On Being an American

What does being an American mean? Are we living up to it?

Let me start this post with a “positionality statement,” as qualitative researchers like to say. I am a fourth-generation Jewish American. Six of my great-grandparents fled persecution in Europe and came to New York City to restart their lives. My grandfather fought in the Army during World War II, and my father was in the Marines during the Vietnam War. This country has given my family and me a home and incredible opportunities to spread our wings and grow, and we have contributed to the country in a number of ways (such as serving in the armed forces and teaching the next generation of young people).

I know it’s fashionable to bash the United States these days. Go to Quora, and you will see tons of anti-Americanism - US citizens begging to move to Europe, Europeans trashing the US as a hellhole, and Canadians boasting about how much better their country is than ours is. I’m not going to get into any any of that. Most people think their country is awesome - as they should. I would not expect anything else. So I am not going to contend that the US is “better” than other countries. I will compare and contrast the US against other countries to make my points, but I won’t say that we are “better” than anyone else.

What I do want to do here, though, is talk about what it means to be an American. The US has been described as a “peculiar experiment” in constitutional governance - at the time of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention, most other countries were ruled by kings, emperors, or other autocratic leaders. Freedom was an elusive concept, and we were among the first countries to offer it to ordinary citizens. We were the first modern country to ratify a constitution that would govern the behavior of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. We are still one of the only nations in the world to guarantee freedom of speech and expression, such that the government cannot arrest citizens for their spoken or written words (as is now happening in various European countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany).

Almost immediately since its inception in the late 18th century, the US has been a magnet for immigrants from around the world. When the Irish Potato Famine occurred in the 1840s and 1850s, the US was the primary country the Irish emigrants came to. When European Jews - like my great grandparents - were being attacked and persecuted in various European cities, the US was their destination of choice. People come here from all over the globe to try their hand at entrepreneurship. If you watch Shark Tank, you’ll see people from many different countries who have come to the US to start businesses. Our country offers opportunities that are unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The US has led the world in innovation largely because we encourage risk taking and push people to reach beyond what they had imagined possible.

But all is not rosy here. Income inequalities between the richest and poorest people are far greater in the US than almost anywhere else. We don’t offer a real safety net, or universal health care, for lower-income people. Homelessness is a much bigger problem here than in other countries because, if you cannot afford to pay for your own home, you will likely be out in the street. Our Second Amendment, while allowing citizens to defend themselves, also has resulted in way more guns - and more gun violence - than is present in other countries. The predominance of fast food - get off any major interstate highway (outside of major cities) and see what food options are available - had led to an obesity epidemic that threatens to cut short the lifespans of many Americans. Our two-party system has created a political landscape where the far left and the far right dominate our discourse, and where the majority of people have to hold their noses at the polls and vote for someone they don’t really like.

So let’s go into the “good” and the “bad” of what it means to be an American - and then let’s see where that leaves us.

The Good

Americans are among the most welcoming people anywhere in the world. Almost everyone I’ve met who has traveled or moved here from other places tells me how open and accommodating we are. We pride ourselves on being generous, caring, giving people who will open up our doors to others who need it. We are used to hearing foreign accents, so they don’t surprise or bother us. You can’t go into a store in much of the US without hearing someone speaking English with a noticeable non-native accent. Many of us smile when we hear these accents, because they remind us of how welcoming we are, and of how the US opened its doors to our own ancestors who needed somewhere to go.

I’ve traveled around much of Europe, and I’ve spent time in Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. Those are all awesome places - but people are not nearly as friendly as we are here in the US. People in other countries are very careful about what they reveal about themselves, and they often react strangely to Americans who want to get to know them. People don’t greet strangers as eagerly as we do, and people who are perceived as foreign may - in some cases - feel less welcome in many European countries than they do in the US. If you live in Germany and you speak German with a Turkish or Arabic accent, native Germans may well look at you with suspicion and wonder what you’re doing in their country.

Think of it this way - is it easier to become an American, or to become a German? In the US, we define our national identity based on people’s values and beliefs. If you value freedom, openness, and patriotism, most of us will welcome you regardless of where you came from. Thousands of people are sworn in as naturalized US citizens every single day - and we accept them with open arms just as we would accept someone who was born here.

Many European countries, however, base their national identity on ancestry. A German is someone whose parents and grandparents were German. If you’re Turkish, you will always be a foreigner no matter how long you live in Germany. I have a good friend who was born in Germany to Turkish parents. She has lived in Germany her whole life - yet many other Germans still see her as a Turk. Germany doesn’t have birthright citizenship, so my friend was not born as a German citizen. She is one now, but she is often not treated like one.

Sure, we have our share of xenophobia in the US - and it goes up and down depending on which party is in power - but it is far less than you see in other countries. I’ve met people who were immigrants in Europe and then came to the US, and they tell me it’s night and day. There is discrimination here, but it’s nothing compared to what they experienced in France, Germany, Spain, or the UK. Almost everyone in the US can trace their heritage to somewhere else, so we are all immigrants if you go back a few generations. That’s not true in Europe. Many British people can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years - and it’s almost all in Britain. The same goes for most other European countries.

We have been a nation of immigrants since our founding, so immigration feels natural to us. Even some of our biggest immigration hardliners are themselves married to immigrants (two of Donald Trump’s wives have been immigrants from Eastern Europe, for example). One third of the populations of Texas and Florida, which are considered the largest “red” states, consist of first and second generation immigrants. We have elected an ethnic minority and immigrant-descent president and vice president - something that most European countries have not done. The US is probably the most diverse large Western country in the world - although we have our share of ethnic and racial conflicts (which I will get to under “The Bad” below).

Upward economic mobility is also the rule, rather than the exception, in the US. More people who grew up in low-income families have become middle class now than at any other point in US history. Our college and university populations have diversified exponentially over the last 30 years or so, and we have more and more millionaires and billionaires of color. Even though there were many barriers to financial and social success for people of color for much of our history, these barriers have weakened considerably. I’m not saying that we’ve reached equality - we haven’t, and we have a lot of work left to do - but anyone who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s would have to say that we are doing pretty damned well compared to when they were kids or young adults.

The US is also one of the safest places in the world to be a Jew. Even though anti-Semitism has been on the rise here over the past 10-15 years, we don’t see mass killings of Jewish people. We don’t see synagogues burned down or thousands of Jewish people murdered at once. I’ve actually met people from Israel who moved here so they could feel safe being Jewish. I know lots of people here who walk around wearing Jewish religious attire, and they feel perfectly safe doing so. I don’t know of many places in Europe where that could be said.

So an American is someone who is tolerant, accepting, values differences of background and of opinion, and is willing to let other people live as they choose. Of course, there are people here who are bigoted and intolerant, and those people have loud voices, but they do not represent who we are. And even though our current president has been accused of being bigoted and intolerant, he doesn’t represent most of us either. As I said earlier in this post, our two-party system often forces people to choose between candidates they don’t like. The fact that someone voted for Trump does not mean they endorse his views on immigration, religious tolerance, or other similar issues. And for what it’s worth, Trump’s daughter Ivana converted to Judaism - and Trump’s own grandchildren are Jewish.

It’s also worth mentioning that people’s views of immigration often shift depending on how immigrants are coming into the country. During times of heavy immigration, many people become less open to newcomers. This finding has been reported in countries around the world. The millions of people who entered the US illegally under Joe Biden’s watch likely contributed to Trump’s electoral victory by decreasing support for immigration. The same can be said for many European countries that are moving to the right politically. By the time Trump’s term is done, US voters will be back to supporting immigration - because levels of immigration will be much lower under Trump than they were under Biden. On the whole, Americans are supportive of immigration. When millions of people enter the country without authorization, some of us get upset about that. (When citizens learn about the crises that are displacing people, they sometimes become more accepting of these people entering the country without legal papers.)

But how tolerant are we? Would we pass laws banning Muslim face coverings as the French have? Would we allow openly anti-Semitic political parties to run for office, as has happened in Germany recently? Would we send police to people’s houses to arrest them for an offensive social media post - as is happening in the UK?

The Bad

When I think about some of the negatives of the US and of being an American, I have to start with the racism that pervaded the early years of the country’s founding. Although African slaves were brought to the Americas long before the US was founded, it took us 90 years to outlaw slavery after the Declaration of Independence. I understand that, because the Articles of Confederation had given the states a tremendous amount of power, compromises had to be reached in order to get the Constitution ratified by the states. One of these compromises involved allowing slavery to continue in the South - even though the Northern states had plans to eradicate it sooner or later. Again, I understand this, but the fact that Southern states insisted on keeping slavery intact remains a stain on our country’s history. The fact that these states seceded from the US after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation - and that we had to fight a war to reclaim these states into the US and to end slavery once and for all - does not speak well for who we once were as a country. Even today, the US Deep South is not exactly the most accepting and tolerant place. There still are “sundown towns” where anyone who isn’t White is expected to leave before the sun sets. These rules, which were once posted on signs but are now enforced informally, were intended to apply to African Americans but now also apply to Hispanics, Asians, and other groups of color. The very idea of such “sundown towns” is absolutely disgusting and does now speak well of who we are now.

Then there is the genocide against Native American tribes. You can spin it any way you want, but westward expansion and “manifest destiny” meant kicking Native people off the lands they had been living on for thousands of years. The Trail of Tears, where President Andrew Jackson ordered Native tribes in the Southeastern US to move west, led to the deaths of more than 16,000 people from the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes. The Seminoles were the only group who disobeyed Jackson, escaping to Florida and hiding in the Everglades where the US troops couldn’t find them. Native American reservations are among the poorest places in the country, and Native people suffer from disparities in drug and alcohol addiction, obesity, suicidality, diabetes, heart disease, and other health outcomes. If your culture and land were taken from you, would you not turn to drinking, overeating, suicide, and other self-destructive behaviors? I’m sure I probably would.

It really says something when you read that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis modeled some of their despicable ideas and practices after the US South and how they treated Black people, and after the US’s treatment of Native Americans. There is an expression that imitation is the surest form of flattery, but this is not a kind of flattery I would want. Few people dispute any of this, but when we talk about the US, and about what being American means, we cannot ignore these disgusting events, conditions, and practices.

And even though almost every settler society - the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and almost every country in Latin America and the Caribbean - has displaced and abused its Native population, the US has done less for its Native people than many other settler societies have. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have centered and celebrated their indigenous groups, and they have publicly apologized for displacing and harming them. If we have done anything like that, neither I nor the Native people I know have noticed.

The US also has a bad habit of intervening into the affairs of other countries, and taking out other countries’ leaders. Few would argue that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Khadafy, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, or Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro are/were good people or effective leaders. But did - or do - we have the right to take them out? Did the CIA have the right to take out Latin American leaders who had endorsed leftist ideologies? Did George W. Bush have the right to invade Iraq on flimsy grounds, destabilize the whole region, and lead to the creation of ISIS and other terrorist groups? Did Ronald Reagan have the right to invade Grenada? Was it a good move for us to stick ourselves in the middle of civil wars in Vietnam and Korea? (I won’t even get into Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada.)

We Americans can be very arrogant about how great we think our country is - to the point where it grates on the nerves of people from other places. Yes, we offer freedoms and opportunities that aren’t available in very many other countries - but no, we are not “better” than other countries. The Nordic countries offer quality of life that we do not, although you could argue that people there trade economic prosperity for security and a social safety net - at least to some extent. A country that has people living in the street is not in a position to call itself superior over countries that feed and clothe their people.

In terms of the comparison between the US and countries with strong social safety nets, think of this analogy. You have a choice between two jobs. The first job offers you unlimited earning power, but if you cannot support your own salary and expenses, then you get fired. The second job offers only modest raises, but your salary can never go down, and your job is guaranteed for life unless you do something illegal or unethical. People who would prefer the first job are entrepreneurs who would be happier in the US, whereas people who prefer the second job would be happier in a Nordic country. There are no right or wrong answers here - only personal preferences. So the US is not “better” than Denmark or Sweden, but Denmark and Sweden are also not “better” than the US. It depends on your risk tolerance versus your desire for a more well-rounded life (rather than working lots of hours as many of us do in the US). I personally would rather work my tail off and make an impact on the world than sit around drinking wine - but that’s just me. And I suspect that many Americans feel the same way I do.

Americans are also perceived as uncultured and as uninterested in interacting with other cultural groups. I remember climbing up the hundreds of stairs in the Brunelleschi Chapel in Florence, Italy, and seeing where someone had written “In the States we have elevators” in black ink. We are also known around the world for coming into local establishments in other countries and insisting that everyone speak to us in English. I can recall the time when I was in Paris, and the agent I was talking to was shocked that I was attempting to speak to her in French. Many Americans would not even bother to try! Americans are known as bulls in a china shop - we show up, knock everything over, and wonder why locals don’t like us. (This is a stereotype, of course, but there are plenty of us who conform well to it.)

There are some issues that unfortunately occur everywhere - such as group tensions, economic ups and downs, and elections that bring in potentially destructive leaders. Anti-immigration politicians have popped up in many countries, including the US but also in various European countries. Recently, Valentina Gomez - herself an immigrant from Colombia - has announced that she is running for a seat in the US House of Representatives. Her platform centers on expelling as many Muslims as possible from the country! Her platform is not all that different from France’s Marine Le Pen or The Netherlands’s Geert Wilders, both of whom are on record as opposing Muslim immigration into their respective countries. Britain’s Nigel Farage, who led the disastrous Brexit movement that withdrew the UK from the European Union, holds views that are similar to those of Donald Trump in the US. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also holds similar views as Trump and Farage - namely a desire to reduce mass immigration. As European nations continue to diversify, they are encountering many of the same ethnic conflicts that we have encountered here in the US over the past 50 years. Even the Nordic countries, which are famous for their tolerance, have begun to push back against mass immigration, and some of these nations have also elected right-leaning leaders who oppose the rapid demographic changes that have been occurring. As I noted earlier in this post, attitudes toward immigration, and toward diversity in general, tend to be most negative during times of mass migration. We are seeing that in Europe as well as in the US.

So, someone looking to criticize Americans might claim that an American is an arrogant person who has little knowledge of the world outside their own country; an overweight, slovenly, uncultured individual who has no interest in learning about other cultures; and someone who constantly waves their flag, boasts about how awesome their country is, and puts everyone else down in the process. Americans are seen as people who don’t play well in the sandbox with the other kids. We insist on taking everyone else’s toys away and claiming them for ourselves. We throw our weight around, take out other countries’ leaders, and threaten to retaliate against anyone who doesn’t do what we want. Of course, there is a huge difference between a country’s government and its citizens, but many of us seem just as arrogant as our leaders do.

The Verdict

So what is an American? Are we the world’s leaders and innovators, or are we entitled bullies who insist on getting what we want? Are we open and welcoming, or are we arrogant and self-righteous? Do we value diversity - given that we are one of the most diverse large nations in the world - or are we looking to return to the days when Whites represented 90 percent of our population?

The answers to these questions are probably both. But the people who are uncultured and entitled are likely not the same people who are leaders in global commerce and technology. With the progress of social media, more and more of us are becoming immersed in the global culture, learning other languages, and spending time abroad. The days of the Ugly American seem to be largely behind us. Despite what people posting on Quora seem to suggest, the US continues to attract millions of newcomers every year, and most people who live here are quite happy with their lives. And although some of us seem to be full of bluster - starting with our current president - most of us are very open and welcoming. Almost all the students I work with at the University of Texas are immigrants, and they talk often about how much they love it here. Many of them have applied for green cards to stay in the US. We must not be all that bad if so many people want to come and live here.

At the same time, we need to be mindful of how we are perceived around the world. Many Americans I know say they don’t care, but the world has become a global village. The oceans that border us no longer isolate us from the rest of the world. The world no longer starts in Boston and ends in San Diego. Everything that happens here is broadcast around the world - I can remember going overseas not long after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, and everyone I talked to was asking me about it. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it often took a few days for events occurring here to get into the world’s consciousness, but those days are long gone. People in other countries know exactly what’s going on in the US, and the “I don’t care what anyone else thinks of us” attitude will not work anymore. People around the world watch our sports, follow our elections, and learn our sayings. (We are doing likewise - I cannot believe how many Americans are following soccer leagues and teams in other countries.) Pro football legend Tom Brady owns a share of an English soccer team. English soccer legend David Beckham owns part of the Miami FC soccer team, and he and his family spend time in Florida each year. Baseball, basketball, and hockey players from other countries come to the US to play, and many of them meet their wives here, get married, and stay here after their playing days are over. Again, we are part of a global village. The days of our not caring about the rest of the world are long behind us - and we need to recognize that and conduct ourselves accordingly.

So let’s end this post with what being an American needs to mean moving forward. Americans must be global citizens - we must be humble, open-minded people who are willing to listen to the rest of the world. We must view ourselves as being on equal footing with other countries, as opposed to the superiority complex we seem to have adopted over the past 80 years or so. What happens in the US affects the rest of the world, and what happens around the world affects us. The way our leaders conduct themselves reflects on all of us, for better or for worse. Stephen Miller - who is Trump’s de facto immigration czar - directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to go into schools and hospitals to find and detain people who might be in the US illegally makes us look like a bunch of heartless people. Even though the Biden administration allowed millions of people to cross into our country without authorization, that does not mean that the next administration should behave in cruel and abusive ways toward people who genuinely needed somewhere to go to escape brutal, dictatorial, and unlivable conditions. The rest of the world is watching, and they are shaking their heads. We can say we don’t care what anyone else thinks, but in a globally interconnected world, that kind of attitude simply doesn’t work as well as it did 30, 40, or 50 years ago.

With constantly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, all of us need to remain vigilant regarding what people and groups in all corners of the world are developing. Many AI experts have been sounding the alarm that, as soon as AI learns to think for itself and make its own independent decisions, we could be doomed as a species. This may be especially true for AI apps that are developed for malevolent purposes. If an AI app developed in China, Russia, or Iran is taught that its ultimate goal is to destroy the US, don’t you think it will figure out a way to do that? For this - and other - reasons, we need to remain connected to the rest of the world. The oceans to the east and west of us will not protect us against a malevolent AI app that has been programmed to harm us.

So, again, moving forward, we Americans need to be open to what the rest of the world has to say. An American needs to be someone who joins hands with the global community to ensure that all of us act in the best interests of humanity as a whole. Our ingenuity, technology, and innovative mindsets will serve as huge assets to us, but we need to stop thinking we are better or more important than everyone else. That kind of thinking will not help anyone, and in the age of rapidly advancing AI, it could interfere with efforts to stop bad actors from using AI to accomplish destructive goals. We should still be proud of who we are and of what we stand for, but it would behoove us to drop the arrogant mindset that what happens elsewhere in the world is of little importance to us.