Who we is?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the idea of America. Mainly, because I am writing a new book on the subject in the run up to the semiquincentennial of the country and because of our current troubles.  So much is happening. All at once. It feels historically familiar, and yet the troubles are unprecedented, precisely because they are ours.

Lonnie Bunch, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, once told me that America is much more than an idea. It is an argument. His words point us to the ongoing battles that shape our understanding of this country. Struggles over its meaning as a nation, over the contradictions that make up our history, struggles over who we take ourselves to be as Americans. Those struggles are as old as the Republic itself.

And, in some ways, at the heart of it all rests an unresolved question over the “we” in “we the people.”  It reminds me of this wonderful formulation James Baldwin offered to David Estes in an interview for the New Orleans Review in 1986, a year before his death. “I had to use ‘we,’” Baldwin said, “and let the reader figure out who ‘we’ is. That was the only possible pronoun.  It had to be ‘we.’  And we had to figure out who ‘we’ was, or who ‘we’ is.”  The delightful play in Black vernacular English, “who we is,” gives us a glimpse of Baldwin’s answer to the question. Americans had to come to terms with the blues chord at the core of the nation’s self-conception.

But the question of American identity has always vacillated between the creed that makes America distinct and the idea of blood and soil that undergirds our national understanding. According to some, we are a nation defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – a country of immigrants freed from the burdens of a feudal past and a “shining city on the hill” that remains a beacon of freedom and democracy for the world. Loyalty stems from the fact of our chosenness and the creed that gives it life (and that distinguishes our form of nationalism from the more dangerous forms that have engulfed the modern West in unimaginable violence).

Underneath or shadowing that view of American identity, however, is the idea that we are a white nation like those countries in old Europe. Anglo-Saxon at the root. That racial identity matters just as much as democratic principles.  We can see it in the history of immigration law here.  We can see it in the compromises in the Constitution surrounding the issue of slavery. And we see it in the ugly appeals of Trumpism, the latest fount of our current troubles.

In a way, this duality is a source of the strange melancholy of this nation – of proclaiming the equality of men and holding others as chattel, of understanding itself as the Redeemer nation, and this sense of looking through the eyes of those forced to live on reservations or who have born the whip’s lash, who judge and find the country wanting.  

This is the American sense of two-ness that W.E.B. DuBois attributed to Black folk here.  It is the split that comes with the American promise and its contempt, warring ideals, from the beginning, that have threatened and continue to threaten to tear the country apart.  

It seems, at every turn, when we confront the ugliness of this racial understanding of American identity that threatens to overwhelm everything, we end up evading the harder questions about who we are or who “we is.” As the late religious historian, Charles Long put it: 

“At each of these mythical cycles the opportunity is given for a change of the ritual, for a break in the repetition of this kind of eternal return.  It was first present in 1776, and then again in the 1960s with the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; but at each of these junctures the American revolution is aborted and the clever priests skillful in the ways of ritual purity and manipulation come upon the scene to ensure the repetition of the American ritual.” 

The “we” is rarely interrogated.  We end up tinkering around the edges. Calling for broader inclusion.  Declaring a commitment to diversity.  Never really interrogating the “we,” and condemning ourselves to a hideous repetition.  The “we” sits there as if it is something coherent or essential.  It sits there at the heart of our politics, dictating how political consultants guide candidates through the minefields of a divided electorate.  It sits there not as a set of principles, but an unexamined and, often, unexpressed idea of who the real Americans are. Coiled tight. Alabaster white. The rest of us need only contort ourselves to fit in, to make others comfortable, and to pay, no matter the cost, the price of the American ticket. 

The old saying that the best cure for the ills of American democracy is more democracy is true as far as it goes.  But, to my mind, it is an empty slogan if we fail, time and again, to reimagine the “we” at the heart of our national malaise and melancholy. 

Each generation must take as its task the daunting challenge of conceiving of American identity untethered from the “we” that has threatened to choke the life out of this place. 

We must finally discover who “we” is!