Who is an American? A Timeline - Part One

PART ONE: The Beginning

History...does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. – James Baldwin

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner

Item # one: June 2019. A Salvadoran father and his daughter drown trying to cross the Rio Grande River. Children endure inhuman conditions in concentration camps while their parents are deported. Toddlers are brought into court without translators. Mothers are told to drink from toilets.

How, we wonder, can the government treat people with such gratuitous cruelty? Has it ever been this bad? Surely, say the pundits and many innocent liberals, this is not who we are!

Item # 2: July 4th, 2019. While Trumpus and his stormtroopers churn up the National Mall and the streets of Washington with military tanks, I take a break from writing and go for a walk in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, where I discover the grave of Fred Korematsu, the Japanese American who fought his conviction for evading internment in World War Two concentration camps for forty years.

Item # 3: June 2021. On “Meet the Press”, Chuck Todd mentions Critical Race Theory:

…parents are saying, “Hey, don’t make my kid feel guilty” And I know a parent of color is going, “What are you talking about?”

Nikole Hannah-Jones responds:

You said, “parents,” and then you said, “parents of color.”

Item # 4: January 2022. Senator Mitch McConnell snorts:

African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.

But I’m not here to bash Republicans; that’s too easy. Consider Joe Biden’s “praise” of Barack Obama in 2007:

...you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.

If you don’t get the irony, I encourage you to read this essay and take some time – lots of time – to consider how the nation has repeatedly determined who is privileged to live within the pale of “us” – the good, the true, the exceptional, the innocent – and who is not, how often those definitions have changed, and how violently white people have responded to those changes.

Item # 5: September 2025. Trumpus threatens to use the military against “the enemy within”.

As I write in “The Myth of Immigration”:

...the immigrant plays a curiously ambiguous role in the narrative of American innocence. Immigrants are outsiders, who in aspiring (or threatening) to become insiders, force insiders to question something we quite ambiguously refer to as the American Dream. To the Paranoid Imagination, however, they threaten to pollute that dream.

A further ambiguity is that their condition is qualified by their skin color, and of course, for generations, by their gender, their sexual preferences and the degree of choice they had to come to this land – as conquerors, slaves, indentured servants, refugees, unskilled workers, graduate students or anti-communists. Our stories of race and immigration announce a universal welcome enshrined on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” There may be no more famous line of poetry in the entire world. But this story – the Melting Pot – is rife with such contradictions that for centuries Americans have required an entire mythology to resolve them – a massive, ongoing, national, cognitive dissonance. Myths are far more powerful than we know. When facts confront myth, it is the facts that must change to fit the myth.

The story of American immigration has always been about those (white) people who were welcomed and those others, including the “conditionally white”, who were merely tolerated until their values and behaviors began to match those of the majority.

Immigrants – those who are just arriving, and especially those of darker skin – provide a convenient mirror for the “nativists” who try to convince themselves that they alone are the real Americans. Such people consumed the earliest versions of the myth of innocence, in which the story, from the beginning, marginalized the original inhabitants of the land.

Mythologists describe the growth and triumph of a grand story that we tell ourelves about ourselves, followed by its tantalizingly slow dissolution, along with the sense of how newer, more inclusive stories are still being formed. Individual people have always populated this story, have suffered, revolted against it or perpetrated inconceivably terrible violence to reconfirm it. But seen from this perspective, all the participants in this play embody it for all of us. Proud or embarrassed, we are all Americans.

That is, almost all of us subscribe unconsciously to the contents of the myths – radical individualism; the opportunities afforded by white privilege; manifest destiny; infinite progress; personal growth; the condemnation of failure and easy violence – that distinguish us from most other peoples. While few are completely innocent, no one has completely escaped the trauma. But only some of us are aware of it.

...I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. – D. H. Lawrence

Every national narrative has its shadow, the part of the story we have suppressed, perhaps out of fear of the “return of the repressed” (see Chapter Four of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: the Myth of American Innocence). The shadow of E Pluribus Unum insists that we can’t speak about how America became what it is without considering the impact of settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, capitalism and the construction of “whiteness.” We must address how those privileged enough to achieve entrance within the pale were granted permission to help determine who was outside the pale, how some might be admitted within the pale, and how they might be forced to impale others on the projection wall of otherness.

To the Indigenous people of this land, the soul matures in a series of initiations including the understanding that the Other is a mirror onto ourselves.

En-lakesh (You are the other me) – Mayan Indian chant

The ancient Greeks certainly knew this. Their word for “stranger” – xenos – the root of “xenophobia” – also meant “guest.”

Whenever our attention settles upon one of these Others, we are attempting in our minds to convince ourselves of the borders of our own identity. In “other” words, we are constantly listing the characteristics of these other individuals and groups to know that we are “not them,” and thus to know who “we” are. The nation’s physical border with Mexico is, in this sense, a metaphor for our own internal struggle to know who we are.

Defining others as outside has been the primary way in which most of us have known who we are on the inside. Our myth of innocence, built upon countless contradictions, is not an indigenous story, growing out of the land itself, it is – and we are – inherently unstable. In a very real sense, Americans are not the people who “are” anything; we are the people who “are not”. In every generation, groups of people – the “Others” – point out the most glaring flaws in the national story, demanding inclusion. In reaction, the privileged circle the wagons to reaffirm the old stories, occasionally allowing the minimal possible modifications.

Once, we knew who we were because of positive things we could say about ourselves: we were the children of the gods; we and our ancestors arose from of this land; we knew all the animals and medicinal plants. But now we define ourselves by knowing that we are “not them.” And we are not them because (in our minds) they are: violent, sexual, hateful, ignorant, lazy, immature, irrational, untrustworthy, overly rhythmic and/or primitive. Together, these traits represent the greatest of all sins to the white, Anglo-Saxon, puritanical mind: the inability or unwillingness to repress or control one’s desires.

Perhaps in considering these stories from the perspectives of women, people of color, Native Americans, Muslims, LGBTQ people, disabled people or recent immigrants, we can understand the base mode of American identity (white, male, Christian, ableist and heterosexual), why so many of us cling to it so tenaciously, why so many are so deeply threatened by anyone who questions it, and why they go to such efforts to try and maintain it, supporting con-man politicians and preachers who steal them blind.

This of course is the story that Howard Zinn told in A People’s History of the United States. And it is why intellectuals, especially historians, have gone to such great lengths to ignore or discredit him. See my essay, Old White Men: Historians as the Gatekeepers of American Myth.

We can read this story depending on the narratives we subscribe to. Optimists will claim, “Look how far we’ve come!”, while pessimists will see the old pattern of oligarchs manipulating the dreams and desires of millions. Yes, it has been this bad before, and no, we cannot become who we were meant to be (if we can still think in such terms) without fully acknowledging who we have been and who we are now. As I write in Chapter Twelve of my book:

Our American cosmogony begins with the original “deities” (the Pilgrims and founding fathers) who created a world out of “nothing.” If we take a radical perspective, we acknowledge that from the start, their new world functioned to concentrate and perpetuate wealth. American history becomes a series of conquests, painful expansions of freedom and countermeasures to protect privilege, culminating in today’s bleak realities. The rich vs. the poor, or the predatory and paranoid imaginations vs. the return of the repressed.

Alternatively, we can take a philosophical approach. Jacob Needleman insisted that the founding fathers were spiritual men, adherents of a timeless wisdom, who created a system to allow people “to seek their own higher principles within themselves.” The nation was formed of unique ideals and potentials, not from ethnicity; and this explains its universal appeal, even if those ideals have been perverted into their opposites by men far less mature than those founding fathers. The American Dream vs. the nightmare of dreams deferred.

Or we can muse poetically about what is approaching, if we could only recognize its song. Time / Kronos vs. Memory / Mnemosyne. From this perspective, we could read our history as a baffling, painful, contraction-and contradiction-filled birth passage in which the literal has always hinted at the symbolic.

So these essays detail a timeline of how America has negotiated that fine line – the border – between “us” and “them.” It’s a long and exhausting list, but I suggest that it falls into the “Don’t look away! Bear witness!” category. These events happened to real people. Notice two patterns that have regularly pointed out the discrepancies between values and norms, or between official policy and actual behavior, or between mythic narrative and reality:

1 – The regular occurrence of mass, genocidal violence (the word “mob” appears over 30 times, “riot” over 40 times and “massacre” over 90 times) – perpetrated almost exclusively by white people.

2 – The activity of the Supreme Court, composed for most of its existence by old, white – and for its first 70 years, primarily slave-owning – men, in the intermittent expansion and contraction of definitions of who is and who isn’t an American.

Take your time as you read, open the links, and consider Thom Gunn’s poem at the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park:

Walker within this circle, pause.
Although they all died of one cause,
Remember how their lives were dense
With fine, compacted difference.

You can listen to an audio version of this essay by clicking on the arrow, and you can read the next installment on the Substack App.