Sorry, racists, but American exceptionalism isn’t genetic

What is an American?

That is the question that powered U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s recent speech — a hodgepodge of contradictions, racism, and antisemitic tropes — at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

The Missouri Republican wallowed in the kind of unabashed defense of Christian nationalism and white supremacy that, not too long ago, you would have turned to history books for, not C-SPAN.

Yet, here we are.

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” Schmitt said. Period. No others need apply.

Before you start crunching the numbers and wonder if Schmitt is simply the reincarnation of Strom Thurmond, a throwback Southern-fried aberration in our enlightened times, recall that on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that if you’re working class, brown, and speak Spanish, you are a fair target for the government to question your right to be here.

Consider it a state-sanctioned version of the question too many of my kind of Americans hear all the time: Yes, but where are you really from?

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Me? Well, I’m from Texas, and my parents are Mexican. I grew up on the southern border, and didn’t live in the U.S. until I was 30. Culturally, I consider myself both Mexican and American, for which I submit my Spotify playlist as evidence.

Now, to Schmitt and his ilk, I am not a real American. You see, I missed the cutoff date of sometime in the 1840s, when the senator’s German ancestors managed to make it over here.

After that, immigration has provided the cannon fodder for “those in power” to wage a “cultural war with their own nations.” Schmitt seems to be endorsing the racist conspiracy theory called the “great replacement,” in which a mysterious cabal (in Schmitt’s words, “elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere”) wants to wipe out the white population and replace it with more pliant and docile immigrants.

Now, these racists have clearly not met some of my feistier cousins. They also ignore America’s history, which includes plenty of people of color who came from elsewhere and helped build this nation.

But, of course, what they really mean and what they want to protect is white supremacy.

There have and always will be people like Schmitt. The problem for America today is that they’re back in power, but know their grip is weak. This makes them even more dangerous.

Now, I don’t believe Donald Trump is racist, per se. The same way I don’t believe he can hold a coherent conversation right now (per se). But his second term’s Evil League of Evil approach to governance was bound to unite the worst of the worst, from anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller inside the White House, to peripheral racist trolls with real power to affect policy like Laura Loomer. And they have the president’s ear.

This has led to a crackdown on immigrants under the fig leaf that the administration is protecting the country from “criminals” who are in the country illegally. The truth — which is as evident in the rhetoric as it is in the brutal tactics used by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — is that Trump has declared war on those who “don’t belong.”

That includes immigrants and “homegrowns” who won’t submit. It’s also no accident that the president issued an executive order to limit birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

I am a beneficiary of birthright citizenship, and I got to reaffirm that fact repeatedly growing up. Every time I would cross the border before post-9/11 passport restrictions were implemented, I would say American when entering the U.S.

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As a child, it was literally a magic word that opened up a different world than the Mexico of my parents’ generation. As I grew up, the differences between my countries became clearer, as did their shortcomings, but I believed America was better.

It wasn’t because it was full of white people, though. After all, Mexico is full of white people who only become brown once they cross the border.

To go back to Schmitt’s speech, I wholeheartedly agree with what makes America exceptional:

“You can’t understand America without understanding things like the freedom of speech, the right to self-defense, the ideals of independence, self-governance, and political liberty.

“What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.”

Schmitt implicitly makes the distinction that it’s only his “sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims” who are capable of abiding by America’s principles, but that’s demonstratively not true.

American exceptionalism isn’t genetic. American exceptionalism lies in its foundational promise of equality, of its ideals of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A quest enabled by the rule of law.

It is endlessly ironic, then, that to preserve their vision of white America, these ethnonationalists are willing to destroy America itself.

The push toward an ethnostate by the darkest part of Trump’s right-wing enablers is now part and parcel of the president’s mad dash toward authoritarianism, which is fitting since it is all thoroughly un-American.

Schmitt gives away the game when he says that “the battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even ‘right’ and ‘left,’ in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.”

To that way of thinking, it is not shameless to decry cancel culture while arresting students over speech; it is not duplicitous to hold the Second Amendment sacrosanct while considering banning transgender people from owning guns; it is not hypocritical to fearmonger over government-owned grocery stores while engaging in corporate shakedowns.

To protect white supremacy, this contingent is willing to abandon America’s ideals — along with democracy or capitalism or conservatism — whatever keeps them in power works for them.

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And they seem to be gaining ground, successfully sabotaging or bending institutions to their will, while terrorizing the most vulnerable among us and running roughshod over constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms.

The most frightening part of this is that it’s only the beginning, and human history is all too familiar with what happens when totalitarianism meets white supremacy.

However, I am an optimist, and while I know it’s not going to be easy to fight against these forces that stand for nothing but themselves, I believe we will win.

Because we Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. We Americans are the descendants of the Indigenous people who fought for their homeland, were decimated, but survived with heads held high.

We Americans are the grandchildren of the people who were enslaved and whose backs were broken building a country that hated them, yet refused to foreswear it. We Americans are the progeny of immigrants of all faiths, from all over the world, who left everything they knew behind for the promise of a better future.

We Americans, to answer Schmitt’s question, are exceptional.