what is being an american essay

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What does it mean to be an American?

Sarah Song, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy in 2005–2006, is an assistant professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2007). She is at work on a book about immigration and citizenship in the United States.

It is often said that being an American means sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideals. 1 Writing about the relationship of ethnicity and American identity, the historian Philip Gleason put it this way:

To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American. 2

To take the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, E pluribus unum – "From many, one" – in this context suggests not that manyness should be melted down into one, as in Israel Zangwill's image of the melting pot, but that, as the Great Seal's sheaf of arrows suggests, there should be a coexistence of many-in-one under a unified citizenship based on shared ideals.

Of course, the story is not so simple, as Gleason himself went on to note. America's history of racial and ethnic exclusions has undercut the universalist stance; for being an American has also meant sharing a national culture, one largely defined in racial, ethnic, and religious terms. And while solidarity can be understood as "an experience of willed affiliation," some forms of American solidarity have been less inclusive than others, demanding much more than simply the desire to affiliate. 3 In this essay, I explore different ideals of civic solidarity with an eye toward what they imply for newcomers who wish to become American citizens.

Why does civic solidarity matter? First, it is integral to the pursuit of distributive justice. The institutions of the welfare state serve as redistributive mechanisms that can offset the inequalities of life chances that a capitalist economy creates, and they raise the position of the worst-off members of society to a level where they are able to participate as equal citizens. While self-interest alone may motivate people to support social insurance schemes that protect them against unpredictable circumstances, solidarity is understood to be required to support redistribution from the rich to aid the poor, including housing subsidies, income supplements, and long-term unemployment benefits. 4 The underlying idea is that people are more likely to support redistributive schemes when they trust one another, and they are more likely to trust one another when they regard others as like themselves in some meaningful sense.

Second, genuine democracy demands solidarity. If democratic activity involves not just voting, but also deliberation, then people must make an effort to listen to and understand one another. Moreover, they must be willing to moderate their claims in the hope of finding common ground on which to base political decisions. Such democratic activity cannot be realized by individuals pursuing their own interests; it requires some concern for the common good. A sense of solidarity can help foster mutual sympathy and respect, which in turn support citizens' orientation toward the common good.

Third, civic solidarity offers more inclusive alternatives to chauvinist models that often prevail in political life around the world. For example, the alternative to the Nehru-Gandhi secular definition of Indian national identity is the Hindu chauvinism of the Bharatiya Janata Party, not a cosmopolitan model of belonging. "And what in the end can defeat this chauvinism," asks Charles Taylor, "but some reinvention of India as a secular republic with which people can identify?" 5 It is not enough to articulate accounts of solidarity and belonging only at the subnational or transnational levels while ignoring senses of belonging to the political community. One might believe that people have a deep need for belonging in communities, perhaps grounded in even deeper human needs for recognition and freedom, but even those skeptical of such claims might recognize the importance of articulating more inclusive models of political community as an alternative to the racial, ethnic, or religious narratives that have permeated political life. 6  The challenge, then, is to develop a model of civic solidarity that is "thick" enough to motivate support for justice and democracy while also "thin" enough to accommodate racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

We might look first to Habermas's idea of constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus). The idea emerged from a particular national history, to denote attachment to the liberal democratic institutions of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, but Habermas and others have taken it to be a generalizable vision for liberal democratic societies, as well as for supranational communities such as the European Union. On this view, what binds citizens together is their common allegiance to the ideals embodied in a shared political culture. The only "common denominator for a constitutional patriotism" is that "every citizen be socialized into a common political culture." 7

Habermas points to the United States as a leading example of a multicultural society where constitutional principles have taken root in a political culture without depending on "all citizens' sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins." 8  The basis of American solidarity is not any particular racial or ethnic identity or religious beliefs, but universal moral ideals embodied in American political culture and set forth in such seminal texts as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Based on a minimal commonality of shared ideals, constitutional patriotism is attractive for the agnosticism toward particular moral and religious outlooks and ethnocultural identities to which it aspires.

What does constitutional patriotism suggest for the sort of reception immigrants should receive? There has been a general shift in Western Europe and North America in the standards governing access to citizenship from cultural markers to values, and this is a development that constitutional patriots would applaud. In the United States those seeking to become citizens must demonstrate basic knowledge of U.S. government and history. A newly revised U.S. citizenship test was instituted in October 2008 with the hope that it will serve, in the words of the chief of the Office of Citizenship, Alfonso Aguilar, as "an instrument to promote civic learning and patriotism." 9 The revised test attempts to move away from civics trivia to emphasize political ideas and concepts. (There is still a fair amount of trivia: "How many amendments does the Constitution have?" "What is the capital of your state?") The new test asks more open-ended questions about government powers and political concepts: "What does the judicial branch do?" "What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?" "What is freedom of religion?" "What is the 'rule of law'?" 10

Constitutional patriots would endorse this focus on values and principles. In Habermas's view, legal principles are anchored in the "political culture," which he suggests is separable from "ethical-cultural" forms of life. Acknowledging that in many countries the "ethical-cultural" form of life of the majority is "fused" with the "political culture," he argues that the "level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities." 11  All that should be expected of immigrants is that they embrace the constitutional principles as interpreted by the political culture, not that they necessarily embrace the majority's ethical-cultural forms.

Yet language is a key aspect of "ethical-cultural" forms of life, shaping people's worldviews and experiences. It is through language that individuals become who they are. Since a political community must conduct its affairs in at least one language, the ethical-cultural and political cannot be completely "uncoupled." As theorists of multiculturalism have stressed, complete separation of state and particularistic identities is impossible; government decisions about the language of public institutions, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing and supporting particular ethnic and religious groups over others. 12 In the United States, English language ability has been a statutory qualification for naturalization since 1906, originally as a requirement of oral ability and later as a requirement of English literacy. Indeed, support for the principles of the Constitution has been interpreted as requiring English literacy. 13 The language requirement might be justified as a practical matter (we need some language to be the common language of schools, government, and the workplace, so why not the language of the majority?), but for a great many citizens, the language requirement is also viewed as a key marker of national identity. The continuing centrality of language in naturalization policy prevents us from saying that what it means to be an American is purely a matter of shared values.

Another misconception about constitutional patriotism is that it is necessarily more inclusive of newcomers than cultural nationalist models of solidarity. Its inclusiveness depends on which principles are held up as the polity's shared principles, and its normative substance depends on and must be evaluated in light of a background theory of justice, freedom, or democracy; it does not by itself provide such a theory. Consider ideological requirements for naturalization in U.S. history. The first naturalization law of 1790 required nothing more than an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. The second naturalization act added two ideological elements: the renunciation of titles or orders of nobility and the requirement that one be found to have "behaved as a man . . . attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States." 14  This attachment requirement was revised in 1940 from a behavioral qualification to a personal attribute, but this did not help clarify what attachment to constitutional principles requires. 15 Not surprisingly, the "attachment to constitutional principles" requirement has been interpreted as requiring a belief in representative government, federalism, separation of powers, and constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. It has also been interpreted as disqualifying anarchists, polygamists, and conscientious objectors for citizenship. In 1950, support for communism was added to the list of grounds for disqualification from naturalization – as well as grounds for exclusion and deportation. 16 The 1990 Immigration Act retained the McCarthy-era ideological qualifications for naturalization; current law disqualifies those who advocate or affiliate with an organization that advocates communism or opposition to all organized government. 17 Patriotism, like nationalism, is capable of excess and pathology, as evidenced by loyalty oaths and campaigns against "un-American" activities.

In contrast to constitutional patriots, liberal nationalists acknowledge that states cannot be culturally neutral even if they tried. States cannot avoid coercing citizens into preserving a national culture of some kind because state institutions and laws define a political culture, which in turn shapes the range of customs and practices of daily life that constitute a national culture. David Miller, a leading theorist of liberal nationalism, defines national identity according to the following elements: a shared belief among a group of individuals that they belong together, historical continuity stretching across generations, connection to a particular territory, and a shared set of characteristics constituting a national culture. 18  It is not enough to share a common identity rooted in a shared history or a shared territory; a shared national culture is a necessary feature of national identity. I share a national culture with someone, even if we never meet, if each of us has been initiated into the traditions and customs of a national culture.

What sort of content makes up a national culture? Miller says more about what a national culture does not entail. It need not be based on biological descent. Even if nationalist doctrines have historically been based on notions of biological descent and race, Miller emphasizes that sharing a national culture is, in principle, compatible with people belonging to a diversity of racial and ethnic groups. In addition, every member need not have been born in the homeland. Thus, "immigration need not pose problems, provided only that the immigrants come to share a common national identity, to which they may contribute their own distinctive ingredients." 19

Liberal nationalists focus on the idea of culture, as opposed to ethnicity or descent, in order to reconcile nationalism with liberalism. Thicker than constitutional patriotism, liberal nationalism, Miller maintains, is thinner than ethnic models of belonging. Both nationality and ethnicity have cultural components, but what is said to distinguish "civic" nations from "ethnic" nations is that the latter are exclusionary and closed on grounds of biological descent; the former are, in principle, open to anyone willing to adopt the national culture. 20

Yet the civic-ethnic distinction is not so clear-cut in practice. Every nation has an "ethnic core." As Anthony Smith observes

[M]odern "civic" nations have not in practice really transcended ethnicity or ethnic sentiments. This is a Western mirage, reality-as-wish; closer examination always reveals the ethnic core of civic nations, in practice, even in immigrant societies with their early pioneering and dominant (English and Spanish) culture in America, Australia, or Argentina, a culture that provided the myths and language of the would-be nation. 21

This blurring of the civic-ethnic distinction is reflected throughout U.S. history with the national culture often defined in ethnic, racial, and religious terms. 22

Why, then, if all national cultures have ethnic cores, should those outside this core embrace the national culture? Miller acknowledges that national cultures have typically been formed around the ethnic group that is dominant in a particular territory and therefore bear "the hallmarks of that group: language, religion, cultural identity." Muslim identity in contemporary Britain becomes politicized when British national identity is conceived as containing "an Anglo-Saxon bias which discriminates against Muslims (and other ethnic minorities)." But he maintains that his idea of nationality can be made "democratic in so far as it insists that everyone should take part in this debate [about what constitutes the national identity] on an equal footing, and sees the formal arenas of politics as the main (though not the only) place where the debate occurs." 23

The major difficulty here is that national cultures are not typically the product of collective deliberation in which all have the opportunity to participate. The challenge is to ensure that historically marginalized groups, as well as new groups of immigrants, have genuine opportunities to contribute "on an equal footing" to shaping the national culture. Without such opportunities, liberal nationalism collapses into conservative nationalism of the kind defended by Samuel Huntington. He calls for immigrants to assimilate into America's "Anglo- Protestant culture." Like Miller, Huntington views ideology as "a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking in racial, ethnic, or cultural sources of community," and he rejects race and ethnicity as constituent elements of national identity. 24 Instead, he calls on Americans of all races and ethnicities to "reinvigorate their core culture." Yet his "cultural" vision of America is pervaded by ethnic and religious elements: it is not only of a country "committed to the principles of the Creed," but also of "a deeply religious and primarily Christian country, encompassing several religious minorities, adhering to Anglo- Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage." 25 That the cultural core of the United States is the culture of its historically dominant groups is a point that Huntington unabashedly accepts.

Cultural nationalist visions of solidarity would lend support to immigration and immigrant policies that give weight to linguistic and ethnic preferences and impose special requirements on individuals from groups deemed to be outside the nation's "core culture." One example is the practice in postwar Germany of giving priority in immigration and naturalization policy to ethnic Germans; they were the only foreign nationals who were accepted as permanent residents set on the path toward citizenship. They were treated not as immigrants but "resettlers" (Aussiedler) who acted on their constitutional right to return to their country of origin. In contrast, non-ethnically German guestworkers (Gastarbeiter) were designated as "aliens" (Auslander) under the 1965 German Alien Law and excluded from German citizenship. 26 Another example is the Japanese naturalization policy that, until the late 1980s, required naturalized citizens to adopt a Japanese family name. The language requirement in contemporary naturalization policies in the West is the leading remaining example of a cultural nationalist integration policy; it reflects not only a concern with the economic and political integration of immigrants but also a nationalist concern with preserving a distinctive national culture.

Constitutional patriotism and liberal nationalism are accounts of civic solidarity that deal with what one might call first-level diversity. Individuals have different group identities and hold divergent moral and religious outlooks, yet they are expected to share the same idea of what it means to be American: either patriots committed to the same set of ideals or co-nationals sharing the relevant cultural attributes. Charles Taylor suggests an alternative approach, the idea of "deep diversity." Rather than trying to fix some minimal content as the basis of solidarity, Taylor acknowledges not only the fact of a diversity of group identities and outlooks (first-level diversity), but also the fact of a diversity of ways of belonging to the political community (second-level or deep diversity). Taylor introduces the idea of deep diversity in the context of discussing what it means to be Canadian:

Someone of, say, Italian extraction in Toronto or Ukrainian extraction in Edmonton might indeed feel Canadian as a bearer of individual rights in a multicultural mosaic. . . . But this person might nevertheless accept that a Québécois or a Cree or a Déné might belong in a very different way, that these persons were Canadian through being members of their national communities. Reciprocally, the Québécois, Cree, or Déné would accept the perfect legitimacy of the "mosaic" identity.

Civic solidarity or political identity is not "defined according to a concrete content," but, rather, "by the fact that everybody is attached to that identity in his or her own fashion, that everybody wants to continue that history and proposes to make that community progress." 27 What leads people to support second-level diversity is both the desire to be a member of the political community and the recognition of disagreement about what it means to be a member. In our world, membership in a political community provides goods we cannot do without; this, above all, may be the source of our desire for political community.

Even though Taylor contrasts Canada with the United States, accepting the myth of America as a nation of immigrants, the United States also has a need for acknowledgment of diverse modes of belonging based on the distinctive histories of different groups. Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Mexican Americans: across these communities of people, we can find not only distinctive group identities, but also distinctive ways of belonging to the political community.

Deep diversity is not a recapitulation of the idea of cultural pluralism first developed in the United States by Horace Kallen, who argued for assimilation "in matters economic and political" and preservation of differences "in cultural consciousness." 28  In Kallen's view, hyphenated Americans lived their spiritual lives in private, on the left side of the hyphen, while being culturally anonymous on the right side of the hyphen. The ethnic-political distinction maps onto a private-public dichotomy; the two spheres are to be kept separate, such that Irish Americans, for example, are culturally Irish and politically American. In contrast, the idea of deep diversity recognizes that Irish Americans are culturally Irish American and politically Irish American. As Michael Walzer put it in his discussion of American identity almost twenty years ago, the culture of hyphenated Americans has been shaped by American culture, and their politics is significantly ethnic in style and substance. 29  The idea of deep or second-level diversity is not just about immigrant ethnics, which is the focus of both Kallen's and Walzer's analyses, but also racial minorities, who, based on their distinctive experiences of exclusion and struggles toward inclusion, have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

While attractive for its inclusiveness, the deep diversity model may be too thin a basis for civic solidarity in a democratic society. Can there be civic solidarity without citizens already sharing a set of values or a culture in the first place? In writing elsewhere about how different groups within democracy might "share identity space," Taylor himself suggests that the "basic principles of republican constitutions – democracy itself and human rights, among them" constitute a "non-negotiable" minimum. Yet, what distinguishes Taylor's deep diversity model of solidarity from Habermas's constitutional patriotism is the recognition that "historic identities cannot be just abstracted from." The minimal commonality of shared principles is "accompanied by a recognition that these principles can be realized in a number of different ways, and can never be applied neutrally without some confronting of the substantive religious ethnic-cultural differences in societies." 30 And in contrast to liberal nationalism, deep diversity does not aim at specifying a common national culture that must be shared by all. What matters is not so much the content of solidarity, but the ethos generated by making the effort at mutual understanding and respect.

Canada's approach to the integration of immigrants may be the closest thing there is to "deep diversity." Canadian naturalization policy is not so different from that of the United States: a short required residency period, relatively low application fees, a test of history and civics knowledge, and a language exam. 31 Where the United States and Canada diverge is in their public commitment to diversity. Through its official multiculturalism policies, Canada expresses a commitment to the value of diversity among immigrant communities through funding for ethnic associations and supporting heritage language schools. 32 Constitutional patriots and liberal nationalists say that immigrant integration should be a two-way process, that immigrants should shape the host society's dominant culture just as they are shaped by it. Multicultural accommodations actually provide the conditions under which immigrant integration might genuinely become a two-way process. Such policies send a strong message that immigrants are a welcome part of the political community and should play an active role in shaping its future evolution.

The question of solidarity may not be the most urgent task Americans face today; war and economic crisis loom larger. But the question of solidarity remains important in the face of ongoing large-scale immigration and its effects on intergroup relations, which in turn affect our ability to deal with issues of economic inequality and democracy. I hope to have shown that patriotism is not easily separated from nationalism, that nationalism needs to be evaluated in light of shared principles, and that respect for deep diversity presupposes a commitment to some shared values, including perhaps diversity itself. Rather than viewing the three models of civic solidarity I have discussed as mutually exclusive – as the proponents of each sometimes seem to suggest – we should think about how they might be made to work together with each model tempering the excesses of the others.

What is now formally required of immigrants seeking to become American citizens most clearly reflects the first two models of solidarity: professed allegiance to the principles of the Constitution (constitutional patriotism) and adoption of a shared culture by demonstrating the ability to read, write, and speak English (liberal nationalism). The revised citizenship test makes gestures toward respect for first-level diversity and inclusion of historically marginalized groups with questions such as, "Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?" "What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?" "What did Susan B. Anthony do?" "What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?" The election of the first African American president of the United States is a significant step forward. A more inclusive American solidarity requires the recognition not only of the fact that Americans are a diverse people, but also that they have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

• 1 For comments on earlier versions of this essay, I am grateful to participants in the Kadish Center Workshop on Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory at Berkeley Law School; the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism; and the UCLA Legal Theory Workshop. I am especially grateful to Christopher Kutz, Sarah Paoletti, Eric Rakowski, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Shiffrin, and Rogers Smith.
• 2 Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups , ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), 31–32, 56–57.
• 3 David Hollinger, "From Identity to Solidarity," Dædalus 135 (4) (Fall 2006): 24.
• 4 David Miller, "Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Theoretical Reflections," in Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies , ed. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 328, 334.
• 5 Charles Taylor, "Why Democracy Needs Patriotism," in For Love of Country? ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 121.
• 6 On the purpose and varieties of narratives of collective identity and membership that have been and should be articulated not only for subnational and transnational, but also for national communities, see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• 7 Jürgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity," in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1996), 500.
• 9 Edward Rothstein, "Connections: Refining the Tests That Confer Citizenship," The New York Times , January 23, 2006.
• 10 See http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/100q.pdf (accessed November 28, 2008).
• 11 Habermas, "The European Nation-State," in Between Facts and Norms , trans. Rehg, 118.
• 12 Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition , ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• 13 8 U.S.C., section 1423 (1988); In re Katz , 21 F.2d 867 (E.D. Mich. 1927) (attachment to principles of Constitution implies English literacy requirement).
• 14 Act of Mar. 26, 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat., 103 and Act of Jan. 29, 1795, ch. 20, section 1, 1 Stat., 414. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship , 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 239–243. James Madison opposed the second requirement: "It was hard to make a man swear that he preferred the Constitution of the United States, or to give any general opinion, because he may, in his own private judgment, think Monarchy or Aristocracy better, and yet be honestly determined to support his Government as he finds it"; Annals of Cong. 1, 1022–1023.
• 15 8 U.S.C., section 1427(a)(3). See also Schneiderman v. United States , 320 U.S. 118, 133 n.12 (1943), which notes the change from behaving as a person attached to constitutional principles to being a person attached to constitutional principles.
• 16 Internal Security Act of 1950, ch. 1024, sections 22, 25, 64 Stat. 987, 1006–1010, 1013–1015. The Internal Security Act provisions were included in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, ch. 477, sections 212(a)(28), 241(a)(6), 313, 66 Stat. 163, 184–186, 205–206, 240–241.
• 17 Gerald L. Neuman, "Justifying U.S. Naturalization Policies," Virginia Journal of International Law 35 (1994): 255.
• 18 David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.
• 19 Ibid., 25–26.
• 20 On the civic-ethnic distinction, see W. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
• 21 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 216.
• 22 See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
• 23 Miller, On Nationality , 122–123, 153–154.
• 24 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 12. In his earlier book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981), Huntington defended a "civic" view of American identity based on the "political ideas of the American creed," which include liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, and private property (46). His change in view seems to have been motivated in part by his belief that principles and ideology are too weak to unite a political community, and also by his fears about immigrants maintaining transnational identities and loyalties – in particular, Mexican immigrants whom he sees as creating bilingual, bicultural, and potentially separatist regions; Who Are We? 205.
• 25 Huntington, Who Are We? 31, 20.
• 26 Christian Joppke, "The Evolution of Alien Rights in the United States, Germany, and the European Union," Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices , ed. T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 44. In 2000, the German government moved from a strictly jus sanguinis rule toward one that combines jus sanguinis and jus soli , which opens up access to citizenship to non-ethnically German migrants, including Turkish migrant workers and their descendants. A minimum length of residency of eight (down from ten) years is also required, and dual citizenship is not formally recognized. While more inclusive than before, German citizenship laws remain the least inclusive among Western European and North American countries, with inclusiveness measured by the following criteria: whether citizenship is granted by jus soli (whether children of non-citizens who are born in a country's territory can acquire citizenship), the length of residency required for naturalization, and whether naturalized immigrants are permitted to hold dual citizenship. See Marc Morjé Howard, "Comparative Citizenship: An Agenda for Cross-National Research," Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006): 443–455.
• 27 Charles Taylor, "Shared and Divergent Values," in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism , ed. Guy Laforest (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 183, 130.
• 28 Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 114–115.
• 29 Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an 'American'?" (1974); reprinted in What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1990), 46.
• 30 Charles Taylor, "Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?)," in Multiculturalism, Liberalism, and Democracy , ed. Rajeev Bhargava et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 163.
• 31 The differences in naturalization policy are a slightly longer residency requirement in the United States (five years in contrast to Canada's three) and Canada's official acceptance of dual citizenship.
• 32 See Irene Bloemraad, Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

What Does it Mean to be an American? Reexamining the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship

What Does it Mean to Be American?

• Posted November 18, 2019
• By Jill Anderson

It started with a simple and yet difficult question for Lowell High School students in teacher Jessica Lander’s Seminar in American Diversity: What does it mean to be American?

Over the course of a year, the students delved into their identity for the class project that was soon dubbed We Are America . Now, that project has grown into a national phenomenon inspiring thousands of students around the country to share stories about their unique identities.

“This project opens the door to students wanting to share and be vulnerable…,” said Lander, Ed.M.’15, during a recent workshop at Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Is that a dangerous space to bring students to? I think as an educator what I try to do in class is open doors and create space; if students want to share a particular story, they can navigate a way to share that story. I’m not going to push anyone to share a happy story, a sad story, a big story or a small story. It’s the story you want to share.”

Safiya Al Samarrai's story is one of the many on display at Gutman Library's We Are America exhibit.

From the onset, Lander’s students were aware that their stories would be shared publicly, and potentially beyond their school. During the yearlong project, the students wrote many drafts of their deeply personal essays, often about immigrating to America or about certain aspects of their American experience — from mental health challenges to learning to accept the color of their skin. Those stories culminated in the book We Are America, which features portraits alongside the students’ stories.

A collection of the portraits and stories are now being exhibited at Gutman Library, where Lander and several of the students spoke about how the project came together and how other educators can explore similar topics with their own students.

“Many students were very courageous in sharing stories that are vulnerable,” Lander said. “In that space as an educator it’s [about] being there to support.”

Almost a year after the project began, it was the students – many now graduated and moved on to college – who expressed interest in scaling it beyond their school.

“On the last day of school, we had the idea: Let’s make the project a national project,” said Safiya Al Samarrai, noting that at first they weren’t sure how to make that happen but jumped at the opportunity to take the project to the next level. “It’s very exciting and powerful.”

Now, in collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves , Reimagining Migration , and New York’s Tenement Museum , the project has expanded to 23 states, involving 36 teachers and 1,300 students. At the end of next year, those new stories will be collected into different volumes based on the regions.

Robert Aliganyira, whose story is among those on display at Gutman Library's We Are America exhibit, participates in the panel discussion.

“We are breathing in a really toxic air right now …. As educators, how do we push this out, how do we filter the air, empower young people so they actually have a chance to change the conversation?” said Adam Strom, director of the education initiative at Reimagining Migration. “I think where Reimaging Migration and Jessica Lander … intersect is we believe very much in the power of young people and the power of children to enter these conversations and change these conversations. In the middle of a toxic environment when everyone is talking about you, how powerful for people to reach out and say, ‘This is actually who we are.’”

For Philly Marte, one of the students from Lander’s class who continues to work on the project as a college freshman, the stories are important. “I believe this project and these stories will create a sense of unity within this country for the people writing these stories and reading these stories,” he said. “Your story matters. Your voice matters and there’s someone else that’s gone through what you have and understands. I believe it will create more peace and more understanding across everyone who comes in contact with this project and this book. I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the people leading it but I honestly believe these stories could change a few lives.”

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To Be An American In The 21st Century

The question of what it means to be American has been debated since the founding of our republic, and we are at another moment when the question has taken on a new urgency.

In The Federalist Papers No. 2: Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence for the Independent Journal , John Jay wrote to the people of New York arguing for the ratification of the US Constitution around the issue of cultural unity. He reasoned for unity because Americans were “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.”

In 1787, Jay was nuanced in that he argued an important part of American identity was also a belief in the American creed such as equality, liberty, individualism, and independence, which are enshrined in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution he was working to ratify.

Others have interpreted Jay’s emphasis on culture more narrowly, arguing for a more tribal American identity. The late Samuel Huntington , a Harvard professor of political science, writes in his book Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, “the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico.” Huntington argues that unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into US culture, thereby rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built America. Huntington then warns this persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages, and we ignore it at our own peril.

Huntington’s nationalism, and parochial extension of John Jay’s line of reasoning, is in direct conflict with the American identity Abraham Lincoln espoused against the anti-immigrant sentiment of his day. In a speech the future president gave in Chicago on July 10, 1858, as part of the Lincoln-Douglas debates , Lincoln discussed how on every 4 th of July Americans celebrate our Founding Fathers. However, he argues brilliantly that those who have immigrated to the United States from Germany, Ireland, France, and Scandinavia are every bit as American as those who trace their ancestry back to the founding of our republic because the principles of the Declaration of Independence serve as an electric chord running through all our hearts.

In embracing an ideal and principle that was meant to be taken literally, namely that all men are created equal, Lincoln also rejects Douglas’s beliefs that the ideals of the Declaration were reserved solely for descendants of the American Revolution and not later arrivals.

Remnants of these disagreements continue today. In his presidential farewell address , Ronald Reagan discussed the renewal that immigration brings to our identity and nation. “Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity,” said Reagan, “we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Reagan views align with those of Abraham Lincoln that beliefs in our founding principles and the common American culture being continually enriched is what makes our identity.

In sharp contrast, President Trump today attacks Hispanics and Muslims as being different than other Americans and a threat to our nation. This nativist sense of national identity calls to mind the nationalism of Samuel Huntington and the most parochial reading of Federalist 2. The irony that Trump holds up the Norwegian immigrant as an ideal while Lincoln had to argue Scandinavians should be part of the American family in his 1858 speech is lost on him.

Like then-Senate candidate Lincoln and President Reagan, I believe Americans share in our nation’s principles and political culture set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I also believe there has been and remains a cultural expectation and responsibility that immigrants will not only bring diverse perspectives but also join their new country as citizens. Jürgen Habermas , a German sociologist and philosopher, wrote of an Iranian immigrant to Germany who chooses to stand with other Germans at a concentration camp to participate in the acknowledgment of the nation’s collective guilt, even though his ancestors were not part of those crimes.

We honor our achievements as a sense of American culture, such as winning World Wars I and II, putting a man on the moon, prevailing in the Cold War, securing civil rights, and ushering in the digital age. We acknowledge the sacrifices of the generations of men and women who spilled blood, whether in places like Normandy or Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge , so we can have opportunity. We also, regardless of background, have common national traditions such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween; and sports such as baseball, basketball, and American football that bind us. We engage in philanthropy, like following the rules, are generally neighborly and friendly, and keep public places clean. Yet, a hallmark of being an American is also carrying on the cultural traditions of our ancestors whether by bringing soccer, our native cuisines, our ethnic dances, or holidays like Diwali and Eid al-Adha to this country.

In the twenty-first century, Americans are more ethnically and racially diverse than we have ever been. Much of this change has been driven by immigration. In 1960, Europeans accounted for seven of eight immigrants in the United States. By 2010, nine out of ten were from outside Europe. In 1965, 84 percent of the country was non-Hispanic white, compared with 62 percent today. Nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the United States in the past fifty years, mostly from Latin America and Asia. This immigration has brought young workers who help offset the large-scale retirement of the baby boomers. Today, a near-record 14 percent of the country’s population is foreign born compared with just 5 percent in 1965. This diversity strengthens our country and makes it a better place to live.

At a time when growth in the US economy and those of other developed nations is slowing, immigration is vitally important to our economy. Immigrants today are more than twice as likely to start a new business. In fact, 43 percent of companies in the 2017 Fortune 500, including several technology firms in Silicon Valley, were launched by foreign-born entrepreneurs , many arriving on family visas. Immigrants also take out patents at two-to-three times the rate of native-born citizens, benefiting our entire country. Family and skilled-based visas complement each other: America would become less attractive to those who come on skills-based visas without the chance for their families to join them.

However, it is important to ensure that these economic benefits help Americans. For too long, some corporations have abused H-1B, L-1, and H-2B visas as a cheap way to displace American workers. To close these loopholes and overhaul the visa programs to protect workers and crack down on foreign outsourcing companies that deprive qualified Americans of high-skill jobs, I have cointroduced bipartisan legislation to restore the H-1B visa program back to its original intent, protect American workers, and make sure we are also providing opportunities for STEM and developing talent here at home.

When done right—as John Feinblatt, chairman of the New American Economy, stated—“The data shows it, and nearly 1,500 economists know it: immigration means more talent, more jobs, and broad economic benefits for American workers and companies alike.”

For many immigrants to this nation, a challenge in the American identity is finding a balance and respect for some of our existing American traditions, while also being proud of one’s own heritage.

I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is fairly suburban, rural, and was 98 percent Caucasian in the 1980s. When my family moved onto Amsterdam Avenue, there was a little bit of chatter and concern on our street that the Khannas were moving in. My parents finally figured out what the fuss was about: On Christmas Eve, everyone on our street would put candle lights on the street. We are of Hindu faith, and there was concern that we wouldn’t. My Dad said that we would be happy to put the candle lights on the street, and we put out lights every year. We were always invited to and attended all the Christmas Eve parties. I also loved playing touch football in my neighbors’ backyards, participating in the same Little League games, avoiding cars while hitting hockey pucks on the road, and going to neighbors’ homes during school candy sales to raise money for charity.

But I never associated my childhood in anyway with giving up my core identity. Let me explain. Years later as a twenty-three-year-old, when I was interning for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (daughter of Robert Kennedy), her aide told me to go work on the Hill because I had an aptitude for policy. You cannot ever get elected, her aide said to me in a matter-of-fact tone, given your faith and heritage. I refrained from writing to him when I won, pointing out that while his boss lost her race for Congress, I ended up winning mine by 20 points . 

But I do remember talking to my parents back then about identity. They told me I will make it in this country if I just keep working hard and was ethical. It is a good and decent country, they assured me. But my Mom made me promise, given my grandfather’s struggle in jail during Gandhi’s independence movement, that I will never give up who I am. I never did.

Today, the grandson of a freedom fighter who remembers seeing his parents have their green cards stamped, represents the most economically powerful Congressional District in the world.

That is the story of America. That represents the hope of American immigrant families.

In many ways my story—born in Philadelphia on the bicentennial year of America’s founding in 1976 and growing up to represent Silicon Valley—is a testament to how open our nation still is to the dreams and aspirations of freedom-loving people who trace their lineage to every corner of the world.

We are still steps away from Lincoln’s hope of becoming a nation that lives up to our founding principles and ushers in a just and lasting peace. But here is what I know: we can be open to the voices of new immigrants without losing our core values or American culture—if anything, the new immigrants will only enrich our exceptional nation.   

Rep. Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley and California’s 17 th Congressional District. Chris Schloesser, his legislative director, assisted with research for this piece.

Speaking of California and immigration, here’s how the Golden State’s population breaks down (the following numbers all courtesy of a May 2018 report by the Public Policy Institute of California). The nation state of 39.5 million residents is home to more than 10 million immigrants. In 2016, approximately 27% of California’s population was foreign-born (about twice the national percentage), with immigrants born in Latin America (51%) and Asia (39%) leading the way. Nearly eight in ten California immigrants are working-age adults (age 18 to 64)—that’s more than one-third of the entire states’ working-age population. A major concern for California’s future: the immigrant education gap. As recently as 2016, one-third (34%) of California’s immigrants hadn’t completed high school—more than four times that of US-born California residents (just 8%). Twenty-eight percent of California’s foreign-born residents hold at least a college bachelor’s degrees—again, less than California’s US-born residents (36%). Why that matters: the less education, the greater the challenge for immigrants to climb the economic ladder and make a go of it in California, home to high taxes, expensive housing, and a crushing cost of living .

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Source: "Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by American immigrants or their children" via Brookings

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Research: What Is American Identity and Why Does It Matter?

Why Does the American Identity Matter?

The most important reason for understanding American identity is related to white racial identification. It may not be prevalent in U.S. political attitudes, but it’s still an issue. A survey from 2012 asked white respondents to indicate if whiteness represented the way they thought of themselves most of the time, as opposed to identifying themselves as Americans . One fifth of the survey’s white respondents said that they preferred the term white to American when identifying themselves.

How to Analyze American Identity

• There’s no such thing as a universal identity, especially for an omni-cultural country such as the USA.
• Everyone has their own understanding of what it means to be American today, as citizens come from different religious, ethnic, ideological, and geographical backgrounds.
• Explaining the concept of American identity calls for an inclusive approach based on solidarity.
• Depending on how you discuss the concept, an academic essay may require arguments on modern-day immigration and immigrant policies. How do they fit within the common understanding of American identity?

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/mean-american-answer-depends-politics-study-says

What does it mean to be American? The answer depends on your politics, study says

NEW YORK — Add one more to the list of things dividing left and right in this country: We can’t even agree what it means to be an American.

A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds Republicans are far more likely to cite a culture grounded in Christian beliefs and the traditions of early European immigrants as essential to U.S. identity.

Democrats are more apt to point to the country’s history of mixing of people from around the globe and a tradition of offering refuge to the persecuted.

While there’s disagreement on what makes up the American identity, 7 in 10 people — regardless of party — say the country is losing that identity.

“It’s such stark divisions,” said Lynele Jones, a 65-year-old accountant in Boulder, Colorado. Like many Democrats, Jones pointed to diversity and openness to refugees and other immigrants as central components of being American.

“There’s so much turmoil in the American political situation right now. People’s ideas of what is America’s place in the world are so different from one end of the spectrum to the other,” Jones said.

READ MORE: Immigration ban reveals a nation divided |

There are some points of resounding agreement among Democrats, Republicans and independents about what makes up the country’s identity. Among them: a fair judicial system and rule of law, the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, and the ability to get good jobs and achieve the American dream.

Big gulfs emerged between the left and right on other characteristics seen as inherent to America.

About 65 percent of Democrats said a mix of global cultures was extremely or very important to American identity, compared with 35 percent of Republicans. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats saw Christianity as that important, compared with 57 percent of Republicans.

Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that the ability of people to come to escape violence and persecution is very important, 74 percent to 55 percent. Also, 25 percent of Democrats said the culture of the country’s early European immigrants very important, versus 46 percent of Republicans.

Reggie Lawrence, a 44-year-old Republican in Midland, Texas, who runs a business servicing oil fields, said the country and the Constitution were shaped by Christian values. As those slip away, he said, so does the structure of families and, ultimately, the country’s identity.

“If you lose your identity,” Lawrence said, “What are we? We’re not a country anymore.”

Patrick Miller, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies partisanship and polling, said the results reflect long-standing differences in the U.S. between one camp’s desire for openness and diversity and another’s vision of the country grounded in the white, English-speaking, Protestant traditions of its early settlers.

Those factions have seen their competing visions of American identity brought to a boil at points throughout history, such as when lawmakers barred Chinese immigration beginning in the 1880s or when bias against Catholic immigrants and their descendants bubbled up through a long stretch of the 20th century.

READ MORE: Why ‘negative partisanship’ is flipping politics on its head

The starkness of the divide and the continuing questions over what it means to be American are a natural byproduct, Miller said, not just of U.S. history, but the current political climate and the rancor of today’s debates over immigration and the welcoming of refugees.

“Our sense of identity is almost inseparable from the subject of immigration because it’s how we were built,” he said. “Given what we are and how we’ve come about, it’s a very natural debate.”

The poll found Democrats were nearly three times as likely as Republicans to say that the U.S. should be a country made up of many cultures and values that change as new people arrive, with far more Republicans saying there should be an essential American culture that immigrants adopt.

Republicans overwhelmingly viewed immigrants who arrived in the past decade as having retained their own cultures and values rather than adopting American ones.

Among the areas seen as the greatest threats to the American way of life, Democrats coalesce around a fear of the country’s political leaders, political polarization and economic inequality. Most Republicans point instead to illegal immigration as a top concern.

Perhaps surprisingly, fear of influence from foreign governments was roughly the same on the left and right at a time when calls for an investigation into President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia have largely come from Democrats. About 4 in 10 Democrats and Republicans alike viewed the issue as extremely or very threatening.

Two questions, also posed during the presidential campaign, offered insight into how Trump’s election may have changed partisans’ views. The poll found about 52 percent of Republicans now regard the U.S. as the single greatest country in the world, up significantly from 35 percent when the question was asked last June.

Some 22 percent of Democrats expressed that view, essentially unchanged from the earlier poll.

Democrats appear to be reinforcing their belief that the country’s range of races, religions and backgrounds make the country stronger. About 80 percent made that assessment in the new poll, compared with 68 percent eight months earlier.

About 51 percent of Republicans held that view, similar to the percentage who said so in the previous poll.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,004 adults was conducted Feb. 16-20, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online or by phone.

AP Polling Editor Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report.

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What Does It Mean to Be an American?: Reflections from Students (Part 3)

The following is Part 3 of a multiple-part series. For Part 1, please visit here , and for Part 2, please visit here .

On December 8, 2020 and January 19, 2021, SPICE posted two articles that highlight reflections from 16 students on the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” I decided to ask students to share their reflections because many have expressed concern about the divisions in U.S. society either directly to the SPICE staff or indirectly through the teachers with whom the SPICE staff works. Part 3 features nine additional reflections.

The SPICE staff’s hope is that the free educational website—“ What Does It Mean to Be an American? ”—will help students reflect upon their civil liberties during this challenging time. On March 24, 2021, SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi will be honored by the Association for Asian Studies for his authorship of the lessons that are featured on the website, which was developed by the Mineta Legacy Project in partnership with SPICE.

One of the featured students, Keilyn Toma, is an American who is enrolled in SPICE’s Stanford e-Japan course, which introduces U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in Japan. The other eight students live in the United States. The reflections below do not necessarily reflect those of the SPICE staff.

Talia Christian, Texas: As a multiracial South African immigrant, I’ve had to keenly observe America. I noticed that people in the U.S. come from many different bloodlines. Sadly, the beauty of this is overlooked because so many find peace with the idea that America is a melting pot yet don’t acknowledge what that means. I find myself uncomfortable because I don’t belong to any racial group in America. How will I identify at school? South African isn’t an option. Am I going to live on the White, Hispanic, or Black side of town? Because de facto segregation is very much alive, I must choose. I hope to see change in America as part of being an American, which means that I have the freedom to be that change and instill unity.

Gracee Curley, Arizona: In today’s world, people seem to be judged by what they do and don’t have, or their race. It seems like after 2020 happened, everyone has a different perspective of America and what it means to be American. To me, being a Native American in the new world today means seeing those “above us” imitating our sacred sound or backing away from us just because of the color of our skin. It means seeing our own culture used as a Halloween costume outfit, and even seeing our people used as school mascots. Being American for me is being scared to go out into public. Nobody wants to be judged in this world just because of one’s ethnicity.

Jeana Fermi, New Jersey: The American identity is inherently revolutionary, forged in the radical notion that anyone can adopt it, and rooted in the winds of change. Being an American has no strict boundaries; it is an open-ended question that we fill with our own uniqueness and interpretations, thus birthing an identity of synergy. Our nation is not perfect, its history marred by painful legacies of injustice that continue to permeate the society we live in now. But I’ve found a unique hope in the American propensity for change—that the pursuit of progress is not merely optional, but fundamental to being American. The American story is a collective striving to form a more perfect union not in spite of our differences, but because of them. I feel most American when I join this effort.

Zaynab Jawaid, California: To be American is to be hardworking. My grandmother came to New York in the ’70s and always held multiple jobs. In order to make it in America and provide for her family she had to work hard and always give 110 percent. Hard work may seem difficult at first, but it is always rewarding. My parents have also persevered and worked hard to give my siblings and me a better and easier life than they had. My grandmother and my parents’ example (especially my mother’s) have shown me how hard work always pays off in the end. As an immigrant and a person of color, you have to give that extra effort in order to make it in American society. Being American also means to be able to believe and practice the religion you want, and for me that means Islam.

Koki Mashita, California: As a Japanese citizen living in the U.S., I have been able to observe cultural differences. The U.S. values individualism, patriotism, and opportunity unlike anywhere else I have lived. Americans often speak up for their own beliefs by protesting. This may make the U.S. seem like an unstable country but speaking up is essential for change. If Americans didn’t love their country, Americans wouldn’t be advocating for their beliefs. An example of this advocacy has taken place during COVID-19, with many Americans, who are struggling to make ends, speaking up. By speaking up, some new opportunities have arisen despite the pandemic. For example, many new businesses that accommodate for restrictions, such as social distancing, have been established. The values of individualism, patriotism, and opportunity come to mind when I think of what it means to be an American.

Phoebe Masters, Ohio: America is by no means perfect. There are actually times in my life when I have not been very proud to be an American. There are so many problems that plague the country: racial inequities, record high incarceration rates, and corruption in the government. But, being an American means we have the ability to see these imperfections in our country and advocate for change. In America, we have the right to protest and speak out against what we think is wrong and unjust. It is our duty and right to hold lawmakers and government officials accountable for implementing the change we want to see. America is not perfect, but being an American means change, evolution, and innovation as a result of endless ideas and opinions coming together, creating one united nation.

Ellie Sul, California: To me, being American means taking advantage of every opportunity given. We have a proper education, a gateway to our dream occupations, and a path to our aspirations. Growing up in America, I’ve been given countless possibilities to achieve my dreams. My grandfather, who came to America to seek a better life for his family, gave his children and grandchildren the opportunity to be successful in America. He was like so many other immigrants who crossed oceans to come to America for the greater good of their families. Being American has granted me this life full of fortune and possibilities, and I am eternally grateful.

Keilyn Toma, Japan: If you were to ask me “Are you American?” I would answer no. I was born in California to Japanese and Chinese parents, but 16 out of my 18 years were spent overseas. I prefer the rice fields of Saitama to the mountains of Utah and the bustling streets of Hong Kong to the avenues of Boston. But perhaps this is the new “American.” The increasingly international fabric of America means more people like me. For me, the American ideals of individuality, opportunity, and freedom serve as support and an instrument of change in whichever culture I choose to be a part of. The opportunity in multiculturalism lies in applying the best parts of different cultures. That means encouraging individuality within Japanese conformity and promoting change within Chinese rigidity. 

Abigail Weiss, Louisiana: If I was asked what it means to be American growing up, I would likely say I am proud of the country I am from, referencing equality of opportunity and the American Dream. Recently, however, the overwhelming level of injustice in this country has diminished the sense of pride I used to have by being American. I used to gladly dress up on July 4th, but in recent years my friends and I are hesitant to even associate with anyone who posts a picture in front of the American flag. This may not represent the universal experience of young Americans, but I think this does highlight the growing political divide. I think there is still hope for me and many other members of my generation to restore our sense of pride in this country by electing officials who care about the lives of all Americans.

SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi Is the 2021 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Recipient

What does it mean to be an american: reflections from students (part 2), what does it mean to be an american: reflections from students.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — American Identity — What is an American: Defining the Identity

What is an American: Defining The Identity

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Published: Sep 5, 2023

Words: 489 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, fundamentals of american identity.

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What Does it Mean to be American?

To me, being American is much more than just being an American citizen or living in American.

To me, being American is much more than just being an American citizen or living in American. It seems people in America have a responsibility, and an obligation to be the best person they can be. It’s part of being an American, and another part is doing your part to keep society running properly. One of the best things about this place we call home, is that the country is basically run completely by the people inside it. Another great thing about being an American is the ability to have the American dream. In an American Creed article by Forbes, the American dream is described as “anyone, through gumption and hard work, can achieve any degree of financial success.” But, a survey ran by Erik Sherman of Forbes magazine said that only 23% of people thought it was common for someone to start poor, and get rich, even though that is categorized by many people as the American dream. A different study by Pew Research center, said that 36% of U.S. adults say their family has achieved the American dream, while another 46% say they are “on their way” to achieving it. This study defined the American dream as “freedom of choice in how to live, having a good family life and retiring comfortably.” Part of the reason Americans feel they haven’t achieved the American Dream and don’t have a chance to, is because our country has gotten so far from its ideals.

In Tribe, Sebastian Junger says, “For humans to be happy, they need autonomy, competence, and community.” People need to feel competent at what they do, authentic in their lives, and they need to be connected to others. Right now, in America people don’t live in tight knit communities, and most people don’t like what they do for a living. This leads to depression, and makes it almost impossible to achieve the American dream. Junger says, “It’s also why when people come back from war they suffer from PTSD and depression.” In order for everyone to get the American Dream, America needs to go back to it’s ideals, that every man is created equal. Another problem is that our prison systems are dominated by minorities. The Federal Bureau of Prisons shows, around 50% of people in prison are minorities. That statistic alone proves to me that the American dream is far from where it needs to be. Right now, everyone doesn’t have the same opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

America was built on the idea that all men are created equal, and that there shall be liberty and justice for all. However, today our country is split into multiple sections, from our politics, races, and lifestyles. In the past, we still had close to the same diversity, but we were closer as a nation, and didn’t let problems split us apart, rather bring us closer together. Junger, in Tribe, also says, “intact communities are more likely to survive than fragmented ones.” Our nation needs to get back to how people lived community wise, at the beginning of time, where there was tight knit communities.

Being American means to be free and have equal opportunity. Also to have the ability to do what you want, how you want, and where you want. The amendments are what give us those freedoms, like the freedom of speech, and the freedom of religion. We’ve strayed from our ideals created by the founding fathers, and became more individualistic, and selfish. America needs to get back to the idea that everyone is created equal.

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Columbus High School What It Means To Be American

This group is comprised of Columbus High School students in Columbus, Montana. They have written arguments with the National Writing Project's C3WP materials to answer the question "What does it mean to be American?" posed by Mark Meckler in the documentary film American Creed.

More responses from What It Means To Be American

More responses from columbus high school, more responses from "citizenship", "dream", and "work".

What Does 'American' Actually Mean?

In Latin America, "American" means anyone from the American continent. U.S. citizens claiming the word are considered gauche or imperialist. So what's the solution?

I was sitting with an Argentine friend, well educated and well traveled, who was reading The Atlantic online. A headline used the term "America" as a synonym for the United States of America. "That's incorrect," he said, sounding shocked that an esteemed publication would make such a junior mistake. "America is a region, not a country."

Though I didn't share his reaction, as a U.S. citizen living in Argentina I had quickly learned that it was in best taste to avoid referring to myself as an "American" or the U.S. as "America." Such terminology almost always provoked my Argentinian acquaintances. "We're all Americans," some would say gently, with a smile. In extreme cases I would receive a tirade denouncing U.S. arrogance. Largely, in Latin America and for Latin Americans, the term "America" means Latin America, and "American," Latin American.

I was unaware of how nuanced "America" and "American" were before moving to Argentina in September 2010. I did have a moment of realization in college, though, that people outside the 50 United States also laid claim to the terms. It came when reading Cuban politician José Martí's seminal 1891 essay "Nuestra América" in a Spanish literature class. Martí urges the people of "América" to join together, strengthen the region and be proud of who they are and what is theirs--an echo of Simón Bolívar's tenets when crusading to unite the entire region in the early 1800s. Martí is undoubtedly speaking to and about Latin America and its people, and I had launched into the text assuming he was about to expound on his perception of the United States of America.

When researching this piece, I reached out to my professor at the time Nathalie Bouzaglo, an assistant professor in the Spanish department and native of Venezuela, to recount this anecdote. "The opposite happened to me," she replied. "When I arrived to the U.S. and people talked about 'America,' I thought they were referring to the continent. I was surprised that America, in fact, referred to the U.S.A."

Meanwhile, my father, a first generation Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen, informed me (I guess I had never noticed) he has always replied "the U.S." when asked where he is from, because for Latin Americans, saying one is "American" is a vague identifier.

Beyond vagueness, "American" also can be interpreted as a loaded term when verbalized by people from the U.S. As one Argentine friend explained, "Someone from the U.S. calling him or herself 'American' is equivalent to people from the U.S. traveling anywhere in the world and expecting everyone to speak English." In other words, many link the practice to that negative U.S. tourist stereotype: rude, culturally unaware and self-centered.

For some ears it even evokes memories of U.S. imperialistic tendencies. "For Latinos/as here and abroad, calling this country "America" is offensive," wrote political activist Elizabeth 'Betita' Martínez in 2003. Martínez was writing at a time when anti-U.S. rhetoric from Latin America was particularly common. The movement was toward Leftist, Populist leaders, of whom the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was the poster child, always free-flowing with criticism of the U.S. and comparisons between President Bush and the devil. "We should all ask ourselves," Martínez wrote, "do we really want to approve that racist, imperialist worldview by using the empire's name for itself?"

Politics and political correctness aside, is there a factually correct or incorrect way to employ "America" and "American"? "I'm not sure if it's incorrect or correct," said Cynthia Arnson , Latin American Program director at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "I think it's an aesthetic issue. If you're in place where it is likely to be taken badly, it's better to refer to oneself as from the United States."

There's also the question of what "American" means to those in other countries or of other tongues. "In France, it's 'Americans' that's largely used (to refer to people from the USA)," Martine Rousseau and Olivier Houdart, editors of French newspaper Le Monde's language blog , wrote in an email. Rousseau and Houdart themselves, however, consider the term imprecise, which inspired them to write a post entitled Should U.S. Americans Instead Call Themselves 'United Statesians? ' They pointed out in the piece "'American' is a multi-layered word, of which the meaning varies depending on context, and which can illustrate a form of set theory: all Americans (of the U.S.) are American, and yet all Americans [ i.e. of the continent ] are not American (of the U.S.)!"

When it comes to potential substitutes to clarify the situation, the two noted that "People from Quebec and other francophone Canadians have used the term "Etats-Uniens" going back decades, "since well before the birth of the anti-globalist movement.'" (Meanwhile, anglophone Canadians, at least in my experience, seem to stay largely removed from the debate: Canadian friends have all said they "definitely" do not consider themselves "Americans" and reserve that term for people from the U.S.)

In Latin American Spanish, estadounidense is the widely used term to refer to someone from the U.S. Francophone Canadians and Latin American Spanish-speakers, therefore, both go for their language's equivalent of "United Statesian," a term that surely has been uttered as a self-identifier by "United Statesians" themselves very few times, if at all. Even this more specific adjective could incite further debate: Mexico also contains "United States" in its official title, as did Brazil until 1930.* Brazil, fascinatingly enough, is the exception to the broader Latin American rule, though the country has always remained largely independent of the Spanish-influenced narrative the majority of Latin America shares. Brazilians, like Canadians, actually do use "American"--in Portuguese, "americano/a"--to refer to those from the U.S.

Yanqui , the Spanglish take on "yankee" is also a commonly used label in Latin America -- in fact, Martí uses it in his essay -- and some Latin Americans present it as an alternative. Many from the U.S., however, would deem "yankee" an inadequate substitute, as it refers almost exclusively to the Northeast region--and is dated by the Civil War. Perhaps not for Latin Americans, but "yankee" also has a "pejorative taint," which Rousseau and Houdart acknowledged in their post. As Bouzalgou elaborated, "words have to be considered within their context."

This all presents the possibility that the "America" debate might not be about political correctness, but rather translation. "Every language carries something other than just words," said Alejandra Uslenghi, who was born and raised in Argentina, moved to the U.S. for graduate studies and now is an assistant professor in the Spanish department at Northwestern University. "There is an experience of a culture and a certain worldview and that is not as easily translatable as you would think. Even in the age of Google Translate we find these culturally interesting problems."

The art and issues of translation have intrigued thinkers like the great Argentinian writer and translator Jorge Luis Borges and it emerges as a theme throughout his body of work. "The original is unfaithful to the translation," is one of Borges' famous quotes (one layer of irony being that itself is a translated quote). In other words, what the word "América" or "americano" means in Spanish may render it a different word entirely from its apparent English equivalent. While they seem to be linguistic parallels, it could be that "americano" is not a direct or even appropriate translation of "American," and vice versa. "Can an identity of a nationality be translated?" Uslenghi asked. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no."

* This section has been corrected. Brazil does not currently contain "United States" in its official title.

Being an American

How do the Founding

The newly updated Being an American curriculum has been modified to accommodate middle school grade levels and ESL students. Lessons contain vocabulary glossaries and shortened versions of primary sources that hold students’ attention while fostering critical thinking.

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American Principles and Virtues

Lesson 1 outlines the main themes of the Being an American curriculum and introduces the final capstone project, in which students will capture and synthesize ideas from the lessons.

American Civic Virtues

American history is filled with examples of the nation’s leaders and other citizens demonstrating civic virtues.

The Enlightenment and Social Contract Theory

What were the major ideas of the Enlightenment? How did the Enlightenment influence the United States’ Founding?

The Declaration of Independence

What were the philosophical bases and practical purposes of the Declaration of Independence?

The Guiding Star of Equality: The Declaration of Independence and Equality in U.S. History

How has the Declaration of Independence inspired Americans throughout history to help the country live up to its Founding Principles?

An “Apple of Gold” in a “Picture of Silver”: The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution

What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? How do these Founding documents reflect common republican principles?

“A Glorious Liberty Document”: The U.S. Constitution and Its Principles

How are the republican principles of limited government, separation of powers, and checks and balances reflected in the U.S. Constitution?

The Creation of the Bill of Rights

How does the Bill of Rights protect individual liberties and limit the power of government? How is this seen in our everyday lives?

The Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights

How has the Supreme Court decided cases in controversies related to the Bill of Rights?

American Heroes, Past and Present

How have Americans shown civic virtues throughout history?

Capstone Project: What Does “Being an American” Mean to Me?

This project provides students with an opportunity to apply and showcase what they have learned throughout their study of the Being an American curriculum. Students will identify a topic related to the curriculum that they wish to learn more about, research that topic, and then develop a product to share with the class on an assigned date.

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What Makes a Great American Essay?

Talking to phillip lopate about thwarted expectations, emerson, and the 21st-century essay boom.

Phillip Lopate spoke to Literary Hub about the new anthology he has edited, The Glorious American Essay . He recounts his own development from an “unpatriotic” young man to someone, later in life, who would embrace such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who personified the simultaneous darkness and optimism underlying the history of the United States. Lopate looks back to the Puritans and forward to writers like Wesley Yang and Jia Tolentino. What is the next face of the essay form?

Literary Hub: We’re at a point, politically speaking, when disagreements about the meaning of the word “American” are particularly vehement. What does the term mean to you in 2020? How has your understanding of the word evolved?

Phillip Lopate : First of all, I am fully aware that even using the word “American” to refer only to the United States is something of an insult to Latin American countries, and if I had said “North American” to signify the US, that might have offended Canadians. Still, I went ahead and put “American” in the title as a synonym for the United States, because I wanted to invoke that powerful positive myth of America as an idea, a democratic aspiration for the world, as well as an imperialist juggernaut replete with many unresolved social inequities, in negative terms.

I will admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very unpatriotic and critical of my country, although once I started to travel abroad and witness authoritarian regimes like Spain under Franco, I could never sign on to the fear that a fascist US was just around the corner.  I came to the conclusion that we have our faults, but our virtues as well.

The more I’ve become interested in American history, the more I’ve seen how today’s problems and possible solutions are nothing new, but keep returning in cycles: economic booms and recessions, anti-immigrant sentiment, regional competition, racist Jim Crow policies followed by human rights advances, vigorous federal regulations and pendulum swings away from governmental intervention.

Part of the thrill in putting together this anthology was to see it operating simultaneously on two tracks: first, it would record the development of a literary form that I loved, the essay, as it evolved over 400 years in this country. At the same time, it would be a running account of the history of the United States, in the hands of these essayists who were contending, directly or indirectly, with the pressing problems of their day. The promise of America was always being weighed against its failure to live up to that standard.

For instance, we have the educator John Dewey arguing for a more democratic schoolhouse, the founder of the settlement house movement Jane Addams analyzing the alienation of young people in big cities, the progressive writer Randolph Bourne describing his own harsh experiences as a disabled person, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocating for women’s rights, and W. E. B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson eloquently addressing racial injustice.

Issues of identity, gender and intersectionality were explored by writers such as Richard Rodriguez, Audre Lorde, Leonard Michaels and N. Scott Momaday, sometimes with touches of irony and self-scrutiny, which have always been assets of the essay form.

LH : If a publisher had asked us to compile an anthology of 100 representative American essays, we wouldn’t know where to start. How did you? What were your criteria?

PL : I thought I knew the field fairly well to begin with, having edited the best-selling Art of the Personal Essay in 1994, taught the form for decades, served on book award juries and so on. But once I started researching and collecting material, I discovered that I had lots of gaps, partly because the mandate I had set for myself was so sweeping.

This time I would not restrict myself to personal essays but would include critical essays, impersonal essays, speeches that were in essence essays (such as George Washington’s Farewell Address or Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon on Vietnam), letters that functioned as essays (Frederick Douglass’s Letter to His Master).

I wanted to expand the notion of what is  an essay, to include, for instance, polemics such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , or one of the Federalist Papers; newspaper columnists (Fanny Fern, Christopher Morley); humorists (James Thurber, Finley Peter Dunne, Dorothy Parker).

But it also occurred to me that fine essayists must exist in every discipline, not only literature, which sent me on a hunt that took me to cultural criticism (Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Burke), theology (Paul Tillich), food writing (M.F. K. Fisher), geography (John Brinkerhoff Jackson), nature writing (John Muir, John Burroughs, Edward Abbey), science writing (Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas), philosophy (George Santayana). My one consistent criterion was that the essay be lively, engaging and intelligently written. In short, I had to like it myself.

Of course I would need to include the best-known practitioners of the American essay—Emerson, Thoreau, Mencken, Baldwin, Sontag, etc.—and was happy to do so.  As it turned out, most of the masters of American fiction and poetry also tried their hand successfully at essay-writing, which meant including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison. . .

But I was also eager to uncover powerful if almost forgotten voices such as John Jay Chapman, Agnes Repplier, Randolph Bourne, Mary Austin, or buried treasures such as William Dean Howells’ memoir essay of his days working in his father’s printing shop.

Finally, I wanted to show a wide variety of formal approaches, since the essay is by its very nature and nomenclature an experiment, which brought me to Gertrude Stein and Wayne Koestenbaum. Equally important, I was aided in all these searches by colleagues and friends who kept suggesting other names. For every fertile lead, probably four resulted in dead ends.  Meanwhile, I was having a real learning adventure.

LH: Do you have a personal favorite among American essayists? If so, what appeals to you the most about them?

PL : I do. It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the one who cleared the ground for US essayists, in his famous piece, “The American Scholar,” which called on us to free ourselves from slavish imitation of European models and to think for ourselves.  So much American thought grows out of Emerson, or is in contention with Emerson, even if that debt is sometimes unacknowledged or unconscious.

What I love about Emerson is his density of thought, and the surprising twists and turns that result from it. I can read an essay of his like “Experience” (the one I included in this anthology) a hundred times and never know where it’s going next.  If it was said of Emily Dickenson that her poems made you feel like the top of your head was spinning, that’s what I feel in reading Emerson. He has a playful skepticism, a knack for thinking against himself.  Each sentence starts a new rabbit of thought scampering off. He’s difficult but worth the trouble.

I once asked Susan Sontag who her favorite American essayist was, and she replied “Emerson, of course.” It’s no surprise that Nietzsche revered Emerson, as did Carlyle, and in our own time, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier. But here’s a confession: it took me awhile to come around to him.

I found his preacher’s manner and abstractions initially off-putting, I wasn’t sure about the character of the man who was speaking to me. Then I read his Notebooks and the mystery was cracked: suddenly I was able to follow essays such as “Circles” with pure pleasure, seeing as I could the darkness and complexity underneath the optimism.

LH: You make the interesting decision to open the anthology with an essay written in 1726, 50 years before the founding of the republic. Why?

PL : I wanted to start the anthology with the first fully-formed essayistic voices in this land, which turned out to belong to the Puritans. Regardless of the negative associations of zealous prudishness that have come to attach to the adjective “puritanical,” those American colonies founded as religious settlements were spearheaded by some remarkably learned and articulate spokespersons, whose robust prose enriched the American literary canon.

Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards were highly cultivated readers, familiar with the traditions of essay-writing, Montaigne and the English, and with the latest science, even as they inveighed against witchcraft. I will admit that it also amused me to open the book with Cotton Mather, a prescriptive, strait-is-the-gate character, and end it with Zadie Smith, who is not only bi-racial but bi-national, dividing her year between London and New York, and whose openness to self-doubt is signaled by her essay collection title, Changing My Mind .

The next group of writers I focused on were the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and a foundational feminist, Judith Sargent Murray, who wrote the 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes.” These authors, whose essays preceded, occurred during or immediately followed the founding of the republic, were in some ways the opposite of the Puritans, being for the most part Deists or secular followers of the Enlightenment.

Their attraction to reasoned argument and willingness to entertain possible objections to their points of view inspired a vigorous strand of American essay-writing. So, while we may fix the founding of the United States to a specific year, the actual culture and literature of the country book-ended that date.

LH: You end with Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” published in 2008. Which essay in the last 12 years would be your 101st selection?

PL : Funny you should ask. As it happens, I am currently putting the finishing touches on another anthology, this one entirely devoted to the Contemporary (i.e., 21st century) American Essay. I have been immersed in reading younger, up-and-coming writers, established mid-career writers, and some oldsters who are still going strong (Janet Malcolm, Vivian Gornick, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, for example).

It would be impossible for me to single out any one contemporary essayist, as they are all in different ways contributing to the stew, but just to name some I’ve been tracking recently: Meghan Daum, Maggie Nelson, Sloane Crosley, Eula Biss, Charles D’Ambrosio, Teju Cole, Lia Purpura, John D’Agata, Samantha Irby, Anne Carson, Alexander Chee, Aleksander Hemon, Hilton Als, Mary Cappello, Bernard Cooper, Leslie Jamison, Laura Kipnis, Rivka Galchen, Emily Fox Gordon, Darryl Pinckney, Yiyun Li, David Lazar, Lynn Freed, Ander Monson, David Shields, Rebecca Solnit, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eileen Myles, Amy Tan, Jonathan Lethem, Chelsea Hodson, Ross Gay, Jia Tolentino, Jenny Boully, Durga Chew-Bose, Brian Blanchfield, Thomas Beller, Terry Castle, Wesley Yang, Floyd Skloot, David Sedaris. . .

Such a banquet of names speaks to the intergenerational appeal of the form. We’re going through a particularly rich time for American essays: especially compared to, 20 years ago, when editors wouldn’t even dare put the word “essays” on the cover, but kept trying to package these variegated assortments as single-theme discourses, we’ve seen many collections that have been commercially successful and attracted considerable critical attention.

It has something to do with the current moment, which has everyone more than a little confused and therefore trusting more than ever those strong individual voices that are willing to cop to their subjective fears, anxieties, doubts and ecstasies.

__________________________________

The Glorious American Essay , edited by Phillip Lopate, is available now.

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What Does It Mean To Be an American Essay, with Outline

Published by gudwriter on January 4, 2021 January 4, 2021

Do you have a paper due tomorrow and don’t understand all the requirements given? Our world history homework help is here to ensure you receive a quality paper within the deadline given and at an affordable price. Below is; what does it mean to be an American essay with an outline.

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What does it Mean to be an American Essay Outline

Introduction

Being an American means enjoying the right to freedom of speech, embracing diversity, embracing the American way of life, and having equal rights of determining the country’s leadership.

Paragraph 1:

An American is free to speak their mind because of the right to freedom of speech.

• This freedom makes it easy for American citizens to serve their country.
• The stand up for what is just and right.
• Free speech is based on the country’s creed which encompasses peace, freedom, and security.

Paragraph 2:

Being an American means one is part of one of the most diverse cultures in the world.

• In the U.S., nationality may not possibly be defined by religion, ancestry, or race.
• The country has many different religions and cultures.
• Rather than religion, race, or ancestry, Americans are defined by their unique social, economic, and political values.

Paragraph 3:

Being an American means leading the American way of life .

• This way of life emanated from the system of the limited government and personal liberty.
• It is rooted in the traditions of equal justice to all, respect for the rule of law, merit-based achievement, freedom of contract, private property, entrepreneurism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.

Paragraph 4:

Americans have equal rights of determining the political leadership of the country.

• Citizens elect leaders from state legislators, Congress members, to the president.
• Even the president is just a representative of the people.
• Bills passed by state legislators and Congressmen and women should be ones geared towards bettering the life of the common American.

Paragraph 5:

Some people may argue that a true American should profess the Christian faith.

• This is an argument that is majorly fronted by members of Native American communities who are largely Christian.
• America should be open to everyone who believes in the American spirit of hard work and lives by American ideals.
• An American knows that they are free to speak freely and that they live in a diverse-cultured country with a certain way of life.
• It means being in a position to determine who leads in whatever position in the country.
• An American is entitled to economic and social rights.
• Americans should resist at all costs anyone who might try to interfere with their freedoms and rights.

Insights on  what makes you unique essay with examples.

What is an American Essay

What it means to be an American goes beyond the legal definition of an American citizen. According to Philip Gleason , a renowned historian, a person did not have to be of any particular ethnic background, religion, language, or nationality in order to become or be an American. All one had to do was to live by the political ideology pegged on the abstract ideals of republicanism, equality, and liberty. American nationality was based on a Universalist ideological character which meant that anyone who willed to become an American was free to do so. One must act as an American to be an American by for instance paying taxes, voting in elections, and serving their country at home or abroad. Thus, being an American means enjoying the right to freedom of speech, embracing diversity, embracing the American way of life, and having equal rights of determining the country’s leadership.

As an American, one is free to speak their mind because of the right to freedom of speech. This freedom makes it easy for American citizens to serve their country by standing up for what is just and right. In this spirit, it would be better and greater for an American to say a “no” from their inner conviction than say a “yes” to please anyone or worse off, to avoid getting into trouble. Free speech in America is based on the country’s creed which encompasses peace, freedom, and security. It also means that Americans have the opportunity to come together and overcome their challenges by finding befitting solutions, a possibility that might not be achievable in other countries. That is why as pointed out by Grant (2012), the freedom to worship God in different religions and communities is a great source of pride and does not undermine the oneness of Americans.

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Being an American also means one is part of one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, cultures in the world. The United States is one of the very few world countries where nationality may not possibly be defined by religion, ancestry, or race. It is a melting pot of many different religions and cultures and it is near impossible to come across anyone whose ancestral roots are not tied to immigrant bloodlines from Africa and Europe (Grant, 2012). Rather than religion, race, or ancestry, Americans are defined by their unique social, economic, and political values. The Great Seal of the United States which reads “E pluribus unum” further drives home the fact that Americans are from all manners of backgrounds. In English, this translates to “From many, one” implying that one may even become and American without being born in the country as long as they embrace what the country stands for.

Third, being an American means leading the American way of life. This way of life emanated from the system of the limited government and personal liberty enshrined in the Constitution as well as the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. It is also rooted in the traditions of equal justice to all, respect for the rule of law, merit-based achievement, freedom of contract, private property, entrepreneurism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance (Raymond, 2014). However, with these freedoms also comes the need for deliberation whereby people must listen to and understand one another. In addition, they need to have the will to moderate their claims with a view to achieving a common ground especially when it comes to making political decisions. With a sense of solidarity, Americans can show one another mutual respect and sympathy which in turn cultivates common good for all.

Further, Americans have equal rights of determining the political leaders in whose hands the governance of the country rests. Every citizen has one vote and has the responsibility of casting it every four years in order to choose their leaders (Grant, 2008). This involves the election of leaders from state legislators, Congress members, to the president. As such, even the president is just a representative of the great people of the United States and any decisions he makes pertaining the presidency should be for the good of all. Similarly, bills passed by state legislators and Congressmen and women should be ones geared towards bettering the life of the common American. This is because they represent the interests of the electorate from whom they get the power to legislate.

Some people may bring in the issue of religion into being an American and argue that a true American should profess the Christian faith. In a certain survey, one quarter of the respondents indicated that one factor essential to being an American is being Christian (Elfenbein & Hanson, 2019). However, this is an argument that is majorly fronted by members of Native American communities who are largely Christian. What they forget is that they too were not U.S. citizens until in 1924 when the Indian Citizenship Act was adopted (Elfenbein & Hanson, 2019). America should be open to everyone who believes in the American spirit of hard work, lives by American ideals as provided for in the Constitution, and vehemently fights for the country’s flag, regardless of their religious affiliation.

To be an American is to be someone who knows that they are free to speak freely and that they live in a diverse-cultured country with a certain way of life. It means being in a position to determine who leads in whatever position in the country. An American has the opportunity to achieve upward economic mobility and cherishes freedom from slavery, freedom to fight for America, and freedom of speech. These ideals were established by the country’s Constitution and are rooted in its Declaration of Independence. No one can take them away from Americans or replace them with oppressive ones because they are the very pillars that distinguish America from other countries. It implies that Americans should resist at all costs anyone who might try to interfere with their freedoms and rights.

Elfenbein, C., & Hanson, P. (2019). “What does it mean to be a ‘real’ American?”.  The Washington Post . Retrieved June 16, 2020 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/03/what-does-it-mean-be-real-american/

Grant, J. A. (2008). The new American social compact: rights and responsibilities in the twenty-first century . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Grant, S. (2012). A concise history of the United States of America . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, T. (2014). Rights and responsibilities of citizens: first grade social science lesson, activities, discussion questions and quizzes. HomeSchool Brew Press .

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Writing America, from the outside

Succession is a show about the heart of US power, created by a non-American. Is that wise, or even legitimate?

By Jesse Armstrong

Is writing something set in the US as an outsider – in this combustible moment, with institutions under threat, a frayed political system, a culture so fractious – wise? Is it possible? Is it legitimate?

It’s certainly happening more and more, even just among writers I’m familiar with. In recent years there’s been Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers ; Georgia Pritchett’s The Shrink Next Door ; Charlie Brooker with certain shards of his Black Mirror ; Armando Iannucci’s team of British writers on Veep ; Alex Garland’s Civil War . This clutch of examples joins the long list of non-American-born writers who have written about the country, from Charlie Chaplin and Billy Wilder for the screen, to Vladimir Nabokov, WH Auden and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the page.

I’ve been involved with the writing of several TV shows and films set or partly set in America: an episode of Veep , the film In the Loop , The Day Shall Come with Chris Morris, and what I’m best known for right now, HBO’s Succession . In that time, I’ve come to appreciate the many problems and few potential benefits one has writing a show about the US from the outside.

The first anxiety to address, I suppose, is whether we British writers might be culturally appropriating America when we write it? After all, it’s hard to imagine foreign writers marching into Lagos’s Nollywood or Mumbai’s Bollywood as blithely as British writers do into the pitching rooms of LA, expecting a small bottle of water and some airtime.

But all questions of cultural appropriation are really questions of power and the US is still the pre-eminent world power, whatever our fears about where it might be headed. It has the dollar, Silicon Valley, the warheads and Hollywood. America can take it, from those who live there and those who don’t. Indeed, in a sense, we Brits also live in America. Amazon, Apple, Meta-Facebook, Alphabet-Google, Disney: they all shape our world in ways we’re aware of. In Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, Angus Hanton points out Weetabix, Boots, HP Sauce and Sky are all US brands now too . US corporations have more employees in the UK than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. Our economic and imaginative spheres, and our Atlanticist political culture, mean we live in something of a rainy Puerto Rico, without representation in the Senate or House but deeply affected by the flows of American capital and moods of American culture.

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I think we can say that it is more than legitimate for outsiders to write about the US – it’s necessary. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s famous aphorism about immigration as an imperial legacy – “we are here because you were there” – is apposite. America is everywhere – the global champ. And everyone knows you’re allowed to have a pop at the champ.

The US is big enough to be criticised. But that doesn’t mean your take on it can’t be annoying, trite, patronising or wrong. In particular, the British point of view on America has a history of condescension – fading but still detectable. You know how it goes: Americans are fat. Americans are stupid. American beer is weak. America is uncultured, prone to violence and, most of all, wealth-obsessed. It’s there in Charles Dickens ’ Martin Chuzzlewit : “All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars… Do anything for dollars!” Dickens’ moral discrimination seems to disappear, as the nation’s people are lumped together as spittoon-hawking, overeating, socially boastful and selfish.

Undoubtedly, there’s much to say on America’s faults – and it can be fun saying it – but if you want to write about America 180 years after Dickens, you need to make sure you’re writing about a real place. Not the British dream-nightmare version of it – which is like those generic “American” accents British actors once used, which come from nowhere and stand for nothing.

I occasionally get asked in British media interviews if there’s something particular about the British sense of humour. It always feels like an invitation to self-satisfaction: BMW may own Rolls-Royce, but we still know how to make the best comedy; a moth-eaten note of irony is the last bit of currency in the imperial vault.

But while I love Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, and looked up to and learned from Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris and the British comic satirical tradition, it was Woody Allen and Joseph Heller, Elaine May and Billy Wilder who I first loved. Seinfeld and Larry Sanders and Annie Hall were the models Sam Bain and I looked to when we tried to learn how to write a sitcom with Peep Show . Only the cloth-eared think we Brits are singing at a more delicious pitch. Only those, ironically, who lack an ear for subtlety think Americans don’t catch irony.

So, if you’re searching for easy targets on the wide American plain, you might find it over-hunted – by Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Lorrie Moore, as well as Matt Groening, Larry David, Jordan Peele and Tina Fey.

What can you offer, as an outsider writing America? “Outsider” is a slippery term, and I am aware there is a certain off-putting, self-regarding twinkle in the eye of someone who declares themselves to be one. The Bukowski-ish cool guy watching from the sidelines with a Scotch and a superior smile, writing “look at all these phonies” in his notebook. And some “outsider” positions are more comfortable than others. A European white man adrift in America I would recommend – all the delectable alienation, less of the physical danger. Though I come from a different nation state, I might be more comfortable in the corridors of US media power than some natural-born Americans. The US has a history of making its own outsiders, those not folded into the flag: new immigrants, native inhabitants and people taken there against their will – slaves and their descendants.

There are lots of ways of being an outsider in America, and many of them don’t require you to come from elsewhere. It’s a country made up of people trying to be American, even when they already are – a chorus of “I like to be in America” sung by people playing a part. Even someone as thoroughly American as John Updike thought of himself as “a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America”. It’s a nation full of spies in the supermarket, invisible men like Ralph Ellison’s; anthropologists like Zora Neale Hurston. Or Jerry, Elaine and George, investigating the secret canon of social case law: can you double dip a chip?

But of those who have a different perspective because they were born in another nation, there are a wide variety of outsider types. There are the visitors: Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, or Waugh with The Loved One . There are the sojourners, who spend a while living and working but don’t relocate for good: Zadie Smith with On Beauty , Martin Amis in Money . (Most British showrunners are some version of this.) There are the emigrants: writers who were born abroad, but moved to the US young: IAL Diamond, who co-wrote The Apartment and Some Like It Hot ; the Yellowface author RF Kuang; Gary Shteyngart. There are the exiles – those who came to America not by choice: as mentioned above, Nabokov, and the great wave of Weimar emigrés: Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger.

There are the imagined Americas of those who never visited, such as Franz Kafka , or those far away, such as Flann O’Brien with his “Unified Stations of Amurikey” in The Third Policeman . There are all the other complicated quasi-Americans: Alexander Mackendrick, born in the US but raised in Scotland, who directed the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success ; Adichie, who divides her time between the US and Nigeria; and Raymond Chandler, born in the US but schooled in the UK.

For most of these non-native Americans, there is an element of coming fresh to their subject. Half-polite guest, half gimlet-eyed, ice-chip-in-the-heart literary spy. And all this spying, this icy looking, what is it good for ? What does the guest see that the resident doesn’t? You notice the smell, which the resident is habituated to. You see the alarming cracks in the wall the resident has stopped noticing. But sometimes you also see the grandeur of a room where the resident can only see the cracks. The guest can get things wrong, slip up, misread the codes, but that lack of habituation, if handled right, with humility can – can – be a strength.

The hardest thing to get right in any work of art, and certainly in a TV show, the single most essential and ineffable thing you’re looking for is a tone. A good tone in a show helps so much else: from the big stuff (its perspective) to the practical stuff (the cast). Even on a technical level: where you should come in on a story, and where you should end. Comedy or tragedy are, after all, in some ways just a question of where you choose to leave your characters. At the altar or at the deathbed.

If tone is the key to a successful show, it’s also, unhelpfully, pretty impossible to describe. You need it in your head when you start, but can’t describe it until the whole thing is done. If it’s off, nothing lands. If it’s working, you can go to surprising places. Maybe being an outsider gives you, if certainly not the whole tone, a start. If not the whole voice, an accent.

Is there perhaps a silent, unwritten introduction to foreigners’ writing about the US that tees things up, by saying, silently, something like: “Holy shit, come and take a look, you’ll never believe this!”? That initial tuning up, that heightening of sensitivity, that sense that there is something inherently interesting here – that is good for writing. I wouldn’t advise trying to efface your outsiderness – I tend to think, like our teachers used to tell us regarding coats, if you put it on inside you won’t feel the benefit when you go out. That’s how I feel about writing that is set in the US: if you don’t have some form of critical-satirical standpoint, you won’t feel the benefit of the outsider perspective.

And I don’t think it’s just my prejudice in favour of comedy or scratchiness that makes it seem that the people who have made best use of their outsiderness have made various types of satire: political satires ( Veep ), social satires ( Yellowface , On Beauty, Hari Kunzru’s White Tears , Adichie’s Americanah ), tech satires ( Black Mirror ) or Hollywood satires ( Sunset Boulevard ). Which is not to say satire should be overt, or campaigning. The American writer James Thurber wrote to a friend, “People never learn that there is 1,000 miles of desert between a good cause and a good play. Few people can cross it alive.” Anyone who starts out to write a satire thinking the impulse to admonish or preach will make it worthwhile should probably have that quote branded, if not on their hands, then above their keyboard.

Do different varieties of non-American writers on America have different tones? Does the willing adult emigrant, for example, have a softer focus? It might be natural that these people, who knew what they were getting into, are most comfortably accommodated to the US – the least sceptical. I think of Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin, and the British directors who came out of advertising to make careers in the US: Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson.

The exile may have a tougher take – “driven into paradise”, as the composer Arnold Schönberg described himself and the emigrés who made 1940s and 1950s Hollywood “Weimar on the Pacific”. Perhaps there is a variety of exile art that is attracted to shifting identities, black humour and subversion. Billy Wilder was triple or quadruple ausländisch – outsiderish – chased from Polish Galicia, Vienna, Berlin and Paris by anti-Semitism. He knew that the worst change was possible. And he lived long enough that the child he saw at the side of the last Habsburg emperor in Vienna – the four-year-old Crown Prince Otto – came in to see him on the Paramount lot. That dizzying historical irony – how could it not colour your sense of the world?

If those Weimar exiles had a specific tone, do British observers offer a particular perspective on that country with which we are so interlinked? It seems possible we are comfortable with a certain profitable acceptance of hopelessness. Britain is, after all, a declining power, living in a Piranesi, full of TS Eliot’s falling towers. Maybe in our cradles we’ve drunk some sour milk which accepts that all projects, grand and small, end up as vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert.

Are British writers more comfortable with the conscious acceptance of guilt, the hypocrisy of power, with the whole thing being a lie, the imperial project a smokescreen for creeping pink cartographical domination? While white America, at least, clings to the city on the hill, the last best beacon of hope?

There are fun things about writing in America. American speech is great. Shorter. Punchier. My favourite dining experience begins not with an outline of the metaphysical concerns of the chef’s culinary philosophy but a New York diner waiter who comes over, pad open, and says: “Talk to me.” New words, new coinages, a madness for contraction and mixing. It’s intoxicating. Freeing.

“I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid,” Auden wrote in September 1939, almost like any giddy Brit just arrived from JFK. In Raymond Chandler’s prose you sense someone with ears alive to American idiom after his youth at Dulwich College. This is Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely , “It was a nice walk if you liked grunting. There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was as cold and wet as a toad’s belly.” You can feel Martin Amis’s excitement to be out of the UK in the famous opening to Money : “As my cab pulled off FDR Drive somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane.”

There are, however, risks. I remember hearing about the streets of provincial postwar England, when kids got their hands on comics but hadn’t heard much real American speech and would go around exclaiming ‘Ghee whizz!” with a hard “G”. One does need to be careful of “ghee whizzing” in your excitement to be writing American. But it’s fun to dive in. To be direct, and say right out that you’re uncertain and afraid.

So much of British language and humour is about the not saying of things: “Don’t mention the war.” Or euphemism: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” Or Humphrey Appleby’s tactic for sowing seeds of doubt about a ministers’ plans by praising them as “courageous”. I love all that. But it’s exciting to have access to US brevity and astringency. Telling it straight, telling it brutal. Dorothy Parker, chased for a piece, told her editor: “Too f***ing busy, and vice versa.”

It’s possible that in Succession we winkled out a profitable clash between two traditions: the Saying vs the Not Saying. Taking your time and enjoying language games is somewhat against the rules of TV and film scriptwriting, where the premium is on speed – no goodbyes on the phone, no change from the bartender. But being a bit more expansive linguistically allowed us to make the show, as well as other things, something of a horror story about language losing its meaning. All those low-IQ “genius ideas” in corporate and media spheres – all the “exciting new challenges” that are likely to leave you without a job.

And of course, one of the great freedoms about American language for a British writer is being released a little from class games. Jerry Seinfeld observed that the luge – the one-person bobsleigh – was the only Olympic sport you could conceivably compete in against your own will. Well for the British, class is the game we all take part in all day, whether we want to or not. All the opportunities for transgression – getting above your station, trying to pass yourself off as even minutely superior, or low-balling it and missing a glottal stop – all that opportunity for embarrassment, has been hugely profitable for British comedy: Dad’s Army , Fawlty Towers , Steptoe , the striving, class-inflected overreach of Alan Partridge and David Brent. The US, of course, has it’s own stratifications, no less minutely calibrated. But class is perhaps a stronger flavour in the UK, and it is liberating to cook with other ingredients.

Equally, there are dangers in writing about America. Those who visit New York know the shiver of delight in seeing the steam rise from the streets just like in the films. We feel we know the US rather intimately. This gloss of familiarity can be a starting point. But you must beware the sense you know America when what you know is the refracted screen version – or risk writing a shadow of a shadow.

Research is usually the antidote to arrogance. I, like most British people, grew up suffused with US culture, and I also took American studies at university. But when Succession came into view, I read and read. On Four Lions and later the Miami-set The Day Shall Come , I found Chris Morris’s level of research initially exhausting, later impressive, and finally essential. Knowledge gives you a chance of not being glib or timorous.

One way to turn your outsider disadvantage to your advantage is to write key characters who are themselves outsiders. In Succession , characters born outside of the US such as Logan and Lukas Matsson were able to verbalise some of our outsider barbs. Indeed, the whole class of people we wrote in Succession , though they were largely American, didn’t really inhabit it. Our milieu was rich, coastal America: New York, LA, San Francisco, which stand like the city republics of Florence, Siena and Venice: jealous of one another but disdainful of the peasants who toil in the lands between. The show is not even set in the US, really, but among a global class, in a US of VC, the United States of Venture Capital, whose boundaries expand to wherever there is a business with value yet to be extracted. Gerri asks Roman when he is training at an upstate theme park, “Is it very horrible in America?” Yes. “No amount of antibacterial gel is going to be able to wipe the America off me,” he tells her.

Kendall says in our election episode that America “is kind of a nice idea, all the different people, together”. Everyone will have their red lines. For me, writing our election episode with the US poised between a nascent authoritarian and a more traditional candidate, I felt it was not within our purview to declare a victor and predict a direction for the US. It was too much of a judgement, one I didn’t feel it was appropriate for us to give. Not when so much hangs in the balance.

So yes, you can write a show in America without being American. In terms of tone, being an outsider means there is often an itch. A wriggle. A shiver. A desire to say, “You know, it can be other ways, too.” Sometimes it means anger, dismay – and those emotions can be fuel.

The outsider’s chief advantage is that indispensable tone or frequency, which pulls everything taut; some sense of an argument going on that can never be settled. America and the world is perhaps one of those tussles. America has such hopes for the world, we have such hopes for it, such fears of it, and we’re continually understanding, misunderstanding one another.

American innocence and European experience are on an old, old axis. It sometimes seems that American innocence has been lost regularly on the hour every hour since the first sailor saw that fresh green breast of America, while all our European experience doesn’t seem to teach us much of anything useful. Still, there is something in the Henry Jamesian, Graham Greene-ish opposition that we can’t stop worrying away at: innocence and experience, idealism and cynicism.

Idealism and cynicism, it occurs to me now, is perhaps one of the submerged stories of Succession . In a way Logan’s children are all American to his European. Their search for something to believe in, among the pile of broken chairs which is the sum total of his moral philosophy, is one way of looking at their tragedy.

It’s an old story, but in some version of the terrible, zealous, hopefulness of America, and the weary, used-up knowingness of Europe – somewhere in the tangle of those old ideas – is still some sweet stuff: the good meat in the claw of the Atlantic lobster.

Jesse Armstrong is the creator of “Succession”. This essay is an edited version of his 2024 Douglas W Bryant Lecture, presented by the Eccles Institute for the Americas at the British Library

[See also: Who runs the show? ]

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A travel writer’s education

One day in the winter of 1975, on a lunch break from my boring, first-year-out-of-college job, I read an article in Esquire magazine on how to live cheaply in France for a year. The trick, the author wrote, was to become a student. Tuition was inexpensive, and it entitled you to room and board. And, if you were serious about it, you could learn another language, something I thought would be helpful to me as a travel writer, which is what I wanted to be.

I spent the following school year living in a dorm and studying at a language institute in Aix-en-Provence. When it ended in June, I packed my big leather suitcase (in the Age of the Backpacker) and traveled to Alsace, as far as I could get from Provence—culturally if not geographically—and still be in France. And there I found a job on a farm, with a family whose son was the same age I was. For the next two months I spent every waking hour with Dany, who didn’t speak a word of English but spoke French, Alsatian, and German like a native. It was a humbling experience, after months of struggling to learn a second language, to find myself among trilingual farmers.

Dany was well-read, a student of history, and a lover of music. He thought Germany far surpassed France when it came to composers—the dynamism of Bach and Beethoven versus the airiness of Ravel and Debussy—but he was fond of the contemporary chanteurs . Afternoons in the cherry orchard, he would belt out the songs of Georges Brassens and Yves Montand, teaching me not only the lyrics to Le Temps des Cerises but also their significance. His father, picking in a neighboring tree, begged me to chime in with some Negro spirituals.

Before leaving for France, I had read a fair amount about Provence—Cyril Connolly, Lawrence Durrell, M. F. K. Fisher—and nothing about Alsace, and it seemed instructive that my summer in the latter was proving more noteworthy than my nine months in the former. Being out of the classroom contributed, of course, but there was also something I was discovering for the first time: the absorbing, generous surprise of the unsung.

Back home in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, I looked around for a newspaper job. At The Trenton Times , which then was owned by The Washington Post , I was perfunctorily handed a job application. When asked to list the duties my last employment had entailed, I wrote, flippantly if accurately, “picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.” When asked my reason for leaving my last employment, I scribbled: “I got tired of stepping in cow shit.” In response to the “May we contact your last employer?” prompt, I wrote, “Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”

Two days later, I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview. The editor-in-chief, she told me, had been so impressed by my application that he had posted it on a wall in the newsroom.

There are two fail-safe ways to stand out: By being brilliant or by being different. I chose the one that was available to me.

After a three-month trial, I was given a job as a feature writer. This suited me fine, because I had never wanted to be a reporter. I wrote about a lumberjack, a tobacconist, a harness racing driver, simultaneous interpreters at the United Nations, a sociology professor at a local college who had researched the cultural and linguistic history of the hoagie. Feature writing was giving me the perfect training to be a travel writer, getting me out into the world—in this case, New Jersey and its environs—to meet some of the interesting people in it.

After a year and a half, I left the paper and moved to Poland. A woman—met on my way home from France—was behind my decision. That, and my unquenched desire for foreign experience. But leaving a promising career in journalism to pursue a woman behind the Iron Curtain was, for some in the newsroom, the most remarkable thing I had done since filling out my job application.

I ended up spending two and a half years in Warsaw, where I married, taught English, learned Polish, witnessed the rise of Solidarity and, in December 1981, the imposition of martial law. Walking around the deadened city, seeing Polish tanks in the streets, watching soldiers rounding up students—including one I recognized as my own—I thought, for the first time in my life: I must tell the world what I’m witnessing.

Returning home to Phillipsburg, I eagerly began work on my first book. I wrote it in longhand, on yellow legal pads. When it was finished, I typed it up in my father’s law office on South Main Street. Then I made a few Xerox copies. When the rare, positive response to a query arrived, I placed rubber bands around the manuscript—one vertical, one horizontal—placed it in a box, wrapped the box in plain brown paper, wrote the name of the publisher, or agent, on the paper, and took the box to the post office, where it was weighed and pushed to the side while I searched for money to cover the postage.

Rejections trickled in, and at first they didn’t bother me. I’d always heard that as a writer you have to get used to rejection. It is one of the natural laws of writing. Rejections are to writers what flies are to cows—a constant annoyance that we somehow attract but never really get used to.

Still, I remained hopeful. This was the ’80s, when travel writing was enjoying a heyday. It had started in 1975, with Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar , and been given literary legitimacy a few years later by Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia . All of a sudden, travel writing was hot. Some publishers created imprints devoted solely to travel books. Jan Morris’s travel essays appeared regularly in Rolling Stone magazine. Banana Republic put little book coves inside its clothing stores and filled them with guidebooks and travel narratives and, for one brief period, the company’s own travel magazine. Instead of glossy photographs and “10 Best” lists, Trips featured whimsical illustrations and a reminiscence by Richard Ford on growing up in his grandfather’s hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas.

It was a heady time to be a travel writer—just not a travel writer who wrote about Poland. Books about Poland were being published, but they were about the political situation. My book touched on it, naturally, but its real focus was on the people, the culture, the everyday life. “He came to believe,” Ian Hunter wrote in his biography of Malcolm Muggeridge, “that the machinations of power, how it was organized and wielded, who governed whom and by what means, all this was less important than a nation’s soul; its character; its religion; its humour and art and music and literature.” The longest chapter was about the pilgrimage I had taken on foot, along with thousands of Poles, to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, in the first summer of martial law.

Also not helping my cause was the fact that travel books were becoming enamored of the good life. 1989 saw the publication of A Year in Provence , which would be followed a few years later by Under the Tuscan Sun . These two bestsellers created a cottage industry of books set in France (though not Alsace) and Italy that continues today. You could write about Spain, but preferably the sunny south. If you wanted to write about the north, where it rains a lot, you pretty much had to walk the pilgrimage route of El Camino de Santiago. And that was the only pilgrimage you were allowed to write about. As economic realities hit the publishing industry, it became depressingly conservative and conformist in its tastes. I began to seriously question my belief in the value of being different.

Yet I eventually found an agent, a woman in Philadelphia who was new to the business but brought to it determination and an unsinkable spirit. After 41 publishers rejected the book, she placed it with an imprint of Houghton Mifflin. In this game, all you need is one editor to say yes, and then all the rejections become immaterial and fade from memory. Writing is that rare profession that allows you not only to overcome failure, but also to erase it.

In the meantime, I had become the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel . My goal was to bring some of the elements of the travel writing that was appearing in books into the Sunday Travel section, which had been viewed primarily as an advertising vehicle dressed up with articles and information, a bland compendium of clichés and tips. Working in my favor was the fact that the travel section was one of the lowest priorities at a newspaper and I was allowed, for the most part, to do what I wished with it.

My ambitions got me in trouble in 1991, a few weeks after the start of the Gulf War, when I ran a cover story about Baghdad. It had been sent to me by a local woman who had returned home from a teaching job in the city shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. My thinking was: Baghdad is on everyone’s mind right now, and here is an account of the city written by someone who had been living and working there. Not surprisingly, I loved getting stories from expats that, while often in need of editing, contained insights unavailable to professional travel writers.

The editor-in-chief’s words on Monday morning, and I remember them distinctly, were: “Goddammit, nobody’s going to Baghdad now!” The travel section received increased scrutiny for a while, but full attention eventually returned to news and sports. After The Best American Travel Writing debuted in 2000 (a woefully belated birth for the anthology), the Sun-Sentinel ’s name appeared—either with selected stories or under “Notables” in the back—in the first nine editions.

In 2008, I became one of the first people in the history of the Sun-Sentinel to be laid off. I was a victim of newspaper downsizing, not my story-centric approach to travel, though it probably contributed to my being in the first wave.

The advantage of being a writer—as opposed to, say, a banker or an auto worker—is that you can continue doing what you do at home. I dearly missed the weekly paycheck, and the travel budget, and being an editor – especially being my own editor. But, deprived of a job, I still had a profession.

I freelanced, and wrote a book, and then started work on a memoir. I was now in my 60s—a little old, oddly, for the memoir business—but I was giving mine a focus greater than myself, braiding the story of my quest to become a travel writer with that of Poland’s struggle to regain its independence. Readers would learn not just about me but also the Cold War.

After it was completed, I discovered that publishers had become even more conservative and conformist than before. Memoirs, judging by the reviews I read, were invariably about one of a small number of seemingly approved themes: abuse, addiction, dysfunction, illness, or grief. Sometimes a memoir combined two or three. These are all important topics, and great books have been written about them: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Mary Karr’s Lit, to name just two. But why, I wondered, were they the only subjects now allowed? Why were Americans being fed a steady diet of misery, with no reprieve, no glittering outliers to brighten the gloom?

And why this unrelenting focus on the self? The United States was the most powerful country in the world and, instead of learning about the world, its citizens—its readers!—were massively turning inward. This didn’t bode well for our nation’s future.

Nor, to be honest, for my memoir, half of which took place abroad. And although it contained its share of hardship, the tone was optimistic and frequently humorous. Making it even more of a pariah in the current climate of despair, it contained not one but two happy endings: I became a travel writer and Poland regained its independence. My penchant for being different seemed to have gone from quaint to professionally suicidal.

And yet, unfashionable, atypical, idiosyncratic books were still sneaking through publishing’s mill of uniformity. If you knew where to look, you could still find signs of richness, variety, diversity—an idea all publishers now bow down before while giving it, in many houses, a sadly limited application. And, I reminded myself, rejection after rejection: all you need is one maverick editor to say yes.

Thomas Swick 's latest book is the memoir Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer.

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Academic Essay Writing Made Simple: 4 types and tips

The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, and nowhere is this more evident than in academia. From the quick scribbles of eager students to the inquisitive thoughts of renowned scholars, academic essays depict the power of the written word. These well-crafted writings propel ideas forward and expand the existing boundaries of human intellect.

What is an Academic Essay

An academic essay is a nonfictional piece of writing that analyzes and evaluates an argument around a specific topic or research question. It serves as a medium to share the author’s views and is also used by institutions to assess the critical thinking, research skills, and writing abilities of a students and researchers.  

Importance of Academic Essays

4 main types of academic essays.

While academic essays may vary in length, style, and purpose, they generally fall into four main categories. Despite their differences, these essay types share a common goal: to convey information, insights, and perspectives effectively.

1. Expository Essay

2. Descriptive Essay

3. Narrative Essay

4. Argumentative Essay

Expository and persuasive essays mainly deal with facts to explain ideas clearly. Narrative and descriptive essays are informal and have a creative edge. Despite their differences, these essay types share a common goal ― to convey information, insights, and perspectives effectively.

Expository Essays: Illuminating ideas

An expository essay is a type of academic writing that explains, illustrates, or clarifies a particular subject or idea. Its primary purpose is to inform the reader by presenting a comprehensive and objective analysis of a topic.

By breaking down complex topics into digestible pieces and providing relevant examples and explanations, expository essays allow writers to share their knowledge.

What are the Key Features of an Expository Essay

Provides factual information without bias

Presents multiple viewpoints while maintaining objectivity

Uses direct and concise language to ensure clarity for the reader

Composed of a logical structure with an introduction, body paragraphs and a conclusion

When is an expository essay written.

1. For academic assignments to evaluate the understanding of research skills.

2. As instructional content to provide step-by-step guidance for tasks or problem-solving.

3. In journalism for objective reporting in news or investigative pieces.

4. As a form of communication in the professional field to convey factual information in business or healthcare.

How to Write an Expository Essay

Expository essays are typically structured in a logical and organized manner.

1. Topic Selection and Research

• Choose a topic that can be explored objectively
• Gather relevant facts and information from credible sources
• Develop a clear thesis statement

2. Outline and Structure

• Create an outline with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion
• Introduce the topic and state the thesis in the introduction
• Dedicate each body paragraph to a specific point supporting the thesis
• Use transitions to maintain a logical flow

3. Objective and Informative Writing

• Maintain an impartial and informative tone
• Avoid personal opinions or biases
• Support points with factual evidence, examples, and explanations

4. Conclusion

• Summarize the key points
• Reinforce the significance of the thesis

Descriptive Essays: Painting with words

Descriptive essays transport readers into vivid scenes, allowing them to experience the world through the writer ‘s lens. These essays use rich sensory details, metaphors, and figurative language to create a vivid and immersive experience . Its primary purpose is to engage readers’ senses and imagination.

It allows writers to demonstrate their ability to observe and describe subjects with precision and creativity.

What are the Key Features of Descriptive Essay

Employs figurative language and imagery to paint a vivid picture for the reader

Demonstrates creativity and expressiveness in narration

Includes close attention to detail, engaging the reader’s senses

Engages the reader’s imagination and emotions through immersive storytelling using analogies, metaphors, similes, etc.

When is a descriptive essay written.

1. Personal narratives or memoirs that describe significant events, people, or places.

2. Travel writing to capture the essence of a destination or experience.

3. Character sketches in fiction writing to introduce and describe characters.

4. Poetry or literary analyses to explore the use of descriptive language and imagery.

How to Write a Descriptive Essay

The descriptive essay lacks a defined structural requirement but typically includes: an introduction introducing the subject, a thorough description, and a concluding summary with insightful reflection.

1. Subject Selection and Observation

• Choose a subject (person, place, object, or experience) to describe
• Gather sensory details and observations

2. Engaging Introduction

• Set the scene and provide the context
• Use of descriptive language and figurative techniques

3. Descriptive Body Paragraphs

• Focus on specific aspects or details of the subject
• Engage the reader ’s senses with vivid imagery and descriptions
• Maintain a consistent tone and viewpoint

4. Impactful Conclusion

• Provide a final impression or insight
• Leave a lasting impact on the reader

Narrative Essays: Storytelling in Action

Narrative essays are personal accounts that tell a story, often drawing from the writer’s own experiences or observations. These essays rely on a well-structured plot, character development, and vivid descriptions to engage readers and convey a deeper meaning or lesson.

What are the Key features of Narrative Essays

Written from a first-person perspective and hence subjective

Based on real personal experiences

Uses an informal and expressive tone

Presents events and characters in sequential order

When is a narrative essay written.

It is commonly assigned in high school and college writing courses to assess a student’s ability to convey a meaningful message or lesson through a personal narrative. They are written in situations where a personal experience or story needs to be recounted, such as:

1. Reflective essays on significant life events or personal growth.

2. Autobiographical writing to share one’s life story or experiences.

3. Creative writing exercises to practice narrative techniques and character development.

4. College application essays to showcase personal qualities and experiences.

How to Write a Narrative Essay

Narrative essays typically follow a chronological structure, with an introduction that sets the scene, a body that develops the plot and characters, and a conclusion that provides a sense of resolution or lesson learned.

1. Experience Selection and Reflection

• Choose a significant personal experience or event
• Reflect on the impact and deeper meaning

2. Immersive Introduction

• Introduce characters and establish the tone and point of view

3. Plotline and Character Development

• Advance   the  plot and character development through body paragraphs
• Incorporate dialog , conflict, and resolution
• Maintain a logical and chronological flow

4. Insightful Conclusion

• Reflect on lessons learned or insights gained
• Leave the reader with a lasting impression

Argumentative Essays: Persuasion and Critical Thinking

Argumentative essays are the quintessential form of academic writing in which writers present a clear thesis and support it with well-researched evidence and logical reasoning. These essays require a deep understanding of the topic, critical analysis of multiple perspectives, and the ability to construct a compelling argument.

What are the Key Features of an Argumentative Essay?

Logical and well-structured arguments

Credible and relevant evidence from reputable sources

Consideration and refutation of counterarguments

Critical analysis and evaluation of the issue 

When is an argumentative essay written.

Argumentative essays are written to present a clear argument or stance on a particular issue or topic. In academic settings they are used to develop critical thinking, research, and persuasive writing skills. However, argumentative essays can also be written in various other contexts, such as:

1. Opinion pieces or editorials in newspapers, magazines, or online publications.

2. Policy proposals or position papers in government, nonprofit, or advocacy settings.

3. Persuasive speeches or debates in academic, professional, or competitive environments.

4. Marketing or advertising materials to promote a product, service, or idea.

How to write an Argumentative Essay

Argumentative essays begin with an introduction that states the thesis and provides context. The body paragraphs develop the argument with evidence, address counterarguments, and use logical reasoning. The conclusion restates the main argument and makes a final persuasive appeal.

• Choose a debatable and controversial issue
• Conduct thorough research and gather evidence and counterarguments

2. Thesis and Introduction

• Craft a clear and concise thesis statement
• Provide background information and establish importance

3. Structured Body Paragraphs

• Focus each paragraph on a specific aspect of the argument
• Support with logical reasoning, factual evidence, and refutation

4. Persuasive Techniques

• Adopt a formal and objective tone
• Use persuasive techniques (rhetorical questions, analogies, appeals)

5. Impactful Conclusion

• Summarize the main points
• Leave the reader with a strong final impression and call to action

To learn more about argumentative essay, check out this article .

5 Quick Tips for Researchers to Improve Academic Essay Writing Skills

Use clear and concise language to convey ideas effectively without unnecessary words

Use well-researched, credible sources to substantiate your arguments with data, expert opinions, and scholarly references

Ensure a coherent structure with effective transitions, clear topic sentences, and a logical flow to enhance readability 

To elevate your academic essay, consider submitting your draft to a community-based platform like Open Platform  for editorial review 

Review your work multiple times for clarity, coherence, and adherence to academic guidelines to ensure a polished final product

By mastering the art of academic essay writing, researchers and scholars can effectively communicate their ideas, contribute to the advancement of knowledge, and engage in meaningful scholarly discourse.

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American Airlines ‘outrageously’ suggests girl, 9, to blame after creepy flight attendant records her in bathroom

A lawyer representing American Airlines has shockingly claimed a 9-year-old girl who’s suing the company should’ve known she was being videotaped by a creepy flight attendant while using a plane bathroom.

The airline’s attorneys made the “outrageous” suggestion in legal papers filed Monday as part of an ongoing lawsuit the girl’s family brought against the company last year, the child’s lawyer said.

Estes Carter Thompson III, 37, was arrested for allegedly secretly filming multiple girls between the ages of 7 and 14 over several months last year, according to federal prosecutors.

American Airlines wrote in Monday’s legal filing that the young girl should have been aware that a device was recording her as she used the lavatory.

“Any injuries or illnesses alleged to have been sustained by Plaintiff, Mary Doe, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s own fault and negligence, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s use of the compromised lavatory, which she knew or should have known contained a visible and illuminated recording device,” according to one of the various legal defenses offered by American Airlines’ lawyers.

The family of the girl is “absolutely livid” with the airline’s latest legal move, said their lawyer Paul Llewellyn.

“I was absolutely shocked and I think it’s outrageous,” Llewellyn told The Post. “The idea that American Airlines and its lawyers would blame a 9-year-old girl for being filmed, in my opinion, just smacks of desperation and depravity.

“What on Earth is American Airlines thinking by adopting such a strategy?”

One Wednesday, American blamed “outside legal counsel” and said it would walk back the claim.

“The included defense is not representative of our airline and we have directed it be amended this morning,” the airline told The Post in a statement.

“We do not believe this child is at fault and we take the allegations involving a former team member very seriously.”

After its flight crew member’s arrest, American Airlines said it takes “these allegations very seriously.”

The 9-year-old’s family, who live in Texas, filed the lawsuit in February more than a year after she was allegedly recorded on a January 2023 flight to Los Angeles.

Thompson was arrested and charged by federal agents in January after the sick allegations came to light when a North Carolina 14-year-old girl on a separate flight noticed an iPhone was recording her after she just wrapped up in the plane’s bathroom in September 2023.

She snapped a photo of the shocking setup before leaving the lavatory.

Llewellyn said Tuesday that American Airlines didn’t suggest the North Carolina teen was culpable in a separate and ongoing lawsuit against the airline that was first filed in December.

Thompson pleaded not guilty during his arraignment in Massachusetts federal court Monday to charges of attempted sexual exploitation of children and possession of child pornography depicting a prepubescent minor, the Boston Herald reported.

Authorities found at least four instances of Thompson recording a minor while the child used the bathroom, federal prosecutors said.

In the legal brief filed Monday, American Airlines also blamed Thompson, claiming his alleged actions happened “outside the course and scope of his employment.”

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Guest Essay

I Was Shot in Vermont. What if It Had Been in the West Bank?

By Hisham Awartani

Mr. Awartani is a Palestinian American student at Brown University.

That frigid autumn night in Burlington, Vt., was not the first time I had stared down the barrel of a gun. It was not even the first time I had been fired at. Half a world away, in the West Bank, it had happened before.

On a hot day in May 2021, a classmate and I, both of us 17 at the time, were protesting near a checkpoint in Ramallah. Bullets, both rubber and metal, were flying into the crowd, even though we were unarmed. I was hit with one of the former; my classmate, the latter. Before, we had been students cramming for our chemistry final; then, on the other side of Israeli rifles, we were a mass of terrorists, disqualified from humanity.

So that night in November, when my two friends and I were shot while we were walking on North Prospect Street, I was not particularly surprised to find myself lying on the lawn of a white house and blood splattered across the screen of my phone. Back home in Ramallah, I knew that I was one wrong move away from bleeding out; Israeli soldiers have been known to prevent or hinder paramedics from tending to injured Palestinians. But I had never expected to feel this on a quiet street in Vermont, on a stroll before Thanksgiving dinner.

The shooting of three Palestinian Americans in Burlington has received more sustained coverage than any single act of violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since Oct. 7. Why did reporters and news channels interview our mothers and take our portraits when young men my age have been shot at by snipers , detained indefinitely without trial and treated as a statistic?

It’s a question that has eaten away at me these past months. Was it the shock of such a violent crime in peaceful Vermont? Was it that my friends and I went to well-known American colleges? Did the timing of our shooting during a holiday weekend play a role? I’m sure it did, but to me, the determining factor is the reframing of the crime: Instead of settlements, the Oslo Accords or the intifada, the conversation around our shooting involved terms such as “gun violence,” “hate crimes” and “right-wing extremism.” Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America. Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.

Death and dehumanization are status quo for Palestinians. We grow used to being funneled through checkpoints and strip-searched, assault rifles trained on us all the while. The result is a constant existential calculus: If an unarmed autistic man , an 8-year-old boy and a journalist wearing a vest emblazoned “Press” could be perceived to be such a threat that they were shot dead, then I must accept that by existing as a Palestinian, I am a legitimate target.

This dynamic was so ubiquitous to me that I could not quite put it into words until I left the West Bank to attend college in the United States. My classes gave me the vocabulary to understand dehumanization, the portrayal of the colonized as a violent primitive. I realized that the infrastructure of the occupation — the checkpoints, the detentions, the armed settlers encroaching — is built around the violence I am assumed to be capable of, not who I am.

This system of othering — Israeli-only roads, fenced-off settlements, the “security” wall — is an inherent part of the Israeli state psyche. Yet far from ensuring Israelis’ safety, it instead inflicts mass humiliation on Palestinians. Close to half of the Palestinians alive today were born after the violence of the second intifada, and have interacted with Israelis only in the confines of the security apparatus built in its wake. The military apparatus in my home in the West Bank is a judge, jury and executioner. While settlers in the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law, Palestinians are subject to military law. It is as if we are all already combatants.

The dehumanization we face is twofold: Beyond the day-to-day aspects of our lives, it permeates the media coverage of what we experience. In the news, our militancy is presumed, our killers unnamed, and our deaths repackaged into statistics. Somehow, we die without being killed. The very veracity of our deaths is called into question . The extent of the civilian death toll in Gaza should not come as a surprise when Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, can speak unchecked of “ human animals .”

My story is one drop in the ocean of suffering faced by Palestinians, and compared to the immense and indescribable suffering of the people of Gaza, frankly trivial. As I wheeled myself down the smooth corridors of the hospital where I received care after the shooting, I thought of those in wheelchairs in Gaza, struggling to navigate the rubble-strewn streets as they fled their homes. I thought of the reports about a woman being shot dead as she held her grandson’s hand while he clutched a white flag. I thought of a 17-year-old shot in the back by settlers in the West Bank . The pain of knowing their fates is fathomless, and it has yet to cease.

I think back to the circumstances in which I was shot with my two friends, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, and imagine them instead in the context of the West Bank. A Hisham, Kinnan and Tahseen shot there could have been left to die. Our names would circulate for a day or two in pro-Palestinian circles, but in the end, we would be commemorated only on a poster in the streets of Ramallah, our faces eventually worn down with time like the countless others I’ve walked past in the streets of my home. If that scenario does not stir the same feelings in you as my shooting, if your first instinct when a Palestinian is shot, maimed or left handicapped is to find excuses, then I do not want your support.

When I was still in the hospital, my family and I were visited by a friend who had just recently made it out of Gaza. He recounted how he saw the beginning of the Israeli bombing from his balcony, and soon after showered and left his house with a prepacked bag. He told me of tents, of hunger, of explosions, but there is one thing that really stood out for me as he recounted his ordeal.

He explained how the only way for him to survive in Gaza was to accept that he had already died. Only after he had come to terms with the realization that his life as he knew it was over could he enjoy a puff of a cigarette and a sip of coffee in the morning. This acceptance is the goal of the Israeli dehumanization complex. To be Palestinian today is to accept this fate.

I have been back on campus since February, and the adjustment has been tough. The man who is accused of shooting me has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder. But my mind is elsewhere. Every morning when I wake up, I check for one number . It has exceeded 35,000. It’s difficult for me to come to terms with the reality of so much loss.

In class, between Mesopotamian myths and commutative algebra, a few thoughts play on a loop in my mind: How can we come back from so much grief? How could we let this happen? What are we supposed to make of the world when Palestinian deaths are excused by talking points, repeated again and again on the news? I yearn to return to my home, to my olive trees, my cats and my family.

I realize, though, that when I cross the King Hussein Bridge from Jordan into the West Bank, I will return to my designation as a potential terrorist. I cease to be a junior at Brown University, a student of archaeology and mathematics, a San Francisco Giants fan, a Balkan history nerd. My entire identity will be reduced to my capacity for violence, not as a human being, but as a Palestinian.

Hisham Awartani is a Palestinian American student at Brown University studying mathematics and archaeology. He grew up in Ramallah, West Bank.

Photographs by Ibrahim alghamdi, 130920, Didier Marti.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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