I suppose that, if I chose to, I could call myself a Swedish-German-Russian-Scottish-English-American, yet I have never done so. I am an American. Period. And don't give me any grief about the Native Americans. When they had the continent to themselves it wasn't America. For America, more than any other nation that has ever existed, is bounded not by physical boundaries or a gene pool but by ideals. Race, ethnicity, situs of birth, religion, etc., are all meaningless when it comes to defining who is an American. To be an American, one need do no more than associate himself with this simple credo :
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed...
and accept that the way in which we have chosen to achieve these ends is through the Constitution, which is, therefore, binding upon all citizens of the United States. It's that easy, and that difficult : easy because it allows any person, no matter their background, their abilities, or their other beliefs to become an American; difficult because it presupposes certain things--belief in God; respect for the rights of others; acceptance of responsibility for oneself--that are all too rare in human history.
This is not, of course, to say that America has always realized these ideals. We have often fallen short, but the shortcomings have been ours; they have not been a function of the ideals themselves. The most important area in which we have failed to live up to these lofty standards has been in the area of race. Between the long history of slavery and the shorter but hardly less vile era of segregation, the major portion of the American polis refused to accept that a sizable minority was truly equal, was, in fact, entitled to be treated as possessors of unalienable rights. This had obviously catastrophic results for the minority, but it took its toll on the majority too--in divisive sectionalism; warfare; and cultural retardation. Much of the first two centuries of the American experiment consisted of the working out of this dysfunction. Racism remains a fact of life today, one that will always be with us because of the limitations of human nature, but it is to our great credit as a society that for the most part is no longer a permissible organizing principle in most facets of American life. There is, however, one great exception to this general rule, and that is the way in which we now countenance the organization of minority racial groups into distinct political tribes.
Keith B. Richburg's powerful book, Out of America, tells the moving story of a black American man who learned the hard way that he prefers to define himself as an American, a believer in those ideals enumerated above, than to define himself by his race. This realization was driven home during Mr. Richburg's event-filled and depressing tour of duty as the Africa correspondent for The Washington Post. During his tenure there he witnessed : the descent of Somalia into warlordism; the mass butchery of Tutsis in Rwanda by rival Hutus; the almost ludicrous murder rampages of bewigged young men in Liberia; the pandemic of AIDs across the continent; the rampant crime and violence in even the crown jewel of black Africa, South Africa; he saw all this and more, almost none of it edifying or giving any reason to hope for a brighter future. One theme ran through all these awful episodes; in every case the violence was a function of people defining themselves ethnically.
Africa is unfortunately not the product of a set of ideals. No country in Africa is really dedicated to the realization of a set of ideals. In Africa, we see writ large and bloody the bitter human harvest of tribalism. Let men define themselves by their tribe and here is what follows :
[T]here I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering
sun, standing at the Rusumo Falls bridge, watching the bodies
float past me. Sometimes they came one by
one. Sometimes two or three together. They were bloated now, horribly
discoloured. Most were naked, or stripped down to
their underpants. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together.
Some were clearly missing some limbs. And as they
went over the falls, a few got stuck together on a little crag,
and stayed there flapping against the current, as
though they were trying to break free. I couldn't take my eyes off one
of them, the body of a little baby.
We timed them: a body or two every minute. And the
Tanzanian border guards told us it had been like that for a couple
of days now. These were the victims of the ethnic
genocide going on across the border in Rwanda. The killers were working
too fast to allow for proper burials. It was easier
to dump the corpses into the Kagera River, to let them float downstream
into Tanzania, eventually into Lake Victoria, out
of sight, and I suppose out of mind. Or maybe there was some mythic
proportion to it as well. These victims were from
the Tutsi tribe, descendants, they say, of the Nile, and more resembling
the Nilotic peoples of North Africa with their narrower
noses, more angular features. The Hutu, the ones conducting this
final solution, were Bantu people, shorter, darker,
and tired of being lorded over by the Tutsi. Maybe tossing the bodies into
the river was the Hutus' way of sending them back
to the Nile.
or this :
What I...noticed were the weapons--crude farming
tools, really. Machetes and long panga knives, more typically used
for
clearing brush and chopping firewood than for severing
human limbs. There were also clubs. Big, flat wooden clubs,
smaller at the handle end and rounded at the top.
They reminded me of the all purpose clubs Fred Flintstone and Barney
Rubble used to carry in the old TV cartoon.
But with one small difference: To make the clubs more deadly on impact,
the
Hutu militiamen drove long nails into the end.
That's what Rwanda has become, I thought. The country has reverted
to
prehistoric times, to a kind of sick version of
Bedrock. And could these be fully evolved humans carrying clubs and
machetes
and panga knives and smashing in their neighbors'
skulls and chopping off their limbs, and piling up the legs in one pile,
and the arms in another, and lumping the bodies
all together and sometimes forcing new victims to sit atop the heap while
they clubbed them to death too? No, I realized,
fully evolved human beings in the twentieth century don't do things like
that.
Not for any reason, not tribe, not religion, not
territory. These must be cavemen.
And so, after three years of experiencing the continuing horror that is post-Colonial Africa, of seeing the dead, being threatened himself, having friends murdered, and seeing black Congressmen and Civil Rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Chavis praise the African national leaders who condone this kind of violence against other Africans, who cling to power by any means necessary, who line their own pockets and those of their cronies while their people live in squalor, Mr. Richburg came to this jarring realization :
Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my
ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain.
He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding
pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And
then
he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship
for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.
Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor.
Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe
he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived,
and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean.
Generations on down the line, one of his descendants
was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father,
moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant
during the Second World War.
And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and
that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa,
birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge
of a river not as an African but as an American journalist - a mere spectator
-
watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading
over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had
been different, I might have been one of them -or
might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing
civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent.
And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.
[...]
Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.
In short, thank God that I am an American.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Richburg has been roundly attacked, particularly by other blacks, for reaching this conclusion. It is not surprising, but it is disheartening. The same "racial solidarity" that demands that blacks be termed African Americans also requires African Americans to identify themselves as a political interest group with similar expectations and needs, and imposes a conspiracy of silence about the social problems that have done so much to destroy black communities and about the rather more profound pathologies that are keeping Africa unstable, ungovernable, underdeveloped, and unfree. It prevents American blacks from being able to provide Africa with genuine assistance. Trapped in a, thankfully less destructive, racial politics of their own, they look to Africa for its blackness, instead of bringing to it their own Americaness. For so long as Africa remains defined by the color of people's skin and the tribes of their fathers, it will remain a disaster area. Only when Africans too decide to organize themselves around a set of ideals that are more elevated than pigment or gene--ideals like freedom, human dignity, peaceful competition, government by consent of the governed, and the like--will there be hope for Africa's future. And only when African Americans accept that the first part of that appellation is an immutable and relatively meaningless reference to ethnicity, while the second part, if embraced, makes them an integral and equal part of a bold and generally successful experiment in open and inclusive government of and by all the people, will we have any prospect of putting our long, ugly, and unfortunate history of divisive racial politics behind us.
I too thank God that Mr. Richburg's ancestor survived his voyage, though
we must lament the manner in which he was brought here and the way in which
he and his heirs were treated, and I too thank God that Mr. Richburg is
an American. Mr. Richburg and I belong to the same tribe, the American
tribe, and it is open to anyone who shares our ideals, regardless of race,
creed, or color.
(Reviewed:05-Feb-02)
Grade: (A-)
