A New American Way

I’ve been reflecting on a question I asked recently during a weekly ecumenical scripture study session: “How will you (we) feel when white people are in the minority?” As one of us pointed out, that day is coming soon. To be clear, ours is a small group of older white clergy.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I was really driving at is this: we—collectively and individually—still tend to approach these issues from a place of patronizing superiority. We assume we understand the problem, that we know how to fix it, and that we must be the ones to act because we hold the power.

Most of us on our Tuesday calls lean liberal, and I’m sure many would be offended by the suggestion that we operate out of an assumed superiority and power. I don’t mean it as an accusation, nor do I intend offense. I simply believe this posture is so deeply embedded in American society that we rarely recognize it. There is no malevolent intent in it—not even racism in the ordinary sense. It is simply part of the cultural fabric.

But the day is coming—and soon—when people of other ethnicities and skin colors will remind mostly white thought-leaders, perhaps sternly, that they can speak for themselves and do not need us to do it for them. They will remind us that our voices carry no more inherent value than theirs. It won’t be a put-down. It will be a leveling of the field—uneven and uncomfortable for many, to be sure. I doubt anyone will demand a grand mea culpa from the former white majority. What will be expected is a willingness to take our place with some humility as one voice among many.

My question is whether this multitude of voices will find enough common ground in the promise of American constitutional democracy and its shared principles of citizenship. It will require accommodating cultural differences while respectfully celebrating each as part of what it means to be American. I’ve seen something like this approximated on Maui, where tensions certainly exist, but there is nonetheless a genuine sense that people can work together for the common good. Whether anything like that can happen in a nation as large and complicated as the United States remains an open question.

Europe, for example, seems to be having its own identity crisis—France, Germany, England, and others struggle to maintain their cultural heritage while absorbing immigrants from far-distant places who do not share the same historical experience. Other nations, such as China, Japan, and Korea, appear to have no intention of attempting such integration at all.

If the American political experiment has been a radical departure from world history, then this emerging diversity of ethnicities and skin colors is an even more radical departure—and a more difficult experiment in demonstrating how such a polyglot of people might live together in reasonable harmony as one nation with shared core values.

I don’t know what that future will look like, but I have some thoughts about it. For sixty years following World War II, national life was dominated by the ideal of the white middle class as the model to which all Americans were expected to aspire. The unspoken assumption was that immigrants and non-white persons would become more fully “American” when they assimilated into that ideal. It hasn’t worked for decades now, and it cannot be recovered despite efforts by white Christian nationalists and others. Yet the ideal did offer worthwhile elements: family stability, a desire for the best in public education, informed civic engagement, and a solid work ethic. Those are principles that can be broadly shared among different cultures, though expressed in different ways. A major failure of the old ideal was its assumption that these were inherently “white” characteristics, unlikely to be fully shared by others. The remnants of that prejudice continue to make progress difficult.

It seems to me that any new multicultural ideal of what it means to be American must use the old as building blocks for the new. Other cultures and ethnicities will add their own building blocks to create a more durable social structure for our remarkable country. But those other building blocks are not for me to define. They must be offered by others as treasured contributions, not as competitors for primacy.

Who will take the lead in helping this new American experiment succeed? I think it will have to come from public intellectuals and religious leaders. They may generate additional leadership within the political sector, but I wouldn’t count on politicians to take the lead by themselves. Moreover, I suspect the public intellectuals and religious leaders who will have the greatest influence will emerge from the local communities they serve rather than from national platforms.

It would help if the legacy press were a willing participant, but that seems unlikely given its consolidation under billionaire ownership with narrow political agendas. Whatever leadership emerges from that direction will come from individual journalists and authors who retain credibility across a broad spectrum of the population.