Does “Whiteness” Exist? Is there an American Breed? By J. D. Hall

Every culture and people-group on Earth is allowed to exist... except for this one. But we do exist. And we are important.

Anyone visiting a foreign country can spot Americans in airports before they say a word. We walk differently, speak differently, and carry ourselves like we own whatever room we're in. That's not arrogance, it's just breed recognition. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims "whiteness is imaginary," but White Americans are as real and distinct as Kentucky Thoroughbreds, forged by specific conditions into something the world instantly recognizes. When they deny our existence, they're not making an argument—they're attempting cultural assassination.

There is a magnificent audacity in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent pronouncement that "whiteness is an imaginary thing." Speaking from the gilded halls of the Munich Security Conference on February 15th, she delivered this cultural erasure in direct response to Vice President JD Vance's keynote address, emphasising shared Western values and civilisation. Where Vance had spoken of the common inheritance that binds Western nations together, AOC countered with the casual confidence of someone who has never been required to defend the existence of her own heritage against the fashionable nihilism of the age.

Her words carry the weight of contradiction, heavy with the kind of selective blindness that has become the signature of progressive orthodoxy. In 2018, speaking to The Cut, she insisted with equal certainty that "there's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second." The logic is as clear as it is cynical: race cannot be separated from class when we're talking about black or brown people, but whiteness can be dismissed as mere phantasm.

This is the double-standard of our moment: the same voices that demand recognition for every conceivable identity group simultaneously insist that one identity, and one alone, has no right to exist. They speak of diversity while practicing erasure, of inclusion while engineering exclusion, of justice while denying the basic dignity of acknowledgment of white people.

But whiteness is not imaginary. White Americans are not a fiction. And the cultural signature we have pressed into the clay of this continent is as real and recognizable as any breed that has ever walked the earth.

I saw a commenter on a video of AOC claiming there's no such thing as "whiteness" who claimed, "American whites are muts." His point was that because Americans come from all over the world - or even more narrowly, from all over Europe - then we are, for all intents and purposes, mutts

THE DISCOMFORT OF DISTINCTION

The word "breed" makes people uncomfortable, as if the very suggestion of cultural distinctiveness somehow violates the egalitarian sensibilities of our sanitized age. But breeds are not about superiority; they are about recognition. They are about the accumulated weight of shared heritage, the visible residue of common struggle, the unmistakable signature that emerges when a people are shaped by the same soil, the same trials, the same transcendent aspirations.

Consider the Kentucky Thoroughbred. They are the aristocrat of the equine world, the crown jewels of horse breeds, the standard by which all others are measured. Its bloodlines trace back more than two centuries to the marriage of Arabian stallions from the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Barb horses from the coastal plains of Morocco and Algeria, and Turkoman mounts from the windswept steppes of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Three distinct bloodlines from three different continents, brought together by English breeders who crossed them with their native mares.

And yet (and here is the crucial point) the Kentucky Thoroughbred could only have been created in Kentucky. It could not have been bred in the Arabian Peninsula, where its ancestors galloped. It could not have been bred in the North African highlands where the Barbs once roamed. It could not have been bred in the Central Asian plains where the Turkoman horses ran wild. It required the limestone-rich soil of the Bluegrass State to provide the calcium that builds its legendary bone density. It needed the rolling pastures, perfect for conditioning their powerful frames. It demanded the concentration of breeding farms and the accumulated expertise of generations of horsemen who understood not just bloodlines, but the alchemy of place and purpose.

Today, the richest men on earth (Saudi sheiks and Emirati princes) pay millions of dollars to import these horses back to the lands where their ancestors originated. The irony is as rich as the purchasers. They are buying back their own bloodlines, transformed and perfected by Kentucky soil and Kentucky expertise into something that never existed in the original homelands. They are purchasing not just horses, but the recognition of a breed (a distinct, identifiable, valuable type that emerged from the marriage of disparate bloodlines in a specific place under specific conditions).

No one would dare call a Kentucky Thoroughbred a "mutt" simply because its ancestors came from different continents. The very suggestion would be met with laughter from anyone who understands the difference between intentional breeding and random mixing, between the careful cultivation of excellence and the haphazard accidents of circumstance. The Thoroughbred is recognized, celebrated, and coveted precisely because it represents the successful fusion of the best qualities from complementary bloodlines, refined and perfected in the unique conditions that only Kentucky could provide.

THE AMERICAN BREED

The American (and more specifically, the White American) is no different. We are a recognizable type, as distinct and identifiable as any breed that has ever emerged from the careful marriage of bloodlines and environment. Drop an American into a crowded terminal at Frankfurt International Airport, and you will spot him before he speaks a word. Watch him in the streets of Rome, shoulders squared, stride unhurried, head up, scanning and vigilant, as if looking for an enemy to come over the horizon. Europeans always notice Americans have a way of leaning against walls, as though we own it, or by our strength, we're holding the building up.

Ask anyone who has travelled extensively, and they will confirm what the rest of the world already knows: Americans carry themselves differently. We occupy space differently. We speak differently (not just in accent or vocabulary, but in volume, cadence, and the fundamental assumption that our voices deserve to be heard). Our English is rhotic, meaning we actually pronounce our Rs, unlike the British who abandoned them as a mark of aristocratic refinement in the 1800s. But we sacrificed being refined, opting for instead, being raw, and we use what they call "hard Rs" to pronounce words like "freedom," "frontier," "sovereign," and "retard" (words that roll off our tongues with the unapologetic clarity of a people who never learned to soften their consonants for anyone's comfort).

We speak more loudly than other cultures, to symbolically show we are, in fact, the most important people in any room. Our handshake is firm, not tentative; we don't shake hands like a dead fish or with limp wrists. We look people in the eye and expect the same in return to assert our own equality. We stand straight. We speak plainly. We do not apologize excessively in every social interaction (looking at you, Canadians) because we have little to apologize for. There are two types of European nations: those whom we have defeated, and those whom we have saved in battle. So you'll pick up on not an ounce of inferiority complex.

In more than one hundred and ninety countries on earth, you can drop an American into a public square and within minutes someone will say, "You're American, aren't you?" Not because of a passport. Because of posture. Because of cadence. Because of a cultural signature that refuses to dissolve. That is not an accident. It is an inheritance. It's because of breeding. We are the product of frontier stubbornness, Protestant work ethic, industrial ambition, agrarian friendliness, Christian hospitality, and constitutional audacity. We are recognized by these very things. And a people that can be recognized is a people that have become a breed.

There are nations that have blurred into anonymity, whose borders remain but whose character has dissolved. That is not America. We are loud enough to be heard, confident enough to be seen, and distinct enough to be named on sight. Even our critics know exactly who we are. They mock the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we carry ourselves, but mockery is a backhanded tribute to visibility. You cannot parody what you cannot identify. And that is why sovereignty matters. Because this country is not a blank administrative zone for foreign governments to organize influence operations inside. It is not a neutral testing ground for media wars declared from overseas podiums. It is a nation with a spine, with a culture, with a recognizable face.

Our breed's distinctness is not arrogance; it's cultural continuity. It is the visible residue of shared history, shared struggle, shared ideals hammered into law and defended in blood. The White European settlers who crossed the Atlantic and beat their knuckles against this continent carried centuries of accumulated civilization in their luggage. And when it arrived in the New World, it aged and fermented and was distilled like Tennessee Whiskey and aged like Kentucky bourbon into something that became a uniquely White American. The Reformation's bone-deep suspicion of concentrated authority. The Common Law's insistence that the crown kneels to principle rather than the other way around. A craftsman's relationship to work as something dignified rather than merely transactional. A farmer's understanding of land as something you tend, so that it tends to you. These were not random cultural accessories. They were the load-bearing architecture of the burgeoning new breed of White American.

When these inherited wisdoms arrived in the New World, they encountered a continent that would either kill the weak or forge the strong into something unprecedented. The American frontier was not a gentle teacher. It stripped away the European refinements that were merely ornamental and pressure-treated what remained until only the essential survived. What emerged from this crucible was not a pale imitation of European civilization, but something entirely new: the breed of White American.

And just like the Kentucky Thoroughbred, whose ancestors hailed from a dozen different countries on multiple continents, and only after a trans-Atlantic journey could have been made in rolling hills of Kentucky, there is nowhere else the White American could have become a breed except on the North American continent. We would not have developed in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where they studied their philosophy. We could never have appeared in the cathedrals of Canterbury, where they refined their theology. We required this soil, this climate, this particular combination of abundance and adversity, of opportunity and obstacle, of freedom and responsibility that exists nowhere else on earth.

It is where God saw fit to create us. This soil is where He planted us, and watered by the blood and sweat of our ancestors - and by blood and soil - our breed sprang forth from the ground..and have become, by all accounts, one of the greatest breeds and bloodlines ever known in the history of man.

Just as the limestone water of Kentucky creates stronger bones in horses, the particular minerals of American liberty created something in us that cannot be replicated elsewhere. We are recognizable not just by our swagger, but by our productivity.

We built cities where there were forests and highways where there were prairies. We put our footprints on the moon and our franchises on every continent. We exported blue jeans, ranch dressing, and rock and roll. We invented the blockbuster, the assembly line, the aircraft carrier, and the pickup truck. You can criticize us. The world often does. But it recognizes us. Instantly. They recognize our breed; White American.

Because we are not a random collection of individuals who happened to wash up on the same shores. We are a breed. A distinct type. A people shaped by shared trials into a recognizable form, carrying the unmistakable signature of its origins.

THE PROGRESSIVE PROJECT OF DENIAL

This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow travellers cannot abide: the stubborn persistence of American distinctiveness in the face of their relentless campaign to flatten culture. They demand that every identity be celebrated except the one that built the civilization they now inhabit. They insist that every heritage be preserved except the one that created the prosperity they now redistribute. They require that every culture be recognized except the one that established the freedoms they now exploit to deny its very existence.

The progressive left understands this truth, even as they work tirelessly to obscure it. Their entire political project depends upon the fiction that America is nothing more than a geographical expression, a blank canvas upon which any people can paint any culture and expect the same results. They need us to believe that our distinctiveness is an illusion because our reality threatens their most cherished delusion: that all peoples are interchangeable, that all cultures are equivalent, that the particular combination of traits that built American civilization could have emerged anywhere, from anyone, under any circumstances.

But this is manifestly false, as any honest assessment of human history will demonstrate. Civilizations are not accidental. They are the product of particular peoples operating under particular conditions, guided by particular beliefs, and shaped by particular struggles. The Greece that gave us philosophy was not interchangeable with any other collection of tribes that happened to live near the Mediterranean. The England that developed the Common Law was not replaceable by any other island nation that happened to sit off the coast of Europe. The America that sent men to the moon was not reproducible by any other people who happened to inherit a continent rich in natural resources.

What we accomplished here required us (specifically us). It required the marriage of Protestant theology and Enlightenment philosophy that taught us to distrust concentrated power while embracing individual responsibility. It required the frontier experience that stripped away European class consciousness and replaced it with meritocratic pragmatism. It required the particular blend of ethnic traditions (Germanic thoroughness, Celtic stubbornness, English legalism, Scandinavian egalitarianism) that fused under American conditions into something unprecedented in human history.

This is not ethnic chauvinism; it is historical realism. The American experiment succeeded not because this continent possessed magical soil, but because it was settled by a people whose cultural inheritance equipped them to build a civilization based on ordered liberty. Other peoples, with other inheritances, might have built different civilizations (perhaps even great ones) but they would not have built this one. They would not have created a system of government designed to check its own power. They would not have developed an economy that rewards innovation over ancestry. They would not have fostered a culture that simultaneously celebrates individual achievement and communal responsibility.

Most importantly, they would not have produced the distinctive American character that the rest of the world recognizes and (whether they admit it or not) depends upon. When natural disasters strike, the world looks to American generosity. When tyrants threaten, the world counts on American strength. When diseases ravage, the world relies on American innovation. When economic crises loom, the world trusts in American resilience. This is not because we possess superior souls, but because we possess a superior culture (one that emerged from the specific marriage of European inheritance and American experience that could have happened nowhere else and among no other people).

https://insighttoincite.substack.com/p/does-whiteness-exist-is-there-an