The Myth of “Common Culture”
Responding to Elon Musk’s White Supremacist Rhetoric
When Elon Musk contrasts a “common culture” with what he calls a “multicultural economic zone,” he invokes a familiar narrative: that America’s cohesion rests on a shared Anglo-American heritage now under threat.
But this idea collapses under the weight of its own history.
The English-Scots-Irish culture Musk praises did not emerge as a neutral civic inheritance. It was forged through Indigenous dispossession — land theft, forced removal, cultural erasure — and through the brutal architecture of racial slavery: human property, plantation wealth, legalized terror.
This is not incidental to America’s founding story. It is structural.
From the beginning, liberty for some depended on unfreedom for others. Any claim that American culture emerged as a clean, organic lineage is therefore historically untenable.
What is often called “common culture” was never mutual agreement. It was an enforced order. Inclusion required conformity to the dominant group’s norms, while exclusion was maintained through law, violence, and social control.
Many who later fought and died for the nation did so while denied full belonging within it.
In this sense, multiculturalism is not the disruption of American culture — it is the challenge to its original exclusions.
A genuine inheritance requires reckoning. It requires naming the dispossessed, confronting the exclusions, and acknowledging that the American project has always been unfinished.
Without that accounting, calls to “defend heritage” become something else entirely: an ideology that protects historical winners by casting them as eternal founders.
The real question is not whether America has an Anglo-American inheritance. It clearly does.
The real question is whether that inheritance was meant to remain exclusive — or whether its own constitutional ideals demand universal extension.
In other words:
Is American heritage a closed inheritance belonging to the original insiders?
Or is it an unfinished democratic promise that expands as more people claim it?
This is the question that appeals to “common culture” consistently evade.