A COUNTRY, NOT A NATION:

[R]ecent disputes are indicative of how a certain cross-section of the American population has come to experience certain language, cultural artifacts, and narrative(s) of the past as resulting in an account of their political community -- of its history, character, and identity -- within which they struggle to locate or recognise themselves. In other words, I want to suggest that much of the uproar about CRT emerges from a group of people who feel as though they no longer belong to their political communities. On the largest scale, this expresses itself as a concern about belonging to the nation itself.

Belonging is, of course, a slippery concept, but it is critical for understanding politics. What I mean by "belonging" is the ability of persons to see themselves as constitutive members and legitimate expressions of their political community, as parts of that larger whole -- especially in the telling of its past, present, and future. The painful yet unsurprising irony is that the anti-CRT fervour has emerged precisely in response to the telling of US history that better includes persons who have long been kept from belonging.

Political belonging is not only about race, but it often is. Vociferous campaigns against "Critical Race Theory" certainly are. Anxiety about race and belonging can take on an especially violent form -- as we have seen in the so-called "replacement theories" espoused by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia (who notoriously chanted "You will not replace us!") and, apparently, by the gunman in Buffalo, New York.

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