After an (enjoyable) introduction to the Ohio Players, the class discussion moved on to a fundamental issue of what is American and who is an American?

I fully disagree with the idea so often put forth that the United States is a “proposition nation.” A nation is defined by the people who live in it. A proper nation is formed around a coherent set of people, typically tied together by similar race, religion, language, folk heroes, history, and social values. The United States, like any other nation, is tied by by those rules. This idea of American exceptionalism, that the U.S. transcends what defines every other country in the world and is somehow above human identity, I think is a kind of messianic idealism not grounded in reality.

The historic American nation has always been bi-racial. Blacks, from forcible removal from Africa, to slavery, to segregation, to attempted integration, have always formed an integral part of the United States, even when subjugated.

Indians, on the other hand, until their receiving of American citizenship in the 1920s, were never a part of the historic American nation. They were not the founders of what the modern world defines as “America.” And the first Europeans who arrived here were not “immigrants.” They did not immigrate to Native American societies or attempt to join or integrate with them. They founded their own settlements and established their own nation separate from that of the natives. Whether they’re romantically referred to as pioneers or disparagingly referred to as conquerors, they were certainly not immigrants.

Likewise, calling the United States a “country of immigrants” is an illogical canard. Yes, current inhabitants of the United States are descendants of people who came from somewhere else. But that applies to every other people other country in the world. At not point did people spring fully formed from the ground. They all arrived from somewhere at different points in time. The Indians arrived to North American 10,000 years ago. Were they immigrants? The “country of immigrants” presupposition is modern cultural marxist-influenced design to degrade the idea of an American nation.

We ended with defining folk culture as arising from “people on the economic margins too poor to participate in commerce,” such as the Cajuns or people of Appalachia. I would agree with this definition.