A Meditation On American Identity

Throughout American history, the question "What is an American?" has plagued our national psyche. I've come to think that this anxiety about "what it means to be an American" is itself intensely American. Since American-ness is not based on traditional, arbitrary ethnolinguistic sorting, but instead a set of shared beliefs regarding democracy, plurality, equality, and opportunity (beliefs often, sadly, more honored in the breach than the observance) as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it stands to reason that being an American is by its nature a precarious identity. Ideas are intrinsically harder to pin down than characteristics like ethnicity; what group you're born into is decided for you, but what ideas you subscribe to must be decided for oneself.

Of course, this is all high-flown and abstract; most Americans don't think about or question their American-ness, and see it in traditional tribal terms. And, in an increasingly diverse and multicultural world, a lot of Frenchmen (and Britons and Indians and Chinese and...) are thinking about what it means to be [insert nationality here] when they are no longer the homogeneous ethnolinguistic groups that once made national self-identification so simple.

But America is still unique: our history, from the very beginning, can be seen as a working-through of the question "What is an American?" It started out as "white, Christian, landowning adults" and has slowly, sometimes painfully so, expanded to include women, the poor, and those of color. We're still grappling with that question today, with controversy over illegal immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, and others. I don't think the question will ever be totally settled. And I think that's a good thing. It keeps us honest and allows us to grow and evolve as a people in a way other nations can't. Thoughts, anyone?