Gratitude for America Is the Antidote to Wokeness

Michael Thomas Jones

Zeal for America is uncool. It goes without saying that expressing zeal for white America is uncouth, even taboo. Growing up, I always inferred from pop culture that patriotism was to be treated skeptically. To Gen Xers and millennials, patriotic sentiment has long carried with it the dubious aroma of Bush-era desert warfare, of big rigs and big guns, of unwashed fundamentalists. One thinks of Borat at the rodeo, taunting an audience full of cowboys who want to kill terrorists.

In recent years, that culture of skepticism has given way to more extreme animosity in the public square. In progressive thinking, if whites have been the source of inequality from the colonial era until to the present, then showing affection for white Americans is an expression of imperialism. White Americans were plantation owners and woman-subjugating zealots back then, and today they reappear in a new mask under new labels as Trumpists or Christian nationalists.

In this view, the only America that can be embraced is the America of the future, one that has achieved full economic and racial equality. One where the regressive white Christian vote has finally been neutralized - in other words, a communist future. The effects of this movement are still rippling through our economy and will continue to define the culture war for a generation.

During the second Trump presidency, many have begun to disavow woke excesses. Still, to openly appreciate white American culture strikes most people as inherently racist. Many would rather proclaim their love for Western civilization, European philosophy, or ancient church traditions. Why can’t we simply appreciate the dominant ways of life passed down on this continent by mostly Protestant Christians of British and German origin? Those cultural habits and genealogies have intertwined over the centuries, linking the first colonists to our families today. In other words, I’m grateful that my great-grandparents were who they were, despite all their flaws.

A healthy appreciation for white Americans is the most basic antidote to communism in our time. That’s not to fetishize whites as somehow genetically pure or morally spotless - there are numerous dilemmas we have inherited from American history. The human heart is wicked, individually and collectively. People sin! The varied cultural legacy of whites must be examined according to the standard set by Christ in the Scriptures. It’s possible to want an ethnic group to be more righteous but still like them. We should not tolerate claims that white America should be abolished.

As such, we do need to thoroughly reform the organizations that have taught us to reflexively belittle and problematize white culture or claim that it doesn’t exist. A culture in which a majority of people possess the characteristics described in the notorious Smithsonian infographic is one of the most precious inheritances in the world. We should honor it in the public square.

Unfortunately, we are in the midst of living among a generation that has been conditioned to reflexively disparage white culture, even when it’s doing so is of no obvious benefit to them.

Consider the case of Francesca Hong, the one-time socialist candidate for governor of Wisconsin. Old tweets were recently unearthed in which she wrote that she hates Thanksgiving and that old white people put her on edge.

Hong’s words:

“I ate two bites of my kid’s cheeseburger at a Culver’s in black river falls and told him they ran out of ice cream. Mostly just wanted to leave bc I was on the verge of an anxiety attack...to [sic] many old white people who didn’t think we spoke English”

And:

“Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it.”

These should be career-ending statements. This is the opposite of zeal for Americans. It’s an open distaste for 80% of Wisconsin’s white population.

According to her tweet, the Puritan colony of 1621 represents something inherently unclean, to be defined by how it brought disease to “Indegenous Folx,” an ambiguous collective who apparently represent the true country’s authentic non-white and non-cisheteropatriarchal origins, to whose way of life we ought to return. To someone like Ms. Hong, that is the true America, and the living, breathing 4.5 million white people in Wisconsin are a withering inconvenience.

When she says we should stop celebrating colonialism, she’s saying that we should not celebrate white people arriving on this continent.

Of course, Ms. Hong, in all likelihood, doesn’t despise all white people. (In fact, it seems that she married one.) The bigger problem is that she now has the gall to campaign to govern a people for whom she has no obvious respect. The state of Wisconsin is one giant Culver’s full of old white people. If their very presence gives her anxiety, why does she think she’s worthy of governing them?

In other words, she’s not very thankful.

We simply cannot keep tolerating this sort of casual anti-white, anti-American sentiment that has become commonplace over the past decade.

Helen Andrews writes in Compact about the racial crossroads facing America. We are soon approaching a tipping point where the majority of people in the United States will no longer feel any personal loyalty to historic American culture, and, in fact, many of these newcomers, like Francesca Hong, are encouraged to casually express antipathy toward legacy Americans and to advance a communist political platform that would expropriate their goods and property. The thought being: they are white people, after all. They couldn’t have earned what they have!

Of course, I didn’t earn my own freedom and opportunities. It was an inheritance. It was a gift from my forefathers. I honor them and don’t want their gift taken away, if I can help it.

This white culture is aging out and slipping away from us. (Or these cultures, if you want to be more precise.) Cultures don’t happen automatically; they had to be cultivated over centuries through lawgiving, wars lost and won, lifetimes of work and leisure, Christian teaching argued over again and again, and different families traveling across the earth and sea in hope of abundance. We cannot expect all of the benefits of this legacy to continue indefinitely without the legacy itself being nurtured and appreciated.

The answer to wokeness is not white pride, but white thankfulness. I’m thankful for the cultural inheritance I’ve received from my white American Protestant ancestors, and I hope to perpetuate and sanctify it. That’s meant with no disrespect to Black Americans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, or Koreans - those are just simply distinct patrimonies from my own.

If communists go unchecked, they will dispossess us. They will abolish the American way of life, marginalizing whites as second-class citizens and scapegoating us as acceptable targets of scorn for ancestral sins. But I fear that our ingratitude and apathy have grown so great that many will merely shrug as we continue to be disinherited.

Michael Thomas Jones works in alternative education in northern Idaho.