What is an American? There’s been some confusion about that lately as we debate, with increasing ferocity, immigration, assimilation, and the sources of American identity.
Generally, there are two schools of thought. The so-called heritage Americans argue that Americanness is mostly based on a combination of history, ethnicity, shared culture, and ancestral heritage. The civic or propositional nationalists think it’s based on a set of ideas, an American “creed” or set of Enlightenment propositions that in theory anyone can adopt, no matter their background, culture, or religion.
Most Americans today probably gravitate towards the latter definition, if only because we’ve all been taught for the past half-century that anyone can be an American if they profess the creed and get their paperwork in order. We fear, too, that tying American identity to culture or heritage smacks of the “blood-and-soil” nationalism of European fascists and homegrown racists.
But after decades of mass immigration, legal and illegal, and the social disruption and discontent that has resulted, the question of American identity isn’t going away. We have to talk about it because it keep coming up.
Just look at what happened over the weekend when an X post from Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French ignited a weeklong controversy over this very question. French posted an image from last weekend’s University of Texas-Ohio State football game that showed a crowd of UT students, most of them of South Asian descent, cheering the Longhorns’ upset victory. He wrote, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
What followed was exactly what you’d expect. Establishment Republicans like outgoing Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who lost his primary to Attorney General Ken Paxton, denounced French’s post as racist and intolerant. James Talarico, the weird little man who won the Texas Democratic primary for Senate, agreed with Cornyn and challenged Paxton to condemn the post. Paxton responded by denouncing Talarico for saying that white men are America’s top terror threat.
Online, a debate erupted over whether it’s okay to notice that South Asians, most of them immigrants from India or the children of immigrants, are now massively overrepresented at places like the University of Texas, while white men are massively underrepresented. Civic nationalists on the right argued that French’s post was not only racist but self-refuting. After all, these students were at a football game. They were wearing UT colors. One of them even had a cowboy hat on. This is what assimilation looks like! And anyway, who’s to say they need to assimilate? Many of them are likely American citizens, which for civic nationalists means they’re just as American as any other citizen.
But of course as my colleague Brianna Lyman pointed out, assimilation is more than going to a football game and, for those born here to immigrant parents, more than merely holding citizenship. Lyman writes that, “just because someone was born on our soil doesn’t magically make them an assimilated American — and that’s a conversation we must have. Many immigrant groups, some generations removed from the initial migrants, cling to cultures and traditions that are fundamentally at odds with American culture.”
Now, to assert that some cultures and traditions might fundamentally be at odds with American culture is to assert that American culture has shape and content, that it is something, not anything or nothing. It is to assert, contra the civic nationalists, that being an American requires more than process neutralism, more than assenting to a set of Enlightenment propositions or a set of abstract ideas, and certainly more than paperwork.
Not that those ideas aren’t important, or that our civic creed isn’t a part of what constitutes American identity. But our civic creed and the ideas that animate it — individual rights, free speech, rule of law — came from somewhere. They were not plucked out of thin air by Thomas Jefferson. They came from Christian Europe, and specifically they came from England.
Why is that important? Because if we pretend that American identity is based on universal ideas that can apply to anyone from anywhere, we will find ourselves in the absurd position of having to affirm that things like Muslim polygamy and child marriage, or Haitian voodoo, or rampant Somali welfare scams, or a 90-foot statue of a Hindu monkey god in suburban Houston, are all valid expressions of Americanness because the people doing these things are U.S. citizens and who are we to judge our fellow citizens’ cultures?
No. The ideas that underpin American society are ideas that came from a specific culture and a specific people. Only the English could have created something like America, and only the English did.
The civic nationalists are loath to admit this. David French (no relation to Bo French) of The New York Times weighed in all this and argued that America is “a nation with a culture created by an idea.” But he gets it exactly backwards. The idea did not create the culture but emerged from it, just as the culture emerged from the cult, from Christianity. Indeed, it was the Christian faith above all that created and shaped English culture, which in time enshrined the doctrine of imago Dei into its customs and laws and political structures, providing protections for the rights of Englishmen in a way that few nations did, even in Christendom. It was this culture, sprung from this faith, that the first Americans brough to Massachusetts and Virginia in the early seventeenth century, and it was their descendants who eventually founded the United States.
It might be considered impolite to say so but if you do not come from this Anglo-American culture and have not inherited the civilization of Christian Europe from your ancestors the way many native-born Americans have, then to become fully American you must choose to be adopted into it, and you must embrace it completely. And this is the important part: you must become fully American by abandoning the aspects of your native culture and society that are incompatible with Anglo-American culture.
Most immigrants today are not interested in this, and they do not do it. French claims that immigrants “don’t want to replace Americans; they want to be Americans.” His evidence for this is that South Asians at UT went to a football game.
But even that image betrayed a larger problem with multiculturalism and mass immigration in America. The South Asian students in question were clustered together in their own little ethnic enclave, so to speak, in the stadium. It was suggestive of a phenomenon familiar to nearly every attentive American: recent immigrants, and even the children of immigrants, are less likely to assimilate into the American mainstream than immigrants of earlier eras. They instead tend to recreate localized versions of their native homelands — not just in big cities as in last century (a Chinatown or a Little Italy) but in communities of all sizes across the country. Once settled in these unassimilated ethnic enclaves, immigrants are less likely to marry outside of them and more likely to retain the cultural practices and social mores of their native countries. Under these circumstances, they do not assimilate, nor do their children. Not only do they show little interest in becoming fully assimilated Americans, they actively resist it.
It was not always thus. Before the middle of the last century, the ideal immigrant to America was someone who aspired above all that their children would be fully American, fully assimilated in a way they never could be, having been born and raised in a foreign land. Our leaders and civic culture encouraged this aspiration among immigrants, and considered it a virtue. Together with low levels of immigration relative to today, and a coherent and stable American mainstream culture, it’s what made assimilation possible in the first place.
That kind of assimilation is frowned on these days, but it shouldn’t be. There is a true nobility to it. The Indian writer Nirad Chadhuri captured the essence of assimilation to the West from a foreign culture in the famous dedication of his work, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian: “To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.”
Chadhuri wrote that in 1951, four years after India’s independence. He was vilified in India for it, a social and literary outcast, but he did not much care. By then, at age 53, he had essentially become English, adopted into the West. He finally moved to England in 1970, where he died 29 years later, an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire, embraced by the country and the people he adopted. He would have made a good American.
