John Podhoretz On Steve King: St. Augustine Was More Black Than White, and Don't Get Me Started on Alexander Hamilton
01/11/2019
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From the New York Post:

Steve King couldn’t be more wrong about ‘Western civilization’
By John Podhoretz January 10, 2019 | 7:44pm | Updated

… For one thing, Western civilization isn’t “white,” if by “white” one is referring to skin color. Much of what we consider the roots of Western civilization comes from Asia Minor and North Africa.

Ancient Jerusalem is the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, and its residents were certainly of a darker hue. St. Augustine, the greatest Christian religious figure of the first millennium, was from Hippo in North Africa and likely a member of the Berber tribe. He may not have been black in the modern sense, but his skin tone was surely closer to black than white.

In America, “white” generally ­refers to the Northern European settlers of our continent — English, Scotch, Irish. They didn’t view the later immigrants to these shores — Italians, Central Europeans, Russians, Jews — as having common racial traits with them.

Italians were as hated at the turn of the century as Mexicans are now.

For instance, uber-WASP T.S. Eliot hatefully wrote in 1915: “In the rooms the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”

And yet Italy was the homeland of the Renaissance, the great explosion of Western civilization in the 15th century.

Want more? The greatest of Russian poets, Alexander Pushkin, was the grandson

Great-grandson

of an African once captured and brought to St. Petersburg to serve as a child slave for a czar. And there is the case of our rock-star Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton, who came from the Caribbean island of Nevis and about whom there is varying evidence that he might either be of Jewish or black stock.

As you can see from looking at a $10 bill in your wallet.

Seriously, Hamilton, with his roast beef-slicing nose, was just about the whitest-looking man in American history. Joseph Ellis wrote:

Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair …

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