Rio Grande, from a white perspective; and African American can appear no different from “Anglo” to those lumped together as “Hispanic.”
African American, indeed, is one of the most context-sensitive designations of all. New arrivals from an African nation may encounter resistance from American blacks to their, possibly natural, assumption that “African American” automatically applies to them. Black and white in America represent descriptors derived as much from culture, heritage, and the history of slavery as from any objective genetic markers. African American almost automatically implies an enslaved ancestry. This brings its own set of problems and assumptions, of course, because not all African Americans were enslaved. The historian Barbara Jeanne Fields highlighted the contrary nature of contemporary cultural assumptions relating to race when she observed that in the United States, a white women may give birth to a black child, but a black woman cannot, at least as far as society is concerned, give birth to a white one. So white may create black, but not vice versa. Unless one turns to literature, in which case, as leading African-American author Toni Morrison contends, that is precisely what has happened. “Whiteness,” she notes, required a black presence. Being American required something, someone to be positioned outside the nation, at least as it was culturally conceptualized. In this respect, concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” (or “Africanism”) functioned together, but for much of the nation’s history it was hardly a relationship of equals.
Clearly, laying claim to an identity in the United States is, for the nation as for the individual, an endeavor fraught with difficulties and challenges but, increasingly, few political or cultural compromises. The once-compelling idea of the United States as a “melting pot” has over the years given way to, first, an emphasis on multiculturalism, and second, to ethnic and cultural (increasingly religious) distinctions that, some fear, are destabilizing the nation. Rather like the federal system itself, in which the states have been accorded varying degrees of autonomy over the course of the nation’s history, so individual Americans sustain a sometimes uneasy balancing act between state and social identities and federal and national ones. Sometimes, as in the case of the American Civil War (1861-1865), this has broken down dramatically. At others, in periods of external conflict or crisis, internal divisions diminish - although they never disappear -in favor of a patriotism either promoted from the center, as during World War II, or derived from the grassroots, as was the case after 9/11 and in the ongoing “war on terror.”
The link between warfare and American identity, indeed, is a complex one. Most nations have violent histories, and the United States is no exception. Yet understanding how a set of loosely connected colonies that relied so extensively on enslaved labor reached the point of coming together to overthrow a colonial power in the name of liberty, equality, and freedom requires an appreciation of the many and various contemporary impulses that led to this apparently contradictory position. Not the least of these was the early consolidation of the relationship between conflict and a New World identity that the colonists forged in relation to both indigenous natives and imperial power.
The land that became the United States became settled, in some cases only temporarily, by European migrants, missionaries, armies, and traders, driven there by the religious conflicts in Europe. From the beginning, therefore, conflict informed both the migration process and the attitudes of European outsiders to America’s indigenous populations. Early propagandist efforts to persuade European monarchs and merchants that the “New World” promised profit in the cause of piety - there were natives to be converted and money to be made - established a deadly combination of the rapacious and the religious out of which conflict was, perhaps, inevitable. The martial origins of the nation were established, of course, in the ultimate colonial conflict, the American War of Independence, that forged the relationship between the nation and the concept of citizen service, between American nationalism and warfare.
That at least part of the story of the Revolutionary War was exaggerated after the event to suggest an enthusiasm not always in evidence at the time in no way diminished the enduring power of the myth of the “Minuteman” as an American martial ideal. This should not be exaggerated but nor should it be underestimated. In the United States today, veterans of America’s wars comprise some i0 percent of the adult population. Ten percent, in the grand scheme of things, is not an overwhelming statistic, and hardly a universal troop movement. However, veterans, and through them the impact of warfare, has a powerful influence on American politics and society (and defense budgets), because as a group, veterans turn out to vote in a higher percentage (c. 70 percent) than the population as a whole (c. 60 percent).
In this context, it is unsurprising that one of the crucial threads in America’s national story is the way in which the unity forged through warfare informed American national identity via the resultant emphasis on freedom or liberty as the fulcrum around which that identity was constructed. Yet even before the emergence of the nation itself, freedom in the “New World” had both positive (freedom to) and negative (freedom from) connotations. Freedom, as the contemporary slogan has it, is not free. And of course it never was. Freedom for the early European colonists impinged on already existing freedoms enjoyed by native nations. Freedom from monarchical rule, as the case of the loyalists during the Revolution made clear, was not the freedom all fledgling “Americans” sought, nor was it one they necessarily welcomed. Liberty was the animating principle of the American experiment, but it was a principle promulgated most vociferously by slaveholders. The Enlightenment, a process that Immanuel Kant described as the “emancipation of human consciousness,” in the eighteenth century may have informed the American revolutionary impulse, but it did not translate into the emancipation of the American revolutionaries’ slaves.
“We hold these truths to be self evident,” the Declaration of Independence (1776) stated, “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.” For too long such “truths” only really held true for those who were either part of, proximate to, or had the potential to join the white, male elite whose perspective these truths had only ever partially represented. Although fully prepared to believe English radical Thomas Paine when he advised them that theirs was “the cause of all mankind,” Americans interpreted Paine’s message in the context of a republican ideology through which the promotion of equality and liberty went hand in hand with the defense of slavery. Facilitated by the development of markets and communications networks, the individual colonies could at least conceptualize a unified political and cultural whole. Achieving it was another matter. For some, liberty as the national ideal could only be achieved if it applied to all. For others, the nation’s future would only be secure if some were permanently enslaved. By the middle of the nineteenth century, one truth was self-evident to Abraham Lincoln, struggling to hold the nation together during the Civil War. “We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln observed, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”