When I arrived in America I spoke no English, knew nothing of its history, understood no civics. I’d never heard of George Washington, Honest Abe or the 4th of July. Apple pie and baseball might have been haggis or tossing the caber for all I knew or cared. I would not have saluted the flag or stood for the anthem, recognizing the significance of neither. Nonetheless, passing no test, swearing no oath, I became a citizen on the spot. Like my parents before me I was grandfathered in. I was an American, but not yet american. Being born at some particular latitude and longitude on the planet might make you a citizen but it alone cannot make you american.
Nor does flying the flag in your front yard, or wearing a pin on your lapel, or holding your hand over your heart as you mumble the words of the national anthem at sporting events suffice. There’s more to it than festooning your car with flags and bumper stickers. In fact, such trappings often unmask someone who has missed the point.
In this nation’s birth certificate, Thomas Jefferson, a fine one to talk, alleged to hold certain truths to be self-evident, chief among them being that all men are created equal. He didn’t really believe that of course, but “all white men with a certain amount of property are created equal” doesn’t scan poetically. Neither did most, if not all, of his co-Founders believe it. They made that clear when they forged a Constitution which etched inequality into the law of the land, a Constitution that contained the Three-Fifths Clause that gave slaveholders a distinct electoral advantage, the Slave Trade Clause that prohibited Congress from banning the transatlantic slave trade before 1808, and the Fugitive Slave Clause that required the return of escaped slaves to their owners, even if found in a free state.
That Constitution may have been the skeleton of our body politic but it’s that phrase of Jefferson’s that captured our soul. From the day that Constitution was ratified in 1789 America became an unfinished story whose plot is the evolution of our laws to align more and more with that ideal.
And lord, has it been a struggle. We’ve been arguing ever since over what is meant by “men”, and what is meant by “created equal”. Amendments 13, 14, 15, and 19 made it clear that “men” means all citizens of whatever gender and of whatever race. Various Civil Rights and Voting Acts, as well as court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education have made it clear that “created equal” means equal before the law and equal in opportunity.
These corrections to our laws have moved us past previous unamerican legal (and illegal) shenanigans like the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, slavery and its Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Dred Scott decision, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Plessy v. Ferguson, Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage and Sedition Acts during World War I, FDR’s Executive Order 9066 that interred Japanese Americans in concentration camps lacking any evidence whatsoever, and assorted laws prohibiting consensual sex and birth control. One would like to think we have also evolved past the Know Nothings, the John Birch Society, the ironically named House Un-American Activities Committee, the various Commie witch hunts, FBI spying on citizens, and other fascist tendencies.
But…
Clearly the great task that Lincoln defined at Gettysburg in 1863 remains unfinished. The spiritual descendants of those slavers, Klansmen, segregationists, mysogynists, homophobes, and xenophobes walk among us still, indeed, constitute nearly half of us.
They have led us into unjustified wars, they have tanked the economy by pandering to the greed of oligarchs, they have cruelly separated immigrant children from their parents, they have cheated on court appointments, they have gerrymandered, cynically removed validly registered voters from their rolls, reduced the number of polling places, restricted polling hours, and refused to accept election results.
And yet it is these distinctly unamerican folks who are most likely to boast of being the only real Americans, when in truth they are the skeletons in our closet. They are the people who never got it, who still don’t get it and refuse to ever get, that it is when we are about equality, when we are about how a disparate people of varying ethnicities, biases, and proclivities can live and work and thrive together, when we are about a level playing field, then, and only then, are we being american.
Then we are the land of opportunity, a nation of immigrants, bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, then we are the melting pot. It is then that we hold certain truths to be self-evident, it is then that we fear nothing but fear itself, it is then that we ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country, and it is then that we have a dream. Then we are Huck Finn, Atticus Finch, Mr Tibbs. Then we are Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harvey Milk.
In fact, I go further. To be american is to be generous and not mean-spirited, to be fair-minded and not petty, to understand how ridiculously lucky we are to be American citizens and therefore willing to help those less fortunate. To be american is to think kindly of others whenever possible and to extend the benefit of the doubt, to defend the weak and not bully them, to be brave and not panic in the face of a few lunatics, to have the gumption to overcome our prejudices. In short, to be american is to honor the words of our greatest American and allow ourselves to be touched by the better angels of our nature.
