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 To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html