Jon of the Rice on The Batman

I like Jon reasonably well. And the main point he makes here is true. 

However, it's a bit funny to hear a Fake American who's Hispanic-ness is the core of his identity (not his American-ness) say over and over again "You have to go back". While he talks about white identity in this video, he doesn't himself share it.

I think that like many good Fake Americans, he buys into the proposition nation myth of America, and refuses to see (or at least admit) the whole reason he was welcomed here and wanted to be here in the first place was because America was built by an overwhelmingly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant population; so overwhelming that anyone else who added a bit of spice to America was just that; nothing more than a bit of spice. The WASP culture, language, religion, and way of life was able to overwhelm entirely anyone else that merged with the population until the Ellis Island wave at least. And even then, it wasn't until a few years after Reagan's amnesty started to bear fruit that it really finally broke. But ironically the WASP people are just about the only people in the world who would have welcomed hordes of Fake Americans and treated them like family.

The black population is different, as it always existed rather awkwardly as a parallel nation within the same (sort of) space as the actual American nation and never came close to being mistaken for similar in either phenotype or behavior. But if Jon takes his argument to its logical conclusion: most likely he has to go back too. Maybe he'd still be welcomed to stay, because he's been a pretty good ally. But he's still a Fake American at the end of the day, and his actions only indirectly benefit Americans, because what he really wants to do is preserve America so that his Hispanic amigos can take advantage of it. Or at least him himself and his family.

My Fake American great grandfather (yes, I'm 1/8 Fake American and 7/8s True American) had a very different sensibility. While he was born in America to Portuguese immigrant parents, he was keenly aware of his status, and didn't try to pretend that he could be both Portuguese and American at the same time. In fact, when he moved from his original hometown, he didn't even tell people he was Portuguese, he told people that his last name was French, because it sounded less foreign, and everyone pretty much knew that French names had always been in America because of the Normans, a few Huguenot refugees from the Colonial period, and the Acadians that got merged after the Louisiana Purchase. His actual Portuguese ancestry wasn't discovered until two generations later when my uncle, as an adult, spent some time in Brazil and recognized the names in the old family Bible family tree for what they were. By this time great grandpa Henriques had been dead for many years already. My great grandmother (a Scots-Irish Galloway, so pretty iconic American stock) went to her grave refusing to believe that her husband had been Portuguese, and she got pretty animated about it, in fact.

My great grandfather is an interesting case study in assimilation. Actually, my entire family is, as my other great grandparents, my grandfather's family (as opposed to my half Portuguese grandmother) are an interesting case study of assimilation of another kind. Despite living for more than three generations on the West Coast, they remained stubbornly unassimilated Southerners, who practiced Southern culture and Southern values. Not Gone with the Wind Southern values; more like Dukes of Hazzard Southern values. When my father finally moved back to the South (or at least to Texas, which was primarily settled by Southerners) he was amazed to find himself culturally at home, and that what he had previously believed, that his family were just unusual iconoclasts, wasn't really true. Rather, they were simply strangers in a strange land; foreigners, if you will, practicing a foreign way of life in another region of the US than the one that they belonged to. (My mother's people were all pretty iconic Rocky Mountain states rural people. While not exactly the same as Southerners, they're similar enough that they tend to get along pretty well. I feel equally at home in the South and in the Rocky Mountain West. My cousins on that side are ones that I relate to pretty well. And I like the scenery and the climate of the West better than the hot and humid South.)

Jon, I think, wants to have his cake and eat it too. My great grandfather did his best to assimilate, but was still keenly aware that he was always going to be a Fake American. But he abandoned his prior identity. He intermarried with an American girl and raised his children as Americans. It wasn't even until two generations later that his 1/4 Portuguese grandchildren discovered that he'd been Portuguese at all, which is probably going too far. For me, and even more for my kids, it's merely an interesting conversation piece. My son once asked me what that one ancestor was again: Puertorican or something? Jon, on the other hand, doesn't appear to want to assimilate. He wants to revel in being Hispanic, while being in America. His website splashes in gigantic letters that he's the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction. He's all Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic all the time. In the past, we've mostly allowed people to do that, and didn't give them much if any grief about it. But the over-reach of every other minority—including tens of millions of entitled, demanding Hispanics—will certainly be the undoing of that paradigm. America will fall apart. I'm not sure how much of it will remain America vs. being ceded to invading conquerors that we've foolishly welcomed to come in. Either way, in True America, if it survives, people won't parade around their minority status anymore, because it will be remembered as the trigger that made our entire way of life fall apart. They'll prudently minimize or even hide it, if they can; change their names, etc. Like they used to, curiously, when they didn't even have to. In the past, immigrants wanted to assimilate. They wanted to be Americans. They didn't want to hold on too tightly to identities that they'd deliberately left behind. In Fake America, most likely, Americans won't be very prevalent at all, and they might still remain a focus for resentment and bitterness for people from failed Third World cultures who envy and covet what Americans built for themselves and then fecklessly threw away. Either way, there won't be room for Jon's vision of America in either True America or Fake America either one. And if Jon is allowed to stay among the True Americans, he'll probably change his name and be glad that he can physically pass for a white guy and doesn't have an accent.

UPDATE: Here's another video that gets it and describes the problems with this movie pretty well. I've had my own complaints about the movie here, but I haven't really dug into it other than to mention the wokeness. To be honest, that wasn't my initial strong impression of the movie, even though that's what I mentioned most. But I didn't really love it. However, in the time since I first watched it, the problems have risen in my consciousness until that's all I can see. That often happens to me with movies. Other than absolutely terrible movies, I usually enjoy them well enough when I first see them, because I'm not really thinking too hard about them. Mediocre movies that I don't really think about after I see them often get a pass at me ever even paying attention to their flaws, because I don't bother thinking about them at all, and forget them soon after watching. This means that if something reminds me of them, I might actually remember them more fondly than they deserve. However, movies that have enough substance of some kind will make me think about them more, and then I will often notice things that I otherwise might wish not to. It can make good movies turn sour on me as I see the subtext more clearly.

Here is Midnight's Edge, explaining how the subtext which I also started to notice after seeing it, has made me gradually start to hate the movie and get pissed off about it.