We are witnesses to attempted murder. Our history? Either forgotten or so badly distorted by Hannah-Jones' bastardization of Howard Zinn's communist re-imaginings to be unrecognizable. Our culture? Without the Bible, Shakespeare, Burke, Byron, Yeats, do we even have one? Our "leaders?" A demented dolt and a braggadocious narcissist. Responsibility – Freedom's homely twin – slaughtered by self-absorbed "me-ism." Freedom itself sliding into License. Our Science? Perverted by politics.
Our best hope? That our love of our children will save both them and ourselves.
Imagine hard working all their lives grandpa and Grandma being so proud of their baby grandchild.
Then that grandchild grows up to learn to hate and despise their grandparents and all they stood for. Hard to imagine but it’s happening all over the English speaking world. Americans have an identity right before them in the yellowing photographs from a different age a different era and indeed a different time. Ancestors who fought tooth and nail to survive every day , who toiled in the fields and factory’s to make something of their lives and indeed the lives of their descendants . Look in the mirror. What do you see ? I see hundreds of years of family making good for future family. They are me. I am them. That’s who I am and what we are.
Jenny, I love your writing and agree with most of your ideas, but you need to understand something, you're not an American, you're a New Yorker, which is not the same thing. You told me yourself you have never traveled in the South, a region populated primarily by descendants of Scots-Irish, once you get away from the East Coast. New York is not America, it's an island that takes up a few hundred square miles on the Hudson and New York Harbor. New Yorkers even believe this, as evidenced by the infamous New Yorker cover depicting New York (Manhattan) in the foreground with the West Coast in the far distance and a wasteland in between. That is the New Yorker's attitude. New York has become important in the minds of the (pseudo)intellectual set because it is the center of publishing, or used to be, and wannabe writers flocked there. A few became famous. They looked down their sanctimonious noses at the real America, the America that exists outside of that island and those distant West Coast cities.
I grew up in rural West Tennessee. NOBODY cared where our ancestors came from! Some of us had Irish (Scots-Irish) blood but most of us had no idea where our ancestors, who have been in America since the 1600s, came from. Some of our ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years. It's the more recent Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. who make a big deal about the "old country." The African-American identity is of recent origin, around the 1980s. While there have been a few Irish and Germans in what is now the United States since the thirteen original colonies, the huge influx was in the mid-nineteenth century with Italians, Poles and Jews (mostly Germans and Eastern Europeans) coming around the turn of the Twentieth Century - after the War Between the States (which was fought to a large extent by German and Irish immigrants who joined the army in order to eat.) While I have Irish ancestry dating back to the early nineteenth century, my Irish ancestors were most likely Scots-Irish. I don't know for sure and do not care. My name can be Irish but it's actually Scottish. My ancestor was a Scottish Presbyterian who fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie then moved to England where he became a well-known Baptist preacher and dissenter who is buried in the same cemetery as John Bunyan. There was not a single Irish-Catholic (or any other kind of Catholic) where I grew up, or Jews either. I had a French aunt my uncle brought home after the war who was no doubt Catholic, but she didn't last long. She took up with another man while my uncle was flying missions over North Korea. My German Anabaptist ancestor (who I didn't know I had until fairly recently), fled Germany to get away from Catholics and Lutherans. His daughter married a Scotsman and somewhere along the line their descendants became Methodists. In short, that old country identity you mention is only found in large cities - New York, Chicago, Detroit, etc. - where large numbers of immigrants settled instead of assimilating into American society. Incidentally, that's also where wokeism comes from, there and the West Coast.
It might be nice to wear green on St. Patrick's Day or whatever depending on one's ancestral background, but unless one's real identity comes from God, the other stuff seems shallow at some point. Galatians 3 reminds those who believe in Christ that "in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith."
Thanks for this Jenny. It made me reflect on our own situation. I am English, my wife is English/Polish and we have made our home here on a small island in Shetland for the last 50 years. It is definitely our home. We farm here, our friends are here. We raised our family here. And yet somehow because this is an island group with a still cohesive “indigenous” culture there is always a lingering sense of being an incomer. The primary attachment for us is place. The proximity to the sea, land to steward and a recognisable community are priceless gifts we treasure.
"Benign neglect — a highly underrated concept among the professional classes — allows kids to *just be.*"
I’d say the greatest gift my parents ever gave me was leaving me alone so that I could simply be. I didn’t really spend a lot of time playing with other children, but I do remember the great sense of comfort I felt, even as a young child, looking up at the sky and watching the clouds for long periods of time, or being in a wood and loving what it felt like to be close to the trees. I feel more authentically myself when I’m living next door to a wood but have a clear view of the sky. And as I get older, I confess that I often find myself feeling less like a “human being” and more like a blob of consciousness that has temporarily taken on, as a sort of “avatar,” my current human form. : )
My grandparents came to America in the 1920's, from Germany. Given what they faced during WW2 as German immigrants, my mother was raised entirely American, including only ever speaking English. Sometimes that makes for the most authentic experience of all - turning away from the old ways and embracing the new. Completely out of fashion now, of course, but there it is.
Excellent article. I remember back in the early nineties an encounter with some American tourists at the visitor centre at Culloden Moor in Scotland - I was on a cycling holiday so was just a casual visitor to the famous battle site myself. The first thing noticed was the usual set of ‘trace your ancestry’ grifters associated with such places and they were working those poor old Americans for all their worth that particular day. Many of those naive ancestor hunters were being deceitfully encouraged to spend hundreds of dollars on certificates and tartan kilts that identifying the Scottish clan that they were supposedly descended from. It made me chuckle when I noticed one guy, with an obviously German sounding name, being convinced that he was related to some fictitious Clan that had been wiped out by the English at the battle! Having several American friends I am only too well aware just how canny they usually are when it comes to money, but this seems to go out the window when they come hunting for their cultural roots in Europe. I live in Ireland now and it is the same in the twee tourist towns like Killarney in Kerry. The Americans go nuts for connections here, no matter how dubious and flimsy they are! Perhaps it’s because ‘melting pot’ type societies like the United States don’t really work and that those born into such a situation feel no particular belonging and need to fulfil some innate desire for identity with a wider cultural family. It’s an interesting problem and one that isn’t new - my Irish father remembers the same type of behaviour from Americans visiting here when he was young too.
My two cents: faith and family first. That’s what holds truth. Without each, the spotlight falls on self. And self, in the end, is empty. One can try to fill that emptiness with whatever “identity” one chooses, but there is no glue. And the center (“authenticity!”) will not hold.
This is exquisite. I hope more and more people see the article. Our identities are in crisis because we care so very much about how we identify as presented to the world. If you’re not like someone else, that makes you automatically deficient and wrong?
Bravo! Bravo! I was going to write a generic substack essay this morning but this essay changed my mind. A review of my own authenticity is in order. Marvelous insights!
I loved this article. I've been ancestry-obsessed since childhood, and also happen to have a very strong and unashamed love of being American. I grew up in Berkeley, the epicenter of folks who wave their hand and say "Americans are so [derogatory thing]," who see themselves above the rest of us. I'm a Constitution fanatic.
I think the right to Free Speech is the most extraordinary thing and will fight for it to be protected and (I hope) spread throughout the world. I can't get through the Star Spangled Banner without a surge of love so strong I cry. This is embarassing for me, but not shameful.
My mother's family were Norwegian immigrants, Evangelical Lutheran, living in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) during her childhood in the 30s and 40s, and they spoke a funny pidgin English with Norwegian and Yiddish words peppered in with New York vowels (cawfee) and Norwegian inflection (Q: "Muthah, did you make caaaawfee?" "A: Ja, I made." ) My Nana's generation was survival- and social-status obsessed, doing all they could do HIDE their foreignness. My mother exaggerated her foreignness, giving us Very Scandinavian Names, and even affecting an accent. As a child in Berkeley of the 60s & 70s, where every other parent was high, finding themselves or abandoning their families (all of the above in our case) I would only wear wooden clogs, and a lace-up corset/vest thing over a dress, imagining myself to be not only "Norwegian," but a visitor from the traditional past. The Disneyland "Small World" ride was the Most Important Thing on my 6-year-old bucket list, with all the dancing dolls in costumes of the world. When I finally got to go and take the ride (like going to Lourdes), I searched for the doll that was ME, MY people, and did indeed feel elevated and blessed by the recognition of MY place in a beautiful whole.
I paid my own way at 16 for a month in forested Norwegian language camp (in Minnesota) and met other ethno-geeks like me. Heaven! I was 29 before I was able to visit actual Norway, and was floored, agog, thrilled, teary-eyed to see the place at last. I walked around and told anyone who would listen that I was "Norwegian." Except for one kindly grocery checker, no one cared.
As soon as DNA testing came out, I learned I "am" 94% Scandinavian (more than most native Norwegians!) and my maternal haplotype is Sami (the indiginous people of the Arctic Circle. I was like one of those orphan kids in Victorian literature discovering they are secretly from a royal family, who is coming to save them one day). I've done all I can to teach my young adult sons (whose paternal granny is from (and lives in) Wales, that they are also *Norwegian*. I've taken them on individual visits to Norway to rub that in, and help them love it.
Now, in my work as a YouTuber who teaches how to heal from childhood truama, I have fans and students all over the world. When I do workshops it's in my best interest to stick to massive population centers where I can cover costs with ticket sales. But luckily, I have an unusually high number of followers in low-population Norway and so last summer, with my brother and and son in tow (their first Norsk pilgrimage), I led a workshop in Oslo, and greeted everyone in my wobbly Norwegian, and could hardly hold back the tears, the feeling of reunion, as so many of them welcomed and hugged me. I am a real American with real Norwegian roots, who has forged an authentic identity as an every-woman amongst the traumatized people of the world who are working to heal their lives.
I grew up in a Northeast mill town that was primarily populated by Irish, French, Polish, and Italian families that had been there for several generations. We had a few Jewish families and one black family. Occasionally we would get black foster kids or a transient family of blacks or Hispanics. They usually helped our basketball team. Most people were Catholic or some form of Protestant. I identify as White/European/Christian. That is my ethnic and cultural identification. We knew we were Irish, and we were proud of that background, but we felt a strong connection with the Italian, Polish, and French kids too. We were brothers. I believe we are losing or have lost the core American identity because that core identity is what mine is. Since our culture managers decided we are not allowed to identify and organize as a race (White = European), what we have left is a deracinated hodgepodge of off-brown, agnostic, mostly depressed consumers of fast American corporate food and crap culture.
I am with the woke Left about racial identity. Ideals cannot hold a people together. Identity does. The data reveals Blacks, Hispanics, and even Asians have a very strong racial preference and a strong sense of racial superiority (and disdain for whites), while whites mistakenly think everyone is the same. This is a delusional artifact of propaganda designed to replace us. We are fools.
We are witnesses to attempted murder. Our history? Either forgotten or so badly distorted by Hannah-Jones' bastardization of Howard Zinn's communist re-imaginings to be unrecognizable. Our culture? Without the Bible, Shakespeare, Burke, Byron, Yeats, do we even have one? Our "leaders?" A demented dolt and a braggadocious narcissist. Responsibility – Freedom's homely twin – slaughtered by self-absorbed "me-ism." Freedom itself sliding into License. Our Science? Perverted by politics.
Our best hope? That our love of our children will save both them and ourselves.
Imagine hard working all their lives grandpa and Grandma being so proud of their baby grandchild.
Then that grandchild grows up to learn to hate and despise their grandparents and all they stood for. Hard to imagine but it’s happening all over the English speaking world. Americans have an identity right before them in the yellowing photographs from a different age a different era and indeed a different time. Ancestors who fought tooth and nail to survive every day , who toiled in the fields and factory’s to make something of their lives and indeed the lives of their descendants . Look in the mirror. What do you see ? I see hundreds of years of family making good for future family. They are me. I am them. That’s who I am and what we are.
Jenny, I love your writing and agree with most of your ideas, but you need to understand something, you're not an American, you're a New Yorker, which is not the same thing. You told me yourself you have never traveled in the South, a region populated primarily by descendants of Scots-Irish, once you get away from the East Coast. New York is not America, it's an island that takes up a few hundred square miles on the Hudson and New York Harbor. New Yorkers even believe this, as evidenced by the infamous New Yorker cover depicting New York (Manhattan) in the foreground with the West Coast in the far distance and a wasteland in between. That is the New Yorker's attitude. New York has become important in the minds of the (pseudo)intellectual set because it is the center of publishing, or used to be, and wannabe writers flocked there. A few became famous. They looked down their sanctimonious noses at the real America, the America that exists outside of that island and those distant West Coast cities.
I grew up in rural West Tennessee. NOBODY cared where our ancestors came from! Some of us had Irish (Scots-Irish) blood but most of us had no idea where our ancestors, who have been in America since the 1600s, came from. Some of our ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years. It's the more recent Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. who make a big deal about the "old country." The African-American identity is of recent origin, around the 1980s. While there have been a few Irish and Germans in what is now the United States since the thirteen original colonies, the huge influx was in the mid-nineteenth century with Italians, Poles and Jews (mostly Germans and Eastern Europeans) coming around the turn of the Twentieth Century - after the War Between the States (which was fought to a large extent by German and Irish immigrants who joined the army in order to eat.) While I have Irish ancestry dating back to the early nineteenth century, my Irish ancestors were most likely Scots-Irish. I don't know for sure and do not care. My name can be Irish but it's actually Scottish. My ancestor was a Scottish Presbyterian who fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie then moved to England where he became a well-known Baptist preacher and dissenter who is buried in the same cemetery as John Bunyan. There was not a single Irish-Catholic (or any other kind of Catholic) where I grew up, or Jews either. I had a French aunt my uncle brought home after the war who was no doubt Catholic, but she didn't last long. She took up with another man while my uncle was flying missions over North Korea. My German Anabaptist ancestor (who I didn't know I had until fairly recently), fled Germany to get away from Catholics and Lutherans. His daughter married a Scotsman and somewhere along the line their descendants became Methodists. In short, that old country identity you mention is only found in large cities - New York, Chicago, Detroit, etc. - where large numbers of immigrants settled instead of assimilating into American society. Incidentally, that's also where wokeism comes from, there and the West Coast.
It might be nice to wear green on St. Patrick's Day or whatever depending on one's ancestral background, but unless one's real identity comes from God, the other stuff seems shallow at some point. Galatians 3 reminds those who believe in Christ that "in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith."
Thanks for this Jenny. It made me reflect on our own situation. I am English, my wife is English/Polish and we have made our home here on a small island in Shetland for the last 50 years. It is definitely our home. We farm here, our friends are here. We raised our family here. And yet somehow because this is an island group with a still cohesive “indigenous” culture there is always a lingering sense of being an incomer. The primary attachment for us is place. The proximity to the sea, land to steward and a recognisable community are priceless gifts we treasure.
"Benign neglect — a highly underrated concept among the professional classes — allows kids to *just be.*"
I’d say the greatest gift my parents ever gave me was leaving me alone so that I could simply be. I didn’t really spend a lot of time playing with other children, but I do remember the great sense of comfort I felt, even as a young child, looking up at the sky and watching the clouds for long periods of time, or being in a wood and loving what it felt like to be close to the trees. I feel more authentically myself when I’m living next door to a wood but have a clear view of the sky. And as I get older, I confess that I often find myself feeling less like a “human being” and more like a blob of consciousness that has temporarily taken on, as a sort of “avatar,” my current human form. : )
Jenny, Thanks for sharing your grandmothers famous smile.
Americans should get back to enjoying what is instead of woke searching for Woke Utopia.
Never satisfied
My grandparents came to America in the 1920's, from Germany. Given what they faced during WW2 as German immigrants, my mother was raised entirely American, including only ever speaking English. Sometimes that makes for the most authentic experience of all - turning away from the old ways and embracing the new. Completely out of fashion now, of course, but there it is.
Excellent article. I remember back in the early nineties an encounter with some American tourists at the visitor centre at Culloden Moor in Scotland - I was on a cycling holiday so was just a casual visitor to the famous battle site myself. The first thing noticed was the usual set of ‘trace your ancestry’ grifters associated with such places and they were working those poor old Americans for all their worth that particular day. Many of those naive ancestor hunters were being deceitfully encouraged to spend hundreds of dollars on certificates and tartan kilts that identifying the Scottish clan that they were supposedly descended from. It made me chuckle when I noticed one guy, with an obviously German sounding name, being convinced that he was related to some fictitious Clan that had been wiped out by the English at the battle! Having several American friends I am only too well aware just how canny they usually are when it comes to money, but this seems to go out the window when they come hunting for their cultural roots in Europe. I live in Ireland now and it is the same in the twee tourist towns like Killarney in Kerry. The Americans go nuts for connections here, no matter how dubious and flimsy they are! Perhaps it’s because ‘melting pot’ type societies like the United States don’t really work and that those born into such a situation feel no particular belonging and need to fulfil some innate desire for identity with a wider cultural family. It’s an interesting problem and one that isn’t new - my Irish father remembers the same type of behaviour from Americans visiting here when he was young too.
My two cents: faith and family first. That’s what holds truth. Without each, the spotlight falls on self. And self, in the end, is empty. One can try to fill that emptiness with whatever “identity” one chooses, but there is no glue. And the center (“authenticity!”) will not hold.
This is exquisite. I hope more and more people see the article. Our identities are in crisis because we care so very much about how we identify as presented to the world. If you’re not like someone else, that makes you automatically deficient and wrong?
Authenticity is fairly inauthentic.
Bravo! Bravo! I was going to write a generic substack essay this morning but this essay changed my mind. A review of my own authenticity is in order. Marvelous insights!
I loved this article. I've been ancestry-obsessed since childhood, and also happen to have a very strong and unashamed love of being American. I grew up in Berkeley, the epicenter of folks who wave their hand and say "Americans are so [derogatory thing]," who see themselves above the rest of us. I'm a Constitution fanatic.
I think the right to Free Speech is the most extraordinary thing and will fight for it to be protected and (I hope) spread throughout the world. I can't get through the Star Spangled Banner without a surge of love so strong I cry. This is embarassing for me, but not shameful.
My mother's family were Norwegian immigrants, Evangelical Lutheran, living in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) during her childhood in the 30s and 40s, and they spoke a funny pidgin English with Norwegian and Yiddish words peppered in with New York vowels (cawfee) and Norwegian inflection (Q: "Muthah, did you make caaaawfee?" "A: Ja, I made." ) My Nana's generation was survival- and social-status obsessed, doing all they could do HIDE their foreignness. My mother exaggerated her foreignness, giving us Very Scandinavian Names, and even affecting an accent. As a child in Berkeley of the 60s & 70s, where every other parent was high, finding themselves or abandoning their families (all of the above in our case) I would only wear wooden clogs, and a lace-up corset/vest thing over a dress, imagining myself to be not only "Norwegian," but a visitor from the traditional past. The Disneyland "Small World" ride was the Most Important Thing on my 6-year-old bucket list, with all the dancing dolls in costumes of the world. When I finally got to go and take the ride (like going to Lourdes), I searched for the doll that was ME, MY people, and did indeed feel elevated and blessed by the recognition of MY place in a beautiful whole.
I paid my own way at 16 for a month in forested Norwegian language camp (in Minnesota) and met other ethno-geeks like me. Heaven! I was 29 before I was able to visit actual Norway, and was floored, agog, thrilled, teary-eyed to see the place at last. I walked around and told anyone who would listen that I was "Norwegian." Except for one kindly grocery checker, no one cared.
As soon as DNA testing came out, I learned I "am" 94% Scandinavian (more than most native Norwegians!) and my maternal haplotype is Sami (the indiginous people of the Arctic Circle. I was like one of those orphan kids in Victorian literature discovering they are secretly from a royal family, who is coming to save them one day). I've done all I can to teach my young adult sons (whose paternal granny is from (and lives in) Wales, that they are also *Norwegian*. I've taken them on individual visits to Norway to rub that in, and help them love it.
Now, in my work as a YouTuber who teaches how to heal from childhood truama, I have fans and students all over the world. When I do workshops it's in my best interest to stick to massive population centers where I can cover costs with ticket sales. But luckily, I have an unusually high number of followers in low-population Norway and so last summer, with my brother and and son in tow (their first Norsk pilgrimage), I led a workshop in Oslo, and greeted everyone in my wobbly Norwegian, and could hardly hold back the tears, the feeling of reunion, as so many of them welcomed and hugged me. I am a real American with real Norwegian roots, who has forged an authentic identity as an every-woman amongst the traumatized people of the world who are working to heal their lives.
I grew up in a Northeast mill town that was primarily populated by Irish, French, Polish, and Italian families that had been there for several generations. We had a few Jewish families and one black family. Occasionally we would get black foster kids or a transient family of blacks or Hispanics. They usually helped our basketball team. Most people were Catholic or some form of Protestant. I identify as White/European/Christian. That is my ethnic and cultural identification. We knew we were Irish, and we were proud of that background, but we felt a strong connection with the Italian, Polish, and French kids too. We were brothers. I believe we are losing or have lost the core American identity because that core identity is what mine is. Since our culture managers decided we are not allowed to identify and organize as a race (White = European), what we have left is a deracinated hodgepodge of off-brown, agnostic, mostly depressed consumers of fast American corporate food and crap culture.
I am with the woke Left about racial identity. Ideals cannot hold a people together. Identity does. The data reveals Blacks, Hispanics, and even Asians have a very strong racial preference and a strong sense of racial superiority (and disdain for whites), while whites mistakenly think everyone is the same. This is a delusional artifact of propaganda designed to replace us. We are fools.
The way forward is obvious.