Digging for our roots: the deepest aren't ethnic.

Several years after the war (World War II), I was in Germany. Although I had good German friends, I felt very much alone. It was the era when one of the most popular songs in Germany was "Ami, Go Home" and the Germans in general seemed stiff and of a piece. So when I ventured forth one morning and saw this man approaching me from the opposite direction, I felt a sense of identification and companionship. He was so obviously American--the way his hat was planted on his head, the way his overcoat flapped a bit, the way he wore his horn-rimmed glasses. I, too, must have looked American to him. We both smiled broadly and said "hello" as we passed. It made no difference that he was black.

That moment came back to me the other night when I saw New Republic contributing editor Stanley Crouch talking with David Gergen on PBS's "NewsHour" about his elegantly written new book of essays, The All-American Skin Game (Pantheon). Among other things, he said in essence that the effort of many African-American scholars to identify with Africans is something of a delusion. An American can don a cap and wear a Kente cloth and go to Africa, Crouch said, but he will on arrival immediately be identified as American. Crouch, an African-American, is always concerned with the meanings of American democracy and how race plays out in it. He confronts the tribalism of minority politics and Afrocentrism and offers jazz as a metaphor in maintaining democratic morale in an industrial world.

Readers with long memories may remember that our common American identity is a recurring theme of mine. I first wrote about it in Commonweal in 1975 in response to the then current emphasis on nationality called "the new ethnicity." It was, I wrote, a search for roots and, in puzzling over it, I invoked some well-known writers on race and identity, chief among them Simone Weil, who said, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." T.S. Eliot wrote of Weil that she was a philosopher whose social and political thought had reached a remarkable maturity, but she wrestled with tremendous problems. "She was three things in the highest degree: French, Jewish, and Christian."

Weil was herself a living example of how complicated our roots can be, and she held that rootedness was difficult to define.

A human being has roots by virtue

of his real, active, and natural participation

in the life of a community,

which preserves in living

shape certain particular treasures

of the past and certain particular expectations for

the future. This participation

is a natural one, in the sense

that it is automatically brought about

by place, conditions of birth, profession,

and social surroundings....Every

human being needs to have multiple

roots. It is necessary for him

to draw well-nigh the whole of his

moral, intellectual, and spiritual life

by way of the environment of

which he forms a natural part."

[Italics mine.]

Rootedness depends on an attitude toward the future as well as an affirmation of the past. And only the living past is worth recovering. These are her criteria for evaluating our own search for roots on which to base our unity.

Weil did not think of national origin as the first source of roots. The nation is a recent historical phenomenon and each people is the result of successive waves of conquest. The French were once Bretons, Normans, Burgundians, Provengals, people of separate cultures and tongues. The English language is compounded of Saxon and Norman words, reflecting conquest--swine in the sty and pork on the table, deer in the forest and venison at the feast--as well as a Latinate legal vocabulary and mystery-evoking words of Celtic origins, thus a testimony to the multiple sources of the people we call English.

For most white Americans today outside of certain urban enclaves, ethnic identification is a matter of choice, for ethnicity has a way of suddenly melting away. I can't help but revert again to my own history. I have always thought of myself as Irish-American, as did my parents, and proudly so. But my children are part German; I have blood cousins of Swedish, French (and probably American Indian), Hawaiian, English, Polish, and Italian background; my children have cousins of Egyptian, black, and Russian-Jewish ancestry. I cannot be anything but moderate or marginal in my ethnicity without denying or denigrating people with whom I share a physical heritage. This is true of millions of Americans.

Diversity implies a certain strength in a society; it makes for an interesting, multifaceted people and for creative tension among them. But how can we find our common roots, that natural participation in the life of a community of Americans "which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future" "What are our particular treasures of the past and our particular expectations for the future?" Concepts of work and time and combined effort formed in the past are built into the self so subtly that we are hardly aware of them. So, too, is our sense of space and the possibility of physical mobility--the fruit of our geography.

Even our angers and our discontents have their source in common values--what Seymour Martin Lipset called the key American values--equality and achievement. We take these values for granted. Our institutions have been shaped by them. De Tocqueville noted that Americans as Americans are encouraged to press for their objectives, not to accept their lot or hope for remedy from an established upper class. But are these values--especially the hope for equality and achievement--realistic expectations for our children and our children's children in the future? These are the expectations being threatened in the growing split between rich and poor, and by the malaise and anxiety and helplessness felt by those affected by globalization and the shrinking job market--those who resonate now to Pat Buchanan's call to corporations to change their ways, however wrong he is about everything else.

We must fall back on the values de Tocqueville noted--that Americans must press for their objectives, not accept their lot. It is time that we insist in the words of the new catechism "that those responsible for business-enterprises are responsible to society for the economic and ecological effects of their operations. They have an obligation to consider the good of persons and not only the increase of profits." We are in this together--Americans all.