I think the Heritage American thing is too online and will burn itself out fairly quickly. Even where I’ve heard it, there’s lots of disagreement on what it means. I’ve seen lots of arguments that “Foundational Black Americans” are in, and arguments that they are out (I don’t think “Foundational Black Americans want to be in the “prestigious” club, so there’s that).
It seems to be mostly driven by the subset of people who in most previous generations would respond as “American” with no modifier to a census, and when asked about ancestry would rattle off a vague, mostly forgotten admixture of northwest European origins.
So there’s a lot of irony and frankly sadness around the movement. A group of people who have long railed against “hyphenated American identity” are now creating their own hyphenated identity. Fairly pathetic shit.
On the flip side, the more extreme wing of identitarian culture warriors have argued that “American” as an identity is mostly meaningless beyond strict legal definitions (at best) or bad and exclusionary/hostile at the worst, and that identity is the salient feature of civic existence, are now confronted with the problem of a subset of people who have always felt they are “just American deciding to agree with them that being American is in fact exclusionary. And since there’s not another club for them to join…….