President Donald Trump nominated Jeremy Carl to a top spot in the Trump administration’s State Department. Usually, there’d be no reason for you to know who Jeremy Carl is. But, recently, Carl told U.S. senators in a congressional hearing that a loss of a “dominant” White culture is weakening the country.

Carl is one of the people who openly supports the Great Replacement Theory, an idea that there is an intentional effort to promote mass immigration, intermarriage of White people with other ethnic and racial groups, and other efforts that would lead to the extinction of Whites.

A few years ago, the chances of a man openly advocating positions like this winning congressional approval for a high-profile government job would have been nil. But we live in an era where White identity politics is on public display every day.

I am fascinated by how Carl and people like him try to define White culture and White identity — try being the operative term. Carl had a hard time nailing it down during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

A lot of my interest comes from growing up in the Deep South in the 1960s and 70s when racist Jim Crow laws were giving way to civil rights.

When I was young, some older White Southerners, displeased with the turn of events and Black people’s newfound political power after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, fell back on culture at every turn to reassure themselves of their status and superiority.

Specifically, they talked confidently in my presence of the superiority of “White culture” when compared to “Black culture,” same for “White music” and “Black music.”

Because of this, I am always hesitant to talk about “White culture” versus “Black culture.”

But Carl evinced no such hesitance. When pressed about the meaning of White culture, he invoked Black culture, without explaining either one in detail. “I would say that the white church is very different than the Black church in terms of its tone and style on average. Food ways could often be different,” he said.

One thing I’ve noticed after moving around the country the past 30 plus years, is that I share a fondness with many Black Americans, even love, for collards, turnip greens, butter beans, black eyed peas.

My fondness comes from my own upbringing in the South, where my family served this same food on our dinner table.

The conclusion I’ve come to over the decades is that a superiority argument for White culture often is more about a person’s comfort and familiarity with a certain culture than about the culture’s inherent superiority.

How many times, for example, have I heard White people my age or older decry Hip Hop and rap without listening to it for themselves: all rap is not gangsta rap; and, frankly, gangsta rap had some important things to say.

If you spend time with Hip Hop, like any musical genre, you have not-sogreat stuff right next to poetry that rivals the ancient texts of Homer or Virgil and the Bible in beauty, profundity and raw emotional power.

These same guardians of White culture might not have the same take on rock-and-roll.

But any serious study of the genre leads you to conclude the Black Blues greats of the Mississippi Delta and Black gospel singers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe exerted immense influence on the formation of the genre.

I say all of this as a White Southerner who Carl and others like him might call a Heritage American, a person who can trace their ancestors’ arrival to the colonial era. On my father’s side, my ancestors made it to Virginia in the 1640s; on my mother’s side, the early 1700s.

I was fortunate to have parents who ensured I was schooled in the Western literary classics that people like Carl think of as markers of White civilization.

But in his Senate testimony, Carl couldn’t actually describe White culture. To do so would have entailed going down a colonial rabbit hole of competing European ethnicities.

For instance, some people making the case for a White culture skim over the differences between the Scottish, Irish and English immigrants, the majority of settlers to the eastern portion of what became the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, when they suggest there is a singular culture. Tell the descendents of the Irish immigrants in the Northeast or New England that there is no Irish culture, only a White culture, and see what happens.

We watched a passionate debate over who is American earlier this month when Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, provoking a fierce debate over whether it was American enough because he performed in his native Spanish; for the record, Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and its people have been U.S. citizens since 1917.

The assertion that speaking English is tantamount to Americanness would be comical to me after living more than half of my adult life in states where Spanish has been spoken longer than English, and where Indigenous languages spoken today thrived long before the Spanish came — if the stakes weren’t so high.

Living in New Mexico has made me more comfortable in saying what I think of people like Carl when they say things like the loss of White culture is weakening the nation: They sound like some White people I knew growing up in the Deep South more than 50 years ago.

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper,

The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.