The Black Lives Matter movement awakened me to the realization that American is not my ethnicity but my ethos. Ethnically I am Scots-English with a smattering of Irish, German, Viking, and whoever else was passing through when the women were fertile. Those are my ancestral peoples and who they were and where they came from has shaped who I am and how I view the world. A person cannot be an American by birth or compulsion. American is a condition of the heart not of birthplace or citizenship. A person can be a citizen of the United States and not be an American in heart. And a person can be an immigrant (legal or illegal) or even a refugee without any rights as citizen and be thoroughly American.

America is not an homogenous people of one primary tribal group like most of the nations of the world. We are composed of voluntary immigrants and the peoples who came into this union by compulsion. The original European settlers were primarily English and Scots who established colonies patterned after the land from whence they had come – hence “New England” and “New London” and “New York.”

The first group who became compulsory citizens were the Indians. They were here first, but they were the last to become United States citizens. Those settlers from the British Isles found the land sparsely occupied by the descendants of those who had journeyed here thousands of years earlier – a people less technologically and less civilizationally advanced than themselves, and soon to be overwhelmed by the waves of immigrants from Europe. They viewed these native peoples as something to be assimilated and transformed into good Englishmen or to be subdued and driven away. The Indian tribes that were here first were legally considered aliens and not citizens. Their alien status is enshrined in the US Constitution and at the establishment of the United States of America in 1789 they were treated as sovereign nations with which the United States dealt with through treaty and through war and it was not until 1924 that Indian tribes (as opposed to individuals) became citizens of the United States.

The second conquered people to find themselves citizens of the United States were those dwelling in the territories “liberated” in the 1835-36 War of Texas Independence (or the Texas Revolution from a Mexican perspective) and the Mexican War of 1846-48, the primary causes of which were the annexation of Texas into the Union and the discovery of vast deposits of gold in California. The young American republic was feeling its oats and considered itself destined to stretch from sea to shining sea and Mexico was in the way. So a war of conquest and a conquered people to be made citizens of the United States as these territories transitioned into statehood – the first being Texas in 1845 and the final two being New Mexico and Arizona in 1912.

The third group to come into citizenship by compulsion were the descendants of African slaves. Africans were viewed as a source of cheap labor and were purchased from that continent and brought here as slaves. (Enslaved people were then, had been for thousands of years, and are even today a common source of cheap labor and service throughout the world.) After a bloody civil war brought an end to chattel slavery in 1865, citizenship was extended to those whose ancestors had been bought and brought in chains in 1868 via the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

I would be amiss if I didn’t at least give mention to some others who are US citizens by compulsion. They would be the people of Hawaii who had their sovereignty stripped away by business interests in a coup d’état in 1893 and became a territory in 1898, the people of Puerto Rico who became a prize of war in 1898 and had US citizenship thrust upon them in 1917, and a scattering of island peoples in both the Caribbean and the Pacific who became possessions and territories of the United States through various and sundry ways.

Why this meandering through the history of America’s settling and the formation of the United States and her citizenry? Well, as I said, the Black Lives Matter movement awakened me to the realization that while the United States are one nation, we are not one people. And our various peoples are not identified so much by their geography as their ethnicity. The ethos of America is deeply rooted in the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. One can come from anywhere and embrace those roots, or one can be born here and reject them. The ethnicity of our citizens is as diverse as the world itself; that which binds us together is holding to the common ethos. You understand this when you hear a Black or Latino or Indian or immigrant politician or race agitator (aka activist) speak of “her people” as opposed to “our people” or “the American people.” This person is making it clear that her identity is separate and distinct from an American identity.

There is a distinct difference between a common ethos and a common culture. The cultural distinctives of all the different ethnicities that comprise our population do not detract from that which we hold in common. One does not need to discard tacos and tamales in order to be fully American anymore than one needs to toss roast beef and potatoes or spaghetti and meatballs to join the American experiment. The diversity of our ethnic origins makes us the richer. For example, I believe we should always honor the treaty obligations we have with the native tribes. If the treaty says they can hunt whales, then hunt whales they can. But a communist/socialist or a nazi/fascist is not American at the core regardless her citizenship. Whether she was born in Brooklyn or Mumbai; is ten generations North American or a first-generation immigrant, what a person has in common with the American ethos makes her American, not her ethnicity.