Tom writes:

> I too am a proud, un-hyphenated, adjective-free American 
>with Virginia ancestors who came to this continent from Europe.
>
>The root is that we, you and I, are Americans. Not black, not
white, not 
>African-, not European-Americans, we are Americans. I was
born in this great 
>country, am proud of it, and proud to be called an American.
I would like to 
>think that all people born in the United States of America
feel this way. 
>Sadly, there are many, many people that do not.

Tom advances two claims here.  

First, he asserts a view that has been quite commonly put
forward by white Americans for many generations.  He is
American, no hyphens.  I would assume that he does so
inclusively.  But that is irrelevant to our purposes. What
matters is that it is demonstrable and indeed incontrovertible
that within living memory, large numbers of white Americans
did not make the claim inclusively.  Rather, they argued that
there was a majority of Americans who qualified for
citizenship, and then a minority, made up of various racial
groups, who did not.  As I argued in earlier posts, the basis
for this exclusive argument was the notion that certain racial
groups were legally incompetent and generically immature, and
could not be entrusted with the duties and obligations of
self-government.

I do not think anyone in this conversation right now would
make such an exclusive argument.  But that is besides the
point.  All of us who lived through the 1960s and 1970s, who
pause to think about it, can point to instances in which
powerful and important American political, social,
intellectual, and moral leaders *did* make such an exclusive
argument.  They did so within the compass of our lives.  The
reality is that that past, created by and affirmed by that
rhetoric, has shaped the world in which you and I live today.

In my experience, most people who were on the receiving end of
this kind of exclusion remember with a certain bitterness
that, not all that long ago, "un-hyphenated American" meant
"white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American."  You did not have to
add in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant qualifiers, because they
could--and were--just assumed.

Now I happen to agree with Tom that in an ideal world, we
would all be un-hyphenated Americans.  That was the ideal of
Martin Luther King Junior, too, if you will recall.  Its a
powerful dream, and a good one.

But we do need to be careful, it seems to me, to acknowledge
that in asserting that dream, we do not deny the history that
those of us who are older than 40 or so can still remember. 
That history has left powerful legacies, and if we just ignore
it, we cannot confront the real damage that those legacies
exerted in the past, and still exert to some degree today.

Tom makes a second point.  He claims that there are
significant numbers of American citizens who do not
acknowledge or claim with pride their American heritage.  Here
I find Tom's position to be both misleading and confused.  Tom
mistakes those Americans who critique our society for falling
short of our ideals as suggesting somehow that those ideals
are unworthy.  I see lots of people who use the highest
aspirations of America for the purpose of calling for reform.
 I do not see very many people at all criticizing American
ideals themselves as being unworthy of pride.

I am proud that I am heir to the American political and
constitutional heritage, and have devoted much of my life to
its study and dissemination.  I am not, however, unlike some
people, so complacent as to think that we manage at all times
and in all places to live up to those ideals.  In making this
distinction, I categorically deny that I am a traitor to
America or to its values.  Indeed, I would argue that the
central problem in America today is not that people are
rejecting American ideals in any significant numbers.  Rather,
I would suggest that the central problem principled Americans
face today is that so many of our fellow citizens are so
complacent about our contemporary situation as to imagine that
we have no more work left to do to achieve our ideals and make
them real.  

The Soviet Constitution of the 20th century was nothing more
than (to use Madison's words) a "parchment barrier" to tyranny
and injustice.  Our constitution has endured not simply
because it exists on paper, but because so many Americans, for
so long, have treated it as an ideal to be realized, and not
something just to be complacently celebrated.  We have not
been complacent about it.  Active, engaged citizenship has
been our civic model.

It is quite complacent indeed, it seems to me, to imagine that
we live in a polity that has not been deeply shaped by the
reality of racist thinking that, at its foundation, denies the
public American ideals of which all of us are proud.

All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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