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This fantastic conversation between @roderickgraham and @xavierbonilla87 about nationalism, identity, and assimilation has brought to mind some thoughts I have about how unique America is.
I believe that America is singular in that it was founded upon an idea—an ideal. In spite of their serious flaws, the Founders crafted documents that transcended them and that, as we attempt to get closer to embodying those ideals, became something truly innovative and special.
There is a sense in which "being an American" is the same as "being Japanese," in that we're speaking about a place of birth, a chunk of land, a name, a flag, a set of laws, etc. But what sets America apart is that it is also the adoption of those ideas the Founders articulated.
That is why, to me, *anyone* can be an American, and they can *become* an American when they adopt those founding ideals. You can live in Uzbekistan or Peru or Korea, but if you hold these values, you're an American to me.
No other country I know of can really make that claim.
No other country I know of can really make that claim.
Conversely, I think that people can live *in* America and "not be American," because although they may be citizens by birth, if they don't believe in those founding principles, they are existing in opposition to them.
Part of the beauty of this is that even the opposition to the principles is protected by those principles. We live in a country where burning the flag simply *cannot* be a sign of disrespect, because the act itself reifies the ideas the flag symbolizes. https://medium.com/@Angel.Eduardo/why-burning-the-flag-is-more-american-than-saluting-it-79ab6b029d60
Many people argue that assimilation is necessary to foster a strong society, and this assimilation is usually seen as taking the form of immigrants eschewing their "non-American" culture in favor of adopting an "American" one.
But part of American culture *is* the variety, the intermixing and the multiculturalism, the hyphenation and—yes—appropriation. We are a melting pot, and we should be. The founding ideals are about change and progress and amendments and evolution into newer and better forms.
I love that there are communities throughout the country where English is barely spoken. I love that we're a country where different people intermingle and intermarry, where children are born with two, three, four different cultural strains in them. There's beauty in that.
Of course, we need to communicate, and we need to educate, and we need some kind of shared reality from which to advance the American project. So learning the language and the history and, most importantly, the founding values, is an important thing to do.
That people are afraid of "strangers" coming in and "changing" their culture by infusing it with their own betrays a misunderstanding of American culture. It's this "there goes the neighborhood" mentality—but few consider what the neighborhood was like before *they* arrived.
The only thing that is necessary to foster a strong, unified American society is an adherence to those founding ideals. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That all people are equal in value. That we govern ourselves through communication. That free speech is sacrosanct.
Of course we have often failed to live up to those ideals, and we will continue to. But the beauty of the American project is the *attempt* to embody them, to strive to be better than we were, to evolve and become a "more perfect union." *Union* being the operative word there.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
