Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.
Good riddance.
Sullivan weighs in here:
From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?
1 comment:
Not that I think Pat Buchanan's argument deserves a logical response, but one of the other problems I see is not just that minorities have become woven into the fabric of American culture. We brought many of them here in the first place, in the case of black slaves, or we violently took their land, in the case of Mexicans and American Indians.
Does Buchanan think we should have made the former slaves swim back to West Africa after the Civil War? Or force out legal Mexican migrant workers? It's the same as the Europeans bringing in North African and Turkish migrant workers after WWII, and then desiring them to leave the land that became their home.
OK, stepping down from soap box now.
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