Eight years and two weeks ago, something happened that changed my life and, more importantly, the course of our country’s history. On January 3, 2008, Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. To be sure, he had intrigued me from the first time I heard him, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
I had long studied multiethnic societies (my early research examined the Austro-Hungarian Empire) focusing specifically on attempts to create a unifying sense of nationhood that could knit together a diverse population into a single people, that could encourage individuals from different backgrounds who shared a land to see themselves as part of a national community even while maintaining the ancestral forms of identity they valued. The concept of democratic pluralism reflects these ideas.
In Boston, Obama spoke in exactly those terms, citing “a belief that we are all connected as one people.” He defined us “a single American family: E pluribus unum, out of many, one,” and, in the most memorable section, declared: “There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.” By 2004, I had shifted my research focus from Austria-Hungary to the contemporary U.S., so hearing a politician speak this way got my attention.
Back to that night in Iowa. Toward the end of then-Sen. Obama’s victory speech, something clicked for me when he proclaimed:
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause.
Here was Obama showing how to do the very thing that years of research and study told me needed to be done. In the course of about 15 seconds, he presented to a huge (yes, I pronounce the ‘h’) audience of Americans a single, common historical narrative that included events all too often separated into “black history” and “white history.”
While doing so seems obvious now—in part because we’ve had a president do it over and over again—it was not so common, not so mainstream in 2008. Additionally, what he did in his second inaugural address—by including Stonewall alongside Selma and Seneca Falls in the pantheon of great American events—was truly groundbreaking. The way we tell this country’s history defines us as a people. When a president defines the story of America in a fully inclusive way, it makes clear that the “we” in “we the people” really does mean every American.
That night in Iowa changed my life because it eventually led me to write a book about Barack Obama’s conception of American national identity: Obama’s America. As I learned in my research, he has been writing and speaking this way for more than two decades, consistently and regularly. He has even offered an alternative definition of American exceptionalism—one that centers on democratic pluralism and rejects the unreconstructed triumphalism of the right wing. For Obama, our relative success in integrating immigrants and creating unity while still respecting diversity provides a coherent, attractive model for other societies. It also provides a contradiction to fundamentalism—in particular the most murderous form it currently takes: ISIS.
Twice in recent months, the president has powerfully revisited his concept of American-ness. Last November, after some Republican presidential candidates suggested, after the ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris, that there should be some kind of “religious test” for which refugees we should admit, he countered:
That’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion...It is good to remember that the United States does not have a religious test, and we are a nation of many peoples of different faiths, which means that we show compassion to everybody. Those are the universal values we stand for.
The key is that Obama not only condemned prejudice, but he condemned it as “not American.” He placed it outside the circle of our “universal values.” He’s certainly not the first politician to do so. Abraham Lincoln, in the most important speech in our country’s history, defined the Civil War as a test of whether we believed in equality and liberty for all Americans. Furthermore, he placed that belief at the center of our country’s definition of itself, stating that America was, in fact, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Obama has done something of profound importance as well. He has done so in a more inclusive way, one that reflects his understanding of important trends in our culture and society—such as multiculturalism—that have profoundly changed the way we see our collective self since Lincoln’s time. Obama’s years of such statements laid the groundwork for what he said in November about religious tests. He may not have invented it, but he has done more than any recent figure to shape and strengthen a powerful vocabulary, a shorthand we can use to contrast prejudice and hate with unity and brotherhood—as well as to connect the former with American values while charging the latter with rejecting them.
This week the president delivered his final State of the Union Address. Unsurprisingly, he closed by revisiting his definition of American-ness. He urged us to reject those who would divide us from one another, to reject ...
Voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.
[snip] I can promise that a little over a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I will be right there with you as a citizen, inspired by those...voices that help us see ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white, or Asian or Latino, not as gay or straight, immigrant or native born, not as Democrat or Republican, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed. Voices Dr. King believed would have the final word -- voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love.
This is Obama’s America, an America that rejects hate, rejects tribalism. It’s an America where we identify as members of groups based on ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, ideology, etc., but where our common bonds as Americans come first. This isn’t the old melting pot that demands immigrants and members of other marginalized groups become “100 percent Americans”—i.e., without hyphens—and fully assimilate into the mainstream. Obama’s America is a gumbo, a thick soup that seeps into each new ingredient added. But those ingredients—even as they absorb the dominant flavor—still maintain their integrity.
Are we there yet? Is Obama’s America a description of our current reality? Of course not, and Barack Obama would be the first one to admit it. But by laying out that vision—by proclaiming that what we aspire to is not a rejection of what we have been, but merely the fullest application of the values we have always embraced—Barack Obama is helping us move closer to becoming what we dream.