Who Are We?

I borrowed the title for this post from a book by Samuel P. Huntington. The subtitle is The Challenges to America’s National Identity. It’s not my favorite book by Huntington, that’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. That book, however, is followed by Who Are We? and the two books are related.

First, American Politics was written to answer a question that was posed to Huntington during his oral defense of his dissertation. “Mr. Huntington,” the member of his dissertation committee stated, “what is the relationship between political thought and political institutions?” The questioner, Dr. Samuel H. Beer, was a political scientist of preeminence. Huntington states that the question was the impetus for a three decade search for the answer to that question, as it pertains to America.

For many, America is an exceptional nation. In many respects that may be true, but it is not because of what America has achieved. It is because of the promise of America. It is because of the political thought that undergirds the documents of early American history. Our institutions of governance, on the other hand, have never achieved the lofty heights that our political ideals established. A fundamental institution of America’s founding was the institution of slavery—the creation of an economic, social, and political system that categorized a group of people as subhuman, as property who could be treated any way that their owners wanted. There was no recourse for those who suffered under the system.

The ideas that were the foundation of American political thought were equality, individualism, liberty, democracy, and constitutionalism. The first three ideas set the standards for relations between individuals and between individuals and their government. Equality, individualism, and liberty all express a love for freedom and mutual respect for the rights of others. Equality expresses the idea that all persons are created equal, that no person is beneath another. Individualism expresses the belief that individuals are free to act in accordance with their own conscience. And liberty expresses the belief that there are limits to government’s ability to place restrictions on individual behavior. The ideas of democracy and constitutionalism relate to the belief that the only form of government that conforms to the first three ideas is democratic and have the powers and, more importantly, the limitations on government codified in a constitution, created by the people to express the compact between them and their government.

But the institutions—slavery especially—have proven problematic. America aspires to create institutions that embody all five ideals, whether the institution is the family, the economy, religion, government, or education. Part of the dilemma is the relationship among the five political ideas: They are not supportive of one another. In fact, increasing equality among persons decreases individualism, for example. But the biggest dilemma is the result of slavery—what Isabel Wilkerson calls Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

For 400 years we have attempted to explain away the dissonance between our beliefs and the institution of slavery. Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but institutions to maintain the practices that separated races and ethnicities, keeping the distinction that had no basis in fact alive. Were White people superior to Black and Brown people? We developed many rationales to sustain the separation and distinction. None was valid, but we were not deterred.

Recently, a friend recorded a video on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court validated the separation of people by race on interstate railway cars in Louisiana by stating the police power of the state allows such distinctions. The law that forced African Americans and other non-Whites to ride in a train car separate from White passengers was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges and immunities, due process of law, or equal protection of the law clauses. The decision pointed out that segregation by race in public education had been upheld in Boston, Massachusetts and in other northern states as well as other distinctions such as prohibiting interracial marriage in a number of states. The distinctions did not violate the equal protection clause because the railway cars for Blacks and others were the same as the cars for the Whites. So we lived with these distinctions in the North and the South, and the dissonance did not cause us pain or trauma. That is, at least for many of us. This extended quote from Justice Brown’s majority opinion is revealing of the continuing dilemma:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case, and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption. The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.

However, as Wilkerson notes, there was pain, both physical and emotional, felt by those who were separated because of a caste system that persists to this day—a system that made them less than human and enabled distinctions that should not be tolerated.

It is time for our aspirations expressed by our ideals to be achieved in the institutions of our society. It is time to cease justifying the dissonance and step into the ideal. We need to establish equity in our institutions by recognizing the humanity of all people, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, or whom they love. In the final sentences of American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Huntington notes that some people say that “. . . America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” Achieving that hope would make America truly exceptional.