Your country is your country – like it or not

The world is my country, all mankind my brethren and to do good is my religion.
          ==Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine, born an Englishman, was an early advocate of American independence and a morale officer for George Washington’s Continental Army.

Later he traveled to France and became an advocate for the French revolutionaries, returning in old age to the new nation of the United States of America.  He said he considered himself to be a citizen of the world, but of no particular country.

A number of posters on one of my favorite Internet sites, as well as a couple of my acquaintances, aspire to be like Thomas Paine.

Although born American citizens, they disavow allegiance to the United States, which they see as a nation founded on slavery of African-Americans, ethnic cleansing of native Americans and enfranchisement of white Anglo-Saxon property-owning males.

None of them, so far as I know, make any actual effort to shed the legal privileges and responsibilities that go with American citizenship.  The question is whether shedding nationality is even possible.

European acquaintances, and friends who’ve spent time in Europe, tell me that Americans are instantly recognizable wherever we may be—by our gait, our body language, the way we speak English and our basic attitudes toward life.   These are not things that are so easy to get rid of!

The black writer James Baldwin traveled to France in the late 1940s and early 1950s to seek refuge from American racism.   What he came to realize, as he wrote in an essay collection called Notes of a Native Son, is that whatever else he was, he was an American.

Baldwin felt a strong solidarity with African students who hated French colonialism.  But he himself understood that he was an American, an African-American—not an African in exile.    He said the idea that nationality is a matter of personal choice is a specifically American idea.

… the American … very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces that have produced him. 

This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears.

What is overwhelming clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past. 

It is the past lived on the American continent … … which must sustain us in the present.

The truth about that past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, has never demanded what it has to give.

==James Baldwin, “A Question of Identity” (1954)

I am aware of the evils described in Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United States and in Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States.

I happen to believe that their story is not the whole story.  I choose to interpret American history as the lead-up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the unfolding of the consequences of the ideas in that Declaration.

But even if my interpretation is wrong, the American story is part of me and I am part of it, and the same is true of Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick and the late Howard Zinn.   I think they would agree.  And if you’re an American citizen, it is probably true of you.

Thomas Paine was a great man.  He risked and sacrificed much for his ideals.  But he ended his lie as an outcast, not at home anywhere, not in Britain or in France or in the United States.

The ideals he believed in were universal ideals.  But universal ideals have little traction unless they are embodied in the institutions, customs and beliefs of actual nations and peoples.   It is not so easy to get along without nationality.

LINK

A Question of Identity by James Baldwin (1954) PDF.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955) PDF.

 

Tags: American Nationality, Declaration of Independence, Fourth of July, Independence Day, James Baldwin, Nationality, Thomas Paine