Tag Archives: American identity

My American Tribe

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There are thousands of distinct tribes and ethnic groups throughout the world. Each one has a culture that distinguishes it from others, and often language is indicative of those distinctions. Those differences and similarities can help us to understand ourselves and one another. For instance, some languages have words for more than two genders; those pushing the gender boundaries can find comfort that their cause is not new (a recent discovery coming from my research of the book Black Leopard, Red Wolf).

Thinking about words in that context makes me wonder about America: how does language and culture differentiate different groups within our country? “American” is a nationality, indicating citizenship to a state, while ethnicity refers to those groups with ties that go beyond American borders and can be older than its existence. But is race an ethnicity? In other words, is being white an ethnicity? Black? Asian? Race appears to be a category that has ethnicities within it. Also, there are regional distinctions, because there is a culture in the American South that is distinct from the American West and the American Northeast—but are these cultures largely distinctions within the white Euro-American ethnicity? Are Black Americans the same in the South, West, and Midwest?

These are only a few of the many questions that can all lead to various discussions (I’ll let you decide if those conversations would be interesting or not), but I want to turn toward myself (and maybe you). I am a white male and I feel like I don’t belong to any particular ethnic group. I do not have cultural ties to any of my European ancestors, and because I have moved dozens of times and lived in a few regions of the United States and the world, I have no ties to a particular location. The closest thing I have binding me to a particular place would be my membership to a church where I connect to small and large groups with whom I share common beliefs and lifestyle. However, I’ve had to change churches a number of times in the past few years, which means I’ve lost that recently. I am disconnected from the places I graduated high school and college. I’ve lived in Colorado since 2012 and currently reside in the city of Denver, but what binds me to the culture of Denver and Colorado? I’ve been listening to the City Cast Denver podcast as a way to get closer to the Denver culture, but listening to it makes me feel like I don’t belong here. This, itself, is due to socioeconomic differences, because . . . well, I guess I’m not cultured enough to be participating in all the goings-on of the city.

Yet, I do have a tribe, and I am fortunate for it. My last name is Chinese because I’ve been adopted into my stepfather’s family, and still my mother’s and biological father’s family consider me one of theirs as well, and now my wife’s family has embraced me as one of them (and she’s almost half Cherokee); thus, I have plenty of family. That is my tribe. We all speak English (and other languages), we all live in America (scattered among many states), we share common values that don’t always align perfectly but well enough, and despite plenty of disputes and offenses, I can almost always walk into any family gathering and be welcome. But I don’t have a single location where I can connect with all or even most of this tribe because we are spread out. This is America, and many of us here can say the same or similar.

This brings me to my point. What if America were a tribe, an ethnic group? What would define it? What would distinguish it among the nations and peoples and cultures of the world while uniting all of us?! I want to suggest two things: the American Dream and “all men are created equal”. Aren’t these what make America great? Maybe this is wishful thinking, because these two ideals have not been true for large portions of Americans throughout our history, and still we are the most powerful nation in the world, with people all over the world coming here to pursue that American Dream.

I think the American identity is changing today, but not really. We’ve always been hypocritical, racist oppressors who claimed the American Dream applies to everyone here while suppressing the rights of those we secretly despise. But today, under Trump’s presidency, we’re flaunting that hypocrisy. His leadership is divisive—he makes enemies of those he’s closest to who dare disagree with him, and a significant portion of Americans do not want his ways to define us. I believe Americans need to come together around what unites us, and then build an agenda and identity around that ideal. Even with the most divisive of issues, there are things we can all agree on, and that’s where we need to start. Because the American Dream is real, and it is made possible by our governmental system and cultural ideals, even if they often fail, and America won’t give up on who we are and who we want to be. #Hope

Is There Justification for American Colonialism?

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Over the years, I’ve seen white Americans argue for why we shouldn’t be made to feel bad for the sins of our ancestors, including slavery and the colonial conquest of America, and I can feel sympathetic toward people not wanting to be held responsible for something that someone else did in another time. However, I haven’t heard any arguments actually justifying the wrongs of our past, and was surprised when I heard Ben Shapiro do this on his show in May 2025.

Shapiro claims that it is “obviously true” that “the world is better off because of . . . American power [and] the spread of European ideals.” He says that although “bad things are a tragedy . . . overall, in the broad scope of history . . . [i]t’s an absolutely wonderful thing that Europeans ended up on the North American continent.” His justification is “[t]he spread of things like property rights, due process of law, capitalism, freedom of religion, these things which are not a human universal.”

I wasn’t merely surprised when I heard this, I was shocked, and I don’t think this is an extreme response. He is saying that the end justifies the means, and he identifies the end as “an absolutely wonderful thing” that includes “property rights, due process of law, capitalism, [and] freedom of religion.” These are all good things that, unfortunately, have not applied to all Americans for much of our history. Further still, the means he refers to, those tragic “bad things,” include the genocide of Native Americans and an economic system that legalized slavery, two very significant parts of United States history that did not die off quickly. The Civil War didn’t end slavery because it was transformed into legalized oppression and dehumanization through Jim Crow laws that continued into the 1960s, and we were sterilizing Native American women against their will as recently as the 1970s, meaning people alive today experienced these abuses.

Shapiro claims that the genocide, oppression, and dehumanization of thousands upon thousands who had to die, suffer, and lose land and culture is made just by the fact that he, a rich white man, has a right to own land. Property rights and due process of law obviously didn’t apply to the victims of our conquests, and for most of the time that the United States of America has been a country, those rights were not given to everyone who called America their country and home. Those property rights he mentioned were only meant to protect land-owning white men when they were established. I would also argue that due process only applies if you can afford lawyers to defend that right, capitalism itself isn’t worth killing over, and freedom of religion is debatable.

This changes the narrative of American history. We Americans do not have the “freedoms” we enjoy because a handful of patriots rebelled against unjust oppression (what is taxation without representation compared to genocide and slavery?). Rather, we enjoy the comforts of the American way because we are “better at war,” as Shapiro puts it, which is not a Judeo-Christian ethic (something else that Shapiro promotes). Shapiro’s end currently applies to all Americans, for the most part, but only because those we oppressed endured a great struggle to undo our hypocrisy. Shapiro’s argument is “might makes right,” and embarrasses America by showing how sanctimonious we are. Our constitution was hypocritical the moment it was signed because it claimed to grant unalienable rights to its citizens while depriving slaves (and others) of those same rights. We cannot claim a moral right to contest the rebellion of those fighting for rights when we used unprovoked conquest to forcibly and oppressively take and maintain our own “rights.”

Refusing to acknowledge the wrongs of our past creates a barrier to addressing today’s failures, but this topic gets considerably more complicated from here. There is no simple fix to the flawed narrative of American history. I somewhat agree with Shapiro when he blasts the concept of simply giving up property, or “your dingy apartment in Brooklyn,” as he puts it, to make amends. It isn’t feasible to hand over the country to the remaining Native Americans, and what do we have that we can restore to the descendants of slavery? But doing nothing isn’t acceptable, and neither is pretending it didn’t happen, ignoring it, or minimizing the atrocity of it. There are a number of books that I recommend, fiction and non-fiction, to better understand the experiences of non-white Americans, including Unsettling Truths, Beloved, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Quite a few other books, movies, podcasts, and TV series are presenting American history more accurately than ever before, but there is so much working against this good work, including comments like Shapiro’s.

I believe we must not only be honest about who we are as Americans, but choose who we want to be and make it so. What does it mean to be American? What is the American dream? What is the American way of life? As for me, I detest Shapiro’s vision that justifies genocide and the dehumanizing actions, policies, and laws that are an unavoidable part of my country’s legacy. However, if we are (or want to be) a land of equality and opportunity for all, then let’s ensure it is truly that.