In the Obama years, the term “dog whistle” once held a strange fascination for liberals. The expression refers to a word or phrase that is innocent-sounding to most normal people, but is actually also a rallying cry to the racists among us, raising them all to dangerous levels of enmity.
You know — words like “Chicago,” (Obama’s adopted home city, that has black people in it); and “golf,” (his favorite pastime, which was played by another slender and mixed-race celebrity, who had trouble of sorts with his wife).
Thus when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an Alabama conservative, and a fairly pale person, uttered a kind word for the “Anglo American heritage” of law as in regard to the thousand-plus-year-old office of sheriff, it was seen as meaning by some that only the Anglos among us are really American or that “justice: is only for them.
“Attorney General faces accusations of racism,” the Daily News had reported. “For the chief law enforcement officer to use a dog whistle like that is appalling,” said Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz.
Someone should sit these people down and explain to them quietly that the “heritage” — especially the legal heritage — of a nation is not the same thing as the ethnic group that composes it today. It often transcends its country of origin and becomes universal. The heritages of ancient Greece, ancient Israel, and ancient Rome are talked of today as the foundation stones of the Western world culture, though only a few of the millions and billions who live in this culture are genetic descendants of the people who gave it its birth.
In the same way, the Anglo-Saxon traditions of law and of politics, which stem from English Common Law, in distinction from Continental European law, also transcended their country of origin. They are followed today in a great many places by people who aren’t “Anglo” at all.
In a panel discussion a few years ago, the Hudson Institute’s Hillel Fradkin described the Thanksgiving observance at the public school he attended on lower East Side of Manhattan. No one there was Anglo, but everyone knew that what happened in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1621 was a part of his own history. The Pilgrim Fathers were his fathers, too, even if he wasn’t a Puritan or even one percent English by descent.
If you were American, you were given your own set of Pilgrim fathers. As a nation of immigrants, it has been the particular genius of the American nation to absorb people from every conceivable background and turn them politically into Anglo-Americans, leaving the rest of their backgrounds as is.
And so today Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Marco Rubio are political Anglo-Americans, as were the Dutch-Anglo Roosevelts, the Celtic John Kennedy, and the mega-WASP Bushes, down to and including the most up-to-date version, the semi-Hispanic George P.
So is former President Barack Obama, who has spoken of the “Anglo-American heritage” of habeas corpus among other things. And why shouldn’t he? In addition to the heritage of the law he studied and lectured in, he is on his mother’s side Anglo-American, as his eighth great-grandfather, Jonathan Dunham (the maiden name of his mother), was born in 1639 or 1640, in Newbury, Mass.
Obama is actually African-Anglo-American, which makes him a part of the fastest growing demographic group in this country — that of people of mixed ethnic description. The black-and-the-white, the Greek-and-the-Swiss, the Italian-and-Polish, the Irish-and-Jewish, the Hispanic-and-everything, their numbers increase with each generation, and indeed with each passing day. Ask not for whom the dog whistle blows, all of you and all of us Anglo-Americans: it blows for us all every day.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
