Gaul Atreides (@gaulatreides)

Devon Stack did an episode on this topic of Franklin's views on race and immigration to the fledgling America. Franklin was racialist in a way that is an artifact of his time, when "race" more closely aligned with "ethnicity" and the "out-group" was Continental EuroWhites a hundred miles inland of Ye Olde England. Franklin could not conceive of a "nation" such as we labor under today; teeming with races from the four corners of the globe. If he came back alive to see what his nation -- and the ancestral land of his Anglo-Saxon forebears -- had become, he'd have been a lot more precise with his editorial inputs to the Declaration and the Constitution to enunciate that America was and forever will be a nation of free White people. At the very least, Franklin in 2026 would be apt to broaden his racial loyalties to encompass most Euro-descended Whites, out of sheer expedience to the racial reality on the ground. As the meme goes, "We are different" "OOGA BOOGA" "We are more alike than previously thought." Another thing to keep in mind about Franklin's writings on race is that the terms he uses don't carry quite the same meaning to how we use those terms today. Franklin said Germans and Scandinavians are "swarthy"; which in his time would be an understandable perception, since both groups are a bit ruddier than English Whites (but just try to explain to a nigger that Swedes are less white than Englishmen because the former evolved in a sunnier climate). In contrast, the globalization of our modern racial perceptions has shifted the connotation of "swarthy" to describe Middle Eastern Caucasians, or Deep Med Whites. No one would describe Germans or Swedes as swarthy today. Also, Franklin perhaps possessed some antipathy to the Irish when he described them as swarthy; on the basis of skin color alone, the Irish are the whitest race on earth.