Don’t Call It “America”

In 1839, New York-born Washington Irving decried his nation’s name. Irving, the son of a merchant class family who named him after George Washington, despised that the “United States of America” were partly named after the Italian merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Writing under the pseudonym “Geoffrey Crayon,” Irving declares:

I want an appellation [i.e., a name for the country] that shall tell at once, and in a way not to be mistaken, that I belong to this very portion of America, geographical and political, to which it is my pride and happiness to belong; that I am of the Anglo-Saxon race which founded this Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness…

Irving was a proud Anglo-Saxon white supremacist. For him, Italians like Vespucci at best possessed a dubious whiteness that clearly paled in superiority to Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Moreover, Irving associated Anglo-Saxon whiteness and supremacy with places (geography) and imperial political schemes (England’s and the US’s). “America” didn’t reference these takes; it referred back to an Italian and non-Anglo-Saxon Italy. Of course, neither did the names Irving suggested: “We might still use the phrase, ‘The United States,’ substituting Appalachia or Alleghania (I should prefer the latter), in place of America…” This suggestion only makes sense if one endorses Irving’s racist claim that what the Indigenous call Turtle Island truly was a “wilderness”—an uninhabited plot of land awaiting Anglo-Saxon civilizing.

The next time you read or discuss “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or “Rip Van Winkle,” texts that made Washington Irving famous, remember that this son of the Empire State didn’t want you to call the US “America.” He demanded that you show more racial pride and respect to Anglo-Saxons than that.

Postscript

Like Washington Irving, I recognize that the US is an Anglo-Saxon empire. I also detest calling the United States of America “America,” but my reasons differ from Irving’s. If you’d like to get a sense of my views, watch Puerto Rican rapper Residente’s music video “This Is Not America.” Warning: The video is graphic and disturbing—as any music video about US imperialism should be.