By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
(CNN) — Last week, Jeremy Carl, who was nominated by the Trump administration for a top State Department post, was asked in his Senate confirmation hearing to define white identity.
Carl, who published a book called “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart,” struggled for 20 seconds to articulate exactly what he considered white culture to be. Then he offered as an example former Sen. Jim Webb’s 2004 book “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America” and “the sort of Scotch-Irish military culture and certain pride that went with that.”
“Scots-Irish,” often used interchangeably with “Scotch-Irish,” is a popular label among the currently ascendent set of American conservatives. Vice President JD Vance, an aggressive nativist, called himself “a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart” in his career-making memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The term also appeared over the weekend in a social media post from Elon Musk, though he botched the spelling of “Scot” and perplexingly combined the term with “English.”
“For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to defend a ‘multicultural economic zone’!” Musk, a South African-born immigrant of mixed Canadian and South African background, wrote on X. “American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for. Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here.”
A certain amount of confusion and imprecision is built into the use of the term. In a country founded out of a colonial patchwork of European, African and Native American cultures, overlaid with further immigration from around the globe, “Scots-Irish” has long served as a kind of shorthand for mythic ideas about what makes someone a “real American.” These days, to its proponents, it basically just means white.
But “Scots-Irish” has a specific and complex history. The first known use of it was by the English in the 1500s, to describe Catholics who moved back and forth between the Scottish Highlands and islands and the northern part of Ireland, said Kerby Miller, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Missouri. That 16th century term for Catholics became a 17th century term for Protestants, as Britain set about colonizing the Irish province of Ulster with Scottish Presbyterians. (Today in the north of Ireland, Protestants of Scottish origin are described as “Ulster Scots.”)
During the 1700s, Scots in Ulster migrated in large numbers to what would eventually become the US. These people were sometimes called “Scots-Irish,” but by the time of the American Revolution, Miller said most of them simply referred to themselves as “Irish.”
Whatever they were calling themselves at the time, Scottish Protestants from northern Ireland played a significant role in the settlement and founding of the US, said Liam Kennedy, a professor of American Studies at University College Dublin. They primarily moved westward and south to Appalachia, as the English elite positioned them at the frontier to protect British development from the French and from Native Americans. Kennedy said several Ulster Protestants signed the Declaration of Independence, and they had a key hand in the Revolutionary War and in the genocide of Native Americans.
Over the years, the Scottish Protestants from Ulster began to assimilate into the