Independence Day

When I think about what it means for me to be American (Irish-American, white American) I always find myself thinking about the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Because of course, of course, the Civil War is one of the very few wars in history I'm glad was fought, one of the wars that holds me back from condemning war. And yet, and yet--the working-class Irish men who had seen their homeland utterly destroyed by famine and British imperialism, who had fled a country where more than 10% of the population simply starved to death for a country where they were treated like dirt, and who were now being asked to atone in blood for the original sin of the United States, a sin they'd never committed and a country which didn't even want them until it needed cannon fodder for this war--even as the Anglo ruling elites who had abetted and profited from slavery for generations bought themselves off from the reckoning at $100 a head--well, I'd have rioted too. No matter how just this war was, it wasn't their goddamned war, and it wasn't just to compel them to fight it. Until, until, like the wicked fools they were, like the wicked fools wretched people so often become, they decided it was black people's fault for being enslaved, for requiring justice. And went out and lynched black men and terrorized black neighborhoods and burned down a goddamned orphanage, and chased a centuries-old black community off the island they'd decided was their own.

At which point it became their war, at which it became our atonement, because now their hands (our hands, my hands) were dripping with black blood too. At which point (and there's a whole history here, of course, but this is a moment in it) the enormous, weighty ambiguity of the American "we" became something they too could join into--for better or for worse. As pride and as responsibility, as guilt and as atonement. "We the people" kept slaves and we also fought a war to free them, we the people exploited immigrants in sweatshops and we won through bloody strikes a better life, we voted to open the prisons and we will vote and demonstrate and riot to shut them down. "We" doesn't mean a shared identity or even a shared history; Americans don't share those things. It means a shared future and a shared responsibility for that future. Am I "proud" to be American? I'm proud to assume that responsibility, and I would be ashamed to shirk it. So yes, I suppose I am.