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Beyond that, there is no shortage of people in favor of book bans that absolutely believe in ethnically-defined identity.
But what you have in schools today is an additional layer on top of that, where the non-white kids are treated differently than the white kids. The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t. At my kids school, they have racially segregated “affinity” groups to facilitate this. My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid). I know that sounds like something I just made up but it’s absolutely true.
This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity. Specifically, they generalize african american racial identity and solidarity and politics to all non-whites. If you walk into a book reading for some of this stuff, you’ll find way more people promoting “brown people” ethnic identity and solidarity than you will find people promoting “white people” ethnic identity and solidarity at a Trump rally. The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
“April 26 1992. There was a riot in the streets tell me where were you”
I'm not sure the best option is to vote for the country club guy whose public statements strongly indicate reports of his private statements on race are accurate. The guy who has kept Stephen Miller around for a decade and talked the proud boys into being the armed second wave of Jan 6. Then pardoned them.
Speaking for myself, even if Trump is somehow the shining light of a post-discrimination society (after failing to do so in his first term), it can't possibly offset the damage he wants to do the economy, consumer protection, and national security.
> This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity.
Beverly Bond, who holds the trademark, was an influencer avant la lettre. She wanted to make a brand—looks line like a clothing line, followed by a TV show, then a podcast.
I get that it’s tempting to blame everything on radical leftist academics or whatever but that’s not what happened here. This is simply capitalism.
You might believe that if an ideological Leftist motive can be kept separate from motives of personal enrichment, then it cannot do significant harm. But most US voters would disagree with you about that: they believe that it can be harmful to believe that there is an oppressive structure at the center of American society if in fact there is not an oppressive structure at the center of American society.
Your assumptions about my motives are incorrect.
Well, um, yeah. That's because white people just aren't oppressed.
Its the same way I don't identify with feminist literature. I can read it, understand it, enjoy it - but I can never fully relate, because I'm not a woman and the way I experience the patriachy will always be different.
Of course black people identify with or relate more to something like the color purple. That doesn't mean the color purple is racist.
Then how can you evaluate feminist literature to be accurate?
Your experience in life will always represent a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of all experiences. If you require a "see it to believe it" approach, you will live and die closed-minded.
That does not mean I need to blindly trust feminists, however.
but then, maybe I can trust a statistically relevant sample of doctor on the basis they are objectively and scientifically trained, regulated and liable?
I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist. But I see this more of a lack of proper cultural empathy/education -- go figure, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere all the time. But as you said,
> This law is about what books are in public libraries.
So why would we ban the books, rather than encourage reading them and having the more meaningful discussions focusing on heritage rather than identity?
As a slightly more abstract aside, identity anything to me is a slippery slope because it will always automatically encourage one to make assumptions; it's a mental shortcut to say Person A == Person B iff PersonA.identity == PersonB.identity. Given that education is hard, learning is hard, and life is hard, I think we need to at least emphathize and appreciate that teachers and the the education system in general need to often fall back on these sorts of mental shortcuts. But that's we need to really invoke our right, privilege, and duty of grassroots participation. Why not walk into that book club that's overcompensating and help them learn what is making you uncomfortable? You might be surprised at how ignorant they were of their own mistakes and that they're willing to learn from your perspective.
But it’s not inclusiveness at all, it’s a caste system. In academic liberal spaces, non-whites are not “included” on the same terms as whites. We are bucketed into a separate caste subject to different standards and expectations. And that caste system plays out in routine social interactions, because white people afraid of being called “racist” will not treat you the same.
Calling it “heritage” instead of identity doesn’t change anything. Your average second-generation non-white American has weak ties to any non-american society. My kids have no meaningful ties to Bangladeshi society, only superficial ones. They can’t, and they wouldn’t even like it if they did. So the only outcome of talking to them about their “heritage” would be to encourage them to see themselves differently from their peers based on connections that are at best superficial.
As to your point about “banning”—we’re not banning the book club. This law is about school libraries. People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
Wait, I thought you were all about how Western society has gone too far in the direction of individual rights?
And assuming your "fundamental rights as a parent" premise (purely for the sake of argument): The rest of us have a pretty-compelling interest in how each other's kids — our future fellow adults — are being raised.
You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community. Once people are allowed into the community, they get to participate in deciding how the community collectively socializes children. That means communities have a strong interest in excluding people who aren’t like minded.
"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....
Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.
Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:
<quote>
“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”
Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/arts/design/st-patricks-c...
In the end, if we’re just comparing anecdata, this isn’t going to be productive.
There’s dozens of other examples, of course. Admissions, hiring, and promotions are often subject to explicit or implicit racial considerations. It’s naive to believe that the same people who are required by institutional policies to think about your skin color when they hired you or admitted you or when they decided to promote you or give your a research grant aren’t thinking about it in daily interactions as well.
> The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
It'd be nice if the reasonable people from both parties could ignore their extremist wings, get to together, and realize they have more in common than different.
Actually, it's back to 1868[0] at least that they'd like[1] (rolling back birthright citizenship) to go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
This is a relatively small number in comparison to the chunk of Harris supporters who would call color blindness “racist.” In my own experience, “brown” ethno-narcissism and ethnic tribalism is more accepted, and even encouraged, among liberals than white ethno-nationalism is tolerated among conservatives.
This is a result of the political incentives of the respective parties. Republicans don’t need white nationalism, they can win when minorities are assimilated into the what the dominant Anglo-American culture (what the left might call “multiracial whiteness”). That’s basically what’s happened in Florida: Hispanics retain their culture in the way Irish and Italian Americans do, but don’t have a strong ethnic identity that is politically motivating.
E.g. it's hard to get more racist than Stephen Miller, but I suppose that's normalized when you're on Jeff Sessions' staff.
Let me ask you this: you acknowledge that India is different from Vermont, right? And you acknowledge that ethnic enclaves of recent Indian immigrants (say in New York), are culturally different from Vermont? Is there any way in your world view for someone to say that they think the culture of Vermont is better, and they oppose immigration that would change the culture and make it more like India (or Latin America)?
Put differently, what could a non-racist version of Stephen Miller do while seeking to maintain the Anglo-American character of the U.S.? Or do you think that race and culture are so intertwined that non-racism requires us to accept Vermont becoming more like India or Latin America?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stephen-mi...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-is-what-we-thou...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/stephen-millers-racist-email...
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/stephen-miller...
There are dozens of similar articles.
The folks at SPLC are cultural relativists. They think culture is just superficial things like food, and doesn’t contribute to material circumstances. The only reason India or Mexico are poorer and more disorderly, in their view, is oppression from whites. In that worldview, any opposition to immigration can only be based on skin-color “racism.” Is that your view?
I’m curious why you won’t answer my question. Does non-racism, in your view, require people to accept immigration that changes America’s culture? Is there a non-racist lane for people who want Vermont or Salt Lake City to remain culturally Anglo-American (regardless of ethnicity)?
The consistent lane you're looking for is "let come those that will. give them all the freedoms and all the burdens of being American, and that's what they'll become. The character of our places might change, as they have in the past and as they will again in the future, but they will be no less American as long as they're full of people seeking liberty, justice, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families."
[1] and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
First, you're conflating America's effectiveness in Anglicizing immigrants with absorbing foreign cultures, which has happened surprisingly little. Our national institutions remain quite Anglo, even though there's pockets of different cultures all over the country.
Second, most good things about American culture trace back to its Anglo roots: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/book/Albio.... Legalism, orderliness, disposition towards freedom and free markets, entrepreneurialism, egalitarianism, etc.
Areas where we've seen cultural change have been negative. For example, one thing we've lost is the WASP austerity. I know some older folks from New England who grew up learning that "food is for fuel, not enjoyment." Amazing! It's a downgrade that we lost that!
> and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
No, it's Anglo-American culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tINJhf1Zs1Q&t=618s. The Anglo countries remain incredibly similar to each other culturally and economically despite the U.S. breaking off from England almost 250 years ago. America is different from England in many ways, but in more or less the same ways it was always different from England.
If you want to emigrate to a place that is static then you will quickly find out that you can't, not really. Switzerland has been trying to do this since forever and is failing badly at it, other experiments in the same direction have led to civil wars and ugly offshoots like apartheid. You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
On one hand, this isn't true. At the national level, our laws and institutions are still predominantly Anglo, because all the Dutch, Germans, Irish, and to a lesser extent, Italians and Eastern Europeans, assimilated into that culture. On the other hand, the places where that is the least true, like Chicago and New York City, only underscore my point. Governance in those cities is terrible because much of the political bandwidth is consumed on issues of fairness and redistribution between groups that are at odds with each other instead of building subway lines or cleaning the streets.
> Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it
Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States, instead of doing a massive "git pull" from the cultures that produced India or Mexico. If you worked at Google, would you hire tens of thousands of Kodak or GE lifers en bloc? Of course not.
> You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
If that’s the choice, I’d choose the latter.
But I don’t quite agree with the dichotomy. Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people. If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence. High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
> Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
Putting aside that this reads like a right-wing parody of WEF talking points, do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950? (Or your own homeland of the Netherlands prior to its experiment with mass immigration?)
Ask the native Americans whether or not this isn't true.
> Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States
That culture is built on violence, slavery, racism and oppression. Iterating on it seems to have brought out its worst elements rather than its best elements. Half the country, including you, voted for a caricature of what a decent human being should be like as president. And you are now 200 days into an assault on your economy and freedoms and you still refuse to see what the end game looks like. That culture? The 1950's are not coming back. And that's not a bad thing.
> Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people.
That's just one form of immigration, why stop there? What about refugees? Oh, right, the USA is good at waging war but then ignores the refugees that inevitably are created, that's for the rest of the world. Handy, being a continent sized country an ocean away.
> If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence.
Foreign influence is minimized by limiting the use of money in politics which is an easy avenue into the heart of the political system. Immigrants - as a rule - do not have the vote.
> High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
Small town America is a lot more racist than you think. They didn't so much end up assimilated, they ended up scared to go out of their houses. If you think you are assimilated and that small town America is accepting and nice you should try to live in the places with < 10,000 inhabitants where the White Master Race is the dominant majority. You'll see - very quickly - how they look at you.
Your USA experience is for the most part informed by living in the larger cities. I've spent a lot of time in rural America (~ a year in total) , easy for me to do since I'm white. What people say in private is hair raising, and really opened my eyes to how deeply embedded racism is in the United States.
> do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950?
I don't know about that. But I also don't think that the current political mainstream in the United States cares about orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic elements of the USA unless it benefits the 'in-group' to the exclusion of everybody else.
This whole discussion reminds me of a guy sitting on a branch cutting the live side with a saw while sitting on the dead side. All of those elements that you wish for have been put in place against massive pressure from the people that you support. And they'd love to go back to Massachusetts, 1950. But without you, and your kids. Your wife is - probably - safe. But you can bet that ICE showing up at your door - or your parents, for that matter - at 4 am is going to be very bad news. And they won't care who you voted for either.
As for that 'Dutch Experiment': it isn't limited to the Netherlands, and by and large the Surinam immigrants have disappeared into background noise on account of their relatively low numbers. But when they first came here (just before Surinam became independent) there was a lot of outcry about this. Now, so many years later there is still a fairly large number of people that identify as such here, most of them live in the three big cities, because of small town racism.
The predominantly Turkish and Moroccan immigrants have set up their own regional presence, some of them have held very strongly to their original identity and stepping into their homes is like stepping into a time/space displacement machine. But they - as a rule - are friendly, incredibly hard working and because they value family a lot more than the original inhabitants and their offspring tend to do, have a fantastic social network around them. Again, due to racism and very overt discrimination their kids have - for some fraction anyway - grown up frustrated. They see all this wealth around them and the skin color based ceiling is so strong that only very few of them manage to break through. The end result of this is that a fraction of them rather than being 'kept in their place' by the whites here - who think these people will never be successful and who deserve to work in crap jobs no matter how intelligent or capable they are. It will take many generations until this has reduced, but there is some - very slow - progress over time. I see more and more people with such backgrounds in positions of influence and some power and wealth and they are the beacons that the next generation will hopefully set course by. It will take many more decades until they are no longer pushed down as a group, and, unfortunately, they are not usually helping and neither are their parents. Intermarriage is rare, which would be one way to reduce the barriers between the various groups.
Romanians, Poles and other people from Eastern Europe have moved here in fairly large numbers. As a rule they are doing fine, even though the newspapers love to magnify the few cases where they are involved in legal or traffic issues.
Syrians and other refugees have not integrated well at all. They have been here only a very short time and are slowly displacing the older immigrant groups for the lowest income jobs. I've had very little interaction with them. But the various asylum seeker places that are dotted across the country are best compared with open air prisons where our bureaucratic engine driven by overt hatred tries to discourage them from staying here. There are far better ways of dealing with this but unfortunately my vote is only just as heavy as that of the racists. It will be decades more before these people too have made this place our home.
Ukrainians, who are here in surprisingly large numbers have integrated in record time. They have learned the language and have assimilated very quickly, to the point that you have to have an ear for it to spot them. They are everywhere and they seem to love it here. It helps that their culture and ours was already closely parallel, besides the Orthodox Church component which quite a few still formally subscribe to (religion, in NL, was on the way out until immigrants brought it back).
This isn't to say that racism doesn't exist, but it's not nearly as big as most make it out to be, and there's far more anti-white hate than there is white racism today. White racism is absolutely outcast as a rule today and the typical Republican wants and has nothing to do with it.
I'm guessing you aren't... people have to draw lines somewhere on this. There's a difference between restricting by age, making available to all and actually assigning material to children. Not all materials are appropriate for elementary school libraries. And I'm not even talking about The Color Purple specifically.
Also, none of this stops a parent from buying a book for their children they feel is appropriate for their child.
I think the law that the judge is ruling on here does not effect a ban of penthouse or similar material in elementary schools. The preexisting laws already had that kind of material banned in elementary schools.
Not everyone agrees as to where the line is for "common sense" and will definitely push boundaries beyond what a community would generally agree to. Laws at a higher level are just "common sense" codified.
Not all mountain out of molehill arguments need to be engaged with I think is the broader lesson we need for our times.
But I'm not able to square that with what you said about ethnic identity.
Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”
Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't look into the details. But it appeared to be a ban to me.
If all they did was say: "these are the books that must be made available at school libraries"
That would be very different, and we wouldn't be talking about a ban.
But if they specifically targeted certain books (who might have not even been at all the school libraries to begin with), and said here are the books that are not allowed to be made available... I mean, that's called a ban.
I support your desire to make sure your kids feel at home and are able to, like everyone else, consider themselves American. I'm from an immigrant family, and it bothers me when people ask "what am I", I'm American, and they're always like... Come on! What are you really? And it's like, dude, you're also 'not really" American, you're German, you're British, etc. Except we're all really American, born and raised.
So I'm with you on that point, and the "born and raise" part, yes it means you should be raised the same as well, raised American.
Where I'll have to disagree with you, is that the books made available and the school curriculum isn't about any of this. It should focus on education, kids shouldn't be dumb, they need to learn history and it's effects, they should engage with hard topics and real problems, they should be exposed to well reasoned and intelligent diverse opinions from all sides, etc. You don't achieve that by selectively banning books whose narrative you personally don't like.
If you came at me complaining that the current selection of books and curriculum goes against that, that it's pigeonholing kids into "brown" and "not brown", and so on, I'd be like, damn right that's a problem, and I'd put forward the same argument I'm making now for why it's an issue that needs addressed.
But like I said, banning books just feels like pigeonholing and propaganda the same that you're trying to avoid just someone else's agenda.
While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?
Do you really believe history books are immune from book bans? Historically speaking, they’re usually first against the wall.
I wonder what PragerU has to say about it.
I can't find a single exit poll that says Trump won over 40% of the Asian American vote.
> I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They're only saying that on the narrow topic of racism, Trump and many (though certainly not all) of his supporters will treat your daughter differently than they do a random light-skinned Appalachian.
Your point about hypothetical racist Trump supporters is wrong for two different reasons. First, I’ve been to Appalachia, and my wife is from rural Oregon, and nobody has ever treated me differently. My brother in law (part black, part Samoan, looks like the Rock) went to a Trump rally and Marjorie Taylor Green came to him to introduce herself. In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Second, building a “brown people” identity around the possibility that someone will occasionally treat you differently is bizarre. I don’t claim that my experience as a brown guy (who has spent a lot of time in the rural south and rural west coast) is universal. But if my family and I haven’t noticed it, that suggests a ceiling on how pervasive it could be. It’s positively grotesque to encourage kids to construct an identity that doesn’t reflect them as individuals, because someone, somewhere, might occasionally treat them differently based on skin color.
For you there wasn't, and like you said earlier, there's no representative "brown person" experience. I have first-hand experience that's the definitely included an aftermath, one person stopped wearing hijab after being taunted, another started going by "Mo", and yet another - who's not even muslim - started dyeing her hair a color much lighter that its natural color to better pass as white.
It's great that you haven't experienced racial discrimination. This hasn't been the experience of people applying for housing at Trump properties.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117470/documents/...
> In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Explain to me how putting up Confederate monuments is so we don't "erase history" but removing historical notes about Native Americans, not mentioning a holiday celebrating freedom for all Americans except to disparage it, and removing information about Trump's impeachment is not. I'd like to understand any other explanation than that Trump and his supporters don't see Native Americans or black Americans as "real" Americans, which is what people mean when they use the word "dehumanizing." Is there any other way to explain it than by using skin color? That is why "white liberals" (why are you bringing their skin color into it) bring it up — the only reasonable explanation involves skin color. Nobody in this thread is suggesting that anybody build an identity around it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-restoring-confederate-nam...
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/5444429-racist-monu...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/juneteenth-trump-too-many-non-w...
https://www.kqed.org/news/12049405/muir-woods-national-monum...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/11/smit...
That means it could be 50%. “Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting. Pew isn’t an exit poll, it uses massive surveys. That’s consistent with other data points. Blue Rose Research found that Trump probably narrowly won naturalized citizens: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
Another data point: lots of majority asian precincts in new york and new jersey flipped to Trump. Trump outright won Flushing, Queens. Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
And it could be 30, but you said for sure it is over 40.
> "Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting.
That's why all of them also do phone interviews, and that's how they're consistent with each other.
> Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
We're talking about Asians. They are not even close to comprising most naturalized citizens.
> Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
35 is less than 40.
How did he do with African Americans?