AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD AS WHITE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liveright, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Fitz investigates the period between 1776 and 1826 anew, tracing shifting U.S. attitudes toward anticolonial revolts south of the border. At first, U.S. onlookers were elated by the exhilarating spread of republicanism in Latin America. . . . But as slavery became a bitterly divisive issue in the United States, so goodwill toward these revolutionaries--whose battles were often anticolonial and antislavery--waned. By the nation's fiftieth anniversary, Latin American independence efforts became a platform upon which many in the United Sates erected new ideological borders that would come to haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations." From the text: "Ironically, what finally ignited the nationwide soul-searching about North American slavery and South American abolition was a group of legislators--the southern wing of the rising Democratic Party--who proudly asserted that the United States was the lone success story in a hemisphere of radicals, the white republic in an America endangered by black and mulatto ones. What made the United States special and superior, southern opposition members suggested, was that it enslaved its black people rather than enfranchising them." Id. at 198. "[T]he move toward radicalized exceptionalism remained gradual and partial, a subtle shift rather than an immediate transformation . . . .  Id. at 233. Yet, that assertion of White American Exceptionalism, accompanied by attempts to disenfranchise people(s) of color (mainly African Americans and Latino Americans, remains strong today embodied in the Republican Party, Donald Trump (e.g., "make America great again!', 'build a wall to keep out those rapists and criminals', 'deport Muslims,' etc.) Evangelical Christians, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, White Separatists., etc.).