I didn’t plan to write this. It started with a Thread, sparked by a conversation with someone who spoke as if identity was destiny, and belonging was determined by pain. They spoke in the voice of certainty—about who could speak, who couldn’t, and who owed what to whom.

But it stirred something old in me.

I grew up in Salt Lake, Oahu. Subsidized garden apartments near the airport. I was six. A haole kid—Irish, English, German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian—surrounded by friends who were Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Samoan, Filipino. In Hawaii, we were all poi dogs: mutts, proud of our mix. Nobody cared what you were—until intermediate school, when I was suddenly just “white.” One word flattened my whole ancestry.

That flattening—that erasure of nuance—is what this is about.

Let’s be clear: America has never been an ethnostate. It’s never required blood purity. It’s flirted with white supremacy, yes. It’s been built on contradictions, certainly. But it has always been chaotic, plural, experimental. Jews were among the first colonists. There were free Black people before slavery became systemic. Hawaiian royalty toured the White House. The myth of America as ethnically pure is just that—a myth.

Compare that with actual ethnostates. Japan. Korea. Hungary. Nations where blood defines belonging. Where being born in-country doesn’t mean you’re accepted. Where assimilation isn’t expected—because it isn’t offered. These are places with coherent boundaries. That’s what makes them safer, yes—but also more exclusionary.

And yet somehow, America bears the guilt of falling short of an ideal no one else even tries to live up to.

Whiteness in America has never been fixed. Irish weren’t white. Italians weren’t white. Jews weren’t white. Whiteness was a moving caste line. A club. Not a color.

Today, the same people who rightly insist on distinguishing between Vietnamese and Chinese, or Dominican and Puerto Rican, will lump everyone with pale skin into “white.” As if all of us grew up with the same privilege. As if someone like me—raised by a single mom, broke, mixed, uninvited—was born at the top of the pyramid.

It’s not justice. It’s just reversal.

Later in life, on Mastodon—a social platform of federated, ideological islands—I found myself in dialogue with an actual white supremacist. He told me I wasn't really white. Not with Irish Catholic blood from County Mayo. Not with Hungarian roots from Budapest. Not with my Slavic features. To him, true whiteness belonged to ethnic English and Germans. Everyone else was an Untermensch—a word I knew from my time in Berlin. A slur. A caste marker. Garbage people.

I laughed it off. But I didn’t forget.

The deeper you look into the world, the more you see these hierarchies. In Singapore, ethnic Han Chinese dominate. In Finland, the elite are Swedish, not Finnish. Every culture has its own purity test.

That’s why America still matters. Even when it fails. Especially when it fails.

Because here, a kid like me could eat kalbi from a Korean neighbor’s hibachi at six years old and fall in love with kimchi before knowing how to spell it. Here, I could be a poi dog and still grow up to write, to speak, to belong. That doesn’t happen in most of the world.

We talk about justice, but we also need to talk about containment. UBI, grievance culture, and online rage cycles don’t liberate people—they manage them. They keep people home, sedated, sequestered. Just enough bread to dull hunger. Just enough narrative to keep them angry but inactive.

It’s not revolution. It’s sedation.

Still—I believe in this country. Not because it’s perfect. But because it’s unfinished. Because it tries, even when it stumbles. Because it allows us to write ourselves in.

So no, America isn’t an ethnostate. And the fact that we even argue about how to be more inclusive proves it.

It’s messy. But it’s ours.
And I’ll defend that—with aloha.