The Homeland Worth Defending
ICE wants you to guard the gate. I want you to find the door back to your own story.
DEFEND THE HOMELAND
They’ve printed the words in block capitals.
Behind them, a composite image — a young officer in dark glasses, a flag caught mid-wave, an outline of the border sketched in jagged black. Below, the promise: Up to $50,000 signing bonus.
It’s a job posting, yes. But look longer and it’s something else entirely: a casting call for a culture war. The role on offer isn’t just employment; it’s identity. Put on the uniform, and you are no longer unmoored, no longer one more rural American whose factory closed or whose main street feels foreign. You are the defender. You belong.
This is what I mean by culture-war conscription — the offer of belonging through exclusion. In the ICE campaign’s framing, the way to recover your place in the story of America is to remove those who, by definition, don’t belong in it. That definition is not new. The Constitution’s original “We the People” was already an edited cast list: landholding men at the center, Indigenous nations outside the frame, enslaved Africans counted but not recognized, women invisible in the script. The Federalist project wasn’t simply about efficient governance — it was about securing the political order for those already holding the levers, insulating wealth and whiteness from the full claims of democracy.
That logic — belonging as a prize of exclusion — has been repackaged in every era. In the 19th century, it was Chinese exclusion and the closing of immigration gates to southern and eastern Europeans; in the 20th, it was the internment of Japanese Americans and the “national origins” quotas that kept the population’s ethnic composition in check. And now, in the 21st, it is the image of a uniformed border guard as a ticket back into a story that has always been told in a narrow voice.
America is for Americans and Americans only!
Cried Stephen Miller.
The ICE poster doesn’t just invite you to enforce the border; it invites you to stand in the place of the original gatekeepers. It tells you there is a fixed America, and that your role is to hold the door against those whose absence makes room for you. It trades in an old currency: fear that the America you’ve been told is yours is fragile, that it could be taken from you if you are not vigilant. But this is a manufactured fear — one that has been with us since the ink dried on the Constitution. It is unjustified not only because it caricatures the people it targets, but because it robs European Americans twice over: first by stripping away the ethnic traditions that once rooted their belonging, and then by chaining patriotism to protectionism, making the recovery of any richer ancestral past seem like a threat to national strength.
Whiteness as Alienation
Whiteness was never a culture. It was a deal. In exchange for proximity to power, you agreed to trade in the particularities of your ancestry — the language your grandmother spoke when she didn’t want the children to understand, the songs that belonged to feast days, the foods your great-grandfather learned to make because they reminded him of home. You learned to call these things quaint or old-fashioned; to set them aside in favor of a uniform Americanism that felt modern, forward, neutral.
The bargain was clear enough: if you were willing to pass under the broad, colorless banner of “white,” you would be protected from the exclusions and humiliations aimed at others. And it worked — if the goal was safety from persecution. But the safety came at a cost: it loosened your hold on the things that make belonging more than a slogan. Americans may become infatuated with DNA ancestry tests or detour to drive past the old greenhouses their immigrant grandparents built, but these glimpses are framed as quaint family lore, not living inheritance. The dinner tables in those first-generation homes, the songs sung without translation, the games played in the street — these are treated as artifacts, happily left in the past rather than adapted into the present. The voices of our ancestors are not meant to dwell only in memory. They are the strength to show acceptance today because many were expelled from their homelands then.
In the modern American context of European descent, a family’s immigrant origins are remembered fondly as proof of industriousness, even moral worth, but rarely as an ongoing reclamation project. Few open their eyes to the work of adapting those traditions into modern life. The void left by this failure is easily filled with imported wellness trends, commercialized “cultural” experiences, and, yes, isolationism. Yoga and meditation become a stand-in for the cultural and meaning-making practices from the Old World that were abandoned to seek security in a new land.
Our modern striving for meaning, so I claim, is an attempt to fill a void that we left behind with our origin stories.
Too often, the origin story becomes less a source of living practice and more a claim of entitlement: proof of one’s right to a place in white America, rather than a call to examine what was surrendered to gain it.
Fear as Recruitment Fuel
When the inheritance you carry is mostly a story about people who worked hard to “make it” in America — rather than a set of practices, customs, and obligations that still shape your days — belonging becomes something abstract. It can be draped over your shoulders in the form of a flag — an emblem of the same legislated identity and power structure that has always defined who counts as American — just as easily as it can be worn in the colors of your grandparents’ homeland. But in the American mainstream, those heritage symbols are often hollowed out into fashion choices or game-day costumes, stripped of the language, rituals, and obligations that once gave them weight. A soccer jersey without the community that raised it is no more a living tradition than the flag is a neutral emblem. Both can serve as surface-level belonging; neither, in that form, resists the flattening power of a forced “America” that makes no room for actual multiculturalism.
When American hubris and boisterous threats of annexation were levied against our neighbors to the north, I bought a hat with a Canadian oak leaf from a Canada-owned shop.
Is that support?
Resistance?
Merely a performative act?
What about my ball cap with the Star of David embroidered on the front from the New York school’s ballclub, the Hebrew Orphan Society—the hat I stopped wearing for fear of representation and misrepresentation.
This is what we mean when we wonder what cultural paraphernalia resist flattening under dominant American, Christian nationalist culture.
I was reminded of this tension recently when TikTok “went dark” and then reappeared with a strange, almost propagandist-sounding thank-you message to Donald Trump. During the brief blackout, something unusual happened: users around the world began seeing more American-created content. In response, many international users added their national flags to their bios — a gesture of visible pride and affiliation. In fact, in an expression of hospitality, many global users encouraged Americans to include our flag in our names or bios.
But for many justice-centered Americans, myself included, the idea of displaying the U.S. flag was fraught. In the current political moment, the flag feels co-opted by the right, recast as a badge of exclusionary patriotism. There’s a nuanced dilemma here: a project of “reclaiming the flag” could, in theory, build a multicultural solidarity against white nationalism — but it also risks reinforcing the very constitutional mythology that has long defined belonging in ways that exclude. To hold both the history and the modern application at once is to walk a tightrope: we want a solidarity that can be seen, but not one that quietly reaffirms the founding exclusions we are yet to undo.
Counter-Belonging Without Dominance
If symbols can be claimed, co-opted, and hollowed out, then they can’t be the foundation of our belonging. What we need is something harder to strip for parts — something rooted in practices, relationships, and memory; the kind of belonging that can’t be manufactured on a poster or hashtagged into fashion.
We need durable identities.
For me, that grounding has come from the slow work of knowing my people. A grandad who baled hay and raised cattle. Another, a railoader, and a branch of our family includes also a grandad who was a judge—one recognized for a lifetime of service, in fact.
My dad is a constant source of trust and a deep and enduring faith.
My Jewish identity gives me a place in a story far older and messier than the United States, one that carries both the experience of exile and the obligations of memory. That grounding has shaped my politics: it is why I seek maximal inclusivity in the communities I join, why I resist any project of belonging that requires someone else’s exclusion. And it is why I feel both grief and anger when I see my tradition used to justify domination — whether in the policies of the Israeli government or in the cynical way American politicians use “support for Israel” as a prop in their culture wars.
I know what it is to risk rejection from my community because I refuse to align my belonging with a project of power. That fear — the fear of being cast out — is real. But it is not the same as the fear ICE seeks to mobilize. My fear comes from stepping away from dominance; theirs is cultivated to make people preemptively accept their lack of agency.
This is what makes the right’s so-called “war on antisemitism” so chilling. It is less a defense of Jewish people than a pretext to gut DEI programs and redefine antisemitism through the narrow lens of nationalism. Under this frame, the only Jews worth protecting are those aligned with a particular political project. It has become a tool to expel and silence people — including Jews — who speak openly against Israel. And it operates with the same logic as “Defend the Homeland”: police the boundaries of belonging, reject those who won’t conform, and declare the expulsion a form of protection.
We’ve seen it escalate quickly. A sitting Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, labeled a Palestinian in a smear meant to paint dissent as foreign infiltration. New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was told to “go back to Africa, and an investigation into his naturalization status and threats from Donald Trump make the case that we argue here: break with dominant politics and see your citizenship threatened.
These aren’t just isolated slurs; they’re acts of political gatekeeping, meant to flatten the range of ideas Americans are allowed to hold about justice, belonging, and the meaning of “homeland.”
It’s the same fight-for-your-culture script ICE runs, and the same rejection that has long met any group — even a historically persecuted one — when its members refuse the terms of conditional belonging. J.D. Vance says America is not an idea:
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.
Our claim is the opposite: America is an idea; a collection of values, but they must be reclaimed from the Framers’ narrow vision and recovered in the living practices of our great-grandparents — the social clubs, the holidays from the Mother or Fatherland, and cultural rites that had to be shifted underground to avoid persecution.
The fear of the “other” is, in many cases, an extension of the fear that Americans of European descent already carry — the fear born from alienation from their own heritage. This is why ethnography matters. To know where you come from in a way that is lived, practiced, and shared is to be inoculated against the hollow patriotism of protectionism and the false belonging of supremacist thinking. It is the antidote to the recruitment poster, because it roots you in something that can’t be offered or revoked by a political campaign.
There is joy in this work. Joy in discovering the ways we are different, and in seeing how those differences can root us in a multiculturalism that doesn’t fear diversity but celebrates it. For Americans of European descent, embracing your own story is not a matter of guilt or political fashion — it is a return to an enduring legacy. The greenhouses your great-grandparents built are not just quaint family lore; they are proof that your people once brought something into being here. What was your family’s name at Ellis Island? When did they become white? These are not “woke” questions — they are autobiography. An autobiography depends on rootedness, on belonging that does not require exclusion. In knowing who we are and where we come from, we gain the power to help others do the same.
And that is why, when I see the block capitals — DEFEND THE HOMELAND — I am not tempted by the invitation. My belonging is not at the border, and it will not be measured by who I can keep out. It is in the stories, practices, and communities that I will not surrender. The homeland worth defending is the one we build with our neighbors, not the one that needs a uniform to prove we belong.