By Davis Carlton
Doug Wilson has recently produced a video on his Blog & Mablog YouTube channel in which he undertakes a definition of ethnicity. As a Kinist or ethno-nationalist I believe that ethnicity is essential to national identity. This means that understanding ethnicity is critical to understanding the Biblical approach to national identity. I made this case when I noted that the simple question: What is a nation? is able to show the clear problems with those who reject a Kinist understanding of nationhood. Many who reject Kinism will say that they also reject globalism as an opposing extreme while tacitly accepting globalist principles and undercutting any real basis for national distinctions based upon their false, half-baked definitions of nationhood. I applaud Wilson’s efforts at defining ethnicity because, as I mentioned before, this is the direction that the conversation needs to take. Unfortunately, I find Wilson’s rhetoric only continues to muddy the waters rather than providing needed clarity.
Wilson begins with “So the people who reduce everything to ‘people of color’ on the one hand and white on the other are either simpletons or malevolent. The driver of virtually everything here is culture not color.” My immediate reaction is to ask who exactly Wilson is talking about. Kinists affirm multiple races of mankind and use skin color as a convenient external indicator of race, as does Jeremiah the prophet (“Can the Ethiopian change his skin”, 13:23). Kinists aren’t in the habit of grouping all non-whites together as indubitably vibrant “people of color.” This is the tactic of the Left, which attempts to unify non-whites against white interests. However, Wilson seems to level his critique against all race-realists when he states that the “driver of virtually everything here is culture not color.”
This is a tired false dichotomy that has been dealt with countless times and, frankly, Wilson ought to know better. Skin color is a convenient and conventional way of identifying race, but race can’t be reduced to a mere difference in skin color. Wilson conflates how race is identified (by skin color as the most obvious external characteristic), with what race is (the major hereditary subdivisions of mankind). Another issue is that Wilson assumes an unrealistic and untenable dichotomy between culture on the one hand and “color” (read: race) on the other. This becomes more apparent as Wilson continues.
Wilson states that ethnic differences came about in what he refers to as a “divine design feature.” Wilson argues from the Tower of Babel that ethnic differences in things like language and customs help keep humanity from becoming overly united within the context of a fallen world, and thus united for sinful purposes. Wilson summarizes the problem by stating, “Given the fallenness of man, if there was going to be unity, that unity was going to be deployed in the service of wickedness.” This is something that every Kinist can agree with and it’s something that we’ve been saying for a long time now. One of the primary purposes for this “divine design feature” in a fallen world is to restrain evil that comes about in deracinated, globalist societies (Gen. 11:6).
Wilson then appeals to a definition of ethnicity provided by Stephen Bryan in his book, Cultural Identities and the Purposes of God: A Biblical Theology of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race. In this book Bryan states that the “building blocks” of ethnicity are: a shared name, sense of place, sense of the past, sense of belonging or kinship, as well as a shared set of beliefs and values that give rise to a shared set of practices and norms. According to Bryan this encompasses “such things as religious beliefs and practices, language, cultural conventions, and customs, as well as cultural ‘products’ such as literature, music, architecture, and art.” Wilson says that this definition is a “really good starting place” as a “truly workable definition.” He believes that Bryan’s definition avoids the pitfalls of being overly specific.
Wilson argues using Bryan’s definition that “American” is a distinct ethnos, but that it is at a different place on the “scale” from other distinct ethnic identities like Japanese or Laplanders. Wilson states that this definition fit America back in the 50s “very nicely” even though we Americans were still way more variegated than the Laplanders. Wilson states that the culture wars of the last five decades have “all but blown” the fifth criterion of shared culture and customs “to smithereens.” Wilson uses the recent celebrations of Hamas on college campuses to illustrate the problem of America’s lost sense of shared culture and values. Wilson contends that maybe – just maybe – recent mass migration has simply introduced incompatible groups to one another at close range. Contemporary America is like tying two cats together by the tail and throwing them over a clothesline per Wilson; the result of this cruelty being union without unity.
Wilson notes that one can alter the “recipe” provided by Stephen Bryan with different outcomes, noting that the Jews have lacked a common homeland until the mid-20th century and that even today the majority of Jews do not live in Israel. Yet in spite of this, Jews are certainly not lacking in “a robust ethnic identity.” That is certainly an understatement! Wilson continues by stating that “even at its most stable, the ethnic identity of American was defined to fit more loosely. That name encompasses a Dutch-American dairy farmer in Washington State, a [presumably Chinese] shop owner in one of fifty Chinatowns, and a grand dame chairwoman of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a direct lineal descendant of James Madison.”
Wilson notes that this is a larger “range” than most ethnic groups. Wilson states that we can “roll with it” to a certain extent, but past a certain point we aren’t rolling with anything but “rather jumping off a bridge.” Wilson notes that “large empires can adopt subcultures much more readily than small mono-cultures” which leads Wilson to conclude that mass migration will destroy Germany much more quickly than it would destroy a country like America due to a “pre-existing multi-culture, our large population size, our land mass, and the fact that our influx is largely Trinitarian and not Muslim.”
Wilson then presents his conclusion, and it’s worth quoting him at length: “But even large poly-ethnic ethnicities have their limit. At some point the Visigoths were running through the streets of Rome acting like they were fairly disinterested in being assimilated. This brings me to the issue of skin color. If some of the more cracked proposals were to be adopted, and a boatload of refugees from Gaza were brought over to America and plopped down here, there would be enormous difficulties as a result. But the difficulties would not be skin coloration difficulties. We wouldn’t even notice that. We already have lots of that color.
“The problem would be worldview, one that is entirely incompatible with the American ethos even in our current state of disarray and one that was not digestible. So the people who reduce everything to people of color on the one hand and white on the other are either simpletons or malevolent. The driver of virtually everything here is culture not color. As Andrew Breitbart famously said, ‘culture was upstream from politics.’ I would affirm this but only to add that worship is upstream from culture. The way a people worship is the single most important thing about them. Worship informs everything about their day to day lives. If we return to Bryan’s definition of cultural identity as cited above we can see that there are numerous variables, and one of the things that variables do very well is…well they vary. As they vary they produce different cultural results, a culture-wide equivalent of fusion cuisine. If you try to reduce everything to a simple binary, whites and blacks say, then you are either selling some political agenda, or you are not very smart.”
Okay. Here is my response. First is the issue of Stephen Bryan’s working definition of ethnicity that Wilson is using. I agree with Wilson that it is generally useful and avoids the pitfalls of being overly specific. I haven’t read Bryan’s work so I assume that Wilson is accurately representing him, but I disagree with Bryan and by extension with Wilson that ethnic groups merely share a sense of belonging or kinship that isn’t tied to actual kinship. I cannot think of any example of this happening in history, but I’m willing to listen if Bryan or Wilson have any examples worth mentioning. I’m not holding my breath.
My next issue is that Wilson states that America in the 1950s fits “very nicely” into Stephen Bryan’s definition of ethnicity, and then immediately skips ahead to modern day social issues like support for Hamas on American college campuses without commenting on what happened in between. It’s enough to give his listeners whiplash! Is America no longer a singular ethnic identity as it was in the 1950s per Wilson? If it isn’t, could the demographic shifts that have occurred since the landmark immigration legislation of the 1960s have anything to do with this? Even the concept of America as a singular ethnic identity in the 1950s is not without its problems.
John Jay could argue convincingly enough in the late 18th century that Americans were “descended from the same ancestors” in order to justify a strong federal government between the states. He was not without his detractors. Conservative anti-federalists opposed the Constitution and the notion of a strong centralized government on the basis that even the slight differences between the various states and regions would be enough to cause problems. David Hackett Fischer details the different Anglo-Celtic folkways of America’s founding in his excellent book, Albion’s Seed. A constant refrain of Fischer is that the characteristics of each region persisted into the mid-20th century. The often unstated implication being is that these distinctive regional traits are largely no longer relevant. One can only wonder if the anti-federalists were on to something.
Wilson also tries to include Chinese shopkeepers in with Dutch-American dairy farmers and WASP descendants of James Madison as part of the unified American ethnos of the 1950s. There were Chinese people present in America in the 1950s, but they were considered distinct from Americans properly speaking. Chinese immigrants were used as laborers in many different contexts on the American frontier such as miners and railroad workers. Fear that Chinese immigration could prove detrimental to American demographics brought about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Furthermore, immigration and naturalized citizenship are related concepts, but they aren’t the same. It wasn’t until the aforementioned legislative revolution of the 1960s that American citizenship was extended to people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds. Until that time immigration was intended to preserve America’s white identity and citizenship was restricted to people of white European descent. There is no question that America’s founders considered America to be a white country, and intended for it to remain that way in perpetuity.
Even setting these issues aside it is obvious that Wilson is glossing over essentially all the relevant historical data from how America went from unified ethnos in the 1950s to the “poly-ethnic empire” and the obvious problems that this has caused for Americans in the present. Wilson insists that America accepting Palestinian refugees would be problematic, but not a problem of race, or what Wilson calls “skin coloration difficulties” presumably because “we already have lots of that color.” But that’s the point.
Since the 1960s American ethnic homogeneity has been steadily eroding and all the problems that Kinism would predict have accompanied this demographic shift. Wilson is either oblivious to or doesn’t care about the harm done by mass migration prior to the current year. It’s not as though previous generations of non-white immigrants have integrated seamlessly into American political life and culture. Wilson’s contention that poly-ethnic empires like America can more easily accept mass migration doesn’t resonate to anyone who isn’t willfully blind to the growing hostility towards founding stock Americans. Can Wilson provide a single historical example of large poly-ethnic empires that accepted mass migration and thrived? Or even survived? Why should we assume that this will work out any better for America?
So why would accepting more pro-Hamas Palestinians and Arabs from the Middle East cause a problem now? Couldn’t they just move into Rashida Tlaib’s congressional district? Or perhaps colonize somewhere else in the United States formerly populated by founding stock white Americans? If it wasn’t a problem before when we were in the process of acquiring “lots of that color,” why should it be a problem now? My suspicion, based upon Doug Wilson’s history and his more recent support for Israel, is that his concern isn’t so much the harm that this particular immigration would do to America in the long run. Wilson seems to be more concerned about the rising specter of “anti-Semitism.” After all, Wilson is on record as saying that his 2% Jewish ancestry means that he “would be much more involved on an active personal level if terrorists overran Israel than we would be if terrorists overran Vermont.”
I don’t think that Doug Wilson is a consciously bad actor who is trying to steer people astray. I think that Wilson means well and gets many things right. But Wilson seems largely oblivious of his own BoomerCon tendencies and unable to overcome certain taboos that were instilled within the Baby Boomer generation. On the issue of race and national identity Wilson gets annoyingly close to the truth without being willing to go all the way and admit that the Biblical concept of nationhood is tied to a shared ancestry in addition to common history, religion, culture, and language. Instead of helping those who have begun to realize what’s going on to grow in their understanding, Wilson seems more concerned with keeping Christians from noticing too much.