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America prides itself on not having an official or monolithic identity—it’s a melting pot, as they say. Yet this is not the case among America’s elites, for whom American identity—in its “purest” form—is being a WASP. One can be a true French or Brazilian regardless of their color, ethnic background, or religion. Édith Piaf was a French national symbol—the fact that she had Algerian ancestry was just a biographical peculiarity, not a marker of her identity. But had Édith Piaf been born in the USA, even after the Civil Rights Movement, she wouldn’t be simply “American”: she would be “Algerian-American.”

Despite there being no laws on the books saying so, the implied message behind hyphenated-American identity labels is that the de facto law of the land is that non-WASPs are not pure Americans. The election of the first American pope—who made headlines within the first few hours of stepping out on the papal balcony for being a mix of French, Spanish, Italian, Louisiana Créole, and Latino (by association)—has shaken up how American identity is typically construed.

Between Religion and Race

In our age, where people freely convert to (or away from) religions of their own accord, religion is less tied to specific ethnicities. Yet this wasn’t the case for most of America’s history: Jews were assumed to be a Semitic race who traced their roots back to Palestine, Protestants had their roots in northern European countries, and Catholics were either from a subdued kingdom or from rival kingdoms—among whom were a myriad of “deplorables” (Irish, Italian, and mixed-race folk like Mexicans mestizos and Louisiana Créoles).

Are you all white?

Racism doesn’t sit well with a Catholic worldview—at least not on paper. The Greek origin of the word itself literally means “universal,” thus Catholicism’s goal of evangelizing all of humanity. Theologically speaking, race does not exist for Catholics, who believe all humans are the progeny of Adam and Eve.1 Yet from a Protestant outlook, racism is a perhaps bit more justifiable.2 María Elvira Roca Barea makes the provocative claim in Imperiofobia y leyenda negra that racism is secular Calvinism, for science “proves” the predestination of certain races.

Using Roca Barea’s logic, the Catholic insistence on each human being’s inherent dignity and free will—as both a moral precept and metaphysical fact–can then be written off as unscientific obscurantism. Just as this quasi-Darwinian manner of conceiving Protestantism’s “evolution” from the Catholic dark ages into a “pure, enlightened” understanding of the faith—in which we can be free thinkers who read the Bible according to our own judgment—can be used to label Catholics as inferior beings, it can be applied to prove that certain races are unevolved and inferior.

Who gets/has to be white?

This kind of pseudo-scientific explanation reached its peak with one of the most important theologians of 19^th century America: Josiah Strong. In Our Country (1885), he explained the correlation of Protestantism and racial superiority as follows:

“Every race which has deeply impressed itself on the human family has been the representative of some great idea […]. The Anglo-Saxon is the representative of two great ideas, which are closely related. One of them is that of civil liberty. […] The noblest races have always been lovers of liberty. That love ran strong in early German blood, and has profoundly influenced the institutions of all the branches of the great German family; but it was left for the Anglo-Saxon branch fully to recognize the right of the individual to himself, and formally to declare it the foundation stone of government.

The other great idea of which the Anglo-Saxon is the exponent is that of a pure spiritual Christianity. It was no accident that the great reformation of the sixteenth century originated among a Teutonic, rather than a Latin people. It was the fire of liberty burning in the Saxon heart that flamed up against the absolutism of the Pope. [...] That means that most of the spiritual Christianity in the world is found among Anglo-Saxons and their converts; for this is the great missionary race.” (p. 159-160)3

The reasoning is quite circular: Anglo-Saxons are superior to Celtics and Germans because they are Protestants and politically liberals, and they are Protestants and politically liberals because they are the great race. After citing the statistics of white American population growth and quoting Darwin, Strong writes:

“It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world's future. […] The time is coming when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence will be felt here as it is now felt in Europe and Asia. Then will the world enter upon a new stage of its history — the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency, inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States, will assert itself. Then this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it — the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization — having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. (p. 174-175)4

And voilà: the Lebensraum of the good pastor. Despite the discrepancies between 20^th century science and evangelical Christianity, Roca Barea reminds us that both Protestants and the French Enlightenment thinkers used science as a key tool to oppose Catholic intellectual authority.5

What you NEED to know about white people

The US’s racially-paranoid census

It amazes us South Americans that if an Argentinian who has four Italian grandparents migrates to the US, he is racially registered as Latino by the census. But a person born in the US with four Italian grandparents is labeled white. Of course, the Brazilian government has records that can show who my grandparents are, and I can gather documents that prove my partial Italian ancestry. But the Brazilian government doesn’t really care. The Brazilian census asks for my skin color, but not my race. I answer “white,” despite my mixed heritage—just like a Brazilian with full Italian ancestry would. Furthermore, the census will not keep an individualized record of white-skinned people—who they are, where they live, etc. If a South American man of pure German descent migrated to the United States, he would be labeled Latino because his country of origin has no data regarding miscegenation—as a detailed racial origin of an individual is, even nowadays, a private issue.

Since the 18th century, the American census, on the other hand, has kept a detailed record of every citizen. During the 19^th century, the peak of social Darwinism, WASP elites were worried about the new stocks which would make up part of the American population, and kept a meticulous racialized record of its people. However, gathering information about specific ethnic groups was a laborious task. In 1890, the census began using Hollerith tabulation. As Yasha Levine stated, the Hollerith tabulations

lent census trackers the ability to slice, dice and mine data in ways that had never been possible; for example, to find a particular person or group of people—say, Americans with at least one Japanese parent in California or all orphans living in New York with a felony. This kind of fine-grained analysis on a mass scale was unprecedented. […] Newton Dexter North, a wool industry lobbyist chosen to head the 1900 census, was astounded by the ability of Hollerith tabulators to so precisely tabulate racial data. Like many upper-class Americans of his day, North worried that the massive influx of immigrants from Europe was […] threatening the nation’s racial purity. (Surveillance Valley, p. 55).

One can wonder how many “scientific” studies were used to prove the intrinsic superiority of WASP racial stock.6

Ariana Grande's transracialism

Before and after the cordon sanitaire

For a long time, American southerners used a quite detailed classification system which would amaze a South American: an expression like octoroon means that just one of your great-grandparents was black. In Portuguese we say mulato meaning that someone is a general mix of black and white, while in America, mulatto means that someone is equal parts black and white. As late as 1910, the one-drop rule created a national cordon sanitaire that hid miscegenation and defined someone with a single black ancestor as black. So, someone like Walter White (1893–1855), a blond, blue-eyed white-skinned man born in Georgia, was undoubtedly a POC (and therefore a second-class citizen), because he knew that—from all his 32 great-great-great-grandparents—five were black. Nazi Germany was far from being that strict, for it only cared to know if any of your grandparents were Jews.

Dolezal's blues

Even after tracing your American roots back many generations, those with black ancestry were not allowed to be considered simply “Americans.” When they excelled in music, their music was regarded as black music—not American music. After the Civil Rights movement, an athlete like Magic Johnson was still black or African-American, not just American. (Compare him to Pelé, who has always been regarded as a Brazilian national icon instead of a black icon.) When the light-skinned mulatto Barack Obama ran for presidency, he couldn’t be seen as anything else than a black American—whose election was a kind of WASP fetish. Kamala Harris, whose skin color is just a few shades away from Prevost’s, was repeatedly described (and self-described) as a black woman.

The -American pope

So, it is quite a surprise that Robert Prevost was labeled an “American” pope—sans hyphenations. The New York Times reported that he has Creole roots, and that two of his grandparents are recorded as mulattos. According to the Times, the pope’s “brother said that the family did not identify as Black. The announcement of his election in Rome focused on his early life in Chicago and decades of service in Peru.” The Peruvians were eager to claim that Leo XIV is the Peruvian pope, but Americans hurried to claim him first.

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The pope is a naturalized Peruvian and spoke Spanish rather than English when he walked out on the papal balcony—in the middle of the year when Trump deleted the White House’s page in Spanish. Even so, he was unanimously recognized and claimed as the American Pope: just American, American without a hyphen. That’s the huge novelty.

This is a reminder to the world that—despite its spotty track record of holding true to it in practice—Catholicism’s moral and metaphysical worldview is blatantly anti-racist. On the other side, well-informed apologists of Protestantism and Enlightenment scientism can hardly bank on their history to claim such anti-racist bona fides. Thus, it’s no coincidence that the first man to crack America’s WASP identitarianism is a Catholic pope. Let us hope that this be a provocation—to both identitarian SJWs and straight-up racists.