American Identity

 

I'm watching the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Birthright" about Worf finding a group of Klingons and Romulons who have learned to live together. Worf brings the Klingon kids their stories and traditions and this disrupts the balance with the Romulons.

 

What I wonder is how new stories and identities are created. Losing history and tradition isn't the answer, but one must also create new traditions.

 

I think about what the American identity is. I think we are being over-run by a limited, small idea of American identity right now.

 

How do we braid the threads of tradition together to form an American identity that can hold us together, but deny no one's history? The attempt to say that whiteness and Christianity is the American identity, is too cheap, too crude, and too disrespectful of so many people's histories. Jewish history must be part of what it is to be American as well as Islamic, Chinese, European, South American, and all other histories and ethnicities that make up the American people.

 

Multi-culturalism is part of the answer, but we also need a stronger answer about what it means to be an American. How else do we all feel a commonality with which we can work together?

 

Probably more reconciliation and reparations are necessary. The native American and African American histories and identities have been disrespected. My intuition is that part of what brings us to this moment of break-down is our failure to find a just integration of all our histories in the US.