Can’t We All Just Be American?

David Bean

David J. Bean is a retired aerospace engineer and a free-lance writer.

The United States has always been an integrating nation. We have taken in every conceivable cultural entity (not without pain) and gradually molded a new one, usually embracing the best attributes of all the others. Germans, Irish, English, and more recently Mexican and Asians have been or are being integrated into the ever-changing American culture.

The Blacks, who were brought in as slaves, have had a profound influence on U.S. culture. Slavery seriously affected the social life of the south and created an aristocracy. Today, blacks that have had the benefit of education or have exceptional talents have progressed in all fields of endeavor and are making positive contributions to the American culture. However, many well-intentioned intellectuals, in a desire to accelerate total integration and to increase diversity, have been promoting a philosophy which works counter to those objectives: multiculturalism. Part of multiculturalism prohibits judgments of all kinds (particularly of radical standards) and introduces a permissiveness that is having a deep impact on traditional American standards.

Herbert London wrote in the SCR that cultural relativism has had a most profound (and negative) effect on modern thought, that cultural relativists reject the superiority of Western ideas over other cultures, and they believe that all cultures are equally valid. Such relativism leads to political tribalism and the rejection of all Western intellectual instruments that have been largely responsible for Western progress.

A recent book of essays, titled Culture Matters, edited by Harrison and Huntington, (Basic Books) explores the reason why some nations and ethnic groups do so much better than others, both economically and politically. The underlying explanation offered by most of the writers is culture. By this they mean the beliefs and values transmitted from one generation to the next within a nation or ethnic group. Another word for this is “socialization”: what parents and teachers and peers and popular culture teach individuals about what matters and how to act.

Slavery repressed black people to a degree not even adequately appreciated today. Although the Civil War officially ended slavery in the United States, the segregation after the War further repressed black people and limited the number who could develop their skills and thus influence the American culture. Repression also fostered a strong, legitimate and long-standing resentment that is still reflected in some of today’s black culture. In the past, the few blacks who did manage to put aside resentment and accommodate the prevailing American culture had to work extra hard to overcome tremendous obstacles in order to succeed, and they were far too few to change early American attitudes.

The key used in the past by other ethnic groups has been to work within the culture, overcoming the bigots and finally receiving acceptance.

Thomas Sowell writing in Forbes about the effects of unrestricted immigration, stated,

A nation and a people is more than simply the sum total of the individuals who happen to live within its borders. For a multi-ethnic society like the United States, especially, it is a population that shares certain cultural traditions and moral values.

The United States has a duty to protect those traditions and values, and accept only those people who are willing to make a commitment to becoming American rather than remaining foreign.

Mr. Ward Connerly, writing in Insight magazine quotes the Pledge of Allegiance, “One nation . . . indivisible.” Connerly points to one nation of people who share values. He writes that the U.S. has become a nation of a thousand tribes. Identity politics, he points out, are antithetical to the basic principle of the indivisible nation: “Those themes argue against the goal of assimilation and the formulation of common ‘Identities.’”

William Raspberry in the Los Angeles Times writes:

I once described America as comprising a series of racial, ethnic and religious islands. Americanization, in this analogy, is the process of leaving the islands and joining the mainland.

We’ve watched over the years as the residents of one island after another have gone through the process. The Irish island, the German island, the Scandinavian islands, the Mediterranean islands-all have become essentially depopulated. They remain, if at all, as a sort of vacation home to visit on special occasions like St. Patrick’s Day or Oktoberfest.

Do we believe the same thing can happen to us? [Meaning blacks.]

How could there be any doubt: Isn’t the answer as obvious as Colin and Tiger and Oprah? Aren’t blacks leaving their ethnic island and becoming simply American all the time? And won’t the process inevitably lead to the island’s depopulation?

For the black island to become depopulated we must stop the forced march toward multiculturalism. If people like Sowell, Connerly and Raspberry can’t do it, perhaps a new Doctor Martin Luther King must emerge to show us the way.