African Americans Are the Most American to Us

Key Insights:

* Nearly all successful political movements over the past 150 years have been strongly nationalistic

* A successful cosmopolitanism must therefore be a nationalistic cosmopolitanism—one that says your country is great because it learns from and has important things to teach other nations.

* We—somewhat surprisingly—find ourselves endorsing and agreeing with Matthew Desmond’s claim that an important root of some facets of American capitalism is found on the plantation.

* We endorse Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton’s calls for reparations,

* We enthusiastically and positively give a shout-out to the highly patriotic Nikole Hannah Jones and her contention that the 1619 founding makes African-Americans the most quintessential representatives of the good side of American nationalism

* You cannot be a real patriot if you do not care about dealing with your country’s flaws—Carl Shurz: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right!”

* Wokeness is 21st century Puritan Protestantism—to build a City Upon a Hill and become a Light Unto the Nations, with a key part of that building composed of our confession that we are the unworthy who must place our hearts on the altar of and tremble before the Almighty .

* It is important to mean it: to repent, to take responsibility, to not just say that America owes reparations, but to work to make America pay what it owes.

* This podcast appears to be our version of: Three strongly patriotic white guys stand up for ‘Murka!

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Ed Baptist: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Half_Has_Never_Been_Told/dSrXCwAAQBAJ>

* Trevor Burnard: Edward Baptist, Slavery and Capitalism <http://trevorburnard.com/wordpress/?p=30>Matthew Desmond: In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html>

* John J. Clegg: Capitalism and Slavery <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683036>

* Nikole Hannah Jones: Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html>

* P.R. Lockhart & Ed Baptist: How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business <https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-economy-capitalism-violence-cotton-edward-baptist>

* Alan L. Olmstead & Paul W. Rhode: Cotton, Slavery, & the New History of Capitalism <https://web.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-economics-studies/olmstead_-_cotton_slavery_and_history_of_new_capitalism_131_nhc_28_sept_2016.pdf>

* Ernst Renan: What Is a Nation? <https://web.archive.org/web/20110827065548/http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/core/hss3/e_renan.html>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>