the Democrats and their shock troops like Antifa and BLM.  Now that the Supreme Court has begun reversing some of the affirmative action judicial decisions maybe things can get straightened out.  And after the borders are closed and the illegals sent home things can get back to normal.  Or maybe they won’t.

But honestly, I still feel that anyone can be on my team if he just tries to follow the rules and doesn’t tell me I’m the cause for all his problems because my skin is a light shade.  Anyone who can’t accommodate those two things isn’t on my side.  So, I hate to say it but my identity is American.  I hope that doesn’t sound too lame.