This Land Is Your Land

Chapter One – Age of Promise – Part I: Recipe for Greatness

The Differentiators – Strangers Who Would Become Family

"All the News That’s Fit to Print"

The New York Times

Today is January 16, 2050, and on this momentous celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the United States has reached a milestone of its own – we are now a nation with no ethnic majority. But that’s not all: In the eighty-seven years since Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we’ve shifted dramatically from a society deeply invested in the idea of race, and where over 88% identified as white, to one where an increasing majority of Americans have moved beyond the construct altogether. We simply no longer find that paradigm useful. 

But this was only the most obvious of sociocultural changes we’ve undergone. Women would cast off two centuries of subjugation, our ethnicity, gender and sexuality-based identities, along with who determined them, would all change in ways never imagined, and people of all faiths and non-faiths would make valuable contributions to our moral, ethical and spiritual growth. Even our concepts of beauty and intelligence, our fundamental assumptions about one another and our beliefs about ourselves have all evolved. And that was only the beginning. 

While the changes we’ve undergone were more than a century in the making, there were inflection points; from the re-integration of our military (which is where, during the Revolution, we started) to the ending slavery, from the first Journey of Reconciliation to women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights. But most significant was the 2008 election of Barack Obama; a moment when the descendant of an enslaved people became head of our nation. Americans from every background, racial identity and state (back then, there were fifty) came together to make this thing, once barely a pipe dream, reality. It was so unprecedented that we thought this one act would transport us instantly to the Promised Land. But the journey had just started, and getting there would require forty years in the desert.  

But not everyone applauded. There was a faction that sought to spin a different narrative; declaring an Obama win a loss for America, a changing people, a dying people, and this evolution, our ending. They’d return to what they know; using their constructed categories to scapegoat other Americans; unaware that the constructs themselves were unraveling. They’d blame our flailing economy on greater minority visibility. They’d label LGBTQIA+ equality as “special” rights, just as they’d done with African Americans in the 1960s. They’d foster the perception that we were being overrun by Muslims, terrorists and “Illegals”; that we were being “force-fed” political correctness and “tolerance”. This land, they’d declare, was their land, that it was being taken from them, and that they’d lose it altogether if they didn’t stand up – right now – and take it back. 

2012 was tough on this group in two ways. First, Obama’s successful reelection made it clear that the historically dominant voting bloc was no longer dominant. “Rousing the sleeping giant” had, for the first time, failed as a political strategy. Second, it’s estimated that this was likely the year ever that ethnic minority births surpassed white-identifying births. The demographic wave had crested; one that would successively ripple through the entire American population. The writing was on the wall. But what those vying to maintain control lost in power, they made up for in almost apocalyptic fervor; a fear that being part of a diverse and equitable democracy would be the end of this faction’s way of life. They framed it as a struggle for the survival of whiteness in America. And just like that, “one nation, indivisible” was rendered obsolete. 

By 2016, this had coalesced into strategy. In that environment, upstart presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”, one borrowed from Ronald Reagan, would take on a very different connotation than it meant in the Cold War era. Some would even go so far as to reimagine our cooperative political process as a kind of war; one waged against our fellow Americans. Like Cain, brothers and sisters had, in their minds, become enemies. We’d weaponize sacred texts. We’d march with rifles and flags and signs that said, “Jews will not replace us” and “Black lives don’t matter, and neither do their votes.” 

But none of this was new. From Brown v. Board to Lovings v. Virginia, from the Immigration and Nationality Act to the Voting Rights Act, we’d tried undoing some of what we’d done to fellow Americans; only to discover we couldn’t stop. We’d blame Asian Americans in the 1970s for running Detroit carmakers out of business, and Latinx Americans, in the 80s, for taking “our” jobs. We’d burn dozens of African American churches across the South in the 90s, and after 9/11, attack Muslim Americans. The 2000s would find us blaming our fragmentation on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ Americans instead of on bigotry and human disregard. 

And in 2020, we actually blamed Asian Americans – yet again – this time for the COVID-19 pandemic and African Americans when we shot the messenger of Critical Race Theory for pointing out systemic inequity. We were addicted to bigotry. But as with any addiction, indulging only made our problems worse. Later, when the dust settled, we’d look back; asking who’s to blame. But in a democracy, rule of the people, we can’t lay problems we, the people, caused at the doorstep of any leader. At every juncture, it was us, the American citizenry, who poisoned our culture and allowed our unity to be shattered; this time, almost irreparably. Because the genie was out of the bottle. 

By 2017, the United States now had more non-white than white-identifying preschoolers, there were more out LGBTQIA+ people than ever, and religious minorities were no longer in hiding. We’d discover that this diverse blossoming was exactly what we needed, and is where we were always headed. It’s who we were; just as much as “land of the free and home of the brave”. 

Out of this would emerge something beautiful; a new, unified theory of American culture. People identifying in every way possible and every state in the union would begin to grasp what it means to be a new nation – one conceived in liberty – and what that requires of us. And to our surprise, we’d find much greater unity in embracing diversity than we ever had in denying it. We’d discover that democracy is only real if it extends to everyone. And we’d realize that our humanity is our most valuable asset. 

But getting here wasn’t easy. We Americans have always undertaken social progress in fits and starts; steps forward and back. The Civil War, Reconstruction, segregation, integration; etc., a cycle on repeat. As a result, the years 2015 - 2025 would be known as the Age of Recompense; a reckoning that we’d been postponing since our first encounters with indigenous peoples and the three-fifths compromise. We’d long held high the American Dream, but neglected the dream of America. The latter would no longer be denied. 

Our saving grace would be what it’s always been; each other; those among us who could look unflinchingly at our faults and still find the beauty. It was they, those Americans, who would inspire us to go forward rather than turn back. To overcome. We’d embrace a better vision of who we are and what we can be; and in doing so, not only pay homage to our past, but make a down payment on the future. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Today is January 16, 2050, and America, despite her faults and fumbles, if not because of them, more than ever, reflects the virtues on which she was founded. 

Though it took us more than 300 years, the direction was set at the very conception of what would become the “United States”, and was invoked with these words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” From birth, we were a nation of immigrants; of strangers who would become family. And we have proven time and time again that we are at our best when we embrace this unique and powerful heritage. Today, as we celebrate MLK’s 121th birthday, let us remember that.

Peyton Ellis – Staff Writer 

The New York Times, January 16, 2050

Houston, We Have A Problem

We, the people, are in trouble. But that's not news. In fact, this might be the one thing that all us Americans can agree on right now. We might differ on how it happened, or who's to blame for it happening, but we all know trouble when we see it. And this isn't just everyday, "so, what else is new" kind of trouble. It's the kind that President Abraham Lincoln was speaking of; the kind that no nation, no matter how dedicated, can long endure. But being in deep trouble doesn't mean it's all over. Our collective fate hinges on what we do next.

This isn't the first time we've found ourselves at the edge of the cliff. In fact, from the American Revolution to the American Civil War, from the Great Depression to the tumultuous 60s, from the oil crisis in the 80s to the 2009 financial collapse, from political gamesmanship to social injustice, we, the people, have more experience with unrest than we do with rest. Despite our declaration that all are “created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights,” we're a nation that's repeatedly declared war on itself. We've done it so often that we're no longer even sure that "United" States or "democracy" are still viable concepts.

And all that comes at a time when American demography itself is changing. For example, the idea of race. Despite the fact that the European diaspora accounts for only 10% of all humans on the planet, and despite America’s lofty aspirations at its founding, we’d invent social whiteness out of whole cloth, then, fashion it into a mechanism for determining citizenship, then, go on to use it to rule American society for well over a century. But that time is over. Before long, the United States will reflect the world. That inevitable change is at the heart of what has brought us to the brink this time, and how we handle this transition will determine whether we're a nation that can endure. So, yes, we've seen trouble before. But also not quite like this.

And that’s only part of it. The construct of race that we invented, then used as the foundation for American society, is just one of many ways we've exploited and cannibalized diversity. We’ve always known that every human being is different; that each of us exists as an “n” of one. That’s why a subset of our forebearers found it necessary to construct typologies; the kind that could create an all-but-omnipotent ruling social class. But again, this is where we get it wrong. Those typologies were built to do the exact opposite of what we thought they did, and what we’ve been told that they did. They don't exist to point out differences. We’re already differentiated. They create commonality.

Take social whiteness. By constructing it, they were able to meld entire nationalities, cultures, histories, languages, religions, appearances and values – over 80 distinct ethnic groups across the European continent, plus an assortment of nationalities from other places – into one colossal “type”. That's where the value has always lain; finding a way to ignore and erase enough of the differences so that what remains is a group with unassailable power. But doing so also requires obliteration. The cost was the erasure of one’s former identity; forsaking one’s heritage, forgetting one’s ancestry, and changing one’s name.

So, when racial supremacists say, "OUR RACE IS OUR NATION," they're essentially rewriting the Constitution; asserting that everywhere that refers to "nation" or “the people” is actually a reference to social whiteness. We'll get into why this tactic worked for well over a century (as well as why it was always a doomed strategy) later. Most important here is understanding that this ideology was constructed, and very few things in this world are built, whether business or belief, without an expected payout. Blinded by myopia, puffed up with hubris, and given to avarice, some of us charged ahead; wantonly cannibalizing diversity, then creating elaborate narratives to justify what we’d done to our societal kin. And now, that whole thing, that entire construct, held together from the onset by deals and duct tape, is coming apart.

"Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here," were the actual words spoken by astronaut Jack Swigert. And when those supporting the Apollo 13 mission heard them, they leapt into action. The question for those on the ground was not, "Who can we blame for this?" Nor was their focus on who would get credit. They weren't fixated on campaigning; convincing people to back their ideas – even if those ideas were the wrong ones. It was all about solving the problem. Over these seventeen chapters, that's our challenge; to revisit, and learn from, our social history, America's shared story. It's a sense-making endeavor; an attempt to grasp the choices that led us to where we are, how we became the people that we are, and, how we choose a better destiny. The hope is, despite our continual history of so often rendering harm to get ahead, that we can prove that there's far more to us than that. Together, we can embrace a unifying narrative; on that includes all of us in "we, the people" and inspires each of us to form a "more perfect union".

At the heart of this work is a challenge to an assumption that virtually all of us have accepted; that there are both individual people and entire groups who, to quote the Doll Study, are good, smart and pretty, or bad, dumb and ugly. Or, put another way, that the reason they do evil is because they're evil; the reason we do evil is because we made a mistake. But even the most cursory examination of human nature reveals hearts that are capable of both; people who perpetrate the worst crimes against humanity – who commit genocide, or enslave others, who poison children's drinking water or steal old people's retirement – even they have people they love, and whom they’d lay down their lives for. They're not just cardboard villains. They have dreams. They've committed acts of kindness. Humanity lives in them just as it does in us. It was Marvin Gaye who sang, "We're all sensitive people, with so much to give." And he was right.

So, if humanity is our factory setting, and if we, and the arc of the entire moral universe "bends toward justice", how did we end up here? That's the question, along with what we do about it, that led to this book. Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, at the end of the film, The Martian, said: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." That's also how a nation endures. 

Life on the Ground – So Little Time

“So little time – try to understand that I'm,
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game – I try to stay awake and remember my name,
Oh, everybody's changing, and I don't feel the same.”

Everybody’s Changing – Keane

As much as perhaps anyone I’ve ever met, Nick Porcelli epitomized diversity and all that’s great about it. I met Nick my third year in New York at a dinner party hosted by a friend from Columbia. As my friend predicted, Nick and I had both some common life experiences and interests. It was one of those meets where instantly you’re old friends. A combination of Jewish, Italian and Cuban heritage, with the good looks of all three, Nick was a striking figure. Women (and men) constantly flirted with him, and he graciously let them know that he was happily married. “But if I wasn’t…” he’d always add, with a wink that made them blush and sent them on their way, feeling a bit better about themselves.

Nick grew up in Chicago’s foster care system and, at eighteen, was out on his own with nothing but his wits and determination to carry him. And carry him, they did. Through night classes and college, through work as a hospital orderly during the day, and through a range of administration jobs that would ultimately land him as a chief administrator at one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. Nick and his wife would adopt his sister’s two children when they were little more than babies, and together, they would shower their daughter and son with all the unconditional love and sense of security that Nick’s own growing up, lacked.

When he and I got to be friends, he was living and working in NY during the week and commuting back home to Chicago on weekends. He lived in a tiny (normal, by New York standards) studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that was warmly decorated and, every time I saw it, absolutely immaculate. Every suit hang the same direction and every shirt, tie and pair of shoes had its place.

Nick did everything with purpose. Though I was a couple inches taller, I had to work to keep up with his long strides as we wove our way through busy pedestrian traffic; everyone in a hurry. But then suddenly, Nick would stop and have a conversation with the homeless veteran on the corner. He knew the man’s name and Nick, shined shoes and handkerchief in pocket, took a moment to acknowledge this man as a human being. “I’ll bring you a plate on my way back,” Nick would often say, as we headed out to eat. And he always did.

Nick helped everyone, and he had a real soft spot for the elderly. His life in New York was like a Woody Allen film – full of wonderfully human but undeniably lovable characters; a brilliant young man confined to a wheelchair, a middle-aged woman bravely facing down a terminal illness, a former Rockette who, though her glory days were behind her, was still a beauty, and so many others, of every ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age imaginable, exceedingly wealthy and economically destitute.

On the floor of the apartment where I lived was a lovely elderly woman. Whenever she went out, even to the store, she was dressed impeccably. With her lace-trimmed dresses and waistcoat, her gloved hands and pillbox hat, she looked like she was heading out to have tea with Jackie O. Nick saw her out collecting cans one day and mentioned it to me. The next time he came to visit, he insisted that we put together a care package for her with bath salts, chocolate, fresh fruit, a bouquet of flowers, among other things, and $50 in an envelope. We arranged it all in a basket and left it secretly at her door.

As my friend, Nick believed in me unequivocally. He’d tell me, “You’re going to change the world, you know that?” and because he believed it, in that moment, I would. Nick would die suddenly and unexpectedly at just 42 years of age, in 2011, and like the jagged cut it was, the wound of his loss has been slow to heal. But I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to have known him for anything. 

You know how we sometimes get stuck on an album, listening to it over and over? For him, that was Keane’s debut album, Hopes and Fears. I remember him playing it, on infinite loop, in his apartment. The fifth song on that album was Everybody’s Changing, and once when it was playing, he volunteered that it was his favorite song. I never asked why and he never elaborated. I think, in part, because it felt like such a vulnerable admission, and partly because it made sense to me. Nick had been making moves to “stay in the game” his entire life, while at the same time, trying to stay awake and remember not just his name, but the names of everyone he’d meet.

Today, when I hear it, or even think of it, I cannot help but also think of my friend Nick. “So little time,” the singer sang; a sentiment that expresses so much of what comes to mind when I think of him – both how little time I’d have him in my life, and how cognizant he was of how little time any of us have. So, Nick lived more fully, more deeply, into every single moment. He savored food, and conversation, and experiences. He took his family on vacation while he could. He extended his hand and walked this earth like every person – no matter how wealthy or poor – was his equal, and he, theirs. Nick savored life.

As a result, Nick’s favorite song has taken on a broader meaning; not just about his life, but all our lives. Increasingly, it reminds me of the reality of change – a truth that Nick’s own life had made him so aware of – and why he lived his life the way he did. 

Everybody is changing. And if I carry within me one lesson learned from the privilege of having known Nick Porcelli and watching how he lived, it is this: For each of us, our highest and most sacred work is embracing those around us in two equally important ways – celebrating the person they’re in the process of becoming and cherishing the person they’ve always been.

We’ve Only Just Begun          

All social entities – whether book clubs or bowling leagues, congregations or corporations, cities or nations – at the beginning, are brimming with hope, possibility and promise. “So many roads to choose,” sang the Carpenters in their 70s wedding classic. “We start out walking and learn to run, and yes, we've just begun.” These communities we form and societies we create are buoyed by hope and held aloft by the dreams that called them forth. And that’s where they could remain, thriving and becoming in this Age of Promise.

But they rarely stay there for long. Something about the nature of both growth and change tends to foster counter-sustainability among us. The same unknowns that once inspired us become overwhelming. We begin to act out in ways that diminish hopes and sever ties. The roads from which we can choose are fewer and we tire of running. We become realists, pragmatists and cynics. We start to expect less from ourselves and believe the worst in others. And that heralds, for any society, the beginning of the end.

The future New York Times article at the start of the chapter, though obviously fictional, is based on real-world facts and describes this precarious place in which we Americans currently find ourselves. We could think of it as a GSS – Great Sociological Shift – one that we’re only part-way through. Like the Pilgrims in the middle Atlantic, we’re too far in to go back, but still a long ways from the other side. But it’s not just the American people who are changing. Our entire society, indeed, all of existence, is in flux.

And that’s where it gets tough. Because America, like all societies, exists by agreement; everything from our borders to our determination of who is, and who is not, one of us, is real because we agree that it is. And of the ideas on which we built American identity, none is more foundational than race. That’s also where our problem lies. This one construct, and the advantagism it allowed, is the driver behind so many of our current struggles. A key focus of this book is helping us understand how this happened and why.

Societies also, like everything else, exist in a state of becoming, of perpetual dynamism. The difference between those that thrive and ones that don’t is their ability to navigate this uncertainty. The question is not whether societies will face challenges that could be their undoing; they will, many times over. Whether confronted by rivals, besieged by disease, visited by catastrophe or simply worn down by the sum of its own choices, one thing human history proves is that no civilization exists in a particular form forever. “So little time” could just as easily be applied to nations as individuals.

We don’t have the hindsight that those who will look back on us will have. What awaits us on the other side of any threshold is unknown. But the one thing we do know is this: The people that emerges from the crucible will, by definition, be different from the one that entered. But like the butterfly is to the caterpillar, they will also be the same. In that moment of existential crisis, societies will either go extinct, or they will find that they have already developed within them the ability to author their own transformation; emerging as something different, but also better.

All of which leads us to a question: What if the inevitable demise of society, isn’t? What if the very reason they end is because they insist on never ending; or more accurately, never changing? What if the final ending isn’t already written, and that we’re penning it right now – by what we do today? And what if, by the embracing of certain traits that counteract our own worst tendencies, we can create societies that adapt, evolve, reinvent themselves, thrive and ultimately, sustain – remaining perpetually in the Age of Promise?

They could. The thing to remember about societies is that they live because the people who live in them, believe. We infuse them with love, endow them with life and nurture them. We sacrifice for their well-being and rally to their defense. We create their institutions and infrastructure and endow them with authority. And because we believe, we’re bound to, and care about, what happens to our fellow society members – both individually and as a collective. When those same people stop believing, those societies begin to die.

 “But I am very worried, about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop, standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.” – Lorraine Hansberry, to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 1963

We, the People

But before we go much further, one word of caution: In all this talk about dynamics of change, of institutions and infrastructure, and of big systems, we can easily lose sight of one indispensable fact; that, we, collectively, are our societies and our societies are an expression of us. There’s no dividing line; no place where we, as people, end, and where we, as a people, begin. This is not, nor ever has been, a systems story, but rather, a human one.

The challenge inherent in this story is rooted in that same humanness; those three instinctual impulses – avarice, myopia and hubris – that are the impetus behind most every bad decision we make, and that are at the heart of why (and how) human civilizations meet an untimely end. Consequently, today’s problems are the direct result of an unbroken chain of offenses committed from our colonial days forward; choices to strip others of their humanity, and in the process, compromising our own.

From those moments in 1963, when Governor George Wallace barred the doors of University of Alabama, and when images of children being swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham with fire hoses, the question we’ve been repeatedly asking ourselves is, “Why are we so divided?” But as we’ve already touched on, our problems didn’t start with our divisions; they began with the shortsighted ways we went about uniting – of drawing a circle around enough of us to give us ruling power while marking them for exploitation. We never thought about how doing this to them would endanger not just us, but America itself. We never saw the link between our actions and these consequences. Fast-forward sixty years, and we’re talking about our dividedness just like we did back then; like it’s new, sudden, and has nothing to do with our actions. But even then, it wasn’t. We’ve been struggling with unity since the onset of the Revolution itself, and at every major point along the way. Despite our name, uniting has never been our strong suit.

 “We the People… in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” – The Preamble to the United States Constitution

It was in the Preamble that we set forth the purpose of the Constitution; our intentions and the principles that guided it. It speaks to our aspirations; painting a picture of what, at its best, we hoped we’d be. And that vision of a more perfect union is a powerful one. But even more remarkable is how it articulated the very traits that usher a society into the Age of Promise and allow it to thrive. Though we didn’t know it, early America had hit upon a set of ideals that would allow for the realization of things that prior, weren’t even imagined.

These ideals would inform everything from our Declaration of Independence to our most inspiring addresses; speaking to who we were at our beginning and who we are at our best. Throughout this book, they are articulated as three sacred virtues: A People of Diversity, Enacting Democracy and Advancing Humanity. This “Golden Triad”, one possessed by societies that thrive; was the secret sauce that colonial America stumbled upon by equal parts happenstance, thoughtfulness and copious borrowing from the rest of the world. They will be our touchstones throughout.

To help us always keep in mind that our shared journey is, above all else, a human one, interspersed throughout are two kinds of encapsulated stories. You’ve already encountered both. The first type is titled, “The Differentiators”. This one told of one possible future, a hopeful one, in the form of a year 2050 newspaper article. The second type is titled, “Life on the Ground”, and in this case, told a bit of Nick’s story. Mostly pulled from my own personal life experience, or a degree or two removed, these latter vignettes tell of those who, despite opposition, contributed profoundly to who we are as a people and to our collective story, others who impeded them, and everything in between. Some are reminders that ordinary people really can do extraordinary things; in fact, they are the only ones who do. Others show us that no matter what we’ve done, that we can learn from our failings, whereas others show us how history will treat us when we fail to learn.

“The Differentiators” tell the stories of those who formed the tip of the spear – heroes who, often at unimaginable personal cost, and through sheer force of will, forged our collective way forward. Using the full measure of their difference to make a difference, they demanded that we not do evil toward one another and call it, good, and they refused – even when it cost them their lives – to allow us to settle for being less than we could be. “Life on the Ground” vignettes are about people navigating a world where collectively, we’ve often gotten it wrong. “The Differentiators”, over and over again, helped us learn to get it right.

Defining Our Terms

One final preliminary point: This story delves deep into our shared social selves, and the constructs on which those selves are built. Many of those constructs speak to all of us in the same way. Many don’t. So, before going much further, it might be helpful to clarify some of the latter. Below are five such terms, listed in order of their likelihood of having a different meaning than one might be used to, as well as an introduction of three new ones – the ARC (American Race Construct), racialization and advantagism.

Race                       
There is simply no way to understand America without first understanding our most powerful cultural export – the Americanized concept of race. And that’s exactly what race is – an idea that we first invented, then treated as if it was real. Think of it like a sorting system – a conceptual tool for dividing us into factions. But if it is a tool, we must ask two questions: “Who’s using it?” and “What’s it used for?” Social frameworks like race are defined (and frequently redefined) by the in-group, based on identifiers of that group’s choosing and in ways that favor that group. Society then adopts that framework as an attribution system for all manner of personal traits. That part isn’t new. We’ve been doing that for as long as there have been people. For ten thousand years, we’ve used everything from tribes, to language, religious practices to how much facial hair we wore for these purposes. But what we Americans did was link race not to who we are, but to who our great grandparents were. 

Race is, in short, a sorting system; one that can be configured on both sides of the construct – what we use as a sorter (physical features, religious heritage, etc.) and the traits we attach to that label (good, pretty and smart or bad, ugly and dumb). Because the concept itself is a cypher – lacking inherent meaning of its own – the idea of different “races” has been used as a stand-in for everything from nationality (the English race), to people group (the Aryan race), to ethnicity (the Hispanic race), to gender (the female race), regionality, to social class & caste, religious heritage, culture. Even up to, and through the conclusion of the Great War, Americans used the word in all these ways. But in the 1800s, as conflict over slavery rose, race increasingly came to mean one thing; ancestry.

Racism
Racism is a value extraction and wealth concentration system. In other words, it’s a machine; one that’s linked to, but also distinct from, the race construct itself. First, we sort people into designated groups. Then, we penalize, subjugate and exploit them using that same category to which we ourselves assigned them in the first place. The process is completely circular. Then, we use everything from propaganda to stereotyping, from segregation to factionism to shore up the conceptual boundaries we created; making them appear indisputably real.  In this sense, racism is embedded infrastructure – a technology, even – rather than the sum of bad, angry feelings we often think of it as. Those are the effects of racism; not the cause. The actions taken through racism are tactical, rather than personal. (This will become clearer in our discussion of bigotry below.)

Bigotry
Bigotry, on the other hand, is very much personal. This is where our closely held feelings and biases, based on a combination of our own very limited experience and ghost stories, reside. Racial bigotry is but one manifestation. It springs up in everything from ethnicity, religious identity, gender assignment and identity, sexuality, nationality, regionality (e.g. – assumptions about people with Southern accents), and even physicality; it’s how we endow traits like height, weight, or masculinity with social desirability. Whereas one must be in a power position to utilize racism as technology, anyone (and everyone) can be bigoted in general, and practice racial bigotry in particular. In our confusing of racism and racial bigotry, we often declare that our actions are not racist if we’re not harboring personal feelings of ill-will towards them.

But if racism is an advantaging technology, then a racist is someone who employs that technology, who benefits from it, and/or who perpetuates it – often, by simply accepting that race is real. In this sense, being racist has little to do with harboring hatred or animus toward another racially assigned group, but rather, engaging in, perpetuating, supporting and benefitting from racism – using race technology to advance our own standing and its ideology to justify our actions. It’s more about how we behave than what we feel. Now, of course, they’re linked, and one can most certainly drive the other. But a person can harbor strong bigoted feelings while marooned on a deserted island, whereas a person can be immensely racist (using race technology to our benefit by harming others) without holding a grudge or being fueled by antipathy.

Part of why this is so critical is because so many of us are quick to declare that we are not racist, and by this, we mean that we have black friends, have dated an Asian, and so forth, or that we don’t hold people of different identities in poor regard. And usually, we don’t. But what we miss is all the ways that race technology has made the very lives that we lead, possible, and the many benefits we derive from its existence. By benefiting from race and supporting policies based on it – regardless of how highly we personally regard minorities – we’re both complicit and allow the system to persist.  

American Race Construct (ARC)
The American Race Construct (ARC) is our own homegrown social sorting system; one that rose to prominence in post-Reconstruction America. This is how we rebranded race to mean one thing rather than being a stand-in for everything from social status, to nationality, regionality, ethnicity, religion, language, culture, etc. For us, it increasingly came to mean ancestry. In this sense, it was the ultimate grandfather clause. It was the ARC that enabled us to construct a caste system – an enduring societal structure where one’s position is determined by the family we’re born into – in the shadow of democracy itself; to sprout between the cracks of equality. Over time, this definition of race-as-parentage, and the social structure it evoked, would emerge as the dominant sorting and grouping construct of the western, if not entire, world.  

Whiteness
Prior to the Civil War, whiteness had no real meaning and few people cared. That’s because the dividing line was between slave and free. Slaves were property, not people. But with the Thirteenth Amendment, that line was erased. Everybody was free. And all of a sudden, it was immensely important to know who was white. That immediately led to formulas that ingeniously tied whiteness right back to slavery; one was considered white only if all your great grandparents would also have been defined as white – which, essentially, meant that to qualify for whiteness, none of one’s ancestors 100 years ago would have been slaves. If any one of your eight great-grand parents was non-European, then you were an octoroon – a person with 7/8ths “white” blood, and therefore, not white.

As the top tier social status group within the ARC, whiteness is fungible; a trait that has allowed it to be extended to previously excluded groups as necessary and beneficial. As such, it’s no coincidence that once rejected ethnic groups were awarded the whiteness franchise starting in the late 1800s; just as freed slaves became eligible to vote. For new entrants, becoming a franchisee meant both embracing the group’s ideology and validating members’ claim to dominance. In exchange for certain benefits, they pledged allegiance to the cause; vowing to defend it from all enemies – both foreign and domestic. In this sense, any person, irrespective of color or ethnicity, can gain at least honorary entry. Still, it would take decades, essentially until WWI, for the idea of whiteness to completely decouple from social standing (i.e. – nobility) and attach to lineage; a shift that’s as difficult for our ARC-conditioned minds to grasp as the idea that blue used to be considered feminine and pink, masculine.

Identity
Identity can be thought of as our psycho-social concept of self – the person we know ourselves to be. It’s the distinguishing qualities and distinct personality that we, as individuals, possess. This evolving self-concept can, and often is, shaped both by external influences brought to bear upon us – particularly in our formative years – (how others see us), and by our own internal processes of self-discovery (how we come to see ourselves). This dynamic of negotiating; with ourselves (and the self we’d most like to express), with the world (and the expressions it will allow us to have), and with every social construct and social convention that’s thrust upon us – is one that, for most of us, will continue throughout our lives. Our identity can be thought of as our psychological orientation of self in regard to the world around us. The process is an immensely personal one and is at the core of self-determination. In a better world, in every respect, and at every juncture, we would get to choose. But in this one, our social context often has other plans.

Racialization
Racialization is the modification or infusing of something (ideology, theology, self-perceptions, institutions, systems, protocols, etc.) with racial ideology. Racialization can be applied to all kinds of mechanisms that might otherwise have nothing to do with a society’s normal usage of “race”, but that get drafted and utilized to perpetuate advantagism. In the same way that Texans can fry anything, we Americans have learned to racialize anything – from drinking at a water fountain, to clothing, music and pop culture, to business models, legislature; even flags and other symbols. 

People can also be racialized – something that happens when we adopt and internalize our society’s designated race construct as our social sorting lens; both embracing our own assigned identity and participating in the assigning and attribution of others. The more racialized we become, the more we depend on the ARC to determine friend from foe, or to know who’s smart and attractive, valiant and good, strong and worthy. We also become less capable of navigating society without that lens, and less aware that the lens even exists at all. 

Advantagism
Advantagism is the true driver behind our taking from and exploiting others. Despite what we’ve been told since primary school, hatred and fear isn’t the root problem. If we’re honest, the reasons we harm people we don’t know are far more pragmatic, from covetousness (we want what they have) to opportunism (we believe we can get away with it). When it’s done to us, we, of course, think it’s personal, but in reality, it almost never is; the justifications and rationalizations come after the fact, not before. Understanding this is crucial because when we identify the wrong root cause, we diagnose the wrong problem and almost certainly implement the wrong solution.

Even people we’d normally think of as driven by racial bigotry may, in fact, not be. This can be true even if we used a racial or other offensive slur. We might indeed be bigoted. But it’s just as, if not more likely, that we’re doing what we all learned to do as kids – honing in on that one thing that we know is going to hurt them most. If you had siblings, you know how this works – how to take whatever they were most insecure about and weaponize it. This didn’t mean we hated them or even that we really believed it. We didn’t even need to know what the word meant. What we knew was that it would make them cry.

Those who long for the good old days of America’s segregated past are driven more by a desire to return to a time that was more favorable to them than necessarily less favorable for others. And in this sense, they are, more accurately, “Advantagists” – people willing to take advantage to get ahead. This path, doing harm, then hardening our hearts in order to cope, is one that virtually all of us, at one time or another, choose. And while this makes for an American story that’s less “black and white”, it’s also more honest; for even the worst things we’ve ever done were, often, ones we most likely believed, at the time, we had to do.

We will encounter these terms and ideas at multiple points throughout.   

The Differentiators – America’s Founding Fathers

Even the men we refer to as our Founding Fathers recognized the power of their diversity and learned to use it to their benefit. Though with respect to nationality, predominantly British, with a variety of ethnicities and mixes comprising their heritage, their backgrounds, experiences, upbringings, education, and even family history in the colonies made them each extraordinarily unique. Indeed, it was this breadth of diversity – of thought, values, learning, perspective and skills – that made the unlikely success of the American Revolution possible. For example, there’s John Adams, who was a direct descendant of Puritans who came to the American wilderness in the 1630s. Having a profound influence on American culture, laws and traditions of their region, Puritans envisioned themselves as a new Israel, with the shores of America as their promised land away from England – their modern day Egypt. They saw their calling to establish a pinnacle of righteousness for God – a city on a hill.

It was these sensibilities, along with a deep commitment to liberty and justice (not to mention a dogged determination) that he brought to the assembly of founders. However, one of his most surprising, yet important contributions was not from him directly, but rather the brilliant insights of his wife, Abigail, who was his most trusted advisor, and who was, on more than one occasion, his source of guidance. In fact, her influence on the group was so great that some consider her an actual Founding Father in her own right. For instance, in March 1776, Abigail wrote both her husband, John, and the entire Continental Congress, stating: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Then, there’s Alexander Hamilton. Born out of wedlock in the West Indies to a Scottish father and an English/French mother, Alexander was orphaned as a child by his mother’s death and received no support of any kind from his father. He was cared for by an older cousin, and later, by a local merchant family. A group of wealthy men from around town, recognizing his intellect, sponsored his attendance at King’s College – now known as Columbia University. While John Adams could trace his lineage in America back a hundred years, Alexander came to America as a college student. When King’s College closed down during the city’s British occupation, Hamilton joined a militia and built a provincial artillery where he was commissioned captain. Serving as senior aide to military commander-in-chief George Washington, he was instrumental in intelligence – effectively conveying Washington’s plans to his generals and back. It was his unique background, life experience and honed capabilities that allowed Alexander Hamilton – one of the youngest Founding Fathers – to also be among its most influential.

Alternately, there’s Benjamin Franklin, who was 70 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Born in 1706, Franklin had already lived a full and colorful life by the time the revolution occurred. This didn’t stop him from getting involved, and many believe that if not for his prudent guidance, the independence effort would have been abandoned, if not stillborn. In addition to his intelligence, as one of the oldest and most well-traveled Founders, he brought the kind of vital wisdom that only comes with age. Though never formally trained in any particular field, he was a polymath with genius-level proficiencies in everything from science to political theory to human behavior. He was a prolific author and inventor – including, of course, his work on electricity. He spoke five languages. Perhaps more than anyone else, Benjamin Franklin, by his actions, words and manner, gave definition to an emerging American ethos – one that was a combination of practical values like hard work, community spirit, self-governance, tolerance, and egalitarianism with the values of the Enlightenment. Journalist, Walter Isaacson, described Franklin as the most accomplished American of his era, and “the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.”

The age range of the Founding Fathers at the signing of the Declaration of Independence included signers ranging from 15 years old to 81. Seventy-year-old Franklin was second oldest. Nineteen-year-old Alexander Hamilton was the second youngest. There was also significant religious diversity among the Founding Fathers, including Anglican/Episcopalian, Roman Catholics, a various range of Protestant denominations including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed and Methodists, as well as anti-clerical Christians such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Historian Gregg L. Frazer further argues that many of the most influential Founders – Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Wilson, Morris, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington – fit neither the Christian nor Deist mold, but rather, something that was both a hybrid of the two and at the same time, something different from them both – providing a prominent example of how diversity advances humankind.

A People of Diversity…

“It’s you I like – it’s not the things you wear, it’s not the way you do your hair. But it's you I like – the way you are right now, the way down deep inside you. Not the things that hide you, not your toys – they’re just beside you. But it's you I like – every part of you. Your skin, your eyes, your feelings, whether old or new. I hope that you'll remember, even when you're feeling blue, that it's you I like – it’s you yourself. It's you. It's you I like.” Fred Rogers, It’s You I Like                                           

"Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed our freedom. That our resolve was just as great as the brave men who stood among us. And with victory, our tears fell just as hard." -- WWII Veteran, 1LT. Anne Sosh Brehm, Army nurse

America has rarely seen the likes of Pauli Murray. As an African American woman, she’s the granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner. As a woman, she was a suffragist, as an activist, she was arrested for not giving up her seat 15 years before Rosa Parks, and as an attorney, she framed the arguments that both advanced equal rights for women and formed the foundation for Brown v. Board (Thurgood Marshall called her work the “bible of the Civil Rights movement.”). She was non-heterosexual, gender nonconforming, an author, poet and Mademoiselle magazine woman of the year. She was Yale Law School’s first African American Doctor of Juridical Science and the first woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Despite being a woman, an ethnic minority and a member of the LGBT+ community, few people have contributed more to the American story. But what if her impact was not in spite of her diversity, but because of it? 

Diversity is, in scientific terms, the amount of variance in a given population – whether siblings, a family, community or society. It’s perhaps because, on a molecular level, no two snowflakes are exactly alike that snowfalls are so beautiful. And those of us fortunate enough to grow up in environments that embrace our uniqueness are reminded, as the Psalmist said, that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. Or as Mr. Rogers often put it, "There is no one exactly like you, never has been, never will be." One great benefit of owning our diversity is what it does for us. Studies tell us that the more we’re able to live into our unique, authentic selves, the less psychic dissonance and depression we’ll contend with and the greater psychological well-being we’ll experience. 

Embracing our own diversity also impacts those around us; we grow both in empathy and social intelligence. In a 2016 Journal of Cognitive Enhancement article, Dr. Anne Böckler and colleagues revealed how learning to understand ourselves increases our ability to understand others. The spiritual principles known as the Great Commandment (“love your neighbor as yourself”) and the Golden Rule (“do to others what you would have them do to you”) also rely on this kind of self-awareness. Other studies show positive relationships between self-acceptance and traits such as resilience, empowerment and agency.

Then, there are the collective benefits. Each of us, by being unique, contributes to a pool of diversity that increases odds and enhances thriving for all of us. Yet, our society, and indeed, most every society, has a complicated relationship with diversity. The amount of variance within a population is a reflection of how much individual uniqueness we are allowed to express. In this sense, societal diversity can be thought of as how we differentiate, how we diverge from the norm, and how we adapt, adjust, and come into our own. In statistics, populations are often analyzed by the distribution of individual elements and how far they are from the center. This is called the degree of “variability” in the data set – i.e., how much each score deviates. In a normally distributed bell curve, approximately 68% of scores fall within one “standard deviation” higher, and one lower than the mean (or average) score. Similarly, 95% of scores are within two standard deviations of the mean in either direction, and so forth. 

So, what does this all mean? Take the standard IQ test. The average score is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. This means that 68% of IQ test-takers fall in the “average” band – with scores between 85 and 115. Of scores beyond the scope of the normal band, an additional 27% (or 13.5% in either direction) constitute a second standard deviation – test-takers with scores that fall between 70 – 85, on one end, and between 115 – 130 on the other. This also means that fully 95% of the population has test scores that fall between 70 and 130. Of the remaining 5% of outlier scores, 4.7% fall between 55 – 70 or 130 – 145, and only 3/10 of 1% of test-takers score lower than 55 or higher than 145.  

But this is, in many ways, oversimplified. First, no one truly reflects the mean in every one of our near-infinite qualities, nor would we want to. We all differ in ways that others around us perceive both positively (e.g. – traditional intelligence, athleticism or attractiveness) and negatively (e.g. – introversion, gender non-conforming behavior/interests, or disabilities). Each of us is an outlier in one way or another. Second, there is inherent bias and unreliability, not to mention social centrism, built into every instrument or test we devise or measure we make. Third, we are, each of us, always in the process of becoming – somewhere between where we were in the past and where we will be in the future. So, while all measurements are a snapshot of a particular moment in time, our lives are more akin to a film reel.

And finally, each of us is infinitely complex. When it comes to intelligence alone, and our understanding of genius, there are multiple ways of defining it; let alone assessing it. Then, there are any manner of other outstanding strengths, talents, and capabilities that are innate, that we develop over time, or both. All of this results in original snowflakes – unique individuals – bursting at the seams with ingenuity, creativity and a range of extraordinary capabilities. And this gets to the core issue:

Our fundamental problem with diversity is less about us being different from “those people” and more about how we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re the same as “these people”.

Societies oriented against diversity are, by nature, stringently stratified and rigidly sorted, with little in the way of ambiguity. Their standard deviations are small and they rigorously penalize those deemed different and cultivate hostility toward diversity in their kids. This is the primary reason that so many newly minted college students, coming from hometowns where conformity is rigorously enforced and homogeneity, highly valued, find themselves acting out in embarrassing ways; including the singing of racist chants (2016) and dressing up in blackface (2019) – both of which happened at the University of Oklahoma, were captured on video and subsequently shared worldwide via YouTube. It’s the communities that shaped them, not these 18-19-year-olds, who are truly culpable. 

Societies, on the other hand, that readily embrace diversity are wild with life and creativity, beauty and vitality. They are constantly inventing, advancing, and improving. They recognize that everyone’s freedom to self-differentiate – to become one’s own unique expression of identity – might, collectively, be our greatest hope. Societal diversity makes us stronger in multiple ways: 

Diversity mitigates survival risk. At its most fundamental level, it produces minute differences across a population, which then increases the odds that some portion will, for instance, survive an epidemic. The same reasons the principle of diversification remains sound advice in the financial world (the more you spread the risk, the less likely your investments will result in financial ruin) are equally applicable to populations and societies. It also increases our chances of finding cures when we need them. On the fictional television show The Last Ship, an airborne virus spread across the world, nearly exterminating the human race. A single navy crew protects a scientist as she works toward a vaccine. Their lucky break comes when they answer the call of a sole survivor of a boat where all others have died of the virus.

They discover that the survivor has an immune deficiency that made her ill for most of her life, and that this same immune deficiency made her immune to the effects of the virus. Her blood was the key to finding not only a vaccine, but a cure. A real-life version of this story played out in AIDS research. Researchers discovered that a very small segment of the human population is naturally immune to the virus. Stephen Crohn, a New York artist and gay man, lost his partner to AIDS in 1978; long before we had any idea how HIV was contracted or even what it was. Over the course of decades, Stephen witnessed the deaths of almost everyone he knew. But Stephen never contracted HIV himself.

After volunteering for testing to determine what was unique about his biology, doctors discovered that Stephen had what some would call a deficiency – one of the two receptors HIV normally uses to enter the cells was truncated – made him immune. It was the discovery of his natural immunity that drove much of our understanding of the disease and laid significant groundwork toward an actual cure. It is often through variations like these that we discover keys to our collective survival. These subtle differences among humankind do far more than allow a small segment of the species to survive; they often hold the key to survival for the rest of us. An added benefit – the effort that’s gone into thirty years of HIV research laid the groundwork that made COVID-19 vaccines possible.  

Diversity produces powerful alternatives and breakthrough innovation. Apple’s most iconic slogan was, almost certainly, “Think Different.” This idea is at the heart of innovation. But how we think is a direct result of who we are, meaning, the only way to truly think different is to be different – to have had different shaping experiences, backgrounds and genetic mixes, different highlights and disappointments, different cultures and religions, different styles of family and different personalities. Variations even present themselves among identical twins, who can differ in a multitude of ways, including handedness, personality and sexual orientation.

Though these differences are extremely slight in comparison to the vast degree of commonality we share across the human race, those slight shifts are at the heart of how people can be exposed to the same source data, and draw very different conclusions. It allows for solutions that are beyond even the smartest individual. Hershey’s series of ads for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (“You got chocolate in my peanut butter…”) were the company’s most famous commercials, and among the most memorable of an era. The idea was simple – two great tastes accidentally end up together; thereby creating something better than either on their own. Whether the printing press, the assembly line or the internet, revolutionary leaps forward almost never happen in a vacuum. They result from the often bracing interactions between two or more diverse thinkers playing off one another. Revolutions – technological or otherwise – take more than a single person thinking outside the box – it requires multiple out-of-the-box thinkers all operating in the same arena. America provided this arena, and out of it came far more than sparks, but everything from electricity, to the automobile, to democracy.  

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, diverse societies are – emotionally and spiritually – better places to live. We contend with less atmospheric stress, which impacts all aspects of our health and well-being. There’s more grace and less angst in the air, and we encounter less resistance to our individual pursuit of happiness. We’re able to unleash our full creativity on the world and freely think outside our cultural boxes. We’re more inventive and ingenious, productive and passionate, engaged and empowered. We recognize that our uniqueness makes us priceless; not worthless. This is a society that we’re willing to care for, to fight for, and even lay down our lives for.   

The Dillingham Flaw

Sociologist Vincent N. Parrillo, in his book titled Diversity In America, describes a phenomenon he dubbed the “Dillingham Flaw”; referencing a 1907 bipartisan presidential commission to study what was then described as the nation’s “immigration problem”. Named after its chairman, Republican Senator William P. Dillingham, the commission was heavily influenced by the work of eugenicists such as Madison Grant; who not only asserted a racial distinction between “old” and “new” immigrant populations, but also that the old immigrant races (note that even in the early 1900s, “race” was being applied to groups who traced their lineages to the exact same place, but who came here, often as little as twenty years, earlier) were in danger of being overtaken by “inferior” races – particularly, those from Southern and Eastern Europe.

A kind of confirmation bias where our group – often unconsciously – over-simplifies, skews, whites out or otherwise misinterprets sociological or historical data about another group to that group’s detriment and to our own, group’s (as identified by us) benefit, the Dillingham Flaw has shaped our understanding of America’s history in a number of ways. Much of our modern-day understanding of America has been interpreted through this lens, including: The faulty assertion that we were founded with the intention of being a Christian nation, and our retroactive description of all Europeans as racially “white”, despite the fact that they weren’t categorized that way at the time. 

A current example of the Dillingham Flaw is our tendency to refer to Americans of European ancestry by country of origin (German, French, British, etc.), while referring to other groups (African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans) by continent. These unconscious biases have a tangible effect. They inflate one group’s significance and status while diminishing and obscuring others; resulting in the very real, ongoing impairment of the same societal kin who could be both bolstering our collective strength and improving our shared quality of life. When applied retroactively to the world at the time of the American Revolution, the Dillingham Flaw over-simplifies our demographic history and asserts an inflated sense of sociological homogeneity. In reality, our collective story is far more colorful, and better for it. 

Population diversity in colonial America

Even by today’s standards, colonial America was diverse – ethnically, religiously, racially (as it was defined at the time) and regionally. The first federal census, conducted in 1790, found that a fifth of the entire population were people who today would be categorized as African American. Included among those we'd now classify today as white, was a vast range of immigrant races from the three major European powers of England, France and Spain, as well people of Scottish, Dutch, German, Swedish, Irish and eastern European descent, all before accounting for indigenous peoples that ranged from modern-day Canada to Mexico and people from other countries around the world. 

Two early settlements, in particular, attracted a variety of people almost from their inception; Philadelphia and New York. Still a small village in 1700, Philadelphia’s population was a majority English and Welsh, but with significant (and growing) populations of Danes, Dutch, Finns, French, Germans, Irish, Scots, and Swedes. Diversity even existed within these groups; German Lutherans, Mennonites and Quakers each sought to build separate communities based on their values and priorities. North America’s greatest concentration of diversity, however, was then, as it is now, in what, today, is modern-day New York. Eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island as early as 1646. Vast racial diversity also existed among the African nationals, who represented different nations and races from across the vast continent – particularly Angola, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Senegambia. Among them, by 1750, over a hundred different languages were spoken. 

This astonishing diversity was, in large part, due to how colonial America was originally settled. Starting in the seventeenth century, various European countries competed to be among the first to establish overseas colonies and trade stations. The Dutch focused on West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and New Netherland (modern day New York and New England), the French on the greater Caribbean including Guadeloupe, and the massive swath of land that extended from modern day Canada to the Mexican border, and the English in the Bahamas, Nova Scotia and of course, along the mainland coast of America. However, aside from informal European affiliations, these early efforts were highly decentralized, with settlements established not under the purview of a particular government, but rather, by various commercial companies and religious organizations, as well as individual entrepreneurs.

By the mid-1600s, governments, recognizing the economic potential in the colonies, began adopting increasingly systematic approaches. England moved aggressively to annex lands including Jamaica, New Netherland (the New York to southern Cape Cod coastal region), and New Sweden (Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey); granting territories to “proprietors” – individuals intent on creating communities that reflected their group's vision of an ideal/perfect/utopian society. Proprietors, however, found it all but impossible to exert the kind of control they’d originally envisioned. For one thing, attracting settlers to such risky propositions required that they make concessions including guaranteeing religious freedom, offering generous land grants, and implementing self-governance, which, in turn, laid the groundwork for what was to become the American Revolution.

African Nationalities

Of America’s estimated 20 million slaves, approximately 20% were of members of Bantu Peoples – an extremely diverse range of races and ethnic groups who spoke between 440 and 680 distinct languages. In addition to collapsing the complexities of an entire continent, that today, comprises 54 countries (compared with 44 European countries), into a single label – “African”, we’ve also discounted, obscured and overlooked the vast range of contributions these peoples brought with them, and made to a fledgling America. Similarly, few of us are aware that people like celebrated French author, Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers – one of the most widely read French authors of all time) and Alexander Pushkin (considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, founder of modern Russian literature) were both of partial African heritage. Alexandre’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the first “person of color”, as we would now describe him, in the French military to become brigadier general, the first to become divisional general, and the first to become general-in-chief of a French army.

In a 2013 science journal, Dr. Sydella Blatch, professor of biology at Stevenson University, described how, though we trace the origins of many scientific discoveries to ancient Greece, Rome, etc., that many of these advances were made sometimes thousands of years earlier, and that beyond the contributions attributed to Egypt, most modern-day Americans have no awareness of the many things we’ve learned from these sophisticated, ancient, sub-Saharan African civilizations, including:

Math
Eight thousand years ago, people in present-day Zaire developed their own numeration system, as did Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. The Yoruba system was based on units of 20 (instead of 10); a numeral system that made addition, subtraction and multiplication all possible, with concepts that have been integrated into the core of mathematics, including the word, “score” – as in “four score and seven years ago…” Similarly, Egyptians devised complex algebraic equations capable of predicting the size of floods of the Nile, defined a circle as having 360 degrees and estimated pi at 3.16.

Astronomy
The Dogon (Mali) people’s astronomical expertise included an awareness of Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, the spiral structure of the Milky Way and the orbit of the Sirius star system: Hundreds of years prior, they’d already plotted its future orbit accurately through the year 1990. (Any escaping slave with this level of knowledge clearly would have had no trouble navigating their way north by constellations.)

Metallurgy and Tools
Everything from steam engines to metal chisels and saws, copper and iron tools/weapons, nails, glue, as well as carbon steel and bronze weapons, were all in use across the entirety of ancient Africa. 2,000 years ago, Tanzanian, Rwandan and Ugandan furnaces were already capable of reaching temperatures of 3,272 Fahrenheit/1,800 Celsius – 20 – 25 percent warmer than those of the Romans at that time.

Architecture and Engineering
In addition to the engineering feats represented by the obelisks and more than 80 Egyptian pyramids, by the 12th century, there were hundreds of great cities dotting the continent, including the West African empire of Mali and cities such as Timbuktu, with its grand palaces, mosques, universities and a population that swelled from 10,000 in the 13th century to about 50,000 in the 16th century.

Medicine
Unbelievable to Americans, African medical practices, prior to the European invasion, were more, rather than less advanced – particularly with respect to botanical medicine. Some of those practices include the use of plants with salicylic acid for pain (as in aspirin), kaolin for diarrhea (as in Kaopectate), and extracts that were confirmed in the 20th century to kill gram-positive bacteria. Medical procedures performed in ancient Africa before they were performed in Europe include vaccination, autopsy, limb traction and broken bone setting, bullet removal, brain surgery, skin grafting, filling of dental cavities, installation of false teeth, what is now known as Caesarean section, anesthesia and tissue cauterization – all skills that were employed on plantations – both with slaves and slave-owners alike.

Navigation
Most of us learn that Europeans were the first to sail to the Americas. However, there is significant evidence – including ancient artwork and cultural artifacts – suggesting that ancient Africans sailed to South America and Asia hundreds of years before Europeans made similar voyages. Many ancient societies in Africa built a variety of boats, including grander structures with many cabins and even cooking facilities. The Mali and Songhai, for example, built a variety of boats, some spanning 100 feet in length, 13 feet in width, and capable of carrying up to 80 tons, including elephants, which as early as the 13th century, were brought back – by boat – from China. The above is only a partial exploration of the knowledge, skills and advances African races brought with them, and that should be counted among their indispensable contributions to the America we now live in today.

Life on the Ground – Angel Island

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, taking the ferry out to Angel Island for a day of bike riding and picnicking was a common pastime. The views from out there in the middle of a sailboat-laden bay, off the coast of what might be the world’s most beautiful city, with Marin, the East Bay, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate and the mouth of the Pacific in the background is utterly breathtaking. One can see as far north as Sonoma and Napa, and at the top, as far south as San Jose. No one I knew, however, realized what an unpleasant place Angel Island, at one time, had been. Though many are familiar with Ellis Island as a symbol of America's immigration history, few realize that Angel Island, a comparable immigration processing center for the West Coast, was in many ways its inverse; the site where immigration policy was enforced – particularly against Asian immigrants. In that sense, San Francisco’s Angel Island represents an important counterpoint to New York’s Ellis Island, and specifically, the saga of American immigration history.

Whereas on the east coast, we said to European immigrants, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” on the west coast, our message to Asian immigrants was decidedly different. Hopeful Chinese, detained at Angel Island between 1910 and 1940, were forced to undergo dehumanizing medical examinations not dissimilar to those that would be imposed in Germany against Jews, gays and gypsies a few years later, as well as endure interrogations involving obscure questions such as, "Who lived in the third house of the second row of your village?" Answers deemed inadequate or inappropriate resulted in either continued detainment or eventual deportation back to China.

In 1970, a park ranger would be the first to discover sets of Chinese characters carved into the wooden walls of the barracks. Now recognized as a historic landmark, the Angel Island detention center bears witness to the pain and heartbreak of excluded Chinese immigrants who carved more than one hundred poems into those walls.

How Asians Built America

One key example of Eurocentric distortion can be seen in how, even today, Westerners categorize the world’s population, and particularly the world’s Asian population. In the 1700s, Asian ethnic groups represented over 60% of humans on Earth, with China and India alone constituting 36%. Those percentages remain roughly the same today. But watch any sci-fi movie and the humanoid aliens will look like they arrived on the Mayflower. The Han Chinese, for instance, are the world's largest single ethnic group and, in 2011, constituted over 19% of the global population. Unbelievably, a segment of the Chinese population, which is a segment of the world’s Asian population, is essentially twice as large as the size of people of European ancestry (10%) on the planet. Despite our downplaying of Asia’s stamp of influence on American society, the evidence – from the laborers who literally built America, to the inventions that propelled it forward, to influences embedded in the American aesthetic – proves otherwise.

Asian Culture
Dennis Carr, Exhibit Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in a 2015 Hyperallergic article titled The Overlooked Asian Influence on Art of the Colonial Americas, described the museum’s new exhibit titled, Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. On display were over 90 objects collected from North, Central and South America, demonstrating how aesthetics and art traditions of China, Japan, and other Asian countries were already potent influences in the colonial-era Americas. 

Examples include porcelain imported to Peru in the 16th century, and an Indian embroidered bed cover that arrived in Boston in the 18th century, and a 12-foot Japanese screen entitled The Southern Barbarians Come to Trade, which shows Portuguese traders disembarking in Japan, including, according to Carr, “Their tight leggings leading up to billowing pants.” Turns out that direct trade between the Americas and Asia – something previously thought to have begun in the 19th century, actually dates back much further – to the founding of earliest New World colonies in the 1500s. “The United States had its own moment of direct trade with Asia just after the American Revolution,” Carr explains, “But in places like Mexico or Brazil, the connection goes back centuries earlier.”

These Asian cultural influences live in everything that is American. For instance, American architecture authority, Clay Lancaster, in an academic journal article titled, Japanese Buildings In the United States Before 1900, states, “The Japanese elements incorporate in contemporary American dwellings are now so numerous and readily recognized that it is no longer necessary to argue the fact of Far Eastern inspiration. The small home, essentially of wood, in close communion with its setting, having a flexible plan and sliding screen walls, with built-in furniture, restraint of decoration, and quiet color schemes largely achieved by the use of unpainted woods and other natural materials is prevalent throughout America.”

Asian Advances

Long before there would be sizeable Asian populations in the colonies, Asia would, through its many inventions and developments, be a major force in shaping America’s course from colony to world power. Ancient China, for instance, already the originator of the Four Great Inventions – paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing – would be the source of inventions so essential to the United States, that it’s hard to even imagine a “United States” without them. Among those inventions are water wells (as early as 1000 BC), paper currency (900 – 600 BC), and the mechanical belt drive – essential to manufacturing (10 BC). 

Bombs, cannons, handguns and other gunpowder-related advances – all of which were deployed in the War for Independence – can be traced as far back as 1100 AD, color printing and gas lighting had been invented by the 1300s, smallpox inoculation in the late 10th century (some 800 years before Europeans), the kite and the match – both around 500 AD, the oil well in 347 AD, the pinhole camera (470 – 390 BC), the wheelbarrow in 100 BC, and the humble toilet paper in 598 AD. In addition, 15th century China was the world's greatest naval power. Under the leadership of Zheng He (pronounced ‘Jung huh’), a eunuch (there’s that diversity again), the massive ships sailed throughout the Indian Ocean, to the east coast of Africa, and scholars agree that they easily could have continued around the Cape of Good Hope to both Europe and what was known at that time as the New World. 

Ancient India had a similar global shaping influence, including the invention of dentistry (7,000 BC), water flush toilets and the scale (2,500 BC), the Pythagorean Theorem (Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians all discovered Pythagoras’ namesake theorem independently in 700 BC – 200 years before him), cataract surgery (200 AD) and the spinning wheel (500 AD). The above is neither an exhaustive list, nor does it take into account the many contributions from other Asian nations, including Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, the Koreas, Malaysia, etc.

Asian Immigrants

Though not present in numbers anywhere comparable to European immigrants, there’s considerable evidence of Asian nationalities living in what would become the United States as early as 1587, when “Luzonians” (modern-day Philippians) landed in Morro Bay (central California) on board a Spanish ship, as well as 1598, after they shipwrecked just off the coast of what is now known as Point Reyes, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Similarly, peoples described as "East Indians," "East India Indians," or "Asiatic Indians" – primarily as slaves/indentured servants, but also as free persons – are documented as having been part of the Jamestown settlement, and recent research has revealed that, from 1719 to 1725 more than 1,000 Malagasy (Madagascan) slaves were delivered to the Commonwealth of Virginia fifty years before the American Revolution; at that time, a sizeable number. For instance, mid-1600s, Virginia had an estimated population of 30,000, with only 300 or so Africans and 4,000 indentured Europeans. 

1778 would see an influx of Chinese sailors to Hawaii – many of whom would stay, settle down and marry Hawaiian women. Seven years later and two years after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, Chinese sailors aboard the American ship, Pallas, would help sail wares from China to Baltimore. One Baltimore newspaper, seeing this as a direct outgrowth of the vision that fueled the revolution itself, reported, “It is no unpleasing Sight to see the crew of this ship, Chinese, Malays, Japanese and Moors… employed together as brethren; it is thus Commerce binds and unites all the Nations of the Globe with a golden Chain.” Filipino fishermen from Louisiana would serve under General Andrew Jackson’s American forces in the War of 1812 and as artillery gunners in the Battle of New Orleans. 

But it was in the 1920s that immigration from Asian nations would hit its stride in the decade prior to the Great Depression. Chinese (mostly merchants, sailors, and students), started arriving in America via Sino-U.S. maritime trade decades earlier, and by the 1850s, young, single Asian men – recruited as miners, railroad builders, farmers, factory workers, and fishermen – would essentially shoulder responsibility for building the country. By 1870, Chinese immigrants alone would comprise 20% of California's labor force, while constituting significantly less than 1/100th of a percent of the nation’s population. 

Those modest numbers, however, would be significant enough to, in the midst of the 1870s depression, make them a target. Extreme, anti-Chinese sentiment – fomented and politicized by people like Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingman’s Party and by California Governor, John Bigler – would lead to the scapegoating and persecution of Chinese workers for economic conditions they neither created, nor had the means of creating. This wave of racial bigotry, summed up in the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go,” would result in a rash of government-condoned riots against Asian immigrants, and ultimately would be enshrined into United States law in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act; the only United States law explicitly structured to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of racial identity, and that would go on to restrict Chinese immigration for the next sixty years. As a result, Chinese immigration to the United States would decline from 39,500 in 1882, to only 10 (ten!) by 1887 – five years later. 

As expected, however, the shortsighted banning of Chinese workers only hurt production and industry, which in turn led to the heavy recruitment of young Japanese and other Asian laborers. Unfortunately, we learned little from our previous behavior, and instead, turned our nativist ire against these new immigrants; a response that was echoed across the country. Even places on the east coast found themselves roiling in conflict between European new arrivals and people from their homeland who lay claim to America simply by virtue of their parents getting here a few years earlier. 

Japanese immigration would be curtailed by mutual agreement between Japan and the United States. Next would be South Asian Indian immigrants, including thousands of Sikhs from the Punjabi region, recruited to work on the railroad. Despite being a monotheistic religion, these same Sikhists (from “disciple”, “seeker”, or “learner”) – people that we recruited – would embarrassingly be misnamed the "Hindu invasion". The "tide of the Turbans" would be outlawed in 1917, with Congress declaring that India should also be included in what was referred to at the time as the “Pacific-Barred Zone” – a list of excluded Asian countries. This push and pull would continue with other Asian groups, including Filipino nationals – wash, rinse, repeat – including, but not limited to, the mass internment of Americans of Japanese descent.

We like to think of America as a national equivalent of Athena, who sprang from Zeus’ head, full grown. But we didn’t come to be in a vacuum. We were contextualized in the world that existed at that time, and in the process, absorbed all the good things that the global human family had to offer – including significantly, perhaps even indispensably, from our Asian roots. Despite facing rejection, horrific mistreatment and persecution here in this land, these amazing and diverse peoples – representing a vast range of racial and ethnic groups – would both be the source of, and bring with them, advances, knowledge, skills, discoveries, creations, heart and soul – all of which would not only contribute to the building of America, but transform it.

Life on the Ground – Raymond and Luther

I was ten years old when I started working outside the grocery store, loading bags into people’s cars and pushing the grocery carts back. It was one of those Alabama winter days where a northern front had blown in, bringing with it freezing rain, making the handling of the carts’ metal push bars, painful. I was standing there with my hands tucked in my armpits trying to get them warm again when Raymond, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam vet and with whom I’d shared my lunch a time or two, walked over. He had with him a clean pair of athletic socks, two plastic bags, and two rubber bands. He gestured for me to show him my hands and he fitted each with a sock, covered in plastic and secured with a rubber band. He said it would do a better job of keeping my hands warm than the gloves I’d purchased from the Five and Dime. And he was right.

I thought of Raymond immediately, when watching the disaster film, Day After Tomorrow. The group is trapped in the New York Public Library with outside temperatures at 150 degrees below zero. But it is homeless Luther – someone who has a PhD in surviving adversity – who makes two suggestions that might have saved their lives. First, it was he who knew the only real place to find actual food in a massive library (“What about the garbage cans? There's always something to eat in the garbage!”), and second, as someone who has spent more than one NY winter on the streets, he knew all the tricks; including that wadded up newspaper, stuffed inside their clothes could help keep them warm.

Though we’re rarely aware of it, our social systems, from civilizations to congregations to corporations, are far more fragile than they seem. All of them, like us as individuals, are intertwined and interdependent. We really do need each other, and more importantly, when the chips are down, it is often those we’ve regarded as least that we need most. Resilience, the internal capacity to persevere despite immense challenges, is one of those things for which there is simply no better teacher than experience. And when things go awry, as they inevitably will, in every case, it is people like Raymond and Luther – those who have endured the most – who are also most prepared to survive. In that new reality, they, not we, are the fittest.

All three of what’s called the “narrative gospels” in the Christian New Testament recount Jesus as saying some version of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”. This statement is often thought of as a prophecy – a foretelling of a point in the future when redistributive justice will force the elites to serve and allow the oppressed to be served. But rather than a prediction, this is more likely simply a statement of fact: Those who have been last are far better equipped to survive and thrive when scarcity hits or when change inevitably arrives. When it comes to knowing how to survive chaos, adversity and tragedy, they’re already miles ahead of the game.

Everything changes; including those things on which we have become most dependent to keep our world intact. I’m reminded of another scripture, also quoted by Jesus – “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone…” When things change, as they inevitably will, it is often those we’ve treated as worthless who, all of a sudden, become priceless. We’ll need their help. The question facing us at that time will be whether we’ve earned it.

Chapter Two – Age of Promise – Part 2: The Golden Triad

The Differentiators – William Penn

Many of us know William Penn – if for nothing else – as one of a handful of people with a state named after them. But William did far more than found the English colony, the Province of Pennsylvania and personally oversee the creation of Philadelphia: He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, noted for establishing good relationships and treaties with Native Americans, an esteemed author and perhaps most notably, one of the first, and most influential members of the Religious Society of Friends; the religious group also known as the Quakers. Born in 1644 in London, William was the son of an English Admiral, Sir William Penn and Margaret, a Dutch heiress. William was about fifteen when he met Thomas Loe, a Quaker missionary, who introduced him to the new Christian sect, at that time, less than ten years old. The fledgling religious movement would go on to have a profound impact on William, and he on it. 

William arrived at Oxford at a time of significant religious unrest in England. With aristocratic Anglicans as the domineering majority, both Puritans and nonconforming Quakers were subject to hazing and exclusion. Though officially a Cavalier (aristocratic Anglican) by social standing, William’s sympathies lay with the persecuted Quakers, and through his time at Oxford, he gained first-hand experience with what it was like to live as a minority. He would carry these lessons with him for the rest of his life. 

When Oxford theologian, John Owen, was fired from his deanery, William, along with a number of other more open-minded students rallied to his side, including attending talks held at his home. It was those intellectual discussions that equipped William with the skills needed to transform ideas into theory, to refine theory through reasoned debate, and finally, to apply these theories out in the real world. After law school, William’s father sent him to Ireland to manage family holdings. While there, he embarked upon the pursuit of two rather divergent paths – serving a stint as a soldier and exploring nonviolent Quaker spirituality. Outlawed by that time, William’s attendance at Quaker meetings led to his arrest, and rather than distance himself from the movement, he publicly declared himself a member. 

In pleading his case, he argued that since Quakers, unlike Puritans and many other Christian movements, had no political agenda, the group should not be subject to laws outlawing religious beliefs that undermined English political policy. However, it was his family's rank, rather than his argument, that got him released. William was immediately recalled to London by his father and given William’s absolute refusal to amend his views, his father, in order to protect the family’s social standing, banished William from the home and withheld his inheritance.

Undaunted, William immersed himself even further in Quakerism, including the embracing of practices such as refusing to bow to or take off one’s hat for those deemed socially superior (a precursor to the practice of Negro men stepping off the sidewalk and removing one’s hat for socially white passersby in the United States’ segregation era). Their firm belief that all men are equal under God was antithetical to both aristocracies in general and monarchies in particular – especially ones that believed that it was God himself who had ordained some people to rule and relegated others to a life of servitude. 

Over this time, William also developed a close friendship with George Fox, himself, the movement’s founder – a mutually influential relationship for both of them. A core tenet of Fox’s theology was, "God who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands," a belief that effectively nullified the church’s otherwise supreme and unassailable authority over the people. William eloquently articulated Fox’s views in his writings, including the underlying idea that is arguably the most important principle in all of modern political history – the rights of the individual. It is upon this singular thought that modern democracies were later founded.

William would go on to be imprisoned for his writings (the official charge was publication without a license, but the real alleged crime was blasphemy). As such, the Bishop of London ordered that he be held indefinitely until he publicly recanted his written statements. Instead, he wrote the famous No Cross, No Crown – one of the most influential books on Christian theology ever written. Expecting to never be released, William declared, “My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot: for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.” He was released after eight months of imprisonment, but this would be far from the last time he was arrested and branded a “political agitator” – the same charge that would be leveled against Martin Luther King Jr., three hundred years later. 

Despite his detractors (including the Crown), William continued his missionary work; vigorously advocating for religious tolerance, railing against discriminatory laws and systematically dismantling arguments that maintained that some men are inherently superior, and others, inferior. Both his teachings and his bold refusal to back down from power drove rapid increases in Quaker membership, and with it, even broader embracing of the movement’s ideas. In light of the continually increasing enmity and escalating volatility between various religious groups, William proposed a solution to the King — the mass emigration of English Quakers to North America. And in 1677, William, along with a group of other prominent Quakers, purchased the colonial province of West Jersey – essentially, half of the present-day State of New Jersey. 

William continued to lobby for additional land, and was surprised when the King agreed to an expansive charter of over 45,000 square miles and that made William the world's largest private (non-royal) landowner. He also gained sovereign rule of the territory with all rights and privileges (except the power to declare war), and in return, the Crown would be owed one-fifth of any gold or silver mined in the province and the Monarchy was freed of a debt to William’s father of £16,000, or the equivalent of  £2,463,355 today. William first called the area "New Wales", then "Sylvania" (Latin for "forests" or "woods"), with the King changing the name to "Pennsylvania" in honor of William’s father. 

William immediately set to work; drafting a charter of liberties that created a kind of political utopia unlike anything in existence at the time. Among other things, the charter guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and, perhaps most importantly, free elections; all of which became foundational components of the Constitution of the United States of America. His dreams shaped not only a new nation, but a new kind of nation. 

But his legacy didn’t stop there: An equally significant memorial for William is Quakerism itself – a spiritual movement that he, as much as anyone, built. More than any other group in America, whether sacred or secular, Quakers would go on to dedicate their heart and soul to the abolition of slavery in the United States. In doing so, they changed the fundamental nature of an entire nation, and made the values that William had held so deeply, real for all of us. William Penn’s life stands as testament that one can dream of things not yet dreamt of, and that we can, if our conviction is strong enough, call even the most impossible of those previously yet-to-be-imagined things, into being.

Religious Diversity in Early America

In 2010, when President Obama noted that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” his claims were met with vociferous and irrational outrage – especially given that they were true. For instance, while no Founding Fathers were professed followers of Islam, at least two – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – owned copies of the Quran, and the documented presence of Muslims themselves precedes the American Revolution by a century. A 1682 Virginia statute declared the following: "negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan [an ancient word for Muslim] parentage and country" could, from that time on, be “purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves.” Historian, Peter Manseau, in One Nation Under Gods: A New American History, asserts: 

“In an era of fracturing traditional affiliations and endless schisms among the newly established churches, the number of Muslims brought to this predominantly Christian land would have rivaled the populations of many Christian denominations in eighteenth-century America.” “… The number of Muslims in the newly independent United States would likely have dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews in this period.”

One of the most famous examples of America’s early Muslim presence is Islamic scholar, Omar Ibn Said. Born in 1770 and educated in what is now Senegal, West Africa, Omar, at 37 years old, was enslaved and brought to the United States in 1807, where he would remain a slave for the remainder of his life. Omar would, over the next fifty or so years, write prolifically, including works of both history and theology, as well as a posthumously famous autobiography. Then, there’s Peter Salem, an American Moor who was one of several Revolutionary War heroes. Peter, born into slavery in Massachusetts, enlisted as a Minute Man while still enslaved. His valor inspired his owners, who would free him, and Peter became a full-time soldier in the Continental army.

Fighting in the famous Battle of Bunker Hill, it is Peter who is credited with the killing of British Major John Pitcairn – just as he was scaling the top of the American redoubt and demanding that the Patriots surrender. In fact, many historians believe that the dark-skinned man immortalized in John Trumbull’s painting of the Battle is Peter himself.

Painting of Peter Salem shooting British Royal Marine officer Major Pitcairn at Bunker Hill.

Part of why Islam’s role in early America is so obscured is because of the complicated and shifting relationship between religion (which, at the time, was thought of as a racial identity – Jews and Moors, Buddhists and Sikhists, and even Catholic nuns) and the then-developing institution of slavery. The prevailing belief was that while Christians could be indentured for a set period, they could not be enslaved. Non­-Christians, however, could be enslaved. This would prove untenable. As long as enslavement was tied to religion, evangelism – a fundamental goal of Christianity – was squarely at odds with the fledgling enterprise; the more Christianity spread, the more it spelled the end of the slavery industry. 

In what would be the first of many disappointing compromises, the Church allowed the passage of a 1667 Virginia law guaranteeing that Christian baptism would not “alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” The law was a win-win for both the spread of Christianity and of slavery. Once passed, the Church would then declare that all enslaved men and women “brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslims], Mollattoes or Indians... shall be converted to the Christian faith.” What emerged was a version of Christianity that was gradually reinterpreted to support, rather than denounce, slavery; one that sought to save souls, and at the same time, reap the economic benefits of exploitation.  

Islam, however, was far from the only non-Christian religion present in America’s early days. Buddhism – both as formal religion and spiritual practice – had been and remains a prominent shaping influence of every aspect of American spirituality. Having come to America’s shores with our first Asian immigrants, with increased contact with Asia, its influence would only continue to grow. By the 1840s, Americans and Europeans, returning from travels to the east, would become some of the faith’s most ardent advocates, and by the latter part of the century, Buddhist influences would be evident in various literary works from Walt Whitman to Henry Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Similarly, Spaniard, Elias Legarde, who arrived at Jamestown in 1621, is but one example of Jewish presence in the New World 150 years before the American Revolution. By the mid-1600s, there was a thriving Jewish community in New Amsterdam (modern day New York), followed by others throughout New England. An estimated 100 Jewish men served as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in 1772, was not only a member of the Sons of Liberty, but was arguably the Revolution’s greatest financier. 

Additionally, American culture was influenced by other faith traditions, including previously mentioned Sikhism, as well as the profound influence that both Indigenous tribes and Traditional African spirituality had; including the ways they shaped, and subsequently, were folded into, then-contemporary Christian beliefs. Historian, Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, describes how syncretism is pervasive in Christianity. “Monotheism,” he states, “As it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in the polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.”  

It’s exactly at this point that some of us start to wonder if this is taking things too far. “I get ethnic diversity,” we say, “but religious diversity?” This especially causes us misgivings if we’ve been taught that our faith tradition represents the truest path to God. By adopting the same hierarchy built into the ARC to religion, we declare that ours is the “truest” truth; that we represent God and that the further other groups are from our beliefs, the less validity they hold. Take literalist Christians. For them, only other literalists have the “true” truth. On the next rung would be mainline Protestantism, which is truer than the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox (both of whom exclusively claim to be the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church), which, because of their belief in Jesus are both closer to the truth than Judaism, which has more validity than Islam, which is truer than Eastern religions, who are better than Pagans, who are better than atheists. 

Other bodies who believe themselves to be God’s authoritative intermediaries here on earth have similar frameworks – of course, with them at the top. But this path is rife with dangers; not the least of which is the sin of smug self-assurance. Then, there’s the violence. The step from certainty that only we are God’s favorite to weaponizing our faith is a small one. That’s what happened in the late 1960s. Clergy began explicitly teaching congregants that being a member of the faithful meant being a soldier in the coming war for the soul of America; one that had the same goals as most other wars – the elimination of one’s rivals and the absorption of that rival’s assets, and its people. 

From the land of Canaan to the Land of Opportunity, our history repeatedly reveals to us how this approach – this kicking against the goads of diversity – creates the exact problems we hope to solve. First, we ourselves become creators of a social environment where verbal violence against one another becomes the norm; a sad affair, given what our respective faiths stand for. Our preemptive actions turn those who could have been friends into foes, allies into enemies; and by making society hostile toward others, we create an environment that requires that they do the same to us.

The second problem is even more tragic: If we are somehow successful at eliminating our rivals, we all pay the price. Just as our personal diversity benefits all of us, so does religious diversity. One of faith systems’ most important functions is holding and transferring all manner of wisdom, cultural technology and social learning to future generations. Everything from the advances in medicine that Africans brought to America, to Quakers’ moral stand against the slavery industry, to the 26 Catholic monasteries that were part of the network to hide European Jews, to the activism of the Civil Rights movement, to Buddhism-inspired Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – all were encoded in, and passed on through faith systems. When we eliminate them, we also eliminate the gift they could have been to us. Once this wisdom and the systems that held it are gone, like the loss of our oceans’ marine life, it is we who are lesser for it.

But perhaps worst of all is what it does to us, as people. Religions, not unlike other social institutions, have a primary orientation – a focus – a core reason for existing. They were created to benefit us, to serve us and to help us both be better and live better. And like most institutions, early on, they do their job well; helping us see how changing ourselves – becoming better people, living in community, challenging our fears, strengthening our resolve, and passing on of our civilization’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom to the next generation – leads to a fulfilled life. 

But over time, that orientation can gradually flip – from serving us to us serving them. As the focus of our faith systems shift from behavior to belief, from spirituality to orthodoxy, from human worth to human depravity, from conscience to conformity, and from us doing the saving to being saved, both what we do and what we deem acceptable to do to others change. Our actions become increasingly inhumane, our attitudes increasingly more toxic, and in reversing its focus, we disable one of religion’s core functions – to sound the alarm when our humanity is in danger. 

The Differentiators – George, Nikola and Mary

Diversity is central to everything we consider to be distinctly American – from advances in governance, technology and medicine, to music and pop culture, inventions and patents, and all manner of other new, revolutionary ideas. The more we became a place where the different could thrive, the greater difference they were able to make. Take, for instance, George Washington Carver, Nikola Tesla and Mary Anderson.

George
George Washington Carver was one of the world’s most innovative scientist-inventors. A botanist by training, he is most well-known for his research into and promotion of alternative crops to cotton, which depleted the soil – particularly peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes. As arduous as his life was, George was, by his own account, blessed with a number of benevolent relationships that made everything he did possible. Born into slavery in Missouri in the 1860s, George’s exact birthdate is unknown. Moses Carver purchased George’s parents in 1855 for $700. When George was only a week old, he, his mother and a sister were kidnapped by night raiders. Moses hired John Bentley to find them, but George’s mother and sister had already been sold. Moses negotiated for George’s return, and after slavery was abolished, he and his wife Susan raised George as their own.

This was the first of the significant relationships that dotted George’s life. His adopted mom taught him to read and write. Early on, Moses and Susan realized that George was intellectually gifted, and they encouraged him to pursue those gifts. Growing up on the farm, George spent tremendous amounts of time alone and in nature; which is where his love of agriculture began. Later in life, he’d describe flowers as his childhood pets and that, even as a young boy, vegetation seemed to thrive under his touch.

George was eleven when he left home. He moved ten miles south to in the neighboring Neosho in order to attend a school for colored children. It was here that he met Mariah Watkins; a second profound influence on George’s development. Mariah, along with her husband, owned the land where the school was housed. They also provided George with lodging and became a surrogate family for him while he attended school. When she asked his name, he identified himself as “Carver’s George”, as he’d always done. She replied that from now on, his name was “George Carver”. According to George, Mariah, who was a nurse in the Civil War, said to him: "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people". This became an important touchstone for him.

George applied to a number of colleges and was accepted at Highland College in Highland, KS. When he arrived, however, his racial identity apparent, his admission was rescinded. He homesteaded for a while, manually plowing 17 acres and planting a range of crops including rice, corn, leafy greens, various fruit trees and shrubbery. He ultimately ended up attending Iowa State, where he was both the first African American student and, later, the first African American faculty member. In 1896, Booker T. Washington invited George to head the Agriculture department at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University); which he did for the next 47 years.

From 1915 to 1923, George concentrated on researching and experimenting with new uses for a range of crops, including sweet potatoes, soybeans, pecans, and of course, peanuts. These efforts were particularly important given the boll weevil infestation that utterly decimated American cotton. The beetles, spreading at 40 to 160 miles per year, were everywhere. George developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton, and together with other agricultural experts, helped farmers learn to restore nitrogen to their soils by practicing systematic crop rotation with crops that were both good for the soil and useful for human consumption. From the peanut alone, he developed more than 100 products; from cosmetics to dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline and nitroglycerin. Although he only published six agricultural bulletins after 1922, he published articles in peanut industry journals and wrote a syndicated newspaper column, "Professor Carver's Advice". But George was a prolific inventor; he was an avid spokesperson for a better America. For four years, he toured white Southern colleges for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. 

In 1916, George was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England; one of only a handful of Americans at that time to receive this honor. He was friends with fellow inventor, Henry Ford, and Henry even installed an elevator at the institute so that an elderly George didn’t have to climb the stairs. The Crown Prince of Sweden spent a one-month intensive under his tutelage. He was friends with Mahatma Gandhi and traveled to India to advise him on nutrition in developing nations. He testified before Congress. He was sought out by and gave advice to three American presidents – Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt – and in 1941, Time magazine pictured him on the cover, describing him as a “Black Leonardo”.

Nikola
From the beginning, Nikola, a Serbian American, was a product of diversity; born in what is now known as Croatia in 1856 to a father who was an orthodox priest and a mother who was the daughter of an orthodox priest. The fourth of five children, Nikola, had an older brother and three sisters. When his brother was killed in a horseback accident, his father wanted more than ever for him to follow in his footsteps, but Nikola, already a scientific and mathematical prodigy, wanted a different life. Nikola suffered from a significant number of serious childhood illnesses and was bedridden for weeks at a time. He also suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. His affliction-fueled visions proved instrumental to his work for the rest of his life. 

He was in his late twenties when he immigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison and he became a naturalized United States citizen about seven years later. Nikola was generally characterized as asocial by those who knew him, though he was well-liked and kept company with a few friends, including Mark Twain. His friend Julian Hawthorne, describing Nikola, wrote "seldom did one meet a scientist or engineer who was also a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink."

From childhood, he spent a tremendous amount of time alone and focused on his studies, designs and ideas. This largely self-imposed isolation paired with an eidetic memory, as well as his own genius and creativity, made for a potent combination, and allowed Nikola to become an expert in a vast array of subjects. He spoke eight languages, memorized complete books, and as a teenager, could perform integral calculus in his head.

Nikola Tesla is credited with some of the most profound scientific advancements in modern history, including the invention of AC (alternating current), the science behind wireless communications, radio and X-ray imaging. Over his lifetime, he obtained over 300 patents in twenty-six countries, and many of his inventions were never patented.

Mary
Mary Anderson was an unusual woman for her time. She was a successful real estate developer, viticulturist and businesswoman, and inventor of the windshield wiper. And she is the very personification of the term, “American ingenuity.” Born in Greene County, Alabama in 1866, one year after the conclusion of the Civil War, by age 22, she, her sister and her widowed mother had relocated to Birmingham. Founded just sixteen years prior in 1871, but with a population of 26,000 and counting, Birmingham was already one of the largest and the fastest growing cities in the South. There, she built the Fairmont Apartments on Highland Avenue, before eventually moving cross-country to Fresno, California, where she owned and ran a successful cattle ranch and vineyard.

On a visit to New York City in 1903, she noted that the motorman drove with the front window open because of the difficulty of keeping the windshield clear of falling snow and sleet. Periodically, he’d reach his arm out the window and use his sleeve to clear the windshield. Upon returning to Alabama, she hired a designer to help her develop a hand-operated device to keep the windshield clear, then she had a local company produce a working model. She applied for and received a 17-year patent for the “windshield wiper”.

Mary was adventurous, curious, and unafraid to pursue a goal – even in areas that were generally considered to be man’s work. We don’t know much about her personal life, but there is no evidence of her ever having married. This, paired with losing her father at an early age, likely contributed to her deep sense of self-sufficiency and autonomy that allowed her to move across the country on her own, launch out into new ventures, and achieve success in so many areas at a time when most women stayed home and stayed put. Her windshield wiper device consisted of a lever inside the vehicle that controlled a rubber blade on the outside of the windshield. The lever could be operated to cause the spring-loaded arm to move back and forth across the windshield. A counterweight was used to ensure contact between the wiper and the window. Though similar devices had been made earlier, hers was the first to prove effective.

In 1905, Mary tried to sell the rights to her invention through a prominent Canadian brokerage, but they rejected her application saying "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warrant our undertaking its sale." People scoffed at Mary’s invention, saying that the wipers’ movement would distract the driver and cause accidents, and Mary was never successful at selling the patent. Nevertheless, by the early 1920s, windshield wipers using Mary’s design had become standard equipment on automobiles. Upon her death many years later, The New York Times carried her obituary, crediting her for her invention.

Built for diversity

Our cursory study so far has only begun to scratch the surface of the ways in which diversity was central to the nation we became and the society that would emerge. And its reach went far beyond ethnicity, nationality and religion. For instance, women contributed just as much – if not more – to the making and survival of America as did men, and it is to our shame that we have no collective memory of our Founding Mothers. Families of every kind – from nuclear to extended, from unmarried couples to fostered families – existed within our borders, and members of the LGBT+ community – long before they were recognized as such – were here, contributing and are woven into every aspect of the American story. Art collectors and spouses Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, in 2020, published LOVING. A Photographic History of Men in Love, which portrays male couples in hundreds of photographs taken during the 100-year period between the 1850s and 1950s.

The collection of 2,800 photos, the result of a twenty-year effort in cultural excavation, was astonishing in both diversity (covering nineteenth-century working-class men, fashionably dressed businessmen, university students, and soldiers and sailors of all ages and ethnicities) and their breadth – spanning from the Civil War, through World War II, and into the 1950s. Similar research is being conducted to rediscover the lost histories of same-sex female couples, transgendered persons, and other gender and romantic expressions. Another example of the Dillingham Flaw, LOVING, is also an undeniable reminder that we’ve always been far more diverse than our categories allowed; and we’ve always been better off for it.

And that’s the crux of diversification – it is the gear that turns the cosmos. Everything that exists, or that comes into existence – from a newborn baby to a newborn star – does so in a state of change. To exist is to be in motion, going somewhere, becoming something. And every becoming makes it possible for yet other things to exist. And when we seek to stop its advance – to rail against it by creating categories that enforce conformity and require homogeneity – we only succeed in creating spaces where we ourselves can’t breathe; splintering ourselves into ever-increasing factions.

It is because of this that the Catholic Church, 600 years after having been declared the only true religion, would, in the Great Schism of 1065, split in two, with both factions claiming to be the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” established by Jesus Christ in his Great Commission. Then, in the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church would split again. Then, Protestants would diverge into Lutherans, Anabaptists, Methodists, and any number of other denominations. Then, within each of those, the splitting into factions would continue – for instance, among Baptists, there are no less than 50 denominations. Diversity simply cannot be stopped. But we can, by how we perceive of, and engage with it, leave ourselves broken into factions and poorer, rather than stronger and richer, for it.

All of us alive today are participants in what might be the grandest social experiment in the history of humankind: We live in an era where virtually every society is multicultural, multi-religious and multiethnic, where previously impossible combinations have emerged, where preexisting constructs are being deconstructed and where complexity is multiplying; all in an increasingly mobile and interconnected global community. The United States might be in rare company as a nation birthed by people from virtually every other nation, but today, there is almost nowhere we can go and live out our lives surrounded only by those with whom we claim common lineage; our prescribed tribe. 

That leaves us with a choice; seek to impede our continual diversification or embrace it as one of our most potent gifts, pine for the relative simplicity of our past or become co-creators of a powerful future. This commitment to embrace both manyness and oneness has always been our greatest strength, and the better at it we get, the stronger, more vibrant and more sustainable we will be. It’s in this sense that America was perfectly built for diversity, and in turn, that diversity built America.

… Enacting Democracy

O, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet, and yet must be – The land where every man is free. I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek – And finding only the same old stupid plan, Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME – who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, must bring back our mighty dream again. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath – America will be! -- Langston Hughes

The dawn of the Enlightenment brought with it a number of radical ideas that completely changed the way we, as human beings, thought of ourselves and our relationships with one another. Built on a premise that society should be structured based on reason rather than doctrine and that civil order should be rooted in natural, rather than religious law, the Enlightenment’s impact was no less significant than its predecessor, the Scientific Revolution. At stake was humankind’s most foundational paradigm; the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, and we, its masters. Instead, we came to realize that the Earth is round, rather insubstantial, and that, contrary to everything our senses tell us, is in constant motion – both rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. In one fell swoop, the Earth (and by extension, humankind) had fallen from the crown of creation to a rather insignificant blip caught up in the wake of our smallish star, and floating somewhere out on the fringes of one of 200 billion galaxies. But as humbling as this stunning realization was, it was also quite liberating; the same knowledge that rendered all of us insignificant also made us – greatest to smallest – equals.

The Enlightenment likewise popularized a range of political ideas that had the same mind-bending effect; making us think differently about assumptions we didn’t even realize we’d embraced. Take, for example, the divine right – whether of kings or the church – to rule. Not only was it universally accepted; no one had ever even thought to question it. That is until the introduction of a paradigm-shattering idea; that rulers rule only by the consent of (and therefore, are accountable to) the governed. This single premise shifted the power from rulers to the people. The American Revolution was heavily influenced by this thinking, including through both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who shaped not only how the revolution was articulated, but how governance was structured, and James Madison, who substantially incorporated Enlightenment ideas into the framing of the Constitution.

But for the idea of democracy itself, we’d borrow from the originators – the Athenians. Developed around the sixth century BC, Athenians invented what’s often described as the first known democracy in the world. The word itself (dēmokratia), derived from demos (“the people”), and kratos (“rule”), meant, “the people rule”, “rule of the people” or put another way, “self-rule”. One way of grasping democracy is envisioning a nation where the people themselves are the rule-makes, rule-keepers, and rule enforcers; or, as defined by President Abraham Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Our version would be a byproduct of everything from new political thought (including segregation of powers, universal civil liberties and religious freedom, equal voting rights, people-chosen leadership, unbiased and just courts, and good governance, devoid of corruption – the very cornerstones of American government) to real-world examples like the Native American Iroquois nation; which, through its Iroquois League, modeled for colonists a form of federated representative democracy – one where power is shared between the federal government and the states.

As a concept, democracy might be the greatest invention of humankind since we started forming primitive societies. It is also arguably the most anthropologically advanced idea we’ve ever conceived of – so much so that centuries later, we’re still struggling to actualize it. Democracy is the foundation of a society with staying power. The concept of self-rule disperses the power of governance to all and is the means by which a more perfect union is formed. Democracy’s power lies in its ability to do something no other governance has been able to – create societal stability. It accomplishes this in two key ways. First, it counteracts both wealth and power concentration, which, undeterred, compromises a society’s support structure to the point where collapse is inevitable. Second, it ensures self-rule; a system where everyone has a viable vote and only one vote, and where the citizenry takes turns at various governance posts. The result is a governing process with a strong immune system; one that wards off threats and maintains coherence.

Today, true democracy still remains more aspirational than actualized; partly because a system where governance is shared by all is a system where unequal power is held by none – including by those who have grown accustomed to rolls of the dice falling perpetually in their favor. The democratic processes that promote freedom for all and the discriminatory policies that endow unequal authority upon a select few are fundamentally incompatible. That’s now where we find ourselves; often wanting to look like a democracy without actually being one. Which is why where we land on the concept of equality – and whether we, as a people, still believe in it – is so critical.

Equality

“And we hold these truths to be self-evident…” These profound concepts articulated in the Constitution describe potent principles that undergird much of the world’s civic structure “… that all men are created equal, that all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, and among those rights are included life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”

Intended as an unambiguous declaration that this would not only be a new nation, but a new kind of nation, this singular statement – a renunciation of the Old World tradition of structuring people, from birth, into classes was a radical departure from any way in which civilizations had viewed themselves prior to this era. America has British philosopher, Thomas Hobbs (1588 – 1679), to thank for many of these revolutionary concepts. In his seminal work, Leviathan, written before any of the American Founders were born, Hobbs asserted the radical notion that society exists, not because of the will of kings or deities, but because of a social contract that we’ve all entered into; implicitly or explicitly. This radical idea, referred to today as Social Contract (or social compact) Theory, made each member of society an empowered participant, and served as the foundation for much of modern political philosophy and, especially, western political theory.

The assertion that people are fundamentally equal might be the slipperiest of these core ideas, and the one most easy to get wrong. That’s because often want to skip right to distribution – of resources, opportunity, etc. – resulting in getting, as they say, the cart before the horse. Equality isn’t about what we get or how much stuff we have. Those are outcomes. Equality is about who we are (validity) and how we’re treated (fairness). There will always be variations in outcomes across a population. But any time we’re able to see patterns – especially patterns along the very social constructs we’ve created – that’s evidence that we’re either invalidating others or treating them unfairly.

For those of us in the group that has more, the temptation is to use these outcomes, not as insight into where society can improve, but as retroactive justification: “The fact that I have more must mean that I’m worth more”. Or, “If I have it, I must deserve to have it.” Then, the rest of society chimes in to back us up. Financial magazines like Fortune and Forbes describe billionaires and the wealth in their possession, as what they’re “worth”. But that’s not really what they’re worth. That’s what they have – whether they actually deserve to have it or not.

Historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, in 1961, theorized that all societies pass through distinct stages, including genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. He argues that civilizations ultimately fall, not because of environmental factors or attacks from the outside, but because they become incapable of solving new problems. According to his theory, the very people we once thought of as superior – whether in intellect, creativity, wealth or some other quality – in an effort to maintain dominance – end up forming the very barrier that prevents the society from adapting, and thus, surviving. The ultimate sign, according to Toynbee, that a civilization has lost all coherence is when the dominant group forms what he describes as a “Universal State” – an attempt to hold by force and “against all right and reason – a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit.”

In our tendency to discount the inherent inestimable value that each person brings, we reduce the idea of equality to mere leveling effect – the process of distribution where we even out of the highs and lows so that everyone gets the same amount. But that’s setting the bar too low. The line where equality resides is not the average: It’s somewhere beyond the fifth standard deviation. What makes us equal is not a regression to the mean. It’s the priceless, often untapped potential inherent in every person. What makes us equal is that we are all invaluable, and all, as a minister friend put it, “fractional reflections of God”.

An enduring belief in equality enables us to create a society where anyone and everyone can achieve their potential, which, in turn, is how societies survive. Put more practically, the degree to which a society believes in equality can be seen in its outcomes – the degree to which validity and fairness permeate all facets of that society. Equality, by its very nature, counteracts preferentialism, discrimination and bias and, at the same time, engenders confidence in society itself. Without it, our collective “we” is fatally compromised. The very systems that hold us together and make us real, start to fray; fragment and eventually deteriorate completely.

A “free-born” democracy like America had an advantage. It didn’t have to migrate to a platform of inherent equality; that’s where we started. But it might also be a disadvantage. We’ve never had to go through the hard work to become something else. The question before us is whether we, a society that’s allowed its commitment to equality to flounder, can find our own way back.

… Advancing Humanity

One evening, an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" His grandfather simply replied, "The one you feed." – Old Indigenous American Proverb

“I look behind my ears for the green – even my sweat smells clean – glare off the white hurts my eyes. Gotta get out of bed, get a hammer and a nail; learn how to use my hands – not just my head – I think myself into jail. Now I know a refuge never grows, from a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose – gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.” – Indigo Girls, Hammer And A Nail

If there’s one thread that weaves unbroken throughout this entire book, it is that of humanity and its prevailing necessity. Humanity can be described as our ability to think, feel, act and react in ways that are consistent with humankind at its best. We can think of it as simply conducting ourselves in such a way that both we and others are better off afterward than before. We all harbor dual impulses – the ability to behave humanely or inhumanely. As such, much of life is about deciding which impulses we will embrace. Consistently living a life marked by humanity might very well be the greatest challenge we can undertake. Doing so requires that we consistently turn away from primitive instincts that come so naturally to us, and to instead choose to strengthen those capabilities that make us more than we’ve been.

Humanity is the catalyst of society. It provides us with the ability to outgrow our own self-destructive tendencies and upgrade the behaviors we consider normal. It breathes life into societies and makes them places where that life can thrive. Throughout, we’ll explore some ways we go about both strengthening our level of humanity and the consistency with which it is manifested. The goal at this point is to simply provide a bit more color regarding how advancing humanity changes us:

Any of us, if we take the time, can recall any number of ways in which another’s humanity has helped us become who we are today. Some of those things were monumental; the saving of a life, helping someone survive a tragedy, or the loved ones who made huge sacrifices on our behalf. But humanity shines through just as powerfully through small things; especially when done by a stranger. It’s the man who gave a girl, who had just had her cab stolen by a suited executive, his umbrella while he stood out in the rain and flagged her down a cab. It’s the woman who dutifully acknowledges people suffering from homelessness as human beings, the person who allowed a woman and her six-year-old daughter to pack a basket with $40 worth of groceries then paid for them – and let the little girl pick out the candy bar of her choice. It’s the person who pays the bridge toll of the person behind them, or the woman who bought shoes for a little boy working outside a Birmingham grocery store.  

Humanity improves how we perceive things – how we look at the world, others, and ourselves. It’s the expanding of our consciousness to grasp that which is not immediately obvious; recognizing the bad choices before we make them, seeing the worth in others that’s sometimes easy to overlook, or anticipating the ripple effects of our actions and the things we set in motion. Humanity improves how we engage our hearts. It enables us to feel with and care for others, to see ourselves in them and they in us, to seek to understand why they made the choices they made and how, in similar situations, we’ve made similar choices. It means extending forgiveness (to both them and ourselves) and bravely advocating on the behalf of those who need it.  

Humanity fosters beauty. It inspires us to make art and make music, to imagine and aspire, to be conduits of both joy and comfort – and to give them due appreciation. It is through humanity that we reify those things we otherwise only dream of, and that we inject both wonder into our lives and meaning into our existence. Humanity renews our souls. It validates our worth and gives voice to that inner part of us where we are most alive, inspiring us to become that better version of ourselves and to lead our best lives. It is this strengthening of our spiritual core that allows us to outgrow hubris and self-inflation, to awaken our conscience and to live in peace – with others and with ourselves. While we understand its value as lofty aspiration, making it real requires, as the Indigo Girls sang, getting our hands in the dirt, and allowing it to manifest in our day-to-day lives. And that only happens in in an America that still values unity.  

Unity

It was great Roman philosopher, Cicero, in De Officiis, who states, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of the many (unas fiat ex pluribus). This reference (or at least this era) is thought to be the point of origin for E pluribus unum – the motto adopted as the Great Seal by America’s first Congress in 1776, and which means, “out of many, one”. 

Both many and one. The adoption of this idea was critical to fledgling America’s survival, as it allowed the colonists to both unite, and at the same time, maintain their individuality – their diversity. The people of America could create a united nation while remaining separate states, share a common spirituality while practicing different faiths, meld a singular culture while expressing many ethnicities. This is how a common identity was forged; moving from being thirteen colonies to being a singular nation. 

With this notion came other important concepts like identity (together, we stand separate and independent from Britain and its government), solidarity (we are all in this together), fraternity (all Americans, regardless of where they herald from or what they look like – are my brothers), allegiance (a willingness to do whatever was necessary for one’s country) and commitment to the commonwealth – or common well-being. From culture to religion, non-religion, racial identity, ethnicity, languages etc., we Americans had more differences than similarities. We therefore needed something other than “sameness” to tie us together. What emerged was a commitment to the dream of what America could become; what it could mean for humanity. It was a pledge of allegiance – not just to the America that was, but to the America that could be. 

While diverse societies have, by far, better chances of succeeding as they mature, they also tend to be more vulnerable at the onset. This is because of two reasons: The first is the challenge of the many; the lack of an already existing dominant culture makes establishing common ground – becoming “one” – far more difficult. The second is a shortcoming of human nature – our lessening regard for those not in our personal circle – in other words, we find it easier to harm strangers than people we know. This is why we’re less affected by millions of people dying in a far-off land, but profoundly impacted by a few thousand deaths in our own country or even a single death in our neighborhood.

But it’s more fundamental than that. For example, in a 1970 study, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, took two groups of female students at NYU, giving one group name tags, and the other group anonymized numbers and hoods. He then asked individuals from both groups to administer shocks to other students. He found that hooded participants were willing to render shocks that were twice as high as those whose identities were known. So, it’s not just when we don’t know them that we’re inclined to behave inhumanely; it’s also when they don’t know us.

His findings are indicative of a state psychologists call “deindividuation" – a condition characterized by both a loss of self-awareness and, along with it, a diminished sense of individual accountability. While this can happen in a number of different scenarios and contexts, anonymity – whether real or perceived – is always a key ingredient. Dr. Zimbardo further suggests that “anonymity, diffused responsibility, group activity, altered temporal perspective, emotional arousal, and sensory overload” are all input variables that can generate “deindividuated” reactions.

Societies full of disconnected strangers are ideal environments for deindividuation; something many of us experience every time we get behind the wheel. In a Wired magazine article titled, Big Question: Why Am I a Horrible Person When I Drive? journalist, Bryan Gardiner, begins: “Here's a scenario that should be familiar: You're driving along on the highway. Suddenly, without signaling, a massive SUV comes barreling into your lane from the right, forcing you to jam on the brakes and swerve out of the way to avoid a collision. “Worthless piece of %$#@,” you yell to this person you don't know (and who can't hear you) before embarking on a quest to teach them a lesson by tailgating them for the next two miles…”

And while the scenario that Bryan presented is one that most of us can relate to and that rarely leads to tragedy, deindividuation can also have far deeper, far more dangerous ramifications, and might even be a key contributor – above and beyond union protections and racial bigotry – to the nationwide problems of police brutality, militarized policing and minority deaths at the hands of police officers. Amidst calls for demilitarization, for the redirecting of some of the policing budget to other, more appropriate services, and a range of other solutions (all of which are worthy considerations), we must not overlook the role that deindividuation – when officers and the other members of the community are strangers – plays.

Both police officers and other members of the community are subject to responding in ways that they would not if they knew each other, if their siblings played sports together, if their mothers worked together, if they picked their kids up from the same school, if they shopped at the same grocery stores or frequented the same farmers market, or even if they simply knew each other’s names. This familiarity and participation in the community off the job, paired with training and standards on the job, has been shown to dramatically reduce violent incidents.

Further, police departments that shift their approach from a focus on process (policing) to one of outcomes (peaceful, cohesive, vital communities) have seen dramatic positive results. Specific examples of new approaches include active recruitment from those communities (as SFPD did with the city’s gay community in the 1970s), getting police officers out of the precinct (and out of their cars) and into the communities (including patrolling on foot and on bikes), creating an ongoing presence by opening small, neighborhood stations that any community member can walk into, and enabling officers to play an active, positive role in strengthening community cohesion (for example, New York City’s Police Athletic Leagues - or “PALs”).

Whether how we drive, how we police or how we respond to tragedies elsewhere in the world, it turns out that learning to see one another as people – as fellow members of a singular, commonly affected community of which we are also a part – might turn out to be the most important thing we can do to combat deindividuation, and instead, move beyond being a land of strangers to that of a united people. Turns out the Beatles were right; love really is all we need.

Life on the Ground – Mary’s Table

You might remember from the preface that I was raised by my grandmother, another Mary from Birmingham, born fifty years after Mary Anderson, and in a place that would not afford her the same opportunities. Nevertheless, the home that she raised me in was a wonderfully warm and happy one. In her and my grandfather’s house, like so many other southern families, Sunday dinner was the big meal of the week. It was the only time that most everyone was home, instead of out working, or otherwise coming and going. She’d taught all her children to cook and half of them cooked professionally. Her son, Robert, was the head chef at Parliament House – Birmingham’s preeminent hotel, and Naomi, her oldest daughter, was one of the city’s most sought-after wedding cake makers. If you were a Belle who wanted her cake to be so spectacular that it ended up being mentioned in the society pages, Naomi was who you commissioned. 

But Sunday dinner was my grandmother Mary’s affair, though everyone all pitched in; spending time together as we did. Weekdays, she made dinner for the family she worked for before heading home, so dinners during the week were simple – liver on Mondays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, fish on Fridays. Sundays, however, were another thing altogether. The food was always wonderful, and guests were often amazed that she and others like her could do so much with so little. But that was common for folk of her era. Southern food has come of age as of late, but back then, like most innovations, it was born of necessity. I remember being completely surprised when, a few years ago, I saw actual collard greens for sale in the Whole Foods produce section. Collards, a hearty green that’s too dense to eat raw, and bitter if not cooked just right, today, are touted for their nutritional value. But ten years ago, they were largely unheard of outside the South. But in my childhood, they were, often mixed with turnip greens, a Sunday dinner mainstay. 

These leafy greens, like the generations of families who grew them and ate them, are hardy. Originating near Greece, they were long an African delicacy, and were brought to America along with them; becoming part of the American diet at Jamestown. And like the people who brought them here, they can survive and thrive in the most difficult of conditions. That, and because they’re so cheap to grow, is how they became such a staple for slave populations and others in the South. Similarly, turnip leaves were the throwaways after the turnips themselves had been harvested for the slave owner and for market. Slaves learned to cook these unwanted parts in ways that made them edible and delicious. My grandmother could do this. I often think that she would have been just as astonished (and pleased) to see southern-style greens on the menus of some of New York’s most exclusive restaurants, as she would have been to see an African American man become President or an ethnic minority woman become Vice President.

Another staple of the southern diet was, in fact, a Native American contribution - corn. Native Americans taught African Americans how to grind the corn to make cornmeal; which was used to make cornbread and infuse it with an alkali to make hominy – which, in turn, became grits – the porridge most Southerners – colored and white-identifying – had for breakfast most mornings. Native Americans were the source of far more than corn, however. The many plants they domesticated; from potatoes and sweet potatoes to tomatoes, pumpkins, cassava, papayas, guavas, avocadoes, cocoa (chocolate), peanuts, pineapples, chili peppers and a variety of bean species would become staples not just here, but around the world.

On any given Sunday, my grandmother’s dinner table was covered with dishes – heaping greens and pot liquor, hot cornbread, buttermilk biscuits and homemade jam, fried or roasted chicken, corn on the cob, oven cooked sweet potatoes, string beans and squash, black-eyed peas and neck bones, fried green tomatoes and okra, and a fresh fruit, cornbread crust cobbler and baked banana pudding for dessert. Much of this came either from her garden, or the gardens of friends; trades of her abundance of tomatoes and peaches for corn and beans.  

I think about the many cultural influences that made this one meal possible – the innovations in cooking and food preparation, the profound “American ingenuity” on display every Sunday afternoon – and it serves, for me, as another reminder of who we are as a people, our strengths as a nation, and of the road that led us here.

Talkin’ Bout a Revolution

“Don't you know, they're talkin' 'bout a revolution. It sounds like a whisper…” Tracy Chapman

For the American Colonies, the path from ragtag refugees to singular society was neither straightforward, nor at all likely. It was made possible by a set of preconditions that, mostly by happenstance, were present in what would become the United States of America.

1. A period of relative isolation
During the early colonial era, it would be the new advances in boatbuilding and naval technology that would make passage across the Atlantic in large numbers, though still treacherous and arduous, nevertheless achievable. However, the distance from Europe made those voyages costly and multiple round trips difficult, thus allowing the colonies an atmosphere of relative noninterference; which in turn afforded them intellectual and social breathing room. The reality of their dire situation and the sink-or-swim nature of their existence further fostered their bourgeoning sense of separation and independence; causing them to challenge policies they deemed either unfair or no longer relevant to them.

Though the British government sought to exert increasingly stringent controls, it found itself thwarted by both the distance and by the rapidly accelerating and intensifying revolutionary sentiments among colonists. Further, unlike many other subjugated peoples or colonized lands, many American colonists were products of their European homelands, and as such, brought with them an intimate knowledge of how their home governments worked, their military tactics etc.; all of which enabled them to buy themselves more time and space to develop a separate sense of identity, with the European crowns far too removed to even attempt to halt it – until it was too late.

2. Potent Heterogeneity
Journeying to America in the 17th century meant coming to a land already populated by indigenous people of many cultures, with a steady stream of adventurers, debtors, opportunists, social outcasts, and people desperate to carve out their own little place in the world. It required undertaking a perilous, 3-month journey across an often-stormy ocean where sickness, disease, and death were commonplace; with many never completing the journey. Necessity and the harsh conditions of this new world forged those who’d survived the trip into communities; heterogeneous groupings were the norm up and down the eastern seaboard. Foods from all over combined to create something distinctly American. As did our music, how we build houses, grow food, create art, worship, celebrate, dress, build families or honor our dead.

While today, globalization means that virtually every country has access to diversity, this was true for what would become the United States more than 400 years ago. The first African Americans, for example, arrived in what would ultimately become the United States in 1526 – almost 100 years before the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower. Brought as part of a slave contingent on a Spanish boat, they revolted, settled in the area, and frequently intermarried and partnered with the Native American populations already here. Both groups retained and shared their traditions and adopted new ones, and in the process became early contributors to our rich heritage. America was a nation born from multiple parents – England, France, Italy, Spain, indigenous tribes, Mexico, South America, the islands, China, Southeast Asia and all parts of Africa.

Even European immigrants, long before they’d been rebranded “white”, were of different nationalities, spoke different languages and adhered to differing religious beliefs, customs and binding narratives; all of which identified them as different races. Even the names given to areas by early settlers reflect this diverse heritage. In addition to the obvious (New Belgium, New England, New France, New Netherland, New Spain, and New Sweden), settlement names were either references to their homelands (New Amsterdam (Holland), New Orleans (France), and New Smyrna, Florida (Greece)), or simply its wholesale adoption – Cambridge (England/Massachusetts), Guttenberg (Germany/New Jersey), Haarlem (Holland/New York), Hamburg (Germany/New Jersey), and Plymouth (England/Massachusetts).

3. Welcoming Borders
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand, A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame. Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name? Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome… “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she, With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” -- The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus - 1903

From the beginning, harsh conditions pummeled colonists; diminishing populations both through sickness, which spiked adult and juvenile death rates, and through malnutrition, which lowered birth rates. This meant that new arrivals were not just welcome, but necessary. Whether supplying people to fight in the war or maintaining the processes any nation needs in place to feed, clothe and sustain its citizens, no issue was more crucial than population sufficiency. Over the years, these immigrants brought more than numbers with them; they brought ideas. And those ideas – from faith to science to culture – would catapult America into the future; making it one of the most dynamic and creative places on earth. 

4. Co-creation
The phrase, “this isn’t the way we do things,” or words to that effect, were virtually unheard of in our early days. There was no “way of doing things”. In fact, in most respects, America was a cultural vacuum. Once colonies-turned-states began to think of themselves as a unified nation, the next step was creating, from whole cloth, a common identity. Starting from scratch allowed broad participation in the shaping of that identity; a set of conditions that has paid off for American in spades. From defining our own art and fashion to our own rituals, narratives, and things held sacred, America was a place of creative agency. Individual contributions, influenced by the ideas of others, resulted in something ultimately unique, dynamic and truly representative of us as a people. From roots music to blues and jazz, rock and hip hop; from the choosing of our national anthem to the holidays we celebrated, or the heroes we chose to remember; the creation of American culture was, and remains, a participative process; though not always an easy one. It is ironic that in a nation that started with no cultural heritage of its own, that American culture would ultimately emerge as one of its greatest exports.

It was this clean slate, not having to do away with anything, that made democracy obvious. Groups like the Pilgrims, seeking both religious liberty and the freedom to live out their culture, would embark upon a perilous, one-way voyage to a rumored land beyond the scope of their known universe – all for the sake of a way of living. More than half of them died the first winter. Upon arriving safely off the coast of modern Provincetown, MA, they, recognizing the significance of the moment, drafted and signed their very own governance commitment called the Mayflower Compact. The document they created is generally believed to be the beginning of democracy in America, and went on to inform the content of the Constitution.

5. Climate of Innovation
As we know, North America, in those early days, was less than hospitable; especially in the New England area. Tough terrain, challenging climate and scarce resources forced people together for survival purposes, which fostered interaction and inclusion, and in turn, allowed creativity to flourish. This was accentuated by those first four preconditions that made revolution possible – our relative isolation (which bred self-reliance), our inherent heterogeneity and a constant influx of people from all over the world; all in a context of co-creation. Then, there’s the exposure to all manner of new ideas and cultural technology that those people brought with them, the entrepreneurial spirit that’s present in any startup environment, and the ethos of originality that was fairly unique to America; one where being labeled a “copycat” was the opposite of cool.

As a result, the United States became home to a disproportionate degree of innovation; especially for a nation that even today represents less than 5% of the world’s population. Innovation is, at its core, the ability to imagine, despite presenting obstacles, an actionable way forward; a way out of no way. For any person, group or society, the better at this we are, the more sustainable our lives become.

And Yes, We’ve Just Begun

“And when the evening comes, we smile; so much of life ahead. We'll find a place where there's room to grow, and yes, we've just begun.” – The Carpenters

Together, these virtues – Diversity, Democracy and Humanity – found fertile ground to flourish on the shores of what would become America. And flourish they did. Out of this assorted mix of peoples, customs, traditions, beliefs, languages, cuisines, music, artistry and inventiveness would come a new kind of nation; one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.

This was our beginning. And in so many ways, we would make real the dreams that birthed us. But in other ways, we’d not just abandon those dreams, but undermine them. They say the American Revolution began with the shot heard round the world. But American society’s shift from the Age of Promise to the Age of Opportunism hardly made a sound.