American culture

The American Identity Author(s): Sheldon Hackney Source: The Public Historian, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 11-22 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3378975 Accessed: 08-05-2018 13:38 UTC

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Roundtable: The National Conversation on American

Pluralism and Identity

Sheldon Hackney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a historian of the United States, launched "The National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity" in 1993, shortly after his appointment by President Clinton. It could be said that life in the United States has always had as a central theme an unofficial conversation about who "we" are as a people and as a nation. Historians who reconstruct that conversation have become increasingly critical of it, for to the modern ear the advocates and supporters of unum in our national past have too often seemed to sing an exclusionary song. It took some courage for historian Hackney to sponsor an NEH-led reinvigoration of the debate about the balance we should strike between pluralism and unity. He was moved to propose this National Conversation by rancorous disputes in the 1990s over multiculturalism and bilingual education, by the battles over the image of our past as expressed in the aborted Enola Gay exhibit, the proposed National History Standards, and "the long list of public-policy issues whose resolutions will be driven by notions of national identity": race-conscious congressional districting, affir- mative action, immigration. "It is time to look again into the national mirror," he concluded, at a time when many sense a crisis in the civic conception of American identity in a nation experiencing the highest levels of immigration in almost a century. Can we still be confident of the cohesive power of the unum in our national motto, E Pluribus Unum?

Hackney reports on the results of the National Conversation in the essay that follows, a version of an address he has presented around the country since late 1995. (This particular version of the address was delivered at Texas Christian University on April 10, 1996.) Discussions over what Americans have in common led inevitably to historical themes, to our inheritance of forming a nation of diverse elements often in conflict. In a packet prepared to assist group discussion, participants were invited to think again about the insights into American identity of George Washington and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, of Mary Antin and W. E. B. DuBois, and were asked to clarify the meanings of pluralism and multiculturalism and the space they left for unum.

Whatever future historians think of our own era, Hackney concludes from the NEH Conversation that there is in the American society a broadly

11

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12 n THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

shared conception of "an inclusive historical narrative,.... a common story" retaining the power to sustain national cohesion. The tensions between the surging, fragmenting stories of America's

pluribus and the public desire for a larger, unifying narrative have had special impact on historians active in the public realm, particularly those working in museums, historical societies, and historic sites. The Public Historian has invited several historians engaged with public audiences to respond to and comment on Hackney's summation of this important NEH initiative.

-THE EDITORS

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The American Identity

SHELDON HACKNEY

SPEAKING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS on October 16, 1995 in the wake of

the racially disparate reaction to the jury verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and on the same day as the Million Man March in Washington by black men for "atonement and reconciliation," President Clinton called upon Americans of all races "to clean our house of racism." "We must be one," he asserted, " ... all of us, no matter how different, who share basic

American values and are willing to live by them." Then, recalling the moments of crises from America's past, when the nation "had the courage to face the truth about our failure to live up to our own best ideals," the president said the country became stronger by becoming more inclusive. "At each of these moments, we looked in the national mirror and were brave

enough to say, 'this is not who we are; we're better than that.'" "This is not who we are." Well, who are we? That is the question, and it

is a crucial question. Who we think we are shapes what we do. Archibald MacLeish, in an essay published in 1949, wrote, "The soul of a people is the image it cherishes of itself; the aspect in which it sees itself against its past; the attributes to which its future conduct must respond. To destroy that image is to destroy, in a very real sense, the identity of the nation, for to destroy the image is to destroy the means by which the nation recognizes what it is and what it has to do."

Small wonder, then, that in recent months we have witnessed rancorous

public disputes about the image of our past: the aborted Enola Gay exhibit, the canceled American history theme park by Disney near Manassas, the proposed National History Standards, and perhaps the attempted abolition of the National Endowment for the Humanities itself. The question posed

SHELDON HACKNEY is chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This version of

"The American Identity" was delivered at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, on April 10, 1996.

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The Public Historian, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1997)

? 1997 by the Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History

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by those disputes is, '"Who owns history?" Who controls our collective image of ourselves? Who is authorized to tell the country "what it has to do" by holding up the national mirror?

By now we can all recite the litany of domestic social ills threatening our sense of well-being; we are also feeling the anxieties of an ill-defined "new world order" that have replaced the ironically comfortable certainties of the Cold War; we are painfully aware of the depredations the global market place is visiting upon the domestic economy; we have seen the polls indicating that most Americans (70 percent in an April 1996 survey) think the country is "on the wrong track," that the younger generation will have a much more difficult time realizing "the American dream" than their par- ents, that the members of each racial group in distressingly high percentages hold negative stereotypes of the members of each of the other racial groups in the American population; and we have heard critics as diverse as Cornel West and William Bennett declare that America is in a spiritual crisis.

Furthermore, there is a long list of public-policy issues whose resolutions will be driven by notions of the American identity: race-conscious congres- sional districting, affirmative action, immigration, bilingual education, En- glish as the official language, Afrocentric curriculums, teaching values in schools, and perhaps such indirect matters as welfare policy, urban policy, and public education itself. It is time to look again into the national mirror.

The National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity, a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, does just that. It invites diverse groups of Americans to come together-by teleconference, on the internet, through the radio, in face-to-face discussion groups-to talk and to listen to each other about what holds us together as a country, about shared values in a heterogeneous society, about common commitments in a society that contains all the divisions of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion that are the source of sectarian violence in almost every other quarter of the globe, about the unum in our national motto, E Pluribus Unum.

The National Conversation has been underway for only a few months, so the projects are still in their early stages.' On the other hand, the Conversa- tion was two years in the making, and I have traveled all over the country talking about it, conducting trial conversations, seeking advice, and listening to Americans respond. There are already lessons that can be drawn from it. This, then, is an interim report.

The first thing to be said is that Americans are eager for the National Conversation. They may be a little puzzled at first if the subject is defined in

1. The NEH has awarded $1.75 million for 38 projects through the special grant competition, and $3.4 million for 37 additional projects that competed in our regular programs but are substantially related to the theme of the National Conversation. A film that is still in preparation and a small amount of extra funding for the state humanities councils are extending the conversation even more broadly. The cumulative total of projects funded through November 1995 is 1,540 "conversations" in 224 cities and towns in 41 states.

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THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION * 15

its most abstract form, but the feeling of social fragmentation, of people drifting apart from one another, is very much on their minds, so they recognize the topic and understand its purpose. In addition to describing the project to dozens of audiences and seeking the advice of a score or more of interested groups, I conducted six "pilot conversations" in communities that differed in geography, ethnic composition, and economic base. The groups were composed of diverse cross-sections of their communities and of people who had not known each other previously. In each case, the groups spontaneously asked at the end of the evening if there was a way they could come back together to continue the discussion. This was a testament to the recognition of the importance of the topic, its protean nature, and also to the reality that it takes some time before participants begin to trust each other enough to express something of their deeper feelings, fears, and dreams.2

There are, of course, flash points and dead ends to worry about in these discussions, but the conversation has an integrity and a currency that draws people along with it across the tiger pits of discord and suspicion.3 Perhaps a few vignettes from some of the discussions I have led will hint at the rewards and lessons of the conversation.

I went for my first "pilot conversation" to Garden City, Kansas, a remote "meat factory" town in the middle of the prairie. There, physically tough, low-wage jobs in the slaughter houses have attracted recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants, making the small town quite diverse. The group that gathered at the public library was as diverse as the town, but the conversa- tion went smoothly. They talked of tolerance, the rewards of pluralism, the challenge of equal opportunity, and the ideal of democracy. There were very few points at which tensions could be observed. At the conclusion, after the

2. There are certain criticisms that the National Conversation has had to face. Critics on

the Right accused it of being a covert effort to impose a multicultural ideology on a naive public. Critics on the Left suspected that it was a camouflaged attempt to reimpose a pre-1960s Anglo-American version of the American identity. Some said there is no real problem in the United States, so why talk? Others insisted that the nation state is archaic and the source of much human misery, so we should be talking about cosmopolitanism. The search for cohesion is fundamentally misguided, another argument insisted, because it would deprive "the Other" of the right to a nonconforming identity. If the conversation is in English, isn't that already an oppressive statement? Talk is like crabgrass and doesn't need subsidizing, ran one line of criticism, missing the distinction between idle chatter and a purposeful humanities conversa- tion based on a text. What will you do, asked journalists circling like vultures over the cultural battlefield, when people start shouting at each other rather than talking to each other? Indeed, was not the subject so charged with emotion that talking about it might make it worse? Despite these attempts to make the National Conversation seem controversial, it has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by humanities and public-interest groups and by the general public.

3. With financial and logistical assistance from the MacArthur Foundation, we brought together in Chicago a group of scholars to help us sharpen our focus, define our questions, and explore the subject. They were enormously helpful. They were: William Galston, Henry Louis Gates, Nathan Glazer, Amy Gutmann, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Stanley Katz, Martin Marty, Martha Minow, Martha Nussbaum, Diane Ravitch, Renato Rosaldo, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Sennett, Catherine Stimpson, Rennard Strickland, Ronald Takaki, Michael Walzer, Iris Marion Young, and Jamil Zainaldin. James Q. Wilson could not attend that meeting but participated in other ways and provided a short essay for the resource kit. The resource kit is available from the NEH; phone 1-800-NEH-1121.

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discussants had all left, I asked the host if I had heard an honest discussion.

"Yes," he said, "but at its most polite level." I had, he thought, heard what the

group thought would make their community look good in the eyes of a visitor, especially a visitor from Washington. I was disappointed. Crushed might be a more accurate word. My long years of experience as a teacher had failed me.

On the way home on the plane, however, I began to think of the conversation in a slightly more positive way. This diverse group, after all, when it wanted to present itself in the best possible light, had reverted to a set of civic values that the town may not have lived by but which they recognized as shared ideals-"our own best ideals," as the president said. True, they had not been able to talk candidly in front of a stranger about how they fell short of their ideal, but they held in common a notion of civic virtue

that was inclusive and tolerant and based on equal access to justice and opportunity. I felt a little better, demonstrating perhaps the power of rationalization.

I traveled not long after that to Detroit and spent a wonderful evening talking about America with a group that was racially and ethnically very diverse, but was generally well educated and prosperous. The group was not shy, but it found itself agreeing in short order with a particularly articulate Euro-American man who argued that the essence of Americanism was a reliance on the Constitution and the political system it defined, along with a commitment to equal individual opportunity, self-reliance, and maximum individual freedom. When it became clear that a surprising agreement had been reached, one of the group looked around and said, "I wonder if the underclass would agree with us?" The ways in which opportunity is struc- tured by class almost always came up in these discussions, along with other social-justice issues.

In Boston, I found myself engaged with a group that was not designed to be a pilot conversation but nonetheless fell naturally into a feisty discussion of the American identity. After that discussion had been boiling along for a while, a young Latino activist was recognized, looked steadily around the big table, and said in a voice full of challenge, "I am not an American. There is nothing about me that is American. I don't want to be American, and I have

just as much right to be here as any of you." What an American thing to say-- squarely in the great tradition of American dissent. He was affirming his American identity even as he was denying it. I think he was also launching a preemptive strike against the threat of exclusion by declaring that he did not want to be included, and he was announcing that his pre-American identity was very important to him and he did not want America to deprive him of it.

I was conversing in Oklahoma City long before it became a national symbol for both the cynicism that is corroding American democracy and for the kind of communal solidarity in the face of catastrophe that is the antidote to our cynicism.

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THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION 0 17

In Oklahoma City, after much talk of grievances held by various Ameri- can groups, as well as about the ideals of equal opportunity and equal justice, a Chinese-American man told his story. He had been born and raised in China and had been fortunate enough to have been sent by the government to the United States to get his Ph.D. Like a lot of his compatriots in that first wave of Chinese students, he defected. He stayed in America and now is a college teacher. For a long time, he said, he thought that for him the appeal of the United States was the higher standard of living, the material comforts it afforded. Then, he told us, he began to realize that what he valued most in his new American identity was freedom. "Here," he said, "no one tells me where I must live, what job I can have, what I can read, what I must think, what I can say, how many children I can have."

Houston is an interesting city because it does not have a racial majority. It is about a third Anglo American, a third African American, and a third Hispanic. The group that came together to discuss the meaning of being American represented those major communities plus the smaller Asian- American portion of the population. At one point, after the group had been discussing family and how America viewed older people, a Vietnamese American made a powerful point through a poignant autobiographical statement. In all cultures influenced by Confucian thought, he said, family is the highest value, and older people are revered as being wise and deserving honor.

He had thus devoted his life to his family. He had risked everything to escape Vietnam, and he had managed against great odds to get his family to the United States. Once in Houston, he had worked very hard to earn a living in a strange land. He was now teaching English as a second language to mostly Chicano young people (prompting from me Yogi Berra's famous response to the news that a Jew had been elected Mayor of Dublin, "Only in America!"), and he devoted all his resources to his family. By working very hard and saving, he had managed to provide a good education for his two daughters. They had just graduated from college and had gotten good jobs, but, he said with resignation more than anger in his voice, "They do not bring their money home!" That is, they were not pooling their money with his as if they were part of the family unit. What he was really saying, of course, was that his daughters had become individualistic Americans while he was still culturally Vietnamese.

In Lawrence, Massachusetts, a Cambodian American and a Vietnamese American argued over the value and wisdom of bilingual education. The Cambodian American took his daughter out of the program after the second year because, according to him, she could read neither Cambodian nor English. One inferred from all he said, however, that he was very intent on blending into his new surroundings. On the other hand, the Vietnamese American was pleased with the same program because he thought it was very important for his children to maintain their cultural identity. Among the other reasons he cited for this was the fact that he had gotten an

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18 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

enormous amount of help from the Vietnamese community in getting started after his immigration. The ethnic community as a support group is an old story in America.

Out of all these conversations comes my sense that almost all Americans have an answer to the question of what it means to be an American, even though it may be somewhat inchoate until it is summoned up into full consciousness and tested. When examined, the question "Who are we?" turns out to be three related questions: (1) what principles of governance for our common life should we hold dear, (2) what widespread traits of charac- ter or typical behavior give evidence that we share ideals of admired behavior and definitions of unacceptable behavior, and (3) how do we think about or describe the whole, the "ONE," and what does that imply about who is really included in the nation. "How wide the circle of we?"

The answer to the question of what it means to be an American usually begins with a belief in the universal values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a belief that what keeps our differ- ences from developing into major conflict is a shared commitment to the idea of democracy, an agreement about how to resolve our disagreements. "Civic nationalism," this is usually called, and it is the foundation of almost all popular conceptions of the American identity. The ever-changing size and shape of the gap between aspiration and achievement is a central theme of American history.

There are dilemmas, to be sure. For instance, Liberty and Equality sometimes pull in opposite directions, yet we are committed to both. For another instance, participants almost invariably expressed a desire to be tolerant of differences growing out of the cultural traditions or beliefs of another group; but some different practices are apparently too much to tolerate. The more obvious examples of this are polygamy, female genital mutilation, ritual drug use, the subordination of women, putting the health of children at risk because of a religiously based refusal to use modern medicine, and so forth. The problem comes when trying to define what class of things must conform to the moral judgment of the majority of citizens and

what class of things can be allowed to be different. Cultures may be equally legitimate, but they are not equally admirable in their every feature.

Assuming that this dilemma can be managed without rupturing the social bonds, the question then becomes, "Is civic nationalism enough to hold us together?" Most Americans with whom I have talked so far think that it is not, but they also believe that there is an American culture-"conventional ways of believing and behaving"-that is shared across regional, religious, ethnic, and racial lines. The problem is that for almost every trait one can cite as being characteristically American, there is its opposite as well. One can construct a veritable Yin and Yang of American culture.

Americans believe in equality and are instinctively suspicious of people who "put on airs." Yet Americans are also fascinated by celebrities. We love

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THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION * 19

to see exceptional people do exceptional things, and we are just as eager to see them crash after attaining exalted heights. Icarus could be a naturalized American.

Americans proclaim that hard work is its own reward, but we are also constantly on the lookout for get-rich-quick schemes. From the gold rush to the land rush to their modern-day equivalents in Wall Street and Las Vegas, we think there must be a way to get rich without having to sweat. The lottery is a poor man's investment in the American Dream.

Americans thus may be motivated by greed, but we are also the most philanthropic people on the face of the globe. We are materialistic, but we have the highest percentage of church members among the developed industrial nations. New Age cults and mysticism thrive amongst people who are pursuing the main chance.

We are heterogeneous in almost every imaginable way, and tolerance of difference is thought to be a virtue; but we have sprouted the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, Know Nothings, Anti-Masons, Militias, and assorted nativist groups.

Ninety percent of Americans describe themselves as middle class, and middle-class virtues are enshrined in our Puritan heritage. Yet we are also the land of instant gratification, of minute rice and fast food, of hot tubs and

easy credit, of Hollywood escapism and theme-park fantasies. We think of ourselves as a practical and self-reliant people, but we have

been host to more utopian experiments in communal living than any other nation on earth. That is what the Branch Davidians were doing in Waco, for instance.

Competition is such a natural thing to Americans that almost every activity is organized into a contest so that we can find out who is the best at it. On the other hand, our national imagination is full of the icons of cooperation: barn raisings and corn huskings, wagon trains going west and communities rallying in selfless solidarity after a hurricane or flood or terrorist's bomb.

Individualism is an American fetish, but our real genius is for large-scale organization--witness the transcontinental railroad and telegraph, corpo- rate giants like IBM and GM, the winning of World War II, putting a man on the moon, and our devotion to team sports.

President Clinton in his Austin speech mentioned optimism as a tradi- tional American trait, and he is certainly right, but there is also a long and honored tradition in Puritan America of the Jeremiad. Cassandra is fre- quently found as the author of a book on the best-seller list.

I believe that it is virtually impossible to tell which one or the other member of these antipodal pairs is more typical than the other. The pairs

indicate fault lines in the culture, locations where there is active stress. They are interesting for that reason.

Bearing in mind the questionable claim of such cultural traits to being

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20 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

useful in distinguishing Americans from others, it is nonetheless interesting to know how Americans think of themselves. Participants in the National Conversation mentioned not only the foregoing traits but a number of other

characteristics they thought were especially American: a high value placed upon free speech and the other individual freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights; a tendency to favor the underdog; a belief that people should have a second chance and that social mobility is a good thing; the expectation of progress and that "things should work"; the belief that striving for success is the normal condition of life, and that individuals are obliged to attempt to improve themselves and their circumstances; that choices should be avail- able; that education is a ladder for social mobility; and that individuals have a duty to conttibute to their communities.

When one moves from individual traits to the task of imagining the group,

one discovers three conventional categories in use. Most writers agree that the dominant cultural style at least until the 1960s was Anglo American (growing out of British and later out of more general European heritage), and that members of other groups were expected to conform to it.

The social revolution of the sixties not only opened up the mainstream of opportunity to members of ethnic and racial minorities, but it replaced the notion of a single acceptable cultural style with a multiplicity of equally legitimate cultural heritages, an orientation known as pluralism. By then the theory of pluralism, rooted in the work of Horace Kallen and popularized first by Randolph Bourne, was half a century old.

The idea of America being a melting pot has existed since Hector St. John de Crevecoeur defined "this new man, this American" during the Revolu- tionary struggle, but it did not become popular as a goal of social policy until Israel Zangwill's play in 1908 struck a responsive chord amidst the anxieties about the lack of social cohesion resulting from the flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries.

Anglo conformity does not work as a model because it does not allow the sort of dual and mixed identities that many Americans want, and because it denigrates the non-European heritages of many Americans. The melting- pot metaphor provides for the huge amount of assimilation that has actually gone on in the United States, but it does not accommodate itself to the huge amount of persistence of pre-American cultural identities that is also part of our reality. Not only do these pre-American cultural identities persist, but Americans want to maintain them and will resist any notion of Americanism that requires the obliteration of these identities of descent.

Cultural pluralism, on the other hand, comes in many forms, but in its most egalitarian form it does not recognize the historical fact of the primacy of British, European, and Western Civilization's cultural parentage. All heritages are equally legitimate, but all were not equally influential. Fur- thermore, there is a separatist version of pluralism that views the United

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THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION * 21

States as simply a holding company for a collection of nations, an umbrella organization for diasporic national fragments whose members get their identities from, and owe their loyalties to, non-American states. Such a vision of America is seen as a worrisome deviation by most Americans. Even more important, pluralism in any of its current guises does not provide for a shared American culture, an identity that all citizens have equal access to, an identity that actually exists and that most Americans want. For these reasons, existing forms of pluralism are inadequate. Americans seem to want

a way to think about diversity that is not provided by any of these existing models but goes beyond them.

There is a new conception of the American identity that one can assemble out of the talk created by the National Conversation and out of recent scholarship.4 First, the new conception is rooted in "civic nationalism," a shared belief in our democratic governance system and the universalistic values to which we committed ourselves in the Declaration of Indepen- dence and the Constitution.

Second, there is a sense that out of our history has come a set of meanings and attitudes and preferences and typical behaviors and tastes that amount to a national character. However difficult it is to specify it with accuracy, it is nonetheless real, and it is recognized by other Americans, and especially by foreigners encountering Americans.

Third, the new way of thinking about the American collectivity allows for both a common American identity and an identity of descent, and even a mixed or multiple identity of descent. It accommodates itself to the Ameri-

can devotion to mobility, both geographic and social. It permits change over time--change in the boundaries of identities and in the meaning of identi-

4. In addition to my discussions and pilot conversations, and in addition to the advisers listed above, my thinking about the American identity has been enriched and informed by my reading in the works of the following scholars and writers, though my ideas do not coincide completely with any of them: Joyce Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism," The Journal of American History 79 (September 1992): 419-31; Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Os Guiness, The American Hour (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Jean Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Arthur Mann, The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); John Higham, "Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique," The American Quarterly 45 (June 1993): 195-219; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); David Potter, Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life, edited by Don Fehrenbacher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Benjamin Barber,Jihad Versus Mc World (New York: Times Books, 1995); David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1995); Lawrence Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); James Davison Hunter, The Culture Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1992), and Before the Shooting Begins (New York: The Free Press, 1994); and Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

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ties, as well as permitting the creation and demise of identities. It accounts for both assimilation and for the persistence of pre-American identities.5

Most important, it recognizes the hybridity of American culture. That is, it reflects the understanding that when various world cultures encountered each other in North America over long periods of time, the relationships were not simply those of dominance and submission but of mutual influ- ence. The resulting American culture therefore may be built on a British and European base, but it is more accurately understood as a hybrid of many cultures, and that it is not identical to any of its root cultures.

The National Conversation about American Pluralism and Identity is roaring along now, so I invite you to join in. There is no more important topic

before the public at this time. You may draw your own conclusions from the conversation, of course. The National Endowment for the Humanities only provides questions and stimulating reading lists. You provide your own answer.

My own belief is that there is a national identity that we can share in a way that brings us together so that we can more easily solve our common problems but that also honors our differences. Based in democracy, this identity guards individual rights but recognizes the need for a sense of duty to the community. I worry that rights-based individualism on the Left, and market-driven libertarianism on the Right, will leave insufficient room for a common vision for the common good. The question absent from our national catechism is, '"What do I owe to my fellow citizens?"

I believe, further, that there is an inclusive historical narrative in which

we all recognize not only the stories of our kith and kin but in which we acknowledge that we all are playing roles in a common story, in which we are all linked to each other across barriers of time and boundaries of race, in

which we share the shame of our mistakes and the glory of our achieve- ments, in which the meaning of America is to be found in the common ground of its aspirations of liberty and justice for all.

5. As David Hollinger writes in Postethnic America, "Postethnicity prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as part of the normal life of a democratic society" (p. 116).

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